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      Giuliani’s attempts to overturn 2020 election partly thwarted by wrong number

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      Rudy Giuliani texted the wrong number as he tried to persuade Michigan legislators to help overthrow the 2020 election.According to a document unsealed in federal court on Wednesday, on 7 December 2020, Giuliani tried to send a message urging someone unspecified to help in the plan to appoint a slate of fake electors.“So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the legislature that states the election is in dispute, there’s an ongoing investigation by the legislature, and the Electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official electors of the state of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline under Michigan law,” Giuliani wrote.As Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, his allies sought to appoint alternate slates of electors in states that he lost to send to Congress. These false slates of electors met in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona and signed certificates in which they represented that they were valid electors in their states. Trump allies then attempted to send those certificates to Congress for counting on 6 January 2021. The plan failed.Some of the electors have since been charged criminally, while others have not. Some have said they were told that they were instructed they were acting as a backup in case Trump won court cases challenging the election results.Prosecutors said Giuliani failed to send the message because “he put the wrong number into his phone,” prosecutors wrote.The detail was included in a legal brief by the special counsel Jack Smith that was unsealed by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election interference case against Trump.The brief, which contains several new details about Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 race, argues why Trump should be held accountable – specifically, why he is not entitled to immunity after the US supreme court held that presidents cannot be charged for “official acts” while in office.Giuliani is an unnamed co-conspirator in the case.He also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has had his law license suspended in New York and has been disbarred in Washington DC over his involvement in the scheme. He is also appealing a judgment that he owes two Georgia election workers nearly $150m for defaming them after the 2020 election.Giuliani has a history of sloppy cellphone use. According to New York magazine, he once accidentally called an NBC reporter and left a message in which he could be heard discussing overseas business and said: “We need a few hundred thousand.”He also once appeared to accidentally text a reporter one of his passwords. More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election

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      James Cozadd, a 49-year-old plumber born in Montgomery, Alabama, has no idea why he got a letter from Alabama’s top election official telling him he was potentially ineligible to vote. He was born in the US, yet the letter said he was suspected of being a non-citizen and he would have to prove his citizenship to vote.“I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” Cozadd said in a court filing in September.He was one of more than 3,200 voters the secretary of state asked to prove their citizenship – part of a wave of actions amid heated rhetoric among Republicans over the idea that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in US elections, a theory that runs counter to data.It’s not just happening in Alabama. Alvaro Manrique Barrenechea, a Tennessee immigration law professor, got a letter this year claiming he could be illegally voting, despite becoming naturalized in 2019 and having the legal right to vote. And Nicholas Ross, an Ohio music professor, became a US citizen in May after nearly three decades in the country but received an accusatory letter from the Ohio secretary of state in June telling him he could be ineligible to vote because he wasn’t a US citizen. Voting as a non-citizen would be a crime, it warned.These purges are not just complicating the ability of some qualified voters to cast a ballot this year. They are also setting the stage for future laws to restrict voters’ access to the ballot and are giving fuel to Donald Trump and his allies to seed doubt about the integrity of elections and undermine results if he loses in November.Trump and other Republicans are already using the false idea that non-citizens could vote in widespread numbers to suggest the election could be stolen.“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the 10 September debate. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” .There is no proof that non-citizens are voting, or even registering to vote, in any meaningful numbers. It’s not the first time Republicans have made these claims, but the purges and rhetoric over non-citizen voting this year are, perhaps, at their apex.The rhetoric makes voting an immigration issue, linking two red-meat issues for Republicans. It also aligns with broad anti-immigrant sentiment the right is advancing, with much of it stemming from a conspiracy that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans with minorities through mass migration – the great replacement theory.Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the theory holds that the white population is being displaced by non-white immigrants “who will vote in a certain particular way”.“These attacks on non-citizens and voters are part and parcel of the great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said. “They’re indistinguishable.”David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said it was clear why Trump and supporters were leaning into the myth of non-citizen voting.View image in fullscreen“This is about setting the stage to claim an election was stolen,” he said. “This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses. And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen.”The myth of non-citizen voting has also taken hold after some of the most outlandish myths about the 2020 election weredebunked, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank.“It keeps ‘Stop the Steal’ alive at a point where most of the other things about ‘Stop the Steal’ don’t have much currency,” he said, referring generally to the movement that tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election.”Republicans have waged an aggressive legal effort in Congress, state capitols and courtrooms to create the false impression that there are non-citizens on the rolls. Congressional Republicans are pushing a bill to address the nonexistent problem, though it is stalled in DC after a failed effort to tie it to a government funding bill.The Republican National Committee and other Trump-aligned groups have also filed suit in a number of battleground states – including Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona – accusing election officials of not doing enough to ensure non-citizens aren’t on the voter rolls. The state officials have all said there are adequate safeguards in place to ensure that only US citizens are voting.Republican statewide officials in several states – Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio and Texas – have also launched efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls and have flagged thousands of voters for possible removal. Voting rights groups have raised deep concerns about those efforts, saying the methodology is flawed and that states are presenting misleading statistics to give an exaggerated impression of how many non-citizens may be on the rolls.The list of potential non-citizens flagged in Alabama has so far shown itself to be off-base, the US Department of Justice said in a lawsuit filed last week, claiming the purge was conducted illegally. In response to letters asking suspected non-citizens to provide documentation of their citizenship before voting this fall – an extra hoop to jump through before casting a ballot – more than 700 voters, nearly one in four on the list, have provided such proof.Ross, the Ohio music professor who received a letter from the state’s top election official, said he dug into why he might have been flagged and found a likely reason. He had renewed his driver’s license in January, when he had a green card, which seemed to land him on the secretary of state’s potential non-citizen list. He sent in paperwork to prove his citizenship after receiving the letter.“When you do this and just look at the last driver’s license, you’re just netting a lot of naturalized citizens,” Ross said. “And of course, my concern is, then you’re creating this narrative of lots of non-US citizens trying to vote by including those numbers.”Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for the office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, says it found “approximately 600 non-citizens registered to vote, a relatively small number considering there are over 8 million registered voters in Ohio”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLaRose’s office forwarded the flagged registrations to the state attorney general for potential prosecution, claiming some of them may have voted. Prosecutors say they have investigated and found little. A prosecutor in one county office told the Ohio Capital Journal that most cases involved people checking the box claiming they are not citizens on their registration forms. When told they should rescind their registration, almost all of them complied.“The secretary believes that voter fraud is extremely rare because we take it seriously here in Ohio,” Lusheck said. “A law that is not enforced isn’t a law, it’s a suggestion.”Many of the naturalized citizens erroneously on the list as non-citizens appear to have been flagged from outdated motor vehicles data. The voters may have driver’s licenses that have not expired, then got their citizenship. The guidelines for what to do after you become a citizen say a driver’s license can be renewed or updated, but it’s not a requirement.In Tennessee, state officials sent more than 14,000 notices to people asking them to prove their citizenship. The secretary of state’s office there has since said it would not remove voters who didn’t prove their citizenship. The office did not respond to a request for comment.One of the voters targeted was Manrique Barrenechea, an immigration law professor at Vanderbilt University, who became a US citizen in 2019 and has voted since. He did not feel comfortable sending documents in the mail to prove what he believes the state should already be able to confirm.“You’re putting the burden on me to get information that you already have as government,” he said.For some immigrants, the letter may read as intimidating, he said.“I hope it’s not that they’re trying to make it difficult for immigrants to vote, but it really generated an extra step to me,” he said.The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, started a process to purge alleged non-citizens from the rolls within 90 days of an election, which both a private lawsuit and the justice department lawsuit claim runs afoul of federal law. Allen also referred the alleged non-citizens on the voter list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, which the lawsuit argues amounts to voter intimidation.Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Some eligible voters who were sent letters by Allen issued declarations in court. Cozadd, a Republican and lifelong Alabaman, received a letter claiming he had previously been issued a non-citizen identification number. He wrote in his declaration that he cannot figure out why the state would believe that.“I was stunned to receive that letter. It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law – just for trying to exercise my right to vote,” he wrote.There have been some isolated examples of states that have had relatively small problems with non-citizens on their rolls. Oregon election officials recently said they would remove more than 1,200 people from its voter rolls after they failed to provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Only nine of them had cast ballots and there are 3 million registered voters in the state.Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers who has studied incidents of voter fraud for decades, said that for years Republicans have seized on misunderstandings of the complex processes to maintain the voter rolls to suggest that non-citizens were voting.What’s different now is the scale at which they are claiming it’s occurring.“It’s now something that has almost a national audience where in the past it was a little more isolated to places like Texas or Arizona,” she said. Constant images of migrants coming over the border that are aired on Fox News and other conservative outlets, she said, had only augmented the myth.Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said the messaging on this issue had ramped up over the past few years and coincided with racism and xenophobia. The misinformation about non-citizen voting could play into conspiracy theories and distrust of elections, she said.“This is an extremely rare problem,” she said. “Because people don’t understand that this is extremely rare, we see laws or policies that end up sweeping in large numbers of naturalized citizens, or sweeping in folks who don’t have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship, and then really taking away their fundamental right to vote.” More

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      in US Politics

      JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

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      JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

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

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      in US Politics

      Melania Trump’s abortion views baffle both sides: ‘Hard to follow the logic’

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      The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.” More

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      in Elections

      Special counsel pushes to use Pence against Trump in 2020 election case

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      Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence – meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that the conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the brief said.View image in fullscreenAnd on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.“For the defendant’s decision to include private actors in the conversation with Pence about his role at the certification makes even more clear that there is no danger to the executive branch’s functions and authority, because it had no bearing on any executive branch authority,” it said.Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that “the process was over” and that Trump consider running again in 2024 – key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.And prosecutors reiterated that charging the most damning evidence that Trump’s lawyers knew they were violating the law – emails where Eastman asked Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to consider one more “minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act – did not impact the functioning of the executive branch.The expansive brief also included prosecutors asking to take to trial evidence of Trump’s effort to pressure state officials to reverse the results and his effort to then rely on fake slates of electors.The response from Trump’s lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.But prosecutors included a pre-emptive rebuttal: “Although countless federal, state, and local races also were on the same ballots … the defendant focused only on his own race, the election for president, and only on allegations favoring him as a candidate in targeted states he had lost.” More

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      in US Politics

      JD Vance takes victory lap and mocks Tim Walz over debate gaffe

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      JD Vance took a self-proclaimed victory lap after his vice-presidential debate against the Democrat Tim Walz, appearing on Wednesday at a campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.Vance told supporters in Auburn Hills that he thought the debate went “pretty well” on Tuesday, as snap polls showed viewers considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.Departing from the generally civil tone of the debate, Vance mocked Walz over his biggest gaffe of the night, in which the Democratic governor said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”In his prepared remarks, Vance did not touch on his weakest moment in the debate, when he refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. But when Vance took questions from the media after his speech, a reporter did ask him about the exchange, and he again sidestepped the question.“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to commonsense economic policies,” Vance said.Vance then pivoted to discussing the issue of non-citizen voting, which has become a rallying cry among Trump and his supporters. Research has uncovered little evidence to substantiate Republicans’ concerns, as voting in a federal election is already illegal for non-citizens.“We’re going to talk about election integrity because I believe that every vote ought to count, but only the legally cast votes, and that’s why we fight for election integrity,” Vance said in Michigan.Vance focused most of his remarks on attacking Harris over her economic policy proposals, blaming her for the high inflation seen earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency and accusing her of avoiding tough questions about her record. Echoing comments he made during the debate, Vance referenced his background growing up in a low-income family in Ohio to relate to Americans struggling to pay their bills.“She’s afraid of interviews, so she doesn’t talk to people, and she doesn’t realize that her economic policies are making it harder on American families,” Vance said. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to afford a good life for your family, and that’s what Donald Trump and I are going to fight for every single day for the next four years.”Vance then linked Trump’s economic policies to his proposals on immigration, as the former president has called for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. An analysis released on Wednesday by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, concluded that Trump’s mass deportation program could cost the federal government as much as $88bn a year on average.“The American media – and especially Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – they don’t want to talk about how this illegal immigration crisis is a theft of the American dream from American citizens,” Vance said. “Here’s the Donald Trump plan, and here’s the Donald Trump message to illegal aliens in this country: in six months, pack your bags because you’re going home.”Despite rehashing some of Trump’s most divisive talking points, Vance made a point to reach out to Democrats who may still be undecided in the election. Trump will probably need some of those voters’ support to carry Michigan, a state that Biden won by 3 points in 2020.“As a person who was raised by a couple of working-class, blue-collar Democrats, I want to say to every Democrat who’s watching at home [and] every Democrat who’s in this room: you are more than welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican party,” Vance said. “We’re the party of common sense. We’ve got a big tent, and you’re welcome in our movement.”And yet, when asked by a reporter how he and Trump would work to unite Americans in the face of political division if they win the election in November, Vance again lashed out against Harris.“Why do we have so much division, and why do we have so much rancor in this country’s political debate? It’s because Kamala Harris and her allies are trying to silence the American people rather than engage with them,” Vance said. “When you try to censor your fellow citizens, when you try to shut them up, you breed division and hatred.”Given Trump’s tendency to deploy personal insults and degrading nicknames against his political opponents, that explanation may not sit well with voters. Trump now has just one month left to convince Americans that he deserves another four years in the White House. More

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      Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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      Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More