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      Harris and Trump make final preparations ahead of crucial presidential debate in Philadelphia

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      It was the debate that was never meant to happen.Donald Trump will take the stage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night to face, not the familiar foe he expected when he agreed to the encounter in May, but an opponent he has never met and has struggled to define; Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, whose emergence as the Democratic nominee has changed the direction, and very nature, of the presidential election.The Republican nominee anticipated that he would be keeping a date in the City of Brotherly Love for a second engagement with Joe Biden, the US president with whom he had an acrimonious debating history from the 2020 election.Instead the unprecedented impact of June’s debate in Atlanta between the pair – in which Biden’s halting and incoherent performance led to him withdrawing his candidacy after mounting pressure from his own Democratic party – has left Trump confronting an opponent against whom he has still to decide a settled line of attack.Harris, for her part, goes into the event having been prepared by aides who have aped Trump’s often vicious and insulting debating technique – especially towards women – and bolstered by her experience from a previous career as a courtroom prosecutor. She is also buoyed by being up against an adversary who was recently convicted of 34 felony charges.The pair face-off in the midst of a race that multiple polls show is neck-and-neck – both nationally and in key swing states – none more than in Pennsylvania, the site of Tuesday’s debate, with more electoral votes up for grabs than any other battleground state.Tuesday’s event, hosted by ABC, will take place under the same rules that governed the Trump-Biden debate, with candidates’ microphones being muted when it is their opponent’s turn to speak. Harris’s campaign argued for mics to be kept live throughout – hoping to goad the former president into the undisciplined and unsavoury interruptions that have marred his previous performances.View image in fullscreenWhile Trump was ready to agree, his entourage – determined to keep him focused and on-message – insisted on keeping the original rules.But it is Trump’s difficulty in coming to terms with Biden’s departure from the race that could decide the contours of the debate, according to Steven Fein, a specialist in presidential debates and professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts.“I think, maybe the most interesting and potentially explosive element of it is the fact that he clearly was very upset that Biden dropped out and has been replaced by Harris,” said Fein, who suggested the debate had greater potential for mind games and psychological drama than any he had previously studied.“It’s going to be a mighty task for him to control his tendencies. Whenever he’s baited … by a woman, he’s usually been very nasty. And a woman of colour is just like the nightmare scenario.“There’s going to have to be some give and take in a way that there didn’t have to be in the first debate, when he didn’t have to say much but just let Biden flail. So the potential for all kinds of drama is great.”The former president has been preparing for the debate with, among others, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress-turned Trump supporter who ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and memorably tangled with Harris in a primary debate.In an eve-of-debate call with journalists on Monday, Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said that it would be Harris who would have difficulty preparing for Trump.“The fact that Trump is out there every day doing unscripted questions [means] you can’t prepare for him,” he said, comparing it with training to prepare to fight Muhammed Ali. “You don’t know what his style is going to be. He has an amazing mix of humour and charm, as well as hard hitting facts.”With Hugo Lowell More

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      US elections live: Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls on eve of debate, new report suggests

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      A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.Amid efforts to purge voters in Republican-led states, the Department of Justice released a fact-sheet on Monday reminding states of the restrictions on removing voters ahead of the voter rolls on the eve of a federal election.The document essentially serves as a warning to states that systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election is illegal under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Any effort to remove voters, according to the law, must also be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory.”The document is notable because it comes as Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have all touted efforts to remove people from the voter rolls in recent months. Many of those efforts have been misleading and have targeted people suspected of being non-citizens and have raised scrutiny from civil rights groups who are concerned the efforts may be unlawfully targeting naturalized citizens.“Examples of list maintenance activities that may violate the NVRA include comparing voter files to outdated or inaccurate records or databases, taking action that erroneously affects a particular class of voters (such as newly naturalized citizens), or matching records based solely on first name, last name, and date of birth,” the fact sheet says.There have also been reports of activists in Georgia and Florida using unreliable software to challenge the voting eligibility of people it believes may have moved. The DOJ guidance issued on Monday reminds states that those efforts are also illegal within 90 days of a federal election.The 90-day blackout period, the document says, “also applies to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized datamatching process.”Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, released a video urging voters to contact DoJ if they believe they have been wrongfully removed from the rolls.“As we approach Election Day, it is important that states adhere to all aspects of federal law that safeguard the rights of eligible voters to remain on the active voter lists and to vote free from discrimination and intimidation,” she said in a statement.Speaking at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a key swing state, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, talked about the intense impact of the conservative Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade on all the women in his life, including Harris.He said he heard the news directly from Harris herself. “I had never actually heard her more upset. And she called to say, ‘Dougie, they actually did it, they actually did it.’”Emhoff said Harris had personally grilled Trump’s rightwing supreme court nominees, who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent when it came to abortion.Emhoff’s remarks come as Democrats focus on abortion rights, which is seen as Harris’ strongest issue.Advocacy groups are continuing to weigh in on the outline of Kamala Harris’s policy priorities, posted on her website today.It’s no surprise that Giffords, a leading gun violence prevention group headed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, praised Harris’s policy outline on gun violence prevention, which comes in the wake of two new high-profile mass shootings in Georgia and in Kentucky.Harris, a former prosecutor who secured the first-ever political endorsement from March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention group formed in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has a long track record on responding to daily community gun violence, and she served as the head of the Biden administration’s newly created Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office advocates had pushed for.The gun control measures Harris endorses are standard for Democratic politicians: she supports legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and supporting red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.Harris’ policy overview touts her record as a prosecutor “getting illegal guns and violent criminals off California streets,” but it also highlights the Biden administration’s big investment in community-based gun violence prevention efforts, which advocates called a significant improvement from the Obama administration. Harris’ platform notes that, after a big increase in gun violence in 2020, during the early pandemic, there appears to have been a historic drop in murders in 2023. (How much decisions at the White House level had to do with either the rise or the fall in murders is deeply unclear, but the decrease in violence that Harris is pointing to is real.)She also makes very clear that she does not support defunding the police, but instead “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them.”This is Lois Beckett, picking up our US politics coverage from Los Angeles.Oprah Winfrey will host a digital rally for Kamala Harris next week, multiple news outlets reported.The event will bring together different affinity groups that have mobilized for the Harris campaign, Variety reported.United We Dream Action, the political and electoral arm of United We Dream, the largest immigrant rights group led by young activists in the US, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, they announced on Monday.Bruna Sollod, the group’s senior political director, said in a statement:
      We choose to block the pain and violence Trump will carry out against our people. We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years to meet the demands of our generation.
      The Michigan supreme court has ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will appear on Michigan’s ballot this fall, the Detroit Free Press is reporting.Despite suspending his presidential campaign last month and endorsing the former president Donald Trump, the Michigan supreme court ruled on Monday that Kennedy’s name would remain on the state’s ballot.This comes just days after an appellate court in Michigan ruled that Kennedy’s name must be stricken from ballots.The Michigan secretary of state’s office said last week that it would appeal to the state supreme court. The new ruling from the state’s high court on Monday overturns the lower court’s decision, the Detroit Free Press reported.Ever since he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy has been fighting to remove his name from ballots in swing states.A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.On Monday, president Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the several individuals to serve as “key leaders in his administration” in a news release.The nominees include Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Dan Sullivan to be Representatives of the US to the 79th session of the General Assembly of the UN, among others.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also told reporters on Monday that Joe Biden would be watching the Tuesday debate between the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the former president Donald Trump.“The president is going to watch the debate, he’s looking forward to watching the debate” Jean-Pierre said. “The president is incredibly proud of the vice-president,” she added.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Monday that president Joe Biden agreed with Kamala Harris’s leadership and policy decisions.During the White House press briefing on Monday, Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter why Vice-President Harris was “spending so much time trying to define Trump and link him to Project 2025, rather than define herself?”Jean-Pierre responded and directed the question to the Harris campaign, but said that the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be “more clear” and said that Biden “agrees with her leadership, her policy decisions.”This comes as the Harris campaign released a list of her policy proposals on Sunday evening.In an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, said that former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, need to change the way they speak about women, when asked why she thinks Kamala Harris has a 14-point lead among women.“Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley, who has previously said she would be voting for Trump in November, said on Monday. “You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far just by accident … she’s a prosecutor.”She continued:
      You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too. The bottom line is, we win on policies, stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win.
      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign posted a list of her policy positions on its website this weekend, after critics have called her vague and thin on policy since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The list of policies on the Harris campaign website are organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.Among the proposals, Harris has said she would implement tax cuts for the middle class, reduce healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, bring back the bipartisan border security bill and more.

      Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump is “probably going to speak a lot of untruths” during their debate tomorrow night. “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said in an interview with Rickey Smiley that aired on Monday.

      Ten retired top military officials announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris in a letter warning that Donald Trump is “a danger to our national security and democracy”. The letter by National Security Leaders for America also sought to defend Harris against Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.

      A 250-page Republican-led congressional report on Monday attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan. Democrats accused Republicans of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

      Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he would jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s election. He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution.

      Donald Trump confirmed he will vote in support of a ballot measure in Florida that would legalize recreational marijuana. Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure.

      Kamala Harris’s campaign will air a new TV ad featuring former officials in Donald’s Trump administration warning about the threat he poses to the country, in what looks like an attempt to goad the former president ahead of tomorrow’s debate.

      The Harris campaign also released three new TV ads targeting Donald Trump on abortion ahead of Tuesday’s debate that includes comments from the Republican nominee claiming credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade.

      The leaders of two major left-leaning women’s organizations said the issue of reproductive rights would offer the “starkest possible contrast” between Harris and Trump at Tuesday night’s debate.

      Republican officials are raising the alarm that Trump campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races.

      Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, postponed a rally he was scheduled to speak on Monday evening in Reno, Nevada due to wildfires in the region, his campaign said.

      Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Kamala Harris in November’s election.
      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate.The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy. More

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      Republicans spread unsubstantiated slurs about Haitian migrants in Ohio city

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      Prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance are sharing false and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating pets and local wildlife.The salacious and often racist social media posts claim, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food. Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.The claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.The misinformation about migrants in Springfield comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border. Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported. A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed intoa school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has spoken against Haitian migrants in Ohio for months and again posted about it on Monday. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote, referring to Kamala Harris.The Trump campaign sent out an email on Monday blasting the vice-president for the unrest in Springfield, saying: “It’s all coming to your city if Kamala Harris is elected in November. It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning on day one, President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history – because he’ll always put America, and Americans, FIRST.”On Monday, the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, a Republican, announced he would use his office’s resources to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”. He said his office would “exhaust all possibilities” to address the migrants. Among other complaints from residents, he said that the migrants were reportedly “killing wildlife for food”. More

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      Samuel Alito accepted concert tickets from conservative German aristocrat

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      Samuel Alito, the US supreme court justice, accepted $900 concert tickets from a Catholic German aristocrat known for her unabashed conservative views and ties to rightwing activists, his latest financial disclosure form reveals.Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis reportedly gifted the tickets to Alito and his wife to allow them to attend the Regensburg castle festival, an annual summer music extravaganza hosted at her 500-room castle in Bavaria.The princess, a descendant of princes of the Holy Roman empire, is noted for ties with Steve Bannon, a key supporter and former aide of Donald Trump, and connections to figures in the Catholic hierarchy opposed to Pope Francis.Her donation to Alito is set out in the justice’s annual financial disclosure report, which he filed late after requesting an extension.The declaration follows a series of controversies over the ethics of supreme court justices amid revelations that some, including Alito himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, have accepted gifts from wealthy benefactors without disclosing on mandatory forms.Alito has been at the centre of reports that he accepted a private jet free travel gift for a luxury salmon fishing trip from a conservative billionaire who had cases pending before the supreme court.He previously met von Thurn und Taxis along with fellow justice Brett Kavanaugh when she visited the supreme court in 2019 along with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who was dismissed from his position as head of the Catholic’s church’s doctrinal body by Pope Francis, and Brian Brown, a leading anti-LGBTQ+ activist.Von Thurn und Taxis’s palatial castle in Regensburg – the venue for the concert attended by Alito and his wife – has been mooted by Bannon as a potential venue for a European network of finishing schools for rightwing conservatives.Once nicknamed Princess TNT by Vanity Fair for her supposedly combustible personality, the princess previously affected a less traditional persona and was known for associating with the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Michael Jackson.A Tatler profile featuring a 1980s photo of her sporting a luxuriantly punk hairstyle, described her as “equal parts Helena Bonham Carter and Princess Diana”, adding: “She struck the socialite community with her outgoing personality and her rambunctious punk aesthetic.”After he reinvention as a conservative Catholic activist, she drew criticism in 2001 after saying on a television talkshow that the high rate of Aids in Africa was due, not to a lack of safe sex, but because “the Blacks like to copulate a lot”. She later tried to amend her remarks, saying Africans had a lot of sex due to the continent’s hot climate. More

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      ParalympicsGB talks up LA Games amid US presidential election fears

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      ParalympicsGB officials say they hope “politics doesn’t get in the way” of a successful Los Angeles Games in four years’ time, amid the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency.The US presidential election remains on a knife-edge, with Trump – the Republican nominee who has infamously denigrated people with disabilities – and the Democratic vice‑president, Kamala Harris, in effect tied heading into the final weeks of the campaign.After completing a successful Games in Paris, where the British team once again finished second and ahead of the USA in the medals table, authorities insist they will take time to evaluate the approach towards LA, but said it would not be the first time that Britain had competed in a “politically challenging” environment.Asked if there were any circumstances in which not sending a team to a Games would be considered, Penny Briscoe, chef de mission of ParalympicsGB, said she hoped politics would not interfere with an event that is a crucial platform for people with disabilities.“LA is probably one of the most inclusive cities in the world,” she said, “and their ambition, which they presented just a few days ago, is that LA is a melting pot, and their commitment to delivering an incredible Paralympic Games experience is already out there.“So from our perspective, at the moment we’re really excited by the prospect of LA. We’re excited by the challenge that facing the Americans on their home turf poses for us, and I really hope that politics don’t impact our preparation or our Games experience in the US.”One of the most notorious moments in Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016 came when he mocked a disabled New York Times reporter at an event. “You gotta see this guy,” Trump said, appearing to impersonate Serge Kovaleski, who has a congenital joint condition. More recently, Trump has mocked Joe Biden’s stammer.“It’s too early to discuss any details, because we don’t know how it will play out,” said Kate Barker, the UK Sport performance director, who oversees funding and medal ambitions for both Olympic and Paralympic teams. “We don’t know what kind of governance structures will be around those Games.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But what is important is what the Olympic and Paralympic Games stand for, and they don’t stand for political statements. They are deliberately against that, and I think our ability to be present at those events is really, really important, and that sometimes in and of itself can be the strongest statement that you can make.“So of course we’ll discuss it as we get closer and we know what we’re doing, but it won’t be the first time that we’re going into a Games with political challenges globally.” More

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      US House clashes over Harris’s role in 2021 Afghanistan troop withdrawal

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      Partisan divisions over the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan have burst into the open ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia after a Republican-led congressional report attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the episode.A 250-page report from the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee castigated the Biden administration for failing to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid takeover and neglecting to prepare for the orderly departure of non-combatant personnel.The decision led to a shambolic evacuation effort and numerous American civilians and US-allied Afghans being left stranded as the country fell to hardline Islamist forces that America and its Nato allies had spent 20 years trying to defeat.The report, written by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, zeroes in on the supposed role played by the US vice-president – mentioning her name 251 times, although no evidence has emerged that she was directly involved in the decisions leading to one of the most damaging foreign policy chapters of Joe Biden’s presidency.By contrast, a 115-page interim report issued by McCaul on the committee’s investigation on 2022 name-checked Harris just twice.Democrats seized on the contrast, accusing McCaul of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order,” states the latest report, titled Wilful Blindness: An assessment of the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that followed.The report’s front page carries a picture of Harris prominently displayed below that of Biden, and above an image of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a more prominent role in the withdrawal.“Despite warnings against withdrawing by senior leaders, Vice President Harris’ aide disclosed the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision,” McCaul’s report goes on. “President Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain affirmed Vice President Harris was entrenched in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to exploit the withdrawal for election purposes while overlooking the fact that the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, took the original decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan when he was president.“Republicans now claim [Harris] was the architect of the US withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” wrote Gregory Meeks, the Democrats’ ranking member on the committee in a 59-page rebuttal to McCaul’s report.Harris’s alleged role in the withdrawal seems likely to arise when she meets Trump for their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.Sharon Yan, a spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the the report was “based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations and pre-existing biases”.She added: “Ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”Harris’s campaign has tried to promote her role in Biden’s foreign policy decisions since she replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket. But she has said little about the Afghan withdrawal. The House report notes that she was on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam at the time and publicly pledged that the administration would protect Afghan women and children.It concludes: “Her promise has clearly not been fulfilled.”Democrats’ accusation of using the Afghan pull-out for campaign purposes echoes criticisms of Trump’s now notorious visit to Arlington national cemetery last month to mark the third anniversary of the event.The former US president’s campaign was rebuked by the US army after its staffers reportedly became embroiled in a confrontation with a cemetery worker when she tried to enforce rules against filming and photographing in a section reserved for service members killed in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.Pictures and footage subsequently emerged of Trump posing at the graveside of personnel killed in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, near Kabul airport – which resulted in the deaths of 13 US personnel and roughly 170 Afghans. Trump denied that his visit was a campaign event, pointing out that he had been invited by families of the fallen servicemen. More

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      Harris campaign lists policies on eve of debate after criticism of vagueness

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has posted a list of her policy positions on its website, less than 48 hours before her debate against Donald Trump on Tuesday, after critics have called her vague and thin on proposed policies since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The Harris campaign’s move came as she and the Republican former president enter the final weeks of the 5 November election – and as new polling published on Sunday showed the candidates are locked in a tight race. The vice-president had initially gained significant momentum over Trump after she replaced Joe Biden at the top of her party’s presidential ticket.A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College released on Sunday found that Trump was up one percentage point over Harris, noting that many voters wanted to know more about the vice-president’s policies.Another poll, conducted by CBS/YouGov, indicated a close race in key swing states, with Harris narrowly leading in Michigan and Wisconsin – but tied in Pennsylvania.By Sunday evening, the Harris campaign had posted a list of policy positions on her website, organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.The campaign promised to build “an opportunity economy and lower costs for families” and to implement economic proposals such as tax cuts for the middle class as well as making rent more affordable and home ownership more attainable by providing first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with down payments.In the list of proposals, Harris also said that she would work to make childcare more affordable, strengthen social security and support small businesses by expanding the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000.Harris pledged to reduce the healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, remove taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, and address competitive practices by big corporations.Her campaign said that she would block any national abortion bans, and if Congress were to pass a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, Harris would sign it into law. She also plans to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in healthcare, housing, education and more into law, the website reads.On the border, the campaign stated that Harris would bring back a bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law after it was blocked by Republicans earlier this year to deny Biden a legislative victory when he was still planning to run for re-election. Harris understands the need for “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship”, the website reads.When it comes to gun violence and crime, the campaign said that – if elected president – Harris would ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws. She will also continue to “invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them”, it added.Harris is committed to ending the opioid epidemic and tackling fentanyl, the campaign stated, adding that the bipartisan border bill she intends to sign would fund detection technology to intercept even more illicit drugs.On foreign policy and national security, Harris pledged to stand with US allies, stand up to dictators, “lead on the world stage” and make sure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. She added a promise to invest in American workers, innovation and industry.The policy proposal list also mentions Israel’s war in Gaza, where Harris stated that she would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself”.The website stated that she and Biden – who ended his re-election campaign on 21 July – were “working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, … hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.At the end of each of the policy sections on the website, the Harris campaign compared and contrasted her positions with Project 2025 – a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative thinktank.Among other things, Project 2025 has called for the elimination of the education department along with the reductions of environmental protections as well as LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, amid criticism and backlash regarding the group’s proposals as being too far right. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties – and that many of the policy goals align with things that Trump has said he intends to do if he wins in November. More

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      Politicians often warn of American decline – and voters often buy it

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      Presidential candidates talk about national decline while campaigning. A lot. This was front and center during the June 2024 debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

      “Throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country,” Trump said, as he has repeatedly.

      Trump continued by saying that if the United States had a president that Vladimir Putin respected, “he would have never invaded Ukraine.” Trump said “we’re laughed at” and that “the United States’ reputation under this man’s leadership is horrible.”

      Biden countered Trump’s evocative statement with the argument that the U.S. has “the finest military in the history of the world” and that it remains well respected abroad.

      “The idea that somehow we are this failing country,” Biden said, “I never heard a president talk like this before.”

      Public polls on other countries’ views of the U.S. support Biden’s point.

      Yet politicians’ warnings of decline persist because they invoke fear for the country’s security, anxiety about another country gaining more power and anger about the United States’ various problems.

      Donald Trump speaks at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity on Sept. 4, 2024.
      Nathan Morris/NurPhoto via Getty Images

      Messages of decline over the years

      While Trump’s messages of American carnage are dramatic, exchanges of this sort are not uncommon in U.S. politics.

      During the 1960 presidential election, for example, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, frequently warned that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union, in everything from space exploration to international respect.

      “I don’t want historians, 10 years from now, to say these were the years when the tide ran out for the United States,” Kennedy said during his first televised debate against his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, on Sept. 26, 1960.

      Warning of national decline has remained a common campaign message ever since, with the challenging party’s side claiming that the country is falling behind or losing respect, forcing the incumbent’s side to play defense.

      Pushing back on messages of decline

      My research examines the role of perceived threats to national status in domestic and international politics. I ran an experiment in March 2024 with 1,079 Americans, aimed at trying to understand how their concerns about national decline affect their foreign policy opinions.

      One-third of respondents were randomly assigned to read a prompt warning that experts and leaders from both parties agreed that the U.S. was declining, relative to its rivals. Another third of respondents read the opposite message, which listed facts from bipartisan experts arguing that concerns about national decline were overblown. The final third read about a topic unrelated to politics.

      Those who read about American decline reported increased levels of fear, anger and anxiety than the group who did not read about this topic. One respondent, for example, wrote, “My biggest concern is other countries won’t respect us. Once we show weakness, other countries will try to overtake us.”

      However, the text of bipartisan experts arguing that the U.S. was not declining did not assuage Americans’ anxieties.

      Approximately 30% of people, both liberal and conservative, who read that experts said the concerns over national decline are overblown outright rejected the premise of the text, compared with just 11% of those who read that U.S. global standing is declining.

      Some respondents asked if the text was a joke and said that the U.S. is becoming a “third-world country.” Others pointed to the state of U.S. health care or reproductive rights to question how one could suggest that the country is not falling behind.

      Kamala Harris waves as she arrives at a campaign rally in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 29, 2024.
      Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

      Fighting emotion with emotion

      When the Democratic ticket changed and Biden announced in July 2024 that he would not run for reelection, the political messaging of Democratic leaders did, too.

      Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have, at times, incited fear about what a second Trump term would look like. But they have also used language and talked about topics that center on joy and excitement, celebrating things like Walz’s tenure as a teacher and football coach and the pride Harris has for her mother’s work and sacrifices.

      “Guided by optimism and faith,” Harris said in her nomination speech in August 2024, she encouraged her supporters to “write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

      Harris has also provided an emotionally powerful counter to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” in the form of “Not Going Back.”

      In Walz’s first appearance as the Democratic candidate for vice president on Aug. 6, he thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy.” With rallies filled with boisterous call-and-responses and chanting, Harris has seized on joy and excitement in detailing a vision of America’s future, juxtaposing her rallies with what she described as Trump’s “the-world-is-doomed rallies.”

      The subtitle of one Harris campaign press release following a Trump news conference, for example, read: “Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was.”

      US global standing in 2024 campaign

      While Harris’ rallies have largely focused on domestic issues like abortion rights and economic inequality, debates over the country’s global standing will reemerge and persist. In an August 2024 poll, the second-most-common reason likely Harris voters said they supported her was because she would strengthen the United States’ status in the world – while the second-most-common reason other voters opposed her was because they thought she would weaken the country on the global stage.

      Trump has continued to describe the U.S. as a “nation in decline.” Harris, in her Democratic National Convention speech, countered that she will work to ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.”

      Harris also remarked in her acceptance speech: “You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”

      Campaign rhetoric warning of American decline has been common since at least 1960, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. But with a new Democratic ticket and a transformed race, Democrats are now fighting emotion with emotion. And that is more likely to resonate than informing people that things are not as bad as they fear. More