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      in US Politics

      Walz asks America to ‘stand up’ for democracy – as it happened

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      Here are some of the key lines from the debate between the Democratic and Republican vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance:On the Middle East:

      Both candidates were asked whether they would support a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. Walz said: “Israel’s ability to defend itself is absolutely fundamental” after the Hamas attacks on 7 October. He said Trump’s own national security advisers have said it’s dangerous for Trump to be in charge. “When our allies see Donald Trump turn towards Vladimir Putin, turn towards North Korea, when we start to see that type of fickleness about holding the coalitions together – we will stay committed,” Walz said.

      Vance said it was up to Israel to decide what it needs to do. He said Trump “consistently made the world more secure”.
      On the climate crisis:

      Vance said he and Trump “support clean air, clean water” when asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have to reduce the impact of climate change. “If we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people,” he said. He did not answer when asked whether he agreed with Trump that climate change is a hoax.

      Walz praised the Biden administration for the Inflation Reduction Act, and criticized Trump for calling climate change a “hoax”. “My farmers know climate change is real,” he said.
      On immigration:

      Walz criticized Trump for derailing a legislative package that he described as “the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation’s seen”.

      Walz accused Vance of having “vilified a large number of people who worked legally in the community of Springfield”, adding that those immigrants had been “dehumanized”. “This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it,” he said. “You demonize it.”

      Vance said the people he was most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, “are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border”.

      At one point, CBS News muted the microphones for both candidates as the moderators tried to turn the debate to the economy.
      On the economy:

      Walz said presidents should seek advice from advisers around them. “If you’re going to be president, you don’t have all the answers. Donald Trump believes he does,” he said. “My pro-tip is this: if you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.”
      On abortion:

      Vance said he “never supported a national ban”. He said that Ohio had passed an amendment protecting the right to an abortion, and that it taught him that his Republican party “have got to do a better job of winning back people’s trust”.

      Walz rejected Trump’s claim that he supports abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy, saying the accusation “wasn’t true”. He said that under Project 2025, there would a “registry of pregnancies” and that it would “get more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments”.
      On mass shootings:

      Walz said his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting at a community center. He referred to his record in Minnesota, where there are enhanced background checks and red-flag laws in place. “We understand that the second amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out,” he said.

      Vance said that the country needs to buckle down on border security, and strengthen safety in schools. “We have to make the doors lock better, we have to make the doors stronger,” he said.
      On the candidates’ previous comments:

      Walz stumbled when asked about his misleading claims that he made about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he initially said. When pushed for an answer, he conceded that he “misspoke”.

      Vance said he was “wrong about Donald Trump” when asked about his previous criticisms of his running mate. He accused the media of spreading false stories about Trump that he believed, and said he supports Trump because he “delivered for the American people”.
      On healthcare:

      Vance, when asked how a Trump administration would protect Americans with pre-existing conditions who were able to secure health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, said there were laws and regulations on the books that should be kept in place. He said the functionality of the health insurance marketplace also needed to be improved.
      On paid family leave:

      Walz did not give a definitive answer when asked how long employers should be required to pay workers for parental leave. He said paid family leave is beneficial for families because it “gets the child off to a better start”.

      Vance said the nation should “have a family care model that makes choice possible”. He said the issue was important to him because he is married to a “beautiful woman” and “incredible mother” who is also a “very brilliant corporate litigator”.
      On the January 6 attack on the Capitol:

      Walz said democracy is “bigger than winning an election”, and that a “president’s words matter”. He said the January 6 attack “was a threat to our democracy in a way that we have not seen” and that it manifested itself because of Trump’s inability to accept that he had lost the 2020 election.

      Vance claimed that Trump wanted protesters to remain peaceful on January 6. He said he believes the biggest threat to democracy is “the threat of censorship”.

      Walz directly asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance declined to answer, instead saying that he was “focused on the future”. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
      Closing remarks:

      Walz said he was as “surprised as anybody” at the broad coalition of support that Harris had built, including progressives like Bernie Sanders and Republicans like Dick Cheney. He said Vance had made it clear that he would stand with Trump’s agenda, adding that Harris is “bringing us a politics of joy”.

      Vance said that Harris’s polices were to blame for key needs like heat, housing and food being harder to afford. Harris has proposed a lot of things that she wants to accomplish on day one, Vance said, but he noted that Harris has been vice-president for three-and-a-half years and that “day one was 1,400 days ago”.
      With that, this blog is closing. Thank you for following along. Here is our full story on the vice-presidential debate:As the Middle East spiraled towards full-scale war, the US vice presidential debate focused largely on domestic issues, like school shootings and the cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare.The CBS News debate moderators largely declined to fact-check JD Vance or Tim Walz, asking them instead to respond to each other.Here are some key takeaways from the debate between the Republican senator from Ohio who wrote a bestselling memoir about poverty in Appalachia and the Democratic football-coach-turned-governor of Minnesota:The topics of abortion and the likelihood of Trump accepting this year’s result if he loses led to the most interesting moments during the debate.Walz demanded that Vance agree to abide by the results of the election and commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And he asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election.“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz shot back.Walz noted that Vance was only on the stage because Trump cut ties with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, for certifying the results of the last election.Vance did not answer the question about whether Trump, who continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, lost four years ago. The exchange served as a reminder of one of Trump’s biggest vulnerabilities heading into the election, one that the Harris campaign will continue to highlight in the coming weeks.Reuters has this interesting bit of analysis of Vance’s performance tonight, writing that the Vance on stage was the one the Trump campaign had in mind when Trump selected him as his number two in July.” The idea then was that the 40-year-old first-term senator and best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” could serve as an articulate and rational voice for Trump’s Make American Great Again movement as well as perhaps one day become a generational torchbearer.But instead Vance had a rocky rollout on the campaign trail, becoming the target of online scorn and mockery while most often serving as Trump’s attack dog. The headlines were mostly negative, and his approval ratings suffered.On Tuesday, Vance largely kept his message positive, while taking every opportunity to advocate for Trump.Vance seemed to be succeeding at a vice-presidential running mate’s primary task: Making the candidate at the top of the ticket more palatable to the viewers at home.It was clear as the evening progressed, that it was this, rather than trying to smear Walz, that was the goal of the Trump campaign in this debate.More from the CNN poll – and as expected – the debate did not shift the polled voters’ views much. Just 1% of them changed their minds:Here is what the Guardian’s panellists made of the debate:When Harris was considering Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, he reportedly told her that he was a bad debater, and at the outset Vance, wearing a sharp blue suit, a pink tie, plenty of make-up and hair gel, looked the more polished performer. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a more bustling figure in a loose black suit.Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on rightwing news channels for years, was polished from the off, comfortably dodging a question about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lament how much money has been spent on solar panels.Walz rose to the vice-presidential nomination, in part, through his confident appearances on cable news – it was from there that his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born – but appeared initially nervous, and did not reprise his searing critique of his opponents.Both men also frequently referenced their upbringing in the midwest.Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance refuted.Both candidates were seen more favourably after the debate than before it, according to CNN:
      Following the debate, 59% of debate watchers said they had a favorable view of Walz, with just 22% viewing him unfavorably – an improvement from his already positive numbers among the same voters pre-debate (46% favorable, 32% unfavorable).
      Debate watchers came away with roughly net neutral views of Vance following the debate: 41% rated him favorably and 44% unfavorably. That’s also an improvement from their image of Vance pre-debate, when his ratings among this group were deeply underwater (30% favorable, 52% unfavorable).
      That is the closest of the last five VP debates, according to CNN snap polls:CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins.The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win.CNN adds this caveat: “The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 3 points likelier to be Democratic-aligned than Republican-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 5 percentage points more Democratic-leaning than all registered voters nationally.” More

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      in Elections

      Vance refuses to say Trump lost the 2020 election in Walz debate

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      JD Vance refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and continued to sidestep questions over whether he would certify a Trump loss this fall during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.The exchange brought out some of the sharpest attacks from Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, in what was otherwise a muted and civil back-and-forth with the Ohio senator.Walz asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”Vance has previously said that he would have asked states to submit alternative slates of electors to Congress to continue to debate allegations of election irregularities in 2020. By the time Congress met during the last election to consider electoral votes, courts, state officials and the US supreme court had all turned away efforts to block legitimate slates of electors from being sent to Congress.Pressed by the CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell on whether he would again refuse to certify the vote this year, Vance declined to answer.“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.” He later said that if Walz won the election with Harris, Walz would have his support.Trump has warned of a “bloodbath” if he does not win the election. He has also said supporters will not have to vote anymore if he wins in November. Both the Trump campaign and Republican allies are seeding the ground to contest a possible election loss in November.Vance tried to pivot away from the issue by suggesting January 6 was not as much of a threat to democracy as limiting discussion of Covid on Facebook. He also equated January 6 with Democrats protesting the 2016 election because of Russian interference on Facebook.Walz did not let those comments go unnoticed. “January 6 was not Facebook ads,” he said in one of his bluntest responses in the debate. “This is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say, he is still saying, he didn’t lose the election.”A Harris campaign official said the moment stood out in a focus group of undecided voters in battleground states. Walz earned the group’s highest support of the evening while Vance saw some of his lowest ratings for defending Trump. More

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      in US Politics

      Democratic voters want Kamala Harris to stand up for Palestinians. Will she? | Judith Levine

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      Palestinians are used to being unheard. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed Great Britain to creating a Jewish state in Palestine without mentioning the people who comprised the majority of the people living there. At least four United Nations resolutions of monumental consequence to Palestine – including the ones that established the borders of Israel in 1948 and expanded those borders after the 1967 war – were passed by a body that still does not recognize a sovereign Palestinian entity, much less a state, with voting-member status.Numerous bilateral agreements between Israel and its neighbors spelled out the Palestinians’ fate but did not include them in the negotiations. Donald Trump’s 2020 “deal of the century” was a Hanukah gift to Benjamin Netanyahu that, among other things, opened the way for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and canceled the Palestinians’ right of return.Since the assault on Gaza began, Joe Biden has been unable to acknowledge the horrors on the ground without asserting his administration’s “rock-solid and unwavering” support of Israel. The US president’s rare expressions of sympathy for the people under the bombs elide cause or solution. A short passage about civilian death and displacement in his 2024 State of the Union address ended with: “It’s heartbreaking.” To the UN general assembly in September he declared: “Innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell … Too many families displaced, crowding in tents, facing a dire humanitarian situation.” He named only one agent of the devastation. The Gazans, he said, “didn’t ask for this war that Hamas started”. Meanwhile, he evinces impotence to deliver what Gaza is asking for, in the voices of wailing mothers and the images of flattened cities: an end to it.So the 2024 Democratic national convention was neither the first nor the worst time Palestinians had been erased by somebody claiming to be on their side. After months of negotiations with the people who organized 700,000 primary voters to withhold their endorsements of Biden until he vowed to force an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by stopping arms shipments, the convention denied a five-minute speaking slot to one Palestinian. After welcoming such deplorables as Georgia’s mercilessly anti-abortion former Republican lieutenant and the chief legal officer of the union-busting Uber to the stage, there was no more room under the big tent.When a definitive “no” reached the demonstrators camping in wait outside the arena, they were deflated if not surprised. For some, enough was enough. Muslim Women for Harris immediately disbanded. “Something kind of snapped,” said Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman, the slated speaker. Romman was not in Chicago for the convention, by the way. She was at a conference scheduled to coincide with it, on a panel called Voices You Will Not Hear at the Convention.After Chicago, uncommitted movement activists huddled over what to do next. Despite the rebuff, the convention was hardly a bust. The movement sent 30 uncommitted delegates; 300 Harris delegates declared themselves ceasefire delegates. The panel on Palestinian human rights was among the best attended events. Some of the biggest applause followed condemnations of Israel’s assaults and support for Palestinian liberation. People were milling around in anti-war T-shirts and keffiyehs.These activists may have been uncommitted primary voters and delegates, but they were committed enough Democrats to stump before the primary and run as delegates. The movement had “mobilized people of [conscience] previously apathetic to the democratic process to civically engage in this election”, the uncommitted website states. “We cannot afford to have this base permanently disillusioned or alienated in November.” They’re as scared shitless as every other sentient human about a second Trump presidency. The struggle continues.Intense debate produced a plan. Uncommitted primary voters had sent a loud message through what they did not say. The strategy continues: turn around a history of being silenced by deploying the power of silence. To pressure the Harris-Walz campaign to signal that a new Democratic administration would assume a new stance toward Israel, uncommitted declined to endorse the ticket. Instead, it is urging people to vote “against Trump” and fascism, and not for a third party, a de facto vote for Trump. This will not be easy; canvassers on the streets are encountering reliable Democratic voters, especially the young, brown or Black, waffling about going to the polls at all. But any experienced anti-war activist knows how hard it is to end a war.For the Democrats, the decision to censor the Palestinian voice was not just morally wrong. It was politically stupid. The Harris campaign must know that of those three-quarters of a million uncommitted ballots, 100,000 came from Michigan, the state that is home to the country’s largest Arab American community and that Biden won by 154,000 votes in 2020. Critical to Harris’s victory, Michigan is considered a toss-up.Aside from stupid, it was unnecessary. In May, Data for Progress found that seven in 10 likely voters, including 83% of Democrats, supported a permanent ceasefire. A majority of Democrats believed Israel is committing genocide. More recently, a poll by the Arab American Institute showed “significant gain and very little risk for Harris” in demanding Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire or calling for a suspension of US arms shipments. Either stand would increase her support by at least five percentage points, pulling in reluctant and undecided voters, including a plurality of Jewish Democrats, AAI says.As the Israel Defense Forces pummel Beirut and bulldoze shops, schools and sewer pipes in the West Bank – punishing unnumbered civilians in pursuit of unnamed terrorists – the US is shocked and confused when the Israeli prime minister raises a middle finger to another temporary truce, this one with Hezbollah. On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen rehearses the tautology behind this passivity. “The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel,” he explained. “But an ironclad alliance … built around strategic and domestic political considerations … means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut – let alone cut off – the flow of arms.” The world’s most powerful nation cannot use its leverage because it won’t use its leverage.A President Kamala Harris could use it. But first she needs to get elected. And to get elected, she’d better open her ears to the silent din – and speak up fast.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia judge says women aren’t ‘some piece of collectively owned community property’ in ruling to overturn abortion ban – live

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      Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      After a Georgia judge’s ruling struck down the state’s restrictive 2019 abortion law, which abortion after roughly around six weeks of pregnancy, advocates and analysts have highlighted the order’s bold arguments, which invoked the Handmaid’s Tale and compared certain kinds of abortion bans to “involuntary servitude” or “compulsory labor.”Some advocates, like senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, have highlighted the broader importance of Georgia allowing access to abortion care through 22 weeks of pregnancy, since many surrounding states in the south also have very restrictive anti-abortion laws.Others, like my colleague Carter Sherman, have noted that this ruling comes after Georgia has made national headlines after a ProPublica investigation into the deaths of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died what experts called “preventable” deaths after delays in care that were related to Georgia’s anti-abortion law.Georgia judge describes ‘subtext of involuntary servitude’ in abortion debateAnother key quote from the order, by Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney, that overturned Georgia’s restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy, which state legislators passed in 2019:“There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”Read my colleague Carter Sherman’s full report here:Who is Judge Robert McBurney, who struck down Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban?It’s not the first time Robert C I McBurney, a Fulton county superior court judge based in Atlanta, has made national headlines.McBurney previously struck down Georgia’s very restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy and he also presided over parts of the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and key allies, a case that is currently stalled.McBurney, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to his role in 2012 by Republican governor Nathan Deal, to fill the seat of a judge who was retiring. He has since run for reelection and won.In 2023, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called McBurney “the hardest working judge in Georgia” and said that a joke recently at the Atlanta courthouse was , “Aren’t there any other judges in the county?”McBurney is also set to hear a key case on election regulations in Georgia tomorrow, the Associated Press reports.Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      More from the Associated Press on the legal reasoning behind the order:
      Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his order that ‘liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.’
      McBurney wrote that his ruling means the law in the state returns to what it was before the law was passed in 2019:
      When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene.
      An “arbitrary six-week ban” on abortions “is inconsistent with these rights and the proper balance that a viability rule establishes between a woman’s rights of liberty and privacy and society’s interest in protecting and caring for unborn infants”, the order says.Abortions in Georgia can once again be performed through 22 weeks – reportAfter a judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions once a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which is usually about six weeks into pregnancy, the procedure is once again legal in Georgia through about 22 weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.More context from the Associated Press:
      When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion, it opened the door for state bans. Fourteen states now bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions. Georgia was one of four where the bans kick in after about the first six weeks of pregnancy – which is often before women realize they’re pregnant.
      A judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.The law was similar to many passed by Republican-led states after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have recently seized on the law as an example of the consequences of electing Donald Trump and the Republicans, after a woman was reported to have died in the state after being denied lifesaving care due to the law. Here’s more on that:As many as 600 people remain missing after Hurricane Helene swept through the south-eastern United States, White House homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall told reporters.“The current data we have is that it looks like there could be as many as 600 loss of lives, but we don’t have any confirmation of that. We know there are 600 who are either lost or unaccounted for, and so that work is ongoing,” Sherwood-Randall said at the White House press briefing.She added that there’s a high degree of uncertainty to the numbers:
      I’ll caution you, because we’ve seen this before. Those numbers vary widely. There’s a lot of reporting that doesn’t add up about the numbers. And so, while we may see the numbers go up as we get to more locations that have not yet been fully developed in terms of disaster immediate emergency response operations, we may see more people who unfortunately perished, but we may also not see the numbers skyrocket as people have predicted they might.
      Authorities in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere have already confirmed more than 100 deaths from the storm that swept in from the Gulf of Mexico:Donald Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States took a new turn on Sunday, when he mulled adopting something only seen in horror films to fight crime. The Guardian’s Robert Tait has more:Donald Trump has been accused of invoking plotlines similar to The Purge – a dystopian horror film in which officially sanctioned murder is occasionally legal – as a possible solution to crime in the US after saying it could be eradicated in “one really violent day”.In what was seen as an extreme display of demagoguery even by his standards, Trump drew cheers from an audience in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a picture of an out-of-control crime spree that he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”.“You see these guys walking out with air conditioners with refrigerators on their back, the craziest thing,” Trump said. “And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension.“They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them, and they want to destroy our country.”In a passage that provoked a storm on social media, the former president and Republican nominee then said: “If you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example, where, when they start walking out with … ”Further evidence that Donald Trump has no intention of giving the politicking a rest in the wake of Hurricane Helene can be found on X, where he implies, once again without evidence, that North Carolina’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper is frustrating the humanitarian response.“I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” Trump wrote.North Carolina is considered a swing state in this election, though it has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 2008, and polls there have lately shown Trump with a narrow lead.The governorship seems to be slipping away from GOP candidate Mark Robinson, after CNN broke the news that he had a long history of making lewd and offensive comments on a pornography websites’s message board. Here’s the latest on that fiasco:When he spoke before a furniture store gutted by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia, Donald Trump insisted he was not there for political purposes. His social media posts tell a different story.About an hour ago on Truth Social, he seized on the below tweet from Kamala Harris:The former president wrote that the photo of the president was “FAKE and STAGED”, without providing evidence, then went on to accuse both Harris and Joe Biden of leaving “Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South”.“Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have ‘leaders’ who have no idea how to lead!” Trump added.Thousands of Americans died in hurricanes that struck Texas, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere during Trump’s presidency. After he left office, a report found that his administration unnecessarily delayed emergency money for Puerto Rico, after it was devastated by Hurricane Maria:Donald Trump attempted to put politics aside as he spoke before a furniture store damaged by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia.That’s despite the fact that he had minutes earlier accused Joe Biden of not speaking to the state’s governor Brian Kemp following the storm, even though the White House said the two men spoke on Sunday.“As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard-fought national election, but in a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters. We’re not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved,” Trump said.Kamala Harris made a little bit of news earlier today, saying in an interview that she supported legalizing marijuana – a step even the cannabis-friendly administration of Joe Biden hesitated to embrace.“I just feel strongly people should not be going to jail for smoking weed. And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail,” Harris told the All the Smoke podcast. “Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior.”The vice-president added: “This is not a new position for me. I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it.”The statement represents a break with Biden, who moved to lower restrictions on cannabis while still keeping it broadly illegal at the federal level. Full decriminalization would solve the array of conflicts that have developed as states have moved to legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes. Here’s more on that:In about 30 minutes, Donald Trump will speak from a furniture store in Valdosta, Georgia, a town affected by Hurricane Helene.The former president began his visit to the swing state by falsely claiming that Joe Biden had not spoken to Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Here’s video of the remark, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:The White House announced yesterday that Biden had spoken to Kemp, a Republican, along with Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, and Valdosta mayor Scott Matheson.When Tim Walz and JD Vance take the debate stage tomorrow night, expect to see two very different styles of debating, and two equally different views of the nation’s future, the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reports:When Tim Walz and JD Vance square off as vice-presidential picks on Tuesday, it will be the biggest debate stage for both of the politicians who are newly becoming household names.Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, have been honing their public-speaking skills – and their pointed barbs at each other – in TV appearances and at events around the country in the past few months.Their experiences in electoral debates haven’t reached the levels or notoriety that come along with a presidential campaign, but both have faced opponents in public debates in past elections.Given the tightness of the presidential race, and how poorly the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump went, there will probably be more people tuned in to the vice-presidential debate than in past cycles. While VP debates don’t usually tip the scales much, they could matter in a close race – and they build profiles for lower-profile politicians who will probably stay on the national scene for years to come.On a press call this morning, Tom Emmer, the Republican representative from Minnesota, confirmed he has been playing Tim Walz in JD Vance’s debate prep.Republicans are seeking to frame Walz, the folksy Minnesota governor who has proved to be the most popular figure in the presidential race, as a mean-spirited, ogreish figure.Asked about his portrayal of Walz, Emmer said: “Quite frankly, it’s tough because he is really good on the debate stage.”Emmer, who ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota governor in 2010, added: “[Walz] is going to stand there and he lies with conviction, and he has these little mannerisms where he’s just, hey, I’m the nice guy, but he’s not nice at all.”Emmer predicted that Vance “is prepared to wipe the floor with Tim Walz and expose him for the radical liberal he is”. He added: “Tim Walz is nothing more than Gavin Newsom [the governor of California] in a flannel shirt.”Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, predicted that Walz is “going to look to stick the shiv into JD Vance at every opportunity” and predicted that: “The Tim Walz we see tomorrow night will be a completely different character from what we’ve seen so far on the 2024 campaign trail.”Asked whether Donald Trump would agree to debate Kamala Harris for a second time, Miller said Trump “has made it pretty clear where he is”. Harris has accepted an invitation to debate on CNN on 23 October, but Trump, who was widely viewed to have lost the first debate, has claimed that it is “too late” for a second debate.The US Department of Justice has agreed to pay $22.6 million to settle a lawsuit by 34 women who claim they were wrongly dismissed from the FBI’s agent training academy because of their sex, according to a court filing today.The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge in Washington DC, would resolve a 2019 class action claiming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is part of the Justice Department, had a widespread practice of forcing out female trainees, Reuters reports.The plaintiffs say that they were found unsuitable to graduate from the training academy even though they performed as well as or better than many male trainees on academic, physical fitness, and firearms tests. Some of them also say they were subjected to sexual harassment and sexist jokes and comments.Along with the payout, the proposed settlement would allow eligible class members to seek reinstatement to the agent training program and require the FBI to hire outside experts to ensure that its evaluation process for trainees is fair.Department’s internal watchdog released a report in 2022 finding that female FBI trainees were disproportionately likely to be dismissed and to be cited for conduct “unsuitable” for an agent. Less than one-quarter of FBI special agents are women, the agency said in a report released in April.The man charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump after allegedly positioning himself with a rifle outside one of the former president’s Florida golf courses on 15 September pleaded not guilty this morning to five federal charges.Ryan Routh, 58, entered the plea to charges that include attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate during a hearing in federal court. He has already been ordered to remain in jail to await a trial, Reuters reports.Prosecutors have said Routh intended to kill Trump as he golfed at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Routh, a struggling roofing contractor, condemned the Republican presidential candidate in a self-published book and dropped off a letter months earlier with an associate referencing an attempted assassination on Trump, according to prosecutors.
      This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” the suspect wrote, according to a court filing by prosecutors.
      Lawyers for Routh suggested at a 23 September court hearing that the letter may have been an attempt by their client at gaining publicity and highlighted what they called Routh’s efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan.Routh is accused of poking a rifle through a fence at the course with the intention to kill Trump. When a federal agent spotted it and fired shots, the suspect fled but was arrested.Joe Biden finished up his remarks on the impact of Hurricane Helene by saying that as US president he had seen many disasters and heard “dozens of stories from survivors”.“I know how it feels to be left with nothing,” he said, “not even knowing where or when you’re back on track. I’m here to tell every single survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as it takes … I urge everyone returning to their communities and homes to listen to the local officials and follow all the safety instructions.”He continued: “Take this seriously, please be safe, your nation has your back and the Biden-Harris administration will be there until the job is done.”In answer to a press question, Biden said no decision has been made yet on whether to ask the US Congress (which is in recess) to come back for a special session to approve additional emergency funding as a result of what he described as the “really, really devastating” storm.He said he had spoken to the governor of North Carolina [Democrat Roy Cooper] and expects to visit the state on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. More

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      Democrats sue Georgia election board over new ballot hand-count rule

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      Democrats sued the Georgia state election board on Monday over a new rule requiring officials to hand-count ballots cast on election day, asking a state court to declare it unlawful and block it from going into effect.The suit, filed in Fulton county superior court by both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia, takes aim at a rule adopted in a 3-2 vote by the state election board on 20 September. The rule requires the poll manager and a team of two other workers in each voting precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and hand-count them. They must all agree on the total count and ensure that it matches the totals from the machine tabulation. If there is an inconsistency, they are required to determine the reason and correct it, if possible.The rule has received widespread pushback from election officials in the state and voting rights groups, who are concerned the process could lead to delays and confusion after election night and cause chain-of-custody issues. Experts have long pointed out that hand-counts are less reliable than machine counts. The concern over post-election chaos is particularly acute in Georgia, a battleground state in this year’s presidential election.“To protect the sanctity of the state’s laws and to prevent election night chaos, this Court should declare that the Hand Count Rule exceeds [the state election board’s] statutory authority and enjoin that rule from going into effect,” the complaint says.The new rule is illegal for several reasons, the suit claims. First, there is no hand-count requirement outlined in Georgia law, and the state election board cannot enact requirements beyond what is written in state statute, lawyers wrote. Second, imposing a hand-count this close to an election would cause disorder, going against the board’s mandate to ensure orderly elections, the complaint says. Last, Democrats claim the board did not follow proper procedures to enact the measures.Even before the board passed the law, Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, advised the board that the new requirement was probably illegal. “The statutes upon which these rules rely do not reflect any provision enacted by the General Assembly for the hand-counting of ballots prior to tabulation,” he wrote in a memo.The rule is one of several that a new, pro-Trump majority on the state election board has enacted this year. Other rules allow local election officials to undertake an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results and require local officials to explain any inconsistencies between the total number of voters who check in and the number of ballots cast in a precinct. Trump publicly praised the three board members at a rally earlier this year, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said in a statement that Democrats were stepping in to ensure a free and fair election.“As Donald Trump invents facts to try to sow doubt in our elections, his Maga allies in Georgia passed a new rule just weeks before election day that will obstruct the process of counting votes so they can complain when voters reject Trump at the polls,” Fulks said. “We agree with Georgia’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it.”In 2020, when two hand-counts of the vote reaffirmed Joe Biden’s win, Trump still sought to overturn the election results. He asked Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, to find him 11,780 votes, enough to switch the results in the state.In addition to the Democratic party, the other plaintiffs in the suit are members of the local election boards in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Forsyth counties – all hubs near the Atlanta area poised to play a major role in determining the winner of the election in Georgia this year. More

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      Veep cast reunites, with special guests, to raise money for Harris

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      As soon as Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential election and threw his support behind Kamala Harris, people immediately started comparing the shocking turn of events to something that would unfold on HBO’s critically acclaimed political satire Veep. At the time, the US vice-president was seen as a Selina Meyers-esque figure, what with her penchant for public awkwardness, clunky turns of phrase and the perception of her as a perpetual also-ran.Since then, things have changed quite a bit, with Harris rising to the occasion and running a highly effective and exciting campaign that has seen her ascend to frontrunner in the race (even if her advantage remains razor-thin).Still, as I wrote in my article from July, her campaign and the Democrats as a whole would be wise to lean into comparisons to Veep. Despite how venal and vain the characters on the show were, the workplace comedy (which wrapped up in 2019) remains as popular and relevant as ever.When you consider this alongside the fact that the majority of the cast, including and especially its star, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, are outspoken liberals, it made all the sense in the world for some Democratic group to try to work with them to raise funds and awareness during this final leg of the campaign.That group ended up being the Wisconsin Democrats. A swing state that is likely to have a big hand in deciding not only who the next president is, but also which party controls the Senate, WisDems put together a live Zoom table read of a classic episode of Veep, featuring the majority of the cast, plus some big-name guest stars, to be livestreamed to the donors, with the money raised going towards presidential, congressional and assembly campaigns across the state.Fellow liberal comic and Veep super-fan Stephen Colbert took on hosting duties. Special guest stars included the Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin in her acting debut (not counting her childhood performance in a school production of Finian’s Rainbow), actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani as a Syrian refugee (“I’m Pakistani, but I can play cat-eating immigrants from all over the world”), Seinfeld co-star Jason Alexander as a pompous feature writer, film-maker Kevin Smith as a reporter, and Larry David – who, in the most fitting turn of events imaginable, spent the first several minutes of the live stream trying to figure out how to work his Zoom – as Selina’s chief hatchet man, Ben Cafferty.View image in fullscreenReprising their roles from the show were actors Diedrich Bader, Nancy Lenehan, Gary Cole, Sam Richardson, Sufe Bradshaw, Timothy Simons, Reid Scott, Matt Walsh, Anna Chlumsky, Tony Hale and, of course, Louis-Dreyfus, while series regulars Clea DuVall and Sarah Sutherland took on other roles, since their characters don’t appear in this ep. (Patton Oswalt, who was also on the show, made a surprise appearance during the post-read Q&A.)The episode chosen was Crate, from season 3, which finds Selina and her cronies campaigning in New Hampshire ahead of the upcoming primaries. Various mishaps involving a pricey photo-op prop, an incriminating cellphone recording and the suicidal first lady, ensue. This episode is regarded as one of the very best in the show’s history, mostly due to one scene: Selina, having just learned that Potus will be resigning from office, effective immediately, shares a joyous freakout alongside her body man/closest confidant, Gary. It’s a bravura performance from both Louis-Dreyfus and Hale, one that probably secured them each an Emmy the following year.(It’s also fitting that this episode should be chosen, given that this intimate scene is immediately followed by Selina betraying Gary, a dynamic that repeats itself in the most devastating moment of the series finale.)For the read-through, the cast slipped back into their roles with ease. Everyone was on point, but Louis-Dreyfus and Hale were extra-dialed in, especially during their big scene. You got goosebumps watching them recreate it 10 years later, over Zoom, while still bringing all of the emotion they did during the actual filming.The guest stars all acquit themselves well, but it should come as no surprise that it was David who got the biggest laughs. While it’s impossible for him not to play himself, his singular delivery proved a perfect fit with Veep’s uber-cynical, profanity-laden screwball dialog.After the reading, we alternated between cast members interviewing a handful of state legislature candidates (with the major focus of the night revolving around abortion rights) and them fielding questions from viewers. Show creator Armando Iannucci joined in for this portion of the event.We got treated to a mini-Seinfeld reunion between Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander and David; Louis-Dreyfus sounded off on her hatred of AI; Smith talked about his favorite scene of the show (Selina accidentally getting high on St John’s wort, naturally); and David went off on a funny tangent about bald men looking better with beards (although he himself would never grow one because comedians can’t be stroking their beards).Someone asked the cast to give their favorite individual lines from the show. Louis-Dreyfus: “Jolly green jizz-face.” Simons: “[You’re] a meme, ma’am.” Walsh: “I’ve met [some] people … and a lot of them are fucking idiots.” Chlumsky: “[That’s] like [trying to use] a croissant [as] a [fucking] dildo. It doesn’t [do] the job and it [makes] a fucking mess!” Bradshaw: “[Get] the government out of my [fucking] snatch.” Colbert: “Danny Wah!”Iannucci seemed to confirm that Kent and Sue indeed hooked up at some point (“It probably involved algorithms”) and speculated on various characters’ outcomes (married politicos Amy and Bill are probably hosting a podcast with their dogs, while the “late” Andrew Meyer is living under a new identity on an island that he’s trying to buy with a view to it being recognized as its own country).When asked about the future of satire, Iannucci said it depended on who wins this election, as the entire premise of political comedy hinges on people holding politicians up to certain standards, standards Trump and his ilk have never shown the least bit of concern over.Colbert wrapped things up by having the cast read aloud their favorite insults of the show’s most despicable and hilarious character, noxious political aide and eventual veep, Jonah Ryan. These cruel gems include: “Childless cat-lady man”, “Disney plus extra chromosomes”, “Harry No-Styles”, “Rape-It Ralph”, “Moonsucker”, “Satellite licker”, “face-circumcised” and “stock photo for sperm-bank reject”.Right as Simons, the actor who played Ryan, broke the news that the fundraiser exceeded its stated goal of $600,000, Iannucci tossed out on final new Jonah barb that he’d come up with earlier in the day:“Jonah, even if you fell into the world’s most powerful castration machine, you’d still come out of it a dick.” More

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      Harris holds Las Vegas rally as Nevada becomes crucial swing state in election

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      Kamala Harris held a rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night as the state, with six electoral college votes, becomes increasingly important in a presidential race that polls show is barely moving to favour either candidate.Both the vice-president and Donald Trump have been making frequent trips to Nevada, but Harris’s rally takes place two days after she visited the US-Mexico border, a vulnerable issue for Democrats that Harris is looking to defuse.Before the raucous Las Vegas crowd estimated at 7,500, Harris renewed her jabs at Trump over refusing another debate, saying, “the American people have a right to hear us discuss the issues. And as you say here in Las Vegas, I’m all in. I’m all in.”Harris offered her condolences for those affected by Hurricane Helene, and her campaign said she would visit affected areas as soon as doing so would not disrupt the emergency response to the storm that has hit the country’s southeast.“We will stand with these communities for as long as it takes to make sure that they are able to recover and rebuild,” Harris said on Sunday.On Friday, Harris walked alongside a towering, rust-colored border wall fitted with barbed wire in Douglas, Arizona, and met with federal authorities to discuss illegal border crossing and fentanyl smuggling.At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on Sunday, the former president attempted to blame Harris for the opioid epidemic. “She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” he said.Six out of 10 Americans rate immigration as “very important”, according to the Pew Research Center, and other polling suggests voters trust Trump can handle the issue more effectively than Harris can.In contrast, fewer than half of voters (40%) said abortion, the key Republican vulnerability, was a very important issue to their vote.In a speech in San Francisco on Saturday, Harris said the “race is as close as it could possibly be” and described it “a margin-of-error race”. The Democrat candidate added that she felt she was running as the underdog.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have also begun testing a new strategy to appeal to younger voters, including visitors to Las Vegas with its long-crafted reputation for inebriation, with posts about what it calls “Trump’s tequila tax” that its says could come as a result of proposed import tariffs.Harris’s campaign swing through Las Vegas comes as both candidates have said they plan to end taxes on tips. Trump presented his proposal in the city in June; Harris used her own rally in August to make the same pledge.The issue resonates in Las Vegas, where there are approximately 60,000 hospitality workers. Nevada’s Culinary Union has endorsed Harris.Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, told the Associated Press that the union favored Harris’s proposal because she pledged to tackle what his union calls “sub-minimum wage”.“That shows us she’s serious,” Pappageorge said.Trump was at the same Las Vegas venue that Harris is speaking at earlier this month. In that address, he called his opponent the “would-be the president of invasion”. More

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      Trump and Harris speak in swing states as running mates prep ahead of VP debate – live

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      Kamala Harris is presenting herself as a change agent who will “turn the page” and offer “a new way forward,” a move far from embracing her role in Biden’s White House.Inflation has been tamed. Illegal immigration has stabalized. Violent crime is down. In theory it is a perfect recipe for electoral success. Yet it is a gift that the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, seems reluctant to accept.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “A new way? She’s been part of a very successful administration and she was chosen by Joe Biden as VP and then essentially chosen to be his successor.“But she has to pretend that she’s going to be forging a new path because she can’t afford to be too closely associated with Biden. I know one person on the inner campaign staff who cringes every time Harris and Biden have to appear together because the visual reinforces the tie they don’t want people to make. It’s nonsensical.”Harris, as the incumbent vice-president, will be hoping to avoid a repeat of the Republican president George HW Bush’s fate in 1992. Economic indicators improved over the spring and summer but too late to save him from defeat by Bill Clinton, whose lead strategist, James Carville, memorably summed up: “It’s the economy, stupid.”Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC, said: “When it comes to the economy people believe their own eyes and they will make their judgments on that basis. This is a lesson I have learned in the six presidential campaigns I’ve wandered in and out of: if you have statistics on the one hand and personal experience on the other, it’s no contest.”More on Harris distancing herself from Biden’s record:Donald Trump is slated to visit Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday, and receive a briefing on the damage caused by Hurricane Helene and “facilitate the distribution of relief supplies”, his campaign announced.The former president is expected to deliver his remarks at 2pm ET.During a speech in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Trump sent his condolences to the families affected by Helene, which killed at least 64 people.Robert F Kennedy Jr will participate in a “Make America Healthy Again” event with Dr Phil McGraw in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Monday, Trump’s campaign announced.Kennedy, who was staging an independent bid for the presidency, endorsed the former president after dropping out of the race in August.Kennedy has hopes of influencing federal health policy under a possible Trump administration. The former third-party candidate has questioned the safety of vaccinating children and promoted theories that suggest HIV is not the true cause of AIDS.Joseph Costello, a Kamala Harris campaign spokesperson, reacted to Donald Trump’s speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, picking on the former president’s comments about overtime pay.“As president, Trump took executive action to rip away overtime pay for *millions* of workers, including nearly 5 million workers without a college degree,” Costello said on Twitter/X.Costello attached a link to a paper by the Economic Policy Institute titled: More than eight million workers will be left behind by the Trump overtime proposal.Donald Trump wrapped up his speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, by summing up his proposals as a presidential candidate, pledging to end crime allegedly by migrants, strengthen the military, and “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity out of our schools”.Donald Trump repeated his plan to close the Department of Education if he’s elected as president in November.“Let the states run their own education,” he said.“We spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world, by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list,” Trump said. “So you know the expression: what the hell do you have to lose? Right?”Donald Trump claimed Butler, Pennsylvania, has become a tourist site after his attempted assassination in July.“Cars are riding by. They’re taking pictures. It’s become an amazing tourist site,”he said.Trump announced that the event in Butler will honor the firefighter who was shot and killed at the rally in July, Corey Comperator.During his speech, Donald Trump confirmed he will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the attempted assassination attempt in July. His visit is scheduled for 5 October.“We have a lot of people coming, and I really believe that will be the safest place on Earth,” said the former president.Donald Trump brought US Senate candidate David McCormick of Pennsylvania to the stage. McCormick, ex-CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is trying to unseat Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who is seeking his fourth term.“It’s a race between strength, a guy who says ‘fight’, and weakness,” McCormick said. “We need to bring law and order to secure that border and stop these illegal immigrants coming in and bringing crime and fentanyl into Pennsylvania.”Donald Trump reaffirmed his stance that workers’ tips should not be taxed.He was the first candidate to endorse this proposal during a rally in June. Months later, Kamala Harris also expressed support for the plan, prompting the former president to label her “Copy Cat Kamala” at other rallies.“We will have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on social security benefits for seniors,” Trump said on Sunday.“When I win, we will get Pennsylvania energy workers, fracking, drilling, pumping and producing like they have never produced before,” Donald Trump said.“Kamala vowed to repeatedly ban fracking, and she imposed a natural gas export ban that was a killer, that is starving a state right now of your wealth and wealth that you deserve right now,” Trump said.Trump criticized Harris’s support for expanding access and manufacturing of electric vehicles in the US.“Her insane electric vehicle mandate will decimate Pennsylvania’s economy by abolishing gas-powered cars and trucks for American roads and destroying your fossil fuel industry,” he said. “And there are very few states that benefit like you do from fracking.”Donald Trump quoted the lyrics of a song supposedly warning against immigration during his speech in Erie, Pennsylvania.Trump read the lyrics of The Snake, which was written by civil rights activist Oscar Brown in 1963. The song was later a hit for soul singer Al Wilson five years later.In Trump’s interpretation, it serves as a cautionary tale about the alleged danger posed by immigrants. The former president recounted the allegorical tale of a woman who foolishly embraces a dangerous serpent.The former president once again called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” during his speech in Pennsylvania on Sunday.“Joe Biden became mentally impaired,” Trump said, adding that Harris “was born that way”.“There’s something wrong with Kamala, and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And you know what? Everybody knows it,” Trump said.He later played an ad against the vice-president, composed of a compilation of her comments regarding immigration.“Honestly, we could give you clips like that all day long. This is not your president. This president would destroy our country, worse than Biden. He’s the worst president in history,” the former president said. More