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      FBI told Harris campaign it was targeted by foreign hackers; Walz defends military service in first solo campaign event – live

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      Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:In the further annals of Republicans who broke with Donald Trump returning to the fold, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr said he will vote for the ex-president in November.Burr, who declined to seek re-election and left the Senate in 2022, was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to the January 6 insurrection.The conviction ultimately failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate required to be approved, and North Carolina’s GOP censured Burr for his vote.In an interview with Spectrum News, Burr said:
      Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.
      Donald Trump’s campaign is facing accusations of racism over this post on Twitter/X earlier today:It appears to be in line with the former president’s messaging around undocumented people, who he has baselessly blamed for causing crime, and sparked a wave of condemnation from users of X:Tim Walz is set to become one of the most prominent Democrats in the country – at least for the next three months, as he campaigns alongside Kamala Harris. Here’s a look at his record in Minnesota, from the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang:Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?Well, he’s Tim Walz.When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.Speaking of the Harris campaign, the vice-president’s newly minted running mate, Tim Walz, today made his first solo campaign appearance at a convention of union members.The Minnesota governor gave a wide-ranging speech in which he attacked Donald Trump and cheered the power of organized labor, while also taking time to respond to attacks from the former president and his supporters, who say Walz has exaggerated his military service.Here’s what he said in response, at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s annual convention:The attacks on Walz’s military service, from Trump allies including his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, have centered on the timing of his decision to retire after 24 years of army national guard service. Here’s more on that:Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:Democrats in Arizona received some good news yesterday, when the secretary of state approved a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports. The party hopes the initiative will bring out voters who will also cast ballots for Kamala Harris in a state that could prove decisive to her hopes to winning the White House:Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.Arizona’s Republican former governor Doug Ducey has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election bid, after he was censured by the state GOP near the end of his term for not being sufficiently loyal to the former president.Ducey cited his support for tougher immigration policies and a continuation of Trump-era tax cuts in his endorsement:Three years ago, the state Republican party reprimanded Ducey after it was taken over by rightwing officials who retaliated against politicians from the state that had clashed with Trump:Donald Trump’s campaign is out with a new statement claiming that the former president’s interview with Elon Musk last night “breaks the internet”.It says 25 million users on X have listened to the entire two-hour-plus interview as of noon today, and that the conversation generated 9.6m posts, among other statistics. It also hit out at Kamala Harris for not having done any interviews since launching her campaign.“While weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has avoided answering questions for 23 days, President Trump delivered his message directly to the people in a historic, two-hour interview that generated millions of posts and impressions related to President Trump and Elon Musk’s unfiltered conversation,” the statement reads.Here’s more, from the Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung:
      President Trump will do everything he can to bring his unscripted message directly to the people, something the fake news media refuses to do. While Kamala Harris enjoys the luxury of hiding from the press, President Trump accepted Elon’s invitation to have an unfiltered conversation about his America First policies with voters and people around the world. The media can lie, but the numbers don’t: Americans are eager to hear from President Trump and his momentum is only growing as we get closer to November 5.
      The prominent progressive senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Donald Trump is preparing to once again dispute the results of the 2024 election, should he lose.Trump has never publicly conceded his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and engaged in a months-long effort to prevent the Democrat from taking office that culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection.In a just-released statement, Sanders cites the former president’s recent language to argue that he is preparing to do the same this year:
      Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent”.
      This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
      The former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges last night.Peters, a one-time hero to those denying that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with the My Pillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, access to the Mesa county election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity, the Associated Press reports.Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to “steal” the election from Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial. Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state. She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation.She will be sentenced on 3 October.Sea level rise will help create “more oceanfront property”, carbon pollution is only a problem once it starts causing “headaches and nausea” and we should be more worried about “nuclear warming” than global warming.Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s conversation on X, which Musk owns, last night featured several incoherent and baseless statements on the climate crisis, prompting both confusion and derision among environmental advocates.Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate group 350.org, labeled it the “dumbest climate conversation of all time.”Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in this election, said that rising seas will help create “more oceanfront property” and complained that “people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” in reference to potential nuclear war.During the often disjointed exchange, Trump also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration hadn’t opened up the Arctic to oil drilling and baselessly claimed that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle” because of climate edicts.Musk, meanwhile, said that he is “helping the environment” by making electric cars via Tesla but said that he didn’t want people to “vilify” the oil and gas industry that is driving the climate crisis and that the real dangers were, he felt, an increase in CO2 that will cause “headaches and nausea” and the world potentially running out of oil.“We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that,” Musk said about the urgency of climate change. “Like leave the farmers alone.”Scientists are clear that the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid worsening and disastrous climate impacts such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts.The exchange did little to assuage concerns that a second Trump term will only help accelerate dangerous global heating. More

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      Exonerated Central Park Five councillor to speak at Democratic convention – report

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      Yusef Salaam, a New York City councillor who was wrongly jailed for a notorious rape in the city’s Central Park, has reportedly been invited to address next week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago in a move that could highlight Donald Trump’s key role in the case and history of racially charged rhetoric.Salaam was one of the “Central Park Five”, a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who were convicted of attacking and raping Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, while she was jogging in April 1989.He could be joined at the convention by other members of the group, according to Semafor, which broke the story but said Salaam’s appearance had yet to be confirmed.Salaam served seven years but was later exonerated and released along with the other four after a convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime, a confession confirmed by DNA evidence.The case became a major cause célèbre, largely due to an intervention by Trump, then an up-and-coming property magnate, who took out full-page adverts in four New York papers calling for the return of the death penalty at a time when the crime had captured media attention.The five defendants, who were all minors, had already been arrested, paraded in public and had their names and addresses published when Trump took out the advert.In a style that was to become familiar in his social media posts of a later era, the advert – carrying Trump’s signature – blared in block capitals: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!”Trump, who did not specifically call for the execution of the five defendants, wrote: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, Salaam said Trump’s high-profile intervention had been a major factor in the teens’ wrongful convictions.“He was the fire starter,” Salaam said. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.”Trump has declined to apologise for his perceived role in the wrongful convictions. After the men were awarded $41m in damages in a civil case in 2014, Trump wrote an article for the New York Daily News calling the award “the heist of the century”.He took a similarly hard line while he was president, telling journalists at the White House in 2019 that “you have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”He added: “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case, so we’ll leave it at that.”His comments were triggered by the release of a four-part Netflix dramatisation of the case, When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay, which Kamala Harris – then a Democratic senator and presidential hopeful, and now vice-president and Trump’s opponent in the forthcoming presidential election – urged him to watch.Salaam won election as a Democrat representing New York’s Harlem district in November last year.Months before, Salaam trolled Trump after the former president was indicted by a Manhattan court on 34 felony charges – on which he was subsequently convicted – for document falsification relating to the payment of hush money to an adult film actor.“For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump – who never said sorry for calling for my execution – here it is: Karma,” Salaam posted on X, then known as Twitter, in February 2023.Salaam’s proposed convention appearance follows attempts by Trump to focus on Harris’s racial identity. Two weeks ago, Trump falsely told the National Association of Black Journalists that the vice-president, who has mixed heritage, had only recently identified as Black after previously emphasising her Indian ethnicity.It also comes after the Republican nominee has been making efforts to woo Black voters. Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and a prominent Trump supporter, told Semafor that the Central Park Five case played to an image of the former president as racist among Black celebrities.“The only thing they can say is that he’s a racist. Central Park Five,” he said. “Other than that, they can’t bring up anything else.” More

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      ‘The dumbest climate conversation of all time’: experts on the Musk-Trump interview

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war.“The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump pondered during the exchange.Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry.“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.“We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people. This would occur with CO2 at about 1,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than double the current record-breaking concentrations.Scientists have been clear that current global temperatures are hotter than at any point in human civilization, and probably long before this time too, which is causing mounting disastrous impacts in terms of heatwaves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world.Governments have agreed to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C above the preindustrial era, with researchers warning of cascading catastrophes beyond this point. The world faces the steep task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade, and then to net zero by 2050, to avoid these worst impacts.Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of Americans set to be affected as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump has his own coastal property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to exit the state due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.“The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.”Mann said that if CO2 levels get so high breathing becomes difficult, then the impacts of the climate crisis “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse. It’s actually Elon’s ill-informed and ill-premised statements that are causing headaches and nausea.”Mann added that Trump’s statement that sea level rise will lead to more oceanfront property “does not betray a lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of grade school geometry.”During his election campaigning, Trump has routinely denigrated electric vehicles but has recently changed his stance towards them after an endorsement from Musk, who previously described himself as a moderate Democrat.Trump, the former president convicted of 34 felonies, has vowed to undo the “lunacy” of Biden’s climate policies should he return to the White House, with his presidency expected to unleash a glut of new oil and gas drilling, accelerate gas exports and remove the US, once again, from the Paris climate agreement. More

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      Donald Trump is in full meltdown mode. Could he destroy his own campaign? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What do you think Donald Trump does for stress relief? Massages, maybe? Or perhaps he binge-drinks Diet Coke while bed rotting. Maybe he writes down his grievances on pieces of paper and then flushes them down the toilet. It’s also possible he lets off steam by smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs and throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans. That feels very on-brand.Whatever Trump does to manage his stress, I imagine he’s doing a lot of it right now. The convicted felon has had a terrible three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, things have been going rapidly downhill for Trump. His campaign had been built around bashing Biden, whose frailty and questionable mental acuity made him an easy target. With the far more energetic and coherent Kamala Harris as his opponent, Trump clearly doesn’t know what to do. His campaign now seems to consist of nothing but racism, the revival of old grudges, conspiracy theories and insults.This strategy isn’t exactly working out for him. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday found Harris four points ahead in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This is a big deal: when Biden was the nominee, Trump was either always slightly ahead in those states or the two men were neck and neck. It’s not just the polls that have shifted, media coverage has, too. A month ago, every headline seemed to be questioning Biden’s mental competence; now, headlines are focused on Trump’s unhinged rambling.While Harris’s campaign has huge momentum and exudes competence, Trump is embroiled in chaos. One of the latest debacles? He was hacked. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the hack was “by the Iranian Government” and added: “Never a nice thing to do!” No – but it provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that Trump’s Twitter (now X) account was compromised in 2020 by Victor Gevers who successfully guessed the password was “maga2020!” This was after the ethical hacker hacked Trump’s Twitter in 2016 by guessing the password was “yourefired”, the catchphrase from The Apprentice. The man who wants voters to think he can manage national security can’t even manage his own passwords.Even an interview on Monday night with his pal Elon Musk was a rambling, grievance-filled disaster. It was also beset by serious technical issues, leading a Harris spokesman to quip that Trump’s campaign is in service of “self-obsessed rich guys who … cannot run a livestream in the year 2024”.Trump isn’t dealing with his stream of setbacks very well; according to Republican sources quoted in a recent Axios report, he “is struggling to get past his anger”. The New York Times has similarly reported that a seething Trump repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private – claims that Trump has denied, despite the fact that he’s happily called the vice-president all manner of names in public. Essentially, he’s in full meltdown mode.So, too, are Trump’s allies, who are desperately begging their candidate to get a grip and start focusing on actual issues, rather than personal attacks. Instead of heeding this advice, however, Trump seems intent on alienating the people who can help him win. At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Georgia is an important state to win and, before Biden dropped out, it seemed as though it was in the bag for Trump. Now he’s polling the same as Harris. Making an enemy of Kemp is a terrible strategy.While it’s highly satisfying to think of a furious Trump setting his own campaign on fire, it’s important not to be complacent. As we know, things change quickly. Harris may be on the up now, but she hasn’t won this election yet. It’s also important not to underestimate the dangers a desperate Trump poses. There’s a chance he might implode, yes. But there’s also a chance he might explode, leaving a hell of a lot of collateral damage in his wake. In an interview this weekend, Biden said that, if Trump loses, he’s “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Nor am I.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn case you were wondering, by the way, there is a real answer to the question about how Trump manages his stress. During a 2004 interview with Larry King, he said: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters … That’s how I handle stress.” I wish I could give that technique a go myself. The problem is, if you’re keen on things such as bodily autonomy and democracy, then this election really does matter. More

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      Kevin McCarthy says Trump needs to stop questioning Harris’s crowd sizes

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      Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican speaker of the House, urged Donald Trump on Monday to stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies, and to instead focus on her policies and record.“You’ve gotta make this race not about personalities,” McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds, and start questioning her position, when it comes to: what did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”This comes just one day after the former US president and current Republican presidential nominee falsely accused Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of using artificial intelligence to create a photograph displaying large crowds of supporters at her rally last week in Detroit, Michigan.On Sunday, Trump shared a photograph of the large crowd at Harris’s rally to his millions of followers on his Truth Social and claimed that the image of the crowd from Harris’s event was fake.“Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd’. There was nobody there!” Trump wrote.In another post on Sunday, he called Harris a “CHEATER” and said that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘AI’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”Many videos and photographs from the event in Detroit last week show a large crowd in attendance, and shortly after Trump accused Harris of fabricating the crowd, her campaign responded to the allegations on X, and denied that the photo was manipulated.The photograph in question “is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan” the Harris campaign said, adding: “Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week … Low energy?”David Plouffe, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign, also responded to Trump’s allegations, and said: “These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.” More

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      Project 2025 mainly led by ex-Trump officials, leaked videos reveal

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      Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025, the controversial rightwing plan for the next Republican presidency, is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for former US president Donald Trump in some capacity.The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.In the 23 training videos, totaling more than 14 hours, former Trump administration officials gave advice to future appointees on governing and how to best advance their conservative policies.In one video, Rick Dearborn, who was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team and served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, admitted that during the Trump administration it was “tough” to fill all the positions at first.The recruiting and training that Project 2025 is doing right now, Dearborn said, is “going to be so important to the next president, because establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now” is a “luxury” that the Trump administration did not have in 2016.In another video, Bethany Kozma, the former deputy chief of staff at the US Agency for International Development during the the Trump administration, said that the climate change movement is part of a goal by the government to “control people”.“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma said. The training video was titled “Left-Wing Code Words and Language.”In the same video, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the justice department under Trump, criticized the Joe Biden administration’s creation of gender adviser positions in the federal government.Sullivan called for the position to be “eradicated” as well as “all the task forces”, “the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites” and a “complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications”.In other videos, several speakers suggested that future conservative political appointees should be prepared to expect a hostility from the mainstream media, from within the federal government, and also from people in Washington DC.The capital city is a place that “does not share your conservative values”, Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at the US Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, told future appointees.Primorac told viewers not to let “career bureaucrats hinder you from advancing the president’s agenda”, adding that “they’re hostile to it because you’re here to to do something that’s not in their interest.”“You’re here to cut government, you’re here to cut spending, you’re here to cut regulations.”Speakers also encouraged the future appointees to focus their attention and time on conservative media outlets, as those are the only ones trusted by conservative voters.Other speakers advised future appointees to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by the Freedom of Information Act or by Congress.In a statement sent to ProPublica after the videos were released, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign said that Trump’s only official policy agenda is Agenda 47.Last month, after Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down, the Heritage Foundation said that while the organization would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state and local – will continue”.As Trump has tried to distance himself from the controversial plan – claiming last month to “know nothing about Project 2025” and to have “no idea who is behind it” – the Washington Post reported last week that Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, told the paper that he had personally talked to Trump about it. “My role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me,” he said.Photos were also published of Trump with Roberts on a private plane in 2022, and Trump gave a keynote speech to the foundation’s annual conference. More

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      Charlie Kirk badgers Christian pastors to do more to elect Donald Trump

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      At a three-day political training session for pastors in a Dallas suburb this month, Charlie Kirk – the powerful rightwing activist and executive director of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) – railed at faith leaders, who he complained had not been doing enough to get Donald Trump elected, and begged them to enlist congregants into “deployments” to swing states.“‘But, but Charlie, I don’t think Trump is a very good role model for our church,’” said Kirk, imitating pastors who have shied away from Trump. “I have no patience for you any more, people. I am sick of this.”The conference featured a lineup of rightwing speakers, including Mike Flynn, the conspiracy theorist and retired lieutenant general, and Kirk himself, whose keynote speech at the Friday gala closed out the conference. Promising to help pastors “mobilize the body of Christ to take meaningful action”, the three-day training conference, for “active pastors and wives only”, cost $199 a pastor and $49 a wife.The event, called Igniting the Remnant Pastors, comes as the Trump campaign – and its allies in the rightwing movement, including TPUSA and America First Policy Institute – have vowed to turn out evangelicals in the 2024 election, viewing them as key to the low-propensity voting bloc they need to win in November. If Kirk’s address offers a window into the strategy, it looks something like this: urging and sometimes shaming church leaders into becoming unofficial Trump surrogates who will in turn mobilize their congregants to door-knock in key swing states.Kirk opened his remarks by denouncing the press for focusing on Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. He called Harris “the most unlikable” person to run for president and “super dumb”. The media, he complained, had failed to sufficiently cover the shooting at the Trump rally, when the former president’s ear was grazed by a bullet. The audience might be feeling like things had gotten rough for their presidential candidate, but that couldn’t stop them, Kirk said.“We fought with the trial, and we fought with the indictments, and we fought through, you know, the debate, and Trump almost got shot. I need a rest – I totally get that, but get over it,” Kirk admonished his audience. “Because we are at war in this country for the future of this civilization.”The speech struck Karen Goll, a researcher who focuses on the Christian right for the group Documented, as dire – even for Kirk, who is known for his fiery rhetoric. In his remarks, Goll wrote in an email, Kirk deployed “provocative language in the hopes that pastors will use their pulpit and the multiplication power of their congregation to deliver the election for Trump”.During his remarks, Kirk lauded the TPUSA-backed primary campaign in Arizona which ousted Maricopa county’s Republican head of elections, Steven Richer, who drew the ire of the far right for refuting Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen there. “[Richer] was close with Biden, talking about how the election was not stolen,” said Kirk. Defeating Richter was, Kirk said, “a red pill or a promising development”.Finally, Kirk called on the room of pastors to mobilize congregants to “chase ballots” in swing states, promising free lodging and stipends.Although electioneering and other forms of partisan political activism by non-profits and churches are technically barred by a 1954 law, the rule is rarely enforced. And in 2023 remarks, Trump vowed to end those restrictions.“Our goal is to have 10,000 out-of-state patriots flood Arizona and flood Wisconsin,” said Kirk, echoing Trump when he added, “in a way that we’ve never seen before.” More

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      Feel the groove: Trump keeps on dancing – does it help his cause?

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      Amid the lies, the vindictiveness, the dystopian portrayal of an America in decline, one aspect of Donald Trump’s political rallies tends to get overlooked: the dancing.At many campaign stops, the former president engages in what has become a signature dance: to the tune of Village People’s YMCA, Trump pumps his arms alternately, while staring blankly into the crowd.Unusually for a dance performance, there is a sort of malevolence to Trump’s movements. It’s rare to see someone dancing with a scowl on their face. But his supporters love it. A compilation video of Trump dancing proved a big hit at the Republican national convention, where it was played on big screens to fawning supporters every night. But why does Trump do this? And is his dancing any good?No it is not, said Brandon Chow, the founder of Hip Hop Dance Junkies, a company with dance schools in several states across the US.“On a scale of one to 10, I would say three. Three or four max,” Chow said.“The arms are there, the arms are very stiff, though – they’re not really moving. It’s literally him with his fists tight and his arms to his side. I mean, there is no movement where he’s leaving his comfort zone or his space. He’s literally just stepping in place, side to side, hips swaying.”View image in fullscreenChow, who predominantly deals in one-on-one coaching, suggested Trump could incorporate his feet more, and experiment with other arm movements.“He should get more steps involved, as opposed to stepping in place. Or if you aren’t going to travel outside of your zone, at least get some arms going instead of locking them to your sides, maybe even just, like a hand in the air every now and then, or doing an arm wave, or a turn or something. It just seems very repetitive, like it’s a robot staying in place,” Chow said.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, said Trump’s characteristic performance is less an irrepressible expression of glee and more a way for him to show his supporters, and his party, who is boss.“It’s a sign of his need for power and control: that if he can lie with impunity, if he can dance oddly whenever he wants to, that’s a sign that, basically, he has enough power to be able to do whatever he pleases without anybody being able to stop him,” Hershey said.“Goodness knows he’s not in control of his dancing, but the fact that he feels this is a sign he’s cool, and it’s something he feels perfectly at ease to demonstrate, shows how he thinks he’s in total control of the Republican party: and he’s right.”View image in fullscreenIt is uncommon to see national leaders dance in public. And when they do, it hasn’t always proved to be a political benefit.Theresa May, while prime minister of the UK, became a figure of fun in August 2018 after performing an odd, stilted dance in front of a group of scouts in Nairobi. A couple of months later, at the Conservative party conference, May attempted to reclaim the narrative by dancing on to the stage to the tune of Abba’s Dancing Queen. The routine was widely panned.Boris Yeltsin, the former president of Russia, was known as someone who enjoyed a good time. During a campaign stop in 1996, he appeared on stage with a rock band and performed a spirited dance composition, which incorporated sashaying hips, under-knee claps, and a fists-clenched, arm pumping motion. Yeltsin won re-election, although questions were raised about the legitimacy of the vote.Barack Obama rarely danced while in office, but in a 2007 appearance on the Ellen show, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination, the former president briefly sashayed along to Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love. To the untrained eye, Obama appeared to display significantly more rhythm than Trump, May or Yeltsin.Joe Biden has had his own issues with musical performance. At a concert to celebrate Juneteenth earlier this year, the president stood frozen in place, arms rigid at his sides, as other people danced beside him.View image in fullscreenUnlike Yeltsin or Obama, Trump never looks to be enjoying himself while dancing. A review of at least 20 videos of Trump performing his signature dance at campaign rallies and, this week, during an interview with the questionable internet personality Adin Ross, failed to find a single instance of Trump smiling.“I would love to see him smile while he dances,” said Rhonda Malkin, a former member of the Rockettes dance troupe and the owner of Fusion Exercise and Professional Dance Coaching, who has tutored scores of professional dancers.Malkin said she suspected Trump was uninterested in a career in dance, but if he were, “he probably should work on his footwork”.“If he’s into moving his hands, then he should move his feet accordingly, with either a side-to-side motion or a step touch,” Malkin said. A step touch involves the dancer stepping one foot to the left or the right, and bringing the other foot next to it. The move is then repeated in the opposite direction.Trump may not have time to work on his footwork, or even arm movements, given he is facing, for the first time in months, serious challenges in his bid to win a second presidential term. Trump has fallen behind Kamala Harris in an average of national polls, as Harris has galvanized previously weary Democratic supporters.View image in fullscreenHe continues to face legal issues, too. He is due to be sentenced on 16 September after being found guilty on 34 felony fraud charges, while a judge presiding over Trump’s election interference case in Washington recently rejected his efforts to throw out the case. In context Trump’s continued jigs seem almost defiant – and now Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, has proved a huge hit, whereas JD Vance, Trump’s VP choice, has faced questions over past remarks and actions.In that context, at least Trump can rely on his ever-adoring base – the type of supporter who is thrilled when the former president does his idiosyncratic dance on stage, and believes Trump can do no wrong.“This does not look like a typical political attachment of even strong partisans to a candidate. I just haven’t seen before mentions of a candidate as the second coming of Christ, or that somehow he was divinely protected from a stray bullet by God,” Hershey said.Trump, Hershey said, has spent years “fundamentally fearmongering” about immigration, crime and “the other” to secure his relationship with his fans. The dancing, however lackluster it may be, is just some rather odd icing on a largely disgruntled cake. More