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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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      Kamala Harris to hold town hall with undecided voters after Donald Trump rejects second debate offer – US politics live

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      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.
      Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city:
      It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”
      Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020:
      Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”
      He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying:
      You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”
      Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.The letter, which was sent to the US Federal Election Commission, said that these volunteering efforts and reports of contact between Labour and the Harris campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.A statement on DonaldJTrump.com on Tuesday night claimed that the “far-left” Labour party has “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.In response Starmer insisted he had a “good relationship” with Trump which would not be jeopardised by the complaint.The prime minister said that party officials volunteering for Harris ahead of the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time” rather than in their capacity working for Labour.Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Starmer said:
      The Labour party … volunteers, have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.
      That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”
      Asked if the complaint risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, the UK prime minister 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, and we’re grateful for him for making the time.”
      We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president in their elections which are very close now.”
      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population. More

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      ‘There’s vomit on my sweater already!’ Barack Obama raps Eminem’s Lose Yourself at Detroit rally

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      Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city: “It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020. “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”He also made reference to Trump’s stunt earlier this week, where he worked in a McDonald’s kitchen and drive-thru counter that was closed to the public. Harris, he said, “worked at McDonald’s when in college to pay her expenses. She did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed.”Tim Walz, also speaking at the rally, decried the stunt as “cosplaying … Fake orders for fake customers”. He also appealed to freedom of speech, saying Trump was “talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.” More

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      Starmer insists he can have a ‘good relationship’ with Trump despite election ‘interference’ claim

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      Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.The letter, which was sent to the US Federal Election Commission, said that these volunteering efforts and reports of contact between Labour and the Harris campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.A statement on DonaldJTrump.com on Tuesday night claimed that the “far-left” Labour party has “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.In response Starmer insisted he had a “good relationship” with Trump which would not be jeopardised by the complaint.The prime minister said that party officials volunteering for Harris ahead of the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time” rather than in their capacity working for Labour.Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Starmer said: “The Labour party … volunteers, have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.“That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”Asked if the complaint risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, the prime minister 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, and we’re grateful for him for making the time.”“We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president in their elections which are very close now.”The complaint cited a now-deleted LinkedIn post by Labour’s head of operations, which said almost 100 current and former party officials were travelling to the US to campaign for the Democrats in swing states including North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The post added that there were 10 spots still available and promised that “we will sort your housing”.The letter, sent by Trump campaign lawyer Gary Lawkowski, mentioned newspaper reports of contact between senior Labour advisers and the Harris campaign and called for an immediate investigation.It drew a comparison to a programme in 2016 in which the Australian Labor party (ALP) sent delegates to help Bernie Sanders’ campaign. In that instance the US Federal Election Commission fined the ALP, which paid for its delegates’ flights and gave them daily stipends, and the Sanders campaign $14,500 each.Labour has said that activists’ trips are not organised or funded by the party and that any officials who campaign in the US election are volunteers who do so in their own time.Starmer met Trump during a trip to New York in September and visited Trump Tower for talks ahead of the US election. Trump heaped praise on Starmer ahead of their meeting, saying he was a “very nice” man who “ran a great race” in the UK election and was “very popular”.The Trump campaign’s complaint said: “When representatives of the British government previously sought to go door-to-door in America, it did not end well for them. This past week marked the 243 anniversary of the surrender of British forces at the Battle of Yorktown, a military victory that ensured that the United States would be politically independent of Great Britian [sic].”“It appears that the Labour party and the Harris for President campaign have forgotten the message.” More

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      US presidential election briefing: Trump fits the ‘definition of fascist’, says former chief of staff John Kelly

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      Two weeks out from election day, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff has claimed his one-time boss “falls into the general definition of fascist”.John Kelly, a former Marine general and presidential aide from 2017 to 2019, made the extraordinary intervention on Tuesday in a series of coordinated interviews. Speaking to the New York Times, he said the former Republican president “prefers the dictator approach to government” and is the “only president that has all but rejected what America is all about”. Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Times that Kelly’s accounts were “debunked stories” and that Kelly had “beclowned” himself.Speaking to the Atlantic, Kelly recounted Trump saying he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Nazi generals showed Adolf Hitler. Trump’s campaign denied the exchange, with an adviser telling CNN: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz said the reported comments about Hitler’s generals “makes me sick as hell”. “Folks, the guardrails are gone,” Walz told a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “Trump is descending into this madness.”Here’s what else happened on Tuesday:Kamala Harris campaign updates

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      Eminem introduced Obama at a rally in Detroit later on Tuesday, where the Democratic powerhouse began his remarks with the opening lines of the rapper’s hit track Lose Yourself. Bruce Springsteen will headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state, the Harris campaign confirmed.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.
      Donald Trump campaign updates

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      The Republican campaign filed an extraordinary complaint claiming the UK Labour party is interfering in the presidential election by recruiting and sending party members to campaign for Harris. It is understood that volunteers are campaigning in the US in their own personal time, rather in their capacity working for the Labour party.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the International Monetary Fund said in forecast. While not mentioning Trump by name, the IMF estimates that a shift towards “undesirable” industrial and trade policies could reduce global GDP by 0.5 percentage points in 2026.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.
      Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Presidential poll tracker

      Harris and Trump policies

      What to know about early voting More

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      Obama and Walz excoriate Trump at Wisconsin rally in early voting push

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      On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”Both were speaking at a rally in Madison, a growing Democratic party stronghold, to encourage early voting and warn of the perils of a second Trump presidency. Obama went on to campaign for Kamala Harris in Detroit on Tuesday evening, alongside rapper Eminem, in an effort to drum up support in Michigan where polls suggest Harris and Trump are in a virtual deadlock.The Democratic vice-presidential candidate ripped into Trump ally and Silicon Valley billionaire Musk, warning that he could be charged with regulating his own businesses if Trump were elected. Musk has also promised the chance to win $1m to voters in swing states who sign a petition linked to efforts to return Trump to power.Walz also slammed Trump, who this week served meals at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, accusing him of “cosplaying” as a working-class person and noting that the restaurant had closed to accommodate the presidential candidate. “It was a stunt,” said Walz. “Fake orders for fake customers.”“He is not the 2016 Donald Trump,” said Walz, describing Trump’s promise to prosecute his political enemies. “He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.”Obama, who won in Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012, urged his Madison audience to get to the polls and spent much of his speech attacking Trump.“I wouldn’t be offended if you just walk out right now and go vote,” he said.“When he’s not complaining, he’s trying to sell you stuff,” he added, referring to Trump, who has raised funds by selling gold-colored sneakers, bibles and $100,000 watches. “Who does that? You’re running for president, and you’re hawking merchandise.”He compared Trump’s meandering rhetorical style with that of Fidel Castro, the former Cuban head of state who was known to deliver hours-long speeches.“He calls himself the father of IVF. I have no idea what that means – you don’t either,” said Obama, casting Trump’s rambling speeches and sometimes confounding remarks as a sign of mental deterioration.“You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”Obama also acknowledged that while his signature healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, did not fix American healthcare, its passage meant people with pre-existing conditions are more able to access health insurance.He spoke about efforts by his administration to implement a pandemic-preparedness plan and accused Trump of abandoning the effort, resulting in more Covid-19 deaths.“Most of you know somebody whose life was touched,” said Obama, urging voters who are fed up with politics to participate in the November election anyway.Before Walz and Obama spoke, Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Representative Mark Pocan, Governor Tony Evers and Senator Tammy Baldwin – herself up for re-election on 5 November – encouraged voters to return their absentee ballots or vote absentee in person.“Don’t take the risk of forgetting to vote– vote early,” said Pocan. “With the Packers game on the Sunday afternoon before the election, you can have a two-day hangover and not worry about missing the vote.”More than 18 million people in the US have voted early so far in the 2024 election, with a little more than 326,000 of those coming from Wisconsin as of 21 October, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Those numbers will increase dramatically now that Wisconsin’s early voting period has begun.Since the 2020 election, when Trump cast doubts on the integrity of absentee voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic, early voting has been a source of consternation in the Republican party. After Trump lost the 2020 election and Republicans failed to generate a red wave during the 2022 midterm elections, GOP leaders have sought to encourage their base to cast ballots before election day.Trump, who discouraged absentee voting before the 2020 election, has struggled to stay on message about early voting, alternately urging supporters to vote early and casting aspersions on the voting method – sometimes during the same speech.With polls showing Harris and Trump in a dead heat across the swing states, including Wisconsin, the last-minute push to turn out voters could determine the outcome of the election. In 2020, Joe Biden won in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes; in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin with a similarly slim majority. With 10 votes in the electoral college, Wisconsin will play a critical role in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from Sauk county, Wisconsin, who attended the rally on Tuesday, said the pressure of Wisconsin’s close margins and the extra time afforded by retirement drove them to volunteer for the Harris campaign.“I’m definitely nervous,” said Deb Merritt, who said knocking on doors in the bellwether county – Sauk county voters have aligned with the winner repeatedly in presidential elections – was gratifying.“We saw a few [undecided voters], mostly leaning Democrat,” said Rod Merritt. “Some people would say: ‘I’m voting for Kamala and my husband was for Trump, but he’s not going to vote.”In both 2016 and 2020, Trump performed better in Wisconsin than polling suggested.“We don’t know if that’s going to happen again this time, or which direction it’ll be or how big the error will be, but we have to expect that we need to overshoot to be able to win by a hair,” Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic party chair, told the Guardian. “For anyone who’s knocking on doors, if you think for a second you’ve got it in the bag, then go and sign up for another volunteer shift to drive it even higher.”In Detroit, an energetic Obama performed part of an Eminem rap when he took the stage and then praised Harris as “a leader who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice, need a champion – somebody who was raised in the middle class”. Reviving earlier jabs against Trump, he noted Harris “did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed”, but actually held a fast-food job in college to help with her expenses.For his Michigan audience, Obama recounted the chaos Trump helped cause in the state after the 2020 election: “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing.” More

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      The US is ‘absolutely’ ready for a female president, Harris says in NBC interview

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      Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More