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      ‘Running away from good news’: why is Harris distancing herself from Biden’s record?

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      As Joe Biden walked on the set of The View, one of America’s most popular daytime television programmes, he was greeted by Hail to the Chief and a studio audience erupting in wild applause and cheers. “They love you!” said the co-host Joy Behar. The US president replied wryly: “It’s always better when you’re leaving.”During the ABC show, filmed live in a New York studio where digital screens showed images from Biden’s career, he claimed to be “at peace” with his decision not to seek re-election in November. Yet he also insisted that he could have beaten “loser” Donald Trump. And the co-host Whoopi Goldberg criticised the way Democrats forced Biden’s hand: “I didn’t like the way it was done publicly.”The wistfulness might be owed in part to Biden supporters’ faith that, for all the concerns over his age and mental acuity, his record should be viewed more as an asset than a liability. Their argument has been bolstered of late by trends that could neutralise three scourges of his presidency.Inflation has been tamed. Illegal immigration has stabilised. 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. Far from embracing her role in Biden’s White House, the 59-year-old is presenting herself as a change agent who will “turn the page” and offer “a new way forward”.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.”View image in fullscreenTravelling by motorcade, helicopter and Air Force One, the Guardian accompanied Biden for two days this week, from his daytime TV slot to a Ukraine event with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, from a glamorous reception at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to a gun safety event with Harris where the audience chanted: “Thank you, Joe!”There were reminders of the 81-year-old’s struggles, which culminated in a career-ending debate performance against Trump in June. “Welcome to Washington!” he told a room full of world leaders, diplomats and journalists at the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel in New York, New York.But this was also a man seeking to cement his legacy, calling for a 21-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, pledging $8bn in military aid for Ukraine and signing an executive order to combat emerging firearms threats and improve active shooter drills in schools. That legacy will also include economic growth, low unemployment and a string of legislative wins.Biden’s tenure has been overshadowed, however, by inflation – in 2022 the prices of gas, food and most other goods and services surged by 9%, a 40-year high – insecurity at the southern border and fears over crime. His approval rating has hovered below 40%. But with less than four months left in office, there are clear signs of the tide turning.Inflation has returned to close to where it was shortly before the Covid pandemic, defying predictions of recession and giving the Federal Reserve confidence to cut interest rates. Petrol prices, always a key indicator of discontent, have been coming down for months; in August the national average for a gallon was $3.38 – about 47 cents lower than the same time a year ago.Border security, long Trump’s signature issue, is also improving. After the former president compelled Republicans in Congress to block a border security bill, Biden stepped in to partially suspend asylum processing. In July the number of people illegally crossing the southern border dropped to 56,400, the lowest level in nearly four years, according to government figures.View image in fullscreenMoreover, Trump recently claimed that crime was “through the roof” under Biden’s administration. But this week the FBI released statistics that showed violent crime in the US declined an estimated 3% in 2023 from the year before, part of a continued trend since the Covid pandemic. Last year witnessed the biggest ever decline in the homicide rate, now 16% below its level in 2020. And for all Trump’s rhetoric, violent crime is now at a near 50-year low.Yet in a polarised political atmosphere, with rightwing media constantly attacking him, Biden is receiving little credit. Opinion polls showed him trailing Trump badly when voters were asked which candidate they trust to handle the economy, immigration and crime (Trump has a narrower lead over Harris on these issues).Sabato said: “Everything’s getting better except the American public thinks we’re in a recession and there are thieves outside their door every evening and those immigrants are trying to eat their pets. It’s insane. A classic case of the failure of civic education. I know that’s basic and people laugh about the term but it’s absolutely the root cause of all this.”In this climate, Harris appears to have concluded that, whatever the headline economic figures say, people are not feeling it. She has acknowledged many families are struggling with the cost of living, including the price of groceries and the dream of buying a home. She has promised to focus on basics such as being able to save for a child’s education, take a holiday and buy Christmas presents without financial stress.View image in fullscreenWendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University, noted that in the last quarter of 2023 and first quarter of 2024, every state in the country had growth in real disposable income. “The problem for the Democrats is that inflation eroded the power of that income up until, you could argue, the late spring of 2024. Do consumers now feel like their wages are buying them something and that things are less expensive?”She added: “You can tell them things are better but, unless they’re feeling it, it won’t help the Democrats in November. There’s a disconnect between voter impression of the economy and personal voter feelings about the economy. But certainly having a series of indicators and the news feed going from negative to positive can help sustain Kamala Harris’s campaign message that she, in fact, will produce a good economy.”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.”Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, acknowledged that inflation, immigration and crime are heading in the right direction. “The political damage is done and I wouldn’t say that these developments are too little but I would say they are too late,” he added.View image in fullscreen“That’s especially true for immigration because, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing that President Biden did eight months ago that he couldn’t have done four years ago. I’m ever mindful of the fact that immigration is the issue that Trump rode to the presidency the first time in 2016.”Harris has accused Trump of killing the bipartisan Senate compromise that would have included tougher asylum standards and hiring more border agents, immigration judges and asylum officers. She says she would bring back that bill and sign it into law. Trump promises to mount the biggest domestic deportation in US history, an operation that could involve detention camps and the national guard.As for Biden, a memo released by the White House this week said he intended to “aggressively execute” on the rest of his agenda and hit the road to highlight the Biden-Harris record. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he delivered an address on the sidelines of the UN general assembly while surrounded by sculptures from antiquity; a moment, perhaps, to consider his own place in history.“I’ve seen the impossible become reality,” he told guests, recalling how he saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of South African apartheid and war criminals and dictators face justice and accountability for human rights violations.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s a very strong argument that we will hear from historians about Joe Biden getting a bad break. He was a better president than was appreciated in his time. If Kamala Harris loses, one of the major critiques is going to be that the Democrats were too quick to turn on Biden and that Harris ran a campaign running away from the good news.” More

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      Walz v Vance: two midwesterners miles apart in politics ready for debate

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      The football coach and the “Yale law guy” go head-to-head in New York City on Tuesday night, as two midwesterners with very different styles and vastly diverging messages slug it out over the future of the US.Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, faces the Republican senator from Ohio, JD Vance, in a vice-presidential debate that promises to be unusually significant in this white-hot election year. They will joust for 90 minutes under the moderation of CBS News as they seek to give their respective running mates – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – a leg up to the White House.Walz has been prepping for the debate in Minneapolis with the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, masquerading as Vance. (Buttigieg may have been suffering deja vu – he posed as Mike Pence during Kamala Harris’s prep sessions ahead of the 2020 VP debate.)Vance has been holding mock debates with the Republican whip in the US House, Tom Emmer, standing in as Walz. Emmer is a fellow Minnesotan, so has the benefit of having studied Walz up close.The two running mates bring contrasting strengths to the gladiatorial ring. Vance is an experienced debater who will relish confrontation under the glare of the TV lights.“Look, he’s a Yale law guy,” Walz has said about his opponent. “He’ll come well prepared.”Walz by contrast will be able to lean on skills learned in the school classroom. Walz spent 17 years as a public school teacher, so he knows how to think on his feet – and deal with a disruptive kid.“I expect to see a very heated debate,” Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, told CBS News.One of the big questions of the night is likely to be whether Vance can redeem himself after a troubled start to his candidacy. Will he be able to get past all the “weirdness”, as Walz has framed it, and bring consistency to the messaging of an often chaotic Trump campaign?From awkward encounters with doughnut shop workers, to the ongoing furor around his “childless cat ladies” remark, Vance has been the subject of online mockery that has at times appeared to engulf him. He also seems to be stuck on the same culture war issues that consume Trump.“Vance does not seem to have drawn additional voters to the Trump ticket, as the controversies he gets into are exactly the same as those the former president gets into,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.Most egregiously, Vance has doubled down on the false and racist narrative that Haitian immigrants are eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio, despite categorical denials from local authorities. He recently confessed to CNN that he was willing to “create stories” if it meant that he attracted media attention.Such comments have sunk Vance underwater in the opinion of the voting public – his unfavorability rating is 11 points higher than his favorable, according to FiveThirtyEight.Walz by contrast is basking in the glow of a positive four-point gap between his favorability ratings, which poses him with a completely different set of challenges on debate night. He will need to parry Vance’s attempts to frame him as the misinformation candidate based on misrepresentations Walz made about his military record, defuse his rivals claims that he is dangerously liberal, and refuse to be knocked off track.“Walz just needs to get in and out of the debate without causing trouble for his ticket,” Burden said.John Conway, director of strategy for Republican Voters Against Trump, said that Walz was best advised to follow Harris’s playbook. He organised focus groups the day after Harris’s debate with Trump, involving voters from five battleground states who backed Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden in 2020.The focus group attendees were enthusiastic about Harris’s dual approach to the debate – attack Trump for his lies and felony convictions, but also lay out a positive plan for the future of the country. “That’s the blueprint Walz must follow,” Conway said, “attack when appropriate but also be substantive on the issues.”There have been several memorable made-for-TV moments from the VP debates since the first in 1976 between senators Bob Dole and Walter Mondale. Most celebrated is the 1988 incident when the Democrat Lloyd Bentsen chastised George H Bush’s running mate, Dan Quayle, for comparing himself to John F Kennedy.“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”“That was really uncalled for, senator,” Quayle wailed.More recently, John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, ribbed Joe Biden, the Democratic VP candidate running with Barack Obama, in 2008, by telling him: “Aw, say it ain’t so, Joe.”Those were neat soundbites that entered the lexicons. But it is notable that neither Bentsen nor Palin were rewarded where it matters – at the ballot box.In fact, vice-presidential debates have tended to be underwhelming in terms of the lasting imprint they have left on US elections. Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, pointed out that even after the dynamic presidential debate between Harris and Trump earlier this month, which was watched by 67 million TV viewers and which Harris was widely judged to have won, the race remains essentially neck-and-neck in the critical battleground states.Sabato said that given the lack of consequences from the debate at the top of the ticket, he expected Tuesday’s vice-presidential tussle to be equally inconclusive. “I don’t expect the vice-presidential debate to make any impact,” he said.Yet this is no ordinary election. Joe Biden’s departure and the sudden elevation of Harris, together with Trump refusing to participate in a second debate with her, has raised the stakes.Tuesday’s spectacle will probably be the final debate before election day on 5 November. “This is really the last main national moment in the campaign, so I do think it is important,” Mook said.Apart from the economy, immigration and foreign wars, which are certain to be addressed during the debate, a more amorphous struggle is likely to play out on stage: who will own the mantle of “authentic midwesterner”? Will it be Nebraska-born Walz, or the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio’s Vance.The rivalry goes beyond mere aesthetics or regional loyalties. It resonates heavily in those states where the election could be decided – the three so-called “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.“I don’t know if the word ‘midwestern’ will be used in the debate, but feelings about the midwest will come through,” Burden said.The candidates offer a diametrically opposed vision of the heartlands. Walz’s midwest is folksy and homely, a world where neighbors look after each other, where football coaches double up as local heroes (Walz coached the sport at Mankato West high school from 1997), and where joy fills the air.Vance’s is a much darker picture of drug addiction, broken families and the threat of immigration. His is the midwest of Trump’s “American carnage” dystopia.Two utterly contrasting visions. Two tough and determined candidates. Gentlemen, shall we begin? More

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      Pennsylvania steel workers, wooed by Harris and Trump, remain skeptical: ‘I don’t trust either one of them’

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      The Monongahela River winds through the tight Mon Valley south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, creating a main artery in the nation’s industrial heart, where the steel and coal industries have driven the region’s economy and shaped political landscapes since the late 19th century.In the weeks preceding the election, the region is once again playing an outsize role in determining the nation’s political future. A controversial Biden-Harris administration plan to kill Pittsburgh-based US Steel’s proposed sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel is viewed in part as an election-year strategy to shore up critical union support in a must-win swing state.On the ground in and around the city, evidence suggests the move may just work – unions oppose the sale and the administration’s position is at the very least maintaining recent Democratic gains in the tug-of-war for swing voters in the nation’s steel capital.Anecdotal evidence and polling point to Harris gaining momentum here.“I’ve learned not to be comfortable with any election because we didn’t think Trump could win in 16 … but I think people are going to vote more common sense this year,” said Keli Vereb, a steelworker union rep and Lincoln borough council member.Unusually in these fractious times, both presidential candidates oppose the deal, backing United Steelworkers International union members across the political spectrum who are determined to thwart a deal they see as a job killer that puts their pensions at risk.Recent memories of supply chain issues have also hardened US resolve to protect vital industries such as steel.Still, politics are omnipresent, and the deal undoubtedly will play a role in determining the next president. It comes eight years after blue-collar workers here defected from the Democratic party en masse when then candidate Hillary Clinton said during a debate that she would put coalminers out of business.Some union leaders say the comment may have cost her Pennsylvania, which Donald Trump won by 0.7%. After four years of pro-labor policies from Joe Biden, the party has begun to win back some who left, and with Trump proposing to block the US Steel sale if he were elected, Democrats risk a 2016 repeat if it is allowed to proceed.“Trump would pounce on them if they let [the sale] go,” said Allen George, a lifelong Democrat who worked in unions adjacent to the steel industry.The companies are making a powerful argument that the deal is vital to US Steel’s survival. US Steel claims it will be forced to cut Pennsylvania jobs and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if Biden blocks Nippon’s $14.1bn bid, while it has promised to invest $2.4bn in its facilities if the sale goes through. The company’s “scorched earth” public relations campaign on the factory floors has at least some rank and file supporting the sale, said Bernie Hall, Pennsylvania director for USI.“Some are scared and think: ‘We should just take this and live to fight another day,’ and that’s natural,” Hall said.Many more, however, oppose the sale. The union’s contract is up in 23 months and they fear a Nippon-US Steel would cut jobs, or continue to send them to non-union states. They point to Nippon’s long history of “dumping” steel in the US, which has cratered prices and cost American jobs, and many fear the purchase is a ploy to continue the practice.US Steel’s record of closing factories and failing to keep promises has generated a deep mistrust and disdain for the company, workers told the Guardian on a recent Monday afternoon outside the Harvey Wilner’s pub in West Mifflin, just south of Pittsburgh. They rattled off a list of facilities that have closed over the decades.“Nippon can have at it,” said Barry Fez, who has worked in manufacturing in the region for decades, but, he says, in a few years he expects they will go back on their word.But that sentiment is colliding with Wall Street and Beltway support for the deal. The latter argue that the administration’s protectionist plan would run counter to international trade norms because Japan is an ally and close economic partner.The idea that trade decorum with Japan is more important than Pennsylvania union members’ security drew scoffs from some workers.“And then they’ll wonder why they lost an election,” said Mike Gallagher, a retired union member.‘They lie all the time’Banking legend JP Morgan created US Steel in a mega-merger in 1901. It grew to be the largest US producer, employing more than 340,000 people at its second world war peak. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, has closed many of its Mon Valley facilities, and now employs about 4,000 people, although the company says it indirectly supports 11,000 jobs and generates $3.6bn in economic activity annually.In the face of waning American steel power, the company has looked for a buyer, and many feel a US-Japan alliance makes sense in countering increasing Chinese domination of the industry.But the union is opposed, and in Pennsylvania, 25% of the electorate is unionized, making it a formidable bloc intensely courted by both political parties.Trump in January said he would stop the deal. Biden has said the same, including in a private meeting with steel workers in April, when the president insisted “US steel will stay US-owned”, according to Don Furko, president of Local 1557 in Clairton. “He said he ‘guarantees’ it.”The administration’s decision on whether the deal should be blocked largely lies with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is made up of Biden’s cabinet members and other appointees. It can veto mergers and acquisitions it finds present a national security risk.CFIUS was expected to issue an opinion on 21 September, but the administration punted until after the election. Union members say they aren’t worried.“President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been pretty clear and they will follow through,” Hall said.Harris has got the message: “US Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated,” she told a rally in Pittsburgh earlier this month.David Burritt, the CEO of US Steel, has warned of consequences if the deal is blocked. He says the company would “largely pivot away” from its blast furnace production in the region, and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh.“We want elected leaders and other key decision makers to recognize the benefits of the deal as well as the unavoidable consequences if the deal fails,” Burritt said last month.That threat has further inflamed tensions. Furko said it reminds him of his young son flipping over the Monopoly board when he loses: “That’s really what’s going on here – if this deal doesn’t go through, then they’re going to flip over the Monopoly board.”Asked about US Steel’s claims that it will revitalize the region if the sale goes through, workers told the Guardian that there are no guarantees that the investment will be in Mon Valley. People would be “foolish” to believe that, Vereb said.That was echoed outside the Wilner’s pub. Fez recalled the pub’s heyday, when “you couldn’t get in there at 7am because it was so packed”, and the floor was littered with quarter wrappers from the slot machines.On a Monday afternoon around shift change time, a group of about a dozen retirees sat around the bar. They blamed US Steel for the region’s slowdown, and while they say they do not expect Biden or Trump to save the city, they have even less confidence that US Steel and a Japanese company will turn it around.“They lie all the time, and I don’t trust either one of them,” said Jack, a retiree who worked for US Steel for more than 30 years, who declined to use his last name.‘He gets credit for that’The political price that the Biden-Harris administration could pay for allowing the deal to go through can be seen in the 2016 election’s wake.Before 2016, the region was largely Democratic. But when Clinton made the comment about the clean energy industry putting coalminers and barons out of business, “Things turned on a dime,” Vereb said. Her borough of 900 was once about 80% Democrats. It’s now about 75% Republican, she estimates.About 75% of those working at US Steel’s Clairton Mill Works, several union leaders estimate, support Trump, and there is little Democrats can do to win back many of them.The situation is also complicated by US Steel’s intense campaign to convince workers that the sale will save their jobs. The company sends regular emails, holds meetings, takes out ads in newspapers and makes their case to reporters.“They say: ‘If you don’t support us, then we’re gonna shut this place down, and if that happens you can thank your union leadership,’” said Rob Hutchison, president of Local 1219. “When [rank and file] have that threat in their face eight to 12 hours per day, then it starts to become something they think about.”That also presents another political risk: if the Biden-Harris administration were to block the deal, and US Steel shuts down a plant, Democrats may again lose some voters.However, so far, the controversial move seems to be paying dividends.“I don’t know if the average Joe is thinking about CFIUS or is that in the weeds, but I think from a macro level, people see it, that it’s Biden supporting the union workers, and he gets credit for that,” Hall said. More

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      Harris to call for tougher border action on Arizona visit; Trump threatens to prosecute Google for ‘bad stories’ – as it happened

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      Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.Kamala Harris delivered a speech on immigration policy, laying out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google for “displaying bad stories” about him. In the middle of a busy day of presidential campaign events in Michigan, a key swing state, Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that, if elected president, he plans to prosecute Google for, he alleged, “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump” while “only revealing Good stories about Kamala Harris”.And, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama for last-minute voter purges. The justice department is suing Alabama for what it alleges is an illegal attempt to remove voters from the rolls too close to November’s election.Here’s what else happened today:

      Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after his meeting in New York with Donald Trump and said the two men had a “very productive” talk. Ukraine’s president said the two “thoroughly reviewed” the situation in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion more than two-and-a-half years ago, Reuters reports.

      In a video address on Friday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, spoke of the indictment of three Iranian nationals for their role in a “wide-ranging hacking campaign sponsored by the government of Iran”. Wray said: “These individuals, employees of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted a US political campaign, current and former US officials, and members of the American media, all in an attempt to sow discord and undermine our democracy.”

      Kamala Harris arrived in Tucson, Arizona, from Washington DC for election campaign events, including a visit to the US-Mexico border.

      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied among voters in North Carolina, a new poll shows. The CNN poll, released today and conducted from 20 to 25 September, shows Harris and Trump both receiving 48% of support among likely voters in North Carolina.

      Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, pleaded not guilty to corruption charges when he appeared in court in Manhattan. He denies federal bribery and fraud charges. The mayor’s arraignment began just after noon local time at a federal courthouse in New York. It is the first time that a sitting mayor of the city has been charged with crimes.
      After Kamala Harris spoke about her policies related to the southern border during a speech in Douglas, Arizona, the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union representing the US border patrol, said that Harris “has ignored the border problem she created for over three years”.“She goes down there for 20 minutes for a photo op and decides to repeat some of the things the NPBC has said before. But again, where has she been the last 3 1/2 years?” the union wrote on X, repeating a Trump talking point.Google followed up on Donald Trump’s claim that the search engine is illegally using a system to only reveal bad stories about him and good stories about Kamala Harris by issuing a statement:
      Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,.
      Following up on a report by Fox News, Google continued: “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”Hugo Lowell in Washington dug into these claims:The progressive advocacy group Center for American Progress Action Fund reacted to Harris’s speech tonight.“Donald Trump’s failed leadership fanned the flames of hate and did nothing to actually fix the problems at the border,” the group posted on X.During her speech, Harris said Trump made the challenges at the border worse.“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” Harris said.Here’s some more in-depth reporting from the Associated Press, capturing how the reality of what is happening at the border has changed dramatically in the past few months, even as the political rhetoric (Trump’s in particular) really hasn’t:
      As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.
      No one is waiting there now.
      Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.
      In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.
      It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star – $11 billion since 2021.
      Read the full Associated Press article here.If you’re looking to put both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s claims about what’s happening at the US-Mexico border in context, this article from August is a good place to start:Here’s how Hamed Aleaziz, a longtime immigration reporter, summed up the substance of Harris’s immigration policy today for the New York Times:
      In a sign of how the politics of immigration have changed, Harris is promoting a policy that resembles a Trump-era effort to ban asylum for those who cross the border illegally. Harris says that she understands that people are desperate to come into the United States, but that the system must be ‘orderly.’
      In the same speech, Harris slammed Trump for separating immigrant children from their families and putting “children in cages”, and called for a gentler rhetoric about immigrants, and a focus on solutions, rather than blame and attacks.Harris is getting big cheers from a Democratic audience as she shifts from talking about tough enforcement and Congress’s failures to pass immigration reform to talking about legal paths to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the US for years, the importance of helping “Dreamers” – undocumented young people who came to the US as children – and the many contributions of immigrant farm workers.Harris is repeating a central part of her immigration rhetoric: that Donald Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan immigration reform bill because “he prefers to run on a problem than fixing a problem.”Harris’s campaign, like the Biden administration previously, is highlighting Mitch McConnell’s own remarks about Trump’s influence on the legislation.The White House has been using this approach to the immigration issue since early this year: “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement in early 2024. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”As Kamala Harris begins her speech on immigration policy, she lays out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Among the people who introduced Kamala Harris, who is beginning her remarks on immigration and border policy, was Theresa Guerrero, a woman from Tucson, Arizona, who has become an activist after her son, Jacob, died of a fentanyl overdose.Trump’s campaign also previously featured remarks, during the Republican national convention, from a parent of a child lost to fentanyl.The Harris campaign is already attacking Donald Trump using a video of his comments from Warren, Michigan, tonight, talking about tariffs and how prosperous the US was in the 1890s.Trump has been making the case for high taxes on imported goods, which Congressional Republicans who oppose tariffs hope they can “water down” if he’s elected, the Washington Post reported yesterday.Mark Kelly, the US senator from Arizona, has been shepherding Harris during her visit to the border town of Douglas on Friday.Kelly began his remarks by sending greetings from his wife, the former Arizona representative Gabby Giffords, setting off a round of cheers for the beloved former representative.He retold the story of negotiating the bipartisan border deal in Congress only to see Trump torpedo the package by pressuring Republican senators to reject it.“This is the most hypocritical thing I’ve seen in three-and-a-half years in Washington,” Kelly said, calling the plan “the deal that Arizona needs”. Harris has vowed to revive the bill, if elected, and said she would have signed it into law.Kelly ended his remarks by saying that the playbook for winning in November was simple: hard work.“This is not rocket science. If it was, I could help,” the former astronaut quipped, as he campaigned for the vice-president.Biden embraced a more Trump-like border policy. Trump still claims Harris is weak.Some context, as we wait for Harris to give a campaign speech in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, where she is expected to call for tougher action at the US border with Mexico:

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made criticism of Trump’s harsh immigration policies part of their bid for the White House in 2020. But the Democratic administration has increasingly moved right on immigration, leading to criticisms that, though Biden certainly does not verbally attack and revile immigrants as Trump does, Biden’s actual policy regarding the US-Mexico border made him a kind of Trump 2.0.

      This past June, Biden signed an executive order limiting the number of asylum seekers admitted at the US-Mexico border, a policy that that split Democrats, and that some advocates said “will only cause suffering.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the Biden administration over the policy.

      Since June, migrant crossings have plunged, though Democrats are asking: at what price?

      Harris, who supported decriminalizing undocumented border crossings in 2019 during her brief presidential run, has moved away from that stance in her new campaign, also striking a more law-and-order tone, which she is expected to continue in her border policy speech today.

      In contrast with Biden or Harris, Trump’s current immigration policy is a pledge to carry out “mass deportations”, which he has promised will be the largest in US history. That is expected to include a legally dubious roundup of up to 11 million people, “deployments of military and police units, and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border”.

      Trump has made political attacks against Harris, blaming her for the border crisis, a central part of his campaign against her. Polls have suggested US voters trust Trump more than Harris on immigration.

      The global picture: in the US, as in the UK and Europe, wealthy democracies have spent decades trying to deter immigrants from coming across their borders to seek a better life by making border crossings increasingly surveilled, militarized and deadly. This has not, broadly speaking, stopped people from continuing to migrate in hopes of finding safer lives for themselves and their families, particularly as wars, climate change and other crises provide reasons to seek asylum elsewhere. But deterrence policies do mean that children and adult attempting to migrate are more likely to die because of the conditions that wealthy countries create at their borders, in hopes of persuading people that it’s too dangerous to migrate.
      A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or declined to answer, Reuters reports.Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s town hall in Warren, Michigan, is running about an hour behind schedule, the New York Times reports. (The Detroit Free Press has a livestream here, should you wish to follow along.)PBS also has a livestream of Kamala Harris’s expected campaign remarks on border policy in Douglas, Arizona, that will go live in about a half-hour.Asked what she had learned from her conversation with customs and border protection officials, Kamala Harris told today’s White House pool reporter:
      They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do. More

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      ‘She’s our vision of the future’: Black Nevadans rallying for Harris hope to make history

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      Las Vegas’s historic Westside has long been celebrated for its Black community’s entrepreneurship, activism and resilience. The neighborhood became “historic” when America’s first racially integrated casino, the Moulin Rouge, opened in 1955, employing Black card dealers and chorus line dancers, and welcoming singers such as Sammy Davis Jr and Ella Fitzgerald to not only perform, but to dine and gamble. Today, campaign organizers for Kamala Harris hope the community will play a history-making role again in November.The 2024 presidential election could hinge on how Nevada swings. To win the key battleground state, Democrats will have to run up the score in Las Vegas to overcome deficits in rural counties and the evenly divided electorate in Reno.About 10% of the state’s population identifies as Black or African American, a majority of whom live in the Las Vegas Valley. According to the Harris campaign, this subset is fired up, and turnout and enthusiasm in the critical Democratic constituency may make a difference.“It’s been pandemonium,” says Ishmael Carroll, the campaign’s regional political director focused on outreach to southern Nevada’s Black community. “I’ve been inundated with calls, texts, emails. It’s complete excitement. In previous elections I had to go find people. People are calling me now first thing in the morning, late at night – ‘How can I be involved? How can I participate? What can I do to help?’“I think they identify the importance of this moment in our history,” Carroll adds.Lya Harvey, a 52-year-old nurse practitioner, is one of those first-time volunteers. Though she always votes, she had never attended rallies, volunteered or donated to a campaign before, she said.“I’m really not that into politics, but given the situation right now between the two parties, I think it’s necessary to be out here getting involved,” she says. She’s tired of the “mean and nasty” attacks that have divided communities and contributed to dysfunction in Washington.View image in fullscreen“We’ve always had Democrats and Republicans and different views,” Harvey adds. “But right, I don’t think we can deal with any problems until we deal with [the division].”Nevada’s winner has gone on to the White House in 10 of the past 12 presidential elections. Democrats enjoy a winning streak in the battleground state that goes back four election cycles, to Barack Obama’s double-digit victory in 2008. But each of those wins was tighter than the last, and though Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump here in 2020, Trump held a significant lead in the polls of their expected rematch, contributing to Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid for lack of a viable path to victory.Harris’s Sun belt strategy to challenge Trump in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada has its strongest chance of a win here, according to current polling estimates.Daniele Monroe-Moreno, a Nevada assemblywoman and chair of the Nevada state Democratic party, says the reasons for Harris’s appeal in the Westside community are multifold. It’s a diverse city with multicultural families that see themselves, their friends and neighbors in Harris’s narrative, she said, which matches their “vision of the future”.“We’re Black, Native American, Hispanic and AAPI all in my family,” Monroe-Moreno shares. “But we’re also straight, gay, bi, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, so when I talk about ‘the community’, I talk about all of us, because it takes all of us working together for a better future. And I believe the excitement we’re seeing with Kamala Harris is that there are so many families like mine that see her and Tim Walz, who is like that guy next door who mows the lawn for the senior who can’t do it any more … They see Kamala and Tim as people they know and can personally attach themselves to.”Volunteers say they’ve been encouraged by voters’ responses to Harris and Walz’s proposals. The anxieties that Las Vegas organizers and volunteers “hear at the doors”, as they say, are consistent all across Nevada. The state’s education system isn’t preparing children for success. Rent and home prices are through the roof. Essential items like food and gas are frustratingly expensive.Harris’s effort to distance herself from criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy has included plans that seem tailored for door-to-door canvassers to assuage skeptical voters. There is the promise to build 3m new homes over four years. Tax credits for parents and small business owners. A plan to investigate corporations that engage in price-gouging on groceries.There’s also clear excitement for a younger, vibes-ier candidate who provides a striking contrast to Trump. There’s fresh hope that she can actually win a race that once looked like a Democratic death march. And then there’s the opportunity to shatter what Hillary Clinton often referred to as the “ultimate glass ceiling”.Harris rarely acknowledges the chance to overcome centuries of biases and oppression that have prevented a woman of color from representing one of the two major political parties as the presidential nominee. She may fear hearing the same attack lines Clinton faced about being driven more by personal legacy than by the kitchen table issues voters ultimately prioritize. Still, to borrow a famous Bidenism: this is a big fucking deal.Being one ballot away from electing the first Black Indian American female president has those communities fired up, along with Democrats who value diverse representation in positions of power.“You can see she actually cares about people,” Harvey, the first-time volunteer, says, “and being a Black woman – and I’m a Black woman – she understands that it’s about a lot more than just being a politician.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHer T-shirt suggests a new slogan: “kaMALA: Make America Laugh Again”. If Harris succeeds, historians will note that joy and humor proved surprisingly effective in galvanizing support against the perceived threat of Maga authoritarianism.There are nonpartisan voters in Las Vegas’s historic Westside who would welcome courtship from Republicans. Brian Harris, 64, founder of the Independent Black Voters group on Facebook, says: “It’s not about the party, it’s about the agenda.”There’s one problem, however. “Until Republicans get rid of the white nationalism, I can’t support them,” he says. “If they stop being the party of Trump and become conservative, I’ll talk to them. And if there are good people, they may get endorsed by us, but it comes down to us picking what’s best for us.”What about the complaints that Democrats only show up every four years when they need the Black community’s vote?Carroll, the Democrats’ regional director, says he grew up in the historic Westside and has been organizing here for years. All the campaign’s outreach teams, he adds, are led by individuals with deep community ties and in partnership with neighborhood non-profits and small business owners who host events.Those include Souls to the Polls gatherings in the Baptist community, neighborhood block parties and a weekly roundtable discussion at the Westside Oasis bar and restaurant.A registered independent, Terry Adams, Westside Oasis’s owner, participates in these discussions in which voters air concerns, analyze the issues and share research on news-making items like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposed agenda for a second Trump term.View image in fullscreenThough the event is called Black Voices of Las Vegas, Adams proudly shares that often a majority of the attendees are white women. “This is for everybody,” he says, adding that it’s his civic duty to provide space for the event. “It’s the principles of the United States of America that matter. That’s what everybody strives for.”Longtime Democratic activists are also turning out with excitement to rally support for a Harris presidency. La Toya Laymon, 49, volunteers in every election. She was raised to understand that if you don’t like the way things are, you need to step up and get involved, she said. Her mother was a freedom fighter in Mississippi who was arrested at age 14 for demonstrating for equal rights and detained for three days afterward in a boxcar.“How could I not fight?” Laymon says. “I am her walking dream.”As a human resources professional, she feels frustrated by efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As a woman, she feels disturbed that the right to an abortion was won and lost during her lifetime.“A lot of people don’t understand the gravity [of elections] because they are reaping the benefits of people like my mother and my grandparents,” Laymon says. “This election is just because we didn’t do the job in 2016, and now everyone is like, ‘OK, who is going to get us back on track to democracy? Kamala Harris is that person.’” More

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      This is the beginning of Eric Adams’ fall from power as New York mayor | Ross Barkan

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      For the first time in the modern history of New York City, a sitting mayor has been indicted.Eric Adams will now know the fate of Donald Trump – to be indicted and possibly convicted in a Manhattan courtroom. Damian Williams, the US attorney for the southern district, has unsealed a 57-page indictment that accused Adams of performing favors for Turkish foreign nationals after accepting more than $100,000 in international plane tickets and accommodations, as well as soliciting illegal donations from them. These donations generated public matching funds for his mayoral campaign in 2021.This indictment, it should be noted, was related to one of at least four possible federal probes into the Adams administration. His police commissioner and top counsel have already resigned, and his schools chancellor – FBI agents seized his phone recently – announced that he is stepping down at the end of the year.City hall is in chaos. All of this, given Adams’ history, was arguably foreseeable.Before Adams was a mayor, he was a Brooklyn borough president and state senator who courted controversy. Corruption clouds followed him. Until now, he was never indicted. Until now, he always found a way to survive.If he and Trump have much that separates them – Adams, a Democrat, is a child of the Black working class – there are also striking commonalities. Both grew up in Queens, an outer borough of New York City. Both talk tough, revel in political combat and enjoy, even more, playing the martyr. In their political and personal conduct, they are remarkably brazen.They do not give in. They do not apologize.Neither care terribly about governing, either. To this day, Trump cannot explain any federal policy adequately. He was not able to sketch the outlines of a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act during his debate with Kamala Harris. He only wants to gut federal bureaucracies, not manage or bolster them.As mayor, Adams has preferred the prestige and the glitz of the office to the actual work of formulating policy initiatives. The municipal government has bled top talent and agencies are stuffed with patronage hires. His achievements, at best, are small bore.His recent predecessors – Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg – could boast of great changes they brought to New York City, like a new universal prekindergarten program or popular waterfront parks. They left behind tangible legacies. They had, above all, governing visions.Unlike Trump, Adams cannot survive an indictment. Either he will resign or he will lose in the Democratic primary next year. His poll numbers, long before the indictment came, were cratering, and they are only bound to fall more. His base has shrunk and Democrats want him gone.Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, has the power to remove him from office but probably won’t. She remains something of an Adams ally and will probably fret the optics of a white governor dragging a Black mayor from office – especially when he hasn’t yet been convicted of a crime.What will happen, instead, is that Adams will drag this out as long as possible. He might eventually cave to pressure from the US attorney’s office and cut a deal with Williams to dodge prison time. Or he’ll battle on to a trial, and force New Yorkers to endure the spectacle of their mayor in a courtroom. Trump had the presidency to protect him from many criminal charges. Adams enjoys no constitutional privileges or loopholes.If Adam does resign soon enough before the Democratic primary next year, there will be a non-partisan special election to replace him. There has never been a mayoral special election before. It will not be restricted to registered Democrats; ranked-choice voting, where voters can pick up to five candidates, will be employed.The disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, is a rumored candidate, hoping to seek redemption from the sexual harassment scandal that forced him from power. Other prominent Democrats in New York City include Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Jumaane Williams, who as public advocate would become acting mayor if Adams resigns. A Republican or two may try for city hall as well.They will all hope to forget the Eric Adams years ever happened.

      Ross Barkan is a writer based in New York More

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      Biden and Harris joined by Parkland school shooting survivor at event on addressing gun violence – US politics live

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      Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:US and European officials have noted with varying levels of alarm the potential for a Trump administration to sharply reduce US aid to Ukraine in order to force Zelenskyy to accept terms for a ceasefire.Asked if the Democrats wanted to “Trump-proof” aid to Ukraine before a potential Trump presidency, a senior state department official said, “I don’t ever talk in those terms” but that the primary goal was to make sure Ukraine “has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things”.“At the end of the year, regardless of who wins our election in December, as at the end of this fighting season, Zelenskyy and Putin need to look at the battlefield and say, here’s what we think next year will look like,” the official said.“And the primary factor there is, do I think the other side has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things?”On Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican, accused Zelenskyy of election interference and demanded he fire his ambassador to Washington over a visit to an ammunitions factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Johnson claimed the Ukrainian ambassador had failed to invite any Republicans to the event and called it a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”.Zelenskyy sought to reduce tensions on Thursday as he thanked the US for the new arms package and praised political leaders’ “strong bipartisan support” in “Ukraine’s just cause of defeating Russian aggression”.“I am grateful to Joe Biden, [the] US Congress and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, as well as the entire American people for today’s announcement of major US defence assistance for Ukraine, totalling $7.9bn and sanctions against Russia,” Zelenskyy wrote.Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:The joint appearance of Biden and Harris today highlights Harris’s role overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.“Over the years, I’ve held the hands of far too many mothers and fathers to try and comfort them after their child was killed by gun violence. And let us all agree, it does not have to be this way,” Harris said. “We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the second amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”The president today is marking the roll-out of an executive order that includes several gun-related measures, including the creation of a task force to assess the threat of machine gun conversion devices.Joe Biden took the podium to chants of “Thank you Joe.”The audience at the White House is full of survivors and the families of those killed by gun violence. Biden was also introduced by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin, whose city was rocked by gun violence on Saturday in the Five Points entertainment district. Four people were killed and 17 injured.“I know the scream of a mother when her child is killed. I know that because I heard it from the voice of my own mother when my brother was killed by gun violence,” Woodfin said. “I heard that scream again this past Saturday.”The president and vice president are speaking from the White House, and were introduced by a student who was 15 when a gunman on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.We’ll follow their remarks.In a characteristically rambling news conference, Donald Trump ripped into Kamala Harris for visiting the border – and unleashed a slew of fiction and fear-mongering about the border and immigrants.Among his claims was that the CBP One app, which people arriving at the US southern border must use to schedule appointment for an asylum screening, was being used by “virtually unlimited numbers of illegals to press a button schedule their illegal immigration appointment at our ports of entry”.Using the app to schedule an asylum screening, is, of course one way to legally immigrate to the US. Seeking asylum is legal.Trump also repeated his fictitious claim about migrants contributing to increased crime, and that crime overall was “up” – dividing ABC’s presidential debate moderators for fact-checking his claims.Here’s my colleague Edward Helmore with more on the actual stats:
      Murder dropped by more than 11% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in two decades, according to FBI data released on Monday.
      Meanwhile, the broader category of violent crime nationwide decreased about 3%, said the data, which is audited and confirms earlier reporting from unaudited statistics.
      Monday’s release of audited data contradicts a talking point that Donald Trump has made on the campaign trail as the Republican presidential nominee seeks a return to the White House during the 5 November election: that crime has been rampant and out of control without him in power.
      In its annual Crime in the Nation summary, the FBI said rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%, property crime dropped 2.4% and burglary fell by an estimated 7.6%.
      Some more background:After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, Fox, One America News Network (OANN) and others for broadcasting their false claims. It settled the case with OANN earlier this year and the Fox case is still pending in New York.Smartmatic said in a statement: “We are very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax. We are now looking forward to our court day against Fox Corp and Fox News for their disinformation campaign. Lying to the American people has consequences. Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”First amendment scholars were closely watching the case and several others like it to see whether libel law can be used as an effective tool to police misinformation.The case was set to be a kind of sequel to the defamation litigation between Dominion, another voting machine company, and Fox over 2020 election lies. That case settled just before the trial was set to begin, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $747.5m. Eric Davis, the judge who oversaw the Fox case, also was overseeing the Newsmax case.Read the full story here:The voting machine company Smartmatic and the conservative outlet Newsmax have settled a closely watched defamation lawsuit days before it was scheduled to go to trial in Delaware.A spokesperson for the Delaware courts said the case had settled on Thursday. He did not offer additional details.Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Kamala Harris made an appearance together after meeting.Harris emphasized: “Nothing about the end of this war can be decided without Ukraine.”She also referenced, without explicitly mentioning, Donald Trump, who has said that Ukraine should have made concessions to Russian president Vladimir Putin before Russia’s attack:“There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory,” she said. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin. Let us be be clear. They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender.”Here’s a look at where things stand:

      New York City mayor Eric Adams was charged in a 57-page federal indictment with crimes relating to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery and receiving campaign contributions by foreign nationals, wire fraud, solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery. He has maintained his innocence.

      Federal prosecutors called Adams’s alleged misconduct a grave breach of public trust. The US attorney for the southern district of New York Damian Williams strongly criticized the mayor at a press conference a little earlier.

      Williams vowed to continue to investigate the mayor’s case and to “hold more people accountable”. Charges against Adams include bribery, wire fraud and acceptance of illegal foreign campaign contributions including from Turkish government officials. Williams said the mayor “kept the public in the dark”.

      The indictment against Adams includes many luxury trips that were not put in annual disclosure forms, prosecutors say. Trips cost many thousands of dollars and included visiting Turkey and flying via Turkey while visiting countries such as China, India, France, Hungary and Ghana.

      Federal agents raided Adams’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the early hours today, as reports emerged of the mayor being hit with a federal indictment. The raid reportedly included a group of nearly a dozen people in suits entering the property, with several carrying briefcases, backpacks or duffel bags.

      Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are meeting at the White House as the Ukrainian president attempts to shore up support for his country’s war aims in its fight against Russia. Before the meeting, Zelenskyy thanked the US president for his support, saying: “Your determination is incredibly important for us to prevail … We must restore normal life, and we greatly value your leadership.”

      Before their meeting, Biden released a statement, saying: “I am proud to welcome President Zelenskyy back to the White House today.” As part of the US’s “surge” in security assistance to Ukraine, Biden has directed the defense department to allocate all of its remaining security assistance funding that has been appropriated for Ukraine by the end of his term. More

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      ‘Be a man and vote for a woman’: Kamala Harris’s unlikely edge in America’s masculinity election

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      A man in a baseball cap strides through a field of corn. A woman in flannel turns and smiles, a line of trucks visible behind her. As piano music swells, an American flag ripples in a gentle breeze. This video is pure, uncut Americana. Naturally, it’s a political ad.Specifically, it’s an ad made by the Lincoln Project, a group of moderates and former Republicans united by a desire to topple Donald Trump and support Kamala Harris. And it’s making one of the most obvious appeals to men and masculinity yet in the 2024 election.As the ad nears its crescendo, the deep voice of Sam Elliott, an actor best known for playing grizzled but folksy cowboy types, demands: “What the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that.” He continues: “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”Masculinity and people’s views on gender roles may be more important than ever in 2024 – and not just because Harris is the first woman of color to ever secure a major-party nomination for president. The 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade thrust women’s rights to the forefront of the election. Numerous identity-based groups, including White Dudes for Harris, have gathered to drum up enthusiasm. An extreme gender gap has also yawned open among the youngest US voters: having come of age in the era of #MeToo, gen Z women are becoming the most progressive and politically active cohort ever measured – while gen Z men are increasingly apathetic to politics and drifting further to the right.Conservatives are openly using anxiety around masculinity to win this election, telling men that their problems stem from not being man enough. Josh Hawley, the influential Republican senator from Missouri, published a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. The Fox News host Jesse Watters went even further.“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security. It’s not the party of strength,” Watters said, shortly after White Dudes for Harris held a call with more than 190,000 participants. Watters added: “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”Watters is not a serious person, but Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status – real or perceived – as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.View image in fullscreenTrump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership – and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.A few good menWhen people conjure up the image of a “good man” or a “real man”, they tend to imagine the same qualities: someone who is dominant, successful and tough – and who is nothing like women, according to Theresa Vescio, a psychology professor who studies gender, politics and privilege at Penn State.This way of thinking is so pervasive that people gender political matters that, objectively, have no sex. National defense and the economy are seen as topics that men care about, because men are expected to prize being providers for and protectors of their families. Healthcare – including abortion rights – and education are seen as women’s issues, because women are supposed to be compassionate caregivers. (In reality, at least among gen Z, young women care about all of these issues more than young men do.) Even the political parties themselves are gendered: Republicans are associated with more masculine issues and traits, Democrats with feminine ones.These stereotypes inform American ideals of the presidency. “What we expect in a good leader is that they’re powerful, high status, top, able to lead. That overlaps substantially with stereotypes of masculinity and men,” Vescio said. “So when we think about who would be a good leader, stereotypes of men fit and complement. There’s no incongruity.”They complement one another so seamlessly, in fact, that the role of masculinity in elections was once invisible. We’re so used to seeing men run for office, and seeing “gender” only become a buzzword when a woman steps into the fray, that we often don’t even recognize that men have a gender, let alone that male candidates offer up different, competing visions of masculinity.But they do compete, even in the most animalistic ways. For example, presidential candidates are more likely to succeed when they have one key, traditionally masculine physical quality: height.The taller candidate is more likely to win more votes and be re-elected; they are also more likely to be seen by experts as being better leaders and simply “greater”. This link between height and presidential preference is so strong and so subconscious that when Richard Nixon ran against John F Kennedy in 1960, voters tended to think their chosen candidate was taller. (Kennedy was taller, and he won.) Ron DeSantis might have been laughed at for reportedly wearing ill-fitting heels when he ran for president, but he would have been right to worry.If you’re still not convinced, take the 2004 race between George W Bush and John Kerry, which hinged on the candidates’ supposed manhood to a startling degree. Bush sold himself as a down-home rancher who may have occasionally been “misunderestimated” but who you wanted to grab a beer with. Kerry, meanwhile, was a Vietnam combat veteran with a deep understanding of policy. This presented a problem for Bush: how could he be “the man’s man” when his opponent was part of the uber-masculine military?“What they did was, they went and they attacked his service record, because that was his greatest political strength,” said Jackson Katz, author of the book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. An advocacy group, technically formed independent of Bush, dedicated itself to questioning Kerry’s record.View image in fullscreenKatz continued of Kerry: “His attitude was like: ‘This is beneath me, to respond to these attacks.’ And it backfired. Because in the masculinity narrative, if you don’t defend your honor that’s being besmirched, you’re emasculated, you’re not strong.”Kerry, of course, lost.The architect of the attack to undermine Kerry is now working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, which is attempting to run the same playbook against Tim Walz. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has suggested that Walz left the national guard to avoid serving in the Iraq war.In fact, Walz was in the national guard for 24 years and left to run for Congress several months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz has defended his record – but Team Trump isn’t typically all that worried about the truth.Masculinity subtext comes textWhen Trump descended down a golden escalator during the 2016 primary, we entered a new, far more obvious era of presidential masculinity. During that primary, Trump loved to talk about “Little Marco” Rubio, which prompted Rubio to attack Trump for his supposedly undersized hands. There is no better proof that masculinity underscores presidential elections than two candidates subtly accusing one another of having small penises.Well, maybe there is: Trump, the man who started the dick-measuring contest, won the one for the White House, too.The more people believe that traditional notions of masculinity are good and true, the more likely they were to vote for Trump in 2016, when Trump ran against a woman, and 2020, when Trump did not, Vescio found in a 2021 study. This finding held true regardless of people’s party, gender, race or level of education. It also held true even after Vescio controlled for people’s trust, or lack thereof, in government, undermining the idea that Trump’s popularity is due to his populism rather than his masculine posturing.When it comes to cosplaying masculinity, one of Trump’s greatest assets is his disinterest in reality. In other words: he’s good at making big, bold, often untrue statements, and people like that in a man.“Trump promises, more than anybody else: ‘I’m going to do this.’ Oftentimes, in violation of what the president can actually do,” said the political scientist Dan Cassino, who studies male gender identity at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “But he says he’s going to go in and fix a problem. ‘I’m going to do this on day one. Whatever Congress says doesn’t matter.’ That sort of agentic behavior is perceived as being very, very masculine.”Republicans, especially, really like this kind of behavior in a man. This can partially be chalked up to demographics. Both men and older people, who are more likely to embrace traditional gender roles, are likelier to be Republicans. It can be explained by the nature of conservatism itself. Conservatives want to preserve tradition.View image in fullscreenThere’s also another explanation: sexism.“As researchers, we differentiate between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is: ‘Women are terrible and it’s OK to beat your wife,’” Cassino said. “Benevolent sexism is more like: ‘Oh, women are pure and precious, we have to protect them.’ That means keeping them out of things like politics, putting up separate spheres.”Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies partisan identity, measured people’s hostile sexism by asking whether they agreed with statements like: “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Republicans, she found, were on average about twice as likely as Democrats to show signs of hostile sexism.“The better predictor of being Republican is not gender, but sexism,” Mason said. “There are a lot of women who hold sexist attitudes and are pro-patriarchy and believe that women shouldn’t be in power.”I’ve encountered shades of this attitude: in January 2020, I met a woman in her 30s from Louisiana, at the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion gathering in the United States. Women, she told me at the time, should not be president, because they just can’t be leaders in the same way as men.“Women and men are completely different biologically,” she said. “And so for that reason, I believe that they should have specific jobs for who they are, biologically.”She planned to vote for Trump.Sexism is more than a collection of views about women – it’s a belief system about how men and women should interact. (And that men and women are the only two genders.) But as much as Trump may benefit from the GOP’s sexism, he doesn’t seem all that interested in gender relations. He has praised and attacked individual women, including his accuser E Jean Carroll, often over their looks, but he rarely speaks about women as a category.Instead, he has largely delegated that to JD Vance.In addition to claiming that “traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood”, Vance has denigrated childfree women as “childless cat ladies”, agreed that the purpose of the “postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren, and claimed women who prioritize careers over families are on “a path to misery”.“Vance is very much doing appeals, I think, less about masculinity, more about benevolent sexism,” Cassino said. “At its edges, it goes into what is called natalism, that the job of women is to reproduce, which is the extreme, extreme end of benevolent sexism.”This is the Vance innovation on the already masculine Trump ticket: he operationalizes Trump’s static vision of white-man hypermasculinity into a blueprint for how genders should live with one another. If Trump and Vance win, that blueprint could be turned into policy.View image in fullscreenThere are signs that Trump is coming around to Vance’s approach – at least when it comes to abortion, one of Trump’s biggest electoral weaknesses and an issue that has quite a bit to do with male-female relations.“I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE,” he posted to TruthSocial over the weekend. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”The feminine catch-22When Harris walked out on stage at the Democratic convention to accept her party’s nomination for president, Kelly Dittmar was immediately struck by one thing.“She didn’t wear white,” said Dittmar, who, as the director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, makes something of a living noting how powerful women present themselves in public.White is the color of the suffragettes who fought for women’s right to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Democratic women regularly don it for the major rituals of US politics, including the convention. “Like half the crowd was wearing white,” Dittmar pointed out.But not Harris. She wore a navy suit and a matching pussy bow blouse.It was an unmistakable declaration: Harris did not want to focus on how she has made history. In the weeks since, she has stayed true to that stance. When presidential debate moderators brought up abortion and Donald Trump’s racist lies about her identity, Harris didn’t respond with anecdotes about her experience as a woman of color. Instead, she told the audience: “I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us.”If Hillary Clinton stands accused of focusing on her gender too much when she ran for president in 2016, Harris is doing everything she can to avoid falling into the same trap. But the braided nature of masculinity, leadership and politics leaves female political candidates in such a bind that even the act of raising an eyebrow becomes fraught.During the debate, Harris didn’t bother to hide her skepticism at Trump’s boasts, lies and rambling. “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” the pollster Frank Luntz posted on X at the time. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”It’s not clear what “female stereotype” Luntz – who said nothing of Trump’s tendency to smirk while Harris spoke – was referring to. (The female stereotype of having expressions?) But it is true that “as a female candidate, you have to be feminine, because otherwise you’re not a good woman”, Cassino said. “But you also have to be masculine, because in the US, we’ve decided that leaders are masculine. So you have to have masculine traits and feminine traits.”When it comes to telegraphing her masculine credentials, Harris has a built-in advantage: she spent years working in law enforcement, a field associated with toughness, victory and men. In her very first speech as the presumptive Democratic candidate, Harris recalled her time as a prosecutor and California attorney general.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, using a line that has since become a part of her stump speech. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Translation: she knows how to dominate the worst of the worst.“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” said Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”Last week, Harris sat down with Oprah, who had been stunned to learn, during the debate, that the vice-president owns a gun. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. Then she laughed. “Probably should not have said that.”That exchange encapsulated Harris’s balancing act. She’s got a gun and she’s not afraid to use it, but she’ll laugh about it. That laugh, experts said, may be one of Harris’s best assets when it comes to convincing voters that she is both competent and warm. It helps burnish her claim that she’s a “joyful warrior”, an image that “creates a distinct persona that I think bridges those gendered expectations”, Dittmar said. Joy, she continued, “alludes [to] kindness and even empathy, which is more traditionally associated with femininity and women”.There are very few true independents in the US electorate; all but 3% of self-identified independents lean Democrat or Republican. But that tiny fraction of the population can decide a close election. When judging a candidate, undecided voters tend to rely heavily on racial and gendered stereotypes, according to Bauer.“If Harris displays masculinity in a super aggressive way, similar to how Trump and Vance might do it, then she risks falling into this ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype that we’ve been socialized to think of as a negative stereotype, as something incompatible with political leadership,” Bauer said. “It’s just this really narrow set of behaviors that she has to fit into to try to show her leadership qualities.”In past elections, the men who have tried to take down Trump attempted to outman him. Rubio suggested he had a bigger you-know-what; DeSantis sold himself to voters as the grown-up version of Trump; in a 2020 debate, Joe Biden snapped: “Donald, would you just be quiet for a minute?” But running on full-tilt masculinity would never work for Harris. Not only did it not work for most of those men, but as a woman, she cannot win a masculinity-off.View image in fullscreenInstead, her supporters’ best shot at defeating Trump may be to unman him. That Lincoln Project ad, for example, framed Trump next to images of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Harris, meanwhile, is pictured giving a salute. “The images of Trump in the ad are chaotic. It’s social unrest,” pointed out Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political science professor. The ad seems to ask: would a real man lose control like Trump did?During the debate, Harris urged viewers to go to one of Trump’s rallies. “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’,” she said. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”Those attacks – the kind of attacks that could once have been directed at Biden – also undermine Trump’s masculinity. Cassino summarized the message as: “He’s kind of old and confused and weird. This is not a masculine guy.”‘Toxic’ masculinityAs much as the internet may like to call traditional stereotypes of masculinity “toxic”, they are not necessarily bad. Success, hardiness, being a provider and protector – those can all be good qualities.The problem, for individuals, is that stereotypes of masculinity can be so strict and stifling that they are impossible for anybody to live up to. No one can be in power at all times. You might be the boss at the office, but when you get home, your teenage children are still likely to ignore your commands.And, for US society as a whole, clinging to a narrow notion of masculinity really can be toxic. “It allows for aggression towards groups that aren’t appropriately masculine, which would be different kinds of groups of men that we define as problems, and women,” Vescio said. “It masks racism and sexism.”Harris isn’t right or wrong to lean into some masculine stereotypes. After all, if a woman can harness them well enough to win the most masculine office in US history, then maybe such attitudes and behaviors won’t be considered “masculine” any more. Maybe they’re just ways that people, of all genders, can act. Maybe voters will start to value “feminine” traits in leaders, too.View image in fullscreen“The only way we can ever stop defining our politics in terms of men versus women is, have so many women run that is just not notable any more,” Cassino said.Sending Trump back to the White House may affirm his brand of masculinity on a national scale. The more Trump larps masculinity, the more Republicans grow to like it; the more deeply invested they become in masculinity, the more polarized the United States may become. People who support traditional masculinity also tend to show signs of sexism (benevolent and hostile), anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.But, in Dittmar’s view, voting Harris into office may indicate that people don’t want to shove women into a separate sphere.“We’re voting on a lot of things, but among them is that version of leadership and our evaluation of these gendered versions of it,” Dittmar said. “As well as, even more broadly, our sense of the appropriate roles of women, the ways in which women should be treated by our political leaders.” More