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      ‘We can win Florida’: Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff rallies for VP in red state

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      In terms of presidential elections at least, Florida has fallen a long way since its heady days as the ultimate swing state. Seven cycles on from the 537-vote cliffhanger in 2000 that was finally resolved when the US supreme court placed George Bush in the White House, Florida is so reliably red, and Donald Trump so confident of picking up its 30 electoral college votes, that he has barely campaigned here.For the same reason, the Sunshine state has not featured on Kamala Harris’s schedule either. So some eyebrows were raised when second gentleman Doug Emhoff, the vice-president’s husband, rolled up on Wednesday to rally Democrats in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, on a break from stumping in the battleground states of the north-east.Publicly, at least, Emhoff believes the state is still in play. “We can win Florida. We should win Florida!” he told a lively gathering of supporters at a Get Out the Early Vote rally at the OB Johnson Center in Hallandale Beach, a Fort Lauderdale suburb in the Democratic stronghold of Broward county.Polling would suggest otherwise: Trump leads Harris by about six points in the latest FiveThirtyEight.com average in a state he won handily in both 2016 and 2020.But even under the specter of a Florida defeat in the presidential contest, Democrats at the national and state levels see extra value in his visit because of a tighter US senate race in Florida between incumbent Republican Rick Scott and his Democratic challenger, former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.Much of the sparring in that contest has been over women’s healthcare rights, and especially Amendment 4, the ballot initiative that will overturn Florida’s draconian six-week abortion ban if approved by a 60% majority.It’s an issue that has caused outrage among advocates largely because of ultra-conservative Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts to interfere. He has been accused of sending law enforcement to the homes of people who signed a petition in support, illegally spending taxpayers’ money on TV ads opposing it, and threatening legal action against networks that broadcast ads supporting it.Emhoff, unsurprisingly, had thoughts. Attacking Trump as the architect of the downfall of Roe v Wade, he said: “Make no mistake, Donald Trump is no friend to women. He has proven himself to be a threat to women. Now he claims to be a friend to women. Would he protect you? Of course not. Trump is proud of it. He brags about stripping away Roe v Wade.”His comments prompted chants of: “Yes on 4!”Mucarsel-Powell was among the speakers and also addressed it. “I will protect healthcare and people with pre-existing conditions. I will stand for women, and children, to make sure we protect them against the attacks on their reproductive freedom,” she said.

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      Also on Emhoff’s agenda was gun violence, the economy and immigration, as well as the Republicans’ extremist Project 2025 agenda. He laid out how Harris would address these issues from the White House, and expressed disappointment that polling, less than two weeks from election day, showed a tightening race.“It shouldn’t be this close,” he said.Some had thought the back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton, that ravaged parts of Florida in recent weeks would be addressed. Harris had sparred with DeSantis over the storms, with the governor reportedly refusing to take her calls because, he said, they “seemed political”.But Emhoff did cover a number of other familiar recent Democratic talking points in his half-hour speech, including Trump’s reported admiration for Adolf Hitler’s military generals, which, as he pointed out, Harris addressed earlier Wednesday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We really need to listen to what Donald Trump is saying, what’s coming out of his mouth. We lived through it when he was president. Somehow we got through it. This time around, he poses an even greater threat – to the economy, to women, and our very lives,” he said.“We can’t look away from this. This is as real as it gets. This is right in front of our faces. He’s completely unfit, unhinged and un-American. We need to turn the page on this chapter of American history.”He also referred to Trump’s “weird” references to Arnold Palmer, and the size of his genitalia. “What is that?” Emhoff said.Following his address in Hallandale, Emhoff headed for a Wednesday night rally and fundraiser in Coral Gablers, Miami, close to where Trump spoke directly to Latino voters earlier this week. Both sides are desperately courting south Florida’s sizeable Hispanic community in the final stages of the race.Supporters speaking before the Hallandale Beach event welcomed Emhoff’s visit. Democratic voter Anthony Hill, of Lauderdale Lakes, said it showed Democrats had not given up on Florida.“Every weekend, the Trump supporters are out here on street corners with their flags. It gets depressing,” he said. “I don’t think Kamala is going to win here, but if we can win some of the down-ballot races we can show that we’re still alive.” More

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      Kamala Harris denounces Trump as ‘fascist’ who wants ‘unchecked power’

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      Kamala Harris has denounced Donald Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to himself after allegations emerged about the former president’s repeatedly-voiced admiration for Hitler.On Wednesday, the vice-president gave a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, doing so in the aftermath of reports that John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, recalled how Trump lamented not having generals who swore loyalty to him in the same manner as military commanders served Hitler in Nazi Germany.“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in,” Harris said.Harris said that the remarks relayed by Kelly showed that Trump “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States constitution”.“He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States,” she said.Posing the question as a stark choice for US voters going to the polls for the presidential election on 5 November, she added: “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be what do the American people want.”

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      Harris’s address came after she had spent more than a week highlighting Trump’s earlier branding of his political opponents as “the enemy within” and demands for the military to be deployed those who cause election “chaos”.In on-the-record taped conversations with the New York Times, Kelly – who was White House chief of staff for 18 months during Trump’s presidency – said his former boss repeatedly praised Hitler, even when contradicted, and fitted the dictionary definition of a fascist.“He commented more than once that: ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” said Kelly, who also said that Trump would rule as a dictator if elected again.Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, made similar remarks in an interview with the Atlantic.Referencing the various reporting, Harris said: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best.”She added: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, certainly falls into the general definition of fascists, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”It was the second time in a week that Harris had, in effect, labelled the Republican nominee a fascist. Last week, she answered affirmatively when a Detroit radio interviewer who asked if Trump’s vision amounted to fascism – although she did not utter the word directly.Trump’s spokesperson has denied Kelly’s claims that Trump said this, calling it “absolutely false”.Harris’s remarks on Wednesday were the clearest sign yet that she had changed tactics from a previous approach initially adopted after becoming her party’s nominee, when she and her surrogates attempted to play down and belittle Trump. In one example, by mocking his obsession with crowd sizes at his rallies.Theories abound as to what Harris could do to turn voters away from Trump’s appeal, which has centered on vows to lower prices that rose during Joe Biden’s presidency and throw immigrants out of the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an interview earlier today on CNN, the noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that the very sort of message Harris pushed this afternoon was not working.“What’s interesting is that [when] Harris focused on why she should be elected president, that’s when the numbers grew,” Luntz said.“And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused onto him and said, don’t vote for me, vote against him, that’s when everything froze.”Kelly’s characterisation of Trump as a fascist echoes that of Gen Mark Milley, the retired former chair of the armed services joint chiefs of staff. Milley, who Trump has said should be executed, is quoted by the journalist Bob Woodward in a recently published book as calling Trump “a total fascist” and “fascist to the core”.Later on Wednesday, it was reported that Harris told NBC News that she was preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump will declare victory before the election is complete, saying: “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that.”Also, at the White House daily media briefing, the press secretary. Karine Jean-Pierre, acknowledged that Biden agreed with those who say Trump is a fascist.“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre replied, when a reporter put the question to her in the White House briefing room. She went on to argue that Trump himself has made no secret of how he would like to govern, saying: “The former president has said he is going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that … we cannot ignore or forget what happened on January 6 2021.”Cecilia Nowell contributed reporting More

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      US warns Musk’s Super Pac $1m-a-day giveaways may be illegal, reports say

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      The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and the New York Times said. The justice department and Musk’s America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.South African-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House. More

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      No Labour wrongdoing in Kamala Harris campaign row, says ex-Tory minister

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      Labour did nothing wrong when party officials campaigned for Kamala Harris in the US election, a former Conservative minister has argued, after Downing Street faced fury from Donald Trump about the move.Robert Buckland, who has also campaigned for Harris due to his distaste for Trump, said it appeared that Labour activists who knocked on doors had volunteered and covered their own expenses, which would not be a breach of US laws on overseas involvement in elections.Trump’s campaign filed a legal complaint alleging that apparent efforts by Labour’s head of operations to organise volunteers amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”, and hit out at what it called Keir Starmer’s “far-left” party.After Starmer said he believed the row would not affect his relationship with Trump, Labour officials insisted that the party had no role in organising or funding staff who joined US campaigning efforts, and that such volunteering was by no means unusual.The Trump legal letter, sent to the US Federal Election Commission in Washington, also complained about what it called “strategic meetings” at August’s Democratic national convention in Chicago between Harris’s team and Morgan McSweeney, now the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s communications director.Labour officials said that the pair were at the event only as observers. The party paid for McSweeney to attend, and Doyle’s costs were covered by the Progressive Policy Institute thinktank.Buckland, a former justice secretary, who stepped down as an MP at the general election, said a since deleted LinkedIn post by Labour’s head of operations offering to arrange housing for 100 current and former party officials campaigning for the Democrats in swing states was “unfortunate”.However, he told the Guardian he did not see any sign of wrongdoing. “It doesn’t look like it to me,” he said. “If these individuals are going under their own steam, paying for their own flights and doing their own thing, and their accommodation is either they’re staying with friends or they’re paying for it, there’s not a problem. But they’ve played into the Trump-Vance campaign hands, and that press release was the sort of politicking that you’re going to see this close to an election.”Starmer, speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, said such volunteering had happened at “pretty much every [US] election”. He said: “They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.”Asked if it risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, Starmer said: “No. I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him, and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did.”There was some muted criticism of the government from the Conservatives, although Oliver Dowden, the party’s deputy leader, did not raise it with Angela Rayner when she filled in for the absent Starmer at prime minister’s questions.John Lamont, the shadow Scotland secretary, told BBC Radio 4 that Labour had created a “diplomatic car crash” that risked undermining relations with Trump.Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, told GB News that the LinkedIn post seemed to show a “very clear breach of American electoral law” and he did not believe the Labour staffers had covered their own costs.Farage attended the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July. His entry in the MPs’ register of interests says the near £33,000 costs for him and a staffer were paid for by a Thai-based British businessman, Christopher Harborne. Farage listed the purpose of the trip as “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton [his constituency] on the world stage”.The former prime minister Liz Truss also attended the event, although by then she was no longer an MP.One Labour MP, Ruth Cadbury, used a holiday in September to campaign for Harris in New Hampshire, while no sitting Conservatives are known to have volunteered in the same way. Almost none have publicly endorsed Trump.Buckland said this did not surprise him, calling Trump “not a Republican”. He said: “I think most Conservatives would identify themselves with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower and George HW Bush, and even George W Bush, not this character.” More

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      The word ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning. And Trump is using that to his advantage | Emma Brockes

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      I remember when “fascist” became a word we all used, right around the time we first learned what it meant in adolescence. It had the kerb appeal of a swearword without the rudeness to get you into trouble, and you could spit it – really put your shoulder into the “f” at the front and the digraph in the middle. There was something satisfying about the word “fascist”, which was, back then, the apex, the very fanciest of insults. You thought I was being mean in a trivial, localised way, when in fact I was offering a structural analysis of your political ideology (plus your horrible personality and disastrous side-parting).Most of us aged out of that phase when everyone and everything that opposed us was fascist. Still, aspects of the pleasures embedded in the word survived its wear and tear so that decades later, there is still a vague frisson, partly nostalgic, lighting up its outer fringes. Among adults, “fascist” tends to be used in a lightly ironised form, often in the context of a customer service dispute or fight with petty officialdom. Analogising the man at T-Mobile with the Nazis delivers some of the old sniggering satisfaction and for a long time this was fine, but now we have run into an obvious problem. The flippancy and babyishness of how we use “fascist” is making it hard, if not impossible, to recharge its meaning.All of which brings us to Donald Trump, or rather to the last-minute scramble, like the mobilisation of linguistic fighter jets, to get “fascist” off the runway and back up in the air. “Weird” was good for a while, but with the polls this close, just two weeks away from the US presidential election, clearly it wasn’t enough. And so now we see a pivot to something that feels simultaneously more serious and much sillier. From multidirections and across multiplatforms there is a push among opponents of Trump to slap the electorate in the face – Come on! Wake up! – with a word the Harris team must be physically having to restrain themselves from prefacing with “literally”. It’s not their fault but still, that is the vibe: oh my God, he is literally a fascist.Addressing a crowd in Pennsylvania last week, Kamala Harris quoted Gen Mark Milley, “Donald Trump’s top general”, who, she said, “has called Trump, and I quote, ‘fascist to the core’”. She also repeated Milley’s assertion that “no one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump”. In the Atlantic, Trump was compared in a headline to “Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.” And this week, the New York Times ran a front page interview with John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who during the encounter, incredibly, read out the definition of the word “fascist” he had found online, and confirmed that in his view Trump fit the bill.Trump has been called a fascist by commentators before, obviously, but it has rarely come from the very top – though in 2022, Joe Biden called Trump’s philosophy “semi-fascism”, a doomed effort to put some nuance back in the term – and this time they seem to really mean it. And when it is used for Trump, the word has tended to be batted easily back to the Democrats as a piece of hysteria, not least by Elon Musk, for whom “fascist” has a non-hysterical meaning only when he is using it to describe, for example, efforts by the county sheriff’s office to shut down Tesla production during the pandemic.This time, Trump’s allies have made a show of taking the accusation vaguely seriously. At the weekend the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch-owned title which, despite its coy insistence that it hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate “since 1928”, is staunchly supportive of Trump and his mission, decided to grapple with the F-word once and for all. Trump had swung by the Journal’s offices to be interviewed by the paper’s editorial board, a moment that, when it’s time to look back on all this, might serve as the point at which another dusty old word – appeasement – was fully re-animated.“If you were to reach the presidency again, would you of course rule out using the military to move against your enemies?” asked the Journal’s columnist Peggy Noonan with excellent witness-leading local-paper energy. “That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you – is that correct?”Despite the fact Noonan’s elbow was buried in Trump’s ribs and she was practically doing Marx brothers’ eyebrows at him, it took Trump a moment and several digressions to catch on to what it was Noonan was after. “Of course I wouldn’t,” he said, whereupon the paper in effect folded its arms and threw a look at the Democrats. Two days later, the Journal ran an editorial in which it asked rhetorically: “Are tens of millions of Americans really falling for a fascist takeover?” It then suggested that Trump is not a “unique threat to democracy” because, in fact, it is the Democrats who have broken “all sorts of political norms to defeat him”. See? I’m not a fascist, you’re a fascist. Fascist fascist fascist. And just like that, the meaning went up in smoke.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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      The Guardian view on the US presidential election 2024: a Democratic government is the one we need

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      The mood may be one of despair. But this election is critical to the country’s future? The best hope lies with Kamala. Only her government can shape the future we want to see
      It is hard to imagine a worse candidate for the American presidency in 2024 than Donald J Trump. His history of dishonesty, hypocrisy and greed makes him wholly unfit for the office. A second Trump term would erode the rule of law, diminish America’s global standing and deepen racial and cultural divides. Even if he loses, Mr Trump has shown that he will undermine the election process, with allies spreading unfounded conspiracy theories to delegitimise the results.There are prominent Republicans – such as the former vice-president Dick Cheney – who refused to support Mr Trump owing to the threat he poses. Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Mr Trump, calls his former boss a “fascist”. America was founded in opposition to absolute monarchy. The Republican nominee models himself after the leader he most admires: Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin.Mr Trump’s authoritarianism may finish US democracy. He has praised and promised to pardon those convicted in the January 6 insurrection. He has suggested bypassing legal norms to use potentially violent methods of repression, blurring the lines between vigilantism, law enforcement and military action, against groups – be they Democrats or undocumented immigrants – he views as enemies.His team has tried to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its extreme proposals – such as mass firings of civil servants and erasing women’s rights – that poll poorly. But it is likely that, in office, Mr Trump would adopt many of these intolerant, patriarchal and discriminatory plans. He aims to dismantle the government to enrich himself and evade the law. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, House and White House, he would interpret it as a mandate to silence his critics and entrench his power.Mr Trump is a transactional and corrupting politician. His supporters see this as an advantage. Christian nationalists want an authoritarian regime to enforce religious edicts on Americans. Elon Musk wants to shape the future without regulatory oversight. Both put self-interest ahead of the American people. Democracy erodes slowly at first, then all at once. In office, Mr Trump appointed three supreme court justices, who this summer blocked efforts to hold him accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election: their immunity ruling renders the president “a king above the law”, in the words of the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor.A historic presidentSince Kamala Harris stepped into the spotlight following Joe Biden’s exit, her campaign has been a masterclass in political jujitsu, deftly flipping Mr Trump’s perceived strengths into glaring weaknesses. With a focus on joy, the vice-president sharply contrasted with Mr Trump’s grim narrative of US decline. In their sole televised debate, Ms Harris skillfully outmaneuvered Mr Trump, who fell into her traps, appearing angry and incoherent. She is confident and composed. He sounds unhinged.The Trump agenda threatens to dismantle voting rights, women’s rights and minority rights – not just reversing decades of social progress but burying it. Mr Trump was behind the shredding of reproductive rights. The conservative forces rallying to him are now intent on imposing a national abortion ban, with – should he win – dire implications for IVF and birth control. Republicans have been hurt in the polls by being associated with such unpopular policies – a weak spot that Ms Harris should keep exploiting.The vice-president has energised Democrats with savvy media appearances while appealing to swing voters. Progressives, determined to defeat Mr Trump, remain committed to freedom and equality. But Ms Harris has disappointed those who have urged her to take a stand on US complicity in Israel’s bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Downplaying war crimes, as arms flow to Israel, has already harmed Democratic chances in key swing states like Michigan.In a political system where style often rivals substance, perception is crucial. While Ms Harris hasn’t made her race and gender central to her campaign, her victory would be historic: she would be the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be president. Symbolism matters to her base. Her candidacy rallied key constituencies – the young, women, African Americans and Hispanics – who were cooling on Mr Biden. This election is a leap of faith in Ms Harris, who offers a sense of possibility for the future, while Mr Trump clings to a reactionary past.Protecting democracyDespite his criminal conviction and being declared a rapist by a judge, Mr Trump remains dangerously close to reclaiming the presidency. Many voters still back a man who was the worst US president ever. But probably not a majority of US voters. Republicans benefit from a skewed electoral system: Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one election since 1992, and secured the overall popular majority for the Senate in every six-year cycle since 1996. Yet the country has often been led by Republican presidents and a GOP-controlled Senate, and therefore a Republican-dominated supreme court. In a close race in November, that could mean Mr Trump doesn’t need to win the election – just a court case.Mr Biden has been a transformational political figure, but he didn’t transform the country. He aimed to tackle inequality, broken public services and the climate crisis with a $4tn plan funded by taxing the rich. His goal was to restore his party’s political credibility by marrying social liberalism with economic justice. But corporate influence and the Democrats’ slim Senate majority shrank his ambitions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shifted his focus to national security, as America experienced rising prices. However, Mr Biden made historic investments to green the economy and refocused industrial policy to take on China. Ms Harris’s plans aim to recapture the spirit of Mr Biden’s insurgency.The US economy is stronger than it has been in decades, yet Mr Trump consistently outpolls Ms Harris on economic issues. This perhaps reflects decades of neoliberalism. Real wages for blue-collar workers have stagnated since the 1970s, while inflation-adjusted house prices have doubled. Polls show 70% of Americans feel significant political and economic reform is needed, putting Democrats at a disadvantage as they are linked to the status quo.Political hope fades when we settle for what is, instead of fighting for what could be. Ms Harris embodies the conviction that it’s better to believe in democracy’s potential than to surrender to its imperfections. The Republican agenda is clear: voter suppression, book bans and tax cuts for billionaires. Democrats seek global engagement; the GOP favours isolation. The Biden-Harris administration laid the groundwork for a net zero America. A Trumpian comeback would undo it. A Harris win, with a Democratic Congress, means a chance to restore good governance, create good jobs and lead the entire planet’s climate efforts. Defeating Mr Trump protects democracy from oligarchy and dictatorship. There is too much at stake not to back Ms Harris for president. More

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      Trump’s proposal for mass deportation of immigrants is a moral abomination | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know any better, you might think, from recent media coverage, that the problem with Donald Trump’s proposal to round up and expel as many as 20 million immigrants is that it’s not likely to work.The Republican presidential nominee has made the mass deportation pledge central to his case for a second term. On the campaign trail, he diverts every question, no matter what the issue, back to the supposed danger and malignancy of immigrants and the urgency of getting rid of them. The economy? It will be better when there are fewer immigrants competing for jobs, he says. Housing prices? They’ll come down when millions of people are kicked out of the country, he claims. Crime will come down when the immigrants are gone, he says, because murder is “in their genes”.The vision he is offering is profoundly racist: Trump’s proposal, which is not limited to undocumented immigrants, is based on the assumption that nonwhite people are the cause of all of the US’s problems, and that everything that is wrong will be made right as soon as they’re gone. His proposed solution to everything – from crime to housing costs to inflation – is to deploy the armed forces to literally round up our friends, family members and neighbors by the millions, in a vast program of ethnic cleansing.It is a terrifying, horrifically immoral, and contemptibly bigoted proposal; racist, indifferent to humanity, and hostile to the principles of pluralism and equality. If it was enacted, it would be among the worst human rights catastrophes of all time. It would destroy families and lives, tear communities apart, inculcate ethnic hatred and distrust. To be accomplished, it would also practically require tremendous amounts of violence and force. Some of those marked for forced removal would hide, and some of their friends would turn them in. Worksites and immigrant neighborhoods would be raided, as cops flooded in and innocent people scattered. Mothers and fathers would be ripped from the arms of their screaming children. There is no other way to accomplish what Trump wants to accomplish: what he is proposing would require atrocity.For him, this may in fact be the point. At the Republican national convention last summer, the crowd in Milwaukee smiled as they held signs aloft reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW”. Trump’s appeal has always been this vision of a future that, through violence, can be made to look more like what these people imagine of the United States’ past – namely, one with many fewer people of color in it.But what is strange about the coverage of Trump’s mass deportation plan is how little its moral perversity has factored into coverage, either by the media or in the attacks lobbed at it by Democrats.CBS and NBC, for their part, seem to have determined that Trump’s pivot to calling for a gigantic scale ethnic cleansing operation is not in itself newsworthy. Instead, they have run stories pointing out that the plan would be expensive and logistically difficult, with the federal enforcement agencies requiring an estimated $216bn in funding to deport the US’s roughly 11 million undocumented people over the next four years. (Ice, they note, received a comparatively paltry $9bn last year.)Construction, agriculture, real estate development business leaders, they note, are skeptical at the idea, noting how much of their own labor force is composed of immigrants: they claim, probably correctly, that the move would lead to large increases in housing and food costs. And economists worry that the broader impact on the economy could be devastating: one economic thinktank found that deporting 1.3 million immigrants would reduce jobs for native-born workers, increasing unemployment by 0.8%.For their part, the Harris campaign has largely taken this line on the issue, preferring to focus on Trump’s mass deportation plan not as a moral horror but as an irresponsible economic move. This is the line taken by Harris campaign surrogate and billionaire Mark Cuban, who has made the threats to the labor force posed by Trump’s plan a key part of his pitch to Harris-skeptical small business owners in swing states.This all may be true enough. It is likely that a mass deportation effort would not only strain the resources of the federal government, but also gut the US private sector labor force, not to mention the disruptions it would cause to productivity when, say, an underslept mother is slow or weepy at her shift because the father of her children was taken from their home by goons. It is likely, too, that the number of jobs created by the mass deportation scheme – the cops and thugs who will be needed to round up the immigrants, the lawyers and judges who will be needed to shove them through the court system, the chefs and guards and drivers who will be needed to feed and transport and monitor them inside the internment camps that such a project will inevitably require – will likely not provide enough jobs to offset the lost tax revenue.But there is something morally depraved about talking about Trump’s plan in these terms. The cost of mass deportation cannot be measured only in whether it will be beneficial or detrimental to the pocketbooks of native-born Americans: doing so supposes both that only those born in the US are worthy of concern, and also that the only thing we have to lose is money. What is being proposed is a vast cruelty, a human tragedy, and a costly national investment in racism. That we are speaking of this proposal in primarily economic terms, rather than moral ones, suggests that the cost to the US has already been quite high.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck. This is a five-alarm fire | Robert Reich

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      With two weeks to go before election day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are essentially tied.Neither candidate is ahead by even a single point in the New York Times’s polling average of five critical battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.How is this possible? Even if polls were systematically off and Harris were ahead of Trump by, say, 5%, I’d still be appalled that so many Americans in swing states were supporting Trump.I’ve spent most of my life fighting bullies, from the grade-school bullies who teased and threatened and occasionally pummeled me, to the white supremacists of the 1960s who murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner when he was trying to register Black voters in Mississippi.I’ve protested Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war and worked to get Richard Nixon – whose henchmen broke into the Watergate complex and who then tried to cover up his illegal acts – impeached.I watched Ronald Reagan bully Americans into accepting the cruel hoax of “trickle-down” economics and legitimize corporate bashing of labor unions.I witnessed George W Bush insist on invading Iraq based on a lie that Iraq contained “weapons of mass destruction”, invading Afghanistan because it contained terrorists, and establishing a gulag of torture chambers across the world.When I was US secretary of labor, I fought Republican bullies who wanted to make it easier for CEOs and their major investors to become richer by shafting their workers. Later, I fought Wall Street bullies who gambled away other people’s money and then, when their bets turned bad, got bailed out by taxpayers.But in all my years, I have never come across a bully more squalid than Donald Trump.He is the bully of all bullies. He emits dangerous lies like most people breathe.He has demeaned and degraded our system of self-government, attempted a coup against the United States, divided Americans with venomous bigotry, and rewarded his rich backers with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.Trump created a supreme court that took away women’s rights over their own bodies and immunized presidents from criminal liability.In recent weeks, he has become even more untethered from reality, more unhinged, even less coherent.He says that if he gets back in power he will wreak vengeance on his political opponents – including many loyal Americans who have stood up to him – calling them the “enemy within” and openly threatening to use the US military against them.He says he wants to cleanse America of “scum” and “vermin”, including refugees, immigrants, and Democratic officials like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.He is threatening to strip television networks of their ability to broadcast news because of coverage he doesn’t like.On Sunday, he said he had subpoenaed the records of CBS, claiming that the network’s edit of Harris’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes was misleading.He refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. This means America will likely suffer weeks or months of litigation following election day, perhaps even accompanied by violence.I felt hopeful in late July, when Joe Biden selflessly bowed out of the election and passed the baton to his vice-president, Kamala Harris.And even more hopeful as Harris has proven herself a tough, exuberant, powerful campaigner and force for positive change. Her debate performance against Trump was the best I’ve ever seen.But at this moment, I’m frankly worried. How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?I don’t believe it’s all due to misogyny and racism. Surely, gender and race continue to play a large part in our politics, but they alone cannot explain what is happening.Nor do I think it’s because of our collective amnesia about the chaos Trump wrought during his presidency. Most of us recall how horrific it was, including a pandemic that for months he refused to acknowledge or act on.Part of the reason may be that we want to normalize our politics and pretend that this election is like any other, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.To accept the reality of who Trump is and what he aims to do is simply too frightening.Part of it also may be that many Americans would prefer blowing up the system as a whole – destroying democracy and our institutions of self-government – than settle for gradual change because they feel the system is hopelessly rigged against them.Beyond these possible explanations lie specific people who are also responsible for bringing us to the brink of this disaster.High on my list is Rupert Murdoch – whose Fox News, New York Post and editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have amplified Trump’s lies, spreading them repeatedly to tens of millions of Americans.There’s also Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, whose X platform, formerly known as Twitter, has become a font of disinformation, incendiary conspiracy theories, pro-Trump garbage and hateful lies about Harris.Musk continues to claim, for example, that Democrats are flying huge numbers of undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote illegally. One such post got 34m views.Musk’s pro-Trump Super Pac has hired an estimated 400 staffers in the seven key battleground states and a platoon of Republican party operatives.The New York Times reports that Trump and Musk are speaking directly multiple times a week. That’s a likely violation of campaign finance laws barring coordination between candidates and Super Pacs.Trump’s other major financial backers include a cavalcade of billionaires – notably Miriam Adelson (wife of deceased casino magnate Sheldon Adelson), Liz and Dick Uihlein (owners of packaging-materials company Uline), and Timothy Mellon (scion of the Gilded Age baron Andrew Mellon).Another contributing reason Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris is the silence of respected business leaders.Heading the list is Jamie Dimon, CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, who calls himself “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan” and who regularly speaks out about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America.A lifelong Democrat, Dimon is considered the “spokesman” of American business.Yet when it comes to denouncing the biggest threat to American democracy since the civil war, Dimon’s silence has been deafening.Who else is responsible? I wouldn’t be surprised if Vladimir Putin were again seeding the election with hackers and bots favoring Trump, as Putin did in 2016.At this juncture – two weeks from election day, with the race virtually tied in battleground states – none of us who cares about the future of this country can any longer afford to be a mere spectator.This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. A five-alarm fire. A category 5 hurricane.Do whatever you can.

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