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      Donald Trump threatens to pull out of 10 September presidential debate

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      Donald Trump has expressed doubt that he will participate in a scheduled televised debate with Kamala Harris next month, hurling a trademark “fake news” slur at the network that had agreed to host it.The former president and Republican nominee threatened to pull out of the 10 September meeting with Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee for November’s election, in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday night.Referring to an interview on ABC’s This Week earlier in the day with the host Jonathan Karl and the Republican Arkansas US senator Tom Cotton, Trump questioned the network’s fairness for the only debate that both presidential candidates had already agreed on.“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote with his usual penchant for erroneous upper case letters.He also alluded to his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the This Week host George Stephanopoulos and the ABC network over comments the anchor made in March stating Trump had been found “liable for rape” instead of sexual abuse in a case brought by the New York writer E Jean Carroll.It is not the first time that Trump, who trails Harris by seven points nationally in a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll published on Saturday, has sowed doubt over his debate appearance.“Right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network earlier this month after Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.He stated he had pledged instead to take part in a 4 September debate on Fox News, to which the Harris campaign did not agree, saying he would see Harris there “or not at all”, before changing his mind again.Harris, meanwhile, seized on Trump’s wavering commitment before a lively crowd at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, last month. “If you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said.Trump’s latest hesitation comes amid a reported impasse between the two presidential campaigns over the conditions of next month’s debate. Politico cited four sources on Monday claiming that negotiations had broken down over the turning off of the participants’ microphones when it was not their turn to speak.According to the report, the Harris campaign is demanding that the microphones be left “hot” at all times, in the apparent belief that the vice-president can make Trump lose his cool under questioning and utter something damaging or inappropriate.Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has been pressing for them to be turned off.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, senior adviser for communications for the Harris campaign, told Politico in a statement.“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself … without the benefit of a mute button.”On Monday, Trump appeared to undercut his campaign’s position by declaring he would prefer to have the microphones on.“I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn’t like it the last time, but it worked out fine,” he told reporters.Trump’s campaign had insisted Harris was reneging on terms agreed for the debate by the Biden campaign when it accepted the 10 September date – and another meeting on CNN in June that never took place.Conditions for those debates included the turning off of microphones between exchanges, as was traditional in debates during previous presidential campaigns.“Enough with the games,” Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, told Politico in a statement on Sunday.“We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris camp, after having already agreed to the CNN rules, asked for a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements. We said no changes to the agreed upon rules.”The Harris campaign disputed the accuracy of Miller’s statement, as well as his assertion that it was Harris seeking to withdraw from the debate – and not Trump.“This seems to be a pattern for the Harris campaign. They won’t allow Harris to do interviews, they won’t allow her to do press conferences, and now they want to give her a cheat-sheet for the debate. My guess is that they’re looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” he said.The dispute comes as the Trump campaign seeks ways to blunt significant momentum built by Harris since she became the Democratic nominee, including a surge in both polling and donations.On Monday, the Guardian reported growing fears among the former president’s senior staff that “palace intrigue” over its leadership could distract from the urgency of regaining a solid footing in the race with little more than 10 weeks until the 5 November polling day. More

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      ‘Desperate’: Billy Baldwin denounces ex-friend RFK Jr for endorsing Trump

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      The actor Billy Baldwin has dismissed Robert F Kennedy Jr as a former friend while accusing him of betraying his values – as well as selling his political soul – after the erstwhile independent presidential candidate suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.The rebuke from the 61-year-old Baldwin – the younger brother of fellow actor Alec Baldwin – added to the wave of blowback against Kennedy for his support of the former president. Kennedy himself acknowledged his wife – the actor Cheryl Hines – was “very uncomfortable” with his backing Trump. And his brother Max Kennedy published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times imploring the public to ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr’s maneuvering.Baldwin, in a lengthy post on X, explained that he has known Kennedy for decades.“We were friends,” Baldwin wrote. “I loved his politics. His speeches inspired me. We were neighbors. Our kids were friends. We carpooled the kids to school for a few years.”But now the actor said he has “completely” disavowed and dissociated from Kennedy.In the statement, Baldwin criticized Kennedy’s actions as the “desperate move of a man who had presidential ambitions but saw the door rapidly closing on the opportunity for him to hold any political office”. Baldwin added that the entire run “was a Hail Mary” – a phrase often used to describe a pass thrown in desperation but with little chance of success in the game of American football.Kennedy on Friday announced that he was suspending his independent White House campaign and then publicly endorsed Trump at a political rally alongside the Republican nominee in Arizona.Kennedy said that he and Trump had met several times and that they were “aligned on many key issues” – despite his reportedly having called him “a terrible human being”, “probably a sociopath” and the “[worst] president ever”.But, as Max Kennedy wrote, Robert F Kennedy Jr had also offered the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, his endorsement in exchange for a position in her administration if she won – though he received no response and then successfully offered the same deal to Trump.Baldwin described Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump as “not only a betrayal of the values and traditions of the Kennedy family” but also an act of “political cowardice”. Kennedy’s father was the former US senator and attorney general Robert F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 as he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination. His uncle was John F Kennedy, the Democratic president assassinated in 1963.“He has sold his political soul and desecrated the historic work and legacy of his father … and his uncle,” Baldwin said.Baldwin’s remarks echo the sentiments of five of Kennedy’s siblings, who in a joint statement recently said his endorsement of Trump betrayed their father’s family values.Kennedy on Sunday appeared on Fox News and addressed his siblings’ anger, saying that the family was “able to disagree with each other and still love each other”.Over the weekend, Kennedy’s campaign told CBS News that he had lost his Secret Service protection after suspending his campaign. That protection had been afforded to Kennedy after the failed 13 July assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania. More

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      Are Trump’s campaign rallies energizing his base – or sowing doubt?

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      As Donald Trump emerged to a thunderous roar of approval in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Rust belt, he was back in his comfort zone among the people who once put him in power.But by the time he stepped off the stage nearly two hours later, even some of the former US president’s supporters were wondering whether his rallies are doing his re-election campaign more harm than good.Trump was on his seventh visit to Luzerne county since he first ran for president in 2016. From the stage of an indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre earlier this month, the former president looked out on thousands of the kind of blue-collar voters who helped put him into the White House by flipping the north-eastern Pennsylvania county after it twice voted for Barack Obama.Trump was back to fire them up once more as he again counts on Luzerne to help push him over the line in a swing state he almost certainly has to win if he is to be a two-term president. But much has changed in Luzerne since he first ran eight years ago.The local Republican party has been torn apart by infighting amid accusations of racism and “sledgehammer politics” over how to get Trump re-elected. Meanwhile, support for Democratic candidates in local and state elections has been steadily rising even as its own supporters describe the local party as a “a complete mess” and “useless”.As the election gets off the ground, political strategists on both sides say that the outcome in Luzerne county and much of the rest of north-eastern Pennsylvania is likely to be decided by turnout in a region where a lower proportion of people vote and so there is greater scope to boost support.Local Republican leaders saw the rally as an opportunity for Trump to take the initiative after evidently being thrown by suddenly facing Kamala Harris after months of leading Joe Biden in opinion polls. Harris has not only erased Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania, but recent polls put her three or more points ahead.Frank Scavo, a businessman and ardent Trump supporter who was part of a coup that took hold of the county Republican party earlier this year, was clear before the rally about what he wanted to hear from Trump.“These rallies fire up the base to go out there and knock on doors. His base will walk on fire for him, but plenty of other Republicans don’t vote. Are they demoralised? Do they think their vote doesn’t count? Most of it is apathy. But if we don’t get people out there knocking on doors, Trump’s not going to win Luzerne county,” he said.“But to do that, Trump’s got to focus on the message and not get distracted by personal attacks. Trump’s a good communicator. He’s got the issues, commonsense issues, most of them economic, not social. He should leave the attacks on Kamala to others, at least until the debate.”That’s not how things worked out.Trump repeatedly broke away from the prepared speech about economics to make rambling claims that Harris was both a fascist and a communist, to attack her laugh as that of “a crazy person” and a “lunatic”, and to claim he was more beautiful than the vice-president. He also spent time debating aloud with himself how to pronounce the name of the CNN anchor Dana Bash.By the time he stopped speaking 100 minutes later, a large number of the arena’s 8,000 seats had emptied.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenA hard core of local supporters, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon”, remained alongside traveling groupies who follow Trump from rally to rally. But in rural cities such as Wilkes-Barre, there is also a contingent who go along to political rallies for the entertainment value, to see a former president on a Saturday afternoon when there is not much else going on, or to help weigh up how to vote. Some of them were not impressed.“He reminded me why I’m not going to vote for him this time,” said Jenny, a local businesswoman who did not want to give her full name because she didn’t want to alienate customers.“I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard. I voted for him again in 2020 but didn’t put the flag out that time. I’ve been thinking of voting for him again because Biden’s been so bad for the economy and Kamala won’t be any better. But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.”The county Republican party split earlier this year over how to win back voters like Jenny and get others to the polls. More than half the leadership quit after a “grassroots” Trump-aligned faction set up a breakaway organisation, Luzerne County Republicans.The county chair, PJ Pribula, resigned in March along with other officials after losing the fight. In his resignation letter, Pribula accused the insurgent group of “sledgehammer politics and intolerance”.“For two years, myself and my executive board have spent 90% of our time and resources fighting the 10% because their twisted beliefs run contrary to what our Republican Party stands for,” he wrote.“They realize that if they are deceitful enough, loud enough, obnoxious enough and demanding enough, they will find a path to the inside. Over the past few weeks, I have seen this group and their candidates making in-roads I never would have believed possible and in seeing that, I realize that it is my time to go.”Pribula told the Scranton Times-Tribune that the new leadership was pushing a hate-filled agenda.“They’d put things on their sites being against gays, lesbians, African Americans, anybody who didn’t fit their cookie-cutter mold they are against and that’s not how I am and that’s not how the Republican party is,” he said.Scavo served as the treasurer of the insurgent group shortly after his release from 60 days in prison for illegally entering the Capitol building during the 6 January 2021 riot. He said he organised a trip of about 200 people to the Trump rally in Washington that day because he objected to the conduct of the vote count in Pennsylvania.In 2019, Scavo expressed regret for the wording of a series of anti-Muslim comments on social media, as well as falsely claiming Barack Obama is Muslim, when he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the state legislature. Shortly afterwards, he was voted out as chair of a local school board.Scavo denies that the new Republican party leadership in Luzerne county is pushing a racist agenda. He said the ousted chair and his staff were going to cost Trump the election because they were elitist and unwilling to listen to voters.“The previous leadership didn’t want to have any resistance or turbulence so they didn’t engage with the grassroots,” he said.“There’s a lot of people that don’t vote, so our job is to find them and then say it’s time to vote. Simple. They didn’t seem to understand that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublican twitchiness about the election in Luzerne county is in part driven by the success of Democratic activists in pulling back support that collapsed after Obama left office. However, Ed Mitchell, a veteran Democratic strategist in Wilkes-Barre who previously worked for one of Pennsylvania’s members of Congress, said little of that is down to the Democratic party itself.“I have a personal philosophy as a consultant that the parties don’t really matter anymore. At the national level, they can raise enormous amounts of money, but our state party isn’t very effective here in Pennsylvania and our local Democratic party in the county is a complete mess. They’re useless,” he said.Instead, Trump’s opponents in Luzerne county drew lessons from his defeat of Hillary Clinton and decided the Democratic party was a part of the problem.View image in fullscreenAlisha Hoffman-Mirilovich volunteered for Clinton in Pennsylvania but became frustrated with how Democratic campaign staff disdained local advice on the issues that mattered in Luzerne county.“It was mostly outside organisers telling locals what to do and not necessarily listening. I myself stopped volunteering because of the way that I was treated and some things that were happening at the time,” she said.“They all packed up and left within the week after the election. But this is my home and I decided we needed to do something.”Hoffman-Mirilovich launched Action Together NEPA, a non-partisan social welfare organisation permitted to campaign on issues but not directly in support of individual political candidates, to work on increasing voter turnout.The group did what the local Democratic party failed to do and banged on thousands of doors to talk policy not personalities.“Because of Trump, we now have something where if you just even mention Republican or Democrat it’s just very divisive in communities, which is much different when you are from a non-partisan organisation that’s issues-led. I have talked to candidates who go to knock on doors and get thrown off of porches even though they’re from the community. They are told to go,” she said.“But people are at least willing to talk to us and we find out what’s important to them, not what the party thinks is important. The largest issue in Luzerne county is corruption. It comes up over and over again.”Hoffman-Mirilovich traces that back to the “kids for cash” scandal in which two Luzerne county judges, elected to the positions as Democrats, sentenced hundreds of children to prison terms for petty offences in return for millions of dollars in bribes from the private company incarcerating them. Some of the children were as young as eight years old and sentenced for offences such as jaywalking and smoking on school premises.Other corruption scandals since then have kept the issue alive. Hoffman-Mirilovich said that has fed into a distrust of the system that extends from suspicion about corporate greed driving inflation to the loading of the US supreme court with conservatives to strip away democratic protections and the constitutional right to an abortion.The Democratic share of the vote in Luzerne county has risen with each election since Trump’s 2016 victory, including the race for Pennsylvania’s governor two years later and a seat in the US Senate. Biden narrowed the gap with Trump in 2020 and then the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro, won the county in his election for governor in 2022.Democrats have also made inroads into the county government in which Republicans previously held all but one of the 11 commissioner seats. At the last election, the Democrats picked up four seats.Mitchell credits Action Together, which said it knocked on 36,000 doors in Luzerne county to get Shapiro elected, and other activists, more than the local Democratic party.Some Republicans say, more in hope than expectation, that Biden quitting the presidential race will cost the Democrats voters who were loyal to the president because he makes much of having spent part of his childhood in Scranton, a city in the neighbouring county.But Hoffman-Mirilovich sees the opposite effect, saying Harris has opened up new possibilities. She said voter turnout in Wilkes-Barre is lower than in the rest of the county in part because it has a younger demographic that is less likely to vote.“We are finding talking to some of these voters that they are now energised with Kamala as the top of the ticket. They are excited about voting for the first time,” she said.“Some people, if not most of them, didn’t want to see the same matchup from 2020.”Scavo is not unaware of the success of the get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Democrats and has been working to match it. The Republicans have driven up party registrations over the past couple of years to nearly match those of the Democrats.But Scavo said Trump then has to get those voters to turn out on election day. He agrees with Hoffman-Mirilovich that it will come down to turnout and thinks Trump needs to do more to make sure his supporters vote.“My father keeps saying: ‘If I vote for Trump, what’s Trump going to do?’ And I’m thinking, if you’re asking me that, then Trump isn’t getting the job done because you should know what he’s going to do on day one,” he said.“So how does Trump win? He stops with the personal narratives of ‘I was prosecuted, persecuted, tried’, and all the personal stuff against Kamala. He needs to start talking to the person that’s disengaged by saying: ‘We’re going to lower your cereal, egg and meat prices. We’re going to lower your energy cost, your gas. We’re going to re-establish the border and have mass deportations.’ That’s the message he’s got to focus on, and then people will come out and vote.” More

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      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

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      As Republicans flail from ‘one stupid jackass thing to another’, Harris strives to define vision

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      As Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for US president, and 100,000 red, white and blue balloons floated down from the rafters, Charlene Dukes’ eyes filled with tears. “It was when she spoke about her family, her upbringing, which is so similar to many of us,” said Dukes, a Black woman from Maryland.“Many of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths,” added Dukes, who said the prospect of the US electing a woman of colour as president for the first time in its 248-year history left her feeling “euphoric”.Harris’s address got a thunderous reception in a packed sports arena in Chicago on Thursday night, crowning a pitch-perfect week for Democrats and whirlwind month that turned the presidential election on its head. Some had feared a repeat of the chaotic and violent 1968 convention in the same city; instead the feelgood factor was closer to the 2008 version in Denver that anointed Barack Obama.In speech after speech, party leaders characterised Harris as a historic figure, the embodiment of hope, “the president of joy” – and predicted that she would defeat Donald Trump’s “politics of darkness” once and for all. Delegates walked the streets of Chicago in idyllic weather with a spring in their step, thrilled that their party had been rejuvenated and revivified.But having preached to the converted, Harris is about to face a tougher crowd. Even after six weeks in which everything went right, she enjoys only a fragile lead in opinion polls entering the final sprint. Trump has urged his supporters to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Harris told hers: “When we fight, we win!” Now both are facing the fight of their political lives.Democrats are not only buoyed up by their new ticket of Harris and running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota with dad, football coach and midwestern appeal: after years of soaring prices, the Federal Reserve has nearly conquered inflation without triggering a recession, a feat few economists predicted.The number of people crossings into the US has fallen dramatically since Joe Biden’s asylum crackdown and stricter enforcement in Mexico, although migration can be cyclical and, as the weather cools, it is possible the numbers will begin to climb.Despite the positive trend lines, across the four-night arc of the convention, Democrats’ most prominent voices cautioned against overconfidence. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, told delegates: “No matter how good we feel tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, this is going to be an uphill battle.”Ex-president Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary’s bid to become the first female president was thwarted by Trump in 2016, added: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.”Implicit in the warning words was the question hanging over the convention: can the Harris honeymoon last?More than a month after 81-year-old Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, Harris has barely started to outline detailed plans that she would pursue as president to address challenges such as immigration, crime and the climate crisis.She faces a crunch test on 10 September when she goes head to head with Trump, a notoriously unorthodox opponent, in a televised debate. As Biden discovered in June, a bad debate performance can change the entire trajectory of a race.Harris has also yet to hold a press conference or give an in-depth media interview to face difficult questions about her leadership style, her significantly changed policy positions in recent years, and the focus on gender and race that looms over her historic candidacy – a topic she was careful to swerve past in her acceptance speech.John Anzalone, a pollster who has worked for the last three Democratic presidential nominees, said: “We can’t put our heads in the sand. She’s a Black woman. The bar is going to be higher for everything and guess what that means: even mistakes are going to be magnified. Every campaign is going to have mistakes.”Harris’s allies acknowledge that she remains largely undefined in the minds of many voters, having operated in Biden’s shadow for much of the last four years. The relative anonymity offers both opportunity and risk.David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said: “The thing about vice-presidents, the downside is, nobody knows who you are. The upside is, nobody knows who you are and so you get a chance to define yourselves.”Speaking on a panel organised by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the convention, Axelrod added: “She is a turn-the-page candidate, and the fight right now is whether the Trump folks can push her back into the box of being an incumbent and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done, or whether she can continue on this path as the choice to turn the page.”Harris used her acceptance speech to promise to pass a middle-class tax cut, support Ukraine and Nato, and push for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. But for now, her team feels no urgency to publish a comprehensive policy platform or sit for media interviews that might jeopardize positive vibes that have produced a flood of campaign donations and a growing army of swing-state volunteers.During a series of meetings throughout the convention week, her advisers cast her policy agenda as a continuation and expansion on Biden’s first-term achievements, though at times with a different emphasis. While Biden spoke often of job numbers, Harris has focused on the cost of living and proposed a ban on price gouging.Harris has also dropped opposition to fracking and support for Medicare for All, which were defining features of her doomed 2020 presidential campaign. Her aides insist her values remain the same but that she has embraced more moderate policies out of pragmatism. Progressives are also looking for clues that she will take a tougher line against Israel over its war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenSarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said: “The extent to which she has been able to shake off Biden’s negatives immediately has been incredible. She doesn’t own his economy, as best I can tell, and she doesn’t own Gaza. This is where I’ve been generally impressed with her and where Biden struggled as a communicator. These are complicated issues that require nuanced explanations and she’s capable of giving those explanations.”The campaign promises a clash of styles. A former prosecutor, Harris devoted a broad chunk of Thursday’s speech to nailing Trump’s narcissism, hostility toward women’s reproductive freedom and embrace of autocrats. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut numerous other Democrats used mockery and ridicule to make Trump seem small, likening him to a spurned boyfriend, a neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower and a tenor warming up with “Me me me me me”. Walz has led the way in branding Trump and his allies “weird”.For his part, the former president has been struggling to find an effective line of attack. The Republican nominee has adopted a kitchen-sink approach against Harris that includes attacks about her racial identity (“Is she Indian or she is Black?”), her intelligence (“stupid”, “dumb”), her laugh, her record as vice-president and her history as a “San Francisco liberal”.Longwell, founder and publisher of the Bulwark website, added: “‘San Francisco liberal’ is a buzzword that [for] conservatives strikes right at their hearts. Or even people who are centre-right. People know exactly what it means – and by that I mean they have no idea what it means but they understand what it feels like and it’s bad, so that is the thing she’s got to push off.”Frustrated Republicans have gone public to urge Trump to focus on policy rather than identity politics. They argue that he still enjoys the upper hand on immigration and inflation, although Harris has closed the gap in polling. But the Trump campaign is still struggling to adapt to its new, younger opponent.James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, said: “The thing that’s most amazed me is how utterly caught off-guard they were and how they still can’t seem to get their sea legs. They can’t settle on an attack. Fox [News] is just lost – they go from one stupid jackass thing to another stupid jackass thing.”Speaking after a tour of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, Carville added: “Can they get it back? Maybe, sure, good chance. But right now they’re spitting blood. They’ve been hit in the mouth. I’m hoping that the country decides we just want something different and has, believe it or not, something different.”The Trump campaign had been structured to attack Biden’s age and mental acuity. The switch to Harris has turned the tables, with Trump, 78, the oldest major party nominee in history and Harris, 59, representing a fresh start.Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Obama White House, said at a media event organised by Bloomberg: “They are pretzeling themselves trying to figure out how to attack Kamala Harris because she has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics. She is an incumbent but she’s also a change candidate right now in this election. She’s been able to seize the banner away from Donald Trump.”Gaspard, who has known Harris since the 2007-8 Obama campaign and describes her as a “Swiss army knife” able to appeal to voters in every context, added: “The Republican party will struggle for the next 75 days to impose some governing discipline on Donald Trump, [the US representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others who are going to continue to go after Kamala Harris with misogynistic, racist, ethnic, xenophobic tropes.“They’re going to struggle with that and they’re going to fail miserably because [Trump] is a candidate who is incapable of being conditioned to a new kind of behaviour. There is no message discipline there. The challenge that they have: Donald Trump is a far better candidate in 2016 than the guy who’s standing on the stage today.”But in a deeply divided country, the election remains too close to call. Not even an attempted assassination or change of nominee has moved the needle more than a few percentage points. Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump will not be a gamechanger either.Most people have made up their minds. According to an ABC News/ Washington Post/Ipsos survey, just 12% of voters are potentially persuadable this election, and they tend to be less engaged: roughly one in four of them say they are certain to vote in November compared with nearly two-thirds of Americans overall.Dan Kanninen, battleground director for the Harris-Walz campaign, told reporters at a Bloomberg event that the electoral map has neither expanded nor shrunk since Biden’s withdrawal: “The race is not fundamentally changed. The enthusiasm is incredible. The fact we’re connecting with some voters in different ways is obvious and shows up in some of the research that you’re all seeing as well. But the race is still very, very tight.”Harris, who with Walz starts a bus tour of swing state Georgia on Wednesday, has clawed back the losses caused by Biden’s low approval rating. But she has 11 weeks left to define herself not merely as the inheritor of the anti-Trump coalition but as an inspiring figure in her own right. Joy alone will not be enough.Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said in an interview: “I don’t think we’re at a sugar high. Where she is now is where Democrats should be but it’s not high enough to win. So to me the bigger question is not so much: ‘Is all this enthusiasm going to go away?’ as ‘Is she going to be able to get beyond just the coalescing of the base and get that next 2, 3, 4%?’”Asked whether she would dare to predict the outcome on 5 November, Walter gave a one-word answer. “No,” she said, with a hearty laugh. More

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      How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?

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      When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation.Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. Launched last year, the Texas-based non-profit organization frames itself as a press freedom group with the goal of “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe group’s day-to-day operations appear to revolve around sharing engagement bait on X and seeking millions from donors for a “fellowship program” chaired by a high school sophomore that would award $100,000 to Twitter personalities such as Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, according to a review of the group’s tax records, investor documents and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Foundation did not return request for comment to a set of questions about its operations and fellowship program.After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk’s claims that freedom of speech is under attack from leftwing forces, one of the organization’s messages found its way to Trump and then his millions of supporters.Disinformation researchers have long warned that generative AI has the ability to lower the bar for creating misleading content and threaten information around elections. After Musk’s xAI company released its largely unregulated Grok image generator last week, there has been a surge of AI content that has included depictions of Trump, Kamala Harris and other political figures. The Milton Freedom Foundation is one of many small groups flooding social media with so-called AI slop.A niche non-profit’s AI slop makes its way to TrumpDuring the spike in AI images on X, the conservative @amuse account posted the images of AI-generated Swift fans to more than 300,000 followers. On the text of the post, which was labeled “satire”, was a watermark that stated it was “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”. Trump posted a screenshot of @amuse’s tweet on Truth Social.The @amuse account has considerable reach itself, with about 390,000 followers on X and dozens of daily posts. Running @amuse appears to be Alexander Muse, listed as a consultant in the investor prospectus of the Milton Foundation, who also writes a rightwing commentary Substack that includes posts exploring election conspiracy theories. The @amuse account has numerous connections with Muse. The X account is connected to a Substack posting the same exact articles that Muse publishes on his LinkedIn page, which also has the username “amuse”, reflecting his first initial and last name. Muse’s book on how to secure startup funding, which includes examples of him asking ChatGPT to pretend it’s Musk and offer business advice, lists that same Substack account as its publisher.Prominent accounts including Musk have shared and replied to @amuse’s posts, which recently have included AI depictions of Trump fighting Darth Vader and sexualized imagery of Harris. Its banner picture is currently an AI-generated photo of Trump surrounded by women in “Swifties” shirts. The account posts misleading, pro-Trump headlines such as claiming Harris turned hundreds of thousands of children over to human traffickers as “border czar”. The headlines, like the AI-generated Swifties for Trump images, come with the watermark “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”.The John Milton Freedom Foundation, named after the 17th-century British poet and essayist, has a small online footprint: a website, an investor prospectus and an X account with fewer than 500 followers. The team behind it, according to its own documents, consists of five people based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with varying degrees of experience in Republican politics. Muse’s daughter, described as a 10th grade honor student on the non-profit’s site, serves as the Milton Foundation’s “fellowship chair”.The foundation’s stated goal is to raise $2m from major donors to award $100,000 grants to a list of “fellows” made up of rightwing media influencers. These include people like the former CBS journalist turned far-right star Lara Logan, who was cut from Newsmax in recent years for going on a QAnon-inspired rant that claimed world leaders drink children’s blood, as well as the author of an anti-trans children’s book. The organization believes that this money would allow these already established influencers to “increase their reach by more than 10x in less than a year”, according to its investor prospectus.While only one of the fellows listed on the foundation’s site mentions the organization on their X profiles and none follow its account, the @amuse account has a prominent link to the group’s community page and the foundation often engages with its posts.It is not clear that the foundation has any money to give and if all the media influencers listed as its 2024 fellowship class know about the organization. One Texas-based account that posts anti-vaccine content lists itself as a “JMFF” fellow in their bio, but none of the others advertise any connection. The most recent tax records for the Freedom Foundation place it in the category of non-profits whose gross receipts, or total funds received from all sources, range from $0 to $50,000 – far below the millions it is seeking.The organization’s board includes its chair, Brad Merritt, who is touted as an experienced Republican organizer with claims to have raised $300m for various non-profits; its director, Shiree Sanchez, who served as assistant director of the Republican party of Texas between 1985 and 1986; and Mark Karaffa, a retired healthcare industry executive.Muse’s experience in digital media appears to be far more extensive than the non-profit’s other members. In addition to his blog, he claims to have worked with James O’Keefe, the former CEO of the rightwing organization Project Veritas, who was known for hidden camera stings until he was ousted last year over allegations of misplaced funds. Muse, who is described in the prospectus as a “serial entrepreneur”, also blogs about how to make money from generative AI. More

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      Is Trump OK? Unhinged reaction to rise of Harris worries supporters

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      Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.The former president has also characterised Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced.Melania’s reaction to her husband’s implicit claim that he is better-looking than his wife is not known.Trump has sought to court Black voters in recent months as he attempts to win enough of their support to swing key states such as Michigan. But he will have done his own cause no good by questioning whether Harris, whose mother was born in India and father in Jamaica, is really Black – all while giving an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, and to the astonishment of just about everyone in the room.View image in fullscreen“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”Trump also claimed to “have been the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln”.In a similar vein, the former president sometimes veers off the written script to have an open debate with himself about how to pronounce names, whether Kamala or the first name of the CNN presenter Dana Bash at a recent rally.At a rally in Pennsylvania a week ago, Trump went as far as rambling on about rambling.“I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he told the crowd.Even some of Trump’s most loyal fans were disturbed by that performance. Joan Long travelled from New York with her husband, Billy, to see the former president speak.“I honestly can’t say I know why he starts talking about how to pronounce names. What does that have to do with the election?” she said. “And I wish he would stop talking about Kamala’s looks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeading Republicans are similarly disturbed. Senator Lindsey Graham pleaded with Trump to stay focused on the issues that play best for the former president, such as the economy.“His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told NBC’s Meet the Press.Nikki Haley, the Republican former presidential candidate who denounced Trump as unfit for office before supporting him, said he “is not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is” or by calling her “dumb”. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican former speaker of the US House of Representatives, told Fox News that Trump should stop making the race about personalities and “stop questioning the size of her crowds”.View image in fullscreenTrump, to no one’s surprise, has ploughed on regardless. He told reporters that he was “very angry” at Harris for calling him weird and was “entitled to personal attacks”.Harris also appears to have hit a nerve with Trump by comparing her history as a prosecutor with his recent status as a convicted criminal. “Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me – they want me to be in prison,” Trump told reporters.All of this is a notable contrast to the weeks following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. Trump apparently listened to his advisers for once, as he took a step back from the relentless personal attacks and largely let the press and public opinion lead the questioning of the 81-year-old president’s fitness for office.The former president briefly looked as dignified as he was ever likely to. The attempt to assassinate Trump in Pennsylvania in July did no harm to his standing. Polls put Trump on the front foot, and his campaign advisers openly gloated about the prospect of a landslide win in November. But the energy unleashed by Harris’s entry into the presidential race drew out the old Trump again.View image in fullscreenWhen the focus was on Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said every presidential candidate should be required to take a cognitive test. Pressed this week by CBS News on whether he has done so himself, Trump claimed to have recently had a “perfect score” on two cognitive tests.“I got everything right. And one of the doctors said, ‘I’ve never seen that before, where you get everything right,’” he said.Many Americans are not so convinced. Earlier this week, a JL Partners poll for the Daily Mail showed the number of American voters who have confidence that Trump is able to fully digest national security briefings, maintain attention in meetings and remember the names of world leaders he is talking to – and who have confidence that he will still be alive in four years – has dropped sharply since March.In just a few months, concern about fitness for office has shifted from Biden to Trump, who is now the oldest US presidential candidate in history. More

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      Trump hails ‘very nice endorsement’ from RFK Jr as Kennedy siblings repudiate move – live

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      Speaking in Las Vegas today, Donald Trump acknowledged a “very nice endorsement from RFK Jr”.“That’s big,” Trump said, adding: “He’s a great guy, respected by everybody.”Trump added that he will discuss the endorsement further at a rally in Arizona this afternoon. RFK Jr was still concluding his remarks at the time.Like JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr previously condemned and insulted Donald Trump on numerous occasions. With news of Kennedy withdrawing and endorsing the Republican, here’s a look back at a few of his past quotes on the former president:

      According to a New Yorker story from earlier this month, Kennedy recently wrote in a text message to someone that Trump is “a terrible human being”, adding, “The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”

      In April, after Trump accused Kennedy of being a “Democratic plant”, Kennedy posted: “When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged. President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”

      In 2020, Kennedy said, “He is a bully. And you know, I don’t like bullies. And I don’t think … that that’s part of America’s tradition. I think, in many ways, he’s discredited the American experiment with self-governance.”
      The former disdain goes both way. Trump earlier this year called Kennedy “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office”, adding, “Reminds me of this fly that’s driving me crazy up here. This fly is brutal. I don’t like flies.”RFK Jr’s wife, actor Cheryl Hines, tweeted about her husband’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign this afternoon, thanking the campaign’s staff for helping Kennedy overcome “the roadblocks and lawsuits that have been brought against them”:
      I’d like to extend a sincere, deeply heartfelt thank you to every person who has worked so tirelessly and lovingly on his campaign. … Over the last year and a half, I have met some extraordinary people from all parties – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. It’s been my experience that the vast majority of all parties are truly good people who want the best for our country and for each other. It has been an eye-opening, transformative, and endearing journey.
      Hines, who’s known for her role on the sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, reportedly opposed RFK Jr’s decision to endorse Trump.The decision by Robert F Kennedy Jr to suspend his presidential campaign brings to an end one of the most bizarre campaigns of recent times.Kennedy, who introduced the general public to the concept of “leaky brain” and the idea that chemicals in water were making children transgender, initially ran for the Democratic nomination but launched an independent campaign in October 2023.His efforts failed to gain traction but left the public with some unusual, and some unsavory, memories.The scandals include revelations he dropped off a dead bear in Central Park; his claim that part of his brain had been eaten by a worm; an alleged photo he took of a barbecued dog; conspiracy theories about wifi radiation; and allegations of sexual assault.Read more here for a detailed recounting of the most notable controversies:After ranting live on Truth Social during Kamala Harris’s Democratic national convention speech last night, Trump couldn’t seem to shake it today. During an event at a Las Vegas restaurant, the former president complained about Harris’s speech, falsely claiming she had made no mention of the border and mocking her for repeatedly thanking the audience.“She mentioned ‘thank you’ about 50 times,” said Trump. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said, making a guttural noise possibly for dramatic effect and then continuing to repeat the word: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank – thank, thank.”“What the hell is wrong with her?” he said.The Harris campaign immediately posted the clip:Here’s a look at where things stand:

      RFK Jr announced the suspension of his presidential campaign and his endorsement of Donald Trump. In a nearly 50-minute address, the independent candidate cited his endorsement reasons as “free speech, war on Ukraine and war on our children”.

      Five of RFK Jr’s siblings have shared a statement denouncing their brother’s decision to endorse Trump. “We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story,” they said.

      JD Vance will attend a fundraiser next month hosted by Keith Rabois, Jacob Helberg and the “Trump 47 Jewish Coalition”. Rabois, an investor, and Helberg, an author and technology investor, are both Jewish (the two are also married). They have been critical of the Joe Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, saying the president has not been vocally supportive enough of Israel.

      In separate appearances on Fox News on Thursday, Donald Trump and Georgia governor Brian Kemp set their long-held distaste for each other aside, with Kemp endorsing Trump and Trump calling Kemp “very nice”. “We’ve got to win from the top of the ticket on down,” Kemp said, speaking in response to Kamala Harris’s nomination at the Democratic national convention last night. “We need to send Donald Trump back to the White House.”

      Merrick Garland announced this morning that the justice department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the real estate software company RealPage. The DoJ alleges that RealPage’s algorithm provided landlords with recommended prices for rentals that allowed them to align their rents.

      Several Secret Service personnel from the Pittsburgh field office have been reassigned to administrative duties and ordered to work from home following last month’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, according to sources speaking to CNN. In a report on Friday, CNN also reported that a member of Trump’s security detail has also been reassigned to administrative duties.

      In response to Kamala Harris’s speech at the Democratic national convention on Thursday, Donald Trump’s campaign released an email on Friday morning, calling Harris “dangerously liberal, not a centrist”. It went on to say: “Her record includes being named the most liberal senator, supporting eliminating private health insurance, and saying we need to ‘redirect resources’ from police. Kamala Harris is dangerously liberal, describing her as anything else is a lie.”

      Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, said on Friday that “the time has come” to cut rates, Reuters reports. During a speech at the Fed’s annual economic conference in Wyoming, Powell said: “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear, and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance of risks.”
      Robert Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that he is dropping out of the US presidential race and throwing his support behind Donald Trump.The 70-year-old scion of the expansive and reliably Democrat family said in a Pennsylvania court filing that he was dropping out of the 2024 race for the White House, according to the Associated Press.Kennedy, a life-long Democrat before he switched to independent – a reflection of his frustration after he was essentially blocked from challenging Joe Biden for the party nomination and later lost Democrat-financed challenges to appearing on state ballots -, said during a press conference that “in an honest system, I believe I would have won the election…”Kennedy point to the system that his father, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, president John F. Kennedy, he said, had thrived in – ‘a system with open debates, primaries with regularly scheduled debates, a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, a system of non-partisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.”He said polls had shown him beating existing candidates in terms of favorability. “I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, for our government and most sadly of all for me and the Democratic party.Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, had hinted the Kennedy campaign might join forces with Trump or forming a new party “because we draw votes from Trump” or “we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump. We walk away from that and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”At the height of his campaign. Kennedy was polling at 10% of voters but since Biden dropped out from re-election in July and vice president Kamala Harris stepped in, Kennedy’s polling support halved. The big question is where that remaining 5% of voters go – with Kennedy and Trump, to Democrats, or withhold their vote entirely.At a campaign stop at a restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada, Donald Trump opened his remarks with a focus on tipped income, and his proposal to abolish taxes on tipped income if elected.“Nobody ever heard of this concept before,” said Trump, of his proposal to do away with taxes on tips, a form of taxation that especially affects restaurant workers. He called Kamala Harris, who has said she supports the same kind of policy, a “copycat” and complained about her decision to back the policy.“Can we get the culinary union to vote for Trump?” he said. “A lot of them are voting for us, I can tell you that.” The Culinary Union, which represents workers in food service, hotels and gaming, has already endorsed Harris for president.“The path to victory runs through Nevada, and the Culinary Union will deliver Nevada for president Kamala Harris and vice president Tim Walz,” wrote Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, in a 9 August statement.Speaking in Las Vegas today, Donald Trump acknowledged a “very nice endorsement from RFK Jr”.“That’s big,” Trump said, adding: “He’s a great guy, respected by everybody.”Trump added that he will discuss the endorsement further at a rally in Arizona this afternoon. RFK Jr was still concluding his remarks at the time.Five of RFK Jr’s siblings have shared a statement denouncing their brother’s decision to endorse Trump.“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy said in a statement.RFK Jr’s campaign has clarified that it did not intend to endorse Donald Trump in a Pennsylvania court filing, according to reports.“Mr Kennedy has not endorsed president Trump,” Stefanie Spear, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The filing was made by an attorney and not reviewed by the campaign. The filing is being updated.”The news comes as RFK Jr is speaking live to the nation.RFK Jr said he will “now throw my support to president Trump”.Citing the reasons for his endorsement of Donald Trump, he said the causes “were free speech, war in Ukraine and the war on our children”.“I want everyone to know that I am not terminating my campaign. I am simply suspending it and not ending it,” RFK Jr said.“My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping president Trump or Vice-President Harris,” he added, saying: “In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me.”“There in Chicago, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day,” RFK Jr said.“Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate. In contrast, at the RNC convention, president Biden was mentioned only twice in four days … What most alarms me is how the Democratic party conducts its internal affairs, or runs its candidates, let alone … resort to censorship and media control, and weaponization of the federal agencies,” he added.“Now, in an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” RFK Jr said.“My father and my uncle thrived in a system … [of] open debates with fair primaries, with a regularly scheduled debate with fair primaries and with a truly independent media, untainted by government propaganda and censorship. In a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.”“I want to thank all of those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat,” RFK Jr said, referring to his presidential run.“Your accomplishments were regarded as impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude, and I’m never going to forget that, not just for what you did, for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because you love our country.”“As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically on the core values that I grew up with,” RFK Jr said.“It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech … and big money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.”“I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to all before I was old enough to vote,” RFK Jr said.“I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960 and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the constitution of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars. We were the party of labor.”RFK Jr is now live on stage.Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates. More