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Trump calls his supporters ‘basement dwellers’, says former press secretary
Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former press secretary, excoriated the Republican presidential nominee at the Democratic national convention on Tuesday, saying: “He has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth.”Grisham, a Republican operative who also served as a spokesperson to Melania Trump, offered firsthand accounts of the former president’s behavior behind closed doors.“I wasn’t just a Trump supporter, I was a true believer, I was one of his closest advisers. The Trump family became my family,” she said, saying she spent her holidays at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. “I saw him when the cameras were off … Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers. On a hospital visit one time when people were dying in the ICU, he was mad that the cameras were not watching him.”She continued: “He used to tell me: ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough and people will believe you.’” She repeated a story she has told before: that during the January 6 insurrection, she asked Melania Trump whether she could tweet that there was “no place for lawlessness or violence”, and the first lady gave a one-word reply: “No.”Grisham earned applause when she said she was the first senior staffer to resign that day. She ended her short speech with an endorsement of Kamala Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”The Harris campaign and the Democratic national convention have been highlighting Republican voters who oppose Trump and are supporting the Democratic ticket.Before Grisham, Kyle Sweetser, an Alabama voter, told the convention crowd that he voted for Trump three times and repeatedly donated to the Republican: “He told us he’d look out for blue-collar workers.” But Trump’s tariffs policy negatively affected him, he said: “Costs for construction workers like me were starting to soar. I realized Trump wasn’t for me. He was for lining his own pockets.”Sweetster added: “I’m not left wing, period. But I believe our leaders should bring out the best in us, not the worst. That’s why I’m voting for Kamala Harris. She’s tough. She’s going to tackle inflation. Trump will make it worse. I’m voting for Kamala Harris because she’ll make us proud to be American again.”Other Republicans due to speak at the convention include Olivia Troye, a national security staffer who worked for Mike Pence, the former vice-president; Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican representative who has been a vocal critic of Trump; John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona; and Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia.Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, also showed up at the convention on Tuesday night. He and Trump have fallen out, and Cohen served as a witness for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. It was not exactly clear why he showed up, but when a reporter asked if he would speak at the convention, he responded, “Only if they let me” and, “Of course I would.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocratic convention highlights:
Six key takeaways from day two of the Democratic convention
Michelle Obama lauds Kamala Harris and takes swipe at Trump
Bernie Sanders urges Democrats to improve lives of ‘struggling’ Americans
Trump calls his supporters ‘basement dwellers’, says former press secretary
Here are the rising stars and politicians to watch this week
What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz More
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Obama to bring message of hope on 20th anniversary of Democratic convention speech
From “skinny kid with a funny name” to elder statesman: Barack Obama, the former US president, will be the headline speaker at the Democratic national convention in Chicago on Tuesday – 20 years after he first burst onto the national political scene.Obama, a state legislator from Illinois, was days from his 43rd birthday and months from being elected to the Senate when he was given a slot at the party’s 2004 convention in Boston. “Rising star to woo voters with upbeat keynote speech,” was the Guardian headline on 27 July 2004.Obama brought Democrats to their feet with a plea for hope and unity. Two decades later, America is more divided than ever, but on Tuesday the first Black president, back in his home city, will make the case for party nominee Kamala Harris to become the first woman and first woman of colour to win election to the White House.“The president will talk again in personal terms about what it takes to be president in this moment and what he’s prepared to do and that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, where we all have to get involved,” Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Obama, said at an Axios House event in Chicago on Tuesday.“One of the lessons we certainly should have learned: it’s not just enough to elect a president. You also have to stay engaged throughout the term of your presidency. Sometimes you elect a president and you go, OK, I’m done, and you go back to your jobs, and that’s not the way democracies work.”Michelle Obama, the former first lady, who is popular enough in her own right that some Democrats floated her as an alternative to Joe Biden, will be speaking on Tuesday night as well.Jarrett, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, added: “Our democracy has been under threat and under attack and it is up to us to be those active and engaged citizens to ensure that we get back on track. I think that’s part of the message you’ll hear from both of them tonight. So be there or be square.”Back in July 2004, in a 16-minute speech, Obama framed the presidential election, talked up nominee John Kerry and told his origin story as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. He told delegates: “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.”Obama did not dwell on policy, but his sweeping indictment of divisive politics struck a chord. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America,” he said. “There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”Joel Rubin, a Democratic strategist, recalled: “It was such a wonderful moment. It was an inspiring moment. It was like a moment to feel truly patriotic and proud to be part of a political party that wanted to bring back the country together. It spoke to the power of our country as a unified people.”Two and a half years later, Obama reprised that theme when he launched his presidential campaign before thousands of supporters gathered outside the Illinois capital of Springfield. His campaign motto was “hope and change”.Yet the flipside of hope was fear, an emotion that Republican Donald Trump was able to exploit to win the White House in 2016. After eight toxic years, the young Obama’s dream of a genuinely united nation seems as elusive as ever.Rubin, a former Obama administration deputy assistant secretary of state, added: “He diagnosed the problem in America right now. One speech never fixes a country. It’s part of a process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What you do is you elect leaders who have a commitment to that kind of vision and, unfortunately, we regressed in 2016 because we had Donald Trump come in committed to the opposite vision by not healing but destroying and magnifying difference rather than unity. But the message for the Democratic convention today is similar to the Obama message of unity and forward purpose.”“The historic nature of this convention is not lost on any of us, but especially those of us who grew up in the civil rights movement,” said Rev Al Sharpton. “Last night, we felt the clear through-line from Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964, Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Rev Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Barack Obama in 2008.”“I think that will be felt as much when Obama takes the stage here in his hometown. I cannot help but think of when I ran for president in 2004 and met briefly with him before each of us spoke. It was clear that night that he struck a tone with the nation – one that still resonates with many of us 20 years later.”On Tuesday, Obama will also honour the legacy of Joe Biden, who served eight years as Obama’s vice-president. Biden will not be in the hall to see his former running mate speak, as he departed Chicago after delivering his own speech.Media reports suggest that Biden is still needled by the role that Obama – along with party leaders Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer – played in pressuring the 81-year-old to not seek re-election due to concerns over his mental capacity.Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, told a CNN-Politico Grill event on Monday: “I’m not going to give my private conversations with the former president. That’s up to him to decide. But we had a number of serious discussions.” More
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Democrats warned to keep euphoria in check as election remains on knife-edge
Anxious Democratic strategists are quietly trying to douse the euphoria engulfing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign by warning that her surge in popularity masks an election contest that is on a knife-edge and could easily be lost.As the vice-president basks in adulation and optimism at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, key supporters are cautioning that more trying times lie ahead after an extended honeymoon period following her ascent to the top of the ticket in place of Joe Biden.Fuelling the Democrats’ feelgood mood have been a spate of opinion polls showing Harris with a national lead over Donald Trump while also leading or newly competitive in battleground states, including southern Sun belt states where Biden had been struggling badly before his withdrawal from the race last month.A recent compilation of national polls by 538, a polling website, showed Harris leading Trump by 46.6% to 43.8%.But Chauncey McLean, the president of Super Forward, a pro-Harris Super Pac that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Harris’s campaign, suggested that the poll figures concealed sobering realities.“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in public,” he told an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics on the convention’s opening day on Monday.He described Pennsylvania, which he identified as the most critical of seven battleground states, as a “coin flip” between Harris and Trump.And despite the apparent resurrection in the Democrats’ prospects, the race overall remains as close as ever.“We have it tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” Reuters quoted McLean as saying. To win, he said, Harris must capture one of three states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia. Recent surveys in the first two have recorded her with a narrow lead or neck-and-neck with Trump, while Trump leads by a wider margin in Georgia, a southern state that Biden won narrowly in 2020.McLean said Harris’s momentum stemmed from an early enthusiasm among young voters of colour in the Sun belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.But she had yet to reassemble the coalition of Black, Hispanic and young voters that underpinned Biden’s victory four years ago. Internal polling shows that voters want more detail on policy.The cautionary theme was amplified by David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, who told the Guardian this week that the Harris campaign must guard against complacency.“I think that if the Harris campaign has one message it will try to get across during this convention, it’s that there is no room for complacency in this election,” he said.The vice-president has already faced scrutiny over her recent disavowal of liberal policy positions she assumed during her ill-fated campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, when she publicly opposed fracking and advocated a single-payer health insurance system that would ultimately have ended private health insurance.While subtly trying to stake out differences from Biden’s position on economic policy – a vulnerable area for Democrats – she has so far avoided one-on-one media interviews since being confirmed as the Democratic nominee, an approach that will need to be jettisoned as the campaign proceeds, thereby ushering in the dangers of public misstatements or policy pronouncements that prove unpopular.But in comments to the New York Times, Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, said embracing ideas of economic populism that are controversial because they run counter to the prevailing free-market neoliberal orthodoxy might be necessary to win precisely because they are attractive to Trump supporters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump,” he said. “We don’t have to win over 25% of his voters. We have to win 5 or 10% of his voters.”Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential election campaigns told the Hill that Harris’s campaign needs to weather a storm at some point.“Every presidential campaign in modern history has had to go through an unanticipated scandal, crisis or world event, and at some point, that political law is going to happen to Kamala Harris’s campaign,” he said. “Until she passes that stress test – and I’m confident she will – this election is still wide open. Anyone who is measuring the drapes at the White House needs a serious reality check.”Another strategist, Tim Hogan, told the same outlet: “Democrats are rightfully elated with the trajectory of the Harris-Walz campaign. But anyone politically conscious over the last decade – especially Democrats – knows that terrain can shift and events beyond our control can quickly change the nature of elections.”He added: “This is going to be a nail-biter.”Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told Fox News that the election outcome would be determined by undecided voters, which he estimated to be about 5% of the electorate. “And the question is, are some of those voters going to get out and actually vote,” he said.James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 election campaign and a vocal advocate of Biden’s withdrawal after his flunked debate performance in June, cautioned about the dangers of over-optimism immediately after Harris emerged as his successor nominee last month.“I have to be the skunk at the garden party. This is too triumphalist,” Carville told MSNBC five days after Biden stepped aside on 21 July.“I think the vice-president, to put it in athletic terms, needs a really good cut man in the corner, because she’s getting ready to get cut. All I’m doing is saying, ‘Watch out people, don’t get too far out there.’ If we don’t win this, all this good feeling is going to evaporate and be all for naught, and that’s what I kinda think my role is right now.” More
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Ex-Nikki Haley voters rally behind Kamala Harris: ‘I picked the side that had the least issues’
After the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, some conservatives across the US continued to vote for her in subsequent primaries, casting ballots that indicated dissent within a party that has otherwise fully embraced Donald Trump.When Haley finally announced that she would be supporting the ex-president in the upcoming election, she said that it was on him to mobilize her loyalists.“Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, and not assume that they’re just gonna be with him,” Haley said.But it was the Biden campaign, not Trump’s, that actively began engaging Haley voters. “I want to be clear: There is a place for you in my campaign,” Joe Biden wrote on Twitter/X alongside an ad targeting Haley voters.With the president out of the race now, some of those former Haley voters have organized behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in a political action group called Haley Voters for Harris.Craig Snyder, the campaign director for the Haley Voters for Harris Pac, told the Guardian that the impetus for the group came after seeing how other Haley supporters continued to support her even after she was no longer a candidate.“When we cast our votes in the primaries we weren’t really voting for her as an active candidate,” he said. “But we wanted to send a message that this was not the kind of Republican party that we wanted, that Trump’s period as the spirit-bearer of the party needed to come to an end.”Snyder wondered what would become of Haley voters in the general election, and homed in on those who have made the decision, however reluctantly, to support Harris.“For those of us in this group, our feeling has been that while we may disagree with the Democratic party on certain policy issues, the better choice is to continue our opposition to Trump by voting Democratic,” he said. “When President Biden made the decision to withdraw, we made the decision to continue along those lines and to support Vice-President Harris.”John “Jack” Merritt, a self-described “center-right” and “strict constitutional constructionist”, registered to vote as a Republican in 1972. He said that, as a “political junkie”, he subscribes to various-leaning political newspapers and watches all of the major news networks. Though he supported Haley in the primaries and has served as a committeeperson for the Republican party in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, Merritt has decided to vote for Harris in November.“I became incredibly disenchanted with the polarization of the two parties in the US,” Merritt said. “I picked the side that had the least amount of issues. I think [Harris and Walz] are more likely to ask for everything they want, but accept what they can get, especially if Congress turns out to be Republican this year. I’m looking for people who can truly govern, not just people who have ideological standards.”Former Haley voters, many of whom are in swing states, will be vital in determining the outcome of the election, according to Snyder. As a result, Haley Voters for Harris is primarily targeting center-right voters by engaging in direct communication and education on political issues.“We are developing the strongest arguments and factual accounts to give to voters to help them cross that last line,” Snyder, a registered Republican, said. “They’ve already taken their journey away from their Republican leaning. The question is: do they go the last mile and vote for the Democratic nominee? We want to get them across that last mile.”But Snyder understands the difficulty that lifelong Republicans might face in trying to stomach support for a Democrat. Still, he said: “There may be disagreements between these voters and a Harris-Walz administration on matters of policy, but they are not fundamental moral values disagreements.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn fact, some aspects of Harris’s history that may have dampened her appeal to progressives, such as her prosecutorial record, could work in her favor with Republicans.“Her greatest weakness to a lot of people turns out to be kind of a strength for winning over Republicans. [She’s] now been kind of leaning into the law and order persona. But I think it’s smart politics that she’s doing that,” said Emily Matthews, a co-chair of Haley Voters Working Group, a coalition of Haley supporters and volunteers.After Harris picked Walz as her running mate, Matthews said there was a lot of disappointment in the group, as they had favored Shapiro. But they’ve been focusing on Harris’s recent messaging as a bright spot.“The border is just really important to a lot of kind of more moderate Republicans and, well, Republicans in general,” she said. “We’ve seen a change in tone from Harris and that has been very welcomed.”Matthews is hoping Harris and Walz use this week’s Democratic national convention to share tangible policy shifts to the center, and to continue reaching out to disaffected Republicans and moderate voters. She said it’s important for the messaging to be clear about the Democrats’ more moderate and center successes.Synder agreed. “When our voters hear those kinds of facts – there’s been more oil production under the Biden-Harris administration than under the Trump administration, the Biden-Harris administration pushed forward a bill to increase the number of border agents far greater than what Trump ever proposed – that is the way to have people get over this obstacle,” he said. “There’s a whole variety of just plain facts about a more moderate kind of approach that Harris has shown compared to this crazy leftwinger that she’s going to be depicted as by the Republicans.”Last month, Haley’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Haley Voters for Harris, urging the Pac to refrain from implying Haley’s “support for the election of Kamala Harris as President of the United States”.But the letter hasn’t deterred Snyder. “Our organization has formally responded through our attorneys, and as of yet nothing further has happened,” he said. “We are continuing our work. At no time have we misrepresented Governor Haley’s position on the race, which is well-known to be support for former President Trump. We are merely calling our group what we are: Haley voters who have decided to vote for Vice-President Harris.” More
