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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

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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      Political violence has marked the 2024 race – but risks rise after election day

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      A year punctuated by two assassination attempts, high levels of threats and harassment, and a number of troubling, violent incidents in the lead-up to election day will culminate on Tuesday with an election deemed existential by all sides.It’s the first presidential election since the January 6 insurrection, a reminder of the ways political violence can manifest that leaves Americans with a fear that such an attack could happen again. Those who study the attack and its participants say they aren’t convinced criminal convictions against them will fully deter those involved on January 6 from future political violence, but that the biggest threat is a lone actor, not a large, coordinated event.In the last few weeks, a man in Arizona was allegedly stockpiling weapons and plotting a “mass casualty” event, according to police who arrested him for shooting at Democratic party offices. The person behind explosive devices that burned hundreds of ballots in two drop boxes in Oregon and Washington is suspected to be a metalworker who could be planning more attacks. Arguments at polling places over political paraphernalia, banned at the polls in some places, have become physical. A young man waved a machete at a polling place in Florida.The risk of political violence only increases after election day, experts say, once races are called. Certain places could become targets of people or groups upset about results or who claim fraud.“The strategic value of political violence will go up once there’s an initial winner,” said Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “I would not say the left is totally off the hook, but it’s most dangerous on the right, simply because Trump did it before.”Trump and his supporters have turned to incendiary rhetoric in recent days, contributing to the tense environment. A speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Kamala Harris the devil, while another spoke of the “slaughter” of Democrats. Trump said on Thursday that the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Social media platforms have enabled some of the conditions that could lead to offline violence. Militias are using Facebook to organize, and in some instances, Facebook has auto-generated militia pages, Wired reported. X, formerly Twitter, has become a frequent source of election disinformation that could be weaponized to stir people up post-election. The platform created a new “election integrity community” where users can post unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Online forums frequented by the far right are showing patterns similar to those that preceded the January 6 attack.“It’s absolutely possible that someone motivated by mis- or disinformation that they see online about some polling place in their community could show up with a gun and try to enforce vigilante justice,” said Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.Alex Jones, the longtime conspiracist, has issued reports on his show for several days warning of a deep state plot to sow chaos around the voting process. “And then there will be a big disputed election and it will get Democrats and Republicans all mad at each other, and that’s the civil war conditions,” Jones said on a broadcast this week.Elections officials emphasize that voting is still very safe in the US, and the threat of political violence should not deter people from casting a ballot. Levels of political violence have actually been lower this year than recent years, but there has been a continuation of high levels of threats and harassment, said Shannon Hiller, executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University, which studies and tracks political violence. Elections officials in particular have been consistent targets of threats and harassment campaigns. Concerns about political violence among local elected officials have also risen.“Whether it’s bad actors or foreign actors, even trying to create that environment of fear is part of what people are doing to undermine our democracy,” Hiller said. “So the best way to push back on that is to remind folks it’s very safe and secure to vote and people feel confident to do so.”Still, voters feel a sense of unease. A recent survey of swing state voters by the Washington Post found fears that there would be violence if Trump loses the election. In six swing states, 57% of voters said they were at least somewhat worried about Trump supporters turning violent if he loses, far more than the percentage of voters who feared the same for a Harris loss.January 6 memory holeThe January 6 insurrection serves to some as a reminder of what a riled-up populace ready to take action for political aims can do. But for Trump, it’s now a “day of love”. He has promised to pardon many of those involved in the attack and referred to them as political prisoners.Having a leader encourage acts of violence or “fear and loathing” of the other side “creates a permission structure for people who want to commit acts of violence to go ahead and do so. They feel more justified, and they expect that they’ll be protected,” Hughes said.Experts don’t believe the US Capitol could see a similar attack because of precautions taken since January 6, but state capitols and other buildings may not be as prepared.Pape has studied those involved in January 6. So far, more than 1,300 have been arrested for their actions that day, the vast majority of whom were not clearly affiliated with a domestic extremist group like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Most of those sentenced have since stayed off the radar and are not commenting online about their political beliefs, Pape has found. Of those who do speak publicly about their charges or beliefs, many have doubled down on the issues that motivated them after the 2020 election. They have continued to express support for Trump and for election fraud narratives.Billy Knutson of South Dakota was charged for his actions on January 6 and has since rapped about the insurrection: “Since they stole the election we living behind enemy lines … We are the people, we won’t be defeated / No peace and no quarter, we never retreated.”Jake Lang, who is alleged to have swung a baseball bat at police on January 6, has been in prison for more than three years awaiting trial. He has brought in more than $240,000 in an online fundraiser on GiveSendGo, the rightwing crowdfunding site, to fund a “J6 truther” website: “This is the single most important thing you can do to support the Jan 6 political prisoners and help exonerate these brave patriots,” he tells donors. He has also been helping set up a “network of election deniers and conspiracists” known as the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm, Wired reported.The “patriot wing” of the DC jail where some violent January 6 participants are being held may be further radicalizing the people staying there, a New York Magazine report posited. Extremism experts told the magazine that “its inmates might re-enter society more primed to take violent action than they were before the Capitol riot”.By reframing what January 6 was, Trump has given permission for his supporters to take similar action again, political violence experts warn.Lone actors a riskA memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned in September that there was a “heightened risk” of domestic violent extremists mobilizing “against ideological opponents, government officials, and law enforcement in an attempt to initiate a civil war” until at least early 2025. The document, obtained by the public records watchdog group Property of the People, said the threat comes from lone offenders, as large group action would probably be deterred by the January 6 convictions.The two assassination attempts against Trump could inspire copycats or retaliation, the agency said. “Real or perceived mistakes or discrepancies in the electoral process” could also play into broader election fraud narratives that stir up domestic violent extremists. Issues like mass migration could drive these extremists.“Widespread or high-profile civil unrest, mass immigration, or crimes by migrants or minorities perceived as threatening the United States may drive some DVEs [domestic violent extremists] to mobilize to violence to ‘save America’ from perceived threats,” the memo said. “For example, online users discussed the potential of a sweeping Executive Order that would have given some migrants citizenship, with one user stating, ‘Biden does that executive order, we shoot all democrat officials. And the supporting federal agents.’”Another DHS and FBI intelligence bulletin obtained by Property of the People from early October said the threat was heightened until inauguration day in January 2025 and extremists could use tactics such as “physical attacks, threats of violence, swatting and doxing, mailing or otherwise delivering suspicious items, arson, and other means of property destruction”. The memo also said there was potential for violence based on grievances related to immigration, LGBTQIA+ rights and abortion access.Surveys have shown increased support for the use of violence to achieve political goals. When support for violence is more mainstream, it can nudge volatile people who are considering taking action over the edge because they believe they are fulfilling a popular mandate, Pape said.“There’s a political cause that they sense from the media is popular, and then they want some of that popularity and fame for themselves, so they do a violent act in the name of that political cause,” Pape said.The risk of violence doesn’t automatically dissipate after the election. But while a Trump loss could inspire his supporters to take action, it could also release the hold he has on the right.“When you have a very influential leader who acts as the center of gravity for a movement that engages in threats and even violence, when the leader recedes from you, that center of gravity has a way of dissolving, and the problems have a way of dissipating,” Hughes said. “So there is a possibility that the outcome of this election will in itself improve the problem somewhat.” More

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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More

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      ‘He could go to jail’: for Donald Trump, election day is also judgment day

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      Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.In the 1970s Trump and his father were sued by the justice department for racial discrimination after refusing to rent apartments to Black people in predominantly white buildings. His property and casino businesses, including the Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, filed for bankruptcy several times in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trump University, a business offering property training courses, faced multiple lawsuits for fraud, misleading marketing and false claims about the quality of its programmes. In 2016 Trump settled for $25m without admitting wrongdoing.View image in fullscreenThe Donald J Trump Foundation, a charitable organisation, was investigated and sued for allegedly using charitable funds for personal and business expenses. Trump eventually agreed to dissolve the foundation with remaining funds going to charity.Trump and his company were ordered to pay more than $350m in a New York civil fraud trial for artificially inflating his net worth to secure favourable loan terms. He is also known to have paid little to no federal income taxes in specific years which, although technically legal, was seen by some as bordering on unethical.But Trump became a fixture of the New York tabloids and hosted his own reality TV show, The Apprentice. Blair added: “His early realisation was that if you get famous, if you get large, people will get out of the way. He spent the first part of his career as a real estate developer, making himself seem the embodiment of enormous tycoon-level success even though, in fact, many things he did weren’t successful and his father kept bailing him out.“But he put across that impression and he rode that fame express that he had created for himself over a remarkable number of obstacles all the way to The Apprentice, which set him up permanently as the image of this unstoppable always-on-top tycoon and people are in awe of that. All of which could be described as branding.”Trump’s private life is no more savoury. Trump has reportedly cheated on all three of his wives. More than two dozen women have come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against him, most recently the former model Stacey Williams, who told the Guardian that Trump groped her in 1993 as Jeffrey Epstein watched in what felt like a “twisted game” between the two men.During the 2016 election campaign, an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women by their private parts. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Then last year a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5m.Trump’s presidency and its aftermath were no less morally compromised. He made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper, spanning everything from the crowd size at his inauguration to the result of the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenHe became the first president to be impeached twice, first for withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate his political opponents, then for instigating a coup on 6 January 2021 following his defeat. He also became the subject of not one but four criminal cases, any one of which would have been enough to scuttle the chances of any other White House hopeful.In May Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels, making him the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes. Sentencing is scheduled for 26 November (the judge delayed it from 18 September after the Republican nominee asked that it wait until after the election).What was billed as the trial of the century has already begun to fade from public consciousness and played a relatively modest role in the election campaign. Jonathan Alter, a presidential biographer who was in court for every day of the trial, recalled: “I’ve covered some big stories over the years but there was nothing like the drama of watching the jury foreperson say, ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty’ 34 times and Donald Trump looking like he was punched in the gut.”Alter, who describes the experience in his new book, American Reckoning, reflects on how Trump has been able to act with impunity for so long. “It’s a combination of luck, galvanised defiance and the credulousness of a large chunk of the American people,” he said. “Demagoguery works. Playing on people’s fears works. It doesn’t work all the time but we can look throughout human history to political figures and how demagoguery and scapegoating ‘the other’ works.”Alter, who covered the trial for Washington Monthly magazine, added: “We’ve had plenty of demagogues, scoundrels and conmen in politics below the level of president. Trump has been lucky to escape accountability but the United States has been lucky that we haven’t had something like this before. The founders were very worried about it. They felt we would face something like this for sure.”The US’s system of checks and balances has been racing to keep up. Trump was charged by the special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss to Joe Biden in the run-up to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. The former president and 18 others were also charged by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, with taking part in a scheme to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia.Trump was charged again by Smith with illegally retaining classified documents that included nuclear secrets, taken with him from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office in January 2021, and then obstructing government demands to give them back.With a such a caseload, it was widely assumed that Trump would spend this election shuttling between rallies one day and trials the next. But the courtroom campaign never really happened since, true to past form, he found ways to throw sand in the gears of the legal system and put off his moment of reckoning.View image in fullscreenOr he simply got lucky. In Georgia, it emerged that Willis had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade, prompting demands that she be removed. Smith’s federal election case was thrown off track for months by a supreme court ruling that presidents have immunity for official actions taken in office. The classified documents case was thrown out by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, although Smith is appealing and the charges could be reinstated.Such delays have made it easier to forget just how much of an outlier Trump is. Past presidential brushes with the law consisted of Ulysses S Grant being fined for speeding his horse-drawn carriage in Washington and Harry Truman receiving a ticket for driving his car too slowly on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1953. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate scandal and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.Meanwhile the standard for presidential aspirants has been high. Joe Biden’s first run for the White House fell apart amid allegations that he had plagiarised a speech by Britain’s Labour leader Neil Kinnock. During the 2000 campaign, a last-minute revelation that Republican candidate George W Bush had a drunk driving conviction that he concealed for 24 years generated huge headlines and was seen as a possible gamechanger. Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 defeat on an FBI investigation into her email server that produced no charges.Trump, by contrast, once memorably boasted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. He has done everything but yet still finds himself within touching distance of a second presidency.Indeed, he has repeatedly flipped the script, citing the cases against him as evidence that he is a martyr of sinister deep state forces. In this version it is Democrats, not Trump, who are the threat to democracy. Claiming solidarity with others who feel a sense a grievance, he often says: “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.”The Georgia case produced the indelible image of Trump’s mugshot, with the former president staring defiantly at the camera. Within hours it had been transformed from a badge of shame into a literal badge for sale, along with posters, T-shirts and other merchandise that is still sported by his fans at rallies with slogans such as “Convicted felon” or “Never surrender”.View image in fullscreenJohn Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “For reasons that I don’t understand, every time he gets indicted his poll numbers have gone up. The reason is people have very negative attitudes about Biden and they think he has weaponised the justice system – which I don’t think he’s done – but Trump has convinced people he’s a victim.“Every time he gets indicted again, he just uses it as more proof that he’s oppressed. It’s ridiculous but he has turned it. Like a good conman, he’s taken a seemingly impossible argument and made it worth a lot to him.”This judo move, turning the opponent’s weight against them, might explain why Democrats have not emphasised Trump’s criminal record to the degree that might once have been expected.Early on, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, did shine a light on Trump’s misdemeanours, drawing a contrast with her past as a courtroom prosecutor by stating: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”The line drew cheers but was absent from her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, which focused instead on likening Trump to a “petty tyrant” who would sow chaos and division. Indeed, some have taken the view that even criminal convictions pale in significance compared with the threat of a would-be fascist.But Moe Vela, a lawyer and a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said he wishes that Trump’s criminal past had been given greater emphasis by the Harris campaign. “I am extremely surprised we have not heard about that more,” he said. “He is a convicted felon. I thought it should have been said more often in the litany of grievances about him because I thought it was like low-hanging fruit.”Can Trump’s luck hold one more time? He has waged another White House campaign riven with extremism and racism, divisiveness and violent language, earning comparisons with fascists from the past. If elected, he is expected to use all the levers of power at his disposal to squash the outstanding cases against him; last week he boasted that he would fire his nemesis Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. But if Trump is defeated by Harris, his legal perils will again gather like a dark cloud.Vela added: “If he loses this election, I pray to God that she does not in any way pardon him. I hope that our judicial system functions effectively and properly in taking all of these cases through to fruition. Some of them may come out where he is not convicted, but if conviction is the result, he should be punished just like anybody else. No one in this country is above the law.”That point was illustrated by the New York case, in which even a former president stood trial and was held to account. The system worked. Alter reflected: “That was very inspiring, the wisdom of the judge and jury, who took their responsibilities very seriously. It gave me a lump in my throat. It made me realise we’re not done.” More