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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More

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      ‘He could go to jail’: for Donald Trump, election day is also judgment day

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      Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.In the 1970s Trump and his father were sued by the justice department for racial discrimination after refusing to rent apartments to Black people in predominantly white buildings. His property and casino businesses, including the Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, filed for bankruptcy several times in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trump University, a business offering property training courses, faced multiple lawsuits for fraud, misleading marketing and false claims about the quality of its programmes. In 2016 Trump settled for $25m without admitting wrongdoing.View image in fullscreenThe Donald J Trump Foundation, a charitable organisation, was investigated and sued for allegedly using charitable funds for personal and business expenses. Trump eventually agreed to dissolve the foundation with remaining funds going to charity.Trump and his company were ordered to pay more than $350m in a New York civil fraud trial for artificially inflating his net worth to secure favourable loan terms. He is also known to have paid little to no federal income taxes in specific years which, although technically legal, was seen by some as bordering on unethical.But Trump became a fixture of the New York tabloids and hosted his own reality TV show, The Apprentice. Blair added: “His early realisation was that if you get famous, if you get large, people will get out of the way. He spent the first part of his career as a real estate developer, making himself seem the embodiment of enormous tycoon-level success even though, in fact, many things he did weren’t successful and his father kept bailing him out.“But he put across that impression and he rode that fame express that he had created for himself over a remarkable number of obstacles all the way to The Apprentice, which set him up permanently as the image of this unstoppable always-on-top tycoon and people are in awe of that. All of which could be described as branding.”Trump’s private life is no more savoury. Trump has reportedly cheated on all three of his wives. More than two dozen women have come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against him, most recently the former model Stacey Williams, who told the Guardian that Trump groped her in 1993 as Jeffrey Epstein watched in what felt like a “twisted game” between the two men.During the 2016 election campaign, an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women by their private parts. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Then last year a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5m.Trump’s presidency and its aftermath were no less morally compromised. He made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper, spanning everything from the crowd size at his inauguration to the result of the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenHe became the first president to be impeached twice, first for withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate his political opponents, then for instigating a coup on 6 January 2021 following his defeat. He also became the subject of not one but four criminal cases, any one of which would have been enough to scuttle the chances of any other White House hopeful.In May Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels, making him the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes. Sentencing is scheduled for 26 November (the judge delayed it from 18 September after the Republican nominee asked that it wait until after the election).What was billed as the trial of the century has already begun to fade from public consciousness and played a relatively modest role in the election campaign. Jonathan Alter, a presidential biographer who was in court for every day of the trial, recalled: “I’ve covered some big stories over the years but there was nothing like the drama of watching the jury foreperson say, ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty’ 34 times and Donald Trump looking like he was punched in the gut.”Alter, who describes the experience in his new book, American Reckoning, reflects on how Trump has been able to act with impunity for so long. “It’s a combination of luck, galvanised defiance and the credulousness of a large chunk of the American people,” he said. “Demagoguery works. Playing on people’s fears works. It doesn’t work all the time but we can look throughout human history to political figures and how demagoguery and scapegoating ‘the other’ works.”Alter, who covered the trial for Washington Monthly magazine, added: “We’ve had plenty of demagogues, scoundrels and conmen in politics below the level of president. Trump has been lucky to escape accountability but the United States has been lucky that we haven’t had something like this before. The founders were very worried about it. They felt we would face something like this for sure.”The US’s system of checks and balances has been racing to keep up. Trump was charged by the special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss to Joe Biden in the run-up to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. The former president and 18 others were also charged by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, with taking part in a scheme to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia.Trump was charged again by Smith with illegally retaining classified documents that included nuclear secrets, taken with him from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office in January 2021, and then obstructing government demands to give them back.With a such a caseload, it was widely assumed that Trump would spend this election shuttling between rallies one day and trials the next. But the courtroom campaign never really happened since, true to past form, he found ways to throw sand in the gears of the legal system and put off his moment of reckoning.View image in fullscreenOr he simply got lucky. In Georgia, it emerged that Willis had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade, prompting demands that she be removed. Smith’s federal election case was thrown off track for months by a supreme court ruling that presidents have immunity for official actions taken in office. The classified documents case was thrown out by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, although Smith is appealing and the charges could be reinstated.Such delays have made it easier to forget just how much of an outlier Trump is. Past presidential brushes with the law consisted of Ulysses S Grant being fined for speeding his horse-drawn carriage in Washington and Harry Truman receiving a ticket for driving his car too slowly on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1953. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate scandal and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.Meanwhile the standard for presidential aspirants has been high. Joe Biden’s first run for the White House fell apart amid allegations that he had plagiarised a speech by Britain’s Labour leader Neil Kinnock. During the 2000 campaign, a last-minute revelation that Republican candidate George W Bush had a drunk driving conviction that he concealed for 24 years generated huge headlines and was seen as a possible gamechanger. Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 defeat on an FBI investigation into her email server that produced no charges.Trump, by contrast, once memorably boasted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. He has done everything but yet still finds himself within touching distance of a second presidency.Indeed, he has repeatedly flipped the script, citing the cases against him as evidence that he is a martyr of sinister deep state forces. In this version it is Democrats, not Trump, who are the threat to democracy. Claiming solidarity with others who feel a sense a grievance, he often says: “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.”The Georgia case produced the indelible image of Trump’s mugshot, with the former president staring defiantly at the camera. Within hours it had been transformed from a badge of shame into a literal badge for sale, along with posters, T-shirts and other merchandise that is still sported by his fans at rallies with slogans such as “Convicted felon” or “Never surrender”.View image in fullscreenJohn Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “For reasons that I don’t understand, every time he gets indicted his poll numbers have gone up. The reason is people have very negative attitudes about Biden and they think he has weaponised the justice system – which I don’t think he’s done – but Trump has convinced people he’s a victim.“Every time he gets indicted again, he just uses it as more proof that he’s oppressed. It’s ridiculous but he has turned it. Like a good conman, he’s taken a seemingly impossible argument and made it worth a lot to him.”This judo move, turning the opponent’s weight against them, might explain why Democrats have not emphasised Trump’s criminal record to the degree that might once have been expected.Early on, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, did shine a light on Trump’s misdemeanours, drawing a contrast with her past as a courtroom prosecutor by stating: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”The line drew cheers but was absent from her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, which focused instead on likening Trump to a “petty tyrant” who would sow chaos and division. Indeed, some have taken the view that even criminal convictions pale in significance compared with the threat of a would-be fascist.But Moe Vela, a lawyer and a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said he wishes that Trump’s criminal past had been given greater emphasis by the Harris campaign. “I am extremely surprised we have not heard about that more,” he said. “He is a convicted felon. I thought it should have been said more often in the litany of grievances about him because I thought it was like low-hanging fruit.”Can Trump’s luck hold one more time? He has waged another White House campaign riven with extremism and racism, divisiveness and violent language, earning comparisons with fascists from the past. If elected, he is expected to use all the levers of power at his disposal to squash the outstanding cases against him; last week he boasted that he would fire his nemesis Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. But if Trump is defeated by Harris, his legal perils will again gather like a dark cloud.Vela added: “If he loses this election, I pray to God that she does not in any way pardon him. I hope that our judicial system functions effectively and properly in taking all of these cases through to fruition. Some of them may come out where he is not convicted, but if conviction is the result, he should be punished just like anybody else. No one in this country is above the law.”That point was illustrated by the New York case, in which even a former president stood trial and was held to account. The system worked. Alter reflected: “That was very inspiring, the wisdom of the judge and jury, who took their responsibilities very seriously. It gave me a lump in my throat. It made me realise we’re not done.” More

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      US presidential election updates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump swing through Wisconsin

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held duelling rallies within miles of each other in swing state Wisconsin’s largest city, Milwaukee, on Friday night. Milwaukee is home to the most Democratic votes in Wisconsin, but its conservative Republican suburbs are a critical area for Trump as he tries to reclaim the state he narrowly won in 2016 but lost in 2020.Earlier, Trump continued to attack Liz Cheney at a rally in Warren, Michigan, where he also lamented the state of his hair. “It looks not so good today … not a good hair day for me, ay ay ay.” After his campaign rhetoric earlier tipped over from hateful to violent – when he suggested Cheney should be shot at with “nine barrels” and the guns “trained on her face” – the attorney general’s office in Arizona, where Trump made the remark, opened a “death threat investigation”.In Pennsylvania, a neck-and-neck race is hurtling toward the finish line of the 2024 election with no clear frontrunner. The victor of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, the most of any battleground state, will probably win the electoral college and determine the trajectory of the country for the next four years.Here’s what else happened on Friday:Kamala Harris election news and updates

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.
      Donald Trump election news and updates

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons.
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      Donald Trump repeats anti-immigrant threads at Milwaukee rally

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      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”Drawing applause and chants of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby”, Kennedy addressed the crowd, reminding them that although he has left the race, he will still appear on the ballot and urging them to vote for Trump. “I said a prayer to God that he would put me in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic,” said Kennedy. “God sent me Donald J Trump.”During his remarks, the Republican congressman Bryan Steil urged the audience to support a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in Wisconsin that would ban non-US citizens from voting in Wisconsin elections – a proposal that seeks to pre-empt municipalities from opening their local elections to non-citizens and comes as Republicans elevate unfounded anxieties about non-US citizens committing voter fraud in federal elections.“We have an opportunity on Tuesday to vote ‘yes’ on an amendment to say that Wisconsin’s elections and American’s elections are for US citizens only, do you agree?” said Steil. The idea that immigrants threaten US elections has caught fire among Trump’s supporters.Jason Tyler, a Republican activist who attended the Milwaukee rally, said he was worried about non-citizens voting illegally in the presidential election. Tyler plans to volunteer as a poll observer in Rock county on election day, where he said he will be looking for non-US citizens casting ballots. “My biggest thing I would be looking for is if somebody can’t speak English and start there,” said Tyler, who acknowledged that the bar for challenging a ballot is high enough in Wisconsin that he would not likely succeed in preventing a voter from casting a ballot.“It’s very difficult – the only thing that I can really do is I can ask for their information, you know, find out who they are, and I can report that, if I felt that there was something weird about it,” said Tyler. “I can’t really tell that person not to vote.”Tyler added that he’s frustrated with the idea that Trump’s inflammatory comments about immigrants are racist. “It’s ridiculous,” said Tyler, adding that his wife came to the US from the Philippines. “She loves Donald Trump.” More

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      Harris and Trump tour key swing states as end of campaign draws close

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      Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”The former president tried to tie Harris to the most recent jobs report, which showed the US added just 12,000 jobs in October.And he again attacked Cheney, one day after he called her a “radical war hawk” in a conversation with Tucker Carlson and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.On Friday, Trump’s comments were similar.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.There was time for reflection, too. “We’re gonna miss these rallies, aren’t we?” Trump asked the crowd at one juncture.At another point, he remarked: “I’m studying my hair. It looks not so good today … not a good hair day for me, ay ay ay.”At a rally for Harris in the evening, Cardi B said the vice-president had inspired her to vote. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life”, the artist said.“I’m not giving Donald Trump a second chance,” Cardi B said. “I am not taking any chances with my future, and I damn sure ain’t taking no chances with the future of my children.“I’m with Kamala.”Harris praised Wisconsin’s motto, forward, and, addressed young voters at the rally: “Here’s what I love about you guys. You are rightly impatient for change. You are determined to live free from gun violence. You are going to take on the climate crisis. You are going to shape the world you inherit. I know that. I know that,” she said.She added: “And here’s the thing about our young leaders. None of this is theoretical for them. None of this is political for them. It’s their lived experience. It’s your lived experience, and I see your power, I see your power, and I am so proud of you.”Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck in swing state polling, and in Michigan, a Detroit Free Press survey shows her having a three-point lead.Republicans and Democrats, as well as their unofficial boosters, have pounced on the tight split. Harris’s camp is pushing hard to convince young voters, who overwhelmingly support the Democrats, to go out and vote.With mere days to go before the 5 November election, some Democrats in Michigan described being “freaked out” by the prospect of another Trump victory in this state. Biden won Michigan in 2020, but Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here in 2016. Relying on polls showing her far ahead, the Clinton campaign had prioritized campaigning in other states, neglecting key Democratic segments such as Black communities and auto workers in the state.Harris has spent more time on the ground in Michigan than in any other state with the exception of Pennsylvania. Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, have bounced around the state in an effort to attract Black voters, white suburban women, college students and factory workers.Last week, Barack Obama rapped with hip-hop legend Eminem at a rally in Detroit. Bernie Sanders, beloved by the Democratic left, tried to reassure young voters in the state that Harris is not just another corporate-minded Democrat.Trump, too, has upped his efforts to woo Michigan voters. On Friday, the former president stopped in Dearborn to court Arab-American voters, many of whom have been left deeply disappointed by Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.Many of the city’s Muslim leaders declined to meet with Trump, including Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah H Hammoud.“The architect of the Muslim Ban is making a campaign stop in Dearborn. People in this community know what Trump stands for – we suffered through it for years,” Hammoud, a Democrat, said on X. “I’ve refused a sit down with him although the requests keep pouring in. Trump will never be my president.”Hammoud, who is neither supporting Harris nor Trump in the race for president, also called fellow members of his party. “To the Dems – your unwillingness to stop funding & enabling a genocide created the space for Trump to infiltrate our communities. Remember that.”Meanwhile, Michigan residents have for months been bombarded by campaign ads, many of which feature exaggerated or blatantly false claims. With the state seeing $759m in political ad spending, Michigan ranks among the top for such disbursements in this election, per NPR. More

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      Threats, racism, misogyny: Trump’s disturbing final week of campaigning

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      There was racism and misogyny by the bucketload. There was a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman. And there was the extraordinary sight of a Republican candidate for president of the United States playing dress-up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck.Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre.With his vitriolic rants and threats of violent revenge against political enemies increasing in intensity, it was hard to set aside Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s closing argument that the former president is “unstable and unhinged”.The former president’s extremist promise to unleash the military against those he considers “the enemy from within” – he named leading Democrats including ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff among them – was unprecedented.And yet it was swiftly eclipsed by this week’s other developments.It will be up to voters next week to decide whether any of it ultimately matters, at least in terms of who occupies the White House for the next four years. But history will record the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign to be like no previous election, with one candidate leaning so heavily into an agenda of hate and menace, and his acolytes attempting variously to deny, distract from or clean up his remarks.The carousel began spinning on Sunday when Trump hosted a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where 85 years earlier American Nazis wearing swastikas had gathered months ahead of the outbreak of the second world war. Before Trump even took the stage there was controversy when a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, delivered a line that was to become the dominant theme of the following days.“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, failing to elicit laughs from an audience of 20,000.The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Republicans joined Democrats in condemning the racist “joke”, while Trump embarked on a mission to try to turn the situation to his advantage.There was no apology, of course. Though, at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump insisted “nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do”, and that the Madison Square Garden event, notable for its deluge of anger, profanity and racism directed at immigrants and Democrats by a succession of speakers, was “a love fest”, and that “the love was unbelievable”.Pennsylvania’s 472,000 Puerto Ricans, many of whom recall Trump withholding disaster relief funds and patronizingly tossing paper towels at desperate citizens after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, saw it differently.View image in fullscreen“This is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected,” Philadelphia voter Yemele Ayala, told the Guardian. “We’re not taking that lightly.”Joe Biden became caught in the maelstrom the same day when a comment he made about “garbage” was construed by the Trump camp as an attack on their candidate’s supporters. What the president intended to say was still under scrutiny on Friday as it emerged the White House had altered the official transcript of his remarks.But the episode also gave rise to the stunt that would provide the defining image of the week, and probably its most ludicrous: Trump in a DayGlo safety vest, demanding of reporters, “Do you like my garbage truck?” before the vehicle emblazoned with his campaign logo was driven in circles around a Wisconsin parking lot in an apparent attempt to show it would be its passenger “taking out the trash” on 5 November, and not his Democratic opponent.Other examples of Trump’s bitter disdain for those who stand up to him, as well as his flagrant misogyny, came to the fore as the week wore on.In Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night, addressing reproductive rights, he attempted to portray himself as a “protector” of women, despite dozens of claims of sexual assault against him, and a judge’s ruling adjudicating him a rapist.“Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them,” he said, drawing an instant rebuke from Harris.The vice-president, meanwhile, became Trump’s target in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing extremist and disgraced former Fox News host, in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday night. Harris, he insisted, was “a low-IQ individual”, and “dumb as a rock”, as he repeated previous slurs against his opponent.The biggest talking point from the Carlson interview, however, was Trump declaring the Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney a “radical war hawk” and saying he would like to see multiple guns pointed at her.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said of a politician who has campaigned with and for Harris. Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, said on Friday she was investigating the comments to see if they amounted to a death threat.In response to Trump, Cheney warned the public of the dangers of a dictatorship and said he “wants to be a tyrant”. Not for the first time this week, his representatives spent much of the day insisting to the media that Trump’s meaning was different from what he said.Trump’s post to his Truth Social network later in the day repeated the same criticisms of Cheney but, conspicuously, omitted any reference to weapons being pointed at her.Harris will make her own closing pitches over the weekend, but left no doubt about her position on Trump’s behavior as she addressed reporters in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday afternoon.“Anyone who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified and unqualified to be president,” she said.“Donald Trump is someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.” More

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      US election live: Harris says Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney ‘must be disqualifying’

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      Kamala Harris spoke of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney in which he suggested Cheney be shot with “guns trained on her face”.Harris said:
      “He has increased his violent rhetoric, Donald Trump has, about political opponents and in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former representative Liz Cheney. This must be disqualifying.”
      Hailing Cheney as a “courageous” and “incredible American”, Harris added:
      “I will tell you, I know Liz Cheney well enough to know that she is tough, she is incredibly courageous, and has shown herself to be a true patriot at a very difficult time in our country …
      We see this kind of rhetoric that is violent in nature, where we see this kind of spirit coming from Donald Trump that is so laden with the desire for revenge and retribution … I think that Liz Cheney is courageous and that we will always make sure that we are all fighting against and speaking out against any form of political violence.”
      Trump is now criticizing “Shawn Fain or whatever the hell his name is,” the president of the United Auto Workers, who is campaigning or Kamala Harris. The crowd boos.Trump says he can’t sleep easily and that he’s “always tossing and turning” thinking about China and the “Russia hoax” and how to make money for the American people.“I don’t feel like a senior. Does anybody feel like a senior?” Trump, 78, says, to some cheers. “I feel better – I think I’m sharper and better now than I was 25, 30 years ago. I do, I swear. I’ll let you know when I don’t.”Trump gives an update on sales of “Dark Maga” merchandise: Trump was talking about Elon Musk, and what role the billionaire will play in cutting government spending in a Trump administration. “You know where he is right now? He’s campaigning in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. How cool is that,” Trump said.At one rally, Musk appeared and wore a “Dark Maga” black hat, Trump said, that the Republican candidate hadn’t even been aware his campaign made. That hat hadn’t sold well, maybe two hats, Trump said, until Musk wore it. Then the campaign sales of those hats took off.“They sold 71,000 black hats, can you believe it?” Trump says. “You make money with money, that’s how it is.”“But now that very low-IQ person who wants to be – have we ever had a low-IQ president before?” Trump asks of Kamala Harris.“It’s like your high school football team playing … what’s a good team today … oh, the Detroit Lions,” Trump tells his Michigan audience. He tells them Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been able to figure out which local sports team to reference.In a post on Truth Social, Trump appeared to be trying to walk back his comments about how Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should face having rifles “shooting at her”.His comments yesterday have been widely condemned, including by Cheney and Kamala Harris, and are also under investigation by Arizona’s attorney general.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Liz Cheney at an event in Arizona. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”“We love everybody right?” Trump says. He drops his voice. “No, we don’t.”Then Trump launches into an attack on Kamala Harris’s message of unity, a central part of her approach.“What about her, she’s always talking about, ‘You know I want to bring the country together, Trump is Hitler, ah, excuse me I shouldn’t have said that,’” Trump says, in a voice imitating Harris.He goes on with the imitation. “‘We want to get together as a country,’ ‘They’re all racists, they’re all this, they’re all that, but we want to have peace, and we want to get along.’”Trump tells his supporters that “the fake news” won’t even report on the bad jobs numbers. If you’re curious how just how false that claim is, you can Google it:Trump is now discussing the underwhelming economic numbers for last month.“This is not good news for them,” he says, of Harris and the Democrats. “How would you like to have an election in four days?”Some experts agree with Trump on this one:“You know, there are those that say that if we don’t win this election you may never have another election in this country … with these radical left lunatics that we’re dealing with,” Trump says.As you recall, Trump himself actually sparked this conversation over whether there might not be elections in the future, because of what he said to Christian voters earlier this year:Trump is now talking about the 2020 Democratic primary, talking about how early Kamala Harris dropped out and revisiting his rude nicknames for various Democratic presidential candidates from the previous election cycle, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.“This will be America’s new golden age,” Trump pledges. “Every problem facing us can be solved, and it’s going to be solved quickly.”Abortion rights advocates are mourning the loss of Nevaeh Crain, an 18-year-old pregnant teenager from Texas who died in October 2023 after three emergency room visits as she sought care for intense abdominal pain.ProPublica’s reporting on Crain, who would have turned 20 today, underscored the potentially fatal threat posed by abortion bans, argued Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All.“Pregnancy should not be a death sentence. Nevaeh Crain should be here, celebrating her 20th birthday today,” Timmaraju said in a statement.Timmaraju placed the blame for abortion bans on the shoulders of Republican politicians like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the incumbent senator who is facing a tough re-election fight against Democrat Collin Allred in Texas.“This has to stop,” she said. “And our best chance to do that is to vote for reproductive freedom, from vice-president Harris to Colin Allred and all the way down the ticket, so we can restore the right to abortion and end these bans.”“It seems so poignant,” Trump says, of the question he keeps asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd roars: “No!”“We’re going to miss these rallies aren’t we?” Trump says onstage in Michigan, but promises his supporters that when he is back in the White House, the spirit of the rallies will continue in a different form.His supporters will someday look back and realize, “there was something very, very, special about what we all did together,” Trump says, speaking of his rallies. He also speculates about few people future presidential candidates will draw to their rallies.“This has been the thrill of a lifetime for me, and for you, and for everybody,” Trump says.The White House pool report has an amusing detail from Janesville for the punctuation nerds: Someone behind Harris on the stage was holding a “,la” sign (comma “la”), which is the proper pronunciation of her name. More