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      Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two | Simon Tisdall

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      Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?By one measure – his wild, deranged language – the deterioration is marked. “His speeches have grown coarser and coarser,” wrote veteran White House watcher Peter Baker, who dubs him “the profanity president”.“Counting tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’ he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024,” Baker wrote. His analysis shows Trump is using such language 69% more often than when he ran in 2016. It’s shocking, even by today’s tawdry standards. Trump calls Harris a “shit vice-president” who is “mentally impaired”. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks.Vulgarity, however gross, is not proof of madness. But it may be symptomatic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, America’s oldest, defines a mad person as one “completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way”. Trump aces this definition every time he opens his mouth. It fits him to a tee. Exhibit A: his oddball musings about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.Bizarre Trump traits, such as compulsive, blatant lying, meet another dictionary definition of madness – behaviour that is “incapable of being explained or accounted for”.A third definition, rooted in US rather than British usage, suggests that Trump is indisputably bananas, in the sense that he is constantly “intensely angry or displeased”. Always feeling furious, feeling “mad as hell”, must be exhausting. It’s enough to drive anyone round the bend. Older people often get irritable, of course; and screw-loose Trump is 78. So is incipient senility, or cognitive decline, another cause of his exceptional looney-ness?Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNarcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).The poisonous effect of NDS was on show at Madison Square Garden, where “comedians” amplified Trump’s sexist, racist, hate-filled messages. This superspreader craziness destroys reasoned debate, splits the country into opposing camps (hence the dead-heat opinion polls) and sends blood pressure soaring. Many Americans fear civil violence. That’s bonkers.This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator More

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      Republicans and Democrats search for unicorns in crucial Wisconsin: undecided voters

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      On a warm October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, Ty Schanhofer found a unicorn: an undecided voter.Schanhofer, an organizer with the University of Wisconsin student Democratic party, had unfolded a plastic table on campus and was trying to encourage people to register in the key swing state.View image in fullscreenWhen Arin Mahapatra, a 21-year-old student from Illinois, stopped by, Schanhofer – who takes an English class with Mahapatra – jumped into action, peppering him with questions and offering reasons to support Harris.“I’m not necessarily [leaning] in a certain direction, I’m just trying to find out who exactly falls in the same line with what I value most,” said Mahapatra, who cited economic issues like the price of gas and cost of student housing as his top concerns.Truly undecided voters are rare in Wisconsin, where presidential elections hinge on the narrowest of margins.“I feel like it’s probably 2% of the voters who are undecided,” said Schanhofer. “It’s not many at all.”Winning the support of young voters like Mahapatra will be crucial for Harris or Trump to pull off a victory in Wisconsin, where students and voters under 30 have turned out in record numbers in recent elections. In 2023, students on college campuses across the state rallied to elect a liberal judge to the Wisconsin supreme court, helping shift the ideological leaning of the bench in hopes that the court would help establish abortion rights in the state.View image in fullscreenPeople like Schanhofer hope that by generating this kind of turnout among young voters, they’ll be able to turn the Wisconsin electorate in Harris’s favor.The Badger state is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.But vanishingly narrow margins in the state decided the 2016 and 2020 elections, and today Wisconsin is a virtual toss-up in the polls, as are many of the other six swing states.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.View image in fullscreenThis election will probably come down to turnout, with the Trump and Harris campaigns attempting to shear away voters from each other’s respective bases. For Trump, that means drawing in young men, who have increasingly drifted to the right.On 26 October, some of those voters could be found queueing up around the corner for an event at the Kollege Klub, a bar just blocks from where the campus Democrats have been tabling for Harris.For hours, the bar was only admitting ticketed attendees, who had spent $150 to see the rightwing Nelk Boys, YouTube pranksters whose podcast has featured the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and Trump himself. The Nelk Boys promised to feature Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Maga organizing hub Turning Point USA (TPUSA), as a special guest.Eric Davis, a 29-year-old who lives and works in Madison, waited in line with his friends for more than two hours in front of the bar. Davis voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but said he’s reversing course this year.“I switched over to Trump because I just think, honestly, our economy right now is not going the way that it should,” said Davis. “I don’t believe in everything he says, but a majority of the stuff he goes with – I’m with it.”View image in fullscreenDavis, who is Black, doesn’t always like how Trump talks about immigrants, thinks the ex-president can be crass and understands why he rubs people the wrong way. But the way Davis sees it, that’s just Trump being Trump.“I don’t think he’s racist at all,” said Davis.“My whole family, they’re all liberals,” added Davis, who has not yet told his family how he planned to vote.Despite the night’s political theme, the actual gathering featured little by way of political mobilization. The Nelk Boys stood on a raised platform in the venue, throwing Trump merchandise into the crowd, but Kirk was nowhere to be seen. A stack of cards with voter registration information sat forgotten on a table crowded with beer bottles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut for Brandon Maly, the chair of the Republican party of Dane county, the night was a success.“I’ve never seen a bar in Madison packed with Maga hats, it was just incredible. I love to see it – it’s part of that psychology in Dane county, that people need to be given a permission structure,” said Maly. “You may not think it translates to votes, but it does in the sense that they’re given permission to support Trump.”Maly has no illusions about turning Dane county red.But given its status as the second most populous county in the state, he sees the area as a rich source of Republican voters – no matter how marginal their political views may be locally.View image in fullscreenHis goal, of chipping away at Democratic party margins in liberal hubs, is mirrored in Democrats’ push to fight back Republican party majorities in rural and suburban parts of the state that have historically leaned red.One of those Democratic party organizers is Deb Dassow, the chair of the Ozaukee county Democratic party, who says she feels she has the shifting political winds at her back. In Ozaukee county, which stretches north of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, Democrats have begun to make gains in the last several election cycles. In 2012, Barack Obama claimed 34% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton took 37%, and in 2020 Biden pulled 43% of the vote there.Since 2019, when the Ozaukee county Democrats opened a permanent office in the county, the local party chapter has poured resources into organizing local Democrats.“Since April, we’ve knocked 25,000 doors – we knocked 5,000 just last weekend,” said Dassow on 25 October. The local Democrats have facilitated food drives, held parties and hosted beading parties, crafting red, white and blue bracelets emblazoned with the letters K-A-M-A-L-A.Since jumping into the race in July, the vice-president and her allies have raised more than $1bn to fuel her campaign; much of those funds have poured into a broad campaign to knock on thousands of doors across the country.And not least, they are trying to turn out young people: according to a source familiar with the Harris-Walz campaign in Wisconsin, the Democratic coordinating campaign hired seven full-time campus organizers across the state and a youth-organizing coordinator before the election.View image in fullscreenThe Republican party, meanwhile, has farmed off most of its ground game to outside groups – including TPUSA and the tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America Pac. Those groups allied with the Trump campaign have sought to turn out “low-propensity” voters for Trump, in particular, targeting rural would-be Trump voters who might otherwise neglect to cast a ballot at all.The Trump campaign touts the strategy as innovative, but neither TPUSA nor America PAC boast the kinds of detailed voter lists that parties traditionally maintain to target supporters.“There’s suspicion as to whether or not this is an actual ground game,” said Brandon Scholz, a former Republican party operative who left the GOP on 7 January 2021 – the day after Trump supporters contesting the 2020 election results stormed the US Capitol. Even as an independent, Scholz maintains close relationships in the party and has followed the 2024 campaigns with keen interest.“Are these folks really here?” said Scholz. “Are they really beating the hell out of the doors? Are they really identifying and getting ready to turn out voters, or getting them out to vote early, or getting them absentee ballots?”The answers to these questions – is Trump’s ground strategy as haphazard as it seems in Wisconsin, and is the Harris turnout machine as effective as Democrats claim? – could very well determine the outcome of the election. More

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      Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes

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      Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declines to endorse Kamala Harris

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.” More

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      In Saginaw, where children are dying of gun violence, local races loom large

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      Tiffany Owens stood before the city council in Saginaw, Michigan, struggling to contain her anguish.“I hate this city because this city took away something that was so precious and dear to me. I’ve been living here all my life and I had to bury two of my kids. They out in Forest Lawn cemetery,” she said, her voice shaking with grief.“We just need y’all to do something. I don’t want another mother to have to stand here where I’m standing. It’s not fair that we all are here but I do not want another parent to have to go through this trauma, go through this pain.”Owens’ eldest son, Tamaris, was 12 years old when he was killed by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting. Her 26-year-old daughter, Tamarea, met a similar fate nine years later in 2021. Owens fears for the wellbeing of her remaining son.The family tragedy does not stop there. Owens’ niece, Tonquinisha McKinley, was killed outside her home during a family celebration before Tamarea’s high school prom in 2013.Behind Owens, other mothers held photographs of children murdered in one of the most dangerous cities in the US. Saginaw has at times had the highest crime rate of any city in Michigan during recent years, surpassing Detroit, with which it shares many of the same problems of industrial decline, deepening poverty and diminishing population over decades.More than 180 people have been murdered in the city of Saginaw over the past decade, most of them with guns, alongside hundreds of non-fatal shootings. About 20 people have been murdered so far this year.The bereaved mothers were pleading for action from Saginaw’s city council at its last meeting before local elections alongside the presidential ballot on Tuesday. For some, the local race is the more important of the two as they look to reverse their city’s decline while the Saginaw council stands accused of dithering and focusing on the wrong priorities. Others see Saginaw’s fate, and the safety of its families, as also inextricably tied to who gets into the White House.Tamara Tucker also spoke at the council meeting. She was still in high school when her 17-year-old brother was shot dead. Not long afterwards, she joined the support group Parents of Murdered Children to help her mother through a terrible time.Tucker remained a member when a few years later she, too, came to experience the grief of being a parent losing a child after her daughter was murdered.“I thought, my God, how can this be? Not again,” she told the Guardian.View image in fullscreenTucker’s daughter, MoeNeisha Simmons-Ross, was trying to prevent her boyfriend from leaving her Saginaw apartment with a gun. He shot her with it. She was pregnant with their child. The boyfriend was convicted of murder.That wasn’t the end. A few months later, Tucker’s younger sister was killed in Florida, and then her nephew in Saginaw.Tucker blames “selfishness” for the violence and the city’s failure to curb it.“It’s going to take the whole community to turn this around. I keep saying it, and I will say it until I’m blue in the face, it’s going to take the community caring. Apparently, there’s not enough children being murdered for them to actually say we got to do something about this,” she said.Barbara Clark went to college to get a degree in criminal justice in an effort to understand the causes of the violence in Saginaw and what to do about it after her son, Tommie Ford, was murdered at 17 years old by another teenager jealous of Ford talking to his former girlfriend.“I wanted to learn as much about the criminal justice system because I need to be able to talk to them in their language so I can know what you’re talking about when they tell me what you can and can’t do,” she said.Clark said that politicians, the police and people in other parts of Saginaw county were too often willing to blame parenting and gang culture for the killings so as to sidestep the part played by poverty, which runs at about 34% of the city’s population, and lack of resources.She ties the rise in murders, shootings and other crimes to Saginaw’s economic decline as more than a dozen car factories closed since the 1990s and the population fell sharply to about 45,000 today. Abandoned houses and bulldozed lots dot many streets on the lower-income east side of the city. Schools have been closed and consolidated. With a dwindling tax base, the city government cut back on services including recreational facilities.“Everything that was there to help those young people, to go to recreation centres, to do anything, has been shut down, decimated. All the schools here are gone. The schools are now placed on the other side of town so you gotta be commuted to it,” she said.“A lot of people want to say the parents ain’t doing their job. That may be true in some cases but not in all. There are some parents, for instance us, we are doing the best that we can do. But when you have limited funds, there’s only so much you can do. You’re looking at a poverty level of people in the inner city that things are happening to the family. What needs to happen is for the city of Saginaw to bring things back in for these young people to do, give them a chance.”There was plenty of sympathy for the mothers from city council members. One expressed condolences for the family of the latest victim, 14-year-old Keyvon Bentley, who was killed at the end of October.Council member Michael Flores, who is not running for re-election, read the names of some of those killed.View image in fullscreen“The thing that hurts me the most as a public official is that we lose Saginaw’s future constantly throughout every year that I’ve been here,” he said. “And a lot of the murder victims that I just listed off were 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 … It’s the saddest thing that I’ve experienced on council.”But there was little commitment to specific change even from those members up for re-election.Criticism of the council has focused on how it is spending $52m in grants under Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa). The council used half of the funds to fill a budget shortfall.The council’s plan for the rest of the money includes $10m to support “community centres, childcare and youth development”. But how that will be spent is still unresolved, to the frustration of campaigners.Flores told the Guardian the city “lacks either the imagination or the ability” to provide opportunities for young people, including initiatives to help those who are otherwise drawn into “a life of crime to be able to produce money for their families”.He said the council was too focused on allocating money to develop upscale housing, in the hope of drawing higher-income residents to the city, at the expense of affordable homes that would improve the lives of lower-income families. He pointed to a recent case where the council spent $3m to upgrade a building only to sell it to a developer for $1,000 to convert it to relatively upscale condos while rejecting a higher offer that would have brought more affordable housing.“The council always has the opportunity to be on the side of the people or be on the side of outside developers that want to come in and get tax abatement or tax credits for developing. We never tend to give it to the people that really need the help,” he said.Carly Hammond is a union organiser running for a seat on the council who is campaigning for more Arpa money to be spent on facilities for young people.“There is a lot that the city council can do to combat youth violence and create youth opportunities. Back in the 1960s, there used to be much more robust after-school youth education programmes, community centres, funded by the city,” she said.View image in fullscreen“A lot of these organisms and concepts were strategically dismantled. Rebuilding them takes a whole lot. Youth development means investing in neighbourhoods.”Hammond accuses the council of hiding behind its own bureaucracy to explain why it is not doing more on affordable housing and support for community organisations. She also accuses the council of leaving some federal money on the table from the community development block grant because it failed to put together the proper documentation.“The lack of investment overall in the community is felt most by the children. They just feel like there’s no future. If you hear parents and young people talk about this, they’re asking for direct action. They’re not asking for sympathy,” she said.The council also heard from Matthew Carpus, president of the Saginaw police union. He said officers on the force long ago lost confidence in the city’s police chief and council to address crime.“Most victims in this city don’t speak out. Either they move out of the city or they suffer in silence. Very few come to these meetings because, like officers, they feel you’re not going to do anything,” he said.“Not only isn’t it being solved, it’s not getting better, it’s trending in the wrong direction. We need to try something different.”Flores wants to see more of the Arpa money spent on policing.“I have done many ride-alongs with police officers. For the amount of area that they have to cover, they’re drastically understaffed,” he said. “There were calls, some of them domestic violence calls and the like, that just weren’t able to be picked up because there were more pressing issues in the moment.”The city has brought in the state police to patrol parts of Saginaw but Clark said that had resulted in little more than racially profiled stop-and-searches of cars.“It’s not helping. Instead of them doing what they were brought in to do, which is community service, they’re targeting. If these young men are blessed to have a nice car with nice rims and dress nice, you’re definitely targeted. If your car is dressed, made up a certain type of way, they’re definitely going to pull you over,” she said.Clark is looking to the new council to change the trajectory. But she said the presidential election would be decisive because while Biden has directed financial support to lower-income communities, she expects Trump to do just the opposite.“Who’s in the White House does affect us because it, I won’t say it trickles down, it starts down and works it way up. They come for our programmes before they do anybody else’s programme. They will cancel our programme before they cancel anybody else’s programmes,” she said. More

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      Harris pitches self as a unifier with a ‘to-do list’ – is it enough for knife-edge race?

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      On the second to last Sunday in July, Kamala Harris had just finished making pancakes and bacon for her grandnieces at the vice-president’s residence in Washington, and was sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle when Joe Biden called.“I got up to take the call, and then life changed,” Harris recounted later. Biden, isolating with Covid at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and facing calls from all corners of his party to step aside, had reached the history-altering decision to end his bid for re-election.“Are you sure?” Harris said she asked the US president. “Because what a big decision.”With Biden’s endorsement, Harris, still wearing her workout clothes and hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, Howard University, leapt into action. Time was of the essence. Over the next 10 hours, with pizza boxes littered around her, she placed 100 calls to Democrats whose support she would need to secure the nomination.By the time Harris walked into her inherited campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to the strains of Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem Freedom, her ascension seemed suddenly – and unexpectedly – inevitable.In the roughly 100 days since, Harris has enthralled her party, which had been all but resigned to defeat with Biden as its nominee. She selected a running mate, the affable Minnesota governor, Tim Walz; accepted the nomination at a joy-filled convention; supercharged volunteer sign-ups and on-the-ground organizing; raised a staggering billion dollars; dominated the contest’s only presidential debate against her opponent, Donald Trump. She secured endorsements from a host of his former advisers and aides, as well as several of the planet’s biggest stars. She appeared on popular podcasts, daytime TV and news networks and delivered a closing argument that blended the economic and the existential anxieties driving Americans’ choice in November.But has it all been enough? The race has built to a deadlocked finale, with each of the seven battleground states – and the nation – virtually tied just days before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast. Along the way, some of that early shine has worn off. Trump has crept back in the polls. Critics have carped at the Harris campaign’s traditionalism, and a perception among some that she has focused too much on Trump’s threat and not offered enough of a vision of her own for Americans to be inspired by.On Tuesday, she delivered her last major speech of the campaign from the Ellipse in Washington, a direct appeal to the vanishingly small slice of Americans who have yet to make up their minds.The significance of the site, an oval-shaped park south of the White House, was twofold. It was intended as a stark reminder of the violent forces Trump inflamed from that very spot nearly four years ago, when he implored supporters to “fight like hell” before a mob of them stormed the US Capitol.And it was meant to underline the possibility of a Harris presidency.

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      With the White House illuminated behind her, Harris declared: “For too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.”She cast the election as a contest between herself, a unifier with a “to-do list” and Trump, a “petty tyrant” seeking a return to “unchecked power”. In 90 days, one of them would take the oath of office. “Kamala! Kamala!” chanted the crowd, her largest to date with an estimated 75,000 people who spilled beyond the park, toward the Washington Monument.Harris is running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history. If she wins, she will have persuaded Americans to do something unprecedented in the country’s 248-year history: elect a woman and woman of color to the presidency.At 18, could she have ever imagined this would be her life, Pro Football Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe asked the 60-year-old during a recent appearance on his podcast. “Never,” Harris said, shaking her head. “Never.”View image in fullscreenThe daughter of an endocrinologist from India and an economist from Jamaica, Harris said an “instinct to protect” propelled her career as a prosecutor, and was central to her opening pitch against Trump. From the courtroom, Harris took on “predators”, “fraudsters” and “scammers”, she would begin, building to the line: “So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”In an election defined by a striking gender gap – with women powering Harris and men turning toward Trump – the central question may be who Americans trust to protect them – and what they believe they need protecting from.Harris has vowed to protect Americans’ “fundamental freedoms” – abortion rights, clean air, decades-old alliances, and democracy itself. Trump has cast himself, by contrast, as the protector of a nation under “invasion”, overrun by illegal immigration and crime. At a recent rally, he crassly suggested he would protect women, whether they “like it or not”.Harris’s critics – even those who will begrudgingly vote for her – knock her as a maddeningly scripted politician who lacks an ideological core and who has struggled to articulate a serious policy agenda.At a CNN town hall, she hewed closely to a set of talking points, offering circular responses to pointed questions. And yet, during the 80-minute segment, she delivered her most forceful warning about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Yes, she agreed, her opponent was a fascist.Harris has waved off any criticism, calling herself disciplined.At a rally with Harris, Michelle Obama defended her further by suggesting critics were holding the nation’s first female and first Black vice-president to a “higher standard” than Trump, who often rambles incoherently, had threatened to jail his political opponents, and would be the first convicted felon elected to the White House if he wins.“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Preach!” a woman shouted from the audience.Over the course of her abbreviated campaign, Harris has laid out a broad strokes economic agenda with proposals for first-time homebuyers, caregivers, new parents, and the “sandwich” generation of adults caring for their children and their parents. She has, meanwhile, backed away from her past support for progressives policies on immigration and fracking, which helped fuel the San Francisco liberal caricature, though it never quite suited the former “top cop” of California. Drawing on support from anti-Trump Republicans, she has vowed to put a Republican in her cabinet, and insisted she would be a president for “all Americans”, including Trump’s supporters.Along the way, many stars have aligned for her. Oprah sang her praise – “Kamaaaaala” – in a DNC speech. Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after her debate performance against Trump. Beyoncé embraced Harris at an abortion-rights focused event in Texas. Bad Bunny urged support for her after a shock jock disparaged Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” at a Trump rally. She has also won support from the billionaire Mark Cuban, who has traveled the country making the case that Harris would be better for business than the man who made his name as a Manhattan builder.Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a hub for liberal donors and organizers, likened Harris’s dizzying “everything, everywhere, all at once” campaign to the Wizard of Oz. The vice-president was thrust to the forefront of American politics and quickly assembled an unlikely coalition that includes gen Z meme-makers and the former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney.“Now here we are. This is the end of the road,” she said. “I just can’t imagine it having been done any other way.”Although Harris has served as the vice-president for nearly four years, she nevertheless arrived at the top of the Democratic ticket relatively unknown. But in stark reversal of fortunes, she defied skeptics of her political skill, and her popularity soared.“She has not put a foot wrong,” said Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist and former adviser to Bill Clinton. If he had to identify a misstep, it would be during an appearance on ABC’s The View, where, when asked how she would distinguish herself from Biden, Harris responded: “Not a thing that comes to mind.” The Trump campaign seized on the line, tying Harris to the unpopular president.Begala marveled at the way Harris has “squared the circle” between Democrats who believed her closing message should be centered around Trump’s threats to democracy – as the party did in the 2022 midterms when they blunted the anticipated red wave – and those who argued she should conclude with an economic-focused message, highlighting Americans’ top voting issue. Trump would arrive in office “obsessed with revenge” against an ever-growing enemies list, Harris says, while she would focused on her “to-do” list: lowering costs and fighting to protect what’s left of abortion access in America.Since the supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, Harris has been a powerful messenger on abortion rights, framing it as a matter of bodily autonomy. On the campaign trail, she has been joined by women whose lives have been put a risk by their state’s abortion bans, as well as by the family of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old mother from Georgia who died of sepsis in 2022 after being denied timely medical care to treat a medication abortion.“We need to make sure that we know who is responsible for those deaths, and that is Donald Trump, his supreme court, and all of the Maga Republicans who have voted for legislation up and down the ballot across the country,” said Silvina Alarcón, political director at Reproductive Freedom for All.Harris has also had to navigate, as she has her entire career, a torrent of racist and sexist abuse, including from her opponent, who has insulted her intelligence, calling her “dumb as a rock” and an “extremely low IQ person”. During a live interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump attacked her racial identity and asked when she “happened to turn Black”. The remark drew gasps in the room.Christina Reynolds, a senior vice-president of communications for Emily’s List, the influential political group that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, said Harris has faced all of the obstacles that have long burdened women, and especially women of color, who seek high political office. But she has also helped blaze her own trail, demonstrating leadership as the vice-president.“She’s had to stack up to the division and hate and lies, while building the plane,” Reynolds said. “I think that when she wins, it will be historic and epic and truly a testament to her and the people around her and the work that they’ve done.”Support for Harris has slightly fallen as the Trump campaign sharpened its attacks. Looming over a race that appears to be teetering on a razor’s edge is whether Harris can stitch together her own diverse coalition, similar to the one that elevated Biden in 2020, while polls show Trump making inroads with voters of color and young people, especially men.Democrats are closely watching places such as Dearborn, Michigan, where Democratic emissaries from Barack Obama and the independent senator Bernie Sanders are working to stave off a mass defection of Arab and Muslim American voters furious at the administration over the deadly war in Gaza. At nearly every stop, Harris is heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom have said they plan to vote for a third party candidate or not at all.John Zogby, an author and pollster who studies the Arab American electorate, said the scale of the devastation in Gaza and now Lebanon, and the depth of these voters’ discontent, have reached a “point of almost no return”.“It really is different this time,” he said.In the final days, Harris will circle between all seven battleground states, searching for any last wells of support that might tip the balance. Until the end, she is attempting to make the affirmative case for herself, while arguing that Trump’s vilification of his most prominent critics, using increasingly violence rhetoric, “must be disqualifying”.Election eve will be spent in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral college votes are seen as a must-win for Harris. On Tuesday, the Harris campaign will host an election night party at Howard, the historically Black college where the vice-president won her first election: freshman class representative.While Democrats remain fearful a second Trump presidency will usher in a dark era for American democracy, and of the former president’s pre-emptive efforts to deny an election loss, those on the ground say they see signs that Harris’s “joyful warrior” campaign will prevail. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the gen Z congressman from Florida, told reporters on Friday: “A bellwether for me in an election is when you’re going to events and you’re seeing people who are not political, who don’t like politics but are there because – sometimes they can’t even articulate it – they’re there because they felt like they needed to be there.“That’s the difference between a political candidate and a movement candidate. And we have a movement candidate, and this is a movement right now.”David Smith contributed reporting More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More