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      Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests

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      Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.The conversation, in which McCabe also questioned Trump’s attitude to supporting Ukraine and Nato in the face of Russian aggression, was recorded before the debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, in which Trump made more controversial comments.Claiming Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had he been president, Trump would not say a Ukrainian victory was in US interests.“I think it’s in the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he said. “Negotiate a deal.”Claiming to have good relationships with Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, Trump falsely said his opponent, Kamala Harris, failed to avert war through personal talks.The vice-president countered that she had helped “preserve the ability of Zelenskiy and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”In one of the most memorable lines of the night, Harris added: “And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”The candidates were not asked about recent indictments in which the Department of Justice said pro-Trump influencers were paid to advance pro-Russia talking points.McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department. Having written The Threat, a bestselling memoir, he is now an academic and commentator.Speaking to One Decision, McCabe said: “You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has.“It may just be from a fundamental misunderstanding of this problem set that’s always a problem. That’s always a possibility. And I guess the other end of that spectrum would be that there is some kind of relationship or a desire for a relationship of some sort, be it economic or business oriented, what have you.“I think those are possibilities. None of them have been proven. But as an intelligence officer, those are the things that you think about.”Saying he had “very serious concerns” about the prospect of a second Trump term, McCabe said he would always be concerned about Russia’s ability to interfere in US affairs.He said: “Their desire to kind of wreak havoc or mischief in our political system is something that’s been going on for years, decades and decades and decades.“Their interest in just simply sowing chaos and division and polarization. If they can do that, it’s a win. If they can actually hurt a candidate they don’t like, or help one that they do like, that’s an even bigger win.” More

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      Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown

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      An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.Of the viewers who watched on cable networks, the highest number of viewers were on Fox News, with 9.1 million people tuning in on the channel known for its positive coverage of Trump.Harris was widely seen to have won the debate. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers showed 63% to 37% that Harris had performed better. Prior to the debate, those voters were split 50-50 on who would win. Of the Harris-supporting viewers polled by CNN, 96% said she had done a better job, while 69% of Trump supporting viewers said so.Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory, but some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.The viewership puts the debate roughly between the Seinfeld (76.3 million) and Friends (52.5 million) series finales.Minutes after it ended, Taylor swift endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket to her 283 million Instagram followers in a post that included a link to the government voter registration website Vote.gov. The site saw almost 338,000 new visitors in the hours that followed, a General Services Administration spokesperson told MSNBC.Swift’s endorsement is likely to be most influential among Americans under 35, since about 30% of that group say they are more likely to vote for someone Swift supports, according to polling conducted for Newsweek. The polling found that 18% of voters say they are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 17% say they are less likely.No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although the Harris campaign have asked for one, and the Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on 1 October.Tuesday’s debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate set off a series of events that resulted in Biden’s withdrawal from the race.While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime. More

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump attend New York 9/11 commemoration

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      Bereaved families, local and national dignitaries and first responders gathered in New York City on Wednesday to mark the 23rd anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people.Kamala Harris and Donald Trump attended the annual commemoration, just hours after their fiery presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.Joe Biden, the US president, accompanied Harris, his vice-president and now the Democratic nominee since Biden ended his re-election campaign in July after his own disastrous debate against Trump.Biden and Harris observed the anniversary of the al-Qaida attacks on the US with visits to each of the three sites where hijacked planes crashed in 2001: the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon near Washington and a field in southern Pennsylvania.Trump attended the event in New York with his Republican running mate, JD Vance. Trump and Harris shook hands, with tight smiles, before lining up solemnly for the ceremony.On Tuesday night, Harris had consciously crossed the stage before the debate began and thrust her hand towards Trump, introducing herself. They had never met in person before, obliging Trump to shake hands.After the subsequent handshake at the memorial and a brief exchange between the two presidential candidates, Harris positioned herself to Biden’s right, with the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg between Biden and Trump, and Vance to Trump’s left.Missing from that central group was the sitting New York mayor, Eric Adams, whose administration is caught up in a series of federal investigations.Harris traveled to New York just a few hours after most polling declared her the winner of the debate against the Republican nominee for president in Philadelphia, with just eight weeks left before the 5 November presidential election.No remarks from the politicians were scheduled at the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, still sometimes popularly known as Ground Zero, where relatives read the names of those who died.Biden and Harris then went to Shanksville, where passengers on United Flight 93 overcame the hijackers and the plane crashed in a field, preventing another target from being hit.Later they headed back to Washington DC and laid a wreath at the Pentagon memorial.Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attack, with more than 2,750 killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania; that figure excludes the 13 hijackers, who also died.“We can only imagine the heartbreak and the pain that the 9/11 families and survivors have felt every day for the past 23 years and we will always remember and honor those who were stolen from us way too soon,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters onboard Air Force One on Tuesday evening.Biden issued a proclamation honoring those who died as a result of the attacks, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Americans who volunteered for military service afterwards.“We owe these patriots of the 9/11 generation a debt of gratitude that we can never fully repay,” Biden said, citing deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and other war zones, as well as the capture and killing of the September 11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, and his deputy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUS congressional leaders on Tuesday posthumously awarded the congressional gold medal to 13 of those service members who were killed in the 26 August 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.In New York, political tensions were high even though the event is always officially a non-partisan commemoration.“You’re around the people that are feeling the grief, feeling proud or sad – what it’s all about that day, and what these loved ones meant to you. It’s not political,” said Melissa Tarasiewicz, who lost her father, a New York City firefighter, Allan Tarasiewicz.Increasingly, tributes delivered in New York and the name-reading of those who died come from children and young adults who were born after the attacks killed a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle.“Even though I never got to meet you, I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Annabella Sanchez said last year of her grandfather, Edward Joseph Papa. “We will always remember and honor you, every day. “We love you, Grandpa Eddie.”A poignant phrase echoes more and more from those who lost relatives: “I never got to meet you.”It is the sound of generational change. Some names are read out by children or young adults who were born after the strikes. Last year’s observance featured 28 such young people among more than 140 readers. Young people were expected again at this year’s ceremony on Wednesday.Some are the children of victims whose partners were pregnant. More of the young readers are victims’ nieces, nephews or grandchildren. They have inherited stories, photos and a sense of solemn responsibility.Being a “9/11 family” reverberates through generations, and commemorating and understanding the September 11 attacks one day will be up to a world with no first-hand memory of them.“It’s like you’re passing the torch on,” says Allan Aldycki, 13. He read the names of his grandfather, Allan Tarasiewicz, and several other people.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Taylor Swift’s Harris endorsement has thrilled fans – but will it move the election needle?

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      Addy Al-Saigh had already gone to bed on Tuesday night when her phone woke her up with a notification: Taylor Swift had added a post on Instagram.The pop star had endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Al-Saigh was thrilled.“She has this impact on such a large amount of people that it is super important that she uses her voice, which I’m so glad she did,” said Al-Saigh, a 19-year-old college student who lives in Virginia. “I am hopeful, definitely hopeful, that this will help push voter registration and push more people to get out and speak up and use their voice.”Perhaps no celebrity endorsement has ever been as hotly anticipated as Swift’s – and she delivered in Miss Americana style on Tuesday, voicing her support for Harris and Tim Walz just minutes after the presidential debate between Harris and Donald Trump concluded.“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote of Harris. “I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate Tim Walz,” who Swift tagged, “who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF and a woman’s right to her own body for decades”.The question on many minds is: does it matter? Although it’s difficult to measure the impact of celebrity endorsements, they can move the needle in elections, especially by energizing voters who may otherwise sit on the sidelines. After Swift encouraged her fans to vote in 2023, Vote.org recorded more than 35,000 registrations in a single day. Al-Saigh first registered to vote because Swift had posted a voter registration link in her Instagram Stories.In January, polling conducted for Newsweek found that 18% of voters say they are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 17% say they are less likely. Swift’s endorsement is likely to hold particular sway among Americans under 35, since about 30% of that group say they are more likely to vote for someone Swift supports. More than half of Swift’s most avid fans already identify as Democrats, a 2023 Morning Consult poll found. The other half of her fanbase is split evenly between Republicans and independents.Swifties for Kamala, which is working to mobilize fans of Swift and has raised more than $150,000 for the Harris campaign, celebrated the endorsement. “We knew she would speak when the time was right and are so excited to keep up the fight,” Irene Kim, the organization’s co-founder and executive director, said in a statement. “Swifties are a diverse group – it’s what strengthens our connections to one another and shapes our shared values.”Trump, meanwhile, dismissed Swift’s endorsement. “She’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace,” he said Wednesday on Fox & Friends. Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman from Florida, said that although he liked Swift’s music, he wanted “to live in a world where liberals make my art and conservatives make my laws”.Jasmine Amussen, a 35-year-old Democrat in the swing state of Georgia who previously responded to a Guardian survey about Swift’s political power, was particularly struck by the musician’s mention of how Trump had used AI-generated images of the pop star to falsely suggest that Swift had endorsed him.“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote in her Instagram post.“I think young people, especially young women, are, like, really grossed out and horrified by things like that,” said Amussen, who said her vote was not personally affected by Swift’s endorsement. “For people who have spent their whole life online and who have experienced a lot of really negative things about being online, like revenge porn and the Nudify websites and things like that, I think it really meant something that she said it like that.”Swift signed off her endorsement as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” – a reference to comments by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, denigrating women who do not have children. Shortly afterward, Elon Musk, a Trump supporter, responded with a tweet that drew widespread condemnation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” Musk tweeted.“I found it disgusting,” Jared Quigg, a 22-year-old Swift fan in Indiana, said of Musk’s post. “I despise that man.”Still, Quigg doesn’t think that Swift’s post will motivate many voters. “If she were to speak up on specific issues, I think that would move the needle on things. But as far as her endorsement, she didn’t really delve too much into issues,” said Quigg, who plans to vote for Harris even though he doesn’t “really like her much at all”.“Now, if she were to speak up about fracking or Palestine, issues that might be considered more important to progressives, perhaps that could have an impact on the party”, Quigg added.Al-Saigh, for her part, wants to get her Virginia college’s Swift fan club to do work around the election, such as helping register people to vote, now that the musician has made her views clear.“Taylor Swift is such a global sensation that if she cares about something, it’s important,” Al-Saigh said. “That’s the way I feel, and that’s the way I think a lot of other people feel too.” More

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      ABC’s debate moderators did what they said was impossible: fact-checking Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      They said it couldn’t be done. For years, we’ve heard all the reasons – excuses, really – that presidential debates cannot and should not be fact-checked in real time.Countering lies is not the job of the moderators, we were told; it is strictly the role of the candidates themselves. Fact-checking would take up too much time and interrupt the flow of the debate, we were told. And what about impartiality? How could moderators be expected to decide whom to challenge with fact checks?Fact-checking, we were told, was impractical and inappropriate, and simply a very, very bad idea. Yes, even in the age of Donald Trump, who wakes up each day and immediately begins lying about his dreams.But then came Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris – and that memorable moment when the moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News piped up with just a few words after Trump went into one of his evidence-free rants about babies being executed.“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said in an even tone. It didn’t take a lot of time, it did correct an oft-repeated lie and it did establish something important: the most egregious falsehoods might well be challenged by these moderators. The candidates were put on notice.Davis wasn’t alone in this. Her co-moderator, David Muir – in much the same neutral, polite tone and with much the same admirable brevity – did the same. After Trump made a wild claim about migrants in Ohio eating pets, Muir calmly stated that ABC had pre-checked this one and determined that it wasn’t true. And in another instance, Muir countered Trump’s charges of uncontrolled and rising crime, especially involving migrants, with this: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”It was noticed. And largely, though not universally, praised. The moderators also did a good job of returning to questions that had not been answered, and in some cases, pressing for a clear yes or no.Trump’s allies were outraged, naturally, that he wasn’t allowed to fib at will. How terribly unfair, they charged. Why weren’t there equal numbers of fact checks and challenges for Harris, they demanded, never stopping to acknowledge that she had mostly stuck to that crazy little thing called the truth. (A lengthy New York Times listing of questionable statements by both candidates, published after the debate, identified a couple of times that Harris has strayed from reality or misled; but, as expected, there was really no comparison with Trump’s litany of lies.)Trump later posted on social media calling the moderator “hacks”. The debate, he charged, was “THREE ON ONE!”But, as CNN’s Abby Phillip drily observed: “When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact-checking.”The post-debate media coverage, in general, was up to its usual tricks of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Overall, it too often failed to convey with clarity what had happened in a debate dominated by the cool strength of Harris and the angry, incomprehensible ravings of Trump. Headlines tended to lapse into neutralizing, conventional language like this one in the Washington Post: “Harris crisply attacks Trump, prompting retorts with fiery language.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNPR, to its credit, noted: “The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.”And even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had “had a bad night”.No doubt, the debate was a win for Harris.And, with the help of ABC’s moderators, a better-than-usual night for the truth.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      The Guardian view on the US presidential debate: Kamala Harris’s triumph isn’t transformative, but it was essential | Editorial

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      If presidential debates don’t really matter, as some have contended, Kamala Harris would not have been on the stage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. Yes, the spectacle can lead to excessive focus on their impact. But Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, which triggered his withdrawal from the race, showed how these choreographed political events can catalyse, if not create, voters’ sentiment about candidates.Only weeks before the nation makes its choice, Ms Harris’s success was critical. Debates are often remembered, as in Mr Biden’s case, when things go wrong. The vice-president didn’t merely clear the very low bar set by her boss – basic competence – but soared over it. Her desire to stick it to Donald Trump may not have elucidated matters for undecided voters who say they want to know more about her and her policies. She did mention a few, including measures to codify abortion rights and promote an “opportunity economy”, but was keener to focus on the broad messages.However, Donald Trump thought the 2024 election would be about his supposed strength against Mr Biden. In contrast, it was Ms Harris who dominated the debate, from the moment she took the physical initiative by crossing the stage to shake his hand – dispelling uncomfortable memories of him looming behind Hillary Clinton in 2016 – to her remark that Vladimir Putin “would eat you for lunch”.Mr Trump’s vanity made him incapable of resisting the obvious bait she laid out for him, especially her observation that supporters were so bored they were leaving rallies during his rambling, incoherent speeches. Her air of amused disdain for his lies gave her the air of, well, an experienced prosecutor listening to the desperate bluster of a felon. In hitting him on abortion, on healthcare, on democracy itself, she was clear and incisive. When he lied about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, she simply mocked him: “Talk about extreme.”Mr Trump’s claim was symptomatic of his reliance on rightwing memes, while Ms Harris sought to reach across the aisle, touting her gun ownership and talking of an America where “we see in each other a friend”. He is still struggling to navigate a position on abortion that will maintain his evangelical support without alienating other voters, but on Tuesday he ludicrously claimed that Democrats wanted to “execute the baby”.There was no doubt that this was the vice-president’s victory, albeit one facilitated by strong moderation. In a flash CNN poll, 63% of viewers said that Ms Harris had turned in the better performance, while 37% opted for her rival. Yet Ms Clinton was judged to outperform Mr Trump by a similar margin after their first debate in 2016 – and edged up less than 1% in the polls over the next week.A boost for Ms Harris is desperately needed because polls suggest the candidates are effectively deadlocked, with Mr Trump gaining some ground recently after her initial surge. Inflation has softened to the lowest level since February 2021, and the Federal Reserve is preparing to cut interest rates. But improvements in the economic picture may not feed through to voting intentions quickly enough to help the Democrats. Cumulative disgruntlement at the cost of living is not quickly dispelled even when price rises slow and are offset by wage growth.An extraordinarily turbulent race may yet have more surprises in store. Nonetheless, in a contest that comes down to a tiny fraction of the electorate, across a handful of battleground states, everything matters, be it debate success or – yes – Taylor Swift’s endorsement. Ms Harris’s campaign knew they needed a clear victory on Tuesday. But even as they celebrate, they know it is only one step along the way.

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      Republicans dismayed by Trump’s ‘bad’ and ‘unprepared’ debate performance

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      Donald Trump’s campaign was in damage control mode on Wednesday amid widespread dismay among supporters over a presidential debate performance that saw Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, repeatedly goad him into going wildly off-message and missing apparent opportunities to tackle her on policy.Even with Trump insisting to have won the debate “by a lot”, Republicans were virtually unanimous that Trump had come off second best in a series of exchanges that saw the vice-president deliberately bait him on his weak points while he responded with visible anger.The Republican nominee – who took the unusual step afterwards of visiting the media spin room, a venue normally frequented only by candidates’ surrogates – was non-committal on Wednesday to the Harris campaign’s proposal for a second debate. Despite widespread opinion to the contrary, Trump suggested she needed it because she had lost. “I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate,” he told Fox & Friends.Harris had not commented herself on her debate performance by Wednesday afternoon, accompanying Joe Biden on official appearances as the US president and vice-president attended a series of events commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, traditionally a non-partisan occasion.Some of the Fox network’s high-profile presenters took a different view from Trump, too. “Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night,” the Fox News analyst Brit Hume said immediately after the debate. “We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically.”Many commentators said the tone of the debate was set at the beginning when Harris walked on to the stage and – after a slight hesitation – approached Trump’s lectern to introduce herself and shake his hand. It was the first handshake at a presidential debate since 2016.The gesture enabled Harris to turn the tables on Trump – who has a track record of condescension towards women – by establishing dominance, wrote Politico.Another defining moment of the 105-minute encounter came when Trump’s eyes flashed as Harris depicted people leaving his rallies “early out of exhaustion and boredom”. Rather than let the jibe go or respond to a follow-up question by the ABC moderator David Muir on an immigration bill, Trump went off on a tangent to compare the two candidates’ rallies. Harris smiled and stared at him, resting her chin on her hand.That exchange – along with several others – crystallised what many Republicans described as a clear defeat for Trump. There was also grudging praise from Republicans for Harris, who won respect for being well-prepared.“She was exquisitely well prepared, she laid traps and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about,” Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for his 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton, told ABC.“This is the difference between someone who is well prepared and someone who is unprepared. Whoever prepared Donald Trump should be fired.”“Trump was unfocused and poorly prepared,” agreed Guy Benson, editor of the conservative website Townhall on X . “[Harris] basically accomplished exactly what she wanted to here. I suspect the polls about the debate will show that she won it.”Congressional Republicans voiced disappointment over Trump’s inability to discipline himself and press home key policy issues. He even seemed preoccupied with the absence of Joe Biden, whose calamitous performance at the previous debate in Atlanta in June prompted his withdrawal from the race, to be replaced by Harris. “Where is he?” Trump asked. “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog.”“I’m just sad,” one House Republican told the Hill. “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin. Just overall disappointing that he isn’t being more composed like the first debate. The road just got very narrow. This is not good.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven as pro-Trump commentators criticised Muir and his fellow moderator, Linsey Davis, for fact-checking Trump but not Harris, there was acknowledgment that the Republican nominee was the architect of his own failings.“Trump lost the debate and whining about the moderators doesn’t change it,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on social media. “He didn’t lose because of their behavior. He lost because of his own performance while his lips were moving, not theirs.”Harris also provoked Trump by saying he was deemed “weak” by US allies, who saw him as toadying up to Vladimir Putin, “who would eat [him] for lunch”.Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”“The headline for the next few days will be how he lost this thing,” one GOP representative told Politico. “I expect him to do something drastic, whether it’s a campaign shake-up or some other wild antic, by the end of the week to change the upcoming news cycle.” More

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      Harris clearly beat Trump – not that you’d know it from the rightwing media. Shame on them | Emma Brockes

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      Short of sticking two pencils up his nose and muttering the word “wibble”, Trump’s appearance on the debate stage on Tuesday night was never going to prove, decisively, to those on the fence, that he is unfit for high office. Unlike Biden’s disastrous turn two and a half months ago, chaos is part of Trump’s appeal – and if his thoughts are garbled, it signifies nothing beyond business as usual. And yet, even for Trump, aspects of his debate performance in Pennsylvania came so close to the edge on Tuesday that the next day what seemed most astonishing wasn’t that Harris had performed so well but that so many apparently sentient human beings were still shilling for her unhinged opponent.Heading into the encounter, one had the strangest sense both of the height of the stakes and also of the sheer entertainment value of the encounter. I found myself wondering about Harris’s nerves – how a person handles them in such a unique situation. In the debate’s opening moments, the vice-president did indeed seem nervous. But she settled, and about 15 minutes in, it started to happen: while Harris’s keenly controlled anger rose to a point, Trump, mouth bunching, eyes disappearing into his head, unravelled.A reference by Harris to her endorsement from Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School, and some senior Republicans including – confusing for liberals! – Dick Cheney triggered a volley of “she”s from Trump. She, she, she, he said – always a sign he is losing it against a female antagonist. “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences, like Run Spot Run!” And off he went on his downward spiral.The next day, consumers of American rightwing media were partially apprised of Trump’s performance, but it was pretzeled around a lot of excuse-making. Even this very mild acknowledgement of Trump’s weakness, however, was a departure from the full-throated support of the Murdoch press in 2016. In the pro-Trump New York Post, the paper admitted that Trump had been “rattled” but bleated about unfairness from the debate moderators on ABC News. (They pulled Trump up on his lies about immigrants eating American pets and Democrats legalising infanticide – there were times, on Tuesday night, when the task of debating Trump looked a lot like trying to debate a copy of the National Enquirer.)Over on Fox News, there was a lot of glum post-debate punditry. Brit Hume said sadly of Harris: “She came out in pretty good shape.” The most Sean Hannity could manage was that the “real loser” was ABC. Jesse Watters said: “This was rough,” pronounced that most people watching wouldn’t think “any of these people won”, and observed: “All the memorable lines were from Donald Trump.” Which, of course, technically was true. (Apart from the pet-eating thing, my two favourite Trump lines were “Venezuela on steroids” and “I told Abdul: don’t do it any more!” – an absolute corker from Trump on the subject of how he stuck it to the Taliban.) Then Trump himself popped up on the network to accuse the debate of being “rigged” – a sure sign, whatever the competition, that he had in fact lost.On X, eugenics fan and world’s richest man Elon Musk admitted Trump had had a bad night and that Harris had “exceeded most people’s expectations”. This was grudging but had the advantage over the reaction of other Trump supporters of actually acknowledging reality. He followed up with: “We will never reach Mars if Kamala Harris wins” – a fact that, assuming Musk himself plans to undertake the journey, would be one drawback to a Harris win indeed.In the rightwing British press, meanwhile, there were various milquetoast attempts to mitigate Trump’s failure, including the Daily Telegraph’s post-debate assertion that it was “difficult to crown Harris the victor when she said so little about her own platform”. Was it, though? Was it really that difficult to pick a winner between the woman who, if she loses in November, we can be fairly certain won’t refuse to accept the decision versus the guy shouting “Execute the baby!” and citing Viktor Orbán as a character witness? And yet the conclusion in the Daily Mail was: “Pathetic, both of them.”Given the evidence before us, these moments of cognitive dissonance are becoming increasingly hard to process. Because the truth, of course, is that Trump looked like a lunatic on Tuesday night. As he got angrier, his shoulders slumped, his body twisted and certain familiar phrases started to pop up in his speech. “I’m not, she is”; repeated use of the word “horrible”. Of Biden he said, referring to Harris: “He hates her; he can’t stand her.” For my money, however, his craziest moment wasn’t any of this, or even the pets thing, but when he wandered off on a diversion about the horrors of solar energy, then said: “You ever see a solar plant? By the way I’m a big fan of solar.” During some of these rants, Harris, despite the tremendous pressure of the moment, actually succeeded in looking bored.Much has been made of how calm she was, and of how her smirk – what the New York Post disapprovingly called her “dismissive laugh” – goaded Trump to greater depths of incoherence. But I think the best parts of the debate were when Harris, too, grew angry. As a candidate, she has had the problem of being tricky to read and has been accused of being too scripted. But in the abortion section of the debate, one felt she jumped beyond the rehearsed remarks, and you could feel the engine of her conviction roaring to life.She was angry – seething, in fact – when she delivered the line about a miscarrying woman “bleeding out in a car in the parking lot” because an emergency doctor might be too frightened to treat her. I got that same flash of genuine outrage when, in relation to Russia’s expansionist ambitions, she said to Trump: “You adore strongmen instead of caring about democracy.” She was, one felt, a beat away from taunting him with: “You want to kiss Putin on the lips, you do.”And then her language changed register, moving into a realm generally more favoured by Republicans than Democrats. “That is immoral,” Harris said of Trump making decisions about women’s bodies. It was a striking moment, this use of a word that might apply equally to all the high-information Americans and their allies in Britain continuing to excuse Trump this far into the game.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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