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      What I learned when Turning Points USA came to my campus | Cas Mudde

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      This Tuesday, Charlie Kirk brought his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour to the campus of my public university in a Republican-controlled state. It was nothing like the last time Kirk and his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization had visited. Although the different timing matters – this was literally two weeks before election day – the differences between the 2018 and 2024 events in many ways reflect the dangerous radicalization of the US right wing.In 2018, Kirk had a fairly similar agenda when coming to my university: “exposing leftist lies and progressive propaganda” at US universities. I wrote a column about the rather bland event, describing it as a “rightwing safe space”, in which Kirk railed against the “cultural Marxists”. Most students seemed more amused than aggrieved. How different this week’s event was.When I came to campus early, I saw them set up their stands. I drank my coffee opposite to a lone female student with a Trump hat – a rare sight even at my university. I then went to teach my course on far-right politics, where TPUSA’s event was the talk of the class. I told my students that I totally understood if they wanted to observe the event – who am I to stand in the way of them getting “de-brainwashed”? – and approximately half of my students indeed left halfway through class to attend the event.After class, I walked down to Tate Plaza, the open space in front of the student center, and was perplexed by the sight. I saw what looked like a sea of Maga hats on the large open space. I bumped into one of my students, who told me that TPUSA handed out the Maga hats for free, and that he was leaving because you couldn’t hear anything anyway. In the background Kirk was droning on about Kamala Harris, wokeism and his other favorite enemies. But there was something to the meeting, an energy that was lacking six years ago. This was not just a safe space, this was a boisterous and proud rally!Sure, almost anyone wearing their own Maga hat was older and not related to the university, but a couple hundred students happily accepted and wore the hat. Moreover, most kept them on when they left the rally, and went to the food court, to class or even downtown. Turns out that a hat that is the most recognizable symbol of support for a man that has been loudly and openly authoritarian and racist in the last months is a rather cool gimmick for privileged young white men.View image in fullscreenThere are important broader lessons to be drawn from the differences between these two TPUSA events. First, the 2024 meeting shows the radicalization of conservative America. While Turning Point was already supportive of Trump in 2018, it still had a largely independent program, ostensibly focused on traditional conservative values as small government and capitalism. In the past years, Kirk has not only fully embraced the authoritarian and nativist agenda of Trump, he and his organization have pivoted to full-on Christian nationalism.Second, Turning Point USA targets college and high school students, that is, those 21 and under. These kids and young adults have been socialized in a world in which 1 Trump is a former president; 2 the Republican party is the party of Trump; and 3 the US Capitol got stormed by Trump sympathizers. For those raised in Republican households, which means most of the students at my university, this means that Trump and the far right are completely normal. What we see as far right, they see as mainstream conservatism. They have no conception of the Republican party of George Bush Sr or Jr.Third, radicalized organizations like TPUSA have overtaken the role of mainstream conservative organizations such as the College Republicans, not just on campus but also as training grounds for the next “conservative” elite. Kirk has literally been training the cadres for the next Trump administration, should it happen. This is a very different kind of “Republican”, if they are Republicans at all. They are more assertive and extremist but less tied to traditional conservative organizations, including the Republican party.Fourth, and most optimistically, the sea of Maga hats also gave me a shimmer of hope for the upcoming election. Since Trump’s shock 2016 win, the media has obsessed about “shy Trump supporters”, that is, people who support Trump in the elections but do not say so in polls because of social desirability. Although empirical evidence has always been weak, the “shy Trump voter” never disappeared from the public debate. Seeing these students wear the Maga hats, not for fun or provocation, but as a “normal” expression of support for the “conservative” candidate in the presidential election, confirmed my suspicion that there are no “shy Trumpers” left in 2024.And, if this is true, there might still be hope, in the sense that the current polls are overrepresenting the Trump vote, because they are overcompensating for a dated phenomenon, the shy Trump voter, yet another victim of the normalization of Trump.

      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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      Trump escalates insults against Harris as he faces scrutiny over alleged praise of Hitler

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      Donald Trump escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris at a Wednesday evening rally in Georgia as he faces growing scrutiny over reports of his praise of Hitler and alleged sexual misconduct.“This woman is crazy,” the former president said at an event in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, hosted by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group. He said voters should stand up to the vice-president and tell her: “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”, later adding: “She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.”The rally, less than two weeks before election day, came after the Guardian published an interview with a former model who accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in 1993 after notorious sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein introduced them, an allegation the Trump campaign denied. Stacey Williams said it felt as if the unwanted touching was part of a “twisted game” between the two men and that it appeared Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

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      Williams’s account put the spotlight back on the roughly two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct throughout his career. Harris, campaigning with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has sought to encourage Republican women to support the Democrat.The Georgia rally also came after Harris’s surprise speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, when she denounced the former president as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, told the New York Times this week that he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. He also said Trump repeatedly commented: “Hitler did some good things, too.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a characteristically rambling speech, Trump went on meandering tangents about Google (“Google is treating us much better. Do you notice that? What happened to Google?”); McDonald’s (“McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that [Google] ever had”); Emmanuel Macron (“I stopped wars with France”); Richard Nixon (“That was not good when they found out he taped every single conversation”); and the vice-president’s name (“You can’t call her ‘Harris’ because nobody knows who the hell you’re talking about”).He threatened to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes, repeating false claims that the station manipulated Harris’s interview after Trump backed out of his planned interview with the program. He reiterated the threat a second time about an hour later in his speech.Robert F Kennedy Jr, former independent presidential candidate, also rallied for Trump in Georgia, calling Kelly a “known liar”. Trump did not address Kelly at the rally, but on Truth Social called his former chief of staff a “LOWLIFE” and “total degenerate”.In a “faith-focused” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia earlier on Wednesday, Trump praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has been condemned for undermining democratic institutions and aligning with Moscow and Beijing.Asked about his faith, Trump responded: “When you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that.” He went on to falsely suggest he has endured more investigations than notorious gangster Al Capone. More

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      China-linked bots targeting Republicans including Marco Rubio in run-up to election, Microsoft says

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      An army of Chinese-controlled social media bots is attempting to influence voters in Alabama, Texas and Tennessee, while denigrating US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, according to new research published on Wednesday by Microsoft.The operation represents a coordinated interference effort against down-ballot races, experts say, in which the fake accounts are denigrating representative Barry Moore of Alabama, representative Michael McCaul of Texas, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Rubio, all Republicans.The troll network has “parroted antisemitic messages, amplified accusations of corruption and promoted opposition candidates”, according to Microsoft.The group allegedly responsible is known as Taizi Flood, which has been previously associated with China’s Ministry of Public Security, researchers say. The lawmakers were each targeted because they had denounced Chinese government policies historically, the report noted.A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington said China “has no intention and will not interfere in the US election” and that such claims are “full of malicious speculations”.Among other things, the bots criticised Moore’s support for Israel and used antisemitic language. Another collective of related accounts claimed Rubio was part of a financial corruption scheme.The bots amplified support for Blackburn’s election rival while spreading claims she took money from pharmaceutical companies. With McCaul, they pushed narratives that he engaged in insider trading.A spokesperson for Moore, Madison Green, said his office was aware of the campaign.“We know that the CCP is antisemitic, so it isn’t surprising that they are targeting me and other politicians who support Israel to try to sow division in advance of the most important election in our lifetime,” said Moore, referring to the Chinese Communist party.“China has made it clear they will use every weapon in their arsenal, including offensive cyber capabilities, to try and destroy democracy across the world,” he added.In an emailed statement, McCaul said he considered the targeting a “badge of honour” as he’s made “standing up to the CCP a central part of my career”.Spokespeople for the other two lawmakers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is coordinating the federal effort to defend the election from foreign influence, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Moore, McCaul and Blackburn are all running for re-election next month. Rubio, who serves as vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, is not up for re-election until 2028.The Microsoft researchers found the influence effort did not result “in high levels of engagement”. The report did not provide any metrics for how many Americans viewed the relevant social media posts. More

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      US warns Musk’s Super Pac $1m-a-day giveaways may be illegal, reports say

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      The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and the New York Times said. The justice department and Musk’s America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.South African-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House. More

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      The Guardian view on the US presidential election 2024: a Democratic government is the one we need

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      The mood may be one of despair. But this election is critical to the country’s future? The best hope lies with Kamala. Only her government can shape the future we want to see
      It is hard to imagine a worse candidate for the American presidency in 2024 than Donald J Trump. His history of dishonesty, hypocrisy and greed makes him wholly unfit for the office. A second Trump term would erode the rule of law, diminish America’s global standing and deepen racial and cultural divides. Even if he loses, Mr Trump has shown that he will undermine the election process, with allies spreading unfounded conspiracy theories to delegitimise the results.There are prominent Republicans – such as the former vice-president Dick Cheney – who refused to support Mr Trump owing to the threat he poses. Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Mr Trump, calls his former boss a “fascist”. America was founded in opposition to absolute monarchy. The Republican nominee models himself after the leader he most admires: Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin.Mr Trump’s authoritarianism may finish US democracy. He has praised and promised to pardon those convicted in the January 6 insurrection. He has suggested bypassing legal norms to use potentially violent methods of repression, blurring the lines between vigilantism, law enforcement and military action, against groups – be they Democrats or undocumented immigrants – he views as enemies.His team has tried to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its extreme proposals – such as mass firings of civil servants and erasing women’s rights – that poll poorly. But it is likely that, in office, Mr Trump would adopt many of these intolerant, patriarchal and discriminatory plans. He aims to dismantle the government to enrich himself and evade the law. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, House and White House, he would interpret it as a mandate to silence his critics and entrench his power.Mr Trump is a transactional and corrupting politician. His supporters see this as an advantage. Christian nationalists want an authoritarian regime to enforce religious edicts on Americans. Elon Musk wants to shape the future without regulatory oversight. Both put self-interest ahead of the American people. Democracy erodes slowly at first, then all at once. In office, Mr Trump appointed three supreme court justices, who this summer blocked efforts to hold him accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election: their immunity ruling renders the president “a king above the law”, in the words of the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor.A historic presidentSince Kamala Harris stepped into the spotlight following Joe Biden’s exit, her campaign has been a masterclass in political jujitsu, deftly flipping Mr Trump’s perceived strengths into glaring weaknesses. With a focus on joy, the vice-president sharply contrasted with Mr Trump’s grim narrative of US decline. In their sole televised debate, Ms Harris skillfully outmaneuvered Mr Trump, who fell into her traps, appearing angry and incoherent. She is confident and composed. He sounds unhinged.The Trump agenda threatens to dismantle voting rights, women’s rights and minority rights – not just reversing decades of social progress but burying it. Mr Trump was behind the shredding of reproductive rights. The conservative forces rallying to him are now intent on imposing a national abortion ban, with – should he win – dire implications for IVF and birth control. Republicans have been hurt in the polls by being associated with such unpopular policies – a weak spot that Ms Harris should keep exploiting.The vice-president has energised Democrats with savvy media appearances while appealing to swing voters. Progressives, determined to defeat Mr Trump, remain committed to freedom and equality. But Ms Harris has disappointed those who have urged her to take a stand on US complicity in Israel’s bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Downplaying war crimes, as arms flow to Israel, has already harmed Democratic chances in key swing states like Michigan.In a political system where style often rivals substance, perception is crucial. While Ms Harris hasn’t made her race and gender central to her campaign, her victory would be historic: she would be the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be president. Symbolism matters to her base. Her candidacy rallied key constituencies – the young, women, African Americans and Hispanics – who were cooling on Mr Biden. This election is a leap of faith in Ms Harris, who offers a sense of possibility for the future, while Mr Trump clings to a reactionary past.Protecting democracyDespite his criminal conviction and being declared a rapist by a judge, Mr Trump remains dangerously close to reclaiming the presidency. Many voters still back a man who was the worst US president ever. But probably not a majority of US voters. Republicans benefit from a skewed electoral system: Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one election since 1992, and secured the overall popular majority for the Senate in every six-year cycle since 1996. Yet the country has often been led by Republican presidents and a GOP-controlled Senate, and therefore a Republican-dominated supreme court. In a close race in November, that could mean Mr Trump doesn’t need to win the election – just a court case.Mr Biden has been a transformational political figure, but he didn’t transform the country. He aimed to tackle inequality, broken public services and the climate crisis with a $4tn plan funded by taxing the rich. His goal was to restore his party’s political credibility by marrying social liberalism with economic justice. But corporate influence and the Democrats’ slim Senate majority shrank his ambitions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shifted his focus to national security, as America experienced rising prices. However, Mr Biden made historic investments to green the economy and refocused industrial policy to take on China. Ms Harris’s plans aim to recapture the spirit of Mr Biden’s insurgency.The US economy is stronger than it has been in decades, yet Mr Trump consistently outpolls Ms Harris on economic issues. This perhaps reflects decades of neoliberalism. Real wages for blue-collar workers have stagnated since the 1970s, while inflation-adjusted house prices have doubled. Polls show 70% of Americans feel significant political and economic reform is needed, putting Democrats at a disadvantage as they are linked to the status quo.Political hope fades when we settle for what is, instead of fighting for what could be. Ms Harris embodies the conviction that it’s better to believe in democracy’s potential than to surrender to its imperfections. The Republican agenda is clear: voter suppression, book bans and tax cuts for billionaires. Democrats seek global engagement; the GOP favours isolation. The Biden-Harris administration laid the groundwork for a net zero America. A Trumpian comeback would undo it. A Harris win, with a Democratic Congress, means a chance to restore good governance, create good jobs and lead the entire planet’s climate efforts. Defeating Mr Trump protects democracy from oligarchy and dictatorship. There is too much at stake not to back Ms Harris for president. More

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      Trump’s proposal for mass deportation of immigrants is a moral abomination | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know any better, you might think, from recent media coverage, that the problem with Donald Trump’s proposal to round up and expel as many as 20 million immigrants is that it’s not likely to work.The Republican presidential nominee has made the mass deportation pledge central to his case for a second term. On the campaign trail, he diverts every question, no matter what the issue, back to the supposed danger and malignancy of immigrants and the urgency of getting rid of them. The economy? It will be better when there are fewer immigrants competing for jobs, he says. Housing prices? They’ll come down when millions of people are kicked out of the country, he claims. Crime will come down when the immigrants are gone, he says, because murder is “in their genes”.The vision he is offering is profoundly racist: Trump’s proposal, which is not limited to undocumented immigrants, is based on the assumption that nonwhite people are the cause of all of the US’s problems, and that everything that is wrong will be made right as soon as they’re gone. His proposed solution to everything – from crime to housing costs to inflation – is to deploy the armed forces to literally round up our friends, family members and neighbors by the millions, in a vast program of ethnic cleansing.It is a terrifying, horrifically immoral, and contemptibly bigoted proposal; racist, indifferent to humanity, and hostile to the principles of pluralism and equality. If it was enacted, it would be among the worst human rights catastrophes of all time. It would destroy families and lives, tear communities apart, inculcate ethnic hatred and distrust. To be accomplished, it would also practically require tremendous amounts of violence and force. Some of those marked for forced removal would hide, and some of their friends would turn them in. Worksites and immigrant neighborhoods would be raided, as cops flooded in and innocent people scattered. Mothers and fathers would be ripped from the arms of their screaming children. There is no other way to accomplish what Trump wants to accomplish: what he is proposing would require atrocity.For him, this may in fact be the point. At the Republican national convention last summer, the crowd in Milwaukee smiled as they held signs aloft reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW”. Trump’s appeal has always been this vision of a future that, through violence, can be made to look more like what these people imagine of the United States’ past – namely, one with many fewer people of color in it.But what is strange about the coverage of Trump’s mass deportation plan is how little its moral perversity has factored into coverage, either by the media or in the attacks lobbed at it by Democrats.CBS and NBC, for their part, seem to have determined that Trump’s pivot to calling for a gigantic scale ethnic cleansing operation is not in itself newsworthy. Instead, they have run stories pointing out that the plan would be expensive and logistically difficult, with the federal enforcement agencies requiring an estimated $216bn in funding to deport the US’s roughly 11 million undocumented people over the next four years. (Ice, they note, received a comparatively paltry $9bn last year.)Construction, agriculture, real estate development business leaders, they note, are skeptical at the idea, noting how much of their own labor force is composed of immigrants: they claim, probably correctly, that the move would lead to large increases in housing and food costs. And economists worry that the broader impact on the economy could be devastating: one economic thinktank found that deporting 1.3 million immigrants would reduce jobs for native-born workers, increasing unemployment by 0.8%.For their part, the Harris campaign has largely taken this line on the issue, preferring to focus on Trump’s mass deportation plan not as a moral horror but as an irresponsible economic move. This is the line taken by Harris campaign surrogate and billionaire Mark Cuban, who has made the threats to the labor force posed by Trump’s plan a key part of his pitch to Harris-skeptical small business owners in swing states.This all may be true enough. It is likely that a mass deportation effort would not only strain the resources of the federal government, but also gut the US private sector labor force, not to mention the disruptions it would cause to productivity when, say, an underslept mother is slow or weepy at her shift because the father of her children was taken from their home by goons. It is likely, too, that the number of jobs created by the mass deportation scheme – the cops and thugs who will be needed to round up the immigrants, the lawyers and judges who will be needed to shove them through the court system, the chefs and guards and drivers who will be needed to feed and transport and monitor them inside the internment camps that such a project will inevitably require – will likely not provide enough jobs to offset the lost tax revenue.But there is something morally depraved about talking about Trump’s plan in these terms. The cost of mass deportation cannot be measured only in whether it will be beneficial or detrimental to the pocketbooks of native-born Americans: doing so supposes both that only those born in the US are worthy of concern, and also that the only thing we have to lose is money. What is being proposed is a vast cruelty, a human tragedy, and a costly national investment in racism. That we are speaking of this proposal in primarily economic terms, rather than moral ones, suggests that the cost to the US has already been quite high.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck. This is a five-alarm fire | Robert Reich

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      With two weeks to go before election day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are essentially tied.Neither candidate is ahead by even a single point in the New York Times’s polling average of five critical battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.How is this possible? Even if polls were systematically off and Harris were ahead of Trump by, say, 5%, I’d still be appalled that so many Americans in swing states were supporting Trump.I’ve spent most of my life fighting bullies, from the grade-school bullies who teased and threatened and occasionally pummeled me, to the white supremacists of the 1960s who murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner when he was trying to register Black voters in Mississippi.I’ve protested Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war and worked to get Richard Nixon – whose henchmen broke into the Watergate complex and who then tried to cover up his illegal acts – impeached.I watched Ronald Reagan bully Americans into accepting the cruel hoax of “trickle-down” economics and legitimize corporate bashing of labor unions.I witnessed George W Bush insist on invading Iraq based on a lie that Iraq contained “weapons of mass destruction”, invading Afghanistan because it contained terrorists, and establishing a gulag of torture chambers across the world.When I was US secretary of labor, I fought Republican bullies who wanted to make it easier for CEOs and their major investors to become richer by shafting their workers. Later, I fought Wall Street bullies who gambled away other people’s money and then, when their bets turned bad, got bailed out by taxpayers.But in all my years, I have never come across a bully more squalid than Donald Trump.He is the bully of all bullies. He emits dangerous lies like most people breathe.He has demeaned and degraded our system of self-government, attempted a coup against the United States, divided Americans with venomous bigotry, and rewarded his rich backers with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.Trump created a supreme court that took away women’s rights over their own bodies and immunized presidents from criminal liability.In recent weeks, he has become even more untethered from reality, more unhinged, even less coherent.He says that if he gets back in power he will wreak vengeance on his political opponents – including many loyal Americans who have stood up to him – calling them the “enemy within” and openly threatening to use the US military against them.He says he wants to cleanse America of “scum” and “vermin”, including refugees, immigrants, and Democratic officials like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.He is threatening to strip television networks of their ability to broadcast news because of coverage he doesn’t like.On Sunday, he said he had subpoenaed the records of CBS, claiming that the network’s edit of Harris’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes was misleading.He refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. This means America will likely suffer weeks or months of litigation following election day, perhaps even accompanied by violence.I felt hopeful in late July, when Joe Biden selflessly bowed out of the election and passed the baton to his vice-president, Kamala Harris.And even more hopeful as Harris has proven herself a tough, exuberant, powerful campaigner and force for positive change. Her debate performance against Trump was the best I’ve ever seen.But at this moment, I’m frankly worried. How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?I don’t believe it’s all due to misogyny and racism. Surely, gender and race continue to play a large part in our politics, but they alone cannot explain what is happening.Nor do I think it’s because of our collective amnesia about the chaos Trump wrought during his presidency. Most of us recall how horrific it was, including a pandemic that for months he refused to acknowledge or act on.Part of the reason may be that we want to normalize our politics and pretend that this election is like any other, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.To accept the reality of who Trump is and what he aims to do is simply too frightening.Part of it also may be that many Americans would prefer blowing up the system as a whole – destroying democracy and our institutions of self-government – than settle for gradual change because they feel the system is hopelessly rigged against them.Beyond these possible explanations lie specific people who are also responsible for bringing us to the brink of this disaster.High on my list is Rupert Murdoch – whose Fox News, New York Post and editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have amplified Trump’s lies, spreading them repeatedly to tens of millions of Americans.There’s also Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, whose X platform, formerly known as Twitter, has become a font of disinformation, incendiary conspiracy theories, pro-Trump garbage and hateful lies about Harris.Musk continues to claim, for example, that Democrats are flying huge numbers of undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote illegally. One such post got 34m views.Musk’s pro-Trump Super Pac has hired an estimated 400 staffers in the seven key battleground states and a platoon of Republican party operatives.The New York Times reports that Trump and Musk are speaking directly multiple times a week. That’s a likely violation of campaign finance laws barring coordination between candidates and Super Pacs.Trump’s other major financial backers include a cavalcade of billionaires – notably Miriam Adelson (wife of deceased casino magnate Sheldon Adelson), Liz and Dick Uihlein (owners of packaging-materials company Uline), and Timothy Mellon (scion of the Gilded Age baron Andrew Mellon).Another contributing reason Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris is the silence of respected business leaders.Heading the list is Jamie Dimon, CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, who calls himself “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan” and who regularly speaks out about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America.A lifelong Democrat, Dimon is considered the “spokesman” of American business.Yet when it comes to denouncing the biggest threat to American democracy since the civil war, Dimon’s silence has been deafening.Who else is responsible? I wouldn’t be surprised if Vladimir Putin were again seeding the election with hackers and bots favoring Trump, as Putin did in 2016.At this juncture – two weeks from election day, with the race virtually tied in battleground states – none of us who cares about the future of this country can any longer afford to be a mere spectator.This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. A five-alarm fire. A category 5 hurricane.Do whatever you can.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Kamala Harris to hold town hall with undecided voters after Donald Trump rejects second debate offer – US politics live

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      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.
      Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city:
      It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”
      Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020:
      Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”
      He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying:
      You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”
      Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.The letter, which was sent to the US Federal Election Commission, said that these volunteering efforts and reports of contact between Labour and the Harris campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.A statement on DonaldJTrump.com on Tuesday night claimed that the “far-left” Labour party has “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.In response Starmer insisted he had a “good relationship” with Trump which would not be jeopardised by the complaint.The prime minister said that party officials volunteering for Harris ahead of the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time” rather than in their capacity working for Labour.Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Starmer said:
      The Labour party … volunteers, have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.
      That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”
      Asked if the complaint risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, the UK prime minister said:
      No. I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did, and we’re grateful for him for making the time.”
      We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president in their elections which are very close now.”
      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population. More