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      Trump’s final pitch to voters: retribution vows, vulgar rallies, fascist accusations

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      As the election nears, Donald Trump’s final message to voters is about revenge, with promises for retribution and rallies that are increasingly incoherent, vulgar and full of vitriol.And his last pitch is as dark and sinister as any he’s made while campaigning the last two years. The US is a “garbage can for the world”, he said at a Thursday rally in Arizona, where he railed against people coming into the country illegally and the Democrats, who Trump called incompetent and stupid.He followed up his hateful rhetoric with a preview of how he would run a second administration, leaving nothing open to interpretation.“Immediately upon taking the oath of office,” he wrote on Truth Social, “I will launch the largest deportation program in American history – I will rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”Trump appeared especially angered this week when John Kelly, his longest-serving chief of staff, told voters that Trump is a fascist. Trump called Kelly “a total degenerate”.Retribution remains a key theme of the Trump re-election campaign. Trump has vowed to root out “the enemy from within” and said he would consider using the military to go after his political opponents. NPR recently tallied “more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents” from Trump in the last two years.On Truth Social on Friday, he issued a lengthy, informal “cease and desist” message to Democrats, whom he continues to insist engaged in “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery” in 2020, depriving him of a second term.“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he threatened.“We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”His campaign is also spending big on anti-trans ads, capitalizing on a culture war issue that elicits anger in many. His campaign is blitzing the airwaves, with $29m in anti-trans ads over the past five weeks, the Bulwark reported based on AdImpact data, compared with $5m on economy-focused TV ads during the same time period. “That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending – one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” the outlet’s Marc Caputo wrote.

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      In the final stretch of campaigning, Trump will reportedly try to rein in the rambles that have made some question his mental fitness. He has said it’s an intelligent speaking style, dubbing it “the weave”. The Washington Post, by comparison, called it “strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs”.Over the last year, the speaking style has revealed his preoccupations to voters. Some of his comments have suggested that thinks Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal, is a real person who has died. He is mad about bacon. He has fulminated against windmills, a frequent source of his disdain. He has conflated legal asylum, the process by which people from other countries seek protection when fleeing persecution, with insane asylums. He spread a false rightwing conspiracy on the presidential debate stage that migrants were eating household pets. He said Harvey Weinstein got “schlonged”. He complimented Arnold Palmer’s penis size. His speeches are often impossible to quote directly without significant editing and context-adding.Between rambles, he has honed the racist, threatening messages he believes are his best hope for getting his old job back. The media is “the enemy of the people”, Kamala Harris is a “shit vice-president”, Joe Biden is a “stupid fool” and Nancy Pelosi is “crazy as a bed bug”.As in 2016, he has cast himself as the only person who can fix all the problems his enemies created.“We stand on the verge of the four greatest years of the history of our country,” he told his supporters in Arizona. “We will redeem America’s promise. We will put America first, and we will take back the nation that we love. We’re going to take it back from these people that have no idea what they’re doing.”With just 10 days to go until election day, Trump’s campaign undoubtedly wants to keep him on message. But his track record – including a recent town hall that devolved into a 40-minute dance event – indicates he might not be capable. ,His last attempt to win over voters includes the message he’s reiterated for four years: that his reign was stolen from him, and he’s trying to get it back. His supporters need to turn out en masse to make his lead “too big to rig,” a line his fans now echo.He delivered that message during a staged appearance working a McDonald’s fryer, where he would not commit to accepting the results of the election. Leaning out of the drive-thru window, he told reporters he was up in the polls. Would he accept the results of the election? “If it’s a fair election,” he responded. More

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      In Michigan, these US veterans call Trump ‘the devil’ – and phone-bank for Harris

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      Like so many military veterans, the ageing group of men and women adorned with badges of fighting forces and theaters of war hesitated to talk about their past lives. But after one finally spoke up to denounce the man they called “the devil”, the floodgates opened to an anger and alarm that went far beyond normal political discourse.The veterans turned out on a warm evening to phone-bank for Kamala Harris in Saginaw, Michigan – a swing county in a key battleground state. But first they got to tell each other about where they served and the ways in which that shapes how they see next week’s presidential election.Most enlisted decades ago, some for only a few years. But that was long enough when fighting in Korea or Vietnam to have marked out the course of their lives and shaped their views of the world. From that vantage point, the veterans look upon Donald Trump with undisguised disgust.Some refused to even speak his name, including former air force electrician Josie Couch.“This man here, that Kamala is running against, he’s like the devil and, you know, he ain’t even trying to hide it,” she told her fellow veterans.A younger generation of Americans is fearful that another Trump presidency will further erode the rights they thought were set in stone, particularly in the wake of the supreme court striking down the constitutional right to abortion.The veterans bring a longer view shaped by early lives without many of the rights now under threat, not least greater racial and gender equality, and after having to fight for them in the first place. Couch, a Black woman, remembers her service and working life in the 1970s as a time of sexism, harassment and hostility that she and others struggled against.View image in fullscreenNow, she said, Trump wants “to take away everything that we done work hard for, our parents worked hard for”.“We all didn’t have a great service life because the men, they didn’t really want us to be there. I was called everything but Josie. I kind of forgot what my name was,” she said.“It’s going to be terrible if we take steps back because we don’t know how to go back.”Others in the hall shouted out: “We’re not going back.”Couch continued.“For them to take away women’s rights, come on now. How did we get here? If we didn’t stand up for our rights, we wouldn’t be here today,” she said.“Men can’t tell you what to do with your body. I haven’t heard yet what they’re gonna do with the men’s bodies, so why do they want to keep pushing us down?”Trump divides veterans in the same way he polarises other Americans. Some who served in the most senior positions in the military are now denouncing him openly.Trump’s ex-chief of staff, retired marine corps general John Kelly, has warned that his former boss meets the definition of a fascist and would rule like a dictator if he were to return to the White House.Other former generals and intelligence officials have joined in denouncing Trump, including the ex chair of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, former CIA director John Brennan and Trump’s defence secretary Mark Esper.But for the veterans in Saginaw, their anger is more visceral. They speak with unusual passion as their contempt for Trump spills out about the former president’s repeated disparaging of those who have served in the military and his targeting of some of the most vulnerable in society.Dave Salogar stepped up to speak wearing a cap marking him as a veteran of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. He began by telling the story of his grandparents, who fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 for Canada and then crossed the border illegally into the US.Salogar’s grandfather was killed in a mining accident in Michigan in 1924 and his grandmother raised her children as a single mother while working in a cannery.“So technically I’m the grandchild of illegal immigrants, and I hear the way immigrants are being beat up for all the ills when they’re the people that make America great. My grandmother, the illegal immigrant, eventually became a citizen at the age of 80. She sent two of her sons to fight in world war two. She sent a third son to Korea to fight and he was wounded,” said Salogar.View image in fullscreen“Myself and two of my cousins, this illegal immigrant’s grandchildren, went off to Vietnam.”Salogar joined a combat unit in 1968 at the age of 19 and served for nearly two years. He told the Guardian that the trauma of that war defined his life and cost him a series of jobs in the transportation industry after he sought refuge in alcohol for a decade. It’s one of the reasons he’s so contemptuous of Trump’s claim to have been unfit for military duty because of bone spurs.But Salogar reserves his real ire for how the former president talks about other veterans. Several of those in the room expressed disgust at Trump’s 2015 attack on Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.As president, Trump also derided American war dead as “suckers” and “losers” after refusing to visit a second world war US military cemetery in Normandy in 2020. In August, the US army publicly rebuked Trump campaign officials for turning a ceremony at Arlington national cemetery to mark the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan into a photo opportunity for the Republican presidential candidate.Salogar does not hide his contempt.“He said we’re suckers and losers. The man could not go to Normandy on June 6 to go to the cemetery because it was raining and he was going to mess his hair. What kind of man is that?” he said.“I wasn’t old enough to vote when I was in Vietnam. Now I’m 76. This will probably be the last election I vote in, but it is the most important one.”Jerry and Dale Blunk met and married while serving on a now-defunct US military base in Iceland. He was in the navy for nearly 24 years and she was in the air force.Speaking to the Guardian, Jerry Blunk said he was supporting Harris because “it’s about time a woman became president of the United States”. Dale interrupted him.View image in fullscreen“Well, that’s not the only reason because both of us agree that Trump can’t be allowed into office again. He has no respect for anyone except himself. He has no respect for the constitution. He has no respect for veterans. He doesn’t have any respect for anyone. So he can’t go back to the White House,” she said.They, too, were infuriated by Trump’s disparaging of other veterans.“The minute he said McCain wasn’t a warrior, it was an insult to everyone who fought and died,” said Dale.But she is concerned about more than insults. Like others in the room, she questioned whether US democracy could survive another bout of Trump in the White House.“I don’t think the rule of law will prevail. The supreme court has already given him unlimited power. You give that to an egotist and a fascist, then we’ve lost our country. Literally, we’ll lose our country,” she said.Still, for all his anger at the former president’s failure to serve while disparaging those who did, Salogar pauses and reflects that Trump would have been a liability as a soldier.“When I was 19, I learned you’re white, Black, brown, you all bleed red,” he said.“I’m glad he wasn’t beside me, because I’ve witnessed unbelievable acts of courage, unbelievable acts of compassion and unbelievable acts of sacrifice by other 19- or 20-year-olds like myself.” More

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      Beyoncé brings star power to Harris rally in Texas with abortion law in the spotlight

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      Beyoncé on Friday lent her star power to Kamala Harris at a high-octane rally in her native Texas, declaring that the country was on the “brink of history” as the vice-president warned the state’s near-total abortion ban could become the law of the land if Donald Trump is elected.“For all the men and women in this room, and watching around the country, we need you,” Beyoncé told a crowd of 30,000 people at the open-air Shell Energy stadium in Houston.With the presidential race effectively deadlocked, Harris detoured from her frenetic race across the seven battleground states to appear in reliably Republican Texas, where she sought to highlight the state’s abortion restrictions for voters who have yet to make up their minds or cast a ballot.“Let us be clear: If Donald Trump wins again, he will ban abortion nationwide,” Harris told the audience, her largest to date. Harris walked on to the stage, as she has ever since she became the presumptive nominee roughly 100 days ago, to Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem, Freedom.Harris has centered her campaign on the theme of freedom. In the closing days of the campaign, she has painted Trump as posing a threat to hard-won progress, eroding access to reproductive care, seeking to walk back LGBTQ rights and targeting American democracy itself. Earlier this week, Harris agreed that Trump was a “fascist”.Harris spoke to an exuberant crowd, thousands of whom had waited hours in the sticky Houston heat to attend. Rally-goers were given flashing wristbands in all different colors. They danced and sang as a DJ spun pop ballads before the event began.But the message Harris came to deliver was sobering. She listed the sprawling impacts of abortion bans like the one in Texas, which she called “ground zero for the right for reproductive freedom.”“All that to say, elections matter,” Harris said.View image in fullscreenDespite the speculation, the megastar did not perform. “I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “We are at the precipice of an incredible shift, the brink of history,” Beyoncé told the roaring crowd.In the final days before the election, the Harris campaign is tapping the star power of the party’s most popular figures and celebrity supporters. On Friday night, Willie Nelson, the country music star and Texas resident, performed his best-known songs, including On the Road Again and actor Jessica Alba urged women to vote. Beyoncé was joined by her mother, Tina Knowles, and her former bandmate Kelly Rowland.“We are grabbing back the pen from those who are trying to write an American story that would deny the right for women to make our own decisions about our bodies,” Rowland said. “Today that means grabbing that pen and casting my vote for Kamala Harris.”The night before, Harris held her first campaign event with Barack Obama. They were joined onstage in Atlanta by rocker Bruce Springsteen, who played a three-song set and branded Trump an “American tyrant.” On Saturday, Harris will rally with Michelle Obama in Michigan.Harris does not expect to win Texas. But Democrats here are suddenly hopeful after polls suggest an unexpectedly close senate race between the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz, and the Democrat, Dallas-area congressman Colin Allred.Democrats face a daunting senate map this cycle. With a loss in West Virginia all but certain, and Montana slipping out of reach, their hopes of maintaining narrow-control of the Senate may rest on an upset in the Lone Star state.“Everything is bigger in Texas,” Allred said on Friday night. “But Ted Cruz is too small for Texas.”The emotional heart of the evening was the personal stories of Texas women who had nearly died from pregnancy-related complications because they did not receive proper care.Ondrea, a Texas woman who appeared in a new Harris campaign, became emotional as she shared her harrowing experience after a miscarriage at 16 weeks and needing an emergency abortion that she was denied under the state’s law. A video played before her remarks showed her with a wound and scars that stretched down her body, from her breast to her pelvis, after a six-hour surgery in which she said doctors had to cut open her torso in order to save her life.Texas residents Amanda and Josh Zurawski, who have become powerful surrogates for Harris on the campaign trail, also shared their story. At 18 weeks pregnant, Amanda Zurawski began to suffer complications and needed an abortion. There was no chance the foetus would survive, but doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy until she eventually developed sepsis, days later.“I was finally close enough to death to deserve healthcare in Texas,” Amanda Zurawski said.Todd Ivey, a reproductive health specialist in Houston, addressed the crowd surrounded by a team of doctors and medical professionals in white lab coats. He emphasized the challenges of administering care to patients when it could mean risking arrest. Since the Texas law took effect the state’s infant mortality has risen.“This is a healthcare crisis,” he said. This is unacceptable and it is cruel.”Among those in the crowd was Sara Gonzales, 32, of Splendora, Texas, who drove to the stadium straight from an early-morning shift at Starbucks. Gonzales said she considers herself an independent and in 2020, wrote in a candidate for president. But the political stakes changed, Gonzales said, the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, and Texas enacted its near-total ban on abortion.“Being a woman in Texas right now, it’s not OK,” she said. “I should have freedom over my own body.” More

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      Democrats are scrambling to keep the Senate. Could an old-school bipartisan help save it?

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      “Everybody’s got their comfy shoes?” Jacky Rosen scanned the room full of union workers who were preparing canvas for her in Reno, Nevada. The room erupted in response.“Those gym shoes are going to be worn out,” the Democratic senator told the crowd. “But that’s OK. Those holes in the bottom mean you’re doing the good work … helping return the Democratic majority in the United States.”Rosen has been wearing out her own shoes – crisscrossing the state and running one of the most aggressive and persistent re-election campaigns in the country as she fights to preserve her own career, and a precarious party advantage in the US Senate. Her campaign message has matched her practical footwear.Her platform has focused on a few big, national issues – including the cost of living and abortion – but also many small ones specific to her geographically vast, politically enigmatic state. She touts her record preserving a local postal hub in northern Nevada, bringing in money for a solar facility.“We’re trying to take care of what we have here, and we want our kids to have a good place to grow up,” she told members of Culinary Workers Union Local 226 – a powerful organisation representing tens of thousands of hospitality workers in the state. “That’s what everyone wants.”With early voting in Nevada already underway, Rosen holds an eight-point lead in polling averages. But she’s not letting up or taking any chances. Armies of volunteers from unions and a coalition of moderate and progressive political groups are knocking on doors on her behalf. And a barrage of advertisements, on the radio and television, in English and Spanish – are tearing down her opponent Sam Brown, a Donald Trump-backed Republican that Rosen has characterised as extreme.The race will be a test of whether candidates like her – a pragmatic, old-school bipartisan focused on local issues – can prevail in a politically polarised country. The outcome in Nevada will help determine which party controls the closely divided Senate, with the power to either impede of enable the agenda of Trump or Kamala Harris.In April, the non-partisan Cook Political Report had ranked the race a “toss-up” – in a swing state that appeared increasingly inscrutable to pollsters. In 2022, the Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto won her seat by fewer than 8,000 votes.And Rosen’s challenger, Sam Brown, a military veteran and Purple Heart recipient, had the makings of a model candidate – one who could help Republicans pick up a Senate seat and flip the chamber for the party. But by August, the polling agency had moved the race to “leaning Democrat” – citing growing enthusiasm for Democrats following Harris’s entry into the race, as well as Brown’s failure to drum up much enthusiasm.“Sam Brown just didn’t turn out to be the candidate that I think Republicans hoped he would be – in terms of energy, in terms of fundraising, in terms of just doing what’s needed,” said David Byler, chief of research at the polling firm Noble Predictive Insights. “And then you have a Democratic incumbent who doesn’t have any obvious flaws.”Paradoxically, Rosen’s unobtrusive temperament and heads-down approach to her first term could become her greatest asset. In Las Vegas and Reno, dozens of voters told the Guardian they weren’t particularly familiar with Rosen’s record – but she seemed to be doing just fine.“She does what she says she’s gonna do,” said Vivian Jackson, 69, of Las Vegas. “They try to attack her, but she’s not like that. She’s a real person.”“She’s occasionally said some stuff that’s given me pause,” said her neighbour Kenneth Logan, 65, a retired bartender and veteran who lives in west Las Vegas. On several issues, his politics are to the left of Rosen’s. “But I’m probably going to vote for her. She’s doing fine, and I can’t think of a candidate I’d vote for instead of her.”Rosen is a former computer programmer and synagogue president who was hand-picked to run for Congress, and then the Senate – seemingly out of nowhere – by Harry Reid, the former Democratic senate leader from Nevada who helped reshape the state’s politics over his long political career. In 2018 – after serving just two years in Congress – she unseated Republican senator Dean Heller with a five-point margin, largely relying on support from the state’s powerful labour unions and by emphasising her support for the Affordable Care Act and immigration reform. Heller had embraced Trump and voted to repeal the popular health care law.Six years later, Nevada – like the US at large – is much more politically polarised. Canvassers for the Libre Initiative, a conservative group affiliated with mega-donor Charles Koch’s political network, have been messaging to mostly Latino voters that Rosen is closely tied with the Biden administration. “She voted 94% of the time with Joe Biden,” said Eddie Diaz, a strategic director at Libre in Nevada. “And people are not better off than they were before.”But unlike many of her colleagues, Rosen has shied away from a national profile, forgoing the Democratic national convention in August in favour of staying in Nevada to campaign there.“I think she’s done a decent job so far, and that’s largely because she’s moderate, and bipartisan,” said Kim, 66, a mental health and wellness educator who said she didn’t want to share her full name because many of her family and clients are staunch Republicans.Her partner, Luis, 55, used to belong to the same synagogue as Rosen. “It’s a small world,” he said.Gladis Blanco, a political organiser with the Culinary Workers Union in Reno, said she credits Rosen for working with the administration to lower the cost of asthma medication. A single mother of five, Blanco said both she and several of her children have asthma – and new price caps on inhalers have transformed her family’s monthly budget. “When I tell voters about that they get so excited,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile Miguel Martinez, a Reno city council member who has been canvassing on behalf of Rosen and Harris, said he was especially impressed that Rosen successfully fought against the US postal service plan to move all mail processing from its Reno facility to California, which locals, especially in remote regions of rural northern Nevada, worried would result in delayed medication deliveries and mail ballot processing. “That was a really big win in our community,” he said.And much like her mentor Reid, who was famous for funnelling funds to the state, Rosen has managed to win allies by delivering federal aid to the state’s cities and rural communities.In recent weeks, several rural Republican officials have backed Rosen over Brown – noting, simply, that they’re happy with the incumbent’s record. “Jacky Rosen helped bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass the largest infrastructure investment in a generation,” said Nathan Robertson, the Republican mayor of the small eastern Nevada town of Ely. “That law is now leading to better and safer roads for our residents, including $24m in federal transportation funding to improve Ely’s streets and sidewalks and revitalise our downtown.”Ed Lawson – the Republican mayor of Sparks, a small city just outside Reno – similarly cited all the funding she has brought to his region. Just a day prior to his endorsement, Rosen and Cortez Masto announced that they had secured $275m in federal funding to enhance a major highway corridor east of Sparks.“I’m a lifelong Republican who has never voted for a Democrat, but this November I’ll be voting for Jacky Rosen,” he said.It has helped Rosen’s cause that Brown has floundered though the election cycle.With early voting underway, the Senate Leadership Fund – the Republican party’s main outside group supporting Senate races – announced it would spend an addition $6.2m on TV, radio and digital ads for Brown. But it’s unclear if the funds will come too late.Brown has often leaned on his personal story in appeals to voters. In 2008, when he was a US army officer in Afghanistan, his Humvee hit a roadside bomb. The explosion caused third-degree burns and Brown had to endure dozens of reconstructive surgeries. The experience was transformative, Brown has said. “God saved me for a purpose,” he wrote in a recent campaign email.But while he has made clear why he’s running for office, he has struggled to define how for voters he would govern.Trump endorsed Brown just days before the primary elections and since then Brown has clung tightly to the former president and his platform. Brown said he wouldn’t have supported the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the Inflation Reduction Act – Biden administration programs that have brought unprecedented federal dollars into the state and help fund a range of projects. His past support for storing nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain – a third rail of politics in the state – has also left the impression that he is out of touch with Nevada.Such missteps have opened the opportunity for an easy critique – that Brown is a newcomer, one who moved from Reno to Dallas in 2018, and simply doesn’t know enough about the state.His muddled stance on abortion has also played badly. In attack ads, Rosen has called Brown a “Maga extremist” who would take away abortion rights. And though Brown has responded by saying he supports Nevada’s current law, which allows abortions up to 24 weeks – he has repeatedly dodged questions on whether he’ll support the state’s abortion ballot initiative, which aims to enshrine Nevada’s abortion rights in the state constitution.Nearly 70% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats said they opposed criminalising abortion, according to a recent poll by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland.Diane Gutierrez, a 65-year-old real estate agent based in Reno, said she is personally opposed to abortion, due to her faith, but believes it should remain protected. “I don’t believe that that should be taken away from any woman,” she said. “It’s just not OK to go backwards.”A registered non-partisan, Gutierrez said she’s voted for both Republican and Democratic candidates in the past. But in recent years, she has gotten more involved in volunteering with the Democratic party – and has largely steered clear of Republicans. “The party has had time, but they haven’t selected good candidates,” she said, adding they’ve failed to make a good case to voters. Initially, she thought Brown bucked the trend.“Being from a military family – my dad was a marine – I appreciate Sam Brown and thank him for his service because obviously he paid a huge price,” she said. “When you’re in the military, you have respect.”But his failure to define a platform of his own has been disappointing, she said. “I would like him to speak up more,” she said. “Where’s Sam Brown? Is he in Nevada? It’s like, ‘Sam – say something.’” More

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      US presidential election updates: Joe Rogan and Beyoncé take centre stage as campaigns make final pitches

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump centred their attention on Texas on Friday, with both presidential candidates holding events there. In appearances on opposite sides of the staunchly Republican state, the nominees set out their contrasting visions for the country – with the content of their pitches underlining recent polling data which shows the gender gap among voters widening to historic levels.In Houston, Harris was joined by Beyoncé, with the Democratic candidate telling the Texas crowd that they were “ground zero in the fight for reproductive freedom”. She went on to call out Texas for having one of the most restrictive bans in the country, adding “now one in three women lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban”.Meanwhile, an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in Austin created another opportunity for Trump to highlight the hyper-masculine tone that has defined much of his 2024 White House bid. A Trump victory could hinge on men turning out to vote for the Republican nominee, according to Politico, which highlighted Rogan’s podcast as a good place to reach them. With an audience in the tens of millions, The Joe Rogan Experience has built a massive, mostly male, audience.Here’s what else happened on Friday:Kamala Harris election news

      At the conclusion of her Houston rally, Harris called on voters to cast their ballots early. “Do we trust women? Do we believe in reproductive freedom? Do we believe in the promise of America, and are we ready to fight for it?” Harris said, before concluding by saying, “When we fight, we win.”

      In Houston, Beyoncé was joined by her former Destiny’s Child bandmate, Kelly Rowland, in front of an audience of 30,000 people. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations.”

      While Beyoncé appealed to a younger crowd, 91-year-old Willie Nelson showed earlier in the event that he still has cachet in his native Texas. “Are we ready to say Madam President?” Nelson asked the crowd before launching into Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys, to which the audience sang along.

      Colin Allred, the Democratic congressman running to unseat Texas senator Ted Cruz, used the rally to denounce his opponent. “I believe in a very different Texas than Ted Cruz does,” Allred said. “My time in Congress, I’ve been the exact opposite of Ted Cruz, because I never forgot where I came from, never forgot the folks who gave me a chance. He went on to lead the crowd in a chant of “You gotta lose your job.”

      Tim Walz delivered a rousing pep talk in Scranton, Pennsylvania, telling voters the race was “going to be tight”. “It’s the fourth quarter. We have got the best team on the field,” Walz said. “We have got to do this one inch at a time, one yard at a time, one door at a time, one call at a time, one dollar at a time, one vote at a time.”
      Donald Trump election news

      Donald Trump ran hours late to a rally in Michigan, causing thousands of his supporters to leave while others huddled in cold weather to await the former president at an outdoor rally in the battleground state. The Republican presidential nominee was delayed by his interview with Rogan, which stretched to three hours. In Michigan, Trump said “we’ve got a war going and she’s out partying,” a reference to Israel’s attacks on Iran.

      Chinese government-linked hackers are believed to have targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as part of a larger breach of US telecommunications networks, according to a New York Times report. Investigators are working to determine what data, if any, was accessed by the “sophisticated” hack, sources said.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      There was uproar and outrage among the Washington Post’s current and former staff and other notable figures in the world of American media after the newspaper’s leaders on Friday chose to not endorse any candidate in the US presidential election. The newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced on Friday that for the first time in over 30 years, the paper’s editorial board would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential election, nor in future presidential elections. The decision, according to some staffers and reporters, was allegedly made by the Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.

      Russian actors were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, US officials confirmed. The video had taken off on social media but was debunked within three hours by local election officials and law enforcement after members of the public reported it.

      Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has called for the defence department to investigate a report that Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Politico reports. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Armed Services Committee, said “Elon Musk, who has billions in contracts that support some of our most sensitive military operations, reportedly has an open line to Putin.” Musk’s spacecraft company SpaceX has multiple contracts with the defence department and Nasa. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the billionaire has had previously unreported discussions with Putin since 2022.

      A fresh group of “lifelong Republican” former aides to Donald Trump added their voices to the chorus of criticism of the Republican nominee, speaking out in support of John Kelly, who earlier this week called his old boss a fascist. “The revelations General Kelly brought forward are disturbing and shocking. But because we know Trump and have worked for and alongside him, we were sadly not surprised by what General Kelly had to say,” a letter from more than a dozen staffers who worked in Trump’s administration says.
      Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Presidential poll tracker

      Harris and Trump policies

      What to know about early voting More

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      ‘It’s going to be tight’: Tim Walz rallies Pennsylvanians for final stretch in Biden’s home town

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      Tim Walz delivered a rousing pep talk in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Friday, encouraging supporters to do everything they can in the next 11 days to elect Kamala Harris as president.Addressing hundreds of voters at the Scranton Cultural Center, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee compared the final days of the neck-and-neck presidential race between Harris and Donald Trump to the fourth quarter of a football game, leaning on his background as a former high school teacher and coach.“It’s going to be tight. It’s the fourth quarter. We have got the best team on the field,” Walz said. “We have got to do this one inch at a time, one yard at a time, one door at a time, one call at a time, one dollar at a time, one vote at a time.”The rally came as polls show a deadlocked race between Harris and Trump, despite hundreds of millions of dollars having been spent in the battleground states. According to the Guardian’s poll tracker, Harris now leads Trump by less than 1 point in Pennsylvania, which could serve as the tipping point state in the electoral college.Walz, the governor of Minnesota, warned supporters in Scranton against the “dangerous complacency” of downplaying the threat that Trump represents to the country.“We are running like everything is on the line because everything is on the line. It is. We feel it. You know it,” Walz said. “[Trump] is telling you what he is going to do, and none of it is good.”Walz specifically reiterated Harris’s message from her CNN town hall on Wednesday, during which she said that Trump’s former advisers were sending a “911 call” to the nation. In an Atlantic article published this week, John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, recounted that the then president expressed a wish for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”. (Trump’s campaign has denied Kelly’s claim.)Walz told voters in Scranton: “Maybe Donald forgot that Hitler and his generals were on the other side of this thing, and it was the sons of Minnesota and Pennsylvania that were carrying the stars and stripes, that kicked his ass and saved this world from fascism.”After cultivating a persona as a “joyful warrior”, Walz has turned increasingly punchy in the final stretch of the presidential race. In Wisconsin on Tuesday, Walz described Elon Musk, who recently appeared alongside Trump at a campaign rally, as a “dipshit”, and the governor repeated the insult on Friday.“I used a midwestern euphemism. I said that he was prancing and dancing around like a dipshit. That is exactly what it was,” Walz said, prompting cheers from the crowd.On a more positive note, Walz took a moment to express his appreciation for Joe Biden, who was born in Scranton and remains a popular figure in the city.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This country owes a huge debt to you and a huge debt to Joe Biden,” Walz said. “[Presidents] have always put this country above themselves, no matter the cost to their personal ambitions or what happened to them. Joe Biden has secured his place in history by upholding that tradition.”The Scranton crowd erupted into cheers of “Joe!” as Walz spoke. Michael McNulty, a 47-year-old voter from Scranton, lives down the street from Biden’s childhood home and expressed his gratitude for the president but said he felt invigorated by the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think there’s a real sense of optimism and hope here. It’s not just against Trump,” McNulty, wearing a Harris-Walz camo hat, said after the Scranton rally. “They’re sharing a vision for the future of the country that is one I want to live in. It’s one that I want to raise my children in and that I’m really proud to go out and contribute to make happen.”Biden won Pennsylvania by 1.2 points in 2020, four years after Trump carried the state by 0.7 points. Although polls show a tied race, McNulty is confident that Harris will win the Keystone state this time around.“We’re going to push this over the finish line here for the Harris-Walz ticket,” he said. “PA is going to deliver, and we’re going to have Madame President.” More

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      Virginia must restore voter eligibility to more than 1,600 after US judge ruling

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      Virginia must restore more than 1,600 people to the voter rolls after a federal judge ruled on Friday that the state had illegally removed them.The US district judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction request brought against Virginia election officials by the justice department, which claimed the voter registrations were wrongly canceled during a 90-day quiet period ahead of the November election that restricts states from making large-scale changes to their voter rolls.“The ruling is a big victory. All of the eligible voters who were wrongfully purged from the voter rolls will now be able to cast their ballots,” said Ryan Snow, a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups that sued the state over the policy. “The judge stopped the outrageous mass purge of eligible voters in Virginia.The voters had been flagged for removal after Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, issued an executive order on 7 August requiring election officials to check voter rolls against DMV records on a daily basis for non-citizens. Voting rights groups have long warned that such comparisons are an unreliable way to check for citizenship because someone can become a naturalized citizen after getting their driver’s license or may accidentally check the wrong box at the motor vehicles department.Thomas Sanford, an attorney with the Virginia attorney general’s office, told the judge at the conclusion of Friday’s hearing that the state intended to appeal her ruling.The justice department and private groups, including the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were canceled were in fact citizens whose registrations were canceled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes like a mischecked box on a form.Justice department lawyer Sejal Jhaveri said during an all-day injunction hearing on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, that’s precisely why federal law prevents states from implementing systematic changes to the voter rolls in the 90 days before an election, “to prevent the harm of having eligible voters removed in a period where it’s hard to remedy”.Giles said on Friday that the state was not completely prohibited from removing non-citizens from the voting rolls during the 90-day quiet period, but that it must do so on an individualized basis rather than the automated, systematic program employed by the state.State officials argued unsuccessfully that the canceled registrations followed careful procedures that targeted people who explicitly identified themselves as non-citizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.Charles Cooper, a lawyer for the state, said during arguments on Thursday that the federal law was never intended to provide protections to non-citizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.“Congress couldn’t possibly have intended to prevent the removal … of persons who were never eligible to vote in the first place,” Cooper argued.The plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, though, said that many people are wrongly identified as non-citizens by the DMV simply by checking the wrong box on a form. They were unable to identify exactly how many of the 1,600 purged voters are in fact citizens – Virginia only identified this week the names and addresses of the affected individuals in response to a court order – but provided anecdotal evidence of individuals whose registrations were wrongly canceled.Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as non-citizens may well be citizens, but he said restoring all of them to the rolls means that in all likelihood, “there’s going to hundreds of non-citizens back on those rolls. If a non-citizen votes, it cancels out a legal vote. And that is a harm,” he said.He also said that with the election less than two weeks away, it was too late to impose the burden of restoring registrations on busy election workers, and said the plaintiffs who filed their lawsuits roughly two weeks ago should have taken action sooner.State officials said any voter identified as a non-citizen was notified and given two weeks to dispute their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form attesting to their citizenship, their registration would not be canceled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn media interviews, Youngkin has questioned the justice department’s motives for filing the lawsuit.“How can I as a governor allow non-citizens to be on the voter roll?” Youngkin asked rhetorically during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.Donald Trump, who is already spreading baseless claims about fraud, also weighed in on the case after the justice department filed a lawsuit to stop the removals.“Sleepy Joe Biden and Comrade Kamala Harris ridiculously accuse me of wanting to ‘weaponize’ the Justice Department, when they have done all of the weaponizing. Now, their truly Weaponized Department of ‘Injustice,’ and a Judge (appointed by Joe), have ORDERED the Great Commonwealth of Virginia to PUT NON-CITIZEN VOTERS BACK ON THE ROLLS,” he said, despite evidence that several of those affected were actually citizens.Jason Miyares, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, issued a statement after Friday’s hearing, criticizing the ruling.“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” he said. “Yet, today a Court – urged by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice – ordered Virginia to put the names of non-citizens back on the voter rolls, mere days before a presidential election. The Department of Justice pulled this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging a Virginia process signed into law 18 years ago by a Democrat governor and approved by the Department of Justice in 2006.”Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama, and a federal judge there last week ordered the state to restore eligibility for more than 3,200 voters who had been deemed ineligible non-citizens. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that roughly 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were made inactive were actually legally registered citizens. More