Kamala Harris

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      Kamala Harris to release health report saying she is fit for presidency – aide

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      Kamala Harris on Saturday planned to release a report on her health and medical history which finds that “she possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if voters elect her in November, according to a senior aide on her campaign.The aide said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the release of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about the Republican White House nominee Donald Trump’s physical fitness as well as mental acuity. The 78-year-old Trump has also not released any information about his health, though he would be the oldest president elected if Americans give him a second term in the Oval Office.As Guardian US reported earlier in October, Trump has been becoming increasingly incoherent at campaign rallies. He has been slurring, stumbling over his words, hurling expletives – and showing signs of cognitive decline consistent with someone approaching his 80s, according to medical experts.Recent speeches have seen him rant about topics ranging from his purportedly “beautiful” body to “a million Rambos” in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Harris campaign aides pointed to Trump’s backing out of an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that the vice-president granted and his refusal to debate her again after their 10 September faceoff. They argue that the former president is “avoiding public scrutiny” and giving voters “the impression … that he has something to hide and may not be up for the job”.“Contrast her age and vitality with his,” the senior aide to Harris, 59, said early on Saturday.Questions over whether he was too enfeebled forced Joe Biden to halt his bid for re-election to the presidency during the summer. The 81-year-old Democrat dropped out of a rematch with Trump on 21 July and endorsed Harris to succeed him.Recent national polling averages show Harris with a nearly four-point edge over Trump in the 5 November race for the presidency. But key swing states remain too close to call, and most experts expect a competitive election.The Republican party chose Trump as their nominee despite his being convicted in May of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an extramarital sexual encounter with him about a decade before his successful run for the presidency in 2016. Among other legal problems, he is grappling with criminal charges that he tried to illicitly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election.Trump, for his part, has maintained that Biden “became mentally impaired”. He also said that Harris “was born that way” while struggling to pronounce the vice-president’s name.At a town hall in Las Vegas for a group of undecided voters on Thursday, Harris said “using language that’s belittling … [is not] healthy for our nation”.“I don’t admire that,” Harris said. “And in fact, I’m quite critical of it coming from someone who wants to be president of the United States.” More

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      US election briefing: Trump escalates anti-immigrant rhetoric as Harris promises bipartisan council

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      Donald Trump doubled down on his anti-immigrant and xenophobic messaging at a rally in Colorado, calling for the death penalty for migrants who kill US citizens and announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans.“The invasion will be stopped. The migrant flights will end and Kamala’s app for illegals will be shut down immediately within 24 hours,” he said in the city of Aurora, which he claims has been overrun by Venezuelan gang members, despite pushback from local officials, including Republicans.Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was focusing on a more positive message, telling an event in Phoenix that if elected president she would create a bipartisan council of advisers to provide her feedback on her policy initiatives and appoint a Republican to her cabinet.“I love good ideas wherever they come from,” said Harris, who is making a push to get Republicans with doubts about Trump to support her.Here is what else happened on Friday:

      Harris landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that reads: “The candidate for our times.” “Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, vice-president Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which has previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”

      Trump’s team reportedly asked for officials to provide him with a dramatic array of military protections as the presidential campaign wraps, including travel in military aircraft and vehicles. Trump’s campaign has also requested ramped-up flight restrictions around his residences and rallies, and “ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states” for his team’s use, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests, adding that they were both “extraordinary and unprecedented”.

      The longtime Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist. The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.

      The US justice department said on Friday it was suing the state of Virginia for violating the federal prohibition on systematic efforts to remove voters within 90 days of an election. On 7 August, Republican governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the commissioner of the Department of Elections to certify that the department was conducting “daily updates to the voter list” to remove, among other groups, people who are unable to verify that they are citizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

      Harris will next week highlight her economic policies that benefit Black men, hoping to energize a voting bloc that some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s advisers fear has embraced Republican rival Trump in large numbers, three sources familiar with the plans told Reuters. The report comes a day after former president Barack Obama questioned Black men’s unwillingness to vote for Harris at an event in Pennsylvania.

      Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Harris next month and return to power. “He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, again refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election over Trump, evading the question five times in an interview with the New York Times, the newspaper reported on Friday. The Ohio senator repeated the response he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, saying he was “focused on the future”.

      The criminal trial of two rural Arizona county supervisors who initially refused to certify election results in 2022 will not occur before this year’s elections after it was again delayed. Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of the three supervisors in the Republican-led Cochise county, face charges of conspiracy and interfering with an election officer. Despite the county’s typically low profile, the trial is being watched nationally as elections experts anticipate a potential wave of local officials refusing to certify results if Trump loses. The red county, set on the US-Mexico border, has a population of about 125,000.

      A solid majority of Hispanic women have a positive opinion of Harris and a negative view of Trump, but Hispanic men are more divided on both candidates, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

      X was “alert” to any platform manipulation attempts, the Elon Musk-owned site told Agence France-Presse on Friday, following a report that hundreds of apparent pro-Russian bot accounts were amplifying US election misinformation. In a study shared exclusively with AFP earlier this week, the Washington-based American Sunlight Project said it found nearly 1,200 accounts on X that pushed pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Trump and misinformation about Harris. More

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      Harris accuses Trump of ‘playing politics’ with hurricane disaster relief

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      Kamala Harris has accused Donald Trump of “playing politics” with disaster relief amid growing criticisms that the former president has tried to exploit Hurricanes Helene and Milton with a flurry of lies and disinformation as he bids to gain the edge in the race for the White House.The US vice-president’s comments came amid increasing evidence that the two storms, which have left a trail of death and destruction in several southern states, are threatening to upset the calculus for next month’s presidential election.Asked at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas organized by Univision, the US Spanish-language TV network, to address complaints about the federal government’s response, Harris aimed pointed comments at Trump, although without naming him.“In this crisis – like in so many issues that affect the people of our country – I think it so important that leadership recognises the dignity [of those affected],” she said.“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she added, as she campaigned in the swing state of Nevada on Thursday.Harris’s comments followed a full-frontal attack on Trump – who has falsely accused the White House and Harris of, among other things, deliberately withholding aid from Republican areas and diverting funds to illegal immigrants – from Joe Biden.The US president accused Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, of spreading “outright lies”.“They’re being so damn un-American with the way they’re talking about this stuff,” Biden told journalists at the White House on Thursday. Addressing Trump specifically, he said: “Get a life, man. Help these people.”Trump and his running mate, the US senator for Ohio JD Vance, have maintained a drumbeat of criticism of Biden and Harris accusing them of deliberately engineering an inadequate response to Hurricane Helene in Republican voting areas, after the storm ripped through Georgia and North Carolina – two swing states vital to the outcome of the 5 November election – even while fellow Republican politicians have praised the recovery effort.The former president has called the rescue operation worse than the response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005 – killing 1,400 – and left an indelible stain on the presidency of George W Bush.“This hurricane has been a bad one, Kamala Harris has left them stranded,” he told a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin. “This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen ever. Probably worse than Katrina, and that’s hard to beat, right?”Harris has taken some time away from the campaign trail this month to participate in White House situation room conferences and meet staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which has led the response to the hurricanes. Helene was the deadliest since Katrina.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Democratic strategists have voiced fears that the need to respond to the twin storms is depriving Harris of vital time in her quest to defeat Trump as the campaign enters its final weeks.Deanne Criswell, Fema’s director, has called the onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories “absolutely the worst I have ever seen” and warned that it is hindering relief efforts.With polls showing the election race tighter than ever, Trump has focused particular attention on Harris. “She didn’t send anything or anyone at all. Days passed. No help as men, women and children drowned,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania.He has put special emphasis on North Carolina, where polls show the two candidates neck-and-neck and which has a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Some Republican politicians have condemned the spread of misinformation but generally without naming Trump.Harris also told CNN on Wednesday. “It is dangerous – it is unconscionable, frankly, that anyone who would consider themselves a leader would mislead desperate people to the point that those desperate people would not receive the aid to which they are entitled,” she said. More

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      Kamala Harris lands second Vogue cover: ‘The candidate for our times’

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      Kamala Harris has landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that reads: “The candidate for our times.”“Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, Vice President Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which has previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”But the accompanying 8,000-word profile elicited little new about Harris’s policy positions if she is elected in November.“One of my first calls – outside of family – will be to the team that is working with me on our plan to lower costs for the American people,” she told the magazine.“It’s not just about publishing something in a respected journal. It’s not about a speech. It’s literally about, How does this hit the streets? How do people actually feel the work in a way that benefits them?”On the widening war in the Middle East, Harris said that while she could not anticipate the future, she would focus on creating “‘incentives’ for de-escalation and a ‘pathway’ for stability” and spoke of “Israel’s right to defend itself” and Palestinians’ “right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.“There’s been a language and a conversation around what’s been happening, particularly around Israel and Gaza, that suggests that this is binary. It’s not,” she said, adding: “You’re not either for this one or for that one.“A lot of the work that needs to be done,” Harris continued, “is a function of the circumstances at the moment. I can’t anticipate what the circumstances will be four months from now.”The publication spoke to the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was deeply involved in the effort to oust Biden from the ticket after the president’s disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump in June.Pelosi said: “We had wanted – we thought that there would be – an open convention” and Harris had recognized the conflicts within the Democratic party.“It was easy for people to come to her because they knew she didn’t have bad feelings toward them,” Pelosi explained. “And then she – boom! – one, two, three, wrapped it all up. It was a beautiful thing.”The cover photo is likely to stir up less drama than a previous Vogue portrait three years ago that provoked a backlash for what critics deemed a lack respect for the first person of Black and south Asian descent sworn in as vice-president after she was photographed in sneakers.“Vogue robbed Harris of her roses,” wrote the Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan. “A bit of awe would have served the magazine well in its cover decisions. Nothing about the cover said, ‘Wow.’ And sometimes, that’s all Black women want, an admiring and celebratory ‘wow’ over what they have accomplished.”Vogue later amended the online picture with a more flattering image.“Obviously we have heard and understood the reaction to the print cover,” the editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, told the New York Times, “and I just want to reiterate that it was absolutely not our intention to, in any way, diminish the importance of the vice-president-elect’s incredible victory.” More

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      US election briefing: Democrats unleash powerhouse surrogates as Trump insults Detroit in Detroit

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      Thursday saw Democrat powerhouse surrogates unleashed on the campaign trail. The Harris campaign announced that Bill Clinton would campaign for Harris in southern battleground states, starting this weekend, while Barack Obama began his swing state tour in Pennsylvania – the battleground with the highest number of electoral college votes.Appearing at the University of Pittsburgh, Obama sought to encourage young people to get their friends and relatives to vote. He said Trump saw power “as a means to an end” and took aim at his “concept of a plan” for healthcare.“The good news is Kamala Harris has an actual plan,” Obama said.“They’ve got to release the kraken,” veteran Democrat campaign strategist James Carville told the New York Times, adding that the Harris campaign should be using Obama and other surrogates “more aggressively”.Inflation, meanwhile, weakened to its slowest pace in more than three years in September, as price growth continued to fall back from its highest levels in a generation. With concerns over the heightened cost of living at the heart of the presidential election campaign, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its final monthly inflation reading before voters head to the polls.Here is what else happened on Thursday:

      Obama questioned Black men’s unwillingness to vote for Harris. Speaking at an event in Pennsylvania before his campaign speech at the University of Pittsburgh, he said: “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighbourhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.” And: “You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that.” A September NAACP poll showed that more than a quarter of Black men under 50 say they will vote for Donald Trump.

      Trump disparagingly compared Detroit, Michigan, to a developing nation. Pointing to the city’s recent history of economic decline from its heyday as the home of American car production, he said: “Well, we’re a developing nation too, just take a look at Detroit. Detroit’s a developing area more than most places in China.” Later in his speech, he said of Harris: “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

      Harris held events in Nevada and Arizona. The Democratic candidate spoke at a town hall in Las Vegas, hosted by Spanish language station Univision. She was questioned on Trump’s claims that the administration had not done enough to support people after Hurricane Helene, and whether people in Hurricane Milton’s path would have access to aid – a sign that Trump’s messaging is breaking through with some potential voters. “I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” Harris said in reply.

      Later, at a campaign event in Phoenix, Harris called on Arizonans to vote yes to Proposition 139, which protects the right to abortion. Talking about Project 2025, Harris said: “I can’t believe they put that in writing,” to loud, sustained boos from the crowd. “They’re out of their minds.” The swing state has 11 electoral college votes.

      A Quinnipiac university poll published on Wednesday showed Harris trailing Trump by two and three points respectively in Wisconsin and Michigan – states which, along with Pennsylvania, Democrats have labelled the “blue wall”.

      America’s top broadcasting regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission, denounced Trump after the former president demanded that CBS be stripped of its licence for airing an edited answer in a primetime interview with Harris. He also called the network a “threat to democracy” and targeted other broadcasters for having their licences revoked also.

      The Kremlin confirmed that Trump sent Vladimir Putin Covid tests when they were scarce during the early stages of the pandemic, as reported this week in a book by veteran US political journalist Bob Woodward.

      The legal brawl between Georgia’s Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, in what’s being seen as a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November. Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county. More

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      Hurricanes, the Middle East, and Covid-19 tests to Putin – podcast

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      It’s less than a month before the US presidential election. Donald Trump is pushing conspiracy theories over the federal response to hurricanes battering several states, and denying he gave Covid-19 test machines to Vladimir Putin during the pandemic. Joe Biden is in talks with Benjamin Netanyahu over growing tension in the Middle East. Kamala Harris rattled through a media blitz, with some criticising her campaign strategy. And Melania Trump has written about being pro-abortion and pro-immigration in her new memoir.
      Jonathan Freedland and the veteran political strategist David Axelrod discuss what all of this means for the election

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More