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      Anti-Walz slogan website used to troll Trump supporters: ‘Let’s vote for adults’

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      If you type in NeverWalz.com in your browser, the page that appears probably doesn’t look like what you expected from a webpage donning a slogan against Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and the current vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic party.“Trump is a convicted felon. Let’s vote for adults,” the webpage reads. “Try being joyful instead of an asshole.”After just a few seconds on the webpage, users are automatically redirected to KamalaHarris.com, the official website for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.The slogan “Never Walz” is indeed anti-Walz, and was seen recently plastered on a booth set up by an group against the vice-presidential nominee, Action 4 Liberty, at the Minnesota state fair. The group was seen handing out fliers and selling merchandise that criticizes Walz.But, it appears that the group did not secure a website domain for the “Never Walz” slogan, leaving it available for someone else to buy and use.As of Monday, the website domain NeverWalz.com is being used to criticize former president Donald Trump and then quickly redirects viewers to the Harris campaign website.The website is being shared on social media by supporters of Walz and Harris.“They forgot to buy the domain,” one X user said posting the link. “Click link for a good laugh.”Action 4 Liberty did not immediately return a request for comment. More

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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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      ‘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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      Harris campaign raised $540m amid surge during Democratic convention

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign says it has now raised $540m for its election battle against Donald Trump.The vice-president’s campaign has had no problems getting supporters to open their wallets since Joe Biden announced on 21 July he was ending his run for re-election to the White House and quickly endorsed Harris. The campaign said it saw a surge of donations during last week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago where Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, accepted their nominations.“Just before vice-president Harris’ acceptance speech Thursday night, we officially crossed the $500m mark,” the campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo released by the campaign on Sunday. “Immediately after her speech, we saw our best fundraising hour since launch day.”Trump has also proved to be a formidable fundraiser but appears to be outpaced in her month-old campaign. The Republican nominee and former president’s campaign announced earlier this month that, alongside its related affiliates, they had raised $138.7m in July – less than what Harris took in during her candidacy’s opening week. Trump’s campaign reported $327m in cash on hand at the start of August.The Harris fundraising totals were raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees.O’Malley Dillon said that nearly a third of contributions during convention week came from first-time contributors. About one-fifth of those first-time contributors were young voters and two-thirds were women, groups that the campaign sees as critical constituencies that Harris needs to turn out to win in November.The Harris campaign says it has also seen a surge in volunteer support for the vice-president. During convention week, supporters signed up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts to help the campaign. 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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      Tactical ad breaks and lies: rightwing coverage of DNC is exactly as expected

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      As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also including the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.” 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