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    Trump and Harris clash over abortion and immigration in fierce debate – live US election updates

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    US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates:Russia has accused both presidential candidates of using Vladimir Putin’s name as part of a domestic political fights, saying: “we really, really don’t like it”.Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the US was hostile and negative towards Russia, Reuters reports, and the Kremlin hoped that candidates would drop such references to Putin.Last week the White House said Putin should stop commenting on the US election after he said in an apparently teasing comment that he favoured Harris over Trump and that her “infectious” laugh was one of the reasons why.Trump Media & Technology Group shares fell 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the combative presidential debate between the former president and Kamala Harris.After the debate, pricing for a Trump victory slipped by 6 cents to 47 cents on online betting site PredictIt, while Harris’s odds climbed to 57 cents from 53 cents.Harris’s candidacy also received a boost after pop star Taylor Swift said she will vote for the Democratic candidate to her 280m on Instagram.Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent of Truth Social app, which is popular among retail traders and is often sensitive to the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 US election, Reuters reports.According to a flash poll by CNN, registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agreed that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump.This is based on a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, that also found that Harris “outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year”.The CNN snap poll found:

    Watchers said, by 67% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia

    96% of Harris supporters who watched said that their chosen candidate had done a better job

    A smaller 69% of Trump’s supporters thought he had done a better job

    Voters who watched the debate found their views of Harris were improved

    Trump was seen to have an advantage on the economy, immigration and being commander in chief. Harris was more trusted on abortion and protecting democracy
    However, the vast majority who tuned in said the debate had no effect on who they were going to vote for in the November election.Following the debate between Trump and Biden in June, watchers said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed the president.And finally, the fifth key exchange of the night was on the Biden legacy, writes Bland:Donald Trump: Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president.Kamala Harris: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.This line from Harris, clearly scripted, was nonetheless a useful shorthand for the way she wants the race to be framed: as a chance to move on from the political division that has exhausted Americans for the last eight years, with her as a candidate who is not wedded to every aspect of the Biden record. In her closing statement, she said: “You’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country: one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past, and an attempt to take us backward. But we’re not going back.’”In his own closing statement, Trump finally did what his team would have wanted him to do throughout – blame Harris relentlessly for everything voters dislike about Biden. “She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said. “They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”But by then, it felt like the narrative of the night was irreversibly set. And when Trump rambled into the claim that “we’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” it merely seemed like normal service had been resumed.The third key exchange, writes Bland, is on abortion. Namely, the last night’s factcheck on a wild claim that Democrats will execute babies after birth.Donald Trump: Her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth … and that’s not OK with me.Moderator Linsey Davis: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.While it’s not exactly a Woodward and Bernstein moment to observe that murdering babies is illegal in America, it was significant that Trump was much more thoroughly factchecked by the debate moderators than he was when he faced Biden. And it was part of a section on abortion rights, up there with the economy as one of the key issues driving this election, which did him few favours.Meanwhile, if you had “baby killers” on your bingo card, you may nonetheless have been caught unawares by Trump’s other truly wild lie of the night: his reference to false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris turned to a visual shorthand she used repeatedly over the course of the debate (above) – cocking her head and looking at Trump with a bemused look on her face and her chin resting on her hand. You will certainly see this memed endlessly in the days ahead.The Spingfield city manager said that there have been no such reports, moderator David Muir noted. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten,” Trump replied. After the debate, Trump and his supporters characterised this kind of exchange as evidence of a “three-on-one” debate, which you can make your own mind up about. Harris, for her part, responded by saying “talk about extreme” and immediately pivoting to her own attack lines – the inverse of Trump’s approach.The fourth key exchange was on healthcare:Linsey Davis: So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan.By coincidence, this is exactly what I told my editor when she asked how close I was to filing about an hour ago. It is also the kind of wafty answer on a matter of substance that is likely to be clipped up and used in Harris attack ads repeatedly over the next few weeks.Trumps “concepts of a plan” refer to how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, the popular Obama era law that mandated the availability of health insurance to low-income families. There were other evasions, too, like his complicated language on abortion, and on whether he had any regrets about January 6. On Ukraine, Trump would not say that he wanted Kyiv to win, instead saying “I want the war to stop” and claiming that he would end it before even taking office by making Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to each other.Archie Bland writes that there are five key exchanges that are likely to dominate the campaign in the days ahead. The first is on the economy, as Kamala Harris promised to lift up the middle class while Donald Trump blamed her for high inflation.Moderator David Muir: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?Kamala Harris: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.Donald Trump: We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history.The debate kicked off with a section on the economy, arguably the toughest section of the night for Harris, who must contend with the fact that many voters blame the Biden administration for years of high inflation. While Harris set out more details of her own agenda, from a $6,000 child tax credit to a tax deduction for small businesses, her point that she and Biden were dealing with the Trump legacy of “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression” did not really make an affirmative case for the record of the last four years.Trump did land his points about inflation and the dubious claim that he created “one of the greatest economies in the history of our country” in his first term. But he also got distracted: by Harris calling his plan to raise tariffs a “Trump sales tax”, and by his own digression into a claim that “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”. That was a hint of what was to come.Second, writes Bland, is Harris tempting Trump into going off topic:Kamala Harris: You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about “windmills cause cancer”. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.Donald Trump: People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.Can it really be this easy to wind him up? Again and again, Harris chose lines that keyed into Trump’s personal preoccupations – and managed to goad him into responding to them at length instead of focusing on the kinds of issues that matter to voters. This exchange about crowd sizes, during a section of the debate that was supposed to be about immigration, meant that he had less time to talk a subject that is one of the areas where voters have the most doubts about Harris.Similarly, during a section about Harris’ changing position on fracking, he allowed himself to be sidetracked by her claim that he was given $400m by his father. Then there was the sales tax thing; the controversial conservative roadmap for a second Trump term, Project 2025; and the way he let a discussion about the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal turn into one about his invitation to Taliban leaders to come to Camp David for talks.None of these subjects would have been on his campaign managers’ list of the talking points they would have wanted him to hit – and none of them mean very much to swing voters.After a period of undoubted momentum for Kamala Harris, the vice-president came into this debate having stalled somewhat. Recent polls suggest that the race is effectively tied, both nationally and in most of the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome. Because the way voters are distributed gives Republicans an advantage in the electoral college, and because you would usually expect to see Harris’ post-convention bump fade somewhat, polling experts like Nate Silver have recently seen Donald Trump as the favourite to prevail.Many presidential candidates have “won” debates and ultimately lost the race – but there is little doubt that Harris had a good enough night to change those odds in her favour. Trump’s team wanted him to hang the Biden administration’s unpopular policies around her neck, but instead he repeatedly lapsed into rambling and extreme Maga talking points that seem likely to have left many voters nonplussed.The problem is not so much that he revealed himself as an erratic character, which any swing voter surely already knows: the problem is that he gifted Harris, who appeared supremely well-prepared, the chance to present him as the exhausting candidate of the all-too-familiar past – and herself as the optimist with a vision for the future.In the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, Archie Bland writes that even Fox News said Kamala Harris won last night’s presidential debate. Bland writes:Democrats’ moods can only have been improved by the news, a few minutes after it ended, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris, and signed her post “childless cat lady”. And CNN’s snap poll suggested that voters thought Harris won by a margin of 63% to 37% – nearly as big a margin as Trump achieved over Biden last time around. Key to Harris’ success was baiting her opponent into rants on marginal topics, instead of talking about the issues that voters are interested in.But while millions watched, Harris and Trump will reach millions more through the clips that will now be distributed through news and social media. For further reading on the debate, take a look at Gabrielle Canon’s key takeaways and this factcheck on both candidates.Investors were watching for any market impact from the debate between the US presidential candidates, vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that the yen hit a nine-month high after a Bank of Japan official hinted at more monetary tightening. But, the news agency reports, the Japanese unit was also boosted by bets on a Harris presidency after she was considered to have come out on top in the US presidential debate.According to AFP, The chances of Trump losing also weighed on bitcoin after he had previously vowed to be a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates: More

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      Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sparred on Tuesday in a contentious presidential debate that repeatedly went off the rails, as Trump pursued bizarre and often falsehood-ridden tangents about crowd sizes, immigration policy and abortion access.The Philadelphia debate marked arguably the most significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump since Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July, and the event began cordially enough. Harris crossed over to Trump’s podium to shake his hand and introduce herself, an acknowledgement that the two presidential nominees had never met face to face before Tuesday night.But the cordiality did not last long. After delivering some boilerplate attack lines about the high inflation seen earlier in Biden’s presidency, Trump pivoted to mocking Harris as a “Marxist” and peddling baseless claims that Democrats want to “execute the baby” by allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.That false claim was corrected by both Harris and the ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, who joined her fellow moderator David Muir in fact-checking some of Trump’s statements throughout the evening. Harris then segued into a stinging rebuke of Trump’s record on abortion, criticizing him for nominating three of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022.“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. “And I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v Wade, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it in to law.”Despite broad public support for Roe v Wade, Trump boasted about his role in reversing it and applauded the supreme court’s “great courage” in issuing its ruling, while he dodged repeated questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban as president.Trump seemed to trip over himself even when moderators offered questions on his strongest issues, such as immigration. When asked about Biden’s handling of the US-Mexico border, Harris pivoted to discussing Trump’s campaign rallies.“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”The tangent appeared to be a blatant attempt by Harris to bait Trump into squabbling over attendance at his rallies instead of discussing immigration policy – and it worked. Trump began attacking Harris with baseless accusations that her campaign was paying people to attend her rallies while celebrating his own events as “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”.Then, rather than highlighting his immigration proposals, Trump chose to spread debunked claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city have started capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”The outburst instantly became a source of mockery on social media, as Democrats celebrated Trump for “doubling down on the crazy uncle vibe”, in the words of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.Even as moments of the debate bordered on absurdity, other exchanges regarding foreign policy and the January 6 insurrection felt heavy with meaning. Pressed on his false claims regarding widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Trump again refused to acknowledge his defeat, prompting a stark warning from Harris.“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so, let’s be clear about that. And, clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said. “But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”On foreign policy, Harris fielded difficult questions on the war in Gaza, as she expressed her support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while calling for “security, self determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve” for Palestinians.Asked about his own stance on the war, Trump reiterated his bombastic claims that his presence in the White House would have prevented the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine.“If I were president, it would have never started,” Trump said. “If I were president, Russia would have never, ever. I know Putin very well. He would have never –and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years – have gone into Ukraine.”And yet, when asked directly whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, Trump deflected.“I want the war to stop,” Trump said. “I think it’s the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right? Negotiate a deal because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Fact-checking the presidential debate

      Harris slams Trump for falsehoods in fiery debate

      Taylor Swift endorses Harris in post signed ‘childless cat lady’

      ‘Maga mad libs’: How the debate played out on social media

      Presidential poll tracker

      Rally sizes, abortion and eating cats: the Trump and Harris debate – podcast More

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      US election live: Trump called ‘evil’ over debate watch party at gun store near Georgia school shooting site

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      Young voter groups have criticized the RNC’s gun store debate watch party, calling Trump ‘evil’ and ‘out-of-touch’ for hosting the event so close to the shooting site.The groups, which include Voters of Tomorrow, College Democrats of America, Leaders We Deserve, College Democrats of Georgia, Georgia High School Democrats, Young Democrats of Georgia, Path to Progress and Blue Future issued a joint statement condemning the RNC decision:
      Just days after students and teachers were murdered in Apalachee High School, Republicans are hosting a debate watch party an hour away at the world’s largest gun store. The Trump team is evil for disrespecting the victims like this — and by continually refusing to support life-saving gun violence prevention policies.
      Donald Trump is out-of-touch with the vast majority of Americans on gun violence prevention. He continues to suck up to the gun lobby and insult victims, as shown by today’s event. As young organizers in Georgia and across the country, and members of a generation that has been defined by mass shootings, we know Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for young Americans’ lives will cost him this election.”
      More on today’s comments from Olivia Troye, a former Trump White House National Security Official, from the Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Lauren Gambino:Troye warned that Trump would be dangerous for American alliances. She said as president, his foreign policy “go-tos were always, like, why don’t we just bomb them?”“He would reach out to dictators and sometimes look at them for strength. So Donald Trump would be looking to Putin for advice,” she said.Of how he would treat the US’s Nato and European allies, she said: “He would totally betray them, because those are the discussions that were actually had in this room with someone like Donald Trump.”Troye said the recent endorsements of former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, former congresswoman Liz Cheny, was representative of a “sea change” happening among independents and moderate Republicans willing to set aside their partisan leaning to stop Trump from returning to the White House.“Dick Cheney, no one can claim that he’s a Democrat, right?” Troye said. “So when you look at someone like him and he’s saying, ‘No, this is unacceptable. I don’t stand for this.’ I think that speaks volumes about where the Republican Party is today and where it’s headed under Donald Trump.”Troye, who was a Homeland Security Advisor to former vice president Mike Pence, urged Harris to confront voter concerns on immigration. But she noted that it was Trump, not Harris, who stood in the way of a conservative border bill. Trump blocked the bill, she said “because he just has his own personal vendetta, and it’s all about him like and that, to me, is like counterintuitive.” She also assailed Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, for promoting a baseless rumor about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.“The way to solve the immigration system is not going out and talking about Haitian immigrants … eating their pets,” she said. “I mean the extremism that these people propose in their agenda, the anti-immigrant and the hatred that they have just for America in general, that’s not the way that fix it. We need to come together in a bipartisan way.”Live from the spin room, Anthony Scaramucci, a former communication director in Trump’s White House, predicted Harris would defeat his former boss in tonight’s debate.Scaramucci, now a surrogate for Harris, warned that Trump was a “clear and present danger” to the American people.Asked if Trump, having participated in seven presidential debates in eight years, had the advantage of experience, the Republican disagreed.“I’m not worried about him having seven debates under his belt, because in a lot of those debates, he acts a little absurd. Frankly. What I’m confident in is [that] she’s going to compare and contrast herself, and she’s going to come out of this at 10:30 tonight as the one choice that the American people need to be president.Scaramucci also joked about his brief tenure in the White House, telling reporters he had “lasted one Scaramucci in the White House, which is 11 days”.Speaking to reporters in the debate spin room, Olivia Troye, a former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence, urged voters to set aside doubts they might have about Kamala Harris’s approach to the war in Gaza.“She has been strong against Hamas and what’s happening there,” Troye said. “I do think that we need to be compassionate for the people that are going through the situation. She’s also been strong on Israel. I think she’s navigating this in the correct way.“What I would say is when I contrast that to what Donald Trump would do in this situation, let me remind you that I was actually there in the Trump administration when Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and his inner circle enacted the travel ban.“When I think about what they’re going to do with Gaza and when I think of Muslim countries and when I think about the international populations, I think about how much they detested those populations and I look at the extremism that will come with a Donald Trump administration. That’s what crosses my mind.”Troye, a member of Republicans for Harris-Walz, added:“What I would say to Michigan voters is: think very carefully in this situation on what really matters to you right now because you’ve got to think more on the greater strategic picture of what someone like Donald Trump would do because he does not have your best interests at heart.”Young voter groups have criticized the RNC’s gun store debate watch party, calling Trump ‘evil’ and ‘out-of-touch’ for hosting the event so close to the shooting site.The groups, which include Voters of Tomorrow, College Democrats of America, Leaders We Deserve, College Democrats of Georgia, Georgia High School Democrats, Young Democrats of Georgia, Path to Progress and Blue Future issued a joint statement condemning the RNC decision:
      Just days after students and teachers were murdered in Apalachee High School, Republicans are hosting a debate watch party an hour away at the world’s largest gun store. The Trump team is evil for disrespecting the victims like this — and by continually refusing to support life-saving gun violence prevention policies.
      Donald Trump is out-of-touch with the vast majority of Americans on gun violence prevention. He continues to suck up to the gun lobby and insult victims, as shown by today’s event. As young organizers in Georgia and across the country, and members of a generation that has been defined by mass shootings, we know Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for young Americans’ lives will cost him this election.”
      The RNC has scheduled a watch party for tonights debate at a gun store in Georgia just miles away from Apalachee high school where two teachers and two students were killed by a 14-year-old shooter last week.“While Georgians continue to mourn the students and educators who were shot and killed at Apalachee High School last week, the RNC is hosting a #Debate2024 watch party at the nation’s largest gun store tonight—less than 50 miles from Apalachee High School,” the gun-control advocacy group Moms Demand Action wrote in a post on X, adding in all caps: “INSENSITIVE. GROSS. REPREHENSIBLE.”Adventure Outdoors, which proudly proclaims itself as “The Greatest Store On Earth,” carries over 15,000 guns in stock and has a 17-lane shooting range. The store has hosted debate watch parties before, including last June when Trump debated Joe Biden.The event, which includes dinner and refreshments, is sponsored by a slew of conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots Action, Fulton County Republican party and the Pac Turning Point Action.Kamala Harris will be joined by her husband, Doug Emhoff, sister Maya Harris and her husband, Tony West, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia tonight, NBC News reported.Donald Trump will be joined by his eldest son, Eric Trump, and his wife and the Republican National Committee chair, Lara Trump, according to CNN. It’s unclear whether Melania Trump will attend.Tommy Tuberville, the Republican senator from Alabama, is blocking the promotion of an army general and top aide to Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, citing concerns about the military leader’s alleged role in the lack of transparency surrounding Austin’s hospitalization earlier this year.The army general in question, Lt Gen Ronald P Clark, has been nominated to become the four-star commander of all US army forces in the Pacific. But the Alabama senator and retired college football coach is holding up the promotion, according to the Washington Post.“Senator Tuberville has concerns about Lt Gen Clark’s actions during secretary Austin’s hospitalization,” a spokesperson for the senator, Mallory Jaspers, told the Post.Jaspers went on to say that Clark knew Austin was “incapacitated” and did not tell Joe Biden, breaking his oath to president.The spokesperson said that Tuberville was waiting to review an inspector general’s report surrounding Austin’s handling of his hospitalization before Clark’s promotion.The Trump and Harris campaigns had been in dispute over the debate guidelines.The Harris campaign had previously pushed for live, or “hot”, microphones, arguing that it would “fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates”.Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign had been pressing for them to be turned off, as was the case in the first debate with Joe Biden.A statement from ABC made clear that microphones for both candidates will be muted during the debate when their opponent is speaking.The other rules ABC News said had been agreed upon with the two sides include:

      No opening statements and closing statements will be 2 minutes per candidate

      Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate

      Props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage

      No topics or questions will be shared in advance

      Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other
      Candidates will have two minutes to answer questions, two minutes for rebuttals and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications or responses.After winning a virtual coin toss, Trump opted to give the second closing remarks; Harris selected the right podium position on the screen, meaning Trump will be on the left.Donald Trump has called on Republicans in Congress to shut down the government as the House speaker Mike Johnson vowed to stay the course and put his government funding package on the House floor on Wednesday.Trump, posting to his Truth Social platform, urged GOP lawmakers not to vote for a six-month continuing resolution to avert a shutdown in three weeks, unless the bill is linked to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act.The Save Act would overhaul voting laws to require proof of citizenship in order to vote. Trump wrote:
      If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. … CLOSE IT DOWN!!!
      Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the measure and the bill has very little prospect of passing the House.From Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman:Robert F Kennedy Jr will appear in the spin room in Philadelphia tonight as a surrogate for Donald Trump, after he dropped his independent presidential bid last month and endorsed the Republican nominee.Trump is “so desperate for support he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel and coming up with RFK Jr”, a statement from Matt Corridoni, the Democratic National Committee spokesperson said, and added:
      Equally desperate, RFK Jr. is willing to sell his soul for attention — abandoning any integrity he had left. Both of these men are driven by their egos and desire for attention and that will be on full display after the debate tonight.
      On 21 July, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris. This historic move changed the landscape of the election and how many felt about the race.As the election enters its final weeks, the Guardian US is averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring.After two weeks of a roughly three-point Harris lead, Guardian US polling averages have Donald Trump and Harris tied for the first time since we started tracking the polls in August. Many of the high-Harris enthusiasm polls from late August are dropping off our 10-day rolling average, while several new high-quality polls have Trump in a narrow lead. Though the results are within the margins of error for the polls, Trump’s lead in those individual polls has led to a big increase in his national average.The first presidential debate between Harris and Trump is Tuesday night. The last presidential debate was arguably one of the most consequential in modern political history, so we will be closely following the impact that the candidates’ performances have on their national standings.A deputy manager for the Kamala Harris campaign debuted new billboards placed across Philadelphia, ahead of the debate there on Tuesday.One billboard appears to reference Wawa convenience stores and mocks Donald Trump and his fixation on crowd sizes.This comes as the Harris campaign also unveiled a new ad this week, titled Crowd Size, featuring former president Barack Obama’s speech from the Democratic national convention last month, during which Obama talked about Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota governor, will be participating in a virtual national debate watch party tonight, he said in a post on X.The virtual watch party will be from 8:30pm ET to 11pm ET.With just hours to go until the much-anticipated debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a new poll published on Tuesday by PBS News/NPR/Marist shows Harris just one point ahead of Trump nationally among registered voters.The poll also states that among independent voters, Trump received 49% while Harris received 46%, and that Trump now has a lead among the Latino voters surveyed, with 51% now choosing the ex-president.A third of the registered voters said that the debate tonight will help them “a great deal or good amount” in making their selection. More

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      Melania Trump boosts conspiracy theory online about rally shooting

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      Former first lady Melania Trump has raised questions around the law enforcement response to the attempted assassination of her husband, in a video she published on Tuesday to promote her new book.In the 34-second video posted to her X account, Melania begins by describing the attempted assassination on her husband as a “horrible, distressing experience”. And now, she says in the video, which is overlayed with dramatic instrumental music, “the silence around it feels heavy”.“I can’t help but wonder why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?” she asks in the video. “There is definitely more to this story and we need to uncover the truth.”The video then cuts to black and then ends with an image of the cover to her new memoir, Melania, and a link to buy copies.Donald Trump himself has recently, without any evidence, blamed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the assassination attempt and accused them of making it difficult for the Secret Service to have the staffing to protect him. Conspiracy theories around the shooting have spread in some Republican and rightwing circles.There has been no evidence that the US president or vice-president were directly involved in or interfered with the Secret Service’s arrangements, or that there was any wider plot to attack Trump beyond the lone shooter, who was killed moments after opening fire.On Melania’s website, it states her memoir, which she describes as “the powerful and inspiring story of a woman who has defined personal excellence, overcome adversity, and carved her own path” is available to pre-order for $40.A signed edition is also available for $75, and a collector’s edition, which includes a signature, bonus photographs and a “digital collectable”, is on sale for $250.Since the assassination attempt on the former president on 13 July in Pennsylvania, where 20-year-old Thomas Crooks opened fire on Trump as he spoke at a campaign rally, the FBI and Secret Service have come under intense scrutiny and criticism over security issues at the event.Trump survived the shooting but sustained an injury to his ear, and one rally attendee was killed in the attack and two others were injured. The gunman was shot dead by a Secret Service officer at the scene.The remarks by the former first lady on Tuesday come as investigations are under way looking into what happened that day, as well as the decisions and actions of personnel leading up to the event.New details have emerged in the last two months regarding the lead-up to 13 July, apparent security and communication failings by and between law enforcement agencies, as well as new details on the shooter himself, such as his search history and preparations for the attack, but FBI officials have not yet uncovered a motive for the attack.In late July, the director of the Secret Service resigned after a hearing where she was criticized by lawmakers over the apparent security failures around the shooting, and of failing to answer some specific questions about what went wrong. A day later, the House voted to form a taskforce to investigate the failings around the rally security and in late August, at least five US Secret Service agents were placed on leave in relation to the 13 July rally. More

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      Georgia governor Brian Kemp weighs options on state election board problem

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      As Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp wrestles with what to do with a seemingly wayward state board of elections that is drawing national criticism for last-hour changes to the state’s election practices born of stop-the-steal election activism, the state attorney general declined to make his job any easier.Kemp asked Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, to render a legal opinion about the governor’s legal obligation to hold a hearing and potentially remove board members, in light of two ethics complaints filed against the board since a raucous hearing in July raised questions about the legality of the board’s actions. Three board members – Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston and Janelle King – have attempted to reopen investigation into the 2020 election, citing a finding of error in Fulton county and the continuation of lawsuits by election denialists.Repeated audits and investigations have found no error in tabulation large enough to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Nonetheless, the three board members have approved new rules giving local elections officials wider authority to make a “reasonable inquiry” into elections discrepancies. By leaving the term “reasonable” undefined, the change is setting off alarm bells among critics, who believe local elections officials with partisan intentions will cast doubt on the results if their candidate loses.Carr’s office earlier this year swatted back the board’s demand to reinvestigate the 2020 election in Fulton county. But it also declined last week to advise Kemp to convene a hearing under the state’s ethics law, because no “formal charges” had been filed for allegedly holding an illegal meeting in August to adopt new election rules.If the law required Kemp to remove board members, he could do so while claiming to Donald Trump-aligned partisans that his hands were tied. That’s no longer an option. If he does so now, voices on the hard right will rise to say that Kemp is, once again, facilitating victory for Democrats at their expense.In a state controlled by Republicans, Georgia’s elections board has become a contentious friction point between conventional conservatives like Kemp and Trump allies who continue to press claims of a stolen 2020 election.Trump praised the board members by name at a rally in Atlanta in August, while trashing Kemp for refraining to stop the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, from pursuing the election interference case against him.The board’s behavior puts Kemp in a political pickle. Trump and Kemp have made overtures in the past few weeks to mend the rift. Kemp endorsed Trump in a conversation with the Fox News host Sean Hannity last month, which Trump accepted graciously in a Truth Social posting. But Trump partisans remain deeply resentful of Kemp’s apparent inaction on Trump’s behalf.For Republicans, the conflict between Trump and Kemp is particularly toxic in an election year. But the board’s actions convey a plain impression of partisan interest, which is also toxic in an election year, as Democrats use the publicity around the election board’s plays to drive turnout.Even though a majority of Georgians are confident that the 2024 election will be held fairly, the partisan split is enormous. Only 9% of Republicans have confidence in a fair election, according to a poll administered by the University of Georgia in June.That has primary election implications for Kemp, who is widely expected to run for the US Senate against the Democrat Jon Ossoff in 2026. Kemp is the most popular Republican in the state – more so than Trump – but would face withering criticism for taking unilateral action against a Trump-oriented board.In the wake of the 2020 election, state lawmakers stripped the secretary of state and his office of some of their power over the state board of elections. The appointment of King, a conservative radio talkshow host, to the swing seat on the board earlier this year has given Trump partisans a 3-2 majority of the board.At its August meeting, the three members outside of Kemp’s orbit – King, Johnston and Jeffares – voted to demand that the state attorney general reinvestigate claims of irregularities in Fulton county’s election tabulation of 2020, threatening to hire outside counsel to investigate instead.Carr’s office responded, denying their demand and notifying them that the only lawyers the state board of elections has, by law, are at the attorney general’s office.Critics such as the Democratic party, who are filing complaints about the board’s actions, suggest that board’s goal is to delay certification in the event of an apparent Trump loss in order to bolster future claims of another stolen election.The complaint filed by the Democratic party of Georgia and Cathy Woolard, a former chairperson of the local Fulton county board of registration and elections, argues that the board “knowingly and willfully violated state law” by holding the August meeting without proper notice, “and have repeatedly disregarded the advice of the attorney general’s office, turning instead to outside parties for both legal counsel and the substance of proposed rules”.By doing so, the board had created an appearance of impropriety, the complaint alleges, noting how board members had received a standing ovation at a Trump rally and how Jeffares, had reportedly discussed a position in the Trump administration in public.The complaint invokes Georgia’s ethics law, which states that the governor is compelled to remove board members who violate the ethics code.The word “shall” limits the governor’s discretion. But Kemp wanted to know if the letter of complaint constituted “formal charges”.Staff attorneys from Carr’s office responded on Friday, telling Kemp that it did not.“‘Upon formal charges being filed’ does not mean that a citizen can simply submit information to the Governor and trigger the hearing process contemplated by the Code Section,” the legal memo says. “Had the General Assembly intended to create an informal process in O.C.G.A. § 45-10-4 that could be initiated by any member of the public, it would have done so as it has in other areas of the law discussed herein. Instead, it provided for a structured process that is only commenced ‘upon formal charges being filed’.” More

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      Trump will not prepare for debating Kamala Harris. He believes he’s perfect | Sidney Blumenthal

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      In a debate or otherwise, hot mic or not, the “issues” are of concern to Donald Trump solely to incite his politics of paranoia. Facts, too, whatever they are, are contemptible; facts aren’t facts at all. They are opinions to be wielded in a contest of strength to intimidate and overwhelm the weaklings who claim there actually are independent facts. Those whose opinions prevail can triumphantly brandish them as symbols of power.In the unusual setting when Trump is awkwardly questioned outside of the protective sphere of rightwing media, he understands that his glib retailing of make-believe and outright lying will glide him past the hazard of facts. The less he cares about them, the better he will do. His lies are so frequent they become elevator music.Journalistic moderators exist simply to serve as his foils and straight-men. He attacks them, often personally, to elide and distract from topics he would rather avoid, if the moderators have the nerve to raise them – his felony convictions, business fraud, alleged and adjudicated acts of sexual assault, attempted coup of January 6, promise of a “bloody” round-up of “millions” of undocumented immigrants, stated desire to be a dictator, to imprison his opponents including Democratic donors, and “terminate” the constitution. The presence of journalists who correct his splotched record proves his victimization.Any so-called debate involving Trump has nothing to do with illuminating the “issues”. Part of the problem with the plea of anxious Republicans that Trump stick to the “issues”, rather than mentally deteriorate before our eyes, is that the “issues”, as they conceive them, aren’t supported by the facts.The facts are these: inflation has substantially cooled and continues to fall. The economy is disinflationary. The Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this month on the basis of the decline in inflation. Job growth under the Biden administration increased by July to 15.8m, while under Trump 2.7m jobs were lost. Trump has falsely stated that “100%” of all new jobs created under Biden “have gone to illegal immigrants”. In fact, the number of native-born Americans in the workforce increased by 6% under Biden. The crime rate is down precipitously, violent crime reduced by 15.2% in just the last year, according to the FBI.The entry of migrants at the southern border between December 2023 and January 2024 fell by 50% as a result of actions of the Mexican government in cooperation with the Biden administration, and crossings fell even more, by 40%, to their lowest level in four years, as a result of Biden’s executive order on asylum policy in June. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. And of immigrants arriving between 2020 and 2022, nearly half, 48%, have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 38% of native-born Americans have attained that educational status. The rest is demagogy.The other part of the problem about the “issues” is that Trump’s underlying motive has nothing to do with them. He still feels the sting that he never really made it as a celebrity in Manhattan. Despite his constant efforts to elevate himself, even pretending to be his own public relations agent, John Barron, he understands that he was ridiculed and rejected by the genteel class whose acceptance he most sought. When he was cast as the star of The Apprentice, its crassness and phoniness failed to win him the respect let alone the adoration of the Hollywood community. He bears the grudge that he was spat out from coast to coast. Arousing the fears and prejudices of the outer-borough petit bourgeoisie in white flight farther into Long Island decades ago writ large, he is a tuning fork of resentments.Trump always has his own facts to depict “a failing nation”. Pessimism is his calling card. If America isn’t collapsing, how can it be great again? Even more important, how can he be great again? As Trump posted this May after he was found guilty of 34 felony counts of business fraud for hush-money payments to an adult film star to influence the 2016 election: “I AM THE POLITICAL PRISONER OF A FAILING NATION, BUT I WILL SOON BE FREE, NOVEMBER 5TH, AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”This election, like all elections for him, is a turnout base election. He must scrape up every possible low-information voter from every cave with an appeal to grievance. He will never reach the lofty level of a 50% majority. He will certainly lose the popular vote by millions as he did in 2016 and 2020. His fundraising is half that of Kamala Harris’s. He has outsourced his ground game to political action committees with no experience at getting out the vote, headed by the conspiracist chatterbox Charlie Kirk (who called George Floyd “a scumbag”) and the Nazi-fascinated space cadet Elon Musk. Trump’s advisers, meanwhile, are locked into their own version of The Hunger Games.The knife’s edge polling makes his imperative to inflame his base more desperate. In 1996, Bob Dole campaigned as the Republican candidate by saying he had “nowhere to go but the White House or home”. Trump campaigns knowing he has nowhere to go but the White House or the jailhouse.Trump’s preparation for his only encounter with Harris consists of not preparing. He’s already perfect. He must repeat himself. He must double down. Then he will be more perfect. The more vehemently he lashes out, the more his masses embrace him. His irrationality, irresponsibility and ignorance billow in their minds as a towering image of strength confirming their preconceived notions of his acumen and decisiveness. Yet he must hope that his blasts don’t blow him into a corner where he has to ring up Republican officials as he did in Georgia in 2020 and for which he has been indicted for voter fraud: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”Trump didn’t want, much less imagine, a debate with Harris. Not so subconsciously he still thinks he’s facing Joe Biden. “I can’t imagine New Hampshire voting for him,” he told the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on 5 September. “Anybody in New Hampshire, cause they’re watching right now, but anybody in New Hampshire that votes for Biden and Kamala.” Trump confuses the faded Biden with the looming Harris. Either he feels Biden is his real opponent or he must make her into Biden to return to the race he expected. His template can’t be altered. Make Harris Biden again.Trump has announced he wants a new clause for the 25th amendment to impeach and remove Harris for engaging in a “conspiracy to cover up the incapacity” of Biden. At the same time, Trump complains that Harris has already ousted Biden. “They deposed a president,” he told a rally on 19 August. “It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.” Trump doesn’t know how to quit Biden.In his debate with Biden, Trump’s outrageous falsehoods were overlooked in the light of Biden’s shattered performance. Trump charged that the president would “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby”. He has since repeated his canard about post-abortion executions in a convoluted effort to wriggle out of stating his position on Florida’s proposition for reproductive rights, which he finally conceded he would vote against.In his Biden debate, Trump claimed that he had never called fallen soldiers “suckers” or “losers”, though his former chief of staff, Gen John Kelly, says he did. Had Trump been in office, he says, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine and Hamas wouldn’t have massacred Israelis. Immigrants, he claimed, are released from prisons and insane asylums to steal “Black jobs” and Social Security funds, which, he says, proves the racist replacement theory: “They’re taking the place of our citizens.” And so on.Trump, according to Trump, was the truth-teller in that debate. Biden was the liar. “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it.” If only Biden hadn’t existed, all would have been well, just as it was. “It was perfect. It was so good. All he had to do is leave it alone.” And, then, poof!, to Trump’s consternation, Biden disappeared.Trump’s charges and boastful lies in that debate are undoubtedly a preview of most of what he will charge against Harris and claim about himself. But he will also accuse her of being Biden in disguise so he can continue to run against Biden. Trump will run “the same tired old playbook”, as Harris remarked in refusing to answer a question in an interview about his race-baiting claim that she decided to “turn Black”.On 6 September, Trump’s disjointed pre-debate attack on Harris reached a crescendo in his conflation of her with E Jean Carroll, a woman he defamed, after sexually abusing her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, according to the judge and jury, for which he was held liable twice, and owes a penalty of $83.5m. He appealed the verdict. Before entering the New York courthouse, he held what he called a “press conference”, at which he answered no questions and ranted for nearly an hour.His stream of consciousness unraveled into an accusation that seamlessly traveled from an apparent reference to Harris to an old photograph of Carroll. “I’m not going to have a Marxist president. The people are getting it,” Trump said. “So we go down to court today to talk about this case is a scam. And all I can say is that I never met the woman other than this picture, which could have been AI-generated.”The photo in question was published in a 2019 New York Magazine article captioned: “Carroll, Donald and Ivana Trump, and Carroll’s then-husband, television-news anchor John Johnson, at an NBC party around 1987.” Of course, artificial intelligence, whose technology did not then exist, could not generate that photo.Trump blathered on: “The other thing is I was very famous then. If I would have walked into Bergdorf Goodman, the department store that she said, everybody would have said, ‘Oh, there’s Trump.’ And it would have been at that time on Page Six. Page Six was the equivalent of today’s internet.”With his ruminations about Page Six, the page in the New York Post for gossip on which Trump planted items about himself and his sexual prowess for years, he inadvertently let slip his true motive to recapture past glory: “I was very famous then.”Trump is frantic not to be dismissed as a has-been. His restless exploitation of his tawdry image had gained him notoriety but disrespect. The more vulgar he was in pursuing his fantasy of himself, however, the more his acceptance into society receded. His wish to return to his youthful days of celebrity now leads him to surround himself with the appearance of celebrity, but he can only attract cartoon characters, the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock. If Trump can only regain the presidency, he can use it for a last chance to make himself a great celebrity again.At his “press conference”, Trump played the star beset by groupies. Time and again, he asserted he didn’t know Carroll. “I have no idea who she is. She wrote a book and she made a ridiculous story up.” At his first defamation trial, Trump claimed she was “totally lying” because “she’s not my type”.Then, Trump spontaneously brought up other cases in which he had been accused of sexual assault. “It’s all fabricated,” he said.He attacked Jessica Leeds, who as a witness in the Carroll trial testified that he molested her in the late 1970s when he sat next to her on an airplane. “She said I was making out with her. And then, after 15 minutes – and she changed her story a couple times, maybe it was quicker – then I grabbed her at a certain part and that’s when she had enough,” Trump said, explaining his technique. “Think of the practicality of this: I’m famous, I’m in a plane, people are coming into the plane. And I’m looking at a woman, and I grab her and start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening?”He added: “And frankly – I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say – but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.” Once again, she wasn’t Trump’s type.Trump then tore into yet another woman who had testified in the Carroll case. Natasha Stoynoff, a reporter for People magazine, came to Mar-a-Lago in 2005 to write a story about Trump and his wife Melania. According to her account, he drew her alone into a room, shoved her against a wall, stuck his tongue down her throat and groped her before she broke loose. Six other women corroborated her story as contemporaneous confidantes to whom she told her story. At a political rally in 2016, singling her out, he told a crowd: “Take a look. You look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”“Think of this,” Trump continued explaining at his press conference, “a woman comes into Mar-a-Lago, interviews me about a love story, a story about my wife and myself. And during that interview, I attacked her and pushed her up against the wall, violently. Okay? And then she leaves, and she writes a perfect story. A perfect story. She doesn’t mention the event … There was no witness. There was nothing … I could go through many other stories outside of this. You know, it’s very funny. When you’re rich and famous, you get a lot of people come up with a lot of stories.” When you’re a star, you’re always innocent.Trump made it clear this outburst was his debate prep. “I’m going into very hostile territory shortly on a debate with ABC, George Stephanopoulos and that group,” he said. “And ABC, I think, is the worst of everybody. I think they’re the worst. They’re the nastiest. They’re as bad as you can be. They’re worse than NBC, which is saying a lot.”Then, he added, “And we have something coming.” But instead of explaining what that might be, he veered to attack Hillary Clinton as unfair in her debate with him in 2016. Then, he attacked the Carroll case again as a “hoax” and “a scam”. And he blamed the reporters he had gathered and whose questions he was not taking. “It’s a political witch hunt. And some of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Thank you very much, everybody.”

      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

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      Republicans spread unsubstantiated slurs about Haitian migrants in Ohio city

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      Prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance are sharing false and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating pets and local wildlife.The salacious and often racist social media posts claim, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food. Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.The claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.The misinformation about migrants in Springfield comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border. Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported. A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed intoa school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has spoken against Haitian migrants in Ohio for months and again posted about it on Monday. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote, referring to Kamala Harris.The Trump campaign sent out an email on Monday blasting the vice-president for the unrest in Springfield, saying: “It’s all coming to your city if Kamala Harris is elected in November. It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning on day one, President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history – because he’ll always put America, and Americans, FIRST.”On Monday, the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, a Republican, announced he would use his office’s resources to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”. He said his office would “exhaust all possibilities” to address the migrants. Among other complaints from residents, he said that the migrants were reportedly “killing wildlife for food”. More

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      US House clashes over Harris’s role in 2021 Afghanistan troop withdrawal

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      Partisan divisions over the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan have burst into the open ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia after a Republican-led congressional report attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the episode.A 250-page report from the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee castigated the Biden administration for failing to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid takeover and neglecting to prepare for the orderly departure of non-combatant personnel.The decision led to a shambolic evacuation effort and numerous American civilians and US-allied Afghans being left stranded as the country fell to hardline Islamist forces that America and its Nato allies had spent 20 years trying to defeat.The report, written by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, zeroes in on the supposed role played by the US vice-president – mentioning her name 251 times, although no evidence has emerged that she was directly involved in the decisions leading to one of the most damaging foreign policy chapters of Joe Biden’s presidency.By contrast, a 115-page interim report issued by McCaul on the committee’s investigation on 2022 name-checked Harris just twice.Democrats seized on the contrast, accusing McCaul of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order,” states the latest report, titled Wilful Blindness: An assessment of the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that followed.The report’s front page carries a picture of Harris prominently displayed below that of Biden, and above an image of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a more prominent role in the withdrawal.“Despite warnings against withdrawing by senior leaders, Vice President Harris’ aide disclosed the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision,” McCaul’s report goes on. “President Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain affirmed Vice President Harris was entrenched in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to exploit the withdrawal for election purposes while overlooking the fact that the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, took the original decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan when he was president.“Republicans now claim [Harris] was the architect of the US withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” wrote Gregory Meeks, the Democrats’ ranking member on the committee in a 59-page rebuttal to McCaul’s report.Harris’s alleged role in the withdrawal seems likely to arise when she meets Trump for their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.Sharon Yan, a spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the the report was “based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations and pre-existing biases”.She added: “Ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”Harris’s campaign has tried to promote her role in Biden’s foreign policy decisions since she replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket. But she has said little about the Afghan withdrawal. The House report notes that she was on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam at the time and publicly pledged that the administration would protect Afghan women and children.It concludes: “Her promise has clearly not been fulfilled.”Democrats’ accusation of using the Afghan pull-out for campaign purposes echoes criticisms of Trump’s now notorious visit to Arlington national cemetery last month to mark the third anniversary of the event.The former US president’s campaign was rebuked by the US army after its staffers reportedly became embroiled in a confrontation with a cemetery worker when she tried to enforce rules against filming and photographing in a section reserved for service members killed in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.Pictures and footage subsequently emerged of Trump posing at the graveside of personnel killed in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, near Kabul airport – which resulted in the deaths of 13 US personnel and roughly 170 Afghans. Trump denied that his visit was a campaign event, pointing out that he had been invited by families of the fallen servicemen. More