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      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s brother ‘heartbroken’ over Trump endorsement

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      Max Kennedy, the brother of Robert F Kennedy Jr, has implored the public to ignore his sibling’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and endorse Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House.In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Max Kennedy said “Trump was exactly the kind of arrogant, entitled bully” that his father, former US senator and attorney general Robert F Kennedy, stood against before he was assassinated in 1968 as he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination.Max Kennedy predicted his father would have admired the Democratic nominee for November’s election, Vice-President Kamala Harris, because she was a former prosecutor as well.“Her career, like his, has been all about decency, dignity, equality, democracy and justice for all,” Max Kennedy wrote.“I’m heartbroken over my brother Bobby’s endorsement of Donald Trump,” the piece added. “Robert F Kennedy’s life was dedicated to promoting the safety, security and happiness of the American people.”Robert F Kennedy Jr made the announcement to suspend his independent presidential campaign on Thursday. He soon appeared with Trump at a political rally in Arizona where he formally backed the former president, who clinched the Republican nomination despite his conviction on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, among various other legal problems.Kennedy said he planned on removing his name from the 2024 presidential election ballot in swing states to boost Trump’s chances of retaking the Oval Office. But Kennedy said he would remain on the ballot in other states that are not expected to decide the presidential race.In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Robert F Kennedy Jr claimed his campaign was undermined by “censorship” by the media – and not being included in the June presidential debate that preceded Joe Biden’s decision to halt his presidential re-election bid.Kennedy also described his periodic conversations with Trump before Thursday’s endorsement announcement, including one hours after the failed assassination attempt of the former president in July.While they agreed that they would be able to continue criticizing each other in connection with issues on which they don’t see eye to eye, “he invited me to form a unity government”, Kennedy said of Trump.Kennedy’s presidential bid and endorsement of Trump has drawn sharp criticism from the rest of his family. That includes his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, whom Kennedy has acknowledged was “very uncomfortable” with his endorsement of Trump despite her statement that she “deeply” respected her husband’s decision.And, before its suspension, his campaign was replete with controversies, including a sexual assault allegation made against him by a former staffer and the proliferation of numerous conspiracy theories over vaccine safety, Covid 19, wireless internet, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and antidepressants.Max Kennedy, a lawyer, is younger than his former presidential candidate brother. He is the ninth child of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy – and he was the nephew of John F Kennedy, who was president when he was assassinated in 1963.He characterized his brother’s endorsement of Trump as “inconceivable”, noting how he had offered Harris his endorsement in exchange for a position in her administration if she won. But Max Kennedy said his brother received no response from the Harris camp and successfully offered the same deal to Trump.“It is all the more tragic because of our brother’s name. To carry the name Robert F Kennedy Jr means a special legacy within a legacy,” Max Kennedy wrote, explaining his father’s record cut a stark contrast with Trump’s on anti-racism, immigration, the rule of law, the environment and gun control. Max Kennedy said the same was true with respect to truth and democracy, apparently an allusion to Trump’s falsehoods about having been robbed of victory in the 2020 presidential race by electoral fraudsters, which drove his supporters to mount the deadly US Capitol attack in early January 2021.“I love Bobby. But I hate what he is doing to our country,” Max Kennedy wrote. “It is worse than disappointment. We are in mourning.“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature. With a heavy heart, I am today asking my fellow Americans to do what will honor our father the most: Ignore Bobby and support vice-president Kamala Harris and the Democratic platform. It’s what is best for our country.”Kennedy on Sunday said everyone in his family needs “to be able to disagree with each other and still love each other”. More

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      Harris campaign raised $540m amid surge during Democratic convention

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign says it has now raised $540m for its election battle against Donald Trump.The vice-president’s campaign has had no problems getting supporters to open their wallets since Joe Biden announced on 21 July he was ending his run for re-election to the White House and quickly endorsed Harris. The campaign said it saw a surge of donations during last week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago where Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, accepted their nominations.“Just before vice-president Harris’ acceptance speech Thursday night, we officially crossed the $500m mark,” the campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo released by the campaign on Sunday. “Immediately after her speech, we saw our best fundraising hour since launch day.”Trump has also proved to be a formidable fundraiser but appears to be outpaced in her month-old campaign. The Republican nominee and former president’s campaign announced earlier this month that, alongside its related affiliates, they had raised $138.7m in July – less than what Harris took in during her candidacy’s opening week. Trump’s campaign reported $327m in cash on hand at the start of August.The Harris fundraising totals were raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees.O’Malley Dillon said that nearly a third of contributions during convention week came from first-time contributors. About one-fifth of those first-time contributors were young voters and two-thirds were women, groups that the campaign sees as critical constituencies that Harris needs to turn out to win in November.The Harris campaign says it has also seen a surge in volunteer support for the vice-president. During convention week, supporters signed up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts to help the campaign. More

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      FBI informant’s book predicts far-right violence: ‘we should be afraid’

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      America’s fraught 2024 election could be hit by far-right violence, warns a high-profile FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in a new book.Joe Moore spent a decade tasked with infiltrating KKK chapters in Florida to investigate enduring ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist organization, an assignment that included disrupting a murder plot by a trio of Klansmen who worked as prison guards.Now the former US army sniper is out with a book, White Robes and Broken Badges, detailing those experiences – and applying the lessons he learned to an approaching election freighted with fears of the impact of far-right and white supremacist groups.A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election.“Unfortunately, I think it’s relevant to any time in our nation’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has come to learn. “One is geographical, where you are raised up in an area where that ideology is simply a part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin in which it’s handed down.”And so begins a story of how Moore, living near Gainesville in the 2010s, became involved with white supremacists in Florida, rose to the position of Grand Knighthawk, the klan’s security official, and disrupted a plot by Klansmen, all prison guards, to murder a Black former inmate, and of bringing down two major KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.“In my first tour inside the KKK – the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago – I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.View image in fullscreenAfter serving in foreign authoritarian countries, he continues, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”Moore described meeting a regional Klan leader, or Grand Dragon, who lived near Rosewood, Florida, the site of a racist massacre of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the town in 1923. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s home I walked over to remnants of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to stop the next Rosewood,” he says.Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.The foreword is written by the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who last week described his experience during the January 6 riot to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago. In the book, Raskin describes the “mobilization of domestic violent extremist groups to act as the frontline shock troops in the assault”.Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America”.Moore says he tried to remain politically neutral, for doing otherwise would mean risking mistakes. But finding the right people to report the corruption he had uncovered was more difficult – Florida officials, he claims, didn’t want to hear his message of KKK infiltration into law enforcement.“It was far more prevalent and consequential than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came out and said there was no information that the issue was any more broad than the case in front of them. But I had a list of officers that were active members and actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process as well.”The KKK may not be the force it once was, but other white nationalist organizations moved in to adopt the messaging and the membership, among them militia groups and movements like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.Moore estimates that by 2014, one-third of all Klan members were also members of another similar organization and the transition was being encouraged at the highest levels of the organization.“It just so happens that geographical and generational origins are dispersed, so if America was to have another civil war it would not be north versus south, but it would be families and geographical locations against other families and geographical locations.”White supremacists moved north in the US – joining homegrown ones already there – for reasons of economic prosperity “but they brought with them the generational origins of racism and seed different areas of the north for racism to grow generationally”, he adds.White Robes is ghost-written by Jon Land, author of the insurrectionist thriller Murder at the CDC, dozens of mystery-suspense novels and the teen comedy film Dirty Deeds, that produces a clash between style and message.No matter. Moore has an informed point when it comes to the infiltration of law enforcement – some 20% of those arrested during the January 6 Capitol attack are believed to have some relationship to US law enforcement.“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, be it prisons, local police or state police. They want information to have control of their environment,” Moore points out. “But the KKK is not about controlling their environment to make money but to fulfill an ideology to bring about a new government or system.”That in turn seeds generations below who also join law enforcement with racist ideology, he says. “It comes down to propagandizing, a self-fulfilling cycle of ideology and survivability. They fear for the loss of their ideology.” More

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      As Republicans flail from ‘one stupid jackass thing to another’, Harris strives to define vision

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      As Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for US president, and 100,000 red, white and blue balloons floated down from the rafters, Charlene Dukes’ eyes filled with tears. “It was when she spoke about her family, her upbringing, which is so similar to many of us,” said Dukes, a Black woman from Maryland.“Many of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths,” added Dukes, who said the prospect of the US electing a woman of colour as president for the first time in its 248-year history left her feeling “euphoric”.Harris’s address got a thunderous reception in a packed sports arena in Chicago on Thursday night, crowning a pitch-perfect week for Democrats and whirlwind month that turned the presidential election on its head. Some had feared a repeat of the chaotic and violent 1968 convention in the same city; instead the feelgood factor was closer to the 2008 version in Denver that anointed Barack Obama.In speech after speech, party leaders characterised Harris as a historic figure, the embodiment of hope, “the president of joy” – and predicted that she would defeat Donald Trump’s “politics of darkness” once and for all. Delegates walked the streets of Chicago in idyllic weather with a spring in their step, thrilled that their party had been rejuvenated and revivified.But having preached to the converted, Harris is about to face a tougher crowd. Even after six weeks in which everything went right, she enjoys only a fragile lead in opinion polls entering the final sprint. Trump has urged his supporters to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Harris told hers: “When we fight, we win!” Now both are facing the fight of their political lives.Democrats are not only buoyed up by their new ticket of Harris and running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota with dad, football coach and midwestern appeal: after years of soaring prices, the Federal Reserve has nearly conquered inflation without triggering a recession, a feat few economists predicted.The number of people crossings into the US has fallen dramatically since Joe Biden’s asylum crackdown and stricter enforcement in Mexico, although migration can be cyclical and, as the weather cools, it is possible the numbers will begin to climb.Despite the positive trend lines, across the four-night arc of the convention, Democrats’ most prominent voices cautioned against overconfidence. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, told delegates: “No matter how good we feel tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, this is going to be an uphill battle.”Ex-president Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary’s bid to become the first female president was thwarted by Trump in 2016, added: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.”Implicit in the warning words was the question hanging over the convention: can the Harris honeymoon last?More than a month after 81-year-old Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, Harris has barely started to outline detailed plans that she would pursue as president to address challenges such as immigration, crime and the climate crisis.She faces a crunch test on 10 September when she goes head to head with Trump, a notoriously unorthodox opponent, in a televised debate. As Biden discovered in June, a bad debate performance can change the entire trajectory of a race.Harris has also yet to hold a press conference or give an in-depth media interview to face difficult questions about her leadership style, her significantly changed policy positions in recent years, and the focus on gender and race that looms over her historic candidacy – a topic she was careful to swerve past in her acceptance speech.John Anzalone, a pollster who has worked for the last three Democratic presidential nominees, said: “We can’t put our heads in the sand. She’s a Black woman. The bar is going to be higher for everything and guess what that means: even mistakes are going to be magnified. Every campaign is going to have mistakes.”Harris’s allies acknowledge that she remains largely undefined in the minds of many voters, having operated in Biden’s shadow for much of the last four years. The relative anonymity offers both opportunity and risk.David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said: “The thing about vice-presidents, the downside is, nobody knows who you are. The upside is, nobody knows who you are and so you get a chance to define yourselves.”Speaking on a panel organised by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the convention, Axelrod added: “She is a turn-the-page candidate, and the fight right now is whether the Trump folks can push her back into the box of being an incumbent and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done, or whether she can continue on this path as the choice to turn the page.”Harris used her acceptance speech to promise to pass a middle-class tax cut, support Ukraine and Nato, and push for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. But for now, her team feels no urgency to publish a comprehensive policy platform or sit for media interviews that might jeopardize positive vibes that have produced a flood of campaign donations and a growing army of swing-state volunteers.During a series of meetings throughout the convention week, her advisers cast her policy agenda as a continuation and expansion on Biden’s first-term achievements, though at times with a different emphasis. While Biden spoke often of job numbers, Harris has focused on the cost of living and proposed a ban on price gouging.Harris has also dropped opposition to fracking and support for Medicare for All, which were defining features of her doomed 2020 presidential campaign. Her aides insist her values remain the same but that she has embraced more moderate policies out of pragmatism. Progressives are also looking for clues that she will take a tougher line against Israel over its war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenSarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said: “The extent to which she has been able to shake off Biden’s negatives immediately has been incredible. She doesn’t own his economy, as best I can tell, and she doesn’t own Gaza. This is where I’ve been generally impressed with her and where Biden struggled as a communicator. These are complicated issues that require nuanced explanations and she’s capable of giving those explanations.”The campaign promises a clash of styles. A former prosecutor, Harris devoted a broad chunk of Thursday’s speech to nailing Trump’s narcissism, hostility toward women’s reproductive freedom and embrace of autocrats. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut numerous other Democrats used mockery and ridicule to make Trump seem small, likening him to a spurned boyfriend, a neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower and a tenor warming up with “Me me me me me”. Walz has led the way in branding Trump and his allies “weird”.For his part, the former president has been struggling to find an effective line of attack. The Republican nominee has adopted a kitchen-sink approach against Harris that includes attacks about her racial identity (“Is she Indian or she is Black?”), her intelligence (“stupid”, “dumb”), her laugh, her record as vice-president and her history as a “San Francisco liberal”.Longwell, founder and publisher of the Bulwark website, added: “‘San Francisco liberal’ is a buzzword that [for] conservatives strikes right at their hearts. Or even people who are centre-right. People know exactly what it means – and by that I mean they have no idea what it means but they understand what it feels like and it’s bad, so that is the thing she’s got to push off.”Frustrated Republicans have gone public to urge Trump to focus on policy rather than identity politics. They argue that he still enjoys the upper hand on immigration and inflation, although Harris has closed the gap in polling. But the Trump campaign is still struggling to adapt to its new, younger opponent.James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, said: “The thing that’s most amazed me is how utterly caught off-guard they were and how they still can’t seem to get their sea legs. They can’t settle on an attack. Fox [News] is just lost – they go from one stupid jackass thing to another stupid jackass thing.”Speaking after a tour of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, Carville added: “Can they get it back? Maybe, sure, good chance. But right now they’re spitting blood. They’ve been hit in the mouth. I’m hoping that the country decides we just want something different and has, believe it or not, something different.”The Trump campaign had been structured to attack Biden’s age and mental acuity. The switch to Harris has turned the tables, with Trump, 78, the oldest major party nominee in history and Harris, 59, representing a fresh start.Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Obama White House, said at a media event organised by Bloomberg: “They are pretzeling themselves trying to figure out how to attack Kamala Harris because she has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics. She is an incumbent but she’s also a change candidate right now in this election. She’s been able to seize the banner away from Donald Trump.”Gaspard, who has known Harris since the 2007-8 Obama campaign and describes her as a “Swiss army knife” able to appeal to voters in every context, added: “The Republican party will struggle for the next 75 days to impose some governing discipline on Donald Trump, [the US representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others who are going to continue to go after Kamala Harris with misogynistic, racist, ethnic, xenophobic tropes.“They’re going to struggle with that and they’re going to fail miserably because [Trump] is a candidate who is incapable of being conditioned to a new kind of behaviour. There is no message discipline there. The challenge that they have: Donald Trump is a far better candidate in 2016 than the guy who’s standing on the stage today.”But in a deeply divided country, the election remains too close to call. Not even an attempted assassination or change of nominee has moved the needle more than a few percentage points. Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump will not be a gamechanger either.Most people have made up their minds. According to an ABC News/ Washington Post/Ipsos survey, just 12% of voters are potentially persuadable this election, and they tend to be less engaged: roughly one in four of them say they are certain to vote in November compared with nearly two-thirds of Americans overall.Dan Kanninen, battleground director for the Harris-Walz campaign, told reporters at a Bloomberg event that the electoral map has neither expanded nor shrunk since Biden’s withdrawal: “The race is not fundamentally changed. The enthusiasm is incredible. The fact we’re connecting with some voters in different ways is obvious and shows up in some of the research that you’re all seeing as well. But the race is still very, very tight.”Harris, who with Walz starts a bus tour of swing state Georgia on Wednesday, has clawed back the losses caused by Biden’s low approval rating. But she has 11 weeks left to define herself not merely as the inheritor of the anti-Trump coalition but as an inspiring figure in her own right. Joy alone will not be enough.Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said in an interview: “I don’t think we’re at a sugar high. Where she is now is where Democrats should be but it’s not high enough to win. So to me the bigger question is not so much: ‘Is all this enthusiasm going to go away?’ as ‘Is she going to be able to get beyond just the coalescing of the base and get that next 2, 3, 4%?’”Asked whether she would dare to predict the outcome on 5 November, Walter gave a one-word answer. “No,” she said, with a hearty laugh. More

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      How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?

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      When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation.Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. Launched last year, the Texas-based non-profit organization frames itself as a press freedom group with the goal of “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe group’s day-to-day operations appear to revolve around sharing engagement bait on X and seeking millions from donors for a “fellowship program” chaired by a high school sophomore that would award $100,000 to Twitter personalities such as Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, according to a review of the group’s tax records, investor documents and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Foundation did not return request for comment to a set of questions about its operations and fellowship program.After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk’s claims that freedom of speech is under attack from leftwing forces, one of the organization’s messages found its way to Trump and then his millions of supporters.Disinformation researchers have long warned that generative AI has the ability to lower the bar for creating misleading content and threaten information around elections. After Musk’s xAI company released its largely unregulated Grok image generator last week, there has been a surge of AI content that has included depictions of Trump, Kamala Harris and other political figures. The Milton Freedom Foundation is one of many small groups flooding social media with so-called AI slop.A niche non-profit’s AI slop makes its way to TrumpDuring the spike in AI images on X, the conservative @amuse account posted the images of AI-generated Swift fans to more than 300,000 followers. On the text of the post, which was labeled “satire”, was a watermark that stated it was “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”. Trump posted a screenshot of @amuse’s tweet on Truth Social.The @amuse account has considerable reach itself, with about 390,000 followers on X and dozens of daily posts. Running @amuse appears to be Alexander Muse, listed as a consultant in the investor prospectus of the Milton Foundation, who also writes a rightwing commentary Substack that includes posts exploring election conspiracy theories. The @amuse account has numerous connections with Muse. The X account is connected to a Substack posting the same exact articles that Muse publishes on his LinkedIn page, which also has the username “amuse”, reflecting his first initial and last name. Muse’s book on how to secure startup funding, which includes examples of him asking ChatGPT to pretend it’s Musk and offer business advice, lists that same Substack account as its publisher.Prominent accounts including Musk have shared and replied to @amuse’s posts, which recently have included AI depictions of Trump fighting Darth Vader and sexualized imagery of Harris. Its banner picture is currently an AI-generated photo of Trump surrounded by women in “Swifties” shirts. The account posts misleading, pro-Trump headlines such as claiming Harris turned hundreds of thousands of children over to human traffickers as “border czar”. The headlines, like the AI-generated Swifties for Trump images, come with the watermark “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”.The John Milton Freedom Foundation, named after the 17th-century British poet and essayist, has a small online footprint: a website, an investor prospectus and an X account with fewer than 500 followers. The team behind it, according to its own documents, consists of five people based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with varying degrees of experience in Republican politics. Muse’s daughter, described as a 10th grade honor student on the non-profit’s site, serves as the Milton Foundation’s “fellowship chair”.The foundation’s stated goal is to raise $2m from major donors to award $100,000 grants to a list of “fellows” made up of rightwing media influencers. These include people like the former CBS journalist turned far-right star Lara Logan, who was cut from Newsmax in recent years for going on a QAnon-inspired rant that claimed world leaders drink children’s blood, as well as the author of an anti-trans children’s book. The organization believes that this money would allow these already established influencers to “increase their reach by more than 10x in less than a year”, according to its investor prospectus.While only one of the fellows listed on the foundation’s site mentions the organization on their X profiles and none follow its account, the @amuse account has a prominent link to the group’s community page and the foundation often engages with its posts.It is not clear that the foundation has any money to give and if all the media influencers listed as its 2024 fellowship class know about the organization. One Texas-based account that posts anti-vaccine content lists itself as a “JMFF” fellow in their bio, but none of the others advertise any connection. The most recent tax records for the Freedom Foundation place it in the category of non-profits whose gross receipts, or total funds received from all sources, range from $0 to $50,000 – far below the millions it is seeking.The organization’s board includes its chair, Brad Merritt, who is touted as an experienced Republican organizer with claims to have raised $300m for various non-profits; its director, Shiree Sanchez, who served as assistant director of the Republican party of Texas between 1985 and 1986; and Mark Karaffa, a retired healthcare industry executive.Muse’s experience in digital media appears to be far more extensive than the non-profit’s other members. In addition to his blog, he claims to have worked with James O’Keefe, the former CEO of the rightwing organization Project Veritas, who was known for hidden camera stings until he was ousted last year over allegations of misplaced funds. Muse, who is described in the prospectus as a “serial entrepreneur”, also blogs about how to make money from generative AI. More

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      Backlash erupts over criticism of Tim Walz’s emotional son: ‘families are everything’

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      For Gus Walz, the Democratic national convention in Chicago last week may not have been the light, good vibes fest that it was for adults in the 17,000-seat Chicago arena.The intense emotional response of vice-president hopeful Tim Walz’s son to seeing his father on stage – “That’s my dad!” – thrust him into the spotlight as the convention’s breakout star and with them raised the issue of nonverbal learning disorders, ADHD and an anxiety disorder that the 17-year-old is reported to experience.The conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted an article on X about Gus’s reaction, captioning it: “Talk about weird …” But the backlash against the mean-spirited post was swift. “He’s 17” trended on the platform and Coulter – unusually – took the post down.“I can see why a child loving their parents would feel foreign to you,” wrote Obama staffer-turned-liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor.It’s never been easy as the child of a high-profile US candidate, but the latest crop of presidential or vice-presidential hopeful offspring may be getting it worse than most, and there is no avoiding the spotlight of both traditional media and social media. Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, is a Brooklyn-based knitwear designer and said to have a hand in her stepmum’s attuned campaign ear to generation Z. The prospective first daughter appeared nightly during the convention, along with Walz, as did Donald Trump’s kids at the Republicans’ convention in July. Chelsea Clinton was in Chicago for her parents’ speeches.Presidential offspring are firmly a part of political electioneering strategy, for better or worse. In 1950, Harry S Truman threatened to beat up a Washington Post music critic who wrote that his piano-playing daughter, Margaret, sang flat. John F Kennedy’s young children featured prominently in reporting of Camelot; Nixon’s daughter got married in the White House.The trail goes on, says the veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, largely as a function of the White House press corps responding to the demands of public interest, with presidential siblings also playing a part, often troubled.“Children and families are a more prominent part of our politics than they’ve ever been – they’re part of the American political storytelling in the modern era,” Sheinkopf says, “because family represent goodness, community and stability and people who don’t have families don’t conform to those churchly American standards.”Which may help to explain the controversy stirred up over JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments several weeks ago or the anger over Joe Biden not accepting four-year-old Navy Roberts, daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, into the family fold.“It’s part of the American mythology that families are everything,” Sheinkopf adds. “Children and families are significant in the discussion of American politics. Always were, always will be.”But there are also cautions to observe, among them a long history of disappointing or tragic or even criminal outcomes, such as John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a self-piloted plane crash, Eric Trump and Don Jr, fined in the family’s $250m fraud trial, and more recently Hunter Biden, who goes on trial for tax fraud next month.In a 2013 book, All the Presidents’ Children, the historian Doug Wead wrote of a 40-page, 1998 study he had been encouraged to write by George Bush, whose son George W also became president.“I struggled to find a positive slant to a very dark picture,” Wead wrote in the book’s preface. “Despite the cruel examples that preceded them, each new generation of president’s children has been filled with hope and almost naive ambition.”During the convention, Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, posted on X that he hopes to inspire his children “so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was”.The introduction of Gus Walz is significant to the discussion of neurodiversity, which has played a backseat to issues of gender and racial diversity, says Nancy Doyle, a UK psychologist specializing in the neurodivergent conditions.Doyle says neurodivergent people tend to be highly sensitive and experience life at the extreme ends – as Gus Walz appeared at the sight of his father – that was “joyful to watch” as well casting a welcome spotlight on different people’s experiences.“It gives us an opportunity to discuss the issue,” says Doyle, who characterizes neurodiversity as an area that is as politicized as gender and diversity. “Expressing emotion is seen as weak because there are so many messages in society to repress, ignore or overcome emotional thinking.”“You’ve got a cultural narrative that makes us want to police our emotions in a certain way, and then you’ve got Gus who’s letting it all hang out and totally going for it. It made everyone go, ‘Wow, what’s that?’”While speakers at the convention spoke frequently of a threat posed by a second Trump presidency, they spoke often of “joy” at a Harris-Walz ticket more frequently than they spoke of “freedom”.“Tonight is about joy,” said the New Jersey senator Cory Booker. “Our nominees, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they bring the joy.”But it was left to the younger Walz to fully inhabit that emotion, says Doyle, and it was a valuable counter to a perception that emotional reactions of children with neurodiverse characteristics are always negative. “What we saw was a pure expression of joy and a valuable counter-narrative to challenge that stereotype,” Doyle says. More

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      Is Trump OK? Unhinged reaction to rise of Harris worries supporters

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      Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.The former president has also characterised Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced.Melania’s reaction to her husband’s implicit claim that he is better-looking than his wife is not known.Trump has sought to court Black voters in recent months as he attempts to win enough of their support to swing key states such as Michigan. But he will have done his own cause no good by questioning whether Harris, whose mother was born in India and father in Jamaica, is really Black – all while giving an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, and to the astonishment of just about everyone in the room.View image in fullscreen“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”Trump also claimed to “have been the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln”.In a similar vein, the former president sometimes veers off the written script to have an open debate with himself about how to pronounce names, whether Kamala or the first name of the CNN presenter Dana Bash at a recent rally.At a rally in Pennsylvania a week ago, Trump went as far as rambling on about rambling.“I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he told the crowd.Even some of Trump’s most loyal fans were disturbed by that performance. Joan Long travelled from New York with her husband, Billy, to see the former president speak.“I honestly can’t say I know why he starts talking about how to pronounce names. What does that have to do with the election?” she said. “And I wish he would stop talking about Kamala’s looks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeading Republicans are similarly disturbed. Senator Lindsey Graham pleaded with Trump to stay focused on the issues that play best for the former president, such as the economy.“His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told NBC’s Meet the Press.Nikki Haley, the Republican former presidential candidate who denounced Trump as unfit for office before supporting him, said he “is not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is” or by calling her “dumb”. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican former speaker of the US House of Representatives, told Fox News that Trump should stop making the race about personalities and “stop questioning the size of her crowds”.View image in fullscreenTrump, to no one’s surprise, has ploughed on regardless. He told reporters that he was “very angry” at Harris for calling him weird and was “entitled to personal attacks”.Harris also appears to have hit a nerve with Trump by comparing her history as a prosecutor with his recent status as a convicted criminal. “Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me – they want me to be in prison,” Trump told reporters.All of this is a notable contrast to the weeks following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. Trump apparently listened to his advisers for once, as he took a step back from the relentless personal attacks and largely let the press and public opinion lead the questioning of the 81-year-old president’s fitness for office.The former president briefly looked as dignified as he was ever likely to. The attempt to assassinate Trump in Pennsylvania in July did no harm to his standing. Polls put Trump on the front foot, and his campaign advisers openly gloated about the prospect of a landslide win in November. But the energy unleashed by Harris’s entry into the presidential race drew out the old Trump again.View image in fullscreenWhen the focus was on Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said every presidential candidate should be required to take a cognitive test. Pressed this week by CBS News on whether he has done so himself, Trump claimed to have recently had a “perfect score” on two cognitive tests.“I got everything right. And one of the doctors said, ‘I’ve never seen that before, where you get everything right,’” he said.Many Americans are not so convinced. Earlier this week, a JL Partners poll for the Daily Mail showed the number of American voters who have confidence that Trump is able to fully digest national security briefings, maintain attention in meetings and remember the names of world leaders he is talking to – and who have confidence that he will still be alive in four years – has dropped sharply since March.In just a few months, concern about fitness for office has shifted from Biden to Trump, who is now the oldest US presidential candidate in history. More