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      Pennsylvania crucial to White House hopes, Trump says at campaign rally

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      Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania, telling his rally attendees that their state was critical to his ability to win back the White House and encouraging them to turn out to vote, though he also called early voting “stupid stuff”.“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said, soon after taking the stage more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. “It’s very simple.”Pennsylvania swung for Joe Biden in 2020, delivering its 20 electoral votes and helping Biden secure the victory in one of the few states that help decide US elections. This year, polls on average have shown Vice-President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump – though the state is clearly in play, and both candidates are campaigning through it frequently in the final two months before November.Trump has held his signature rallies significantly less this year than he did in 2016, Axios recently reported, which said his campaign promises Trump will ramp up the rallies in the final stretch. Earlier in the day, Trump listened to farmers talk about the problems they’re facing and boosted his ideas about imposing tariffs on foreign countries as a way to improve economics in the US.While he’s on the road for large rallies less, he’s increasingly known for his frequent digressions, a longtime fixture of Trump’s speaking style that appear to be increasing this year. At the rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he hopped around at breakneck pace and was difficult to follow. When coherent, he painted a dark vision of America under Democratic rule and starkly laid out what he would do if he won, including mass deportations.Trump has started defending his meandering rambles as a storytelling technique called “the weave” – a sign of his oratory brilliance. Critics say his tangents about bacon sales or Hannibal Lecter, and his defense of them as intentional and smart, show a salesman trying to rebrand his disarray.After starting on claims that Harris would turn the US into Venezuela at Monday’s rally, Trump then moved into “where they cure the tar”, saying: “For the environmentalists, you know where they cure the tar, where they take the tar and they make it into beautiful oil, Houston, Texas, and it all goes flying up in the air.”Trump joked that he nearly called Pennsylvania a “state” rather than a commonwealth, saving himself from a gaffe that he claimed would invite negative headlines. He caught himself before calling it a state, though, because “I’m cognitively very strong.” He also called Harris “a very dumb person”.“Winston Churchill was this great speaker – great,” he said at one point. “I get much bigger crowds than him, but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”Despite his nonstop verbal wandering, he bragged about his lack of a script: “Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use a teleprompter?”He repeated a spate of false claims, such as that crime is up. Crime is down. He alleged he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. He lost. He wove an alternate reality where wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas do not exist because he had won in 2020.View image in fullscreenHe lashed out at Biden and Harris. He said he was again calling Biden “sleepy Joe”, regressing back to that insult instead of “crooked Joe” because he is not smart and is not acting as president any more. Harris, for her part, is a “very dumb person”, Trump said, and cannot answer basic questions.He brought up a recent interview Harris did with Oprah Winfrey, who Trump claimed “used to love me until I decided to run for politics”. He said some people believe former president Barack Obama, who Trump called Barack Hussein Obama with an emphasis on his middle name, is leading the country instead of Biden. And he surfaced the unproven claim that Harris did not actually work at McDonald’s as a student, something that recently has irked him as rightwing accounts spread rumors questioning her fast-food work history.“I’m going to go to a McDonald’s next week,” Trump said. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”He brought up abortion, a key liability for Trump and other Republicans after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Several states have direct ballot measures that would protect access to abortion, and Democrats have made abortion access a major plank of the 2024 race. He praised the US supreme court for overturning Roe, saying the decision took “courage”. He added that there should be unspecified “exceptions” to abortion bans.“That’s all they talk about. The country is falling apart. We’re going to end up in world war three, and all they can talk about is abortion,” he said.The stop in the critical swing state comes after two assassination attempts, including one in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Trump will be returning to Butler in early October, some news outlets reported Monday. He displayed the immigration chart that he says saved his life from the Butler shooter during Monday’s rally, joking that he “sleeps with that page” at night. “Immigration saved my life,” he said.Later in the speech, he again railed against immigration and migrants, bringing up towns that have received increases of people in recent years and saying those places are “lawless”, full of gangs and irreparably damaged. He promised that all migrant flights to Pennsylvania and elsewhere would be ended if he wins.“You have to get them the hell out,” Trump said of migrants. More

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      Republican bid to change Nebraska voting rules to help Trump fails

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      A Republican attempt to change the electoral system in Nebraska to give Donald Trump a possible advantage in the event of a tied presidential election has been rebuffed after a state legislator refused to back the plan.Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who crossed to the Republican party this year, said he would not vote to change the midwestern state’s distribution of electors to the same winner-takes-all process that operates in most of the US.His decision followed intense lobbying from both Republicans and Democrats, who anticipated that a change in the allocation of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes could have have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 5 November poll.It reduces the possibility that the former president and Kamala Harris could be tied on 269 electoral college votes each, a scenario that would throw the final say on the election’s outcome to the House of Representatives.A tie scenario could have arisen if Trump earned five electoral votes – rather than four, as expected under the present set-up – from winning Nebraska, then won the four “Sun belt” states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, while the vice-president carried the northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.US presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote nationwide but by which candidate wins a majority of 538 electoral college votes, usually awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each state.Nebraska’s Republican legislators, egged on by Republicans on Capitol Hill, proposed to change the distribution of electors to ensure that Trump would be awarded all five electoral votes if, as expected, he wins the solidly pro-Republican state.That would have upended the status quo under which Nebraska, unlike every other state apart from Maine, splits its allocation to give two to the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote while awarding the other three on the basis of who prevails in each of its three congressional districts.The state’s second congressional district, covering its biggest city, Omaha, was won by Joe Biden in 2020, a feat Harris hopes to emulate.The spotlight had fallen on McDonnell, a former firefighter and the chair of Omaha’s federation of labour, because his support would have provided the two-thirds majority needed in the state legislature to change Nebraska’s distribution system law, which has operated since 1992.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement, McDonnell, who had seemed to wavering in recent days from his earlier vow not to vote to restore the winner-takes-all system, made it plain that he had not moved from his original position.“Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” he said. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from election day, is not the moment to make this change.”His announcement came despite a meeting with the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, who travelled to Nebraska last week to lobby local legislators, and appeared to end plans by Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor, to call a special legislative session to change the law.“With Mike McDonnell being an absolute no, that kind of closes the lid,” the Republican state senator Loren Lippincott told the Nebraska Examiner newspaper.McDonnell’s stance won praise from a former ally, Jane Kleeb, the chair of Nebraska’s Democrats, who hailed him for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy”. More

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      US Congress agrees to funding deal to avert shutdown in blow to Trump

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      US congressional leaders have agreed to a short-term funding deal in a move that averts a damaging pre-election government shutdown and also amounts to a snub for Donald Trump.The prospect of a shutdown at the expiration of the current government funding on 30 September had been looming after Republicans insisted on tying future funding to legislation that would require voters to show proof of US citizenship – known as the Save Act and backed by Trump but opposed by Democrats.After weeks of backroom maneuvering, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced a compromise that provides funding for another three months while decoupling it from the Save Act. Any other path would have been “political malpractice”, he added.The new package continues present spending levels while also giving $231m in emergency funds to the beleaguered Secret Service to enable it to provide added protection for Trump – the Republican presidential nominee, who has been the subject of two failed apparent assassination attempts – as well as his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, before the presidential election on 5 November.It represents a climbdown for Johnson, who had previously adhered to Trump’s demand that government funding be conditioned on passing the Save Act. The bill – has become an article of faith for the former president and his supporters due to their belief, unsupported by evidence, that electoral fraud is rife.Writing to congressional colleagues, Johnson made it clear he was bowing to the inevitable.“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” he wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”The temporary settlement – known as a continuing resolution and which will have the effect of postponing haggling over spending until after the presidential election – was welcomed by Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, who nevertheless said it could have been reached earlier.“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Schumer said. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the Maga way and wasted precious time.”Trump is believed to have been in favour of provoking a shutdown by insisting on the Save Act’s passage – believing that the Biden administration, including Harris, the vice-president, would be blamed, as he was for a five-week closure when he was president in 2018.Johnson held talks with Trump, even visiting his club in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, over how to resolve the impasse.The compromise “officially defies” Trump, Politico wrote in its Monday Playbook column, noting that the ex-president had not, at the time of publication, responded to Johnson’s move.The website Punchbowl argued that Johnson and Trump had been guilty of a political misjudgment in pushing the Save Act, suggesting that the speaker had weakened his position in the process.“The Save Act hasn’t been the political hammer that Johnson or Trump hoped it would be,” it wrote. “Thus Johnson ends up with little here. Not empty handed but close. And he’ll be negotiating a spending deal during a lame-duck session held in what’s certain to be a highly polarised post-election period with his own political future on the line.” More

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      As the election looms, can Harris’s campaign juggle joy with a sense of gravity? | Osita Nwanevu

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      While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.Then there were the doldrums of July, after a debate that wound up being extraordinarily consequential. Joe Biden’s shockingly poor performance finally made his age unignorable as an issue in the race – despite the best efforts of many Democrats and their unhinged hangers-on to ignore it. They manufactured an impressive amount of nonsense in his defense – their baseless warnings about Republican ballot shenanigans that never materialized, for instance, or the insistence that wanting Biden off the ticket was an expression of white male privilege, a glittering idiocy that should be long remembered.All that gave way predictably and immediately to unbridled enthusiasm for Kamala Harris once Biden stepped away, of course. And already in the brief and bewildering time she’s been on the ticket, Harris has essentially run two different campaigns.The first campaign, in those early days and weeks after she stepped into the race, was defined by relief and exuberance, bundled up into the repeated invocations of “joy” – a word that established an immediate contrast between Harris and both Biden and Trump. Both had staked their campaigns on a sense of gravity – Trump’s morbid and ludicrous vision of an America being undermined and invaded by dangerous foreigners and Biden’s well-founded warnings that Trump remained an existential threat to the American republic.The first Harris campaign didn’t depart from Biden there, but it did begin communicating with voters in a different register – Trump was to be feared, yes, but could also be mocked jovially. “You know it, you feel it,” Walz told a Philadelphia crowd in early August. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.” There was something thrillingly barbed underneath that folksiness and his avuncular affect – a hostility towards the Republican party beyond Trump that turned the page from Biden’s forlorn appeals to the right of the past and was grounded by invocations of Project 2025, surely by now the most infamous policy document the conservative movement has ever produced.Project 2025 still figures heavily in Harris’s messaging, and Oprah Winfrey herself talked up the merits of political joy in an appearance with Harris this week, but the campaign overall has plainly changed – the affective contrasts with the right are being replaced with affective and substantive moves in its direction. Consider Harris’s references to her gun ownership – “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” she told Oprah with a laugh – or her promises, before national audiences at the Democratic national convention and during this month’s debate, that she’ll command “the most lethal” military in the world as commander-in-chief. More substantively, the predictable backtracks from positions on energy, criminal justice and other issues she took during the 2020 Democratic primary have been joined by a departure from the Biden administration’s own tax policy – she’s pointedly proposing a smaller increase in the capital gains tax rate – and more criticisms of Trump’s sabotage of the Republican senator James Lankford’s bipartisan but remarkably conservative border bill.Obviously, to win the election, Harris will have to spend the next several weeks convincing the voters who matter most in this country – swing state swing voters who might loosely be described as center-right to the extent that they have coherent and categorizable views at all – to see her as something other than the generically liberal Democratic woman of color from California she’s been on most issues for most of her career. But she needn’t throw everything her campaign can think up at the wall to that end. It’s doubtful that many votes – or more relevantly, that many donations – are going to hinge on the difference between Harris’s capital gains tax increase and Biden’s; appealingly tough talk on hypothetical home invaders does not have to be paired with a substantive retreat from, say, eliminating the death penalty.Moreover, ridicule should remain an important part of the campaign’s playbook – ideally, the more time Harris spends framing the right as bizarre and culturally alien, the less time she’ll spend implicitly, and wrongly, conceding that they might be right on an issue like immigration, where a panic over immigrants stoked by the mainstream and conservative press alike has finally and inevitably curdled into the execrable campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. The garbage about barbecued cats isn’t something to be laughed off. The immigration discourse of the last several years has already produced multiple massacres and promises still more violence; polls show most Americans have now been frightened into nativism. All the talk and positioning of the moment aside, what would Harris do to pull those numbers back down? How much courage can we expect from Harris and the party she now leads, more broadly, should she win? At the moment, the campaign is doing everything it can to ensure only time will tell.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Harris calls out Trump again for ‘looking for an excuse’ to avoid a second debate

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      Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHead-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president. More

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      ‘This isn’t the real Oprah’: Trump lashes out at talkshow host over Harris support

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      Just over a week ago, it was the pop superstar Taylor Swift. Now Donald Trump is taking aim at Oprah Winfrey over her support of Kamala Harris.Whether or not attacking some of the most popular and powerful entertainment figures in US history will prove a solid campaign strategy is yet to be proven, but the former president has not held back.In a rant on Truth Social, Trump said he “couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah”.“This isn’t a person that wants millions of people, from prisons and mental institutions, and terrorists, drug dealers, and human traffickers from all over the world pouring into our country,” he wrote.In the post, Trump noted that the TV show host Winfrey had invited him and his family on to her talkshow the final week of the show’s finale.“It was my honor, with my family, to do it,” he wrote.The episode with his family actually aired in February, three months before the series finale in May 2011. At the time, Winfrey’s show billed it as the first Trump family interview with his wife, Melania, who he had married six years earlier.Winfrey hosted a livestreamed interview with Kamala Harris on 19 September that served as a virtual rally with other celebrity guests, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller.“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here,” Winfrey said during the event, which had 400 in-person attendees and 200,000 live viewers.The live stream gave Harris a viral and somewhat controversial clip when Winfrey said she was surprised that the Democratic nominee was a gun owner.“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said, laughing. She immediately brushed off the comment, saying: “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”Winfrey is just the latest in a slate of high-profile celebrities Trump has slammed in recent months.When George Clooney became the first major celebrity to voice concern over Joe Biden’s age, Trump called Clooney “a fake movie actor who should get out of politics”.Then in September, after the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Trump went on to say on his social media site: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” More

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      Gretchen Whitmer calls Trump ‘deranged’ after comments on abortion

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years. More

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      More than 700 national security officials endorse Kamala Harris for president

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      More than 700 national security leaders and former military officials publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a letter released on Sunday, calling her a candidate who “defends America’s democratic ideals”.They also said her Republican rival, Donald Trump, was “unfit” for the job.The letter, signed by retired US navy R Adm Michael Smith and hundreds of others, criticized the former president’s remarks about “terminating” the US constitution over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and his suggestion of becoming a “dictator” if re-elected.The group also condemned Trump’s lack of remorse for the January 6 Capitol attack.The letter is a further boost to the vice-president and her bid for the White House. Since Joe Biden dropped his bid for re-election in July, Harris has opened up a narrow lead over Trump and performed more strongly in the crucial swing states needed for victory. She has also secured the endorsement of some key anti-Trump Republicans.The security and military officials wrote in the latter that Harris “grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world”.“The contrast with Mr Trump is clear: where Vice President Harris is prepared and strategic, he is impulsive and ill-informed,” the letter reads.Among those signing the letter is the former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bleich, who served as the US ambassador to Australia under Barack Obama, and the former CIA director John Deutch.In her new book, Clinton expressed her excitement of the prospect of a woman becoming president.“When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps,” she said. “After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union.”The letter made public also criticized Trump’s relationship with leaders overseas, including China’s president, Xi Jinping, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe national security leaders also slammed Trump’s decision to criticize leaders in the UK, Israel, Australia, Canada and Germany.“Mr Trump denigrates our great country and does not believe in the American ideal that our leaders should reflect the will of the people,” says the letter. “Mr Trump is the first president in American history to actively undermine the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of American democracy.”The pro-Harris letter comes on the heels of another endorsement earlier this month by a group of 10 retired top US military officials, including retired Gen Larry Ellis, condemning Trump’s comments disparaging members of the military.Last month, Trump was pictured giving a thumbs up with family members at a ceremony to mark the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan. The army accused two campaign officials of pushing aside a worker at the cemetery who told them that it was not permitted to take photographs at the graves of recently deceased soldiers. More