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      Inside the Republican legal blitz to sow election doubt: ‘The claims are garbage’

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      Nearly four years after waging an aggressive legal effort to overturn the 2020 elections, Republicans have filed a slew of lawsuits that appear to be aimed at seeding doubt about the outcome of the 2024 race in the event of a Donald Trump loss.From 2023 until September of this year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and local affiliates have filed or are involved in at least 72 cases, according to an analysis by Democracy Docket, a left-leaning voting rights news platform founded by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. At the same point during the 2022 midterm election, Republicans had filed 41 lawsuits.There’s nothing unusual about an explosion of litigation over election rules ahead of a presidential election. But experts say what stands out this year isn’t the volume of the cases but their subject matter.Many of the lawsuits are based on a theory that states are not adequately maintaining their voter rolls and that there could be scores of ineligible voters, including non-citizens, on them. They make weak legal claims, election experts say, and instead appear to be more of a public relations effort to motivate Republican voters and echo Trump’s falsehoods about voting.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”“If the fraud theme of 2020 was ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated’, the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting’, and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles.In Nevada, a swing state, Republicans claimed in a suit filed in September there were nearly 4,000 non-citizens on the rolls who appear to have voted.It was a claim that the Nevada secretary of state, at the time a Republican, already investigated and debunked (she said that those people were probably naturalized citizens). Republicans claim the state should have investigated more and also cited data from the cooperative congressional elections survey to suggest that there may be even more non-citizens on the rolls, but the authors of the study have long warned against using its data to try to claim there are non-citizens on the rolls.In North Carolina, another battleground this year, the RNC also filed two misleading lawsuits designed to give the impression that the state was not properly vetting its voters. In late August, the RNC accused election officials of not following a new law that requires them to use juror information to verify citizenship information. The state board of elections said the claim was flatly untrue.The RNC separately sued to potentially invalidate the registrations of 225,000 people for lacking information that’s required under federal law. A 2002 statute, the Help America Vote Act, requires voters to provide either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number when they register.In North Carolina 225,000 people don’t have that information recorded in the state’s voter registration database, but experts have noted that doesn’t necessarily mean that they lack that information. Voters may have registered before the law went into effect, or the absence may reflect clerical errors. Experts say such minor errors shouldn’t lead to wide swaths of voters getting disenfranchised.“If they’re talking about 225,000 people disenfranchised for a clerical error that was not their fault, I think that would be a wild overreaction,” Sam Oliker-Friedland, the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, a watchdog group, told the Raleigh News and Observer. “It would just simply mean that people can’t vote because of paperwork, and that’s not a fair outcome.”Asked for comment for this story, the Republican National Committee provided a statement from Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, that contained a number of falsehoods about voting.“Kamala’s open border is flooding illegal migrants into our country at the most dangerous rate we’ve ever seen. As this invasion escalates, Democrats are pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” the statement said. While a handful of localities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.“While radical Democrats have allowed non-citizen voting in California and DC, states such as Walz’s Minnesota have no system to keep non-citizens off the rolls, resulting in an open door to illegal voting,” she added. Incidents of non-citizen voting are extremely rare. “This is no coincidence, and Democrats aren’t even trying to hide their election interference schemes. President Trump will secure the border and secure our elections so that every American vote is protected.”The Harris-Walz campaign described the 2024 election as “the most litigious presidential election in American history, even more than 2020”, and said it had hundreds of lawyers in courts across the country “winning case after case”. It noted that Republicans had lost several of the cases they have filed in at least the trial court, including challenges to mail-in ballot rules in Nevada (the RNC is appealing some of the rulings).“For four years, Donald Trump and his Maga allies have been scheming to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can cry foul when they lose. But also for four years, Democrats have been preparing for this moment, and we are ready for anything,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, said in a statement.For Trump, lawsuits have crafted a misleading imprimatur of legitimacy around his false claims about elections. In 2020, nearly every lawsuit that he and allies filed after the election was thrown out. Nonetheless, the claims and affidavits from poll-watchers that were included – all filed with legal formatting, signatures from lawyers, and court stamps – helped shape the impression that there was legitimate evidence something had gone amiss.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLawsuits also can be a particularly powerful forum for spreading misleading information. Public officials sometimes won’t speak publicly about pending legal matters, leaving facts in an initial complaint or petition to go unchallenged in public discourse. It can be weeks before a response is filed or a hearing is held, long after a flood of initial headlines repeating the allegations in the suit. By the time a case gets thrown out, it may not get as much attention as the initial filing.Even though none of Trump’s cases attempting to throw out the 2020 election succeeded, the false claims in them – that suitcases of ballots were pulled out from under tables in Atlanta, that machines were flipping votes – live on today.“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has said.“A lot of it is sort of projecting to your audience that you’re actively pursuing problems and trying to resolve them and also just kind of creating energy on your base to get involved or stay vigilant,” said Rebecca Green, co-director of the election law program at William & Mary Law School.Hasen said some of the lawsuits may be “placeholders” that Republicans and Trump allies could point to after the election to argue they hadn’t waited too long to bring legal claims. Berwick called these suits “zombie cases”.“They’re dead on arrival, but will be resurrected after the election,” he said. “I am virtually certain that election deniers will focus on these narratives in the post-election period, both to discredit results they don’t like and as the basis for post-election legal challenges to try and throw out certain ballots, or even interfere with certification of results.”Aside from the public relations lawsuits, the RNC has waged an aggressive effort over rules for counting mail-in ballots, including a closely watched suit at the US Court of Appeals 5th circuit that could prohibit states from accepting mail-in ballots that arrive after election day. Eighteen states, including battleground Nevada, allow ballots to count if they are postmarked before election day but arrive afterwards and this rule could impact an election where the result could come down to just a few thousands votes in any given swing state.Republicans have also backed mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that are missing a date or wrongly dated, even if the ballot is returned on time and the voter is eligible. They have also sought to limit counties from offering practices for voters to cure errors with their absentee ballots so they can be counted.Experts have also raised questions about the timing of some lawsuits. Federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Yet some of the RNC’s lawsuits challenging how states maintain their voter rolls were filed within that 90-day period.Republicans recently have also challenged the legality of ballots from overseas and military voters, filing lawsuits in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania (the RNC is the plaintiff in North Carolina and Michigan, and Republican members of Congress are the plaintiffs in Pennsylvania). The federal law that governs the practice of dealing with absentee ballots has been in place for decades, and states have long had their own policies in place.“The timing of these claims is laughable – the processes they challenge have been public for years, and they could have filed these lawsuits months ago, at least,” Oliker-Friedland said in an email. “Instead, they’re choosing to waste election administrators’ time with litigation that, even if successful, won’t practically change anything.” More

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      in US Politics

      Young men on being Republican in New York: ‘It caused all types of consternation among my friends’

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      In New York City, Republicans are something of a rarity. Only 10% of New Yorkers are Republicans, according to 2021 voter registration data, and the state is polling bright blue for Kamala Harris. But the Republican party has not called it quits.“You live in a blue city, but it’s going red very, very quickly,” Donald Trump claimed at a Bronx rally in May. Step into the suburbs, and Republican candidates have enough momentum to turn multiple House elections – and ultimately, control of the House – into nail-biters.It’s an interesting time for the New York Young Republicans Club (NYYRC). The club brings together conservative New Yorkers 40 and under to socialize, campaign and discuss policy; recent events have included debate watch parties and a self-defense course in light of “illegal military-age male immigrants flooding our country, the threat of World War III, and New York’s insistence on stripping our Second Amendment rights”. It’s using this momentum in New York to branch out to other Republican youth organizations around the country.This year, the photographer Paola Chapdelaine spent time with four male members of NYYRC and one male member of the nearby Connecticut Young Republicans, who represent a nationwide trend of young men increasingly embracing the right. Here, they explain how they found their way to the Republican party as young men in a liberal city and what they think of political polarization in America.Frank Filocomo, 27: ‘Community cannot be politically monolithic’View image in fullscreenWhen I was an undergrad, I saw a woman on the train with a button on her backpack that said “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. I remember completely disagreeing with that. This move towards dissolving the family, or saying that we don’t need each other and we could just be these totally individualized, autonomous beings with no connection to family, with no connection to our history, I reject that idea. I think we’re all connected to something greater. I guess that’s what makes me a conservative.Recently, I thought I had a great rapport with a date – lots of laughter, great chemistry. Then, the morning of the second date, she [texted]: “Hey, I did some thinking, and never mind. I would not like to go on a date with you.” I immediately knew that she Googled me. I’m not a rightwing vigilante, but I write for conservative publications.If I start immediately in a relationship by saying: “Hi, I’m Frank, I’m a conservative,” then I’m setting myself up for failure. I say: “Hi, I’m Frank, I have a cat that I love. These are my hobbies. I play guitar.” That’s not to say you should be deceptive about your beliefs, but it is to say that you should be cognizant of the political polarization in this country. I think it was Muhammad Ali who said that he judges people based on how they treat waiters at restaurants. Similarly, how do you treat animals? I think squabbling over the tax code, or the right number of immigrants we should have per year, or how you feel about foreign policy ultimately mean nothing to me in a relationship. What I care about is how you treat me and how you treat others.I sound like a hippy, but I also totally believe in this idea of community, and that community cannot be politically monolithic. It has to have Democrats in it, has to have liberals. The second we go to the “me versus them” or “us versus them” mentality, we’re doomed.Born, raised and currently living in Brooklyn, Filocomo is program manager at the conservative non-profit National Review Institute. He serves as policy chairman of NYYRCJude Somefun, 41: ‘My politics caused all types of consternation among my friends’View image in fullscreenIt was 2008 and I was a political free agent. This was when everybody was like, “Obama, Obama, Obama.” He was the hope and change guy. But he was saying stuff like: “These billionaires and millionaires have made too much on American people. It’s time for them to spread the wealth” – like socialists. And I was like: “I can’t vote for this guy.”That’s when I leaned on biblical faith and started researching the political parties. Growing up in New York, most Black people are implicit Democrats or explicit Democrats. My friend Ben, who was a socialist, illustrated to me what it takes to be courageous and not fall into the trend, to express your opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with socialism, I just felt like he was very courageous.I felt like the Republican party was more in alignment with freedom, more in alignment with business, more in alignment with marriage, more in alignment with life in the womb. I was like, “OK, I could get down with that.” It caused all types of consternation amongst my friends, my girlfriend at the time. People were having interventions. My dad kind of renounced me as a son. It was very, very tough.In this election, I believe we should promote the interests of America first. A lot of people are hurting now economically. I don’t see the benefit in sending money over to Ukraine, a bunch of foreign aid, a border that’s open, when we have to take care of our citizens.Somefun is philanthropy chairman of NYYRC. He was born and raised in Harlem and currently lives there. He is a life insurance agentMatthew Carrier, 22: ‘From the outside, I’m a raging conservative, but biodiversity concerns me’View image in fullscreenI got started with the College Republicans my sophomore year. There were four of us, so, like, something had to change. So we made it a very conversation-centric group. Our first topic was the Afghanistan pullout, because that was timely. Veganism was a recent [topic] we did, but the conversation was very good. We had a transgenderism and athletics meeting that was probably our most contentious.The club is College Republicans, there’s no hiding from that, and still, we’ve gotten a very dynamic group of people that are willing to have conversations. We have respect for ourselves. We have respect for the campus, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s something I see where other college Republican groups falter.From the outside, I’m a raging conservative, but biodiversity concerns me [as a farmer]. Still, I don’t share the same concerns [as environmental activists] with GMOs and stuff, because I see there’s a need when you have a world of 8 billion people to feed. I try not to criticize farmers that are at a much larger scale than me by saying: “Just let there be more ladybugs and your crops will be fine.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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      Republicans are very much a party of clean air, clean water. When you want to talk about global warming and such, that’s where you lose us. I’m much more appreciative of the climate change conversation if folks I’m talking to are willing to rank their issues. That’s a hard thing to do, and maybe a very cold way of thinking. But what’s the biggest issue, carbon in the atmosphere or plastic on the ground? Biodiversity? I think there’s a lot of benefits to nuclear [power], but no one wants to be the guy that stakes a claim to nuclear out of concern that things go bad.Carrier is the former president of College Republicans at University of Rochester and current statewide chairman of the Connecticut Young Republicans, as well as a political consultant and small scale farmer and beekeeper. He is from Enfield, ConnecticutLucian Wintrich, 36: ‘We’re in an economically terrifying situation’View image in fullscreenSo many younger people in New York are conservative, but they’re scared to actually come out and say that they’re conservative. [There’s also] a quarter of the party, and it tends to be these younger, reactionary kids, who will regurgitate whatever certain conservative influencers say, rather than reading and thinking for themselves.I was the only gay guy and the only pro-Bush guy in fourth grade. To me, conservatism is about actual individuality and autonomy and the understanding that the only real authority that we should appreciate and look towards is God, versus the government and elected officials. I mean, I fully believe in community. Most public schools, before the [federal government] took over and established the failing Department of Education, were run by communities. The more you involve the [federal government], the less control communities have, individuals have, and the worse off we are.[In 2024], I think we need to stop funneling all this money to Israel and Ukraine and honestly, every other country that we’re funneling money to. Actually, Israel is a little trickier than Ukraine. I do think it’s a stabilizing country [in the Middle East], but still we’re hemorrhaging money while our debt is going up. We’re in an economically terrifying situation right now.Wintrich lives in New York’s East Village. He is a media strategist and PR consultant and serves as press chairman of NYYRCKwasi Baryeh, 24: ‘It seems like political violence is becoming normalized’View image in fullscreenOne of the biggest problems I see with New York and other cities that lean liberal is that there’s a degradation of property rights. There’s potential for squatters. Tenants have the right to not pay and stay within the property. It’s also landlords abusing their position by not following their legal responsibilities. When people don’t pay rent or don’t abide by their contracts, that’s probably a gateway to people refusing to obey laws, refusing to follow established norms and conventions. It prevents people from living as moral people.I support the party. I support Trump. Trump did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. A couple months ago, I filed my tax return, and I saw I got a little extra money from that. He also [signed a bipartisan bill] funding HBCUs, which my mother, who’s a college professor, was really grateful for. He met with Kanye to see what could be done to remedy the injustice of more Black people being in prison – reducing the incarceration problem. The First Step Act, allowing the formerly incarcerated to re-enter society, was bipartisan, and it was passed. But with the [current] political environment, it doesn’t seem feasible that anyone is going to get much done.[I’m also concerned about the] two recent assassination attempts on Trump. It seems like political violence is becoming more normalized in our society, which makes things much more unstable as things get close to election day.Baryeh is a financial analyst. He lives in the Bronx and is a board member of the NYYRC Catholic caucus

      These interviews have been edited for clarity More

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      in US Politics

      If Kamala Harris is trying to show she can meet the needs of Black America, she has gaps to fill | Shamira Ibrahim

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      As we enter the final 21 days of the 2024 presidential election, the euphoric sheen from the summer’s “Kamala is Brat” phenomenon, which resonated with large swaths of gen Z voters, has waned. The Harris campaign is scrambling to communicate its case for selection at the polls, with the vice-president hurriedly pushing out platforms that address lingering skepticism amongst various demographic groups. On Tuesday night, during a broadcast conversation with the radio host Charlamagne tha God, Harris turned her attention to Black men.Harris’s concern is not completely unfounded – several notable Black male celebrities, such as the rapper 50 Cent and the sports personality Stephen A Smith, have expressed their receptiveness to the Trump campaign. On the aggregate, there has been a dip in support: a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Black voters reported that 78% of all Black voters expressed an interest in voting for Harris, which would be a significantly smaller turnout than the 90% of Black people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The most pronounced drop comes from Black men, 85% of whom turned out for the US president in the last election and just 70% of whom now say they would vote for Harris.In the hour-long interview, Charlamagne, whose daily morning show The Breakfast Club reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly, prodded Harris on topics spanning reparations, criminal justice reform, economic inequality and the fearmongering of the Trump campaign. Harris homed in on her consistent talking points about the necessity of voter participation, a proposed influx of capital for the middle class and misinformation, responses that felt stale and limited. But at other times, her replies landed with impact: when asked about issues specific to Black people that she would prioritize, Harris stressed initiatives around Black maternal mortality and the child tax credit as long neglected needs.In a few cases, Harris’s answers felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole. When asked by a caller how she intends to address the homelessness crisis in the US when the current administration seems to overemphasize foreign interests such as the Israel-Gaza war, the Democratic nominee deflected, punting back to her well-tread lines on home ownership and small business loans.The full exchange, which aired on iHeartRadio’s podcast platform and was simulcast on CNN, both reflected Harris’s best assets and underscored her biggest flaws as a candidate. She remains unflappable on her key points – including the idea that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and Black advancement – and she’s deft at articulating the possibilities and limitations of the government.But her inability to veer away from her entrenched positions or to adequately explain how they could substantively apply to the poor and working class, where Black communities are disproportionately represented, leaves much to be desired. If Harris’s aim is to squash the nagging perspective that she will be unable to meet the needs of Black America, then she still has a gap to fill. Her insistence that “we can do it all” is undercut by the reality that a large part of the Black working class is struggling with unemployment, homelessness, and other critical issues that prevent successful class migration.Yesterday, Harris’s campaign released the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, a five-point platform focused on Black entrepreneurship, mentorship, marijuana legislation, and cryptocurrency. The platform came on the heels of a contentious lecture from Barack Obama to Black men in Pittsburgh, where the former president alleged that they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that”.Whether misogyny is a factor in Harris’s current polling numbers or it isn’t, the emphasis on Black men feels overstated. The Black population accounts for barely 13% of the country, with high distribution in metropolitan areas that skew predominantly Democratic, while white and non-Black populations have voted for Trump at significantly higher rates.Despite this disconnect, the Harris campaign has responded with an aggressive media blitz of interviews and campaign stops directly targeted at Black communities. As a result many Black voters are ultimately left with the idea of voting as a means of harm reduction and not one of enthusiasm. For all of Harris’s insistence that the Trump campaign thrives on driving fear, the most animating influence on her campaign’s push to get Black voters to the polls seems to be fear as well. More

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      Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules

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      Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

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      Pelosi says she still hasn’t spoken to Biden since pressuring him to drop out

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      Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.The former speaker of the House told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden’s failing mental acuity.“Not since then, no,” she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. “But I’m prayerful about it.”She added: “I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she said. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”“Elections are decisions,” she added. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning … and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”Pelosi admitted that some in Biden’s campaign may not have forgiven her for her role in limiting Biden’s legacy to one term, but that a Trump victory would have equally reflected terribly on his legacy.Known as a uniquely influential House speaker, particularly during a Biden administration that passed major legislation on infrastructure and climate, Pelosi was widely seen as a senior Democrat willing to indicate that Biden should reconsider his bid for re-election when the polls showed Trump beating him badly.After Biden did step aside, Pelosi then encouraged the party to endorse Kamala Harris – and scored yet another victory when the vice-president named former congressman Tim Walz as her running mate.Pelosi has also been a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, frequently antagonizing him into posting long rants about her on social media, and publicly ripping up his State of the Union speech in 2020 on the podium of the House of Representatives, calling it a “manifesto of mistruths”.Explaining her unique ability to hold together a fragile coalition of centrist and progressive Democrats, Pelosi explained that she thought “leadership is about respect, about consensus building”, while deriding Trump’s ability to do anything of the sort, particularly with his hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, who he has described as “poisoning the blood of this country”.“I hardly ever say his name,” she says of Trump, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”.“I think [Trump is] a grotesque word … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.“It’s up there with like, swearing.”In her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi describes being the first woman speaker of the House, and her disappointment at the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, but says she remains optimistic that Harris will make history where Clinton could not.“I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House,” she told the Guardian. “The Congress of the United States is not a glass ceiling there. It’s a marble ceiling. And it was very hard to rise up there. But the public, I think, is better disposed … In Congress, they would say to me: “Understand this, there’s been a pecking order here for a long time of men who’ve been waiting for openings to happen and take their turn.” And I said: “That’s interesting. We’ve been waiting over 200 years.”She praised Harris, however, for not running as “the first woman or first woman of color. She’s running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that’s a different race than Hillary Clinton ran.”Noting that more women support Harris and more men support Trump by considerable margins, Pelosi said: “The reason that there’s such a gender gulf is because there’s such a gulf in terms of policies that affect women.”“A woman’s right to choose is a personal issue. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a democracy issue. This is an issue about freedom, freedom to manage your own life.”“What is a democracy? It is free and fair elections. It’s a peaceful transfer of power. It’s independent judiciary and is the personal freedoms in the bill of rights of our constitution. And he is assaulting those by particularly harshly on women, harshly on women. Did you see the other day? He said Kamala Harris was retarded. This is a person running for president of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Has he no respect for the office? Has he no decency about how to communicate?”Pelosi spoke about her fear of political violence, noting that misinformation spread by Trump had caused an atmosphere in which US disaster response agency Fema had to withdraw rescue workers from parts of North Caroline hit by a hurricane after reports of trucks of militia saying they were hunting Fema workers.“This is springing from the top,” she said of Trump’s role in fomenting political violence. “He’s taking pride in doing it. Don’t take it from me, take it from him.”After an armed assailant attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, in their home after breaking in with an intent to harm her, many Republicans made jokes – including Trump’s son Donald Jr, who suggested he would dress as Paul Pelosi for Halloween.“When it happened, what was so sad for my children and grandchildren was that [some Republicans] thought it was a riot – they were laughing and making jokes … his son, all those people making jokes about it, right away. We didn’t even know if he was going to live or die.”Asked if she agreed with the recent remarks of the former chairperson of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, that Trump was “a fascist to the core”, Pelosi said:“Yes, I do. I do. And I know it’s interesting because Kamala Harris says, I’ve prosecuted people like Trump. I know men like that. No, I know him,” she said, stressing Trump.“There’s one picture of me leaving the Roosevelt Room at the cabinet meeting. And I’m pointing to him and I’m saying, I’m leaving this meeting because with you, Mr President, all roads lead to Putin. [Milley’s] comment, ‘fascist to the core’, speaks to the actions that he has taken. Trivialize the press, fake news – that is a tactic of fascist governments.”She added that a possible repeat of January 6 was a key reason for the importance of Democrats at least winning the House in 2024. “Hakeem Jeffries must have the gavel, which means that we have the majority of the votes to accept the results of the electoral college for the peaceful transfer of power.”‘“Nobody could have ever seen an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. But an outsider, as a loser in this election, once again, he might try that.”Later in the interview, Pelosi said Trump’s name, then caught herself. “I said his name. Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.” More

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      Harris calls Trump a ‘risk for America’, after former president’s ‘enemy within’ remarks

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      Kamala Harris has said a second Trump term would be “a huge risk for America”, in a renewed effort to paint her Republican opponent as a threat to democracy, after the former president threatened to use US armed forces against those he has branded “the enemy within”.At her own campaign rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the US vice-president showed a montage of clips of Trump, including the former president saying “those people are more dangerous – the enemy from within – than Russia.”At a speech in Coachella in California on Saturday, Trump referred to Democratic opponents as “the enemy within”, saying they posed a bigger threat to the US than the country’s foreign foes, and targeted Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman who is running for the US Senate.In an interview on Fox News the following day, he repeated the phrase to describe those he claimed were planning to create “chaos” on the day of the presidential election. He said the military should be deployed against them.“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Harris told the crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, after playing the clip.She went on to say that Trump poses a danger because he believes those who do not agree with him are the enemy.At the same time, Harris’s campaign released a new campaign advert, titled The Enemy Within, featuring some of Trump’s recent ominous comments about his adversaries and warnings from two former members of his presidential administration about the danger he would pose if elected.The 30-second video, complete with footage of Trump walking in front of a row of helmeted riot officers and showing troops on the street during his presidency, tries to concentrate voters’ minds with contributions from Olivia Troye, a one-time national security adviser to Mike Pence, and Kevin Carroll, a former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.“I do remember the day that he suggested that we shoot people on the streets,” Troye says in the ad, which is accompanied with a dramatic musical soundtrack.Carroll adds: “A second term will be worse. There will be no stopping his worst instincts. Unchecked power to no guardrails. If we elect Trump again, we’re in terrible danger.”Harris, who has embarked on a late-campaign round of high-profile interviews after being accused for weeks of avoiding the media, is seeking to highlight the increasingly authoritarian tone Trump has been striking at his rallies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s use of extreme language has coincided with an increase in his vitriol to describe Harris, who he last week described as “mentally impaired”. He called her “retarded” while addressing Republican fundraisers in September, the New York Times reported.Harris’s campaign is also trying to draw attention to what it says a dearth of mainstream interviews given by Trump, who instead has chosen to make himself available to sympathetic interviewers, such as the rightwing radio host Hugh Hewitt.“As of today, it has been **one month** since Trump’s been interviewed by a mainstream media outlet, as he has backed out of 60 Minutes and refuses to debate again,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams posted on Twitter/X.By contrast, Harris is due to be interviewed on Wednesday by Bret Baier on Fox News, an outlet that is usually a go-to platform for Trump but unfriendly terrain for Democrats. More

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      Trump sparks outrage after calling for army to handle enemies on election day

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      Donald Trump has provoked an angry backlash from Democrats after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.In comments that added further fuel to fears of an authoritarian crackdown if he recaptures the White House, the Republican nominee said the military or national guard should be deployed against opponents that he called “the enemy within” when the election takes place on 5 November.He singled out the California congressman, Adam Schiff, who was the lead prosecutor in the ex-president’s first impeachment trial, as posing a bigger threat to a free and fair election than foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants, his usual prime target for abuse.Trump’s comments, to Fox News in response to a question on possible election “chaos”, triggered an angry reaction from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which likened them to previous remarks that he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second presidency and his suggestions that the US constitution should be terminated to overturn the 2020 election result, which he falsely claims was stolen by Joe Biden.Trump and the vice-president are locked in a tight contest as election day looms. Most national polls put Harris narrowly ahead, but in the crucial swing states which will decide the election, the contest appears much tighter and offers Trump numerous paths to a potential victory.After initially saying election chaos would not come from his side, Trump launched a vituperative attack on his opponents when the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, raised the possibility of outside agitators or immigrants who had committed crimes.“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme.“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and expert on fascism at New York University, told NBC that Trump was flagging up what he planned to do as president, which she compared to the “‘strongman’ ruling templates of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia respectively.“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orbán does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said.Trump also turned his fire on Schiff, who is a candidate for the US Senate in next month’s poll. He said: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”It was his second attack in two days on Schiff, who earned Trump’s enmity when he was the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee during his presidency, when he said there was evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016. The House later voted, under Republican leadership, to censure Schiff over his comments.At a rally in Coachella, California – a state he has virtually no chance of winning – on Saturday, Trump mocked Schiff’s physical characteristics and labelled him a bigger threat than foreign adversaries, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping.“He [Xi] is somebody that we can handle,” Trump said. “The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff. He’s a major low-life.”He claimed, without providing evidence, that Schiff was engaged in mass voter fraud. “They send millions and million of ballots all over the place,” he said. “[In] California, you don’t have anything like a voting booth. They take ballots and they just send them all over the place. They come back and they say, oh, somebody won by 5m votes.”Schiff responded on Twitter/X by accusing Trump of inciting violence in the same manner as he was widely accused of doing on 6 January 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to stop certification of Biden’s election win.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Today, Trump threatened to deploy the military against the ‘enemies from within.’ The same thing he has called me,” Schiff wrote.“Just as he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he again stokes violence against those who oppose him.”Harris’s campaign issued a more extensive condemnation. “Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” campaign spokesperson Ian Sams said.“Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one’, calls for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.“What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”While Trump, being out of power, will be in no position to deploy troops on election day, his call for military power to quell political opposition is familiar, recalling his demand that soldiers be deployed in the streets of Washington DC in 2020 to disperse thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd.Gen Mark Milley, the then chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly came close to resigning over the demand.Milley, who has since fallen foul of Trump, is quoted in a new book by Bob Woodward – the journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped to expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – as calling the ex-president “a total fascist” and has voiced fears that he could be recalled to service and court-martialled if he returns to office. 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