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      The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn’t say | Moira Donegan

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      The public got a peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign last week, when the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein did what major news outlets refused to: he published the opposition research dossier on JD Vance’s electoral vulnerabilities that was written by the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the VP announcement.The dossier, which was obtained in a hack thought to have been perpetrated by Iranian state interests, would have been compiled by Donald Trump’s camp as part of a routine vetting process as the Republican campaign surveilled possible VP picks and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. It is thorough: at 271 pages, it contains a robust and factual accounting of the vice-presidential candidate’s public statements and associations going back years. As such, it offers a unique perspective into how the Trump campaign views the race – and how they understand the controversial man who is now in their No 2 spot.But the document, a litany of everything the Trump camp thinks is wrong with Vance, is maybe most revealing for what it omits: there is almost nothing about his comments on women, and nothing at all about his extensive, repeated and impassioned hatred for childless women, including the “cat ladies” comment that has been Vance’s stickiest scandal and perhaps his greatest contribution to the campaign thus far. The comments that provoked the ire of thousands of women – including no less influential a figure than Taylor Swift – and turned the race partly into a referendum on the purpose and value of women’s lives were nowhere to be found in the document.Instead, the dossier was largely focused on comments by Vance that make him vulnerable with an audience of one: that is, his past negative statements about Trump.The mainstream news organizations that declined to publish this hacked document justified this decision by saying that much of the information was not newsworthy. If this is their standard, it seems to be a new one: in 2016, when Russian-backed hackers obtained emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, one of the disclosures included risotto cooking tips from campaign chair John Podesta. (He says that adding the liquid slowly helps the rice become creamier, in case you’re interested.) But the Vance dossier is newsworthy, though not because of what it reveals about Vance. What the document says about Vance himself is largely a matter of public record. What is newsworthy, instead, is what the document exposes about the Trump campaign’s priorities.The dossier concerns many worries that Vance is not conservative enough. It also seems preoccupied with how the Ohio senator has wounded Trump’s ego. The absence of Vance’s extreme gender views from the document suggests that the Trump campaign did not understand his comments on women to even be controversial: they don’t seem to have thought that it would come up.Maybe the Trump campaign is staffed with people, including the apparatchiks who do its vetting, who have so little exposure to feminism (or, perhaps, to women more broadly) that it simply did not occur to them that anyone would find Vance’s ravings about women offensive. Maybe the Trump camp made the calculation – one certainly not exclusive to the political right – that women’s investment in their own rights is partial and unserious, and that they would not be moved by gendered insults to their dignity in anything like meaningful numbers. Maybe they assumed that gender politics is now a man’s game, and that appeals to masculine woundedness and grievance now carry much more sway than appeals to women’s rights do. If this is what they think – that misogyny can be an asset for them but never a liability – it would certainly explain some of their actions.But the salience of the comments also signals something else that has changed this election: Trump no longer solely sets the terms of the conversation. Trump’s ability to command attention and to dictate the news cycle has noticeably waned this term – think, for instance, of how quickly and decisively each of his not one but two assassination attempts disappeared from the front pages, and how little an impact they seem to have ultimately had on his support. Trump has been unable to get a nickname to stick to Kamala; he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to generate vulgar distractions about her sexual history or the authenticity of her racial identity.So far, all he has managed to do is spread lurid and racist lies that have made life hell for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s vulgarity, his hysterics, his domineering indifference to the truth – all these used to fascinate voters, or at least the national media. But Trump has lost his juice.Which brings us to the other reason why the dossier may not have contained many of Vance’s most potent vulnerabilities: perhaps Trump’s staff overlooked them because they assumed that they would be able to generate the narrative on their own, assuming that it was they, and they alone, who would dictate what the media covered and what the public cared about. Those days are over. Just ask your local cat lady.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Georgia judge says women aren’t ‘some piece of collectively owned community property’ in ruling to overturn abortion ban – live

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      Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      After a Georgia judge’s ruling struck down the state’s restrictive 2019 abortion law, which abortion after roughly around six weeks of pregnancy, advocates and analysts have highlighted the order’s bold arguments, which invoked the Handmaid’s Tale and compared certain kinds of abortion bans to “involuntary servitude” or “compulsory labor.”Some advocates, like senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, have highlighted the broader importance of Georgia allowing access to abortion care through 22 weeks of pregnancy, since many surrounding states in the south also have very restrictive anti-abortion laws.Others, like my colleague Carter Sherman, have noted that this ruling comes after Georgia has made national headlines after a ProPublica investigation into the deaths of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died what experts called “preventable” deaths after delays in care that were related to Georgia’s anti-abortion law.Georgia judge describes ‘subtext of involuntary servitude’ in abortion debateAnother key quote from the order, by Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney, that overturned Georgia’s restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy, which state legislators passed in 2019:“There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”Read my colleague Carter Sherman’s full report here:Who is Judge Robert McBurney, who struck down Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban?It’s not the first time Robert C I McBurney, a Fulton county superior court judge based in Atlanta, has made national headlines.McBurney previously struck down Georgia’s very restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy and he also presided over parts of the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and key allies, a case that is currently stalled.McBurney, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to his role in 2012 by Republican governor Nathan Deal, to fill the seat of a judge who was retiring. He has since run for reelection and won.In 2023, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called McBurney “the hardest working judge in Georgia” and said that a joke recently at the Atlanta courthouse was , “Aren’t there any other judges in the county?”McBurney is also set to hear a key case on election regulations in Georgia tomorrow, the Associated Press reports.Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      More from the Associated Press on the legal reasoning behind the order:
      Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his order that ‘liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.’
      McBurney wrote that his ruling means the law in the state returns to what it was before the law was passed in 2019:
      When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene.
      An “arbitrary six-week ban” on abortions “is inconsistent with these rights and the proper balance that a viability rule establishes between a woman’s rights of liberty and privacy and society’s interest in protecting and caring for unborn infants”, the order says.Abortions in Georgia can once again be performed through 22 weeks – reportAfter a judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions once a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which is usually about six weeks into pregnancy, the procedure is once again legal in Georgia through about 22 weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.More context from the Associated Press:
      When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion, it opened the door for state bans. Fourteen states now bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions. Georgia was one of four where the bans kick in after about the first six weeks of pregnancy – which is often before women realize they’re pregnant.
      A judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.The law was similar to many passed by Republican-led states after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have recently seized on the law as an example of the consequences of electing Donald Trump and the Republicans, after a woman was reported to have died in the state after being denied lifesaving care due to the law. Here’s more on that:As many as 600 people remain missing after Hurricane Helene swept through the south-eastern United States, White House homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall told reporters.“The current data we have is that it looks like there could be as many as 600 loss of lives, but we don’t have any confirmation of that. We know there are 600 who are either lost or unaccounted for, and so that work is ongoing,” Sherwood-Randall said at the White House press briefing.She added that there’s a high degree of uncertainty to the numbers:
      I’ll caution you, because we’ve seen this before. Those numbers vary widely. There’s a lot of reporting that doesn’t add up about the numbers. And so, while we may see the numbers go up as we get to more locations that have not yet been fully developed in terms of disaster immediate emergency response operations, we may see more people who unfortunately perished, but we may also not see the numbers skyrocket as people have predicted they might.
      Authorities in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere have already confirmed more than 100 deaths from the storm that swept in from the Gulf of Mexico:Donald Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States took a new turn on Sunday, when he mulled adopting something only seen in horror films to fight crime. The Guardian’s Robert Tait has more:Donald Trump has been accused of invoking plotlines similar to The Purge – a dystopian horror film in which officially sanctioned murder is occasionally legal – as a possible solution to crime in the US after saying it could be eradicated in “one really violent day”.In what was seen as an extreme display of demagoguery even by his standards, Trump drew cheers from an audience in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a picture of an out-of-control crime spree that he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”.“You see these guys walking out with air conditioners with refrigerators on their back, the craziest thing,” Trump said. “And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension.“They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them, and they want to destroy our country.”In a passage that provoked a storm on social media, the former president and Republican nominee then said: “If you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example, where, when they start walking out with … ”Further evidence that Donald Trump has no intention of giving the politicking a rest in the wake of Hurricane Helene can be found on X, where he implies, once again without evidence, that North Carolina’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper is frustrating the humanitarian response.“I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” Trump wrote.North Carolina is considered a swing state in this election, though it has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 2008, and polls there have lately shown Trump with a narrow lead.The governorship seems to be slipping away from GOP candidate Mark Robinson, after CNN broke the news that he had a long history of making lewd and offensive comments on a pornography websites’s message board. Here’s the latest on that fiasco:When he spoke before a furniture store gutted by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia, Donald Trump insisted he was not there for political purposes. His social media posts tell a different story.About an hour ago on Truth Social, he seized on the below tweet from Kamala Harris:The former president wrote that the photo of the president was “FAKE and STAGED”, without providing evidence, then went on to accuse both Harris and Joe Biden of leaving “Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South”.“Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have ‘leaders’ who have no idea how to lead!” Trump added.Thousands of Americans died in hurricanes that struck Texas, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere during Trump’s presidency. After he left office, a report found that his administration unnecessarily delayed emergency money for Puerto Rico, after it was devastated by Hurricane Maria:Donald Trump attempted to put politics aside as he spoke before a furniture store damaged by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia.That’s despite the fact that he had minutes earlier accused Joe Biden of not speaking to the state’s governor Brian Kemp following the storm, even though the White House said the two men spoke on Sunday.“As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard-fought national election, but in a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters. We’re not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved,” Trump said.Kamala Harris made a little bit of news earlier today, saying in an interview that she supported legalizing marijuana – a step even the cannabis-friendly administration of Joe Biden hesitated to embrace.“I just feel strongly people should not be going to jail for smoking weed. And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail,” Harris told the All the Smoke podcast. “Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior.”The vice-president added: “This is not a new position for me. I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it.”The statement represents a break with Biden, who moved to lower restrictions on cannabis while still keeping it broadly illegal at the federal level. Full decriminalization would solve the array of conflicts that have developed as states have moved to legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes. Here’s more on that:In about 30 minutes, Donald Trump will speak from a furniture store in Valdosta, Georgia, a town affected by Hurricane Helene.The former president began his visit to the swing state by falsely claiming that Joe Biden had not spoken to Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Here’s video of the remark, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:The White House announced yesterday that Biden had spoken to Kemp, a Republican, along with Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, and Valdosta mayor Scott Matheson.When Tim Walz and JD Vance take the debate stage tomorrow night, expect to see two very different styles of debating, and two equally different views of the nation’s future, the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reports:When Tim Walz and JD Vance square off as vice-presidential picks on Tuesday, it will be the biggest debate stage for both of the politicians who are newly becoming household names.Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, have been honing their public-speaking skills – and their pointed barbs at each other – in TV appearances and at events around the country in the past few months.Their experiences in electoral debates haven’t reached the levels or notoriety that come along with a presidential campaign, but both have faced opponents in public debates in past elections.Given the tightness of the presidential race, and how poorly the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump went, there will probably be more people tuned in to the vice-presidential debate than in past cycles. While VP debates don’t usually tip the scales much, they could matter in a close race – and they build profiles for lower-profile politicians who will probably stay on the national scene for years to come.On a press call this morning, Tom Emmer, the Republican representative from Minnesota, confirmed he has been playing Tim Walz in JD Vance’s debate prep.Republicans are seeking to frame Walz, the folksy Minnesota governor who has proved to be the most popular figure in the presidential race, as a mean-spirited, ogreish figure.Asked about his portrayal of Walz, Emmer said: “Quite frankly, it’s tough because he is really good on the debate stage.”Emmer, who ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota governor in 2010, added: “[Walz] is going to stand there and he lies with conviction, and he has these little mannerisms where he’s just, hey, I’m the nice guy, but he’s not nice at all.”Emmer predicted that Vance “is prepared to wipe the floor with Tim Walz and expose him for the radical liberal he is”. He added: “Tim Walz is nothing more than Gavin Newsom [the governor of California] in a flannel shirt.”Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, predicted that Walz is “going to look to stick the shiv into JD Vance at every opportunity” and predicted that: “The Tim Walz we see tomorrow night will be a completely different character from what we’ve seen so far on the 2024 campaign trail.”Asked whether Donald Trump would agree to debate Kamala Harris for a second time, Miller said Trump “has made it pretty clear where he is”. Harris has accepted an invitation to debate on CNN on 23 October, but Trump, who was widely viewed to have lost the first debate, has claimed that it is “too late” for a second debate.The US Department of Justice has agreed to pay $22.6 million to settle a lawsuit by 34 women who claim they were wrongly dismissed from the FBI’s agent training academy because of their sex, according to a court filing today.The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge in Washington DC, would resolve a 2019 class action claiming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is part of the Justice Department, had a widespread practice of forcing out female trainees, Reuters reports.The plaintiffs say that they were found unsuitable to graduate from the training academy even though they performed as well as or better than many male trainees on academic, physical fitness, and firearms tests. Some of them also say they were subjected to sexual harassment and sexist jokes and comments.Along with the payout, the proposed settlement would allow eligible class members to seek reinstatement to the agent training program and require the FBI to hire outside experts to ensure that its evaluation process for trainees is fair.Department’s internal watchdog released a report in 2022 finding that female FBI trainees were disproportionately likely to be dismissed and to be cited for conduct “unsuitable” for an agent. Less than one-quarter of FBI special agents are women, the agency said in a report released in April.The man charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump after allegedly positioning himself with a rifle outside one of the former president’s Florida golf courses on 15 September pleaded not guilty this morning to five federal charges.Ryan Routh, 58, entered the plea to charges that include attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate during a hearing in federal court. He has already been ordered to remain in jail to await a trial, Reuters reports.Prosecutors have said Routh intended to kill Trump as he golfed at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Routh, a struggling roofing contractor, condemned the Republican presidential candidate in a self-published book and dropped off a letter months earlier with an associate referencing an attempted assassination on Trump, according to prosecutors.
      This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” the suspect wrote, according to a court filing by prosecutors.
      Lawyers for Routh suggested at a 23 September court hearing that the letter may have been an attempt by their client at gaining publicity and highlighted what they called Routh’s efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan.Routh is accused of poking a rifle through a fence at the course with the intention to kill Trump. When a federal agent spotted it and fired shots, the suspect fled but was arrested.Joe Biden finished up his remarks on the impact of Hurricane Helene by saying that as US president he had seen many disasters and heard “dozens of stories from survivors”.“I know how it feels to be left with nothing,” he said, “not even knowing where or when you’re back on track. I’m here to tell every single survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as it takes … I urge everyone returning to their communities and homes to listen to the local officials and follow all the safety instructions.”He continued: “Take this seriously, please be safe, your nation has your back and the Biden-Harris administration will be there until the job is done.”In answer to a press question, Biden said no decision has been made yet on whether to ask the US Congress (which is in recess) to come back for a special session to approve additional emergency funding as a result of what he described as the “really, really devastating” storm.He said he had spoken to the governor of North Carolina [Democrat Roy Cooper] and expects to visit the state on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. More

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      Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale

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      At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.This, he writes, was in part thanks to having “lived quite frugally during our time in the military, spending a lot of time deployed, accumulating savings, taking advantage of base housing and meals, and of course spending almost nothing while on deployment.“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.Sheehy grew up in Minnesota and attended the US Naval Academy in Maryland. Describing his early days in Montana, he has often told of how he, his wife and their first child started out living in a tent. That might boost his claim of living below the poverty line, but Sheehy has also described how living under canvas was a choice.Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reported documents seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.Regardless, Sheehy seems well-placed to secure a Senate seat, holding seven- and eight-point leads over Tester, a three-term moderate Democrat.Federal figures regarding poverty in Montana in 2014 do back up one claim in Sheehy’s book. Describing how he hired his first employees, he says he paid just $1,500 a month, amounting to $18,000 a year, to his first chief pilot, Tim Cherwin.Cherwin brought with him “the chain-smoking desert rat Steve Taylor, who would become our director of maintenance”. Sheehy, who says he started the business with $400,000, says both men were “earning wages below the poverty line”. More

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      Harris holds Las Vegas rally as Nevada becomes crucial swing state in election

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      Kamala Harris held a rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night as the state, with six electoral college votes, becomes increasingly important in a presidential race that polls show is barely moving to favour either candidate.Both the vice-president and Donald Trump have been making frequent trips to Nevada, but Harris’s rally takes place two days after she visited the US-Mexico border, a vulnerable issue for Democrats that Harris is looking to defuse.Before the raucous Las Vegas crowd estimated at 7,500, Harris renewed her jabs at Trump over refusing another debate, saying, “the American people have a right to hear us discuss the issues. And as you say here in Las Vegas, I’m all in. I’m all in.”Harris offered her condolences for those affected by Hurricane Helene, and her campaign said she would visit affected areas as soon as doing so would not disrupt the emergency response to the storm that has hit the country’s southeast.“We will stand with these communities for as long as it takes to make sure that they are able to recover and rebuild,” Harris said on Sunday.On Friday, Harris walked alongside a towering, rust-colored border wall fitted with barbed wire in Douglas, Arizona, and met with federal authorities to discuss illegal border crossing and fentanyl smuggling.At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on Sunday, the former president attempted to blame Harris for the opioid epidemic. “She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” he said.Six out of 10 Americans rate immigration as “very important”, according to the Pew Research Center, and other polling suggests voters trust Trump can handle the issue more effectively than Harris can.In contrast, fewer than half of voters (40%) said abortion, the key Republican vulnerability, was a very important issue to their vote.In a speech in San Francisco on Saturday, Harris said the “race is as close as it could possibly be” and described it “a margin-of-error race”. The Democrat candidate added that she felt she was running as the underdog.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have also begun testing a new strategy to appeal to younger voters, including visitors to Las Vegas with its long-crafted reputation for inebriation, with posts about what it calls “Trump’s tequila tax” that its says could come as a result of proposed import tariffs.Harris’s campaign swing through Las Vegas comes as both candidates have said they plan to end taxes on tips. Trump presented his proposal in the city in June; Harris used her own rally in August to make the same pledge.The issue resonates in Las Vegas, where there are approximately 60,000 hospitality workers. Nevada’s Culinary Union has endorsed Harris.Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, told the Associated Press that the union favored Harris’s proposal because she pledged to tackle what his union calls “sub-minimum wage”.“That shows us she’s serious,” Pappageorge said.Trump was at the same Las Vegas venue that Harris is speaking at earlier this month. In that address, he called his opponent the “would-be the president of invasion”. More

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      Trump and Harris speak in swing states as running mates prep ahead of VP debate – live

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      Kamala Harris is presenting herself as a change agent who will “turn the page” and offer “a new way forward,” a move far from embracing her role in Biden’s White House.Inflation has been tamed. Illegal immigration has stabalized. Violent crime is down. In theory it is a perfect recipe for electoral success. Yet it is a gift that the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, seems reluctant to accept.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “A new way? She’s been part of a very successful administration and she was chosen by Joe Biden as VP and then essentially chosen to be his successor.“But she has to pretend that she’s going to be forging a new path because she can’t afford to be too closely associated with Biden. I know one person on the inner campaign staff who cringes every time Harris and Biden have to appear together because the visual reinforces the tie they don’t want people to make. It’s nonsensical.”Harris, as the incumbent vice-president, will be hoping to avoid a repeat of the Republican president George HW Bush’s fate in 1992. Economic indicators improved over the spring and summer but too late to save him from defeat by Bill Clinton, whose lead strategist, James Carville, memorably summed up: “It’s the economy, stupid.”Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC, said: “When it comes to the economy people believe their own eyes and they will make their judgments on that basis. This is a lesson I have learned in the six presidential campaigns I’ve wandered in and out of: if you have statistics on the one hand and personal experience on the other, it’s no contest.”More on Harris distancing herself from Biden’s record:Donald Trump is slated to visit Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday, and receive a briefing on the damage caused by Hurricane Helene and “facilitate the distribution of relief supplies”, his campaign announced.The former president is expected to deliver his remarks at 2pm ET.During a speech in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Trump sent his condolences to the families affected by Helene, which killed at least 64 people.Robert F Kennedy Jr will participate in a “Make America Healthy Again” event with Dr Phil McGraw in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Monday, Trump’s campaign announced.Kennedy, who was staging an independent bid for the presidency, endorsed the former president after dropping out of the race in August.Kennedy has hopes of influencing federal health policy under a possible Trump administration. The former third-party candidate has questioned the safety of vaccinating children and promoted theories that suggest HIV is not the true cause of AIDS.Joseph Costello, a Kamala Harris campaign spokesperson, reacted to Donald Trump’s speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, picking on the former president’s comments about overtime pay.“As president, Trump took executive action to rip away overtime pay for *millions* of workers, including nearly 5 million workers without a college degree,” Costello said on Twitter/X.Costello attached a link to a paper by the Economic Policy Institute titled: More than eight million workers will be left behind by the Trump overtime proposal.Donald Trump wrapped up his speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, by summing up his proposals as a presidential candidate, pledging to end crime allegedly by migrants, strengthen the military, and “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity out of our schools”.Donald Trump repeated his plan to close the Department of Education if he’s elected as president in November.“Let the states run their own education,” he said.“We spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world, by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list,” Trump said. “So you know the expression: what the hell do you have to lose? Right?”Donald Trump claimed Butler, Pennsylvania, has become a tourist site after his attempted assassination in July.“Cars are riding by. They’re taking pictures. It’s become an amazing tourist site,”he said.Trump announced that the event in Butler will honor the firefighter who was shot and killed at the rally in July, Corey Comperator.During his speech, Donald Trump confirmed he will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the attempted assassination attempt in July. His visit is scheduled for 5 October.“We have a lot of people coming, and I really believe that will be the safest place on Earth,” said the former president.Donald Trump brought US Senate candidate David McCormick of Pennsylvania to the stage. McCormick, ex-CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is trying to unseat Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who is seeking his fourth term.“It’s a race between strength, a guy who says ‘fight’, and weakness,” McCormick said. “We need to bring law and order to secure that border and stop these illegal immigrants coming in and bringing crime and fentanyl into Pennsylvania.”Donald Trump reaffirmed his stance that workers’ tips should not be taxed.He was the first candidate to endorse this proposal during a rally in June. Months later, Kamala Harris also expressed support for the plan, prompting the former president to label her “Copy Cat Kamala” at other rallies.“We will have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on social security benefits for seniors,” Trump said on Sunday.“When I win, we will get Pennsylvania energy workers, fracking, drilling, pumping and producing like they have never produced before,” Donald Trump said.“Kamala vowed to repeatedly ban fracking, and she imposed a natural gas export ban that was a killer, that is starving a state right now of your wealth and wealth that you deserve right now,” Trump said.Trump criticized Harris’s support for expanding access and manufacturing of electric vehicles in the US.“Her insane electric vehicle mandate will decimate Pennsylvania’s economy by abolishing gas-powered cars and trucks for American roads and destroying your fossil fuel industry,” he said. “And there are very few states that benefit like you do from fracking.”Donald Trump quoted the lyrics of a song supposedly warning against immigration during his speech in Erie, Pennsylvania.Trump read the lyrics of The Snake, which was written by civil rights activist Oscar Brown in 1963. The song was later a hit for soul singer Al Wilson five years later.In Trump’s interpretation, it serves as a cautionary tale about the alleged danger posed by immigrants. The former president recounted the allegorical tale of a woman who foolishly embraces a dangerous serpent.The former president once again called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” during his speech in Pennsylvania on Sunday.“Joe Biden became mentally impaired,” Trump said, adding that Harris “was born that way”.“There’s something wrong with Kamala, and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And you know what? Everybody knows it,” Trump said.He later played an ad against the vice-president, composed of a compilation of her comments regarding immigration.“Honestly, we could give you clips like that all day long. This is not your president. This president would destroy our country, worse than Biden. He’s the worst president in history,” the former president said. More

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      Top Republicans disavow Trump’s ‘mentally disabled’ attacks on Harris

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      Senior Republicans distanced themselves Sunday from comments made by Donald Trump at campaign stops over the weekend that opponent Kamala Harris was born “mentally disabled” and had compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on Trump’s remarks, which came in what Trump himself admitted was a “dark” speech.“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy.”Graham’s comments came as immigration and border security remained the top domestic issue on Sunday’s political talk shows. Trump made his comments during a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday amid remarks on Harris’s actions on those issues as vice-president.“Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.Trump added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer, a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team, told ABC News: “I think we should stick on the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues.”But Maryland governor Larry Hogan struck back, telling CBS News that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.“I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan added.Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly address Trump’s comments, widely criticized as offensive, but said Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.Trump’s comments joined a long list of personal attacks against opponents that supporters at his campaign eagerly lap up. Democrats have their own reductive articulations, calling Trump and Vance “weird”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the use of mental disability to describe Harris’s faculties has been widely seized upon. Democrat Illinois governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”.“Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” Pritzker said. Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, said Trump’s comments indicated “cognitive decline”.“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities.Town said in a statement to the Washington Post that Trump’s comments “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability”. More

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      Florida Republican charged with threat to ‘call up hit squad’ to kill primary rival

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      The justice department has charged a Florida man for threatening to “call up my Russian-Ukrainian hit squad” to kill his political opponent, the Republican congressional representative Anna Paulina Luna, in 2021.The department unsealed an indictment against 41-year-old William Robert Braddock III of St Petersburg, Florida on Thursday, alleging that on 8 June 2021 he made multiple threats to hurt and kill Luna – identified as Victim 1 in the indictment – in a phone call with another individual, Victim 2.Braddock and Luna were candidates in the 2021 Republican primary election in Florida’s 13th congressional district. Victim 2 was identified as a private citizen and acquaintance of Luna.In 2021, the Associated Press reported that Luna alleged in a Florida court that Braddock was stalking her and had threatened to hurt her.In her petition at the time for a permanent restraining order, Luna said she received text messages between Braddock and other people in which Braddock allegedly said he wanted to “take me out”. Luna added that others told her the text “means he intends to kill me”.“I do not feel safe and I am currently in fear for my life from Mr Braddock,” Luna said in the petition.The justice department said that Braddock subsequently left the US and was living in the Philippines, but was recently deported back to the US, where he made his first court appearance on Thursday in Los Angeles.Braddock was charged with one count of interstate transmission of a true threat to injure another person. If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe case is part of the justice department’s election threats task force. Launched in June 2021, it addresses threats of violence against election workers. More

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      Walz v Vance: two midwesterners miles apart in politics ready for debate

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      The football coach and the “Yale law guy” go head-to-head in New York City on Tuesday night, as two midwesterners with very different styles and vastly diverging messages slug it out over the future of the US.Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, faces the Republican senator from Ohio, JD Vance, in a vice-presidential debate that promises to be unusually significant in this white-hot election year. They will joust for 90 minutes under the moderation of CBS News as they seek to give their respective running mates – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – a leg up to the White House.Walz has been prepping for the debate in Minneapolis with the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, masquerading as Vance. (Buttigieg may have been suffering deja vu – he posed as Mike Pence during Kamala Harris’s prep sessions ahead of the 2020 VP debate.)Vance has been holding mock debates with the Republican whip in the US House, Tom Emmer, standing in as Walz. Emmer is a fellow Minnesotan, so has the benefit of having studied Walz up close.The two running mates bring contrasting strengths to the gladiatorial ring. Vance is an experienced debater who will relish confrontation under the glare of the TV lights.“Look, he’s a Yale law guy,” Walz has said about his opponent. “He’ll come well prepared.”Walz by contrast will be able to lean on skills learned in the school classroom. Walz spent 17 years as a public school teacher, so he knows how to think on his feet – and deal with a disruptive kid.“I expect to see a very heated debate,” Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, told CBS News.One of the big questions of the night is likely to be whether Vance can redeem himself after a troubled start to his candidacy. Will he be able to get past all the “weirdness”, as Walz has framed it, and bring consistency to the messaging of an often chaotic Trump campaign?From awkward encounters with doughnut shop workers, to the ongoing furor around his “childless cat ladies” remark, Vance has been the subject of online mockery that has at times appeared to engulf him. He also seems to be stuck on the same culture war issues that consume Trump.“Vance does not seem to have drawn additional voters to the Trump ticket, as the controversies he gets into are exactly the same as those the former president gets into,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.Most egregiously, Vance has doubled down on the false and racist narrative that Haitian immigrants are eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio, despite categorical denials from local authorities. He recently confessed to CNN that he was willing to “create stories” if it meant that he attracted media attention.Such comments have sunk Vance underwater in the opinion of the voting public – his unfavorability rating is 11 points higher than his favorable, according to FiveThirtyEight.Walz by contrast is basking in the glow of a positive four-point gap between his favorability ratings, which poses him with a completely different set of challenges on debate night. He will need to parry Vance’s attempts to frame him as the misinformation candidate based on misrepresentations Walz made about his military record, defuse his rivals claims that he is dangerously liberal, and refuse to be knocked off track.“Walz just needs to get in and out of the debate without causing trouble for his ticket,” Burden said.John Conway, director of strategy for Republican Voters Against Trump, said that Walz was best advised to follow Harris’s playbook. He organised focus groups the day after Harris’s debate with Trump, involving voters from five battleground states who backed Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden in 2020.The focus group attendees were enthusiastic about Harris’s dual approach to the debate – attack Trump for his lies and felony convictions, but also lay out a positive plan for the future of the country. “That’s the blueprint Walz must follow,” Conway said, “attack when appropriate but also be substantive on the issues.”There have been several memorable made-for-TV moments from the VP debates since the first in 1976 between senators Bob Dole and Walter Mondale. Most celebrated is the 1988 incident when the Democrat Lloyd Bentsen chastised George H Bush’s running mate, Dan Quayle, for comparing himself to John F Kennedy.“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”“That was really uncalled for, senator,” Quayle wailed.More recently, John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, ribbed Joe Biden, the Democratic VP candidate running with Barack Obama, in 2008, by telling him: “Aw, say it ain’t so, Joe.”Those were neat soundbites that entered the lexicons. But it is notable that neither Bentsen nor Palin were rewarded where it matters – at the ballot box.In fact, vice-presidential debates have tended to be underwhelming in terms of the lasting imprint they have left on US elections. Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, pointed out that even after the dynamic presidential debate between Harris and Trump earlier this month, which was watched by 67 million TV viewers and which Harris was widely judged to have won, the race remains essentially neck-and-neck in the critical battleground states.Sabato said that given the lack of consequences from the debate at the top of the ticket, he expected Tuesday’s vice-presidential tussle to be equally inconclusive. “I don’t expect the vice-presidential debate to make any impact,” he said.Yet this is no ordinary election. Joe Biden’s departure and the sudden elevation of Harris, together with Trump refusing to participate in a second debate with her, has raised the stakes.Tuesday’s spectacle will probably be the final debate before election day on 5 November. “This is really the last main national moment in the campaign, so I do think it is important,” Mook said.Apart from the economy, immigration and foreign wars, which are certain to be addressed during the debate, a more amorphous struggle is likely to play out on stage: who will own the mantle of “authentic midwesterner”? Will it be Nebraska-born Walz, or the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio’s Vance.The rivalry goes beyond mere aesthetics or regional loyalties. It resonates heavily in those states where the election could be decided – the three so-called “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.“I don’t know if the word ‘midwestern’ will be used in the debate, but feelings about the midwest will come through,” Burden said.The candidates offer a diametrically opposed vision of the heartlands. Walz’s midwest is folksy and homely, a world where neighbors look after each other, where football coaches double up as local heroes (Walz coached the sport at Mankato West high school from 1997), and where joy fills the air.Vance’s is a much darker picture of drug addiction, broken families and the threat of immigration. His is the midwest of Trump’s “American carnage” dystopia.Two utterly contrasting visions. Two tough and determined candidates. Gentlemen, shall we begin? More