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    Major US firefighter union declines to endorse Trump or Harris for president

    The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has declined to endorse a candidate ahead of next month’s US presidential election, despite efforts by both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns to court the union.“This decision, which we took very seriously, is the best way to preserve and strengthen our unity,” the IAFF said in a statement.The union, which has almost 350,000 members, was a key part of the coalition built by Joe Biden – and the first union to back the president’s run for election in 2020.It is the second leading trade union to refrain from endorsing either Harris or Trump as tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their votes. The Teamsters International, a US transportation workers union that represents more than 1.3 million workers, also announced it would not back a candidate.Both campaigns had sought the IAFF’s support, with Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, and JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing the union’s convention in August.Walz claimed in his speech that he had signed “the most comprehensive firefighter legislation in the nation” as governor of Minnesota. Vance, who grappled with boos from the audience, claimed that he and Trump represented a “new kind of Republican party” and would “never stop fighting” for first responders.On Thursday, the IAFF said its executive board had voted by a margin of 1.2% to not endorse a presidential candidate. “We encourage our members – and all eligible voters – to get out and make their voices heard in the upcoming election,” said Edward Kelly, the union’s president.It is not the first time the IAFF has refrained from backing a candidate. While it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, it reportedly shelved plans to publicly support Hillary Clinton, the Democrat presidential candidate in 2016. More

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    What is Melania Trump’s game in suddenly defending abortion rights?

    When news broke on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump supports abortion rights – and apparently has for her entire adult life – it was greeted with surprise and confusion.Melania’s husband, Donald Trump, is trying to rapidly recalibrate his approach to abortion as he races towards election day. Is his wife trying to help him? Hurt him? Or neither?In her forthcoming memoir, Melania Trump went into extensive detail about her support for the procedure.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body?” she wrote. “A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.”Shortly after the Guardian broke the news, Trump uploaded a black-and-white video of herself to social media, set to stirring music.“Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth,” she said. “Individual freedom. What does my body, my choice really mean?”The news of Melania Trump’s support for abortion rights comes at a time when her husband is striving to convince voters that he can be trusted to protect abortion rights.In the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, abortion has become Republicans’ achilles heel. It cost Republicans victories in the 2022 midterms, while abortion rights supporters have won a string of ballot measures even in states as red as Kentucky, Kansas and Ohio.Earlier on in his campaign, Trump attempted to be all-things-abortion to everybody, alternately bragging about his role in overturning Roe – by appointing three of the justices who voted for its demise – and grousing that hardline positions on abortion were costing the GOP elections. But since Kamala Harris, an extraordinarily effective messenger on abortion, became the Democratic nominee for president, he has abandoned that approach in favor of garbled support for abortion rights.“WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTH, CONFIDENT AND FREE!” Trump recently posted on Truth Social. “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES.”Melania Trump’s revelation, then, could be intended to reassure undecided voters who are disinclined to vote for Harris but support abortion rights – as a majority of Americans do. But Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people on abortion for more than two decades, said the odds of such comments appealing to moderates or abortion-supporting conservatives were “fairly slim”.After all, regardless of her personal convictions, it seems unlikely that Melania Trump has any real sway over her tempestuous husband’s policies. Her pro-abortion rights beliefs did not stop Donald Trump from helping to demolish Roe. It also doesn’t help that Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship is, at least in public, far from cozy. (He recently indicated, despite having written the foreword, that he hasn’t read the book.)“Nothing Republicans say will distract the American people from the reality they see with their own eyes: story after story of victims of rape and incest being forced into pregnancy, doctors forced to turn away patients during miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies and women literally dying because of Trump’s abortion bans,” Emilia Rowland, Democratic national committee press secretary, said in a text.View image in fullscreenMelania Trump’s disagreement with her husband is also not as novel as it may seem. Betty Ford, the wife of the Republican president Gerald Ford, was an adamant supporter of abortion rights, said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. It didn’t end up making much of a difference in Gerald Ford’s campaign.“I think people understand that Melania and Donald Trump are very different people,” Ziegler said. “I could see independent and swing voters saying: ‘Wow. It’s bad that even Donald Trump’s wife doesn’t like Donald Trump’s position.’”What Melania Trump’s news seems to have done is anger the anti-abortion activists who have made up some of Trump’s most reliable supporters. These activists were already annoyed by Trump’s recent attempts to paint himself as an abortion rights champion.“Melania Trump’s support of abortion is anti-feminist and clearly outside the teaching of our Catholic faith. She is wrong,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the pro-life organization Students for Life of America, posted on X. “What a lost opportunity to inspire a generation of young women.”Melania Trump’s strategy, such as it is, may be much more straightforward than activists and politicos may think. She has never seemed particularly interested in being first lady, and she doesn’t appear to be invested in winning the job back, seeing as she has largely disappeared from the 2024 campaign trail.But Trump does seem interested in doing at least one thing: selling books. Suggesting that there is controversy within her memoir’s pages probably helps move copies.Or not. In her post, Hawkins added: “I won’t be buying Melania’s book.” More

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    Seth Meyers on JD Vance’s debate performance: ‘Brazen and shameless’

    Late-night hosts talk JD Vance’s many lies during the vice-presidential debate and a new special counsel report detailing how Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.Seth MeyersDonald Trump is “a bad liar”, said Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s Late Night, but he chose as his running mate “someone who is much more polished at it”. JD Vance, Ohio senator, is “brazen and shameless, but he’s admittedly very smooth. He’s like a slick used car dealer, and can be very convincing until you remember the car he’s trying to sell you is an AMC Gremlin with raccoons in the engine.”For instance, during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday evening, Vance claimed that he was not in favor of a national abortion ban, but did support a “minimum national standard”.“That’s a ban,” Meyers corrected. “A ‘minimum national standard’ is just a bullshit way of describing a national abortion ban. It’s like when I go to the coffee shop on my block and they say they sell all-natural, gluten-free breakfast biscuits. That’s a cookie, dude. Except now you’ve guaranteed that my kids won’t stop asking me why they can’t have it.”Vance has said multiple times that he favors a national abortion ban. On a rightwing podcast in 2022, he said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”“That’s what happens when you say yes to every rightwing podcast in the universe,” said Meyers. “JD Vance is on record contradicting every thing he says now. Politicians used to be worried about being caught on a hot mic. But now they go into every McMansion basement they can find like they’re on a hot mic scavenger hunt.”Vance also refused to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. When asked point blank by his opponent, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, Vance deflected with: “I’m focused on the future.”“If you ask someone a straightforward question and they say ‘I’m focused on the future’ that’s how you know they’re caught in a lie,” said Meyers. “Vance may have delivered a slick performance last night, but it was just that – a performance.”Stephen Colbert“We are all still struggling to digest last night’s vice-presidential debate – which is surprising, because usually I have no trouble eating two slices of white bread,” joked Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night.The Late Show host described the debate as a “frosty cup of ZzzQuil”, as the two politicians performed civility and appeared to frequently agree with each other.The Atlantic described the debate as “a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump”.“I would love that,” said Colbert, “but here’s the thing: Donald Trump hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still the main character. This is like a scene from It without Pennywise on camera, and everyone is suddenly like, ‘Welp, guess there’s no more scary clowns in Derry. Ooh, free sewer balloon!’”Colbert took particular aim at Vance’s answer to a question on Obamacare, which Trump tried to destroy numerous times: “I think you could make a really good argument that [Trump] salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along.”“That kind of junior high debate team sophistry is exactly the worst kind of behavior that intelligent people use to justify evil,” added Colbert. “You know, when you think about it, it could be argued that Godzilla really spearheaded Tokyo’s urban renewal.”Colbert was also incensed at Vance’s characterization of January 6: “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”“Yeah, 14 days after his plot to overthrow the election ended in a violent coup that failed,” said Colbert. “That’s like saying to your ex: ‘Barbara, I think it’s rich that you’re calling me psychotically obsessed with our relationship, when I left your and Brad’s wedding peacefully. You’re the one who won’t stop talking about me setting fire to the DJ.’”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel looked ahead to election day: “We are 34 days away from Trump saying the election was rigged, just as he did four years ago.” Trump’s efforts to overturn the election four years ago are detailed in a new report from special counsel Jack Smith.The judge overseeing the January 6 case in Washington unsealed a 165-page court filing containing a “mountain” of testimony and evidence against Trump. “All the stuff we know happened, we now have in writing,” said Kimmel.The filing lays out “the increasingly desperate ways Trump tried to steal the election”, Kimmel explained. “You know, sometimes I would wonder, does Trump really believe that this election was stolen from him? And the answer is no, he doesn’t. The plan all along was to declare himself the winner even he if wasn’t, which he did. And then when he realized he was going to lose, he made up these claims of fraud.“He called governors and election officials,” he continued. “He hammered Mike Pence. He deliberately spread lies, even though he privately admitted they were crazy lies. He was directly involved in the fake elector scheme. And he stole all the Oreos from the White House snack cabinet.”The report also detailed just how many times Trump pressured Mike Pence to try to decertify the election, though he had no authority to do so. “There were meetings, phone calls, text messages – Pence was basically Trump’s Baby Reindeer,” Kimmel joked. More

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    Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election

    James Cozadd, a 49-year-old plumber born in Montgomery, Alabama, has no idea why he got a letter from Alabama’s top election official telling him he was potentially ineligible to vote. He was born in the US, yet the letter said he was suspected of being a non-citizen and he would have to prove his citizenship to vote.“I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” Cozadd said in a court filing in September.He was one of more than 3,200 voters the secretary of state asked to prove their citizenship – part of a wave of actions amid heated rhetoric among Republicans over the idea that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in US elections, a theory that runs counter to data.It’s not just happening in Alabama. Alvaro Manrique Barrenechea, a Tennessee immigration law professor, got a letter this year claiming he could be illegally voting, despite becoming naturalized in 2019 and having the legal right to vote. And Nicholas Ross, an Ohio music professor, became a US citizen in May after nearly three decades in the country but received an accusatory letter from the Ohio secretary of state in June telling him he could be ineligible to vote because he wasn’t a US citizen. Voting as a non-citizen would be a crime, it warned.These purges are not just complicating the ability of some qualified voters to cast a ballot this year. They are also setting the stage for future laws to restrict voters’ access to the ballot and are giving fuel to Donald Trump and his allies to seed doubt about the integrity of elections and undermine results if he loses in November.Trump and other Republicans are already using the false idea that non-citizens could vote in widespread numbers to suggest the election could be stolen.“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the 10 September debate. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” .There is no proof that non-citizens are voting, or even registering to vote, in any meaningful numbers. It’s not the first time Republicans have made these claims, but the purges and rhetoric over non-citizen voting this year are, perhaps, at their apex.The rhetoric makes voting an immigration issue, linking two red-meat issues for Republicans. It also aligns with broad anti-immigrant sentiment the right is advancing, with much of it stemming from a conspiracy that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans with minorities through mass migration – the great replacement theory.Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the theory holds that the white population is being displaced by non-white immigrants “who will vote in a certain particular way”.“These attacks on non-citizens and voters are part and parcel of the great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said. “They’re indistinguishable.”David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said it was clear why Trump and supporters were leaning into the myth of non-citizen voting.View image in fullscreen“This is about setting the stage to claim an election was stolen,” he said. “This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses. And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen.”The myth of non-citizen voting has also taken hold after some of the most outlandish myths about the 2020 election weredebunked, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank.“It keeps ‘Stop the Steal’ alive at a point where most of the other things about ‘Stop the Steal’ don’t have much currency,” he said, referring generally to the movement that tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election.”Republicans have waged an aggressive legal effort in Congress, state capitols and courtrooms to create the false impression that there are non-citizens on the rolls. Congressional Republicans are pushing a bill to address the nonexistent problem, though it is stalled in DC after a failed effort to tie it to a government funding bill.The Republican National Committee and other Trump-aligned groups have also filed suit in a number of battleground states – including Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona – accusing election officials of not doing enough to ensure non-citizens aren’t on the voter rolls. The state officials have all said there are adequate safeguards in place to ensure that only US citizens are voting.Republican statewide officials in several states – Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio and Texas – have also launched efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls and have flagged thousands of voters for possible removal. Voting rights groups have raised deep concerns about those efforts, saying the methodology is flawed and that states are presenting misleading statistics to give an exaggerated impression of how many non-citizens may be on the rolls.The list of potential non-citizens flagged in Alabama has so far shown itself to be off-base, the US Department of Justice said in a lawsuit filed last week, claiming the purge was conducted illegally. In response to letters asking suspected non-citizens to provide documentation of their citizenship before voting this fall – an extra hoop to jump through before casting a ballot – more than 700 voters, nearly one in four on the list, have provided such proof.Ross, the Ohio music professor who received a letter from the state’s top election official, said he dug into why he might have been flagged and found a likely reason. He had renewed his driver’s license in January, when he had a green card, which seemed to land him on the secretary of state’s potential non-citizen list. He sent in paperwork to prove his citizenship after receiving the letter.“When you do this and just look at the last driver’s license, you’re just netting a lot of naturalized citizens,” Ross said. “And of course, my concern is, then you’re creating this narrative of lots of non-US citizens trying to vote by including those numbers.”Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for the office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, says it found “approximately 600 non-citizens registered to vote, a relatively small number considering there are over 8 million registered voters in Ohio”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLaRose’s office forwarded the flagged registrations to the state attorney general for potential prosecution, claiming some of them may have voted. Prosecutors say they have investigated and found little. A prosecutor in one county office told the Ohio Capital Journal that most cases involved people checking the box claiming they are not citizens on their registration forms. When told they should rescind their registration, almost all of them complied.“The secretary believes that voter fraud is extremely rare because we take it seriously here in Ohio,” Lusheck said. “A law that is not enforced isn’t a law, it’s a suggestion.”Many of the naturalized citizens erroneously on the list as non-citizens appear to have been flagged from outdated motor vehicles data. The voters may have driver’s licenses that have not expired, then got their citizenship. The guidelines for what to do after you become a citizen say a driver’s license can be renewed or updated, but it’s not a requirement.In Tennessee, state officials sent more than 14,000 notices to people asking them to prove their citizenship. The secretary of state’s office there has since said it would not remove voters who didn’t prove their citizenship. The office did not respond to a request for comment.One of the voters targeted was Manrique Barrenechea, an immigration law professor at Vanderbilt University, who became a US citizen in 2019 and has voted since. He did not feel comfortable sending documents in the mail to prove what he believes the state should already be able to confirm.“You’re putting the burden on me to get information that you already have as government,” he said.For some immigrants, the letter may read as intimidating, he said.“I hope it’s not that they’re trying to make it difficult for immigrants to vote, but it really generated an extra step to me,” he said.The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, started a process to purge alleged non-citizens from the rolls within 90 days of an election, which both a private lawsuit and the justice department lawsuit claim runs afoul of federal law. Allen also referred the alleged non-citizens on the voter list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, which the lawsuit argues amounts to voter intimidation.Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Some eligible voters who were sent letters by Allen issued declarations in court. Cozadd, a Republican and lifelong Alabaman, received a letter claiming he had previously been issued a non-citizen identification number. He wrote in his declaration that he cannot figure out why the state would believe that.“I was stunned to receive that letter. It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law – just for trying to exercise my right to vote,” he wrote.There have been some isolated examples of states that have had relatively small problems with non-citizens on their rolls. Oregon election officials recently said they would remove more than 1,200 people from its voter rolls after they failed to provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Only nine of them had cast ballots and there are 3 million registered voters in the state.Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers who has studied incidents of voter fraud for decades, said that for years Republicans have seized on misunderstandings of the complex processes to maintain the voter rolls to suggest that non-citizens were voting.What’s different now is the scale at which they are claiming it’s occurring.“It’s now something that has almost a national audience where in the past it was a little more isolated to places like Texas or Arizona,” she said. Constant images of migrants coming over the border that are aired on Fox News and other conservative outlets, she said, had only augmented the myth.Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said the messaging on this issue had ramped up over the past few years and coincided with racism and xenophobia. The misinformation about non-citizen voting could play into conspiracy theories and distrust of elections, she said.“This is an extremely rare problem,” she said. “Because people don’t understand that this is extremely rare, we see laws or policies that end up sweeping in large numbers of naturalized citizens, or sweeping in folks who don’t have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship, and then really taking away their fundamental right to vote.” More

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    JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

    JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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    ‘People are giving, sharing’: Augusta comes together as Kamala Harris surveys damage

    As Kamala Harris descended on Wednesday into Augusta, she met a city contemplating how much of their lives have been unmade by Hurricane Helene.“I am here to personally take a look at the devastation,” Harris said after receiving a briefing by emergency response leaders in Georgia. “It’s particularly devastating in terms of loss of life that this community has experienced, the loss of normalcy, and the loss of critical resources.”The Augusta area hasn’t quite drawn the national attention given to western North Carolina, with its washed-out roads and severe flooding. Augusta is still marginally functional. Hurricane Helene shaved the land here with a dull razor. The damage resembles a tornado strike more than a hurricane, said Leroy Redfield, describing pockets of destruction that make what survived all the more remarkable.“Driving in, in a mile you’ll see at least 20 broken power poles,” he said. “I mean broken in half.” Redfield has taken to watching in the morning to see where new poles go up; that’s where the power is going next.Most people here have been without power since Friday morning. Some had been unable to leave their homes for days, as tall poplar, live oak and cedar trees littered the streets. Uprooted trees line every major road. Trees along Augusta’s downtown strip lie on their sides, torn out of the sidewalk straight through four inches of concrete.View image in fullscreenAnd yet, just as Harris was offering her assessment of the damage a few blocks away, Sherman Gartrell was tossing lemon pepper wings in a food truck next to a toppled tree on Broad Street, feeding people for free as they came. A furniture store owner on Broad Street had paid for him to come down from Athens and help, Gartrell said.Broad Street still had power, though most places could only take cash because internet service outages had rendered credit card processing useless. Water was out. Most things were out, frankly. And yet, somehow, the street still had some bustle because everything everywhere else seemed to still be some flavor of broke.“We’ve found that people down south, they still do the right thing,” said Melanie Lumpkin of Augusta. Wednesday was the first she had been able to venture out of her neighborhood, she said. “People are giving, you know, sharing. We were at a store, and the guy needed $2 in cash, and every single person in line immediately reached for their wallet. People are sharing gas and food and bringing their neighbors cooked meats.”Lumpkin has a tree visiting her attic, and two more that took out her carport and shed. Augusta’s aggressive humidity has already caused mildew and rot in the house. Water is spotty; power is nonexistent. She’s insured, but the first quote to get the trees off of her home came in at $60,000, Lumpkin said.It’s too soon to assess whether the state and federal emergency response has been effective, her son Will Lumpkin said. “Augusta is really coming together, but at the same time, there’s still a long way to go. “I don’t think we were prepared. This isn’t going to be months. For this, it will be years.”But Mary Katherine Gorlich said this could have been much worse. “This would have been very different with someone else in the White House,” Gorlich said. The army veteran said she loved Augusta but had been considering her options overseas in the wake of a possible Joe Biden loss before Harris’s ascent.View image in fullscreenRepublican voters were aware that Donald Trump had visited Georgia recently. Nonetheless, most voters may be locked in at this point, even with a hurricane reshaping their lives.“Nobody’s changing,” said John Oates, taking refuge in an Augusta hotel while the power is out. “Nobody’s changing their mind.”The politics of catastrophe have yet to reveal themselves in Augusta. But the Lumpkins are worried that Augusta’s racially fractious local government will end up relegating Augusta to last place on the repair list.The White House appears to be taking some measures to short-circuit local and regional competition for relief.“The president and I have been paying close attention from the beginning to what we need to do to make sure federal resources hit the ground as quickly as possible, and that includes what was necessary to make sure that we provided direct federal assistance,” Harris said.“We are at our best when we work together and coordinate resources, coordinate our communications to maximum effect.”People living in one of the counties under an emergency order are eligible for a $750 Fema payment to offset losses. Upfront funds can be used to help with essential items like food, water, baby formula and other emergency supplies. Funds may also be available to repair storm-related damage to homes and personal property, as well as assistance to find a temporary place to stay.Fema personnel have been going door to door to assess people’s needs and help them apply, Harris said. More

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    Melania Trump’s abortion views baffle both sides: ‘Hard to follow the logic’

    The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.” More