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      Is Taylor Swift a secret Trump supporter? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      It was the embrace that launched a thousand tweets: on Sunday, Taylor Swift hugged Brittany Mahomes – the wife of NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes – at the US Open. A photo of the hug immediately had tongues wagging.If you’re not Extremely Online, the only thing that might stand out from the innocuous-seeming hug photo is that Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce (also in the photo) has horrendous taste in hats. The broader context, however, is Mahomes’s link to Donald Trump. Last week the former president thanked Mahomes for “strongly defending me” after she liked one of his Instagram posts back in August. That post, titled “The 2024 GOP Platform”, outlined what a second Trump term would consist of – things such as “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Mahomes did not appreciate people criticising her for liking the post (which she seems to have later unliked), calling them “haters” with “deep-rooted issues … from childhood”.This drama matters because Swift is one of the most influential people on the planet. There has been intense speculation about whether the pop star will endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle. In the absence of any such endorsement, people have been scrutinising her actions for clues about her political leanings. Hugging Mahomes after her Trump controversy? Well, that’s been taken by some as a sign that Taylor is Team Trump.The Mahomes hug isn’t the only evidence people are citing to suggest Swift, who endorsed Democratic candidates in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2020, might be leaning to the right now. There’s also the fact she was tight-lipped when Trump recently shared a bunch of AI-generated images on his Truth Social platform that implied Swift and her fans were endorsing him. “The Swifties for Trump movement is real!” the post, originally created by a murky rightwing non-profit, read. “I accept!” Trump wrote above the fake photos.A presidential candidate using your image without your consent to claim you support his racist and regressive views is a big deal. If you think his views are abhorrent, you’d want to publicly distance yourself from him, right? There are scores of famous musicians, from Céline Dion to Beyoncé, who have made it very public that they don’t want Trump using their music at rallies. “Don’t even think about using my music, you fascists,” Jack White said last month, after a Trump aide used a White Stripes song in an online video. White added that he would sue the Trump campaign. If you’re angry a man like Trump is associating himself with you, then that’s how you act. Meanwhile, various media outlets reported that Swift’s “spokesperson did not return multiple messages seeking comment” after Trump posted the fake endorsement photos.To be clear: I don’t think Swift is a secret Trump supporter. She’s been critical of him in the past, after all. But it can’t be stressed enough that Swift isn’t a billionaire just because she sings catchy songs. She’s a billionaire because she is a brilliant businesswoman who exerts meticulous control over her personal brand. Everything she does is intentional, done with the knowledge that her fanbase will scrutinise and attempt to decode even the most banal action like it’s the Rosetta Stone. One imagines the reason her spokesperson didn’t comment about the fake Trump photos wasn’t that they were too busy, it was that they’d decided silence was the savviest choice.Swift may have endorsed Biden-Harris in 2020, but that was a very different time. After the George Floyd protests, “Brands, which often remain silent when it comes to social justice issues, began speaking out,” a 2021 AdAge article noted. They did so because they knew that being in tune with the zeitgeist was good for their business. Now companies are being targeted by the right with boycotts and harassment if they align with progressive causes. That bullying has worked: industry experts have warned of a worrying trend of brands taking significant steps back from diversity and sustainability initiatives. Swift is one of the biggest brands there is; it’s only natural she’s shying away from politics.That said, I hope Swift proves me wrong and speaks up this election cycle. We live in a world where everything is political. Swift isn’t avoiding politics by staying quiet: her silence speaks louder than words. More

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      Trump will not prepare for debating Kamala Harris. He believes he’s perfect | Sidney Blumenthal

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      In a debate or otherwise, hot mic or not, the “issues” are of concern to Donald Trump solely to incite his politics of paranoia. Facts, too, whatever they are, are contemptible; facts aren’t facts at all. They are opinions to be wielded in a contest of strength to intimidate and overwhelm the weaklings who claim there actually are independent facts. Those whose opinions prevail can triumphantly brandish them as symbols of power.In the unusual setting when Trump is awkwardly questioned outside of the protective sphere of rightwing media, he understands that his glib retailing of make-believe and outright lying will glide him past the hazard of facts. The less he cares about them, the better he will do. His lies are so frequent they become elevator music.Journalistic moderators exist simply to serve as his foils and straight-men. He attacks them, often personally, to elide and distract from topics he would rather avoid, if the moderators have the nerve to raise them – his felony convictions, business fraud, alleged and adjudicated acts of sexual assault, attempted coup of January 6, promise of a “bloody” round-up of “millions” of undocumented immigrants, stated desire to be a dictator, to imprison his opponents including Democratic donors, and “terminate” the constitution. The presence of journalists who correct his splotched record proves his victimization.Any so-called debate involving Trump has nothing to do with illuminating the “issues”. Part of the problem with the plea of anxious Republicans that Trump stick to the “issues”, rather than mentally deteriorate before our eyes, is that the “issues”, as they conceive them, aren’t supported by the facts.The facts are these: inflation has substantially cooled and continues to fall. The economy is disinflationary. The Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this month on the basis of the decline in inflation. Job growth under the Biden administration increased by July to 15.8m, while under Trump 2.7m jobs were lost. Trump has falsely stated that “100%” of all new jobs created under Biden “have gone to illegal immigrants”. In fact, the number of native-born Americans in the workforce increased by 6% under Biden. The crime rate is down precipitously, violent crime reduced by 15.2% in just the last year, according to the FBI.The entry of migrants at the southern border between December 2023 and January 2024 fell by 50% as a result of actions of the Mexican government in cooperation with the Biden administration, and crossings fell even more, by 40%, to their lowest level in four years, as a result of Biden’s executive order on asylum policy in June. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. And of immigrants arriving between 2020 and 2022, nearly half, 48%, have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 38% of native-born Americans have attained that educational status. The rest is demagogy.The other part of the problem about the “issues” is that Trump’s underlying motive has nothing to do with them. He still feels the sting that he never really made it as a celebrity in Manhattan. Despite his constant efforts to elevate himself, even pretending to be his own public relations agent, John Barron, he understands that he was ridiculed and rejected by the genteel class whose acceptance he most sought. When he was cast as the star of The Apprentice, its crassness and phoniness failed to win him the respect let alone the adoration of the Hollywood community. He bears the grudge that he was spat out from coast to coast. Arousing the fears and prejudices of the outer-borough petit bourgeoisie in white flight farther into Long Island decades ago writ large, he is a tuning fork of resentments.Trump always has his own facts to depict “a failing nation”. Pessimism is his calling card. If America isn’t collapsing, how can it be great again? Even more important, how can he be great again? As Trump posted this May after he was found guilty of 34 felony counts of business fraud for hush-money payments to an adult film star to influence the 2016 election: “I AM THE POLITICAL PRISONER OF A FAILING NATION, BUT I WILL SOON BE FREE, NOVEMBER 5TH, AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”This election, like all elections for him, is a turnout base election. He must scrape up every possible low-information voter from every cave with an appeal to grievance. He will never reach the lofty level of a 50% majority. He will certainly lose the popular vote by millions as he did in 2016 and 2020. His fundraising is half that of Kamala Harris’s. He has outsourced his ground game to political action committees with no experience at getting out the vote, headed by the conspiracist chatterbox Charlie Kirk (who called George Floyd “a scumbag”) and the Nazi-fascinated space cadet Elon Musk. Trump’s advisers, meanwhile, are locked into their own version of The Hunger Games.The knife’s edge polling makes his imperative to inflame his base more desperate. In 1996, Bob Dole campaigned as the Republican candidate by saying he had “nowhere to go but the White House or home”. Trump campaigns knowing he has nowhere to go but the White House or the jailhouse.Trump’s preparation for his only encounter with Harris consists of not preparing. He’s already perfect. He must repeat himself. He must double down. Then he will be more perfect. The more vehemently he lashes out, the more his masses embrace him. His irrationality, irresponsibility and ignorance billow in their minds as a towering image of strength confirming their preconceived notions of his acumen and decisiveness. Yet he must hope that his blasts don’t blow him into a corner where he has to ring up Republican officials as he did in Georgia in 2020 and for which he has been indicted for voter fraud: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”Trump didn’t want, much less imagine, a debate with Harris. Not so subconsciously he still thinks he’s facing Joe Biden. “I can’t imagine New Hampshire voting for him,” he told the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on 5 September. “Anybody in New Hampshire, cause they’re watching right now, but anybody in New Hampshire that votes for Biden and Kamala.” Trump confuses the faded Biden with the looming Harris. Either he feels Biden is his real opponent or he must make her into Biden to return to the race he expected. His template can’t be altered. Make Harris Biden again.Trump has announced he wants a new clause for the 25th amendment to impeach and remove Harris for engaging in a “conspiracy to cover up the incapacity” of Biden. At the same time, Trump complains that Harris has already ousted Biden. “They deposed a president,” he told a rally on 19 August. “It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.” Trump doesn’t know how to quit Biden.In his debate with Biden, Trump’s outrageous falsehoods were overlooked in the light of Biden’s shattered performance. Trump charged that the president would “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby”. He has since repeated his canard about post-abortion executions in a convoluted effort to wriggle out of stating his position on Florida’s proposition for reproductive rights, which he finally conceded he would vote against.In his Biden debate, Trump claimed that he had never called fallen soldiers “suckers” or “losers”, though his former chief of staff, Gen John Kelly, says he did. Had Trump been in office, he says, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine and Hamas wouldn’t have massacred Israelis. Immigrants, he claimed, are released from prisons and insane asylums to steal “Black jobs” and Social Security funds, which, he says, proves the racist replacement theory: “They’re taking the place of our citizens.” And so on.Trump, according to Trump, was the truth-teller in that debate. Biden was the liar. “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it.” If only Biden hadn’t existed, all would have been well, just as it was. “It was perfect. It was so good. All he had to do is leave it alone.” And, then, poof!, to Trump’s consternation, Biden disappeared.Trump’s charges and boastful lies in that debate are undoubtedly a preview of most of what he will charge against Harris and claim about himself. But he will also accuse her of being Biden in disguise so he can continue to run against Biden. Trump will run “the same tired old playbook”, as Harris remarked in refusing to answer a question in an interview about his race-baiting claim that she decided to “turn Black”.On 6 September, Trump’s disjointed pre-debate attack on Harris reached a crescendo in his conflation of her with E Jean Carroll, a woman he defamed, after sexually abusing her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, according to the judge and jury, for which he was held liable twice, and owes a penalty of $83.5m. He appealed the verdict. Before entering the New York courthouse, he held what he called a “press conference”, at which he answered no questions and ranted for nearly an hour.His stream of consciousness unraveled into an accusation that seamlessly traveled from an apparent reference to Harris to an old photograph of Carroll. “I’m not going to have a Marxist president. The people are getting it,” Trump said. “So we go down to court today to talk about this case is a scam. And all I can say is that I never met the woman other than this picture, which could have been AI-generated.”The photo in question was published in a 2019 New York Magazine article captioned: “Carroll, Donald and Ivana Trump, and Carroll’s then-husband, television-news anchor John Johnson, at an NBC party around 1987.” Of course, artificial intelligence, whose technology did not then exist, could not generate that photo.Trump blathered on: “The other thing is I was very famous then. If I would have walked into Bergdorf Goodman, the department store that she said, everybody would have said, ‘Oh, there’s Trump.’ And it would have been at that time on Page Six. Page Six was the equivalent of today’s internet.”With his ruminations about Page Six, the page in the New York Post for gossip on which Trump planted items about himself and his sexual prowess for years, he inadvertently let slip his true motive to recapture past glory: “I was very famous then.”Trump is frantic not to be dismissed as a has-been. His restless exploitation of his tawdry image had gained him notoriety but disrespect. The more vulgar he was in pursuing his fantasy of himself, however, the more his acceptance into society receded. His wish to return to his youthful days of celebrity now leads him to surround himself with the appearance of celebrity, but he can only attract cartoon characters, the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock. If Trump can only regain the presidency, he can use it for a last chance to make himself a great celebrity again.At his “press conference”, Trump played the star beset by groupies. Time and again, he asserted he didn’t know Carroll. “I have no idea who she is. She wrote a book and she made a ridiculous story up.” At his first defamation trial, Trump claimed she was “totally lying” because “she’s not my type”.Then, Trump spontaneously brought up other cases in which he had been accused of sexual assault. “It’s all fabricated,” he said.He attacked Jessica Leeds, who as a witness in the Carroll trial testified that he molested her in the late 1970s when he sat next to her on an airplane. “She said I was making out with her. And then, after 15 minutes – and she changed her story a couple times, maybe it was quicker – then I grabbed her at a certain part and that’s when she had enough,” Trump said, explaining his technique. “Think of the practicality of this: I’m famous, I’m in a plane, people are coming into the plane. And I’m looking at a woman, and I grab her and start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening?”He added: “And frankly – I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say – but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.” Once again, she wasn’t Trump’s type.Trump then tore into yet another woman who had testified in the Carroll case. Natasha Stoynoff, a reporter for People magazine, came to Mar-a-Lago in 2005 to write a story about Trump and his wife Melania. According to her account, he drew her alone into a room, shoved her against a wall, stuck his tongue down her throat and groped her before she broke loose. Six other women corroborated her story as contemporaneous confidantes to whom she told her story. At a political rally in 2016, singling her out, he told a crowd: “Take a look. You look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”“Think of this,” Trump continued explaining at his press conference, “a woman comes into Mar-a-Lago, interviews me about a love story, a story about my wife and myself. And during that interview, I attacked her and pushed her up against the wall, violently. Okay? And then she leaves, and she writes a perfect story. A perfect story. She doesn’t mention the event … There was no witness. There was nothing … I could go through many other stories outside of this. You know, it’s very funny. When you’re rich and famous, you get a lot of people come up with a lot of stories.” When you’re a star, you’re always innocent.Trump made it clear this outburst was his debate prep. “I’m going into very hostile territory shortly on a debate with ABC, George Stephanopoulos and that group,” he said. “And ABC, I think, is the worst of everybody. I think they’re the worst. They’re the nastiest. They’re as bad as you can be. They’re worse than NBC, which is saying a lot.”Then, he added, “And we have something coming.” But instead of explaining what that might be, he veered to attack Hillary Clinton as unfair in her debate with him in 2016. Then, he attacked the Carroll case again as a “hoax” and “a scam”. And he blamed the reporters he had gathered and whose questions he was not taking. “It’s a political witch hunt. And some of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Thank you very much, everybody.”

      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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      Harris and Trump make final preparations ahead of crucial presidential debate in Philadelphia

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      It was the debate that was never meant to happen.Donald Trump will take the stage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night to face, not the familiar foe he expected when he agreed to the encounter in May, but an opponent he has never met and has struggled to define; Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, whose emergence as the Democratic nominee has changed the direction, and very nature, of the presidential election.The Republican nominee anticipated that he would be keeping a date in the City of Brotherly Love for a second engagement with Joe Biden, the US president with whom he had an acrimonious debating history from the 2020 election.Instead the unprecedented impact of June’s debate in Atlanta between the pair – in which Biden’s halting and incoherent performance led to him withdrawing his candidacy after mounting pressure from his own Democratic party – has left Trump confronting an opponent against whom he has still to decide a settled line of attack.Harris, for her part, goes into the event having been prepared by aides who have aped Trump’s often vicious and insulting debating technique – especially towards women – and bolstered by her experience from a previous career as a courtroom prosecutor. She is also buoyed by being up against an adversary who was recently convicted of 34 felony charges.The pair face-off in the midst of a race that multiple polls show is neck-and-neck – both nationally and in key swing states – none more than in Pennsylvania, the site of Tuesday’s debate, with more electoral votes up for grabs than any other battleground state.Tuesday’s event, hosted by ABC, will take place under the same rules that governed the Trump-Biden debate, with candidates’ microphones being muted when it is their opponent’s turn to speak. Harris’s campaign argued for mics to be kept live throughout – hoping to goad the former president into the undisciplined and unsavoury interruptions that have marred his previous performances.View image in fullscreenWhile Trump was ready to agree, his entourage – determined to keep him focused and on-message – insisted on keeping the original rules.But it is Trump’s difficulty in coming to terms with Biden’s departure from the race that could decide the contours of the debate, according to Steven Fein, a specialist in presidential debates and professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts.“I think, maybe the most interesting and potentially explosive element of it is the fact that he clearly was very upset that Biden dropped out and has been replaced by Harris,” said Fein, who suggested the debate had greater potential for mind games and psychological drama than any he had previously studied.“It’s going to be a mighty task for him to control his tendencies. Whenever he’s baited … by a woman, he’s usually been very nasty. And a woman of colour is just like the nightmare scenario.“There’s going to have to be some give and take in a way that there didn’t have to be in the first debate, when he didn’t have to say much but just let Biden flail. So the potential for all kinds of drama is great.”The former president has been preparing for the debate with, among others, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress-turned Trump supporter who ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and memorably tangled with Harris in a primary debate.In an eve-of-debate call with journalists on Monday, Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said that it would be Harris who would have difficulty preparing for Trump.“The fact that Trump is out there every day doing unscripted questions [means] you can’t prepare for him,” he said, comparing it with training to prepare to fight Muhammed Ali. “You don’t know what his style is going to be. He has an amazing mix of humour and charm, as well as hard hitting facts.”With Hugo Lowell More

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      US elections live: Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls on eve of debate, new report suggests

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      A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.Amid efforts to purge voters in Republican-led states, the Department of Justice released a fact-sheet on Monday reminding states of the restrictions on removing voters ahead of the voter rolls on the eve of a federal election.The document essentially serves as a warning to states that systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election is illegal under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Any effort to remove voters, according to the law, must also be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory.”The document is notable because it comes as Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have all touted efforts to remove people from the voter rolls in recent months. Many of those efforts have been misleading and have targeted people suspected of being non-citizens and have raised scrutiny from civil rights groups who are concerned the efforts may be unlawfully targeting naturalized citizens.“Examples of list maintenance activities that may violate the NVRA include comparing voter files to outdated or inaccurate records or databases, taking action that erroneously affects a particular class of voters (such as newly naturalized citizens), or matching records based solely on first name, last name, and date of birth,” the fact sheet says.There have also been reports of activists in Georgia and Florida using unreliable software to challenge the voting eligibility of people it believes may have moved. The DOJ guidance issued on Monday reminds states that those efforts are also illegal within 90 days of a federal election.The 90-day blackout period, the document says, “also applies to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized datamatching process.”Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, released a video urging voters to contact DoJ if they believe they have been wrongfully removed from the rolls.“As we approach Election Day, it is important that states adhere to all aspects of federal law that safeguard the rights of eligible voters to remain on the active voter lists and to vote free from discrimination and intimidation,” she said in a statement.Speaking at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a key swing state, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, talked about the intense impact of the conservative Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade on all the women in his life, including Harris.He said he heard the news directly from Harris herself. “I had never actually heard her more upset. And she called to say, ‘Dougie, they actually did it, they actually did it.’”Emhoff said Harris had personally grilled Trump’s rightwing supreme court nominees, who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent when it came to abortion.Emhoff’s remarks come as Democrats focus on abortion rights, which is seen as Harris’ strongest issue.Advocacy groups are continuing to weigh in on the outline of Kamala Harris’s policy priorities, posted on her website today.It’s no surprise that Giffords, a leading gun violence prevention group headed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, praised Harris’s policy outline on gun violence prevention, which comes in the wake of two new high-profile mass shootings in Georgia and in Kentucky.Harris, a former prosecutor who secured the first-ever political endorsement from March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention group formed in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has a long track record on responding to daily community gun violence, and she served as the head of the Biden administration’s newly created Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office advocates had pushed for.The gun control measures Harris endorses are standard for Democratic politicians: she supports legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and supporting red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.Harris’ policy overview touts her record as a prosecutor “getting illegal guns and violent criminals off California streets,” but it also highlights the Biden administration’s big investment in community-based gun violence prevention efforts, which advocates called a significant improvement from the Obama administration. Harris’ platform notes that, after a big increase in gun violence in 2020, during the early pandemic, there appears to have been a historic drop in murders in 2023. (How much decisions at the White House level had to do with either the rise or the fall in murders is deeply unclear, but the decrease in violence that Harris is pointing to is real.)She also makes very clear that she does not support defunding the police, but instead “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them.”This is Lois Beckett, picking up our US politics coverage from Los Angeles.Oprah Winfrey will host a digital rally for Kamala Harris next week, multiple news outlets reported.The event will bring together different affinity groups that have mobilized for the Harris campaign, Variety reported.United We Dream Action, the political and electoral arm of United We Dream, the largest immigrant rights group led by young activists in the US, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, they announced on Monday.Bruna Sollod, the group’s senior political director, said in a statement:
      We choose to block the pain and violence Trump will carry out against our people. We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years to meet the demands of our generation.
      The Michigan supreme court has ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will appear on Michigan’s ballot this fall, the Detroit Free Press is reporting.Despite suspending his presidential campaign last month and endorsing the former president Donald Trump, the Michigan supreme court ruled on Monday that Kennedy’s name would remain on the state’s ballot.This comes just days after an appellate court in Michigan ruled that Kennedy’s name must be stricken from ballots.The Michigan secretary of state’s office said last week that it would appeal to the state supreme court. The new ruling from the state’s high court on Monday overturns the lower court’s decision, the Detroit Free Press reported.Ever since he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy has been fighting to remove his name from ballots in swing states.A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.On Monday, president Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the several individuals to serve as “key leaders in his administration” in a news release.The nominees include Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Dan Sullivan to be Representatives of the US to the 79th session of the General Assembly of the UN, among others.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also told reporters on Monday that Joe Biden would be watching the Tuesday debate between the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the former president Donald Trump.“The president is going to watch the debate, he’s looking forward to watching the debate” Jean-Pierre said. “The president is incredibly proud of the vice-president,” she added.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Monday that president Joe Biden agreed with Kamala Harris’s leadership and policy decisions.During the White House press briefing on Monday, Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter why Vice-President Harris was “spending so much time trying to define Trump and link him to Project 2025, rather than define herself?”Jean-Pierre responded and directed the question to the Harris campaign, but said that the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be “more clear” and said that Biden “agrees with her leadership, her policy decisions.”This comes as the Harris campaign released a list of her policy proposals on Sunday evening.In an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, said that former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, need to change the way they speak about women, when asked why she thinks Kamala Harris has a 14-point lead among women.“Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley, who has previously said she would be voting for Trump in November, said on Monday. “You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far just by accident … she’s a prosecutor.”She continued:
      You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too. The bottom line is, we win on policies, stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win.
      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign posted a list of her policy positions on its website this weekend, after critics have called her vague and thin on policy since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The list of policies on the Harris campaign website are organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.Among the proposals, Harris has said she would implement tax cuts for the middle class, reduce healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, bring back the bipartisan border security bill and more.

      Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump is “probably going to speak a lot of untruths” during their debate tomorrow night. “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said in an interview with Rickey Smiley that aired on Monday.

      Ten retired top military officials announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris in a letter warning that Donald Trump is “a danger to our national security and democracy”. The letter by National Security Leaders for America also sought to defend Harris against Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.

      A 250-page Republican-led congressional report on Monday attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan. Democrats accused Republicans of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

      Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he would jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s election. He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution.

      Donald Trump confirmed he will vote in support of a ballot measure in Florida that would legalize recreational marijuana. Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure.

      Kamala Harris’s campaign will air a new TV ad featuring former officials in Donald’s Trump administration warning about the threat he poses to the country, in what looks like an attempt to goad the former president ahead of tomorrow’s debate.

      The Harris campaign also released three new TV ads targeting Donald Trump on abortion ahead of Tuesday’s debate that includes comments from the Republican nominee claiming credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade.

      The leaders of two major left-leaning women’s organizations said the issue of reproductive rights would offer the “starkest possible contrast” between Harris and Trump at Tuesday night’s debate.

      Republican officials are raising the alarm that Trump campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races.

      Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, postponed a rally he was scheduled to speak on Monday evening in Reno, Nevada due to wildfires in the region, his campaign said.

      Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Kamala Harris in November’s election.
      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate.The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy. More

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      Republicans spread unsubstantiated slurs about Haitian migrants in Ohio city

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      Prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance are sharing false and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating pets and local wildlife.The salacious and often racist social media posts claim, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food. Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.The claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.The misinformation about migrants in Springfield comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border. Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported. A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed intoa school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has spoken against Haitian migrants in Ohio for months and again posted about it on Monday. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote, referring to Kamala Harris.The Trump campaign sent out an email on Monday blasting the vice-president for the unrest in Springfield, saying: “It’s all coming to your city if Kamala Harris is elected in November. It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning on day one, President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history – because he’ll always put America, and Americans, FIRST.”On Monday, the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, a Republican, announced he would use his office’s resources to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”. He said his office would “exhaust all possibilities” to address the migrants. Among other complaints from residents, he said that the migrants were reportedly “killing wildlife for food”. More

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      Harris campaign lists policies on eve of debate after criticism of vagueness

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has posted a list of her policy positions on its website, less than 48 hours before her debate against Donald Trump on Tuesday, after critics have called her vague and thin on proposed policies since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The Harris campaign’s move came as she and the Republican former president enter the final weeks of the 5 November election – and as new polling published on Sunday showed the candidates are locked in a tight race. The vice-president had initially gained significant momentum over Trump after she replaced Joe Biden at the top of her party’s presidential ticket.A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College released on Sunday found that Trump was up one percentage point over Harris, noting that many voters wanted to know more about the vice-president’s policies.Another poll, conducted by CBS/YouGov, indicated a close race in key swing states, with Harris narrowly leading in Michigan and Wisconsin – but tied in Pennsylvania.By Sunday evening, the Harris campaign had posted a list of policy positions on her website, organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.The campaign promised to build “an opportunity economy and lower costs for families” and to implement economic proposals such as tax cuts for the middle class as well as making rent more affordable and home ownership more attainable by providing first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with down payments.In the list of proposals, Harris also said that she would work to make childcare more affordable, strengthen social security and support small businesses by expanding the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000.Harris pledged to reduce the healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, remove taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, and address competitive practices by big corporations.Her campaign said that she would block any national abortion bans, and if Congress were to pass a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, Harris would sign it into law. She also plans to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in healthcare, housing, education and more into law, the website reads.On the border, the campaign stated that Harris would bring back a bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law after it was blocked by Republicans earlier this year to deny Biden a legislative victory when he was still planning to run for re-election. Harris understands the need for “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship”, the website reads.When it comes to gun violence and crime, the campaign said that – if elected president – Harris would ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws. She will also continue to “invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them”, it added.Harris is committed to ending the opioid epidemic and tackling fentanyl, the campaign stated, adding that the bipartisan border bill she intends to sign would fund detection technology to intercept even more illicit drugs.On foreign policy and national security, Harris pledged to stand with US allies, stand up to dictators, “lead on the world stage” and make sure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. She added a promise to invest in American workers, innovation and industry.The policy proposal list also mentions Israel’s war in Gaza, where Harris stated that she would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself”.The website stated that she and Biden – who ended his re-election campaign on 21 July – were “working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, … hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.At the end of each of the policy sections on the website, the Harris campaign compared and contrasted her positions with Project 2025 – a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative thinktank.Among other things, Project 2025 has called for the elimination of the education department along with the reductions of environmental protections as well as LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, amid criticism and backlash regarding the group’s proposals as being too far right. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties – and that many of the policy goals align with things that Trump has said he intends to do if he wins in November. More

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      How will Harris debate Trump? Six key moments offer insight

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate. The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy:Sense of humorBefore Harris became vice-president, she served as the attorney general of California and then the state’s junior senator. When Harris ran for her Senate seat in 2016, her top opponent was Democratic congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. The two candidates faced off in an hour-long debate in October 2016, and despite the robust conversation around policy, the event is best remembered for Sanchez’s bizarre closing statement.Sanchez chose to punctuate her final comments with a dance move: the dab. For those who were not extremely online in 2016, a dab involves stretching out an arm and lowering one’s head into the crook of the other arm.Harris reacted to the move with baffled amusement, tightly pressing her lips together, in an apparent attempt to hold back laughter, before she said with a chuckle: “So there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race.”The simple retort effectively undercut Sanchez and bolstered Harris’s pitch. And it worked; Harris defeated Sanchez by 23 points a month later. Harris has already deployed her sense of humor to undercut Trump, who has shown no tolerance for mockery, and she may be looking to do so again on Tuesday.Prosecutorial skillsAfter taking her seat in the Senate, Harris quickly made a name for herself as a tough questioner who could put witnesses on the spot as she dissected their political records. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, experienced this first-hand in June 2017.When he appeared before the Senate intelligence committee, Harris pressed Sessions on his contact with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign, as he was serving as a surrogate for Trump. Harris rattled off a series of questions to Sessions, who grew frustrated as he struggled to give clear, concise answers.As Sessions tried to further elaborate on one of his answers, Harris told him: “Sir, I have just a few minutes …”Sessions then interrupted, saying, “Will you let me qualify it? If I don’t qualify it, you’ll accuse me of lying, so I need to be correct as best I can … I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous.”The exchange cast even more scrutiny on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials and showcased Harris’s prosecutorial skills. A clash with KavanaughHarris’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh went viral in 2018, when she pressed the supreme court nominee on his conversations about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his views on abortion access.Harris asked Kavanaugh whether he had discussed Mueller’s investigation with anyone at a law firm founded by Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz. “Be sure about your answer, sir,” Harris told Kavanaugh.The nominee fumbled for a moment before saying, “I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”Harris replied: “I think you’re thinking of someone, and you don’t want to tell us.”A Republican senator interjected to relieve the pressure on Kavanaugh, but Harris’s questioning raised questions about the nominee’s credibility.An even more telling exchange came when Harris asked Kavanuagh, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”Kavanaugh replied: “I’m happy to answer a more specific question.” When pressed, he conceded: “I’m not thinking of any right now, senator.”That comment gained renewed attention in 2022, when Kavanaugh became one of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade, ending federal protections for abortion access. Harris has blamed Trump for that decision, as he nominated three of the justices who issued the ruling, and she is sure to uplift the fight over abortion access on Tuesday.A challenge on busingHarris launched her first presidential campaign in January 2019, but she and other Democratic candidates found it difficult to overtake Biden’s early polling advantage.At a primary debate in June 2019, Harris decided to confront Biden head-on. Biden had recently attracted controversy for praising the past “civility” of politics, citing his cordial relationships with two late segregationist senators as examples. Harris attacked Biden over the comments and connected them to his past opposition to busing, the practice of transporting children to schools outside their local neighborhood to help achieve racial equity in classrooms.“You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris told Biden. “So I will tell you that, on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously.”The attack line increased Harris’s national profile, boosting her standing in the polls. But that surge became the high-water mark for Harris’s campaign, and she was forced to withdraw from the race in December.‘Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking’Despite their earlier clash, Biden selected Harris as his running mate after winning the nomination, and the new vice-presidential candidate immediately got to work promoting their campaign.In her debate against Mike Pence in October 2020, Harris had to push back against the then vice-president as he attempted to talk over her.In what became a viral moment, Harris told Pence, “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking.”The catchphrase inspired campaign merchandise and painted Pence as out of touch. The success of that moment might explain why Harris’s campaign fought to have the candidates’ mics unmuted at all times during the debate on Tuesday, as that could create an opportunity to establish a similar dynamic against Trump. But Trump’s team successfully fought that rule change, so mics will only be unmuted when moderators cue a candidate to speak.Regardless, the pushback against Pence might still teach Trump a lesson going into the debate: Harris refuses to be steamrolled.An imprecise answerTrump has reason for concern as he plans for Tuesday. But Harris has also displayed vulnerabilities that could help Trump in the debate.In Harris’s first major interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, CNN host Dana Bash started off with a rather obvious question: what were her plans for day one of her administration?“Well, there are a number of things,” Harris said. “I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward.”The vague answer prompted Bash to follow up by reiterating, “So what would you do day one?”Harris then described her plans to implement an “opportunity economy”, including expanding the child tax credit, but the exchange underscored the nominee’s penchant for avoiding specifics when discussing policy. Trump is not exactly known for his detailed policy positions either, but voters will be looking for Harris to outline a more precise vision for her presidency when she takes the debate stage on Tuesday. More

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      Election outcome may depend on whether Harris or Trump can rebrand themselves as ‘new’

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      When Kamala Harris sat down for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, she praised Joe Biden for his intelligence, commitment, judgment and disposition. But twice she used the phrase “turn the page”. And twice she used the phrase “a new way forward”.This was no accident. US voters are yearning for a shift in direction, with two in three saying the next president should represent a major change from Joe Biden, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Yet in November they face a choice between two known quantities: Harris, the sitting vice-president, and Donald Trump, a former president with an inescapable four-year record.Just 25% of voters think Harris signifies a major change, the poll found, while 56% believe she represents “more of the same”. When it comes to Trump, 51% think he would offer major change, whereas 35% consider him more of the same. Victory in the race for the White House might be decided by which of these quasi-incumbents can rebrand themselves as a breath of fresh air for a weary, divided nation.Despite the polling, Democrats are convinced that Harris has the momentum. “The American people are looking for not just new faces but a new message,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re looking for somebody who can heal our divisions and close our partisan divides. To the extent she’s running on a message of bringing the American people together, it helps her become a change agent.”Since 1836, just one sitting vice-president, George HW Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Those who tried and failed include Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his popular but scandal-plagued boss, Bill Clinton, may have proved costly in his narrow defeat by George W Bush.Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and local prosecutor, became the first woman and person of colour to serve as vice-president after Biden selected her as his running mate in the 2020 election. Like most vice-presidents, she gained relatively little public attention for three and a half years.And when she did, some of the headlines were negative, for example those regarding her role in tackling the root causes of immigration and apparent discontent in her office. Axios reports that of the 47 Harris staff publicly disclosed to the Senate in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring.But after the president’s feeble debate performance against Trump on 27 June, everything changed. Biden bowed to pressure, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. The Democratic party quickly rallied around her with a combination of relief and energy bordering on ecstasy.Speakers at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago dutifully paid tribute to Biden’s service but then pivoted to looking forward to a new era under Harris. Her acceptance speech, and a biographical video, did not dwell on her vice-presidency but rather introduced her life story as if for the first time.Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said: “People see don’t see her as vice-president in large part because they rarely see the vice-president as leading the country. But she’s campaigning on a platform that includes bringing people together, ensuring that most Americans can make ends meet.“Donald Trump is a prisoner of the past. She’s a pioneer of a future. That’s the message that brings people in line with her values versus what he campaigns on every day, which is all about attacks, insults and derogatory statements.”On the campaign trail, Harris has been walking a political tightrope, embracing her boss’s achievements while keeping his unpopular baggage at arm’s length. Whereas Biden touted jobs and growth numbers, Harris has acknowledged the rising cost of living and proposed a federal ban on grocery price-gouging.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “She wants it both ways. She wants to take credit for the improvement in the economy, the number of jobs, the successes of bringing inflation down. But she doesn’t want to be blamed for voters’ continuing frustration that they’ve been hurt because of inflation.He added: “She’s been trying to run as the change candidate, which is very strange because the change motif is for the challenger, not the incumbent party.”The switch from Biden, 81, to 59-year-old Harris instantly removed the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability – age – and weaponised it against Trump who, at 78, is the oldest major party nominee in US history.At the first debate in June, he came over as more engaged and vital than Biden, who stumbled over answers and stared into the distance with mouth agape. At the next debate on Tuesday, it is Trump whose age will be thrown into sharp relief by a rival nearly two decades younger – who would become the first female president in the country’s 248-year history if she wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We went from a generic where we had two candidates who were pushing 80, so anytime that you add in a new element and someone who is generationally younger, that’s a change without even having to say a word. The fact that we are going from two old white men to a woman of colour – that screams change. It creates the tangible illustration of past versus future.”Trump has been wrongfooted by the Democrats’ abrupt change of nominee and still complains bitterly about it. Nicknames such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”, as well as criticism of alleged Biden family corruption, now ring hollow. He has continued to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election as he makes his third bid for the White House. Still promising to “Make America great again”, he has lost the mantle of a disrupter taking on the status quo.Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Any time that you’re the candidate whose slogan uses the word ‘again’, that doesn’t scream change. That screams going backwards. Clearly voters want something that’s more forward-facing and, frankly, more optimistic as well. I don’t think we can overestimate the tone difference.“One campaign is saying, it’s a disaster, everything is terrible, America will be destroyed if Kamala Harris is president. The other campaign is saying we can do better, we can be better, our best days lie ahead. It’s much more optimistic and for voters coming out of Covid, January 6, the sense of weariness they have with both Biden and with Trump, that idea of turning the page and having a fresh start is a very appealing sentiment.”The Trump campaign has unleashed countless attacks tying Harris to Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan but with little tangible effect, at least so far. Instead, Harris continues to wear her vice-presidency lightly and cast herself as the candidate of the future.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said: “She’s not pulling it off because of particular policy positions, but her race and gender create an image of change without ever stressing it or mentioning it.“The idea that a Black, Asian American woman could be president of the United States says change all by itself. That’s how she has created this impression that she is the change candidate in a change election, even though she’s the incumbent vice-president.”Trump would be wise to contrast his White House record with that of the Biden-Harris administration, Ayres argues. “Emphasising the economy and immigration is an obvious place for him to go. And then painting Harris as a San Francisco liberal – and there are plenty of issue positions that she has taken, in the past at any rate, that allow him to do that. If he could actually focus on that rather than using schoolyard bullying name-calling, he could win the thing.”Trump represented the shock of the new in 2016, running as an anti-establishment outsider, rattling the foundations of the Republican party and defeating the Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton. But eight years, four criminal cases and two impeachments later, many Americans say the act has gone stale and the novelty has worn off.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He feels diminished to me. He feels smaller, less relevant, he’s not breaking through. In part it’s because she’s rising above and talking about where she wants to take the country; she’s not engaging him. He’s using this old formula of creating chaos and fighting with his opponents and she’s not playing, and it’s hurting him.”He added: “There’s only one Trump. This Trump isn’t working the way it used to and they don’t have a plan B, and the Trump campaign’s in trouble. He’s singing the same songs and they’re not connecting the way they used to. It’s a real problem for him.”But the latest New York Times and Siena College poll – in which Trump is up by one percentage point at 48% to Harris’s 47% – makes Republicans sceptical of the notion that she has become synonymous with change in the minds of the electorate.Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that if you look at the media narrative, that’s how she’s been framed. But with voters it could be a very different picture. As we get a little bit more data, we’ll be able to get a firmer sense of whether this framing is one that’s taken hold or if it’s just an inside-the-Beltway creation. Hard to say at this point.” More