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    Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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    When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fetterman Plans His Return to Campaign Trail in Pennsylvania Senate Race

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      Three months after John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate nominee, was sidelined by a stroke, he is planning to return to the campaign trail with a rally next Friday.Mr. Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, announced on Friday that he will hold the rally in Erie, Pa., his team said. He is facing Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor and Republican nominee, in one of the nation’s marquee Senate battles.Pennsylvania may offer the Democrats their best chance at picking up a U.S. Senate seat, and Mr. Fetterman’s general election debut, on the cusp of the intense fall campaign season, will be closely watched. For weeks after the stroke in May, he remained largely out of the public eye, releasing brief video clips as he recovered. In June, his campaign acknowledged that he also had a heart condition called cardiomyopathy. Mr. Fetterman said that he had “almost died,” and he promised to focus on his recovery.He has slowly begun to emerge, greeting volunteers in July and attending some in-person fund-raisers, while Dr. Oz has criticized him for his absence from the trail. Some who have listened to Mr. Fetterman at fund-raising events in recent weeks have said that he appears energetic but that it was sometimes evident that he was grasping for a word — something Mr. Fetterman has acknowledged.“I might miss a word every now and then in a conversation, or I might slur two words,” Mr. Fetterman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month. “Even then, I think that’s infrequent.” He added, “I feel like we are ready to run.”While Mr. Fetterman himself has had a light in-person campaign schedule, he and his team have maintained a relentless pace on social media, pursuing a range of creative tactics to cast Dr. Oz as more at home in New Jersey — which had been his longtime principal residence — than in Pennsylvania, where he says he now lives, in a Philadelphia suburb.Mr. Fetterman’s campaign tapped Nicole Polizzi of “Jersey Shore” fame — better known as Snooki — to record a video for Dr. Oz declaring that “Jersey will not forget you.” And Stevie Van Zandt, a renowned musician and actor who has reached legend status in his home state, recorded a direct-to-camera message to Dr. Oz urging him to “come on back to Jersey where you belong. And we’ll have some fun, eh?” For his part, Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon, has unveiled a site that criticizes Mr. Fetterman as a “basement bum” over his absence from the campaign trail. He has also sought to link Mr. Fetterman to President Biden, who has struggled with anemic approval ratings, and to Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Mr. Fetterman backed in the 2016 presidential primary.Public polling shows Mr. Fetterman with a sizable lead over Dr. Oz. But Pennsylvania is perhaps the ultimate swing state, and the race may tighten significantly before Election Day. On Friday, Mr. Fetterman’s campaign announced that it surpassed one million individual contributions since he announced his candidacy last year.“Whoever wins Erie County will win Pennsylvania,” Mr. Fetterman said in a statement announcing his plans for a rally. “Erie County is Pennsylvania’s most important bellwether county.” More