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      Trump vows to impose tariffs as experts warn of price hikes and angry allies

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      Donald Trump doubled down on his promise to levy tariffs on all imports in a bid to boost American manufacturing, a proposal that economists say would probably mean higher prices for consumers while angering US allies.“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariffs’,” Trump said in an often-combative conversation with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday. “It’s my favorite word.”Trump was grilled on the potential impacts of tariffs, and often dodged questions about the tangible impacts of the levies on inflation and geopolitics. Trump is proposing an at least 10% blanket tariff on all imports, with tariffs as high as 60% on goods from China.“You see these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are empty and falling down,” Trump said. “We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes for companies that are going to make their products in the USA. And we’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs.”

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      Though speaking in Chicago, Trump repeated many of the claims he made at the Detroit Economic Club last week. At the time, Trump bashed the city, saying it has a high crime rate and few job opportunities.“We’re a developing nation, too,” he said on Tuesday. “Take a look at Detroit.”Trump centered the auto industry, claiming that tariffs would encourage car manufacturers to build plants in the US – an assertion some economists have suggested amounts to wishful thinking.“The higher the tariff, the more you’re going to put on the value of those goods, the higher people are going to have to pay,” Micklethwait told Trump.“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory,” Trump said in response, to applause from the audience.Micklethwait pointed out that economists have estimated Trump’s economic proposals would add $7.5tn to the US deficit, twice the amount as Kamala Harris’s proposals. He also pointed out that the tariffs would also be targeting American allies.“Our allies have taken advantage of us, more so than our enemies,” Trump said.When asked whether he had talked to Vladimir Putin after the end of his presidency, Trump said that he doesn’t “comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing”.“If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing,” he said.Trump was also asked about his stance on the Federal Reserve, specifically on comments he has made against Fed chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump first appointed in 2018.“I think if you’re a very good president with good sense, you should at least get to talk to [the Fed],” Trump said. “I think I have the right to say, as a very good businessman … I think you should go up or down a little bit.“I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not interest rates should go up or down.”Even a recommendation from the White House as to what the Fed should do with interest rates would amount to a significant step away from the central bank’s long-established independence.Trump frequently made personal jabs at Micklethwait, saying “I know you’re an anti-tariff guy” and at one point: “This is a man who has not been a big Trump fan.” More

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      Trump bizarrely claims Democrats want to ban cows and windows in buildings

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      Donald Trump over the weekend told supporters of his campaign for a second presidency that his Democratic opponents want to ban cows and windows in buildings, inviting another round of questions about his mental fitness.“They just come up, they want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings,” the Republican White House nominee said during a campaign event with Hispanic voters in Las Vegas on Saturday. “They have some wonderful plans for this country.“Honestly, they’re crazy, and they’re really hurting out country, badly.”Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently reacted to the remarks on social media by writing, “a confused Trump goes on a delusional rant”.Other Trump critics echoed the Democratic vice-president’s observation, describing the rant as “stunningly senile” and “incoherent”.Nevada’s Democratic party also criticized the former president, writing: “Trump came to town and questioned Nevadans’ values and rambled about cows and windows.”Saturday was not the first time that the former president has accused Democrats of wanting to get rid of cows.

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      During a rally earlier this summer, Trump said that Harris would pass laws to outlaw red meat if elected. He added: “You know what that means – that means no more cows.”Trump has also said over the last several years that the Green New Deal, an expansive climate plan introduced and supported by progressive Democrats, would “take out the cows”.The Green New Deal, he said in 2020, “would crush our farms, destroy our wonderful cows”.“I love cows. They want to kill our cows. You know why, right? You know why? Don’t say it. They want to kill our cows. That means you are next,” he said.The Green New Deal, introduced in part by the progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, outlines broad principles of a plan to fight inequity and tackle climate change while aiming to begin reducing the US’s reliance on fossil fuels that are fueling destructive global warming.The resolution does not call for eliminating animal agriculture. But it calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible”.Though it suggests reducing emissions from agriculture, that “doesn’t mean you end cows”. Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019.According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, about 10% of total American greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, including cows, soils and rice production.Trump’s confusing comments about Democrats wanting to get rid of cows and windows on buildings on Saturday came just two days before another bizarre moment from this campaign cycle.On Monday, at a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, Trump stood on stage swaying and bobbing his head for about 30 minutes while music played after medical emergency-related interruptions.At the same event, although his election against Harris is on 5 November, he told the crowd to get out and vote on “January 5 or before” – prompting critics online to again comment on Trump’s cognitive health.Harris released a medical report which found that the most notable aspects of her health history were seasonal allergies and hives. “She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if she is elected in November, the report said.A senior aide to Harris, 59, stated that the vice-president’s advisers saw the release of her health report and medical history as a chance to call attention to questions about Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity.On Sunday, more than 230 doctors, nurses and healthcare providers, called on the 78-year-old Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health as he seeks to become the oldest president elected.“With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” the doctors wrote in a public letter. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”Trump has consistently declined to disclose detailed information about his health during his public life. On Tuesday, the former president went on his Truth social media platform and published a post claiming his health “IS PERFECT – NO PROBLEMS!!!” More

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      Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules

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      Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

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      Harris and Trump are tied in the polls – so I conducted my own less traditional research | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Polls! What are they good for? Absolutely nothing, except for driving yourself bonkers. Oh look: Donald Trump is up by two points. Wait, it looks like Kamala Harris is up by five points. Yikes, now Trump is up by one-nineteenth of a point. Now, according to a much discussed NBC News poll that came out on Sunday, Trump and Harris are neck and neck.As the US election draws closer, I have developed a severe case of poll-tigue. Can we just give the damn things a rest already? As we all know, polling is an inexact science at the best of times. More importantly, pretty much all the results of recent Trump-Harris polls have been within the margin of error. The fact that this new poll shows Harris tied with Trump (within the margin of error) while a poll in September showed that Harris was leading Trump (also within the margin of error) might signal that the Harris honeymoon is officially over, but ultimately, it’s not that big a deal. You can scrutinise the numbers ad infinitum, but when it comes down to it, the truth is that nobody knows what is going to happen in November other than it’s (probably) going to be very close. Polls are basically astrology for political nerds at this point.Speaking of which, professional astrologers have their own murky methods for predicting the outcome of elections and they seem just as confused as everyone else. Laurie Rivers, a political analyst turned astrologer with more than 235,000 TikTok followers, told the Economist she sees Harris winning “overwhelmingly”. Meanwhile, Amy Tripp, another influential astrologist, has said Trump will win and she can make “objective” forecasts because she is an Aquarius.I’m not an Aquarius, but I’ve also been dabbling in some “objective” forecasting. I recently devised two unorthodox polling methods, the results of which I will exclusively present in this column. In terms of methodology, both surveys were conducted by me in Philadelphia – the biggest city in Pennsylvania, which is probably the most important swing state in the US. In other words: very serious stuff.Let’s start with Arwa’s Little Walk poll. On Monday I counted all the political signs I saw displayed in people’s houses on the 10-minute walk from my house to my child’s preschool. The final tally? Twenty-six Harris/Walz signs, zero Trump signs and one sign for “Giant Meteor 2024”. (That sign did not belong to me, but I share the sentiment.) In short: a giant meteor has a better chance of winning my little stretch of Philadelphia than Trump. What does this mean? Well, it means I live in a liberal bubble. And, also, that I might be on some kind of neighbourhood watch list now because I peered into so many strangers’ windows.We’ll call the next experiment the Rascal Eats a Treat poll. I put a brown treat in one hand (representing Harris) and a pink treat in another (representing Trump), then I asked my dog Rascal to pick a hand. Much to Rascal’s delight, I conducted this experiment multiple times. And guess what? Every single time he picked the Harris indicator. At first I thought that meant my dog was a savant trapped in a chihuahua’s scruffy little body. Then, of course, I realised Rascal could smell the difference between the treats and simply preferred one artificial flavour to the other. As an objective Aries, I will admit that this poll would probably not stand up to serious scrutiny.That said, the Rascal treat test is not quite as ridiculous as it might sound. The Busken Bakery in Cincinnati has been running a presidential Cookie poll since 1984. It sells cookies with candidate’s faces on them and the highest-selling cookie candidate has won nine out of 10 elections (2020 was the outlier). A random bakery has been right just as many times as Allan Lichtman, the distinguished professor who is famous for his 13 “keys” to the White House. (Lichtman got 2020 right but 2000 wrong.) And the bakery has certainly done better than many pollsters.In all seriousness – and before the Guardian gets inundated with complaints from the Association for Preserving the Reputation of Political Polling – I should clarify that polls aren’t a complete waste of time. The latest NBC poll is yet another reminder that the US is a deeply divided country and this election will be won on the margins. And my own polls show that Rascal is a dog of discerning taste. More

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      Pelosi says she still hasn’t spoken to Biden since pressuring him to drop out

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      Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.The former speaker of the House told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden’s failing mental acuity.“Not since then, no,” she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. “But I’m prayerful about it.”She added: “I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she said. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”“Elections are decisions,” she added. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning … and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”Pelosi admitted that some in Biden’s campaign may not have forgiven her for her role in limiting Biden’s legacy to one term, but that a Trump victory would have equally reflected terribly on his legacy.Known as a uniquely influential House speaker, particularly during a Biden administration that passed major legislation on infrastructure and climate, Pelosi was widely seen as a senior Democrat willing to indicate that Biden should reconsider his bid for re-election when the polls showed Trump beating him badly.After Biden did step aside, Pelosi then encouraged the party to endorse Kamala Harris – and scored yet another victory when the vice-president named former congressman Tim Walz as her running mate.Pelosi has also been a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, frequently antagonizing him into posting long rants about her on social media, and publicly ripping up his State of the Union speech in 2020 on the podium of the House of Representatives, calling it a “manifesto of mistruths”.Explaining her unique ability to hold together a fragile coalition of centrist and progressive Democrats, Pelosi explained that she thought “leadership is about respect, about consensus building”, while deriding Trump’s ability to do anything of the sort, particularly with his hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, who he has described as “poisoning the blood of this country”.“I hardly ever say his name,” she says of Trump, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”.“I think [Trump is] a grotesque word … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.“It’s up there with like, swearing.”In her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi describes being the first woman speaker of the House, and her disappointment at the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, but says she remains optimistic that Harris will make history where Clinton could not.“I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House,” she told the Guardian. “The Congress of the United States is not a glass ceiling there. It’s a marble ceiling. And it was very hard to rise up there. But the public, I think, is better disposed … In Congress, they would say to me: “Understand this, there’s been a pecking order here for a long time of men who’ve been waiting for openings to happen and take their turn.” And I said: “That’s interesting. We’ve been waiting over 200 years.”She praised Harris, however, for not running as “the first woman or first woman of color. She’s running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that’s a different race than Hillary Clinton ran.”Noting that more women support Harris and more men support Trump by considerable margins, Pelosi said: “The reason that there’s such a gender gulf is because there’s such a gulf in terms of policies that affect women.”“A woman’s right to choose is a personal issue. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a democracy issue. This is an issue about freedom, freedom to manage your own life.”“What is a democracy? It is free and fair elections. It’s a peaceful transfer of power. It’s independent judiciary and is the personal freedoms in the bill of rights of our constitution. And he is assaulting those by particularly harshly on women, harshly on women. Did you see the other day? He said Kamala Harris was retarded. This is a person running for president of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Has he no respect for the office? Has he no decency about how to communicate?”Pelosi spoke about her fear of political violence, noting that misinformation spread by Trump had caused an atmosphere in which US disaster response agency Fema had to withdraw rescue workers from parts of North Caroline hit by a hurricane after reports of trucks of militia saying they were hunting Fema workers.“This is springing from the top,” she said of Trump’s role in fomenting political violence. “He’s taking pride in doing it. Don’t take it from me, take it from him.”After an armed assailant attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, in their home after breaking in with an intent to harm her, many Republicans made jokes – including Trump’s son Donald Jr, who suggested he would dress as Paul Pelosi for Halloween.“When it happened, what was so sad for my children and grandchildren was that [some Republicans] thought it was a riot – they were laughing and making jokes … his son, all those people making jokes about it, right away. We didn’t even know if he was going to live or die.”Asked if she agreed with the recent remarks of the former chairperson of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, that Trump was “a fascist to the core”, Pelosi said:“Yes, I do. I do. And I know it’s interesting because Kamala Harris says, I’ve prosecuted people like Trump. I know men like that. No, I know him,” she said, stressing Trump.“There’s one picture of me leaving the Roosevelt Room at the cabinet meeting. And I’m pointing to him and I’m saying, I’m leaving this meeting because with you, Mr President, all roads lead to Putin. [Milley’s] comment, ‘fascist to the core’, speaks to the actions that he has taken. Trivialize the press, fake news – that is a tactic of fascist governments.”She added that a possible repeat of January 6 was a key reason for the importance of Democrats at least winning the House in 2024. “Hakeem Jeffries must have the gavel, which means that we have the majority of the votes to accept the results of the electoral college for the peaceful transfer of power.”‘“Nobody could have ever seen an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. But an outsider, as a loser in this election, once again, he might try that.”Later in the interview, Pelosi said Trump’s name, then caught herself. “I said his name. Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.” More