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      After a hurricane, Democrats try to snatch rare victory in swing state North Carolina

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      Eric “Rocky” Farmer is stoking a bonfire of what’s left of his life. Billows of smoke rise from a mound of debris burning in front of what he once called his home – a large two-storied house that is now a contorted mass of twisted metal and broken beams.When Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last month, the North Fork New River that runs beside his property broke its banks, rising more than 20ft. The raging waters lifted up a mobile home from upstream as effortlessly as if it were a rag doll, slamming it into the corner of his house and causing the structure to crumple.Farmer, 55, will have to dismantle the mess and rebuild it, largely with his own hands. “It’s a bad scene, but we’ll get back up,” he said, sounding remarkably serene.Farmer’s struggle has now become entangled in the painfully close and hyper-tense election in North Carolina. The state is one of seven battlegrounds that will decide the outcome of the presidential race on 5 November.Several tracker polls, including the Guardian’s, show the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to be neck-and-neck in the state.With polls so tight, the impact of Hurricane Helene has made a complicated election look as mangled as Farmer’s house. What the disaster does to turnout, and with that to the candidates’ chances, could tip the race.Amid the wreckage of his home, Farmer is taking a philosophical approach. “Politics is like mother nature,” he said. “You just watch what it does from the sidelines, then deal with the consequences.”Though he plans to vote on 5 November, he is still not sure whether that will be for Trump or Harris. “Guess I’ll go with the lesser of the two evils – they’re both evil as far as I’m concerned,” he said.View image in fullscreenThe hurricane that struck on 26 September hit the Appalachian mountain region of western North Carolina hard, killing at least 96 people. Many roads are still closed and thousands of people have been displaced or remain without power and running water.More than 1.2 million voters live in the stricken region – about one in six of the state’s total electorate. The obvious fear is that turnout will be depressed.“Nobody’s talking about politics here, because it doesn’t matter,” said Shane Bare, 45, a local volunteer handing out donated coats. “If you can’t flush your toilet or get to your mailbox, you could care less about the election.”Bare expects he will vote in the end, probably for Trump, whom he doesn’t much like but thinks has the edge on economic policy.Other voters are more upbeat about the election. Kim Blevins shared her passion for Trump as she was picking up free tinned food and bottled water from a relief station in Creston.“If Trump doesn’t get in, it’s going to be worse than the hurricane,” she said. “It’ll be world war three. Kamala Harris wants to make us a communist country.”Harold Davis, 68, a Harris supporter salvaging lumber from the side of the river, told the Guardian that he also cares more than ever about the election. “It’s so important. Maga is really Mawa – Make America White Again – and the sooner we can get back to treating everyone as equals the better,” he said.For Trump, the stakes in North Carolina could not be greater. For decades, the state has veered Republican, only backing Democrats twice in almost half a century (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008).If Trump can take the state, as he did four years ago by a razor-thin 75,000 votes, along with Georgia and Pennsylvania, he will return to the White House. Without it, his path is uncertain.“It’s very hard for us to win unless we’re able to get North Carolina,” Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has said.Trump descended on North Carolina for two days this week, scrambling between Asheville in the storm zone to Greenville and Concord, and then Greensboro. He has been busily spreading lies about the hurricane response, accusing the Biden administration of refusing aid to Republican voters and falsely claiming that federal money has been redirected to house undocumented immigrants.His frenetic schedule and lies are perhaps indications of Trump’s anxieties about the impact of the hurricane on his electoral chances. Of the 25 counties hit by the disaster, 23 voted for Trump in 2020.“Outside the cities of Asheville and Boone, which are pretty Democratic, most of the hurricane area went strongly for Trump in 2020. So if turnout is down because of the disaster, it is likely to hit Trump most,” said David McLennan, a political scientist at Meredith College who runs the Meredith opinion poll.Republicans in the state have drawn comfort from the record-breaking early voting. In the first week of in-person early voting, almost 1.6 million people cast their ballots, surpassing the total crop of early votes in 2020.Four years ago, Republican early voting slumped in the wake of Trump’s false claims about rampant fraud. But this year’s record-smashing turnout suggests that the party has now put that behind it – Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied in their early voting numbers.“Despite all the challenges, people have shown they are determined to come and vote, a lot of them specifically against Kamala Harris,” said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina Republican party. “So we are feeling optimistic.”In the tranquil tree-lined suburbs on the north side of Charlotte, the effort to squeeze out every vote for Kamala Harris is entering its final heave. Here, sandwiched between the solidly Democratic city and the heavily Trumpian countryside, the suburban voters, women especially, could hold the key.Fern Cooper, 83, standing at the door of her detached suburban house, said she was powerfully motivated to vote because of her disdain for Trump. As a former New Yorker from the Bronx, she’s observed his flaws up close.She recalled how he was gifted huge sums of money from his real estate father; how he called for Black young men known as the Central Park Five to be executed for a rape they did not commit and for which they were later exonerated; how he treated his first wife, Ivana Trump, badly.“I know everything about Trump,” she said. “He’s not getting my vote.”Hannah Waleh, 66, is also all-in for Harris, for more positive reasons: “She will bring change, she is real, not a liar. She is for the poor and working-class people.”Waleh, a medical technician, has been urging her colleagues at her hospital and church to get out and vote early for the Democratic candidate: “I’m begging them. If everybody votes, I’m sure she will win.”View image in fullscreenShe might be right. The Meredith poll has tracked the extraordinary transformation in the race after Harris took over the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden.“Biden was losing North Carolina,” McLennan said. “Harris’s entry into the race returned the state to being 50-50 again – it’s back to being purple.”It is one thing bringing North Carolina back into contention and quite another to win. Part of the challenge is that, according to the poll, 2% of voters are still undecided, a tiny slice of the electorate that both campaigns are now frantically chasing.“I’ve never seen undecideds that low so close to the election,” McLennan said.They include Faith and Elizabeth, both 27, who have erected a 15ft Halloween skeleton on the lawn outside their house in the Charlotte suburbs. They told the Guardian that the most important issue, in their view, is abortion and the rights that women have already had taken away from them under Trump.And yet they still haven’t committed to voting for Harris. “We want to be certain,” Faith said.The Democrats are prioritising such suburban women, including those who formed part of the 23% of Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. They are doing so by focusing on abortion rights, with the Harris-Walz campaign warning that the state’s current restrictive 12-week abortion ban would be tightened under a Trump administration to a total nationwide abortion ban.They have also sought to tie Trump to extreme Republicans further down the ballot. The main target is the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who has described himself as a “Black Nazi” and has been revealed to have made extreme racist remarks.During the past 18 months, Democrats have invested in the state, opening 28 offices with more than 340 staffers. They have even pushed into rural counties that previously had been assumed to be beyond the party’s reach.“The Democrats have prioritized getting the party’s message out in more rural parts – on the grounds that a vote from rural areas is just as useful as from the city,” said Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Bolstering the party’s ground game is a vast alliance of non-profit progressive organizations such as the Black-led group Advance Carolina and Red Wine & Blue, which works with suburban women. The alliance, which playfully calls itself Operation We Save Ourselves, has a goal of knocking on 4m doors to promote candidates with progressive values – the largest independent program of its sort in North Carolina’s history.If hard work were all it took to win presidential elections, Harris would already have one foot inside the Oval Office. But anxieties continue to swirl around the Democratic ticket, led by concerns that early turnout from African American voters, who in past cycles have swung overwhelmingly Democratic, is lower this year than at the same stage four years ago (37% in 2020, compared with 20% today).As the months remaining until election day turn into days, and days into hours, the Harris-Walz campaign will be making last-ditch efforts to persuade Black voters to get out and vote – voters like Christian Swims, 21, a student at community college, who would be voting in his first presidential election.If he votes at all, that is.“I don’t follow the election much,” he said. “My friends don’t talk about it. People round here aren’t very political.”Or Joseph Rich, a Fedex worker, 28. “I don’t know too much about Trump and Kamala Harris,” he said. “I’ll read up on them, but now I’m not sure.”Time is running out for Democrats to connect with voters like Swims and Rich. Whether or not they succeed could make all the difference. More

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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More

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      Do we have any idea who will win the US election? No. Uncertainty is sky-high | Cas Mudde

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      It is generally believed that Americans only start to care about presidential elections one month before election day. Hence, it is only in the last month that polls become meaningful. If that is true, the polls don’t tell us too much yet.Despite the fact that Donald Trump has become openly authoritarian and racist – promising to jail his “enemies” and referring to immigrants as “cannibals” – the race is still too close to call. Almost all national polls have Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in the popular vote, but the difference is mostly within the so-called “margin of error” – meaning, in essence, that the difference is too small to be certain. So what should we look out for in the coming weeks?The polls: national v swing statesFirst of all, it is important to note that the US president is not directly elected. There is little doubt that Harris will win the popular vote – Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one of the presidential elections this century. But to become president, a candidate does not need to win the popular vote but the electoral college – ironically, given that the electoral college handed Trump the victory in 2016 and could do so again next month, the institution was introduced by the founders to protect the country from electing a “populist” president.So, rather than focusing on the national vote, we should focus on polls in so-called “swing states”. For the 2024 elections, these are expected to be the following seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Unsurprisingly, given that they are swing states, the polls are extremely close in all seven states. It is doubtful that this will change before election day on 5 November.The electoral coalitionTrump has the most homogeneous electoral coalition, consisting overwhelmingly of religious white voters. Over the last decades, predating Trump, the Republican party has become more evangelical, male and white. Although that demographic is decreasing as a percentage of the population, the enthusiasm for Trump within the group is high. Moreover, polls are indicating that Trump is picking up Hispanic and, to a lesser extent, (male) African American voters.The main worry for the Republican party are (suburban) white women, who have supported Trump in majority before. Since the Dobbs ruling put abortion back at the top of the agenda, and younger women are much more liberal than previous generations, white women could cost Trump the election – particularly if young white women vote in similar numbers as older generations.Although Harris has a larger potential electorate, it is also much more changing and heterogeneous as well as much harder to mobilize. Traditionally, the Democrats win large majorities of both African American and Hispanic voters as well as a large minority of white voters. Although Harris has brought back the enthusiasm lost under Joe Biden’s lackluster campaign and debate performance, and largely closed the gap with Trump, there are several groups that could cost her the elections.Hispanic voters have been moving to the Republican party for several years now, while a group of African American men seem unwilling to vote for a woman as president. And then there is Gaza, which has turned a lot of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans – as well as progressive white voters – off the Democratic party. In most of these cases, the question is not so much whether they will vote for Harris or Trump but rather whether they will vote for Harris or not vote at all.Election day will not be decision dayIf you think it is frustrating that the polls don’t give us a highly likely winner before election day, you will be even more frustrated to hear that you still will probably not know the winner on 5 November. Four years ago, most major networks only called the election on 7 November, four days after election day. It will almost certainly take even longer this year, as Republicans have introduced a host of measures to make it more difficult and slower to count the votes (such as hand counting).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd once the votes are finally counted, and particularly if they don’t hand Trump a victory, we can expect several institutional challenges to the results. Since their failed attempt to challenge the 2020 election, Republicans have tightened their grip on electoral boards and state courts, including in some swing states like Georgia. No wonder election experts have raised alarm that the vote counting and certifying will not just lead to delays but also to chaos.Post-electoral violence?Even when all the votes are counted, and the final result is certified, it is doubtful that the country will move on – particularly if Trump loses the election. This is in itself not that surprising: both Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, still do not recognize Biden’s election, while 57% of Republicans believe Biden’s election was “illegitimate”. Moreover, both Trump and Vance have indicated that they would not recognize a defeat in November, a position shared by almost half of Republican voters (and more than a quarter of Democratic voters).Unsurprisingly, there is a growing worry in the country about post-electoral violence, among both Democrats and Republicans. In fact, almost half of the population thinks it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the country would slip into a civil war! While the combination of conspiracy theories and a large number of (semi-automatic) weapons makes some post-electoral violence highly likely, I doubt we will see another insurrection, let alone a civil war. That said, there is little doubt we are in for a very tense period, which will last well beyond 5 November.

      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More

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      We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “But stupidity is not enough,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. The facts must be eliminated. “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” Followers must “forget that one has ever believed the contrary”. Memory must be erased. “This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” The past, like the facts, must be reinvented. “For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”At the very moment Trump delivered his remarks highlighting his campaign for a dictatorship, the Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming his motive. He reported that Trump, as president, had rebuked the US military command, stating: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”Then, Trump’s former chief of staff, the former general John Kelly, stepped from behind the curtain in an interview with the New York Times. “Certainly,” he said, “the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly added, the Times wrote, that “in his opinion, Mr Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law”.The warning of the generals against Trump’s fascism is unanimous among those who have served most closely with him. The former chair of the joint chiefs, the retired general Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward, in his new book War, that Trump was “fascist to the core”. Trump’s secretary of defense, the former general James Mattis, emailed Woodward to express his agreement with Milley that Trump was “the most dangerous person ever”, and “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.” It’s Defcon 1.In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole.View image in fullscreenBut Trump’s presidency was a rehearsal for fascism. Quite apart from his record of kleptocracy, allegedly pervasive corruption and obstructions of justice, pardons of criminal associates and dangling of pardons to insure their silence, contempt for the law, maniacal obsession with Hitler, who “did some good things”, scorn for military service (“suckers” and “losers”), worship of foreign tyrants, congenital lying, paranoid conspiracy mongering, disdain for climate science, willful neglect of public health, ignoring warnings and spreading falsehoods in the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, the organization and incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and indifference to the near-assassination of his vice-president by a mob he had unleashed (“So what?”), Trump systematically abused the Department of Justice to investigate, harass and prosecute his “enemies within”. Trump’s current rage is hardly a new threat. In a second term he intends to smash through the constraints that inhibited him in his first.The Just Security website of the New York University School of Law reports: “The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president.” Just Security distilled “A Dozen Times Trump Pushed to Prosecute His Perceived Enemies”, but there were many more.“The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the justice department,” Trump said on 2 November 2017. “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.”Trump’s years in office showed him on a learning curve of fascism. He saw democracy as a plot against him that he had to break down. Like a hotel burglar jimmying door locks, through trial and error he discovered how to turn the keys. He pushed and prodded looking for weaknesses and loopholes. He located the places where he encountered resistance. He felt for the limits and how to go beyond them. He found out who would deter him and who would enable him. He calculated the price of everyone. He discovered those whose craven ambition would serve him. He realized that ideology was a tool he could use like a crowbar. He absorbed the lessons of crime and punishment in order to commit greater crimes without punishment. His administration was a school for the making of a fascist.Trump was frustrated that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself so that he could not kill the former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign connections to the Russians. The Mueller report stated: “According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton …”After publicly attacking the justice department for not investigating “Crooked Hillary”, Trump succeeded in intimidating Sessions into naming a special counsel to investigate the already debunked conspiracy theory that Uranium One, a Canadian company, made a deal with the Russians in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. A grand jury was empaneled, issued subpoenas and prosecutors concluded there was no there there. But it was not until two years later that the case was closed without any charges on 15 January 2021, five days before Trump left office.Trump blamed the FBI for the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign. His paranoia morphed into ever widening conspiracy theories about the “deep state”. He fired the FBI director, James Comey, for not exonerating him. He forced the firing of the deputy director, Andrew McCabe, on 16 March 2018, two days before McCabe’s scheduled retirement. The justice department opened an investigation into whether McCabe illegally leaked information about the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation probes. The federal judge overseeing the McCabe case, Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, stated: “I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road …”The case against McCabe was dropped without charges on 14 February 2020, and his back pay and pension were restored.On 20 May 2018, Trump demanded a justice department investigation into a “deep state” conspiracy theory going all the way up to Barack Obama, in which Trump stated that “the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes” – “Spygate”. An investigation was opened. But on 11 December 2019, the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued a report stating that, contrary to Trump’s assertions, there was “no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any [confidential human sources] within the Trump campaign … ”On 23 August 2018, Trump declared that his appointment of Sessions was a terrible mistake. In response, Sessions issued a statement: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” The next day Trump tweeted a long list of his people he designated as enemies whom he demanded Session should investigate. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!” On 8 November, he forced Sessions to resign. The new attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, a compliant mid-level rightwing operative from Iowa, was a stand-in until William Barr took over in February 2019.Barr, who had been attorney general under George HW Bush, was advertised as a conservative Republican institutionalist. He knew how to game the system for the gamester in the interest of his own game. The cultural reactionary, on the board of the reactionary Opus Dei organization’s Washington DC front, the Catholic Information Center, believed he was using the depraved Trump in a crusade for the restoration of traditional morality. More importantly, Trump was the useful idiot to stock the federal bench with Federalist Society-stamped judges. Leonard Leo, chair of the Federalist Society, served on the Opus Dei group’s board with Barr.Barr was the adult in the room who became Trump’s enabler, enforcer and teacher. On 24 March 2019, Barr issued a letter pre-empting the release of the full Mueller report so that he could to distort its conclusions and present those distortions as truthful. He wrote that Trump’s campaign had not “conspired or coordinated” with the Russians, that Trump had fully cooperated with the investigation and that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice. He redacted and withheld from the public key sections of the report. “Mueller’s core premise – that the President acts ‘corruptly’ if he attempts to influence a proceeding in which his own conduct is being scrutinized – is untenable,” Barr wrote to justify his cover-up.View image in fullscreenThe US House of Representatives held Barr in contempt for withholding the full report. It revealed that Trump had committed 10 indictable obstructions of justice to keep evidence and witnesses from investigators, which neither Barr nor his Biden-appointed successor, Merrick Garland, ever prosecuted. The report identified 272 contacts between Trump agents and Russian operatives, not one of which Trump reported to the FBI. Judge Walton ruled that Barr had “distorted” and been “misleading” about the contents of the report. On 30 September 2020, he decided Barr had violated federal law and that the redacted sections should be released, which they were, only days before the 2020 election. But Barr was not about to open a prosecution of himself.The bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, released on 18 August 2020, disclosed literally hundreds of instances of Trump campaign involvement with Russian operations. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, regularly shared “sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy” with a Russian intelligence officer, Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he had a long relationship on behalf of Russian interests in Ukraine.One of Trump’s obstructions, cited by Mueller, was his dangling of pardons for Manafort, who was convicted of numerous tax and financial frauds, and for Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser convicted for lying to the FBI and not registering as a foreign agent. Trump was enticing them not to testify. Both stonewalled, and both received pardons.After Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime dirty trickster, was convicted of lying to the Congress and obstructing justice about acting as a conduit for Russian intelligence through WikiLeaks on hacked Clinton campaign documents, among other murky things, and sentenced to nine years in prison, Trump expressed outrage: “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them.” Barr instantly intervened to reduce the sentence. The four prosecutors on the case resigned in protest.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump tweeted: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!” Just before leaving office Trump would commute Stone’s sentence.Meanwhile, as soon as Barr assumed his post he revived the “Spygate” conspiracy theory, declared “spying did occur” and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate what Trump called an “attempted coup” against him. Trump denounced the Mueller investigation as “illegal”: “Everything about it was crooked – every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.”Barr appointed John Durham, the former US attorney for Connecticut, who spent four years trying to prove Trump’s accusation that the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Russian interference was a “hoax”, as Trump claimed. Durham’s chief prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, quit because she thought he was running a political operation and that Barr had “violated DoJ guidelines”. Durham interviewed nearly 500 witnesses, including Hillary Clinton, to determine “whether the conduct of these individuals or entities [with ties to the Clinton campaign] constituted a federal offense and whether admissible evidence would be sufficient to obtain a conviction for such an offense”.Durham’s two high-profile cases, against the attorney Michael Sussmann and the Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, resulted in embarrassing acquittals. Durham wound up convicting an FBI lawyer for altering an email in his effort to shortcut a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, for which he received probation and community service. Durham ended his snark hunt by criticizing the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference as “seriously flawed”, but without anything of consequence to show. Trump tweeted: “WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed …”For two years, Barr waged a war against Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, a Republican, who indicted Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on campaign finance charges for paying hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels to silence her about a sexual relationship with Trump. Trump clearly appeared in the indictment as Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1. Barr pressured Berman to reopen the case in order to toss it out. Berman refused.Barr then tried to strong-arm Berman at Trump’s instigation into indicting the former secretary of state John Kerry for trying to keep alive the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated during the Obama administration. Berman refused. Barr pushed Berman to indict Greg Craig, Obama’s former legal counsel, on flimsy charges of not registering as a foreign agent, in order to have a prominent Democrat’s scalp. Barr sent a deputy to tell Berman he should prosecute Craig to “even things out” before the election. Again, Berman refused.Barr moved the Craig case to the District of Columbia, where he leveraged an indictment. On 4 September 2019, the jury acquitted Craig in less than five hours. “Throughout my tenure as US attorney,” Berman wrote in a memoir, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining – in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired. I walked this tightrope for two and a half years. Eventually, the rope snapped.”Berman was conducting a criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney who had sought to fabricate dirt against Joe Biden in Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in exchange for Stinger missiles, which precipitated Trump’s first impeachment. On 19 June 2020, Barr announced Berman was resigning. It was news to him. He refused to go. Then, Trump fired him.After Trump lost the election of 2020, Barr was on board with Trump’s claim it was stolen, sending a memo to DoJ prosecutors to investigate “vote tabulation irregularities”. Sixteen assistant US attorneys resigned in protest. Later, Barr acknowledged, of Trump’s assertion that the election was fixed: “It was all bullshit.” On 14 December 2020, Trump attempted to get Barr’s involvement in the fake electors scheme. Barr declined to be ensnared in an obviously illegal act in a losing cause. He saved himself from becoming incriminated and resigned.Trump had already got whatever he wanted from Barr up to the last minute, when Barr’s instinct for personal self-preservation asserted itself. On the eve of 6 January, Barr relinquished the Tom Hagen role for his godfather. Trump was done with the disloyal consigliere. He turned to other helpers.After the January 6 insurrection, Barr accused Trump of a “betrayal of his office”. “All of a sudden, Bill Barr changed. You hadn’t noticed,” Trump remarked. Yet this past April, Barr endorsed Trump for re-election, explaining that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left.” Trump sneered: “Wow! Former AG Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him ‘Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy’. Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill.”The conservative majority on the US supreme court, three of whose members Trump appointed, rescued him from facing trial for January 6 before the 2024 election. Taking up Trump’s appeal, the court languidly spent months to render an opinion bestowing on him and future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts”. In its ruling, with a sharp understanding of Trump’s methods, the court stated that a president could order a sham investigation of his political enemies, if he wished, without any restraint or accountability.The decision was explicit in granting free license to political prosecutions: “The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”The court has ruled: Trump’s past efforts to stage “sham” show trials of his “enemies” and launch a coup involving the DoJ are above the law. His future dictatorship in which he could exact retribution from his “enemies within”, deploying the DoJ, has received advance approval.The supreme court’s immunity decision justifying Trump despotism, presented by Chief Justice John Roberts, was better explained in the twisted language of an apparatchik from the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984:“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”On 24 October of this month, Trump boasted about the unlimited power that he would possess once he is back in the White House. Speaking to the rightwing radio talkshow host Hugh Hewitt, he declared that he would at the start fire the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who has indicted him for his crimes of January 6 and stealing national security secrets. “We got immunity at the supreme court,” Trump said. “It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.” Trump would then have 86,398 seconds left to be a dictator on “day one”.

      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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      Trump fills Madison Square Garden with anger, vitriol and racist threats

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      Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.The event at Madison Square Garden, in the center of Manhattan, had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the arena in 1939. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, said there was a “direct parallel” between the two events, and the Democratic National Committee projected images on the outside of the building on Sunday repeating claims from Trump’s former chief-of-staff that Trump had “praised Hitler”.There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2m US citizens, as an “island of garbage”; Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ racial identity; a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a “sick bastard”; and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump’s declaring that Harris is “the antichrist”.The Puerto Rico comments, made by Tony Hinchliffe, a podcaster with a history of racist remarks, were immediately criticized by the Harris-Walz campaign. Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican popstar who has more than 18m followers on Instagram, wrote in a post: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez in a statement said “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”View image in fullscreenBut that could prove problematic in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the swing state’s 580,000 eligible Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. Both campaigns have been trying to appeal to Latino voters in the final weeks of the campaign, and Harris had visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, where she outlined plans to introduce an “economic opportunity taskforce” for Puerto Rico.The pugnacious mood didn’t change once Trump began speaking, as the former president quickly repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”.Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square”, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark. The former president also stated, wrongly, that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because “they spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes”.Trump’s usual dystopian threats were on offer, as the 78-year-old expanded on his claims about “the enemy within” – a group of political opponents that he has said he will set the military on if elected.“We’re just not running against Kamala. I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing, she’s purely a vessel that’s all she is,” Trump said.“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party. They’re just vessels.”Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden – home to the New York Knicks and Rangers, and venue for countless legendary acts including Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Lennon’s last concert appearance before his murder – marks the culmination of his peculiar love-hate flirtation with his native city. Despite the fact that he has no chance of winning New York state – Harris is 15 points ahead in the Five Thirty Eight tracker poll – this was his third rally here this year.View image in fullscreenIn May he made an audacious attempt to woo Black and Latino voters in the south Bronx, just a few miles from his childhood home in Queens. Then in September, he pitched up in the New York City suburbs in Long Island.What Trump intends by staging this trilogy of seemingly pointless electoral appearances is unclear. He has used his rambling speeches to take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to what he sees as the golden days of his life as a New York real estate magnate.But he has also portrayed New York City in the most dark and dystopian terms, as a rat-infested haven for drug addicts, gangs and “illegal aliens” housed in luxury apartments while military veterans shiver on the sidewalks. His toxic language is perhaps a reflection of his bitterness towards the city of his birth, which in separate court cases has convicted him of 34 felonies, found his company the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud, and found him personally liable for sexual abuse.On Sunday Trump again criticized his home town, claiming that the Biden administration had forced “hundreds of thousands of really rough people” into the city and telling New Yorkers, despite police saying crime has declined: “Your crime is through the roof. Everything is through the roof.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe pugnacious tone had been set earlier in the afternoon, when several of the opening speakers made obscenity-laced and hate-filled remarks.Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico – he also made lewd sexual innuendos about Latina women – were met with big laughs from the crowd. A comment from radio personality Sid Rosenberg that Hillary Clinton is a “sick bastard” was similarly well received, as was Rosenberg’s claim that “the fucking illegals get everything they want”.David Rem, a Republican politician who the Trump campaign described as a childhood friend of the former president, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”, to loud cheers. Rem later took a crucifix out of his pocket and announced that he was running for New York City mayor.View image in fullscreenAs soon as Trump announced his intention to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden just days before the election, critics leapt to point out historical parallels with one of the most notorious events in New York history. On 20 February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, the pro-Hitler German American Bund held a mass Nazi rally in the exact same arena.The organizers chose George Washington’s birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism. They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the stars and stripes.More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathisers attended, many dressed in storm trooper uniforms and giving the Sieg Heil salute. The “Führer” of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be “returned to the people who founded it”, and decried the “Jewish controlled press”.Hillary Clinton had noted the similarities between the two events in an interview with CNN last week, and at a rally in Nevada earlier on Sunday, Walz was happy to continue the comparison.“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said.“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”The Trump campaign reacted furiously to the accusations, describing Clinton’s comments as “disgusting”. One of the few people to reference the 1939 rally on Sunday was Hulk Hogan, who emerged to wrestling music, spent several seconds struggling to rip off his shirt, then claimed: “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.After a night of fire and fury, it will be up to the American voters to decide. More

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      Racist remarks and playing to the base: key takeaways from Trump’s MSG rally

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      Donald Trump reveled in what advisers called his happy place at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, as he enveloped himself in the adulation ahead of the final stretch of campaigning until the November election.The capacity rally at the Garden – something Trump had talked about for years – was essentially a reboot of the Republican national convention this summer, widely seen as Trump’s most confident moment.Trump had the more polished speakers from the convention double down on crude and xenophobic rhetoric, while he had Hulk Hogan rip his shirt on stage again, and got Melania Trump to appear again.The rally was a safe space for Trump and the campaign to lean into their most caustic impulses: speakers falsely saying Kamala Harris allowed migrants to “rape and kill” Americans or questioning whether Harris was Black or “Samoan-Malaysian”.There was nothing about trying to broaden his base. The rhetoric of Trump and his speakers was designed to give the crowd what they wanted to hear, doubling down on immigration rhetoric which Trump thinks his supporters love to hear the most.That disinterest to reach undecided voters by moderating the rhetoric also underscored the confidence of the Trump team with fewer than nine days until the election – they have long seen their path to victory as juicing turnout.The Trump team in recent days have in hushed whispers suggested privately they might even get close to winning the popular vote, which Trump lost in 2016, describing him as a comeback story with momentum on his side.Here are the key takeaways from perhaps Trump’s final major rally before election day:1. Racist and crude remarksTrump’s warm-up speakers appeared to feel particularly emboldened to take shots at Latinos and African Americans at the rally, in an apparent attempt to copy the former president.From the very first speaker, Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of the Kill Tony podcast, there was a push to stoke racial animus. Latinos “love making babies … there’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country.”He added: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”The radio host Sid Rosenberg leaned into attacking Democrats, using ad hominem slurs to describe Hillary Clinton – a villain to Trump supporters who lapped it up.“Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. A bunch of degenerates. Lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of ‘em. Every one of ‘em,” Rosenberg said.And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who lost his prime time perch in the wake of the network getting sued for defamation over promulgating false 2020 election fraud claims, went after Kamala Harris.“As the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ, former California prosecutor to ever be elected president,” Carlson falsely said in a mocking tone of Harris’s racial background. “No, she’s not impressive.”2. Anti-immigration rhetoricTrump himself doubled down on his anti-immigration rhetoric, promising to pursue the death penalty for migrants who kill an American and that he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.Trump’s actual border plans are filled with rhetoric but light on details. For instance, he has pledged mass deportations without saying how it would logistically happen or how it would be funded. The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries with which the US is at war, that have invaded the country or have engaged in “predatory incursions” – but it requires a link to actions by a foreign government.But Trump has noted to advisers his crowds seem most energized when he talks about deporting illegal immigrants, and his speech repeatedly veered back to immigration even as he touched on other campaign messaging.3. Light on economic agendaTrump kept himself disciplined enough to throw out a new economic promise as he competes with Harris to increase disposable incomes for Americans: to introduce a new tax credit for family caregivers.He also promised to cut energy prices in half if he was re-elected and to lower corporate tax rates for businesses.Trump was again light on details for his economic agenda, given changes to the tax code would require the approval of Congress and it is unclear whether Republicans will retain control of the House or take the Senate majority. More

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      Trump to speak at Madison Square Garden after Harris rallies in Philadelphia – US politics live

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      Hulk Hogan, the retired WWE wrestler, has taken the stage, sporting yellow sunglasses and a red “Trump-Vance” tank top. He took a few jabs at Vice President Kamala Harris.“Kamala is responsible for the border crisis, and Kamala is also responsible for inflation,” he said. “She acts like she’s the victim, and then all of a sudden, she flips, she flops, she spins and turns it around and acts like she’s gonna be the damn hero.”The disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is expressing his support for former president Donald Trump at a campaign event in New York City.“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said about Trump. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us, and that’s the single most liberating thing you can do for people.”Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in that order, took the stage at Donald Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. Ramaswamy made transphobic remarks, while Gabbard listed some of the ways she believes Vice President Kamala Harris will harm the country.“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for economic hardship, high cost of living, poverty and homelessness,” Gabbard said. “And a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for economic prosperity and opportunity for every single one of us as Americans.”So far, the speakers at Donald Trump’s rally in New York City have resorted to lewd language and racist remarks in their speeches.A stand-up routine from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, for example, was filled with racist stereotypes of Latinos, Jews and Black people.“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said Hinchcliffe, whose joke was flagged by Democrat Kamala Harris’ campaign.Speaker Mike Johnson made an appearance at Donald Trump’s rally in New York City.He said he felt a resurgence of the Republican party and pointed to a widespread dissatisfaction with current policies under the Biden administration.“We’re in a battle between two completely different visions for who we are as a nation and who we’re going to be,” Johnson said. ‘“This is not your father’s Democratic Party. They are now full on Marxism and socialism.”The vice-president said she would create an “opportunity economy taskforce” in efforts to foster economic growth in the Caribbean archipelago by creating more jobs.She also recognized the need to urgently rebuild Puerto Rico’s energy grid. The US territory is still facing the aftermath of several hurricanes that ravaged the power grid. Puerto Rico is also undergoing the effects of austerity measures imposed by a non-elected fiscal board after the local government filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.“I will cut red tape to ensure disaster recovery funds are used quickly and effectively, and work with leaders across the island to ensure all Puerto Ricans have access to reliable, affordable electricity,” she said.“I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and incompetent leader,” she said. “He abandoned the island, tried to block aid after back-to-back devastating hurricanes and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults,” she added.Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, wrapped up her nearly 15-minute speech in Philadephia.She encouraged the crowd to convince their families and friends to get out and vote, using similar phrases to those in her campaign ads.“There is too much on the line, and we must not wake up the day after the election and have any regrets about what we could have done in these next nine days,” she said.Vice President Kamala Harris directed her remarks toward younger voters in the Pennsylvania crowd.“Is Gen Z in the house?” she asked. “You are rightly impatient for change. You are rightly impatient. You who have only known the climate crisis, you are leaders in what we need to do to protect our planet.”
      “You, who grew up with active shooter drills,” she said. “You, who right now know fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers understand the importance of fighting for the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”
      The Vice President spoke about the war in Gaza less than five minutes into her speech.“We must seize this opportunity to end this war and bring the hostages home,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to meet that end.”Jacob Roberts, a 26-year-old voter from Westchester attending Harris’ rally in North Philadelphia, has already voted early for her.He told the Guardian that he feels optimistic about the outcome of the election, even as polls show a tied race in Pennsylvania.“I’m seeing a lot of Kamala yard signs around,” Roberts said. “I actually just drove out to western Pennsylvania. I didn’t see a lot of Trump signs on barns or anything, so I think we’re looking good.”Asked whether he was disappointed to miss some of the Eagles game to attend the rally, Roberts said it was well worth it.“This is our country we’re talking about,” Roberts said.Brenda Exon, a 60-year-old voter from Wallingford known as the “Philly Pride Lady,” is at Kamala Harris’ rally in Philadelphia with her “timeline to liberty” apron.The apron tells the story of Philadelphia, from the founding of Pennsylvania to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the civil rights movement.“Our Philly story is our nation’s story, and that’s what we’re fighting for really. We don’t want Donald Trump to take this away,” Exon said.“We’re coming up on our 250th [anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence], and who should be president celebrating that in 2026? Kamala Harris.”Trump approved Rudy Giuliani to be on the stage tonight at the Madison Square Garden rally, according to a person familiar.Giuliani walked into the stage at the Trump rally to the loudest cheers so far of the event and a standing ovation from a capacity Madison Square Garden.Giuliani opened by referencing when Pope John Paul came to NY in 1995, a visit Giuliani presumably recalls because it took place while he was mayor.It’s the kind of anecdote that will play well with most of the crowd here but there are many younger Trump supporters here who have no idea what that’s about.Governor Tim Walz joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, on a Twitch livestream as the two played the American football video game Madden and talked about the election.The unconventional campaign appearance comes as the Harris-Walz campaign tries to drum up support among young male voters. In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez’s first appearance on Twitch was one of the platform’s most-watched events at that time.Here’s Michael Sainato with more on the stream:On the six-year anniversary of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff have released statements acknowledging the mass shooting.“Six years ago today, a white supremacist committed the deadliest attack on American Jews in our nation’s history,” Emhoff wrote. “We honor the lives of those lost on that horrific day by continuing our fight against antisemitism and hate in all its forms.”A federal judge blocked the state of Virginia from removing suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls, CNN reported.The court cited potential violations of a federal ban on “systematic” removals within 90 days of an election.The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision paves the way for a potential Supreme Court battle as early voting begins in Virginia. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have rallied around the case, arguing that noncitizen voting is a significant election risk, despite its rarity.The order clarifies that Virginia can still prevent noncitizen voting by canceling registrations on an individual basis or prosecuting noncitizens who vote.Today so farThanks for joining us this morning. As I hand over to my colleague Coral Murphy Marcos, here are the main headlines we’ve been following today so far:

      In a bevy of Sunday morning talk show appearances, JD Vance defended Donald Trump against claims from former Trump staffers that the ex-president has authoritarian tendencies. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris described her choice to deliver her closing argument speech at The Ellipse, Lindsey Graham denounced attacks against Trump’s character and Bernie Sanders said Trump has “strong tendency toward authoritarianism”.

      This morning, Kamala Harris campaigned “neighborhood-to-neighborhood” in Philadelphia, kicking off the morning by attending services at a predominantly Black church before heading to a nearby barbershop to speak with young Black men. She’ll be stopping at a Puerto Rican restaurant later this afternoon before speaking at a rally this evening.

      Supporters of Donald Trump’s have already begun gathering at Madison Square Garden as the ex-president prepares to deliver his closing arguments there. Campaigning in Nevada today, Tim Walz has criticized the rally as “a direct parallel” to a Nazi rally held at the venue in 1939.

      Following the news that the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times will not endorse a presidential candidate this year, the New York Times opinion section has published a full page image reminding readers that it endorsed Kamala Harris last month. Earlier this week, our own editorial page strongly endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

      In the final days of the 2024 election, Harris’s campaign has slowballed Joe Biden’s offers to campaign for his vice-president, Axios reports. More

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      ‘We have to blow it up’: can never-Trumpers retake the Republican party?

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      The former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney “hopes to be able to rebuild” the Republican party after Donald Trump leaves the political stage. Mitt Romney, the retiring Utah senator and former presidential nominee, reportedly hopes so too.Among other prominent Republicans who refuse to bow the knee, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan is running for a US Senate seat in a party led by Trump but insists he can be part of a post-Trump GOP.“I think there are a lot of people that are very frustrated with the direction of the party and some of them are giving up,” Hogan told the Guardian. “I think we’ve got to stand up and try to take the Republican party back and eventually get us back on track to a bigger tent, more [Ronald] Reagan’s party, that can win elections again.”Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair turned MSNBC host, advocated more dramatic action: “We have to blow this crazy-ass party up and have it regain its senses, or something else will be born out of it. There are only two options here. Hogan will be a key player in whatever happens. Liz Cheney, [former congressmen] Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh – all of us who have been pushed aside and fortunately were not infected with Maga, we will have something to say about what happens on 6 November.”That’s the day after election day, when Trump will face Kamala Harris. If Trump wins, all bets will be off. If he loses, the never-Trumpers could try to reclaim their party. Few are under any illusions about the size of the task.“It’s going to take somewhere between six, eight, 10 years to defeat the Maga piece of the party resoundingly and definitively,” said Reed Galen, son of the late GOP stalwart Rich Galen. Galen is an adviser to George W Bush and John McCain, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and now running Join the Union, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.“If you think about it, 85% of Republican primary voters this year voted for Trump. Now, is that bad for somebody who owns the party and is a former president? Yeah, electorally, it could be. But it also says that the people who actually choose nominees are Maga, right?“Do I think there will be some erosion if Trump loses? Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to be below 50% and I don’t think that anybody who considers themselves a diehard Republican or a Maga Republican is looking to go back to the days of George W Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or even Nikki Haley.“If the establishment, such as it is, wants its party back, then it’s going to have to do some pretty serious work to destroy the parts of it that are anti-democratic and fundamentally dangerous to the country. I don’t know, based on their track record, whether they’re willing to do that. Frankly, I don’t think they are. I think they’re going to try and figure out how to survive long enough that maybe the thing burns itself out on its own.”Among elected or formerly elected Republicans with national profiles, Cheney has gone furthest, campaigning for Harris in battleground states. Romney has stayed quiet. He might thus seem better positioned to shape a post-Trump party but Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist turned publisher of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, recently called his stance “genuinely insane”.View image in fullscreenShe said: “‘I can’t come out and endorse Kamala Harris because I have to maintain some juice to help rebuild the Republican party?’ No.”Trump and Trumpists’ grip on Romney’s party is too strong, Longwell said, to allow for such passivity.Cheney has hinted at interest in building a new rightwing party, telling an audience in Wisconsin that “it may well be [necessary] because … so much of the Republican party today has allowed itself to become a tool for this really unstable man”. But starting afresh would be tremendously difficult, not least because rightwing donors and advocacy groups have so successfully capitalized on Trump’s capture of the GOP, achieving epochal policy wins, not least the removal of the federal right to abortion.Galen said: “All of the people who built all of these front groups, whether the Heritage Foundation [originator of the controversial Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term] or the Conservative Partnership Institute, or [the dark money impresario] Leonard Leo, all these people have spent decades and billions of dollars building out this stuff. It’s not like they’re simply going to fold up their tent and say, ‘You guys in the establishment, take your party back.’ These people are true believers.”So are the younger donors, strategists and elected officials now led by JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator who once opposed Trump but became his vice-presidential pick with backing from billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.“The worst kept secret in the world is that JD Vance or [Texas senator] Ted Cruz or [Missouri senator] Josh Hawley all desperately want Trump to lose, because they want their shot,” Galen said. “Trump is [nearly] 80. They’re in their 40s, maybe early 50s, and they want him to go the hell away.“But even if he loses, they can’t separate themselves from them him completely. They they may try but the truth is we’re talking not just about the Republican party, but the American body politic. This a decade-long program, at least, to get this thing back into some sort of healthy state.“Beating Donald Trump is like surviving a car crash. It doesn’t mean you’re not in the hospital, and it doesn’t mean you’re OK. It just means that they got the jaws of life out and they yanked you out of the car.”To Galen, wondering if the Republican establishment can take back its party is ultimately a waste of time – with the emphasis on “time”. Cheney is 58, Hogan 68, Romney will be 78 next year. Mike Pence, the vice-president Trump abandoned to the mob on January 6 but who stays quiet, is 65 himself.“They’re the dinosaurs of the Republican party,” Galen said. “The comet has hit, the cloud has covered, it’s just a matter of accepting your fate.”In his late 40s, Galen professes energy for the fight to come. Nonetheless, he describes a sobering recent experience in London, when he sat with “Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera, and he was battering some Trump spokesperson in a debate”. That was fun, but Galen had a confrontation of his own. One of the panel participants, a younger Trump supporter, leaned over and told him: “You know, we killed your party, and we couldn’t be happier about it.”“The Republican party is a nationalist, nativist party,” Galen said. “All of this stuff that I grew up with as far as the party was concerned, the idea of moral and muscular foreign policy, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty?“All that stuff’s gone. It’s gone.” More