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      Judge in federal Trump election interference case to allow special counsel to file hundreds of pages of evidence – live

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      A federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election interference case will allow special counsel Jack Smith to submit a 180-page brief that could contain new evidence.The oversized brief contains legal arguments and evidence reflecting how the supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity will affect the case against Trump, which include felony charges for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity affects the charges against Trump, who is facing four felony counts related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Trump’s legal team called the request to submit the brief “fundamentally unfair” in part because it was so much longer than most opening briefs.The Trump campaign is holding a bus tour this week in Wisconsin featuring campaign surrogates and local party activists. The bus stopped in Appleton today, drawing around 100 spectators and featuring a lineup of activists, including an activist with the rightwing organization Moms for Liberty, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition – Wisconsin, and Trump loyalist Kash Patel.During the event, John Pudner of Wisconsin’s chapter of the Faith and Freedom Coalition handed out pamphlets for attendees to hand out to the public and stressed that faith-focused voters could have an outsize impact on the election if the Republican party can turn them out.“Let me tell you something,” said Pudner. “Florida in 2000 is Wisconsin in 2024.”In 2000, Florida’s election was decided by roughly 500 votes and a supreme court decision to end the recount there.The first ballots have been sent out for the hotly contested November elections that will determine the nation’s future.What is early voting?States – with the exception of Mississippi, New Hampshire and Alabama – offer all voters the opportunity to cast a ballot in person at a polling place before election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.In those places, registered voters can head to their polling location within the early voting time frame and cast a ballot. Most states begin counting those ballots on election day, and some require officials to wait until polls are closed to begin counting.Some states offer a version of early voting called “in-person absentee” voting, in which a voter can obtain and submit an absentee ballot in person at a polling place before election day.What about absentee voting?Most states allow for some form of absentee voting, in which a voter requests a ballot ahead of time, which officials then send to them in the mail to fill out and return by mail. Some jurisdictions offer voters the option of returning absentee ballots to a secured dropbox. Fourteen states require an excuse for voters to cast a ballot by mail, such as an illness or work-scheduling conflict. Eight states practice “all-mail” elections – in those places, all registered voters receive a ballot in the mail, whether or not they plan to use it.Federal law requires states to send absentee ballots to military voters and voters overseas.States regulate the “processing” and counting of absentee ballots; most states allow officials to immediately process ballots, which typically entails verifying the signature on the ballot with the voter’s signature from when they registered to vote. Other states require officials to wait until election day to begin processing ballots – which can slow the release of election results.One morning in February, 16-year-old Levi Hormuth took off school as his parents called out of work, and the three began a five-and-a-half-hour drive.The purpose of the 350-mile trip from their home in St Charles county, Missouri, to Chicago, Illinois, was a routine doctor’s appointment.Levi, a transgender boy, now 17 and in his final year of high school, had been a patient at the Washington University (WashU) Transgender Center since he was 13. The center, a short drive from home, had helped Levi in his transition, providing counseling and eventually hormone treatments at age 15. The testosterone had profoundly positive impacts, Levi and his parents said, helping him overcome significant mental distress stemming from his gender dysphoria.But in June 2023, Missouri’s Republican governor enacted a bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for youth under 18. The law had an exception for youth like Levi who were already accessing the care, but WashU, fearing legal liability, stopped prescribing medications to all trans youth.The best alternative for Levi and his family was to cross state lines.“The fact that I have to drive five hours both ways for treatment just shows our government in Missouri doesn’t care about things that are actually important,” Levi said one afternoon, sitting on his backyard deck with his parents in St Charles county, which is more conservative than neighboring St Louis. “We have potholes galore that should be fixed, we have horrible crime rates. It’s enraging that they’re not focusing on what matters and listening to our voices.”The stakes of the presidential election are enormous for people like Levi and the broader LGBTQ+ community.Donald Trump has promised aggressive attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, with a focus on trans youth, who have been a central target of the GOP’s culture war. The former president’s proposed “plan to protect children from leftwing gender insanity” includes ordering federal agencies to end all programs that “promote … gender transition at any age”; revoking funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth and subjecting them to US justice department investigations; punishing schools that affirm trans youth; and pushing a federal law stating the government doesn’t legally recognize trans people.Read more:A federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election interference case will allow special counsel Jack Smith to submit a 180-page brief that could contain new evidence.The oversized brief contains legal arguments and evidence reflecting how the supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity will affect the case against Trump, which include felony charges for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity affects the charges against Trump, who is facing four felony counts related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Trump’s legal team called the request to submit the brief “fundamentally unfair” in part because it was so much longer than most opening briefs.Seeking to secure every last electoral vote he can get, Donald Trump had been pushing allies in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral system to a winner-takes-all system. The state currently awards its five electoral votes based on congressional district.But after a key Republican legislator declined to support the last-minute effort to change the state’s system, the state’s governor has said that he won’t be calling a special legislative session to make the changes.“My team and I have worked relentlessly to secure a filibuster-proof 33-vote majority to get winner-take-all passed before the November election. Given everything at stake for Nebraska and our country, we have left every inch on the field to get this done,” said Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor. “Unfortunately, we could not persuade 33 state senators.”Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator, announced he wouldn’t support the change. “Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” McDonnell said in a statement. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.”Nebraska has awarded its electoral votes by congressional district since 1991, and since then, Republican candidates have usually secured all of the state’s votes. But in 2008, Barak Obama got the vote from the state’s second congressional district in the Omaha region, and in 2020, Joe Biden took that vote.Back at the United Nations, Ukraine’s president spoke before the security council, and suggested that negotiations to end Russia’s invasion would do no good.“This war can’t be calmed by talks. Action is needed, and I’m grateful to all the nations that are truly helping in ways that save the lives of our people,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.“Putin has broken so many international norms and rules that he won’t stop on his own. Russia can only be forced into peace, and that is exactly what’s needed, forcing Russia into peace as the sole aggressor in this war, the sole violator of the UN charter.”Zelenskyy is also using his visit to the summit of global leaders to press US lawmakers for continued aid that he says will give his military the edge over Russia in the conflict. Here’s more on that:Joe Biden will travel to Angola next month, the White House announced, marking the first trip by a US president to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015.Biden will visit the capital, Luanda, from 13 to 15 October, and meet with João Lourenço, the southern African nation’s president, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.“The president’s visit to Luanda celebrates the evolution of the US-Angola relationship, underscores the United States’ continued commitment to African partners, and demonstrates how collaborating to solve shared challenges delivers for the people of the United States and across the African continent,” Jean-Pierre said.Barack Obama was the last US president to visit sub-Saharan Africa, with a trip to Kenya and Ethiopia in July 2015. Biden welcomed Lourenço to the White House last year, and promised to visit Angola.Prior to arriving in Angola, Biden will visit Germany “to further strengthen the close bond the United States and Germany share as allies and friends and coordinate on shared priorities”, Jean-Pierre said.Local authorities in Tempe, Arizona, have said that someone fired shots at a Democratic party campaign office in a Phoenix suburb, causing damage but no injuries, according to the Associated Press.Tempe police told the Associated Press that the damage was discovered early on Monday and that the incident is being investigated as a property crime. Nobody was in the office at the time the shots were fired.On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the office is shared by staff for the Arizona Democratic party, the Kamala Harris campaign, and Senate and House campaigns.This comes as Harris is scheduled to visit Arizona later this week.New York’s Climate Change Superfund act was stripped from the state budget this year, but then it passed both chambers of the state’s legislature with bipartisan support in June.Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, it would require officials to work with scientists to figure out how much climate-related damage to people, ecosystems and infrastructure is attributable to big oil companies’ planet-heating pollution, then establish procedures to collect payments from big oil companies to fund those changes.At the rally on Tuesday outside the New York governor Kathy Hochul’s office, New Yorkers detailed their own experiences with climate disasters.Michael-Luca Natt from the New York chapter of the youth-led environmental group Sunrise Movement described how extreme city heat in the summer made it difficult to play outside as a youth.“It is time for the fossil fuel industry to be held accountable,” he said.If signed into law, the New York bill would be the largest policy of its kind in the nation. Vermont became the first state to pass a climate superfund bill in May.Dozens of climate activists gathered outside Kathy Hochul’s office on Tuesday demanding the New York governor pass the Climate Change Superfund act, which would force big polluters to help the state pay for damages caused by the climate crisis.“We are being played for suckers by the fossil fuel industry, and Governor Hochul is going along with it,” Bill McKibben, the veteran environmentalist who founded non-profits 350.org and Third Act, said at the rally.The activists from the fossil fuel accountability group Make Polluters Pay coalition, which includes environmental and human rights organizations such as Food and Water Watch, the New York Public Interest Research Group, Fossil Free Media, and Avaaz, carried large boxes filled with more than 127,000 petitions to Hochul’s office. They chanted: “What do we want? Climate justice,” and: “Make polluters pay.”A new poll of young voters published on Tuesday shows that among registered voters aged 18 to 29, Kamala Harris is 23 points ahead of Donald Trump, and 31 percentage points ahead among likely voters.The leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a non-profit that represents the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, has filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance on behalf of the group, according to an announcement from the law firm representing them.The group is charging the former president and Republican nominee for president, and his running mate and Ohio senator, with disrupting public service, making false alarms, committing telecommunications harassment, committing aggravated menacing and violating the prohibition against complicity per the press release.The Associated Press is reporting that the group has invoked its private-citizen right to file the charges in the wake of inaction by the local prosecutor.This comes as the city of Springfield has experienced an onslaught of disruption, harassment, chaos and threats since Trump and Vance began spreading false claims about Haitian immigrants there eating other residents’ pets.Last week, the mayor of Springfield issued an emergency proclamation following the continued rise in public safety threats.A new Reuters/Ipsos poll of registered voters published on Tuesday has Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 46.61% to 40.48% in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.The Democratic vice-president’s six-point lead is a slight increase from the last Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this month, which had her five percentage points ahead of the former president. More

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      Trump tells supporters at campaign rally ‘if we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing’ – as it happened

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      “Our entire nation is counting on the people of this great commonwealth,” Donald Trump said about Pennsylvania.“We got to take our country back from these horrible people because, if we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” he said.Thanks for reading. Rachel Leingang’s story from the Trump rally is here:

      Former president Donald Trump delivered a speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania, telling supporters: ‘If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing.’

      JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, refused to take a stance on the scandal involving North Carolina’s lieutenant governor during a Charlotte visit.

      A key Nebraska lawmaker rejected a Trump-backed effort to change state’s electoral vote rules.

      A government shutdown seems to have been averted, with Republican speaker Mike Johnson heading off the politically damaging disruption by agreeing to a spending deal that does not include measures against non-citizen voting, which Trump had demanded.

      Kamala Harris won the endorsements of hundreds of former national security and military officials, who said Trump “has proven he is not up to the job”.

      The White House laid out how Joe Biden will spend his final months in office, dubbing it the “sprint to the finish”.
      On Twitter, Kamala Harris’s campaign also reacted to Trump’s remarks on abortion and the overturning of Roe v Wade.“Trump: Nobody should want a federal law protecting abortion rights,” reads a tweet.Donald Trump has ended his 96-minute speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania.Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted on Twitter to Trump’s pledge to close the Department of Education.Trump later started using athletes in the Olympics to make anti-trans remarks and false claims. There were no transgender athletes who were competing outside of the gender they were assigned at birth at this year’s Olympic games.“We are going to keep men out of women’s sports,” he said. “It’s so demeaning to women.”“You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” Trump said to the women in the room. “It is now where it always had to be: with the states, and the vote of the people.”“Everyone wanted abortion out of the federal government and into the states,” he said. “Six brilliant and very brave justices of the United States supreme court were able to do that for you, and they did it.”Donald Trump turned his attention to women, claiming “women are poorer than they were four years ago.”He claimed women are less healthy, less safe, and more depressed than during his administration.“I am your protector,” he said. “As president, I have to be your protector.”Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris for her history as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, as well as the environmental policies she plans to put in place.“She wants to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles, which will destroy the Pennsylvania way of life,” he said.“As Attorney General, she destroyed San Francisco and she destroyed all of California,” Trump said. “Now she’s coming to destroy the United States of America, and we’re not going to let it happen.”Donald Trump brought Republican David McCormick to the stage. McCormick is running against the Democratic Senator Bob Casey in an uphill battle for the senatorial seat.“It’s a battle between common sense and these radical liberal policies,” McCormick said.Donald Trump continued making anti-immigrant remarks.“If Kamala Harris wins this election, she will flood Pennsylvania cities and towns with illegal migrants from all over the world, and Pennsylvania will never be the same, you will never be the same,” he said.“When I’m president, all migrant flights to Pennsylvania will stop immediately,” Trump said.He then claimed that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, a detail in her resumé she uses to win over a powerful bloc of working-class voters.“She never worked there, and these fake news reporters will never report it,” he said.After attacking Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, the crowd in Pennsylvania chanted “send them back!”Donald Trump later attacked Venezuelan migrants, generalizing the community and calling them “lawless gangs,” while blaming them for problems in the housing market and with crime.Donald Trump returned to his claim that the city of Aurora, Colorado, has been overrun by Venezuelan immigrants. Trump has been using Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, as examples of the Biden administration’s mistakes on immigration policies.“Harris has inundated small towns all across America with hundreds of thousands of migrants,” he said.He bragged about not using a teleprompter before asking: “Do you think Springfield will ever be the same?”Trump and JD Vance, his running mate, have falsely claimed that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield – a statement that has been debunked.The former president also touched on the famed Pennsylvania steel industry.“We have to be strong and powerful again, and we must put tariffs on foreign predators,” he said. “We have to make US steel great again.”During Trump’s administration, he imposed several rounds of tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, and goods from China. He has said that, if elected, he will would impose 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.Trump touched a nerve with fracking in Pennsylvania, saying Kamala Harris is planning to ban it.“If anybody here believes that she will let your energy industry continue fracking, you should immediately go to a psychiatrist,” he said.“I will get Pennsylvania energy workers pumping, fracking, drilling and producing like never before.”Donald Trump claimed that, during his presidency, foreign countries wouldn’t fight each other without his permission.“They would call me up to ask whether or not they could go to war with some other country,” he said.Trump took a stab at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman in history” and said “he wants them to win this election so badly”.Donald Trump says he promises to deliver tax cuts, attacking Kamala Harris for her plans to raise the corporate income tax rate.“Kamala Harris is the tax queen, and she’s coming for your money,” he said. “She’s coming for your pensions, and she’s coming for your savings, unless you defeat her in November.”Trump then focused his speech on inflation, pointing to higher prices for energy and groceries.“Vote Trump, and your incomes will soar,” he said. “Your net worth will skyrocket, your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down, and we will bring back the American dream, bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”Former President Donald Trump once again falsely claimed that crime is going up, by 45 percent, despite recently released FBI statistics stating otherwise.Here’s more context: More

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      As the election looms, can Harris’s campaign juggle joy with a sense of gravity? | Osita Nwanevu

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      While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.Then there were the doldrums of July, after a debate that wound up being extraordinarily consequential. Joe Biden’s shockingly poor performance finally made his age unignorable as an issue in the race – despite the best efforts of many Democrats and their unhinged hangers-on to ignore it. They manufactured an impressive amount of nonsense in his defense – their baseless warnings about Republican ballot shenanigans that never materialized, for instance, or the insistence that wanting Biden off the ticket was an expression of white male privilege, a glittering idiocy that should be long remembered.All that gave way predictably and immediately to unbridled enthusiasm for Kamala Harris once Biden stepped away, of course. And already in the brief and bewildering time she’s been on the ticket, Harris has essentially run two different campaigns.The first campaign, in those early days and weeks after she stepped into the race, was defined by relief and exuberance, bundled up into the repeated invocations of “joy” – a word that established an immediate contrast between Harris and both Biden and Trump. Both had staked their campaigns on a sense of gravity – Trump’s morbid and ludicrous vision of an America being undermined and invaded by dangerous foreigners and Biden’s well-founded warnings that Trump remained an existential threat to the American republic.The first Harris campaign didn’t depart from Biden there, but it did begin communicating with voters in a different register – Trump was to be feared, yes, but could also be mocked jovially. “You know it, you feel it,” Walz told a Philadelphia crowd in early August. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.” There was something thrillingly barbed underneath that folksiness and his avuncular affect – a hostility towards the Republican party beyond Trump that turned the page from Biden’s forlorn appeals to the right of the past and was grounded by invocations of Project 2025, surely by now the most infamous policy document the conservative movement has ever produced.Project 2025 still figures heavily in Harris’s messaging, and Oprah Winfrey herself talked up the merits of political joy in an appearance with Harris this week, but the campaign overall has plainly changed – the affective contrasts with the right are being replaced with affective and substantive moves in its direction. Consider Harris’s references to her gun ownership – “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” she told Oprah with a laugh – or her promises, before national audiences at the Democratic national convention and during this month’s debate, that she’ll command “the most lethal” military in the world as commander-in-chief. More substantively, the predictable backtracks from positions on energy, criminal justice and other issues she took during the 2020 Democratic primary have been joined by a departure from the Biden administration’s own tax policy – she’s pointedly proposing a smaller increase in the capital gains tax rate – and more criticisms of Trump’s sabotage of the Republican senator James Lankford’s bipartisan but remarkably conservative border bill.Obviously, to win the election, Harris will have to spend the next several weeks convincing the voters who matter most in this country – swing state swing voters who might loosely be described as center-right to the extent that they have coherent and categorizable views at all – to see her as something other than the generically liberal Democratic woman of color from California she’s been on most issues for most of her career. But she needn’t throw everything her campaign can think up at the wall to that end. It’s doubtful that many votes – or more relevantly, that many donations – are going to hinge on the difference between Harris’s capital gains tax increase and Biden’s; appealingly tough talk on hypothetical home invaders does not have to be paired with a substantive retreat from, say, eliminating the death penalty.Moreover, ridicule should remain an important part of the campaign’s playbook – ideally, the more time Harris spends framing the right as bizarre and culturally alien, the less time she’ll spend implicitly, and wrongly, conceding that they might be right on an issue like immigration, where a panic over immigrants stoked by the mainstream and conservative press alike has finally and inevitably curdled into the execrable campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. The garbage about barbecued cats isn’t something to be laughed off. The immigration discourse of the last several years has already produced multiple massacres and promises still more violence; polls show most Americans have now been frightened into nativism. All the talk and positioning of the moment aside, what would Harris do to pull those numbers back down? How much courage can we expect from Harris and the party she now leads, more broadly, should she win? At the moment, the campaign is doing everything it can to ensure only time will tell.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Harris condemns Senate Republicans for blocking IVF bill; VP calls Ohio attacks a ‘crying shame’ – live

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      Kamala Harris said that Senate Republicans refusal to vote in favor of protecting IVF “is not an isolated incident”:
      Every woman in every state must have reproductive freedom. Yet, Republicans in Congress have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.Congressional Republicans’ repeated refusal to protect access to IVF is not an isolated incident. Extremist so-called leaders have launched a full-on attack against reproductive freedom across our country. In the more than two years since Roe v Wade was overturned, they have proposed and passed abortion bans that criminalize doctors and make no exception for rape or incest. They have also blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception and proposed four national abortion bans.Their opposition to a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her own body is extreme, dangerous and wrong. Our administration will always fight to protect reproductive freedoms, which must include access to IVF. We stand with the majority of Americans – Republicans and Democrats alike – who support protecting access to fertility treatments. And we continue to call on Congress to finally pass a bill that restores reproductive freedom.
      Arizona’s top elections official said Tuesday that a newly identified error in the state’s voter registration process needs to be swiftly resolved, as early ballots are scheduled to go out to some voters as soon as this week.Election staff in the Maricopa county recorder’s office identified an issue last week, which concerns voters with old drivers licenses who may never have provided documentary proof of citizenship but were coded as having provided it and therefore were able to vote full ballots. The state has a bifurcated system in which voters who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship cannot vote in local or state elections, only federal ones.Because of the state’s very close elections and status as a swing state, the issue affecting nearly 100,000 voters will likely be the subject of intense scrutiny and litigation in the coming weeks. Arizona has more than 4.1 million registered voters.Governor Katie Hobbs directed the motor vehicles division to fix the coding error, which the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said was already resolved going forward.It’s not clear if any of these voters have unlawfully cast a ballot or if they have already provided proof of citizenship. People who register to vote check a box on registration forms, under penalty of perjury, declaring they are citizens.“We have no reason to believe that there are any significant numbers of individuals remaining on this list who are not eligible to vote in Arizona,” Fontes said in a press conference Tuesday. “We cannot confirm that at this moment, but we don’t have any reason to believe that.”The error, reported by Votebeat on Tuesday, relates to several quirks of Arizona governance.Since 1996, Arizona residents have been required to show proof of citizenship to get a regular driver’s license. And since 2004, they have been required to show proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections.State drivers licenses also do not expire until a driver is age 65, meaning for some residents, they will have a valid license for decades before needing renewal. These factors play into the error.The issue has split the Republican recorder in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, and the Democratic secretary of state. Recorder Stephen Richer is arguing that these voters should only be able to cast a federal-only ballot, while Fontes says the state should keep the status quo of allowing them to vote full ballots given how soon the election is. Fontes directed counties to allow these residents to cast full ballots this year.Read more here:Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has said that Republicans would do well to help avert a looming government shutdown.The path to preventing a shutdown, as ever, remains shrouded. House leader Mike Johnson’s current proposal – which extends funding while also folding in a Republican measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in national elections – lacks even enough Republican votes to pass.Non-citizen voting is already illegal and voter fraud by non-citizens is virtually non-existent, and the inclusion of the measure, which would add barriers to voting for US citizens, is a nonstarter for Democrats in the Senate.Meanwhile, far-right Republicans say Johnson’s proposal doesn’t go far enough in pushing their agenda, and see the threat of shutdown as an opportunity to push Democrats to compromise on immigration and other issues.Since Kamala Harris launched her presidential bid in July, Democrats have showered her campaign with cash. Last month alone, the vice-president raised $361m, tripling Donald Trump’s fundraising haul of $130m for the month. According to Harris’s campaign, she brought in $540m in the six weeks after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race.Democratic congressional candidates appear to be benefiting from this financial windfall as well, as Republicans sound the alarm about their fundraising deficit in key races that will determine control of the House and Senate in November.But in one crucial area, Republicans maintain a substantial cash advantage over Democrats: state legislative races. In recent years, Republicans have controlled more state legislative chambers than Democrats, giving them more power over those states’ budgets, election laws and abortion policies.The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which supports the party’s state legislative candidates, has raised $35m between the start of 2023 and the end of this June, the committee told the Guardian. In comparison, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which invests in an array of state-level campaigns, such as supreme court races, in addition to legislative campaigns – has raised $62m in the same time period.That resource gap is now rearing its head in key battleground states, the DLCC says. In Pennsylvania, a crucial state for the presidential and congressional maps, Republican state legislative candidates have spent $4.5m on paid advertisements, compared with $1.4m for Democratic candidates.“When we think about the context of what’s at stake, we think about more than 65 million people being covered by our target map this year,” said Heather Williams, president of the DLCC. “And that means that the rights of all those people will be determined by who’s in power the day after the election.”Read more here:A national voter poll from Monmouth has found that there are fewer “double haters” – voters that dislike both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates – since Kamala Harris joined the race.Only 7% of voters polled in this latest round favored neither Donald Trump nor Harris – compared to 16% of disliked both Trump and Joe Biden.“Senate Republicans put politics first and families last again today by blocking the Right to IVF Act for the second time since June,” said Emilia Rowland, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.Rowland warned that Donald Trump, who claimed to be a “leader” on IVF during his debate against Kamala Harris last week, would jeopardize access to fertility treatments if he wins in November.“Voters know the difference between words and actions,” she said. “And between now and November, they will turn out against Republicans from the top to bottom of the ballot.”JD Vance is scheduled to speak in an hour at an event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.The last time I was at this event space was for one of Kamala Harris’s inaugural rallies, which was held on the sprawling grounds adjacent to the hall where Vance will speak today.Cathy Weber, a retired farmer and military serviceperson, said she came to see Vance speak to get a better sense of who he is as a politician. When I asked about Vance’s comments about Haitian immigrants, she said she thought “he misspoke,” and chalked it up to being a younger politician – which she viewed as an asset.“He’s 39,” said Weber. “I said to my son: ‘That’s your generation, that’s our future.’”As the Guardian’s Robert Tait reported earlier this month, JD Vance has a history of opposing IVF – in contradiction to the Republican party and Donald Trump’s current stance that they support it:In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure.The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade and annulling the federal right to abort a pregnancy.The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.Kamala Harris said that Senate Republicans refusal to vote in favor of protecting IVF “is not an isolated incident”:
      Every woman in every state must have reproductive freedom. Yet, Republicans in Congress have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.Congressional Republicans’ repeated refusal to protect access to IVF is not an isolated incident. Extremist so-called leaders have launched a full-on attack against reproductive freedom across our country. In the more than two years since Roe v Wade was overturned, they have proposed and passed abortion bans that criminalize doctors and make no exception for rape or incest. They have also blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception and proposed four national abortion bans.Their opposition to a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her own body is extreme, dangerous and wrong. Our administration will always fight to protect reproductive freedoms, which must include access to IVF. We stand with the majority of Americans – Republicans and Democrats alike – who support protecting access to fertility treatments. And we continue to call on Congress to finally pass a bill that restores reproductive freedom.
      Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, pointed to the failure of the IVF bill today as proof that Republicans’ promise to protect access to in vitro fertilization is hollow:Meanwhile, John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, called the bill “an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn’t one”.Before its convention this year, the Republican party adopted a policy platform that supports states establishing fetal personhood, while also, contradictorily, encouraging support for IVF. But the platform does not explain how IVF could be legally protected if frozen embryos are given the same rights as people.Senate Republicans voted to block a bill that would have ensured access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.Every Republican, except Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the measure. Though a majority of 51 voted in favor, the bill needed 60 votes to pass.Democrats had brought the measure back to the floor after Republicans previously blocked it from advancing in June.Democrats have been pushing the issue this year after the Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered children under state law, leading several clinics in the state to suspend IVF treatment.Republicans, including Donald Trump, have scrambled to counter what could be a deeply unpopular stance against IVF. More

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      Suspect never had sight of Trump and didn’t fire shots at agent, Secret Service chief says after apparent assassination attempt – live

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      Ronald Rowe Jr, acting director of the Secret Service, said that once an agent detected Routh armed with a rifle, he discharged his firearm before the 58-year-old fled.“He did not fire or get off any shots at our agent,” Rowe said. “With reports of gunfire, the former president’s close protection detail immediately evacuated the president to a safe location.”Rowe also told reporters that Trump was “out of sight of the gunman” during his unscheduled visit to the golf club.“The protective methodologies of the Secret Service were effective yesterday,” Rowe added.Shortly after Donald Trump became president, authorities tried to warn him about the risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, according to The Washington Post.The agents told him that if photographers with long-range lenses could capture images of the president on the course, potential gunmen could do the same.Despite these warnings, Trump reportedly insisted that his clubs were safe and decided to keep golfing in them.Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspect in what the FBI has called an “attempted assassination”, previously made a series of donations to Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 elections, according to Federal Election Commission records.The documents show that Routh donated to campaigns supporting Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Beto O’Rourke, and Tom Steyer.The donations, which did not exceed $25, were made between September 2019 and March 2020, according to the records.Ronald Rowe from the Secret Service said he has “ordered a paradigm shift”.He said that the current methodologies work and described them as “sound”, but called on a reevaluation amid the current “dynamic threat environment”.Earlier, he said that the Secret Service constantly evaluates their methodologies “based on threat.”Ronald Rowe said that former president Donald Trump was not scheduled to be at the golf course on Sunday.When reporters asked if Routh knew whether Trump was going to be at the golf course at that time, Rowe responded: “It’s an active investigation. I don’t have any information on that subject.”Ronald Rowe Jr, acting director of the Secret Service, said that once an agent detected Routh armed with a rifle, he discharged his firearm before the 58-year-old fled.“He did not fire or get off any shots at our agent,” Rowe said. “With reports of gunfire, the former president’s close protection detail immediately evacuated the president to a safe location.”Rowe also told reporters that Trump was “out of sight of the gunman” during his unscheduled visit to the golf club.“The protective methodologies of the Secret Service were effective yesterday,” Rowe added.Jeffrey B Veltri, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office, took the stage, stating that the agency is investigating the event as “an apparent assassination attempt of former president Trump”.“We view this as extremely serious and are determined to provide as to what led up to the events that took place,” he said.Veltri stated that Routh was the subject of an investigation in 2019 by the FBI based on a tip that he was in possession of a firearm.“In the area of the tree line from where Routh fled, agents found a digital camera, a backpack, a loaded SKS-style rifle with a scope and a black plastic bag containing food,” Lapointe said.He also said Routh was convicted of felonies in North Carolina in December 2002 and March 2010. Routh was prohibited from carrying a firearm amid these felonies, according to Lapointe.US attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the southern district of Florida is providing an update about the apparent assassination attempt on former Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.Lapointe confirmed that Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was charged with gun-related offenses. He had an appearance in court this morning in West Palm Beach.Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader from Kentucky, issued a statement regarding the potential assassination attempt against Donald Trump, describing this week as “a time to reflect on the ways that our political process has been infected by reprehensible violence”.“For the second time in as many months, law enforcement faces an even more urgent task: completing a thorough, swift and transparent investigation into the circumstances of yesterday’s close call,” he said.“The American people deserve answers. They deserve assurance that a former President who tens of millions of Americans have nominated once again will receive every appropriate measure of security,” he added.Federal prosecutors have brought gun charges against Ryan Wesley Routh, who was arrested yesterday in Florida after what investigators believe may have been a potential assassination attempt against Donald Trump. In charging documents, an FBI special agent said that Routh’s cellphone spent nearly 12 hours in the vicinity of the tree line at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, and that he had previously been convicted in North Carolina on a felony charge of possessing “a weapon of mass death and destruction” after being found with a fully automatic gun. Trump sought to use the incident, in which he was not injured, to his advantage, telling Fox News that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were to blame because they’ve described him as a threat to democracy for his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.Here’s what else has happened today:

      The sheriff’s office in Martin county, Florida, shared footage of the moment that Routh was arrested yesterday.

      Biden spoke briefly to reporters about the incident, saying the Secret Service should be given more resources, perhaps personnel.

      Harris said she was “deeply disturbed by the possible assassination attempt” targeting Trump.

      In addition to blaming Democrats, Trump is fundraising off the potential assassination attempt.

      Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, said more funding for the Secret Service could be included in a spending bill under negotiation with House Republicans.
      Reuters reports that Ryan Wesley Routh, who was arrested yesterday for potentially trying to assassinate Donald Trump, was charged for possessing “a weapon of mass death and destruction” in North Carolina in 2002 after being found with a fully automatic gun.Reuters also found that Routh has a criminal history in the state that goes back to at least 1990, including for writing bad checks, traffic violations and possessing stolen goods.Amid calls from across the political spectrum to give the Secret Service more resources after a potential second assassination attempt yesterday targeting Donald Trump, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer has hinted that the funds could be allocated as part of the latest round of spending negotiations.“We all must do our part to ensure an incident like this does not happen again. This means that Congress has a responsibility to ensure the Secret Service and all law enforcement have the resources they need to do their jobs,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor.“So, as we continue the appropriations process, if the Secret Service is in need of more resources, we are prepared to provide it for them, possibly in the upcoming funding agreement.”Congressional leaders are trying to pass some kind of funding agreement to keep the government running beyond 30 September, when the current authorizations expire. Democrats, who control the Senate, and Republicans, who hold a majority in the House, have not yet reached an agreement, with one of the sticking points being calls from Trump and some GOP lawmakers to also pass a bill that makes voting by non-citizens a federal crime. Here’s more on that:Donald Trump is returning to X Spaces this evening for a broadcast on the social media platform’s live audio feature:About a month ago, he held a nearly three-hour-long talk on Spaces with X’s chairman, Elon Musk, which was surprisingly light on news:Before news of a potential second assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump broke, the New York Times reported on Sunday that John Roberts, the conservative chief justice of the supreme court, to encourage his colleagues to rule in favor of the former president on the question of his immunity that came before them earlier this year. Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Anna Betts:John Roberts Jr used his position as the US supreme court’s chief justice to urge his colleagues to rule quickly – and in favor – of Donald Trump ahead of the decision that granted him and other presidents immunity for official acts, according to a New York Times investigation published on Sunday.The new report provides details about what was happening behind the scenes in the country’s highest court during the three recent supreme court decisions centering on – and generally favoring – the Republican former president.Based on leaked memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, the Times report suggests that Roberts – who was appointed to the supreme court during Republican George W Bush’s presidency – took an unusually active role in the three cases in question. And he wrote the majority opinions on all three.In addition to the presidential immunity ruling, the decisions collectively barred states from removing any official – including Trump – from a federal ballot as well as declaring the government had overstepped with respect to obstruction of justice charges filed against participants of the 6 January 2021 attack that the former president’s supporters aimed at Congress.The Times reported that last February, Roberts sent a memo to his fellow supreme court justices regarding the criminal charges against Trump for attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden.Merrick Garland, the attorney general, issued a statement where he promised to “work tirelessly” and use “every available resource” in the investigation into the apparent attempted assassination on Donald Trump.“We are grateful the former president is safe,” Garland’s statement reads.
      The entire justice department – including the FBI, the US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida, and the national security division – is coordinating closely with our law enforcement partners on the ground.
      “We will work tirelessly to ensure accountability, and we will bring every available resource to bear in this investigation,” he added.Here’s more from Joe Biden’s address to the National HBCU Week Conference in Philadelphia, during which he decried the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump and urged Americans to work together to stop the scourge of political violence.The Secret Service’s acting director, Ronald Rowe Jr, was in Florida “assessing what happened and determining whether any further adjustments need to be made to ensure” Trump’s safety, AP quoted Biden as saying. He added:
      America has suffered too many times the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet. It solves nothing. It just tears the country apart. We must do everything we can to prevent it and never give it any oxygen.
      Joe Biden has been speaking at a conference of historically Black colleges and universities in Philadelphia, during which he addressed the apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump.Biden commended the Secret Service for their “expert handling of the situation”, per pool report. He said:
      Let me just say there is no – and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, and those of you who know me know this – in America, there is no place for political violence.
      A video posted to Facebook on Monday shows the arrest of the man suspected in the apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump.The body camera footage shared by the Martin county sheriff’s office shows Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, walking backward with his hands over his head on the side of a road before being handcuffed and led away by law enforcement.The White House described a now-deleted post by Elon Musk on X as “irresponsible” after the tech mogul questioned why Donald Trump has faced two apparent assassination attempts while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not encountered any.In a Sunday night post, Musk wrote: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” He later the deleted the post after intense backlash, claiming his comments were intended as a joke.In a statement, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said:
      As President Biden and Vice President Harris said after yesterday’s disturbing news, ‘there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country,’ and ‘we all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence.’
      “Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about. This rhetoric is irresponsible,” the statement added. More

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      Trump repeats false claims about Ohio cities after Biden says ‘no place in America’ for attacks on Haitian immigrants – as it happened

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      Donald Trump went on to threaten “large deportations” in Springfield, Ohio, which is home to a large Haitian community that he and his allies have vilified in recent days.“I can say this: we will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We’re going to get these people out,” Trump said.Haitians are currently shielded from deportation under the homeland security department’s Temporary Protected Status through 3 February 2026, due to their home country’s troubles.

      Joe Biden said the hostile attacks on Haitian immigrants in the US “[have] to stop” after Donald Trump repeated a false and derogatory claim about a Haitian community in Ohio.

      Donald Trump repeated racist claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, on Friday, doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric as residents in the town have faced bomb threats and have detailed their fears amid harassment.

      Some schools in Springfield were reportedly closed by administrators for a second day in a row as Trump and his allies spread unproven stories of pet-eating by Haitian migrants.

      Haitians have reportedly been intimidated and had their cars vandalized in Springfield since the campaign against them began. People chanted “we’re not eating cats” at a rally held by Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, in Michigan yesterday.

      Trump also defended his association with Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist whose penchant for public displays of racism has unnerved even some of his most extreme allies.

      Kamala Harris is participating in a taped interview with a local station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to air later on Friday. Harris will also host a virtual livestream rally together with Oprah Winfrey next week.

      Pope Francis criticized Donald Trump over his plan to deport millions of immigrants and Kamala Harris over her stance supporting abortion rights.

      Kamala Harris’s campaign stepped up its mockery of “chicken” Donald Trump for ducking out of another presidential debate, with the Democratic nominee telling her Republican rival he owes it to voters to face her again.

      Joe Biden and Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, are meeting at the White House where they are expected to discuss a loosening of restrictions on Ukraine to launch long-range strikes into Russia.

      Joe Biden is planning a trip to Angola in the coming weeks. This would make Biden the first US head of state to visit sub-Saharan Africa since then president Barack Obama in 2015, according to Reuters.
      Joe Biden is meeting with the UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, at the White House.The pair are expected to discuss – though not necessarily announce – a loosening of restrictions on Ukraine to launch long-range strikes into Russia.Biden and Starmer took photos inside the Oval Office before sitting down for talks in the Blue Room alongside UK and US officials, per pool report.Before talks began, Biden said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will not prevail in the war with Ukraine. He said he and Starmer would talk about Ukraine, the Middle East and the need for a hostage and ceasefire deal, as well as the Indo-Pacific region.The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said political leaders should not be “attacking vulnerable communities” as she criticized Donald Trump for spreading false and racist theories targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.The Washington Post reported Jean-Pierre, whose parents immigrated from Haiti to New York, telling reporters today:
      Political leaders should not be attacking vulnerable communities. That’s not who we should be. And if they’re going to fall for conspiracy theories online, maybe they shouldn’t be our leaders.
      Pope Francis has criticized both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for their policies on abortion and immigration, claiming both candidates are “against life”.The pope was speaking to journalists on Friday when he was asked about the US presidential election. He replied:
      Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies.
      He went on to say that not welcoming migrants is a “grave” sin and compared undergoing an abortion to an assassination, Reuters reported.Catholics would have to “choose the lesser evil” when they vote in November, he said, without elaborating.
      Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don’t know. Everyone, in conscience, (has to) think and do this.
      “Not voting is ugly,” he added. “It is not good. You must vote.”Kamala Harris is participating in a taped interview with Brian Taff for Action News 6 ABC, a local station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The interview will air on the station’s 6pm broadcast.Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris will host a virtual livestream rally together next week.The event, titled Unite for America, will take place on Thursday 19 September, at 8pm ET.This comes as Winfrey, who said she was a registered independent, made a surprise appearance at the Democratic national convention last month and endorsed Harris for president.President Joe Biden is planning a trip to Angola in the coming weeks, Reuters is reporting, citing several sources familiar with the plans.The trip, Reuters reports, is likely to occur after the UN general assembly meeting in September and before the presidential election in November, according to a source.This would make Biden the first US head of state to visit sub-Saharan Africa since then president Barack Obama in 2015, according to Reuters.Biden had previously said he would visit Africa during his presidency.MoveOn, a progressive public policy advocacy group, is partnering with ice-cream company Ben & Jerry’s to create a special limited edition Kamala Harris-inspired ice-cream flavor, titled Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee, as part of a get-out-the-vote initiative.MoveOn announced on Friday that it will also be traveling to battleground states with an ice-cream truck, where it will hand out free ice-cream, and raffle off free, limited-edition, autographed pints of Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee – which is described as a coconut ice-cream with a caramel ripple and confetti stars.The Scoop the Vote tour begins on 16 September in Philadelphia with the founders of Ben & Jerry’s, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the organization said.In addition to free ice-cream and other goodies, the tour will feature elected officials, activists and other special guests, MoveOn said.And on top of the coconut ice-cream, MoveOn will also serve a variety of electorally themed ice-cream flavors, they said, that include: Unburdened by What Has Vanilla Bean, Inauguration Celebration Birthday Cake, Fight for Our Rights Sorbet and MoveOn Mobilizer Milk Chocolate.Despite the efforts of local leaders, Donald Trump has continued to demonize the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, vowing at a press conference to carry out “large deportations” in the town if returned to the White House. He also defended his association with Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist whose penchant for public displays of racism has unnerved even some of his most extreme allies. At a White House event celebrating Black excellence, Joe Biden said the attacks on Haitians have “no place in America”, and Kamala Harris was on her way to Pennsylvania for more campaign events this evening.Here’s what else has happened so far today:

      Some schools in Springfield were reportedly closed by administrators for a second day in a row as Trump and his allies spread unproven stories of pet-eating by Haitian migrants.

      People chanted “we’re not eating cats” at a rally held by Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, in Michigan yesterday.

      Haitians have reportedly been intimidated and had their cars vandalized in Springfield since the campaign against them began.
      Donald Trump’s press conference has concluded, but before he wrapped up, the former president was prompted to talk about what he might do for California if he wins the election.Trump turned it into a campaign pitch to Golden State voters, who haven’t backed a Republican presidential candidate since George HW Bush was on the ballot in 1988:
      Vote for me, California. I’m going to give you safety. I’m going to give you a great border, and I’m going to give you more water than almost anybody has.
      Notice the reference to water, an all-important issue in the western state, which is also the nation’s most populous:Trump was asked again about his association with Laura Loomer, and what he thinks she brings to his campaign.Loomer has pedaled conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, and made racist posts on social media. Nonetheless, Trump said:
      She brings a spirit to us that a lot of people have. We have very spirited people. And, in all fairness to her, she hates seeing what’s happened to the country. More

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      US election live: Trump called ‘evil’ over debate watch party at gun store near Georgia school shooting site

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      Young voter groups have criticized the RNC’s gun store debate watch party, calling Trump ‘evil’ and ‘out-of-touch’ for hosting the event so close to the shooting site.The groups, which include Voters of Tomorrow, College Democrats of America, Leaders We Deserve, College Democrats of Georgia, Georgia High School Democrats, Young Democrats of Georgia, Path to Progress and Blue Future issued a joint statement condemning the RNC decision:
      Just days after students and teachers were murdered in Apalachee High School, Republicans are hosting a debate watch party an hour away at the world’s largest gun store. The Trump team is evil for disrespecting the victims like this — and by continually refusing to support life-saving gun violence prevention policies.
      Donald Trump is out-of-touch with the vast majority of Americans on gun violence prevention. He continues to suck up to the gun lobby and insult victims, as shown by today’s event. As young organizers in Georgia and across the country, and members of a generation that has been defined by mass shootings, we know Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for young Americans’ lives will cost him this election.”
      More on today’s comments from Olivia Troye, a former Trump White House National Security Official, from the Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Lauren Gambino:Troye warned that Trump would be dangerous for American alliances. She said as president, his foreign policy “go-tos were always, like, why don’t we just bomb them?”“He would reach out to dictators and sometimes look at them for strength. So Donald Trump would be looking to Putin for advice,” she said.Of how he would treat the US’s Nato and European allies, she said: “He would totally betray them, because those are the discussions that were actually had in this room with someone like Donald Trump.”Troye said the recent endorsements of former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, former congresswoman Liz Cheny, was representative of a “sea change” happening among independents and moderate Republicans willing to set aside their partisan leaning to stop Trump from returning to the White House.“Dick Cheney, no one can claim that he’s a Democrat, right?” Troye said. “So when you look at someone like him and he’s saying, ‘No, this is unacceptable. I don’t stand for this.’ I think that speaks volumes about where the Republican Party is today and where it’s headed under Donald Trump.”Troye, who was a Homeland Security Advisor to former vice president Mike Pence, urged Harris to confront voter concerns on immigration. But she noted that it was Trump, not Harris, who stood in the way of a conservative border bill. Trump blocked the bill, she said “because he just has his own personal vendetta, and it’s all about him like and that, to me, is like counterintuitive.” She also assailed Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, for promoting a baseless rumor about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.“The way to solve the immigration system is not going out and talking about Haitian immigrants … eating their pets,” she said. “I mean the extremism that these people propose in their agenda, the anti-immigrant and the hatred that they have just for America in general, that’s not the way that fix it. We need to come together in a bipartisan way.”Live from the spin room, Anthony Scaramucci, a former communication director in Trump’s White House, predicted Harris would defeat his former boss in tonight’s debate.Scaramucci, now a surrogate for Harris, warned that Trump was a “clear and present danger” to the American people.Asked if Trump, having participated in seven presidential debates in eight years, had the advantage of experience, the Republican disagreed.“I’m not worried about him having seven debates under his belt, because in a lot of those debates, he acts a little absurd. Frankly. What I’m confident in is [that] she’s going to compare and contrast herself, and she’s going to come out of this at 10:30 tonight as the one choice that the American people need to be president.Scaramucci also joked about his brief tenure in the White House, telling reporters he had “lasted one Scaramucci in the White House, which is 11 days”.Speaking to reporters in the debate spin room, Olivia Troye, a former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence, urged voters to set aside doubts they might have about Kamala Harris’s approach to the war in Gaza.“She has been strong against Hamas and what’s happening there,” Troye said. “I do think that we need to be compassionate for the people that are going through the situation. She’s also been strong on Israel. I think she’s navigating this in the correct way.“What I would say is when I contrast that to what Donald Trump would do in this situation, let me remind you that I was actually there in the Trump administration when Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and his inner circle enacted the travel ban.“When I think about what they’re going to do with Gaza and when I think of Muslim countries and when I think about the international populations, I think about how much they detested those populations and I look at the extremism that will come with a Donald Trump administration. That’s what crosses my mind.”Troye, a member of Republicans for Harris-Walz, added:“What I would say to Michigan voters is: think very carefully in this situation on what really matters to you right now because you’ve got to think more on the greater strategic picture of what someone like Donald Trump would do because he does not have your best interests at heart.”Young voter groups have criticized the RNC’s gun store debate watch party, calling Trump ‘evil’ and ‘out-of-touch’ for hosting the event so close to the shooting site.The groups, which include Voters of Tomorrow, College Democrats of America, Leaders We Deserve, College Democrats of Georgia, Georgia High School Democrats, Young Democrats of Georgia, Path to Progress and Blue Future issued a joint statement condemning the RNC decision:
      Just days after students and teachers were murdered in Apalachee High School, Republicans are hosting a debate watch party an hour away at the world’s largest gun store. The Trump team is evil for disrespecting the victims like this — and by continually refusing to support life-saving gun violence prevention policies.
      Donald Trump is out-of-touch with the vast majority of Americans on gun violence prevention. He continues to suck up to the gun lobby and insult victims, as shown by today’s event. As young organizers in Georgia and across the country, and members of a generation that has been defined by mass shootings, we know Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for young Americans’ lives will cost him this election.”
      The RNC has scheduled a watch party for tonights debate at a gun store in Georgia just miles away from Apalachee high school where two teachers and two students were killed by a 14-year-old shooter last week.“While Georgians continue to mourn the students and educators who were shot and killed at Apalachee High School last week, the RNC is hosting a #Debate2024 watch party at the nation’s largest gun store tonight—less than 50 miles from Apalachee High School,” the gun-control advocacy group Moms Demand Action wrote in a post on X, adding in all caps: “INSENSITIVE. GROSS. REPREHENSIBLE.”Adventure Outdoors, which proudly proclaims itself as “The Greatest Store On Earth,” carries over 15,000 guns in stock and has a 17-lane shooting range. The store has hosted debate watch parties before, including last June when Trump debated Joe Biden.The event, which includes dinner and refreshments, is sponsored by a slew of conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots Action, Fulton County Republican party and the Pac Turning Point Action.Kamala Harris will be joined by her husband, Doug Emhoff, sister Maya Harris and her husband, Tony West, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia tonight, NBC News reported.Donald Trump will be joined by his eldest son, Eric Trump, and his wife and the Republican National Committee chair, Lara Trump, according to CNN. It’s unclear whether Melania Trump will attend.Tommy Tuberville, the Republican senator from Alabama, is blocking the promotion of an army general and top aide to Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, citing concerns about the military leader’s alleged role in the lack of transparency surrounding Austin’s hospitalization earlier this year.The army general in question, Lt Gen Ronald P Clark, has been nominated to become the four-star commander of all US army forces in the Pacific. But the Alabama senator and retired college football coach is holding up the promotion, according to the Washington Post.“Senator Tuberville has concerns about Lt Gen Clark’s actions during secretary Austin’s hospitalization,” a spokesperson for the senator, Mallory Jaspers, told the Post.Jaspers went on to say that Clark knew Austin was “incapacitated” and did not tell Joe Biden, breaking his oath to president.The spokesperson said that Tuberville was waiting to review an inspector general’s report surrounding Austin’s handling of his hospitalization before Clark’s promotion.The Trump and Harris campaigns had been in dispute over the debate guidelines.The Harris campaign had previously pushed for live, or “hot”, microphones, arguing that it would “fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates”.Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign had been pressing for them to be turned off, as was the case in the first debate with Joe Biden.A statement from ABC made clear that microphones for both candidates will be muted during the debate when their opponent is speaking.The other rules ABC News said had been agreed upon with the two sides include:

      No opening statements and closing statements will be 2 minutes per candidate

      Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate

      Props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage

      No topics or questions will be shared in advance

      Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other
      Candidates will have two minutes to answer questions, two minutes for rebuttals and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications or responses.After winning a virtual coin toss, Trump opted to give the second closing remarks; Harris selected the right podium position on the screen, meaning Trump will be on the left.Donald Trump has called on Republicans in Congress to shut down the government as the House speaker Mike Johnson vowed to stay the course and put his government funding package on the House floor on Wednesday.Trump, posting to his Truth Social platform, urged GOP lawmakers not to vote for a six-month continuing resolution to avert a shutdown in three weeks, unless the bill is linked to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act.The Save Act would overhaul voting laws to require proof of citizenship in order to vote. Trump wrote:
      If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. … CLOSE IT DOWN!!!
      Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the measure and the bill has very little prospect of passing the House.From Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman:Robert F Kennedy Jr will appear in the spin room in Philadelphia tonight as a surrogate for Donald Trump, after he dropped his independent presidential bid last month and endorsed the Republican nominee.Trump is “so desperate for support he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel and coming up with RFK Jr”, a statement from Matt Corridoni, the Democratic National Committee spokesperson said, and added:
      Equally desperate, RFK Jr. is willing to sell his soul for attention — abandoning any integrity he had left. Both of these men are driven by their egos and desire for attention and that will be on full display after the debate tonight.
      On 21 July, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris. This historic move changed the landscape of the election and how many felt about the race.As the election enters its final weeks, the Guardian US is averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring.After two weeks of a roughly three-point Harris lead, Guardian US polling averages have Donald Trump and Harris tied for the first time since we started tracking the polls in August. Many of the high-Harris enthusiasm polls from late August are dropping off our 10-day rolling average, while several new high-quality polls have Trump in a narrow lead. Though the results are within the margins of error for the polls, Trump’s lead in those individual polls has led to a big increase in his national average.The first presidential debate between Harris and Trump is Tuesday night. The last presidential debate was arguably one of the most consequential in modern political history, so we will be closely following the impact that the candidates’ performances have on their national standings.A deputy manager for the Kamala Harris campaign debuted new billboards placed across Philadelphia, ahead of the debate there on Tuesday.One billboard appears to reference Wawa convenience stores and mocks Donald Trump and his fixation on crowd sizes.This comes as the Harris campaign also unveiled a new ad this week, titled Crowd Size, featuring former president Barack Obama’s speech from the Democratic national convention last month, during which Obama talked about Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota governor, will be participating in a virtual national debate watch party tonight, he said in a post on X.The virtual watch party will be from 8:30pm ET to 11pm ET.With just hours to go until the much-anticipated debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a new poll published on Tuesday by PBS News/NPR/Marist shows Harris just one point ahead of Trump nationally among registered voters.The poll also states that among independent voters, Trump received 49% while Harris received 46%, and that Trump now has a lead among the Latino voters surveyed, with 51% now choosing the ex-president.A third of the registered voters said that the debate tonight will help them “a great deal or good amount” in making their selection. More

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      in US Politics

      Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him

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      In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More