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      US election live: Harris says Puerto Ricans ‘deserve better’ as outcry grows over ‘hateful’ Trump rally remarks

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      The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has released a statement condemning the “shameful rhetoric” displayed at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Monday, where speakers made racist remarks about immigrants, and one speaker described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.In the statement, the caucus called the language and rhetoric at the rally as “not only divisive but dangerous”.
      Hateful rhetoric has real-world consequences. When political leaders, influencers, and those with a large social platform choose language that dehumanizes communities, families get hurt, and hate crimes rise.
      The statement continues:
      This type of language emboldens prejudice, encourages violence, and undermines the values of unity and respect that our country is built on. It’s deeply troubling to see Republican leaders celebrate this rhetoric instead of promoting unity and truth.
      Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”Read more:Kamala Harris’s campaign has seized on the racist remarks about Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s New York rally on Sunday in a new campaign ad in which the vice-president argues “Puerto Ricans deserve better.”In the ad released on Monday, Harris also criticized Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island and killed thousands of people in 2017. “He abandoned the island and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults,” she said.A report from 2021 found that the Trump administration delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico after the hurricane.Donald Trump has pledged to gut the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate law, even though some of his closest allies have benefitted from it.At least seven of Trump’s associates and fundraisers – or the companies they run – have obtained incentives thanks to the climate law, Reuters first reported.The IRA increased consumer interest in clean energy loans from California-based financial technology company Mosaic, which counts Trump’s son-in-law and former White House senior advisor Jared Kushner’s private equity fund Affinity Partners as an investor. Another IRA beneficiary was carbon capture and sequestration project Summit Carbon Solutions, in which Trump ally Harold Hamm’s fossil fuel company Continental Resources invested $250m in 2022.Though its founder Elon Musk has attacked the IRA, Tesla has also received gargantuan subsidies from the IRA. Musk is one of Trump’s most consequential boosters.Vicki Hollub, the Occidental Petroleum CEO and a major Trump donor and fundraiser, has also benefited from the IRA’s carbon capture tax credit and other subsidies. And pipeline company Energy Transfer – headed by longtime Trump supporter Kelcy Warren – participates in carbon capture and hydrogen projects boosted by IRA tax credits.The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act represented the biggest green downpayment in American history. Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the law.Kamala Harris took another swipe at her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, during her visit to a semiconductor plant in Michigan.She attacked the former president again for the tone and content of his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, and defended the Chips and Science Act she said he wanted to abandon:
      We are eight days out from an election, so I’ve got to also talk about the contrast, because my opponent spends full time talking about, just kind of diminishing who we are as America, and talking down at people, talking about that we’re the garbage can of the world. We’re not.
      He just recently did a radio talk show and talked about how he’d get rid of the Chips act. That was billions of dollars investing in just the kind of work that’s happening here. And you know how we did it? We created tax credits to create the incentive for the private sector to do this work. That’s good work.
      When he was president, he sold advanced chips to China that helped them with their agenda to modernize their military. That’s not about what’s in the best interest of America’s security and prosperity, which should be two of the highest priorities for president of the US.
      There is a very serious choice presented in the next eight days. And as much as anything it is a question about what is the direction of the future that we want for our country.
      As Donald Trump’s campaign faces intense criticism over racist remarks from a speaker at the Republican candidate’s New York rally on Sunday, JD Vance has responded by saying that Americans need to “stop getting offended”.Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster and comedian who spoke ahead of Trump at Madison Square Garden, described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”. His comments have drawn widespread condemnation and outrage.Trump’s running mate said he had “heard about” the joke, and argued that Kamala Harris is painting the former president’s supporters as “Nazis”.“I think that it’s telling that Kamala Harris’s closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump’s voters are Nazis and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke. That is not the message of a winning campaign.“I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m so over it.”The Puerto Rican singer Marc Anthony has just posted a stinging attack on Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, reminding voters how the then president “blocked billions in relief while thousands died” on the island after 2017’s Hurricane Maria.“I’m here to tell you that even though some have forgotten … I remember. I remember what it was like when Trump was president. I remember what he did and said, about Puerto Rico … About our people,” he posted on X to his 11m followers:
      I remember after Hurricane Maria devastated our island… Trump blocked billions in relief … while thousands died. I remember that when our families lacked clean water and electricity, Trump threw paper towels and called Puerto Rico ‘dirty’ and ‘poor.’

      But I was not surprised … because I ALSO remember … he launched his campaign by calling Latinos criminals and rapists. He’s told us what he’ll do. He’ll separate children from their families and threatened to use the ARMY to do it.
      This election goes way beyond political parties. Now let’s remember what the United States represents and stands for. It’s our name – United. Regardless of where we’re from. I’m Marc Anthony … I remember.
      Police say they have identified “a suspect vehicle” connected to incendiary devices that set fire to separate ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington state early on Monday, the Associated Press reports.Surveillance images captured a Volvo stopping at a drop box in Portland, Oregon, just before security personnel nearby discovered a fire inside the box, officials said.That fire damaged three ballots inside. Around the same time, a fire was set at a drop box in nearby Vancouver, Washington, on early Monday, and hundreds of ballots were destroyed.Authorities said at a news conference in Portland that enough material from the incendiary devices was recovered to show that the two fires Monday were connected, and were also linked to an incident on 8 October when an incendiary device was placed at a different ballot drop box in Vancouver.Read more:The Nevada supreme court on Monday upheld the state’s post-election deadline for mail ballots lacking a postmark, CNN reported. The ruling is a rejection of a lawsuit brought by Republicans and the Trump campaign.The lawsuit challenged Nevada’s acceptance of mail ballots that are missing postmarks up to three days after an election. The supreme court, however, said the plaintiffs had failed to make a convincing case.“Notably, the RNC [Republican national committee] presented no evidence or allegations that counting mail ballots without postmarks … would be subject to voter fraud, or that the election security measures currently in place are inadequate to address its concerns regarding these ballots,” the ruling said.According to CNN, a similar case was filed by Republicans in federal court, but the US ninth circuit court of appeals is unlikely to resolve that case before next Tuesday’s election.Kamala Harris has been touring a semiconductor plant in Saginaw county, Michigan, on Monday afternoon, and talking up the Chips and Science Act.The Democratic presidential nominee said that if she wins next week’s election she will be reassessing “on day one” which federal jobs require a college degree and which ones do not.The comment, at the Hemlock Semiconductor facility in Hemlock, is both a policy proposal and a political bridge, the Associated Press news agency said, reporting her visit.One of the clearest political divides in the nation over the past few presidential cycles has been between college-educated and non-college-educated voters, with Democrats acknowledging they need to cut into Donald Trump’s support among the latter group, it said.“One of the things immediately is to reassess federal jobs, and I have already started looking at it, to look at which ones don’t require a college degree,” Harris said. “Because here is the thing: that’s not the only qualification for a qualified worker.”Earlier in her speech, Harris said: “We need to get in front of this idea that only high-skilled jobs require college degrees.”Moms for Liberty, a rightwing activist group focusing on education, launched a video ad in four battleground states on Monday targeting a Biden administration rule protecting LGBTQ+ students from gender bias.The ad, titled That’s Not Fair, features a father comforting his athlete daughter after she lost a race. “Dad, it’s not fair! I had to run against a boy! It’s not right,” the girl tells her father, who replies: “I know.”The ad will air in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.In June, a federal judge in Louisiana appointed by Donald Trump blocked the Biden administration from enforcing an education department rule extending sex discrimination protections under Title IX to LGBTQ+ students in Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho. More

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      Chinese hackers collected audio from a Trump campaign adviser’s calls – report

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      Chinese state-affiliated hackers intercepted audio from the phone calls of US political figures, including an unnamed campaign adviser of Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported Sunday.Various media outlets reported on Friday that the Trump campaign was made aware last week that the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate JD Vance were among a number of people inside and outside of government whose phone numbers were targeted through the infiltration of Verizon phone systems.The FBI and the US cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency confirmed they were investigating unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by people associated with China, though they did not not name the Trump campaign in the statement.Reuters later reported that Chinese hackers also targeted phones used by people affiliated with the campaign of Kamala Harris.The Post now reports that the hackers were able to access audio from a phone call from a Trump campaign adviser, as well as unencrypted communications such as text messages of the individual.Trump’s campaign and the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Trump campaign was hacked earlier this year. The US justice department charged three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps with the hack, accusing them of trying to disrupt the 5 November election.Verizon said on Friday it was aware of a sophisticated attempt to target US telecoms and gather intelligence and is working with law enforcement.Congress is also investigating and earlier this month US lawmakers asked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to answer questions about reports Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers.The Chinese embassy in Washington DC said last week it was unaware of the specific situation but said China opposes and combats cyberattacks and cyber thefts in all forms. More

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      Michelle Obama introduces Harris at Michigan rally; across state, Trump joined by Arab and Muslim leaders

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      Senator Bob Casey attacked his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick, over allegations that he fostered a toxic work environment as CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater, describing the claims as “disqualifying”.“I’ve always placed a priority on combating sexual harassment in the workplace, and apparently at Bridgewater, it was just a whole different story,” Casey told reporters this morning.“So he’s being held accountable for that, and he should be held accountable. I think that alone is disqualfiying. If you’ve engaged in that kind of activity in the private sector, you should not be a public official at any level.”The Casey campaign released an ad this week highlighting claims that McCormick attempted to silence or retaliate against female employees of Bridgewater who came forward with harassment claims.Casey’s campaign manager also penned a letter calling on McCormick to demand that Bridgewater release employees who reported harassment from their non-disclosure agreements.“It is your responsibility to ensure the voters of Pennsylvania have complete information about your record before casting their votes,” Tiernan Donohue, Casey’s campaign manager, wrote in the letter. “They deserve the full story.”Speaking to reporters after his event with the Carpenters Union, Senator Bob Casey said he believes the momentum and enthusiasm on the ground in Pennsylvania will lift Democrats to victory in 10 days.“I think it is close. There’s no question about that,” Casey said. “That energy and intensity on the ground is starting to uplift our side. I’ve never seen the number of volunteers that we’ve seen in this state. Every weekend they’re breaking another record.”Asked specifically about whether young voters will turn out to vote for him and Kamala Harris, Casey expressed confidence that they would.“I think the turnout is going to be high,” Casey said. “Young voters might engage a little late, but I think they’re ready to vote.”Kamala Harris is drawing out the personal and political differences between her and Donald Trump.“I grew up in a middle class neighborhood with a working mother who kept a strict budget and did everything she could to make sure my sister and I had all that we needed. I come from the middle class, and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris said.Trump’s “agenda is all laid out in Project 2025, which I still must say, I cannot believe they put that in writing,” she added, before going on to talk about her plan for a child tax credit and to lower housing and healthcare costs.Senator Bob Casey addressed members of the Carpenters Union in Philadelphia this morning, as the three-term Democrat enters the final 10 days of his race against Republican Dave McCormick.Casey, whose race has grown increasingly close in recent weeks, again critcized McCormick over his leadership of the hedge fund Bridgewater and his recent residency in Connecticut.“He was investing in Chinese oil companies, investing in Chinese steel companies and betting against US Steel — hurting our workers, hurting our companies. That is his record as a hedge fund CEO,” Casey said.“I’ll put my record — fighting for families in this state, investing in communities in this state and fighting for working men and women — I’ll put that record up against his record any day of the week.”Thanking the union for its support throughout his political career, Casey added, “I’m going to work night and day for the next 10 days, like I’ve been working my whole life, to earn your votes and to earn your trust.”Protesters demonstrating against the war in Gaza briefly interrupted Kamala Harris’ rally in Kalamazoo.The crowd chanted over the protesters before Harris continued, “And listen on the topic of Gaza, we must end that war, and we must end the war and bring the hostages home, but now I am speaking about 2024″.”Michelle Obama has welcomed Kamala Harris to the stage in Kalamazoo.“The stakes are high, because, as [Michelle Obama] reminds us, as my mother taught me, don’t just complain about injustice, do something,” Harris said.Michelle Obama says Kamala Harris will defend reproductive freedom “not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a decent human being.”“She will usher in a new generation of American leadership and send the ugliness of Donald Trump and his politics, back where it belongs. The past,” Obama said, before encouraging the crowd in Kalamazoo to “do something” and talk to their family and community about voting.Michelle Obama is painting a picture of what restricted reproductive health care could look like across the United States if Donald Trump is re-elected.“We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing life saving treatments because they are worried about being arrested. More medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all. More OB-GYN clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout this country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn, will leave millions of us at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers,” Obama said.“To the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking the basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life,” she continued.“I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” she said. “Do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through.”Michelle Obama is asking the crowd at Kamala Harris’s rally in Kalamazoo to consider which presidential candidate they think will look out for their civil and reproductive rights.“If you’ve ever been out there marching and weeping for justice, who do you think is going to have your back? Is it Donald Trump, who once took out a full-page ad to demonize innocent young Black teenagers in New York City, who has dreamed openly about his own version of a purge, where, in his words, he has said for one day, one real rough, nasty day, he says he will allow cops to use violence indiscriminately?” Obama said.“There’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth, and sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work,” she added, describing the stigma many women feel discussing everything from menstruation to menopause.“And look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives,” she said. “There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health, and if you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored even by your own doctors,” she added, to a chorus of agreement.“If we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as Trump intends to do, I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health.”Still speaking in Kalamazoo, Michelle Obama has criticized Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic and January 6 attack.“When the American people fired him from a job that was too big for him to begin with, he tried to steal it,” Obama said. Referencing the growing list of former Trump administration officials who have noted the ex-president’s authoritarian tendencies, Obama added, “These folks know that nothing this man says or does is funny in any way. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”“I hope that you will forgive me if I am worried that we will blow this opportunity to finally turn the page on the ugliness once and for all, because, believe me, if Donald Trump is president again at some point or another, that ugliness will touch all of our lives.”In an interview with Meet the Press, JD Vance has tried to explain Donald Trump’s comments on “the enemy from within.Vance told moderator Kristen Welker: “I think what Donald Trump said is that those folks pose a greater threat to United States’ peace and security because America is strong enough to stand up to any foreign adversary.” The full interview will air tomorrow.Although she says she hates politics, Michelle Obama says the stakes of this election were too high for her to sit it out.“I wanted to do everything in my power to remind the country that I love that there’s too much we stand to lose if we get this one wrong,” the former first lady said.Obama also called out the higher standards that Black women are held to as some have criticized Harris. “They accuse her of not providing enough policy detail. Some wonder, do we really know her? Is she too aggressive? Is she not aggressive enough? There are folks sowing seeds of doubt about whether she’s who she appears to be,” Obama said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, voters have every right to ask hard questions of any candidate seeking office, but can someone tell me why we are once again holding Kamala to a higher standard than her opponent?”“For Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”Speaking at the Harris campaign’s rally in Kalamazoo, Michelle Obama seeks to draw a stark comparison between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Kamala Harris is “showing us what a sane, stable leader looks like,” the former first lady said. “That’s because Kamala Harris is a grown-up. And Lord knows we need a grown-up in the White House.”“This is someone who understands you, all of you, someone from a middle class family raised mostly by her mom, like so many of us, leaning on her neighbors, like we all do, that’s what you want in a president,” Obama said.“With all that being said, I got to ask myself, well, why on earth is this race even close?” she added “It’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment, because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready. The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment.”Michelle Obama is speaking now at Kamala Harris’ rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The former first lady, who was welcomed onstage to uproarious applause, called the city “Kamala-zoo”. More

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      Chinese believed to have targeted Trump’s and Vance’s phones in US telecommunications breach

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      Chinese government-linked hackers are believed to have targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as part of a larger breach of US telecommunications networks, according to a New York Times report.The Trump campaign was informed this week that the phone numbers of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominee were among those targeted during a breach of the Verizon network, the paper said, citing sources.Investigators are working to determine what data, if any, was accessed by the “sophisticated” hack, the sources said. Other current and former government officials were also targeted, according to the report.The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed an investigation was under way into the “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China”. It did not name the Trump campaign in the statement.“After the FBI identified specific malicious activity targeting the sector, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) immediately notified affected companies, rendered technical assistance, and rapidly shared information to assist other potential victims,” the agency said.The Trump campaign did not directly address whether the phones used by Trump and Vance had been targeted.In a statement, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, criticized the White House and Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and sought to blame them for allowing a foreign adversary to target the campaign, the Times reported.A Wall Street Journal report last month said a cyber-attack linked to the Chinese government had infiltrated multiple US telecommunications firms and may have gained access to systems used by the federal government in court-approved wiretapping efforts.The hackers accessed at least three telecommunication companies – AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies – in what may have been an attempt to find sensitive information related to national security, according to the report.The Trump campaign earlier this year revealed it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US justice department unsealed criminal charges in September against three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps suspected of hacking the Trump campaign.Justice department officials said hackers were trying to undermine Trump’s campaign and intended to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of the 5 November election.With the election under two weeks away, Trump and Kamala Harris are locked in a tight race. In both national head-to-head polls and surveys in the crucial swing states where the election will be decided, the pair seem almost deadlocked. More

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      Walz says Musk’s $1m voter giveaway reflects that Trump has ‘no plan’

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      Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.Musk offered registered voters in swing states a chance to enter a $1m a day giveaway if they sign his Super Pac’s petitions, “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms”. Experts have questioned whether the plan is legal or, in effect, buying votes.“Well, I think that’s what you do when you have no plan for the public,” said Walz, when asked about the giveaway on ABC’s The View, a daytime talkshow.“When you have no economic plan that’s going to benefit the middle class, when you have no plan to protect reproductive rights, when you have no plan to address climate change and produce American energy – you go to these types of tactics,” said Walz.As to whether Musk’s strategy was legal, Walz said: “I’ll let the lawyers decide.”This is the second time the Democratic presidential ticket has appeared on The View talkshow in recent weeks. Kamala Harris announced a new “Medicare at home” plan on the show, which she said would help seniors pay for home health aides without driving themselves into destitution.Walz, known to be chatty in such interviews, also quipped that “one nice thing” about Trump is that “he will not be president again.” He advised JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, to “just go in and order the chocolate doughnut”, referring to an awkward campaign stop.This is one of several recent TV outings for Walz, including an upcoming appearance on The Daily Show and recent appearances on Fox News Sunday. The governor appeared ebullient on The View – akin to the television appearances that helped land him the job as second on the Harris ticket.In the abbreviated time that Harris had to pick a running mate, and in which Walz has had to introduce himself to the country, he briefly took a more conservative approach to campaigning. Most notably, Walz was panned during the vice-presidential debate.Walz appeared more confident on Monday, telling voters watching The View: “Choose a future where you’re the center of it not Donald Trump.”

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      in Elections

      JD Vance falsely claims Donald Trump didn’t lose 2020 election

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      The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, told a reporter on Wednesday that there were “serious problems” in the 2020 election and suggested for the first time that the then president Donald Trump did not actually lose the race.“Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree with me or disagree with me on this issue.”He was pressed on his response by a reporter later in the day on another campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, saying: “I think that big tech rigged the election in 2020. That’s my view. And if you disagree with me, that’s fine.”The response comes in the wake of a non-response earlier this month, when during an interview with the New York Times, Vance was given five opportunities to “acknowledge that Trump did not win in 2020” and he “refused to say so”.Trump notably lost the 2020 election and currently faces numerous charges related to election interference after being found guilty in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money trial.The Harris campaign criticized Vance’s responses to the question about the 2020 election.“There we have it – JD Vance finally admitted he denies the 2020 election results,” a Harris campaign spokesperson, Matt Corridoni, said in a statement. “As Governor Walz said on the debate stage weeks ago, Donald Trump selected Vance for this exact reason – he knows Vance will be a loyal soldier in Trump’s pursuit for absolute, unchecked, limitless power.”Previously, Vance has sidestepped answering the question directly, deflecting when pressed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, during a debate if Trump lost the 2020 election. He also downplayed the insurrection on 6 January, 2021.

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      “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance said.In September 2024, during a podcast interview, Vance responded to a question on what he would have done differently than the former vice-president Mike Pence in January 2021: “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”Vance was once a critic of Trump, comparing him to Hitler ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He shifted toward backing Trump’s election denial claims as he vied to be his running mate.Shortly before joining the Trump campaign, Vance claimed in an interview with the ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Mike Pence could have done more, whether you agree or disagree, Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”Trump has claimed there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win the 2024 election. He also claimed his supporters will not have to vote any more if he wins as Trump and his allies have laid the foundation to contest the 2024 election results. More

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      Project 2025 ex-director denounces Heritage president’s ‘violent rhetoric’

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      The former director of Project 2025, a conservative plan to overhaul the US government, has blamed “violent rhetoric” from his former boss Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation thinktank, for the blueprint’s downgrading as Donald Trump has sought to publicly distance himself from it.Paul Dans, who resigned as head of the project in July after it threatened to become an electoral liability for Trump, said it was damaged after Roberts made inflammatory comments in a podcast that were widely interpreted as a veiled threat against leftwingers if they resisted an envisioned conservative takeover.In an interview with the Washington Post, Dans also called on Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, to withdraw a foreword he wrote for Roberts’s forthcoming book, which has been criticised for perceived violent undercurrents, partly due to its appeal to rightwingers to “load the muskets”.“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Dans told the newspaper. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”Roberts made headlines in July when he told Dave Brat, a former Republican congressman who was presenting Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”The comments intensified scrutiny on Project 2025, a 922-page policy document detailing plans for – among other things – the mass firing of thousands of civil servants and a drastic curtailment of reproductive rights. The project had been run, in collaboration with other thinktanks, under the Heritage Foundation’s auspices and the ultimate authority of Roberts.Trump subsequently sought to disown the project – in public at least – as the Democrats seized on Roberts’s remarks to highlight its most radical provisions and depict it as a roadmap for a second Trump presidency. The Republican nominee falsely claimed that he did not know its architects, even though many of them – including Dans – had served under him when he was US president.Dans said he warned Roberts against media interviews and provocative language and squarely blamed his comments for damaging the project and those who had worked on it.“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august thinktank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

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      Roberts has been criticised for using similarly strident terms in promoting his book, Dawn’s Early Light, whose original September publication date has been postponed until after next month’s presidential election.Its original subtitle, Burning Down Washington To Save America, has been watered down and its cover illustration of a lit match has been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDans has also urged Vance – whose relationship with Roberts has undermined Trump’s efforts to dissociate himself from Project 2025 – to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation president by retracting the foreword he has written for his book.In it, Vance calls for a more aggressive conservative line of action, writing: “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’A foundation spokesman, Noah Weinrich, dismissed Dans’ criticism and said Roberts’s podcast comments had been referring to the threat of leftwing violence.“Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” he told the Post.Vance, whose links to the thinktank long predate his support for Trump, has not commented.Dans previously blamed Trump campaign officials for the downgrading of Project 2025’s status in the Republican nominee’s priority list. He singled out the campaign aides Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita for publicly denigrating the project in a September interview with the New York Times and said they had jeopardised Trump’s chances of beating Kamala Harris. More

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      What does JD Vance really believe? | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The world is on fire, but in Washington DC topic A is Olivia Nuzzi. Her suspension as a writer for New York Magazine for sharing “demure” nude photographs of herself and other indiscreet communications with Robert F Kennedy Jr has engendered gales of hilarity to relieve the tension of the razor-thin close campaign.Nuzzi’s relationship in journalistic terms fits the supreme court’s ruling on presidential immunity of the distinction between Donald Trump’s “private” and “official” acts involving the January 6 insurrection. In the spirit of the court and The Scarlet Letter, the blond bombshell has received more punishment for sexting than the blond bomber has for attempting a coup.In the hurricane of gossip the most notable public discussion of the Nuzzi affair was an exchange of two buddies giggling at their lowbrow humor. “There’s this weird sex scandal story going on right now,” says the first. “The media is obsessed with – I don’t think there was any actual sex in the sex scandal.” Hahaha. His pal snickers, “That’s how I’m sure it is.” They guffaw. “I think that’s right,” replies the first. They laugh together in a communion of their misplaced coolness, unclever witticisms and pubescent misogyny.This is not dialogue from an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. It is not a cartoon. It is not a satire. The first jokester is the Republican candidate for vice-president, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. His interlocutor is Tucker Carlson, the erstwhile No 1 Fox News host, fired as a liability, financial and personal, and left to roam untethered in the social media wasteland.Vance appeared on stage with Carlson on his tour on 22 September, undeterred after Carlson had recently featured a Hitler apologist and Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. Vance preferred to talk about Nuzzi rather than the Nazis. After raising the kerfuffle unprompted, he swiveled without a skip to lay out a cascading conspiracy theory pinging from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to the entire press corps with an inference to Nuzzi. Biden is “sleepwalking into world war three”, he declared, then jumping to “the reason why we have Joe Biden is because Kamala Harris lied about his mental fitness in office. If you actually care about the truth, ask those questions and leave this salacious bullshit to the tabloids. But they can’t do that. And if they did, Tucker, again, if they did, a lot of them would lose their jobs.”So, in translation, the Nuzzi affair is really the media’s way to avoid confirming Vance’s conspiracy theory. The third world war weighs on Vance’s mind. It is a meme, like the “cat meme” about the Haitians, as he called it. In the mode of Butt-Head impersonating a serious person, Vance told Tucker: “We’re worried about getting involved in world war three because we should be, because we have nuclear weapons now, and you have to be cautious about that stuff.” Tucker was gravely silent.Without missing a beat, Vance offered a new wrinkle in the great replacement theory. “If you look at the Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney view, their basic argument is, let’s flood the United States with millions upon millions of foreign laborers because that’s good for business.” Now it was the conservative endorsers of Harris who were to blame for the bogeyman of immigration. Vance was unconcerned that Liz Cheney had been ousted as chair of the House Republican conference for investigating January 6 and defeated in a primary for her seat, and that Dick Cheney had ceased serving as vice-president more than 15 years ago. It was their fault.“The third thing,” said Vance, “that I think really divides the parties, and it’s like me, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump, we’re all on the same page on this is, do you think that the United States should ship its entire industrial base to foreign countries, some of which hate us?”First of all, “the third thing” wasn’t the third thing, but more about the second thing. Second, by embracing Bobby Kennedy, Vance didn’t seem aware he was back to another thing – “this weird sex scandal story”. Then, he returned to the subject of Springfield, Ohio, which is his warped example to prove the replacement theory, his first, second and third thing. “Amen,” said Tucker.Vance is Trump’s running mate in large part because of the influence of Carlson. For the past couple of years, he has been escorting Vance to introduce him to people hostile to Nato. At least one of them was nonplussed when, rather than sticking to the menace of Nato expansion, he expatiated on his many pathological stepfathers. Carlson notoriously appeared in Budapest under the auspices of the pro-Putin Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán. Vance has been uniformly opposed to support for Ukraine. On the eve of Russia’s invasion, he said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”In the battle over who Trump would chose as his running mate, Carlson was pitted against Rupert Murdoch, who had fired him from his perch at Fox. Murdoch favored the wealthy businessman and North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Carlson told Trump about Murdoch, according to the New York Times, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”Trump had to overcome his aversion to Vance for his remarks that he was an “idiot”, “unfit for our nation’s highest office” and a looming “American Hitler”. On 4 January 2021, two days before the assault on the US Capitol, Carlson wrote in a private text about Trump, “I hate him passionately,” but subsequently ingratiated himself back into his good graces. Now he played on Trump’s deepest fear. If Trump picked a “neocon”, a pro-Nato Republican like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Times reported, “then the US intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr Trump in order to get their preferred president”. Carlson was buttressed in waging his paranoid campaign to eliminate competitors to Vance by Donald Trump Jr, whom Carlson had recruited into the Vance inner circle.Trump put Carlson on the platform at the Republican convention in order to have Tucker hail him as the “kindest”, “bravest” man of “empathy” who “actually cares”, and most “wonderful person”. Carlson delivered his tribute seemingly unaware, or perhaps completely aware, that his speech was almost word for word a copy from the film The Manchurian Candidate of the brainwashed description of Raymond Shaw, the phoney Medal of Honor winner himself conditioned into becoming an assassin in a communist conspiracy to kill the party’s nominee for president and turn the country over to the Russians under a rightwing puppet. Maj Ben Marco, played by Frank Sinatra, who served with Shaw in Korea, breaks the code of the brainwashed idealization: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”Carlson and Vance have curiously parallel lives. One born to wealth, the other in poverty, both were partly abandoned children. Vance and Tucker are Lost Boys in their own Neverland who have signed up with Captain Hook.Carlson’s mother, heiress to one of California’s oldest and greatest fortunes, left Tucker at the age of six for life in a hippy commune, never seeing him again. After his father remarried to the heiress of the Swanson frozen food fortune, Tucker was sent off to boarding school.As Vance chronicled in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, his mother was suicidal and addicted to alcohol and heroin. “Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures,” he wrote. He was abandoned to be more or less raised by his grandmother, who from the age of 13 had four children and eight miscarriages, possibly some of them abortions. She once tried to set her drunken abusive husband, Vance’s grandfather, on fire while he slept.Vance is a construct. The man known as “JD Vance” has existed for three years. His various name changes tell only a superficial part of his story. James Donald Bowman carried his father’s middle and last name. When his parents divorced he dropped the middle name “Donald” for “David”. He took his stepfather’s last name when he became James David Hamel. In high school he called himself “JD”. He graduated from Ohio State University and served in the military as James D Hamel. He was accepted to Yale Law School under that name. While at Yale, in 2010-2011, he blogged for David Frum’s FrumForum as JD Hamel.He implied in his 2016 memoir that he took the name of JD Vance upon his wedding in 2014, but in fact he assumed the name “Vance”, after his grandmother’s name, just before his graduation from Yale Law in 2013. Then, when he announced his candidacy for the Senate from Ohio in 2021, he removed the periods from his initials to become simply “JD”. which is how he is listed in his US Senate biography.Vance has had more mentors than name changes. One of them explained to me that his technique is to mirror them, one after another, to win approval and get ahead. His greatest skill is advancement through mimicry. A ruthless instinct for survival drives his hollow striving. He demonstrated his method in justifying Trump’s fabrication about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he told Dana Bash on CNN. His own self-creation involves a lot of creativity.From mentor to mentor, too numerous to mention without writing a small treatise, Vance has shape-shifted. Under the tutelage of the Yale Law professor Amy Chua, author of the terrifyingly strict parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, he framed his story. She threw out his first draft of a memoir, then directed and edited the writing and its promotion. Chua had been the making of Brett Kavanaugh’s career, helping to place him in a clerkship on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, and she became a pipeline of clerks to him when he ascended to the US supreme court, advising her proteges that he preferred women who “looked like models”. She advanced Usha Vance, whose match to JD she encouraged, to become a Kavanaugh clerk, while telling Vance not to apply for the post but to stick to composing the book.Vance met Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, at a Yale event. Thiel inducted him into his network, hiring him after graduation for his venture capital firm. In the 2016 campaign cycle, Thiel became the single largest donor to the Republican party. He was drawn to Trump’s darkness. Thiel is an anti-democratic, illiberal dystopian for whom Trump is a mere agent. When Vance ran for the Senate from Ohio in 2022, Thiel bankrolled him with $15m, a pittance for the potential investment.Thiel and his venture capital network are heavily sunk into cryptocurrency. On the day before Trump anointed Vance as his VP, he endorsed a federal strategic bitcoin reserve that would put the US government behind the essentially worthless commodity. That would trigger an explosion of cryptocurrency products. Vance as vice-president would be a guarantor of an unregulated market that would almost certainly lead to financial chaos, the fleecing of small investors and new avenues for international crime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism, embracing a particular strand of anti-liberal traditionalism. As a boy he had been a Pentecostal. At Yale, he was an avowed atheist. Through Thiel, he met a number of profoundly reactionary Catholic ideologues, including Patrick Deneen, author in 2023 of Regime Change, a manifesto for the “Party of Order” to defeat the “Party of Progress” to install “the post-liberal order”. At a panel about the book at the Heritage Foundation, Vance appeared with Deneen and Kevin Roberts, the rightwing thinktank’s president and an adherent of Opus Dei, a reactionary Catholic sect developed in Franco’s Spain that is at war with Pope Francis’s liberal openings. Vance proclaimed himself there a cadre of the “postliberal right” and “explicitly anti-regime”, a further confession of faith.At the time, Roberts was overseeing the publication of Project 2025, a far-right wish book of draconian policies for a second Trump term. Roberts wrote an accompanying book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, for which Vance wrote the introduction. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” he wrote. But when Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025, the book’s publication was stopped, retitled – “Burning Down” scrapped for “Taking Back” – and pushed back until after the election.Vance had also become close to another radical rightwing theocrat, Rod Dreher, a columnist for The American Conservative, a magazine founded by Patrick Buchanan, avatar of the America First movement. Dreher was present at Vance’s Catholic conversion ceremony. Yet Dreher had already left the Catholic church for Eastern Orthodoxy because, among other things, he felt Catholicism was controlled by a “Lavender Mafia” of gay priests. In 2022, he went into voluntary exile in Hungary, where he became the director of Orbán’s Danube Foundation “network project”, for which he facilitated the trip of Carlson while he maintained his close relationship with Vance.When Vance wants to impress the theoreticians of the quasi- and neo-fascist right, he mirrors by echoing their special language, showing he is one of them. But when he wants to prove himself to Trump, he no longer poses as the intellectual manqué but instead a standup insult comic.His awkward jocularity and lame jokes, if they are jokes, almost always bomb. Notoriously, there’s the sophomoric snark of “childless cat ladies”. There are his put-downs, such as: “I’ve actually got thoughts in my head – unlike Kamala Harris.” There was Vance’s misfired tweet intended to mock Harris by posting a 2007 video clip of Miss South Carolina Teen Caitlin Upton freezing in her answer to a question about finding the United States on a map – only to have it revealed that Donald Trump subsequently offered her a job and that she had been a Trump supporter. She condemned Vance for “online bullying”.Vance wore a different persona than the apprentice name-caller in his debate with Tim Walz. Now he was the trained attorney smoothly spreading an oil slick of falsehoods to defend his guilty client. Vance lied that he never supported a national abortion ban; that Trump saved the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – instead of trying to destroy it at every turn; and that “illegal immigrants” in Springfield, Ohio, had “overwhelmed” the community. When Margaret Brennan of CBS News corrected him that the Haitians there are legal immigrants, Vance revealed a glint of anger. “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to factcheck,” he complained. Facts are not his friend. Then, Vance closed with his most breathtaking lie, that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20”, eliding January 6. With that, Vance could breathe easy that he had jumped the hurdle of the big lie.JD obviously feels most comfortable bantering with Tucker. Together on stage, on 22 September, they jammed to stroke Trump’s narcissism as a true man of the people. Tucker kicked it off. “It’s impossible,” he said, “to imagine Carmela, or whatever she’s calling herself, Harris, talk to the lady behind the counter about the differences in quality and weight and price between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac. He has such strong feelings about it. He’s really thought about it a lot.”JD chimed in. “Well, and again, this goes to his leadership style,” he said. “Donald Trump actually really cares of what people think. So, he has absolutely thought to himself, what is the better value between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac? He actually wants to know what the people who work there think about this question. And by the way, I have views about this. Obviously, the quarter pounder is a better deal.”“That’s absurd,” replied Tucker. “Without secret sauce, it’s not even worth going there. But whatever. Honest people disagree.”“You’ve allowed yourself to be manipulated by the elites,” JD ribbed him. “The secret sauce is not the thing that matters. It’s the amount of meat. You get way more meat with a quarter pounder.”Vance clinched his point with an anecdote about being interviewed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago to be his running mate. Trump told him he had asked the gardener whom he should pick. “I’m sitting there, sweating bullets like, ‘Well, sir, what did the gardener at Mar-a-Lago have to say about who should be the VP?’” Trump did not tell him. But, according to Vance, it proved “he actually likes to know what people think about things. That’s one of his secrets of success as a political leader.” Vance did not interpret the incident as Trump toying with him in a humiliating little game in which he dangled the gardener as a determining factor in his fate.Then Tucker and JD riffed about what JD called “the Kamala switcheroo” in full Beavis and Butt-Head style. “The switch-up, the disappearance of the president of the United States. Biden is still president, technically, correct?” says Tucker. “I don’t know,” answers JD. “I don’t either. I really don’t know. I don’t know what happened to him. He was pretty famous at one point, and then he’s just gone.” “I saw some clip on social media that Jill Biden was running a cabinet meeting,” says JD. “Was that real or was that – for sure.” “She’s a doctor, JD. Settle down. She’s got this. Anyone who hasn’t read her dissertation on community colleges in the state of Delaware really should see where the doctorate comes from. She literally is a part of it where she’s breaking down the proportion of bi-ethnicity of students … I’m like, I’m not good at math.” “Wait a second.” “No,” says Tucker, “you should read Dr Jill’s dissertation. It’s unbelievable. Anyway, she’s running the government, just so you know.” Hahaha.In an earlier conversation for Tucker’s podcast, on 18 September, Tucker and JD blithely talked about the agenda of a coming Trump administration. “If you guys win,” says Tucker, “and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander-in-chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover.” “That’s exactly right,” replied JD. “The question is, do you care?” “Well,” JD answered, “I think we have to not care.” He wasn’t joking.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More