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      Time is running out for Kamala Harris to break with Biden on the Gaza catastrophe | Moira Donegan

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      In an appearance this week on the daytime talkshow The View, Kamala Harris was asked how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said. The comment was seized on by the Trump campaign, who have used it in an attempt to seize upon Biden’s unpopularity and blame Harris for the issues that seem to most enrage and terrify their supporters, among them high consumer prices and immigration. But the comment also rankled some members of Harris’s own base: namely, the young, progressive and non-white voters who have been distraught over the suffering inflicted by Israel in its US-backed war on Gaza.If Harris can’t think of any way she would differ from Biden, these voters may have some suggestions for her. The Biden approach to Israel, after all, has been disastrous on multiple fronts. It has been a moral catastrophe, with Israel’s wildly disproportionate campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza leading to famine, plague and tens of thousands of deaths. It has been an electoral liability, alienating Muslim and Arab American voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan and depressing turnout among the young voters whom Democrats have long relied on and which were a crucial part of Biden’s 2020 victory.And it has been a complete strategic failure, with Israel now expanding its war into Lebanon, the region on the brink of a large-scale conflict between American and Iranian proxies, and the whole world watching as American leaders fail to exert any meaningful pressure or discernible consequences on a small country that has used a great number of US weapons while completely ignoring US instruction.There was a moment, earlier in the war, when things could have gone differently. After the 7 October 2023 attacks killed hundreds of innocent Israelis, the Biden administration reportedly urged caution. But it was only in February, some four months into the war, when much of Gaza had already been leveled and its hundreds of thousands of people displaced into the south, that the Biden White House attempted to stop the Israelis from invading Rafah, the small southern border city where the refugees had fled, by delaying a shipment of 2,000lb bombs.The move had broad support: Nancy Pelosi, hardly a robust supporter of the Palestinian cause, was by then urging enforceable conditions on aid to Israel. The move would also have had the benefit of bringing the Biden administration’s actions more plausibly into line with American and international law, which compels that states not sell arms to armies, like Israel’s, that have likely committed war crimes.It was, to say the least, a mild gesture, and not one that had any impact at all on Israel’s military readiness: all told, America has sent more than 10,000 such bombs to Israel over the past year, many of which have been dropped on Gaza. By the time the Biden administration even so much as dawdled in sending military support to Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been massacred. But reportedly, the anger that this small act of non-compliance provoked among Israeli officials and the American pro-Israel lobby was so intense that the Biden administration got spooked.No meaningful conditions have been imposed on military aid since, and Israel has openly flouted American efforts to de-escalate, continuing its brutal assault on Gaza, launching an invasion into Lebanon that has displaced approximately 1 million people, and attempting to provoke Iran into an outright war – which, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government seems to believe, America will fight on Israel’s behalf. Meanwhile, the whole world watches on, with every foreign leader around the globe seeing anew each day the bleak reality of diminished American power: the United States, the Gaza war has proved, neither keeps its promises nor follows through on its threats.But for all that the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war has been devastating and embarrassing internationally, it has also been unpopular domestically, creating real electoral dangers for the Harris campaign. The protests that sprang up across American campuses last spring were not merely the venting of a fringe minority; they represented a large-scale mobilization of young people morally outraged by the images coming out of Gaza.These young voters view the Biden administration as complicit in a genocide; for Democrats to assume that this belief is insincere, or that those who hold them will overcome such a grave moral objection and turn out to vote for Harris anyway, seems both entitled and unwise.Early in her campaign, Harris seemed to understand this. She refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when he came to Washington this summer, and she had strong words for the Israeli prime minister when they spoke together at a news conference. Harris also made positive rhetorical gestures towards the plight of Palestinians, saying kind words in her convention speech about the injustice of their suffering and their right to self-determination. But for the most part, that’s all these moves were – words. Now, Harris has mostly stopped saying them.Voters have noticed. Specifically, Arab American voters in Michigan have. In February, when Michigan held its Democratic primary, more than 100,000 primary voters cast “uncommitted” ballots, as part of a protest movement aimed at pressuring Biden to change his stance on Gaza. The uncommitted votes were several times greater in number than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state. That discontent has not gone away. A recent national poll of Arab American voters found Trump leading by more than four points among the group, which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the last cycle. This may have a particularly potent impact in Michigan, where a new Quinnipiac poll released last week found Harris trailing Trump by three points.Harris may not want to place much daylight between herself and the incumbent she has served as vice-president. But she has an opportunity to break with Biden on Gaza in these last months of the campaign – to show strength and resolve internationally, to show deference to the interests of a key voter group, and to do the right thing. For all the tendency to cast Israel as a global exception, the truth is that Netanyahu’s style of governance – his bigotry, his corruption, his advancement of a violent and exclusionary nationalism – is part of a broader trend of far-right authoritarianism.It is the same trend that Harris aims to defeat in her campaign against Donald Trump. She has presented herself as a candidate on a mission to revive the liberal order, to protect democracy, to remake America into a country worthy of its global power, and to embody the principles of courage, justice and equality that make leaders worthy of following. She has a chance to show that she means it.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      What does JD Vance really believe? | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The world is on fire, but in Washington DC topic A is Olivia Nuzzi. Her suspension as a writer for New York Magazine for sharing “demure” nude photographs of herself and other indiscreet communications with Robert F Kennedy Jr has engendered gales of hilarity to relieve the tension of the razor-thin close campaign.Nuzzi’s relationship in journalistic terms fits the supreme court’s ruling on presidential immunity of the distinction between Donald Trump’s “private” and “official” acts involving the January 6 insurrection. In the spirit of the court and The Scarlet Letter, the blond bombshell has received more punishment for sexting than the blond bomber has for attempting a coup.In the hurricane of gossip the most notable public discussion of the Nuzzi affair was an exchange of two buddies giggling at their lowbrow humor. “There’s this weird sex scandal story going on right now,” says the first. “The media is obsessed with – I don’t think there was any actual sex in the sex scandal.” Hahaha. His pal snickers, “That’s how I’m sure it is.” They guffaw. “I think that’s right,” replies the first. They laugh together in a communion of their misplaced coolness, unclever witticisms and pubescent misogyny.This is not dialogue from an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. It is not a cartoon. It is not a satire. The first jokester is the Republican candidate for vice-president, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. His interlocutor is Tucker Carlson, the erstwhile No 1 Fox News host, fired as a liability, financial and personal, and left to roam untethered in the social media wasteland.Vance appeared on stage with Carlson on his tour on 22 September, undeterred after Carlson had recently featured a Hitler apologist and Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. Vance preferred to talk about Nuzzi rather than the Nazis. After raising the kerfuffle unprompted, he swiveled without a skip to lay out a cascading conspiracy theory pinging from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to the entire press corps with an inference to Nuzzi. Biden is “sleepwalking into world war three”, he declared, then jumping to “the reason why we have Joe Biden is because Kamala Harris lied about his mental fitness in office. If you actually care about the truth, ask those questions and leave this salacious bullshit to the tabloids. But they can’t do that. And if they did, Tucker, again, if they did, a lot of them would lose their jobs.”So, in translation, the Nuzzi affair is really the media’s way to avoid confirming Vance’s conspiracy theory. The third world war weighs on Vance’s mind. It is a meme, like the “cat meme” about the Haitians, as he called it. In the mode of Butt-Head impersonating a serious person, Vance told Tucker: “We’re worried about getting involved in world war three because we should be, because we have nuclear weapons now, and you have to be cautious about that stuff.” Tucker was gravely silent.Without missing a beat, Vance offered a new wrinkle in the great replacement theory. “If you look at the Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney view, their basic argument is, let’s flood the United States with millions upon millions of foreign laborers because that’s good for business.” Now it was the conservative endorsers of Harris who were to blame for the bogeyman of immigration. Vance was unconcerned that Liz Cheney had been ousted as chair of the House Republican conference for investigating January 6 and defeated in a primary for her seat, and that Dick Cheney had ceased serving as vice-president more than 15 years ago. It was their fault.“The third thing,” said Vance, “that I think really divides the parties, and it’s like me, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump, we’re all on the same page on this is, do you think that the United States should ship its entire industrial base to foreign countries, some of which hate us?”First of all, “the third thing” wasn’t the third thing, but more about the second thing. Second, by embracing Bobby Kennedy, Vance didn’t seem aware he was back to another thing – “this weird sex scandal story”. Then, he returned to the subject of Springfield, Ohio, which is his warped example to prove the replacement theory, his first, second and third thing. “Amen,” said Tucker.Vance is Trump’s running mate in large part because of the influence of Carlson. For the past couple of years, he has been escorting Vance to introduce him to people hostile to Nato. At least one of them was nonplussed when, rather than sticking to the menace of Nato expansion, he expatiated on his many pathological stepfathers. Carlson notoriously appeared in Budapest under the auspices of the pro-Putin Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán. Vance has been uniformly opposed to support for Ukraine. On the eve of Russia’s invasion, he said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”In the battle over who Trump would chose as his running mate, Carlson was pitted against Rupert Murdoch, who had fired him from his perch at Fox. Murdoch favored the wealthy businessman and North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Carlson told Trump about Murdoch, according to the New York Times, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”Trump had to overcome his aversion to Vance for his remarks that he was an “idiot”, “unfit for our nation’s highest office” and a looming “American Hitler”. On 4 January 2021, two days before the assault on the US Capitol, Carlson wrote in a private text about Trump, “I hate him passionately,” but subsequently ingratiated himself back into his good graces. Now he played on Trump’s deepest fear. If Trump picked a “neocon”, a pro-Nato Republican like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Times reported, “then the US intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr Trump in order to get their preferred president”. Carlson was buttressed in waging his paranoid campaign to eliminate competitors to Vance by Donald Trump Jr, whom Carlson had recruited into the Vance inner circle.Trump put Carlson on the platform at the Republican convention in order to have Tucker hail him as the “kindest”, “bravest” man of “empathy” who “actually cares”, and most “wonderful person”. Carlson delivered his tribute seemingly unaware, or perhaps completely aware, that his speech was almost word for word a copy from the film The Manchurian Candidate of the brainwashed description of Raymond Shaw, the phoney Medal of Honor winner himself conditioned into becoming an assassin in a communist conspiracy to kill the party’s nominee for president and turn the country over to the Russians under a rightwing puppet. Maj Ben Marco, played by Frank Sinatra, who served with Shaw in Korea, breaks the code of the brainwashed idealization: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”Carlson and Vance have curiously parallel lives. One born to wealth, the other in poverty, both were partly abandoned children. Vance and Tucker are Lost Boys in their own Neverland who have signed up with Captain Hook.Carlson’s mother, heiress to one of California’s oldest and greatest fortunes, left Tucker at the age of six for life in a hippy commune, never seeing him again. After his father remarried to the heiress of the Swanson frozen food fortune, Tucker was sent off to boarding school.As Vance chronicled in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, his mother was suicidal and addicted to alcohol and heroin. “Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures,” he wrote. He was abandoned to be more or less raised by his grandmother, who from the age of 13 had four children and eight miscarriages, possibly some of them abortions. She once tried to set her drunken abusive husband, Vance’s grandfather, on fire while he slept.Vance is a construct. The man known as “JD Vance” has existed for three years. His various name changes tell only a superficial part of his story. James Donald Bowman carried his father’s middle and last name. When his parents divorced he dropped the middle name “Donald” for “David”. He took his stepfather’s last name when he became James David Hamel. In high school he called himself “JD”. He graduated from Ohio State University and served in the military as James D Hamel. He was accepted to Yale Law School under that name. While at Yale, in 2010-2011, he blogged for David Frum’s FrumForum as JD Hamel.He implied in his 2016 memoir that he took the name of JD Vance upon his wedding in 2014, but in fact he assumed the name “Vance”, after his grandmother’s name, just before his graduation from Yale Law in 2013. Then, when he announced his candidacy for the Senate from Ohio in 2021, he removed the periods from his initials to become simply “JD”. which is how he is listed in his US Senate biography.Vance has had more mentors than name changes. One of them explained to me that his technique is to mirror them, one after another, to win approval and get ahead. His greatest skill is advancement through mimicry. A ruthless instinct for survival drives his hollow striving. He demonstrated his method in justifying Trump’s fabrication about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he told Dana Bash on CNN. His own self-creation involves a lot of creativity.From mentor to mentor, too numerous to mention without writing a small treatise, Vance has shape-shifted. Under the tutelage of the Yale Law professor Amy Chua, author of the terrifyingly strict parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, he framed his story. She threw out his first draft of a memoir, then directed and edited the writing and its promotion. Chua had been the making of Brett Kavanaugh’s career, helping to place him in a clerkship on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, and she became a pipeline of clerks to him when he ascended to the US supreme court, advising her proteges that he preferred women who “looked like models”. She advanced Usha Vance, whose match to JD she encouraged, to become a Kavanaugh clerk, while telling Vance not to apply for the post but to stick to composing the book.Vance met Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, at a Yale event. Thiel inducted him into his network, hiring him after graduation for his venture capital firm. In the 2016 campaign cycle, Thiel became the single largest donor to the Republican party. He was drawn to Trump’s darkness. Thiel is an anti-democratic, illiberal dystopian for whom Trump is a mere agent. When Vance ran for the Senate from Ohio in 2022, Thiel bankrolled him with $15m, a pittance for the potential investment.Thiel and his venture capital network are heavily sunk into cryptocurrency. On the day before Trump anointed Vance as his VP, he endorsed a federal strategic bitcoin reserve that would put the US government behind the essentially worthless commodity. That would trigger an explosion of cryptocurrency products. Vance as vice-president would be a guarantor of an unregulated market that would almost certainly lead to financial chaos, the fleecing of small investors and new avenues for international crime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism, embracing a particular strand of anti-liberal traditionalism. As a boy he had been a Pentecostal. At Yale, he was an avowed atheist. Through Thiel, he met a number of profoundly reactionary Catholic ideologues, including Patrick Deneen, author in 2023 of Regime Change, a manifesto for the “Party of Order” to defeat the “Party of Progress” to install “the post-liberal order”. At a panel about the book at the Heritage Foundation, Vance appeared with Deneen and Kevin Roberts, the rightwing thinktank’s president and an adherent of Opus Dei, a reactionary Catholic sect developed in Franco’s Spain that is at war with Pope Francis’s liberal openings. Vance proclaimed himself there a cadre of the “postliberal right” and “explicitly anti-regime”, a further confession of faith.At the time, Roberts was overseeing the publication of Project 2025, a far-right wish book of draconian policies for a second Trump term. Roberts wrote an accompanying book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, for which Vance wrote the introduction. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” he wrote. But when Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025, the book’s publication was stopped, retitled – “Burning Down” scrapped for “Taking Back” – and pushed back until after the election.Vance had also become close to another radical rightwing theocrat, Rod Dreher, a columnist for The American Conservative, a magazine founded by Patrick Buchanan, avatar of the America First movement. Dreher was present at Vance’s Catholic conversion ceremony. Yet Dreher had already left the Catholic church for Eastern Orthodoxy because, among other things, he felt Catholicism was controlled by a “Lavender Mafia” of gay priests. In 2022, he went into voluntary exile in Hungary, where he became the director of Orbán’s Danube Foundation “network project”, for which he facilitated the trip of Carlson while he maintained his close relationship with Vance.When Vance wants to impress the theoreticians of the quasi- and neo-fascist right, he mirrors by echoing their special language, showing he is one of them. But when he wants to prove himself to Trump, he no longer poses as the intellectual manqué but instead a standup insult comic.His awkward jocularity and lame jokes, if they are jokes, almost always bomb. Notoriously, there’s the sophomoric snark of “childless cat ladies”. There are his put-downs, such as: “I’ve actually got thoughts in my head – unlike Kamala Harris.” There was Vance’s misfired tweet intended to mock Harris by posting a 2007 video clip of Miss South Carolina Teen Caitlin Upton freezing in her answer to a question about finding the United States on a map – only to have it revealed that Donald Trump subsequently offered her a job and that she had been a Trump supporter. She condemned Vance for “online bullying”.Vance wore a different persona than the apprentice name-caller in his debate with Tim Walz. Now he was the trained attorney smoothly spreading an oil slick of falsehoods to defend his guilty client. Vance lied that he never supported a national abortion ban; that Trump saved the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – instead of trying to destroy it at every turn; and that “illegal immigrants” in Springfield, Ohio, had “overwhelmed” the community. When Margaret Brennan of CBS News corrected him that the Haitians there are legal immigrants, Vance revealed a glint of anger. “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to factcheck,” he complained. Facts are not his friend. Then, Vance closed with his most breathtaking lie, that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20”, eliding January 6. With that, Vance could breathe easy that he had jumped the hurdle of the big lie.JD obviously feels most comfortable bantering with Tucker. Together on stage, on 22 September, they jammed to stroke Trump’s narcissism as a true man of the people. Tucker kicked it off. “It’s impossible,” he said, “to imagine Carmela, or whatever she’s calling herself, Harris, talk to the lady behind the counter about the differences in quality and weight and price between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac. He has such strong feelings about it. He’s really thought about it a lot.”JD chimed in. “Well, and again, this goes to his leadership style,” he said. “Donald Trump actually really cares of what people think. So, he has absolutely thought to himself, what is the better value between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac? He actually wants to know what the people who work there think about this question. And by the way, I have views about this. Obviously, the quarter pounder is a better deal.”“That’s absurd,” replied Tucker. “Without secret sauce, it’s not even worth going there. But whatever. Honest people disagree.”“You’ve allowed yourself to be manipulated by the elites,” JD ribbed him. “The secret sauce is not the thing that matters. It’s the amount of meat. You get way more meat with a quarter pounder.”Vance clinched his point with an anecdote about being interviewed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago to be his running mate. Trump told him he had asked the gardener whom he should pick. “I’m sitting there, sweating bullets like, ‘Well, sir, what did the gardener at Mar-a-Lago have to say about who should be the VP?’” Trump did not tell him. But, according to Vance, it proved “he actually likes to know what people think about things. That’s one of his secrets of success as a political leader.” Vance did not interpret the incident as Trump toying with him in a humiliating little game in which he dangled the gardener as a determining factor in his fate.Then Tucker and JD riffed about what JD called “the Kamala switcheroo” in full Beavis and Butt-Head style. “The switch-up, the disappearance of the president of the United States. Biden is still president, technically, correct?” says Tucker. “I don’t know,” answers JD. “I don’t either. I really don’t know. I don’t know what happened to him. He was pretty famous at one point, and then he’s just gone.” “I saw some clip on social media that Jill Biden was running a cabinet meeting,” says JD. “Was that real or was that – for sure.” “She’s a doctor, JD. Settle down. She’s got this. Anyone who hasn’t read her dissertation on community colleges in the state of Delaware really should see where the doctorate comes from. She literally is a part of it where she’s breaking down the proportion of bi-ethnicity of students … I’m like, I’m not good at math.” “Wait a second.” “No,” says Tucker, “you should read Dr Jill’s dissertation. It’s unbelievable. Anyway, she’s running the government, just so you know.” Hahaha.In an earlier conversation for Tucker’s podcast, on 18 September, Tucker and JD blithely talked about the agenda of a coming Trump administration. “If you guys win,” says Tucker, “and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander-in-chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover.” “That’s exactly right,” replied JD. “The question is, do you care?” “Well,” JD answered, “I think we have to not care.” He wasn’t joking.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US election briefing: Polls show election tightening as Trump and Harris seek to shore up support

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      Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, spent Sunday trying to shore up political support in battleground states across the country, with polls showing them locked in a tightening race.In North Carolina, Harris attacked her rival for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton. The vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, telling the assembled crowd “there are some who are not acting in the spirit of community … lying about people who are working hard to help the folks in need, spreading disinformation when the truth and facts are required.”From Arizona, Trump spoke to Fox News, telling them he could impose tariffs higher than 200% on vehicles imported from Mexico. The former president said his aim would be to prevent the selling of cars from Mexico into the US. “All I’m doing is saying ‘I’ll put 200 or 500, I don’t care.’ I’ll put a number where they can’t sell one car,” he said.Here’s what else happened on Sunday:

      At his rally in Arizona, Donald Trump proposed hiring 10,000 additional Border Patrol agents and giving them a $10,000 retention and signing bonus, after he derailed a bipartisan bill earlier this year that included funding for more border personnel. In Prescott Valley, roughly 260 miles north of the state’s border with Mexico, he accepted an endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council.

      A New York Times poll published on Sunday found that Harris is underperforming among Latino voters, when compared with the past three Democratic candidates for the White House. An NBC News poll showed the candidates in a “dead heat” nationally at 48% support.

      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended near a Trump campaign rally in California on Saturday, authorities have said. “The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said. Police said the suspect, Las Vegas resident Vem Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization. He was released after posting $5,000 bail.

      President Joe Biden surveyed battered communities and debris-filled streets in Florida, vowing to continue supporting the state’s recovery from Hurricane Milton. The president reiterated his call for US lawmakers – who are on recess until after the 5 November presidential election – to return to Washington to approve more disaster funding.

      Republican House speaker Mike Johnson resisted White House and state lawmakers appeals to approve more disaster assistance, telling NBC News, “the states have to go and calculate and assess the need and then they submit that to Congress, and that takes some time.”

      Trump said he spoke to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “like two days ago”. Trump was asked when last he spoke to the Israeli leader during a Fox News interview. Joe Biden also spoke to Netanyahu last week, in what was the first known conversation between the two leaders since August. Trump called the lack of conversation between Biden and Netanyahu in nearly two months “pathetic”.

      Former president Bill Clinton urged churchgoers in Albany, Georgia, to rally behind Harris’ campaign. “Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.” Georgia is one of seven states seen as pivotal in this year’s presidential race, and turnout among Black voters could hold the key for Democrats to winning the state’s 16 electoral votes. More

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      Man arrested near Donald Trump’s California rally with loaded guns, police say

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      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.The suspect, identified as Las Vegas resident Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before it began, police said Sunday.Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said in a press release.The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was apprised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”The US Attorney’s Los Angeles office, in a statement on Sunday, also said Trump was not in danger, citing the US Secret Service. The statement added that while no federal arrest had been made, an investigation was ongoing.Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said he believed at a press conference on Sunday that Miller was plotting to kill Trump, but acknowledged that was “speculation”. “What we do know is he showed up with multiple passports with different names, an unregistered vehicle with a fake license plate and loaded firearms,” the sheriff said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.The suspect later told US media that he was a Trump supporter who bought the guns for his own safety and notified police at a checkpoint that they were in the trunk of his car. “These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller said. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”He said he was surprised by his arrest, and had been detained for about eight hours.Miller holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Harris rallies North Carolina crowd to ‘fight to realize the promise of America’ as Trump hits Arizona – live

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      At a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton.“We can already see the harm he’s up to as a candidate,” Harris said. “Most recently, spreading disinformation in the wake of natural disasters.”“Donald Trump cares more about scaring people, creating fear, running on a problem instead of what real leaders do, which is to participate in fixing problems,” Harris added.Donald Trump invited National Border Council President, Paul Perez, to the stage. He quickly attacked Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, and condemned her stance on immigration and her handling of the US-Mexico border.“[Trump] has always stood with the men and women who protect this border, who put their minds on the line for the country, a man who knows about putting his life on the line for what is right,” said Perez.“On behalf of the 16,000 men and women represented by the National Board of Patrol Council, we strongly support Donald J. Trump for President of the United States,” Perez said.Donald Trump expressed his support for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate in the Arizona Senate race, calling her a “tough one”.Lake is running against the US Representative Ruben Gallego, with whom she debated on Wednesday.“You destroyed that poor guy,” Trump said about her performance. “That was a destruction.”Donald Trump called the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, Mike Coffman, a “radical left Democrat”.During his rally, Trump repeated his comments about Venezuelan gang activity at an apartment complex in the city.Coffman previously said these remarks were “grossly exaggerated”, adding they “have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety”.Donald Trump bragged about his list of endorsements, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, former US representative Tulsi Gabbard, former third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien.He also boasted about the harsh immigration policy undertaken during his presidency. Trump displayed a chart he usually presents during his rallies, showing a decline in people entering the US through the southern border while he was president.He started his remarks by encouraging the crowd to vote “to take back our country”.“With your help, 23 days from now – can you believe it? – we’re going to win Arizona and we’re going to defeat Kamala,” he said. “She shouldn’t even be running.”He proceeded to use degrading language toward immigrants.“We are here together this Sunday afternoon because we love our country,” Kamala Harris said during her rally in North Carolina. The crowd cheered “USA, USA, USA!”“I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to then fight for the ideals of our country and to fight to realize the promise of America,” Harris said before concluding her speech.Kamala Harris said Donald Trump’s presidency resulted in more than one in three women living in states with abortion bans, including North Carolina.“General Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs under Donald Trump, said: ‘No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.’ Think about that,” the vice-president said during her rally.At a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton.“We can already see the harm he’s up to as a candidate,” Harris said. “Most recently, spreading disinformation in the wake of natural disasters.”“Donald Trump cares more about scaring people, creating fear, running on a problem instead of what real leaders do, which is to participate in fixing problems,” Harris added.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential pick, attended Nascar’s Bank of America Roval 400 on Sunday at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.Vance attended the playoff race with his family and did not deliver any remarks during the event.Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver his remarks soon at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona.Before his speech, Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller took the stage, attacking the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.“She not only annihilated our border, but she began using your tax dollars by the billions to smuggle, fly, bus, transport and, in every way possible, relocate illegal aliens en masse inside the United States,” Miller said.He continued to make anti-immigrant comments and condemn the Biden administration’s border policy. More

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      Harris and Trump, locked in tight race, seek edge among undecided voters

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spent Sunday trying to shore up political support among what they perceived to be must-have voting blocs with polls showing them locked in a tight 5 November presidential race.With election day less than a month away, the Democratic vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, North Carolina, as part of her campaign’s “souls to the polls” push. She later exalted the way communities – especially in the western part of the state – were coming together after damage from Hurricane Helene in late September, especially the way “people who have the least give the most”.Her Republican opponent, meanwhile, was in Arizona – looking for Black and Latino support as he seeks a second presidency, after a rally in California a day earlier.Both candidates are attempting to get a decisive edge among votes who have not yet decided who to support. Surveys show that early voting, which tends to favor Democrats, is down 45% from previous election years – a sign that there may be millions of undecided voters.Trump has now switched from condemning early voting as a Democrat plot to engineer his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that support was split down gender lines, with women voting 60-40 to Harris and men breaking for Trump by a similar margin.Trump needs white women, who supported him in a greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 – but also Black men. On Sunday, he argued that his fellow former president Barack Obama’s call last week for Black men to support Harris based “solely on her skin color, rather than her policies” as “deeply insulting”.View image in fullscreenDemocratic Georgia senator Ralph Warnock on Sunday told CNN, “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers.” But his fellow Black Democrat Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina congressman, told CNN, “Yes, I am concerned,” about Black men voting for Trump. Separately, former president Bill Clinton was urging voters in rural Georgia to get behind the Democratic ticket.A New York Times poll published Sunday found that Harris is underperforming the last three Democratic candidates for the White House among Latino voters.The election may come down to fractional increases in support for each. An NBC News poll released Sunday showed the candidates in a “dead heat” nationally at 48% support. The poll found that voters are reassessing Trump’s first term more favorably – but also that voters view reproductive rights as a top motivating issue, which could hurt the former president after three of his US supreme court appointees eliminated the federal right to abortion.A CBS News poll, also released Sunday, found that the presidential race is more than just two conflicting ideologies – but about a fundamental disconnection.For instance, most Trump supporters said relief for victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton wasn’t reaching affected people – while Harris supporters indicated it was. Trump supporters said the economy was bad; Harris supporters said it was good. Trump’s voters said US-Mexico border crossings were increasing; Harris’s voters said they were down.Trump’s voters, especially the men, said gender equality efforts had gone too far; Harris voters said not far enough. But both agreed that social media was untrustworthy and had made it harder to find things to agree on and to tell fact from fiction.Each poll contained positive signs for Harris, including a five-point advantage on “looking out for middle class” (ABC); abortion being “#1 motivating issue” (NBC), with Democrat up 19 points on the issue over Trump (New York Times); Trump’s Latino support at the same level from 2020 (CBS), and also Harris matching Biden in 2020 with Black voters.But the response to the two hurricanes that the south-eastern US recently continued to dominate Democrats’ campaign. On Sunday, Biden was scheduled to survey damage inflicted on Florida’s Gulf coast by Milton, where he would announce $600m in funding for damaged electrical grids.Response to hurricanes remains Democrats’ political preoccupation. Harris’s rally Sunday came amid the intense politicization of the speed of federal disaster response to Helene.In North Carolina, Harris appeared to be looking to defuse hurricane politics while also calling out false information that spread after Helene.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCrises, she said, “have a way of revealing the heroes among us, the angels among us, and of showing us all the best of who we are … heroes who do not ask the injured or stranded whether they are a Republican or a Democrat, but who simply ask: ‘Are you OK?’”And yet, Harris said: “There are some who are not acting in the spirit of community, and I am speaking of these who have been literally not telling the truth, lying about people who are working hard to help the folks in need, spreading disinformation when the truth and facts are required.”That came as the Wall Street Journal reported that some of the earlier response to Helene had come in the form of Patriot Front, an organization that the Anti-Defamation League has concluded is a white-supremacist group – and that was using misinformation as a recruiting tool.With Arizona, Nevada and Georgia potentially leaning for Trump, and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin potentially leaning for Harris, the loss of North Carolina would cost Trump 16 electoral college votes needed to reach the winning threshold of 270. The state narrowly voted for Trump in 2020.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that he would deny Harris and Biden’s call to bring Congress back to Washington to approve more disaster relief funding after the hurricane.“It can wait,” Johnson said, pointing to $20bn in additional disaster funding that had recently been approved. He claimed only 2% of that funding had been distributed. As soon as states have assessed and calculate their “actual needs”, and submitted them, “Congress will meet and in bipartisan fashion, we will address those needs.”Johnson accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of being “slow to respond”. He said: “They did not do the job that we all expect and hope that they will do, and there’s going to be a lot of assessment about that as well in the days ahead.”But with Harris’s support appearing to slip in recent weeks, including after a series of TV appearances, there are reports of growing tensions between her campaign and Biden’s White House. The president cancelled a trip to Germany to concentrate on the hurricane response. But he is now reported to have rescheduled the trip for Friday.According to Axios, Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid amid questions about his age. He is 81 – only three years older than Trump.Harris’s team believed Biden upstaged her by holding an impromptu press briefing while she held a rally in Michigan.Biden on Sunday was expected to meet with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with whom Harris was feuding earlier in the week. An aide to Harris, 59, told the outlet that the president’s team are “too much in their feelings”. More

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      Gretchen Whitmer apologizes for feeding chip to podcaster after Catholic backlash

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      Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has apologized for feeding a Dorito chip to a social media influencer who dropped to her knees after Roman Catholic organizations accused the Democratic politician of insulting their religion by mocking the sacrament of communion.“I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” Whitmer said in a statement that her office provided to the Michigan television news station WJBK on Friday.She explained that the stunt in question – captured on video with popular TikTok content creator Liz Plank – was meant to promote legislation signed by president Joe Biden in 2022 that is colloquially known as the Chips Act and provided $280bn to research as well as manufacture semiconductors. But it was all “construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that”, Whitmer said.On the video, Plank genuflects before Whitmer, who then places a Dorito chip in the podcaster and influencer’s mouth. The governor caps the scene off by gazing at the camera while she wears a hat supporting fellow Democrat Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in November’s presidential election.The Michigan Catholic Conference – which has clashed with Whitmer over her support of abortion rights – joined other church groups in condemning the governor’s video with Plank.A statement Friday from the conference’s chief executive officer, Paul Long, accused Whitmer and Plank of “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Eucharist”.Long’s statement alluded to how Catholics believe the wafers used for the sacrament of communion literally transform into the body of the crucified Jesus Christ, adding: “It is not just distasteful or ‘strange’; it is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices.”Whitmer subsequently issued her apology and said she had taken time to speak with the Michigan Catholic Conference.People that WJBK described as “Democratic sources with knowledge of Whitmer’s participation in the video” also made it a point to tell the station that the video was part of a viral social media challenge that involved awkwardly feeding friends on camera.In his statement, Long added: “While dialogue on this issue with the governor’s office is appreciated, whether or not insulting Catholics and the Eucharist was the intent, it has had an offensive impact.”Whitmer has been Michigan’s governor since 2019. She had previously been considered a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination after Biden ruled out running for re-election and endorsed Harris to succeed him.But Whitmer ultimately ruled herself out, has been a prominent supporter of Harris and recently made headlines by calling Donald Trump “just deranged” after the Republican nominee boasted that women would no longer be thinking about abortion if voters gave him a second presidency on 5 November.Michigan stands among one of a handful of vital swing states that is expected to decide Harris’s race against Trump. Biden only won the state by 154,000 votes in 2020 after it had backed Trump in his electoral college victory four years earlier. More