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      Harris vows to make US tax code ‘more fair’ in New Hampshire speech – live

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      Kamala Harris says she will make the US tax code “more fair” while also prioritizing investment and innovation.“Billionaires and big corporations must pay their fair share in taxes,” she tells her supporters. “That’s why I support a billionaire minimum tax and corporations paying their fair share.”She says that while her administration will ensure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, it will also tax capital gains “at a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses”.
      If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan. Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad based economic growth, and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.
      Kamala Harris’ campaign has accepted rules for the upcoming debate with Donald Trump.The rules for the 10 September meeting of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will include muting microphones, a source told Reuters.The campaigns had disagreed over whether microphones should be shut off when it isn’t a candidate’s turn to speak. Harris’ campaign had previously advocated for live microphones, arguing that it would “fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates”.Here’s footage of Kamala Harris’s remarks on the Georgia school shooting from earlier today:Tim Walz and the Harris campaign have trolled JD Vance over the GOP vice-presidential nominee’s awkward encounter at a doughnut shop:The Democratic vice-presidential candidate said: “Look at me, I have no problem picking out donuts.”The remark is a reference to Vance’s recent visit to a doughnut shop during which the GOP candidate stumbled while ordering, saying he’d get “whatever makes sense”.Tina Smith, a US senator from Minnesota, has also weighed in:Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will travel to Ground Zero in New York to commemorate the September 11 attacks, the White House has just announced.The president and vice-president will also visit the Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, officials said in a press release. Donald Trump is also reportedly considering a stop at the 9/11 memorial in New York on the anniversary, according to the New York Times.A Republican-led House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz to say it had been investigating the Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.The Harris campaign has not said whether Kamala Harris supports requiring automakers to build only electric or hydrogen vehicles by 2035 – a position that she held during her 2020 presidential campaign.According to Axios, the Harris campaign has sent contradictory signals about her position on a mandate for automakers, a key issue in pivotal battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where many autoworkers are based. The report says:
      In a lengthy ‘fact-check’ email last week that covered several issues, a campaign spokesperson included a line saying that Harris ‘does not support an electric vehicle mandate’ – suggesting she changed her previous position, without elaborating.
      When asked to clarify Harris’s position, the campaign declined to comment, according to the report.The Trump campaign said it raised $130m in August, ending the month with $295m cash on hand.The fundraising was slightly lower in August when compared with the previous month; the Trump campaign said it raised $138.7m in July and had a cash-on-hand total of $327m at the end of July.When Kamala Harris mentioned Donald Trump during her campaign speech in New Hampshire, a member of the audience shouted “Lock him up”.Harris responded by saying that “the courts will handle that and we’ll handle November”.Kamala Harris says she will make the US tax code “more fair” while also prioritizing investment and innovation.“Billionaires and big corporations must pay their fair share in taxes,” she tells her supporters. “That’s why I support a billionaire minimum tax and corporations paying their fair share.”She says that while her administration will ensure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, it will also tax capital gains “at a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses”.
      If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan. Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad based economic growth, and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.
      Kamala Harris says she will also invest in small businesses and innovators throughout America, noting that “talent exists everywhere in our country” but that not everyone has access to the financing, venture capital or expert advice.She says that if elected, her administration will expand access to venture capital, support innovation hubs and business incubators, and increase federal contracts with small businesses. Small businesses in rural communities will be a particular focus, she says.Kamala Harris says she will also help existing small businesses to grow, by providing low- and no-interest loans to small businesses that want to expand.She also pledges to “cut the red tape that can make starting and growing a small business more difficult than it needs to be”.For example, Harris says she will make it cheaper and easier for small businesses to file their taxes.
      Let’s just take away some of the bureaucracy in the process to make it easier for people to actually do something that’s going to benefit our entire economy.
      Kamala Harris moves on to talking about what she calls an “opportunity economy”, which she envisions is a one “where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed”.She says America’s small businesses are an “essential foundation to our entire economy” and that she wants to see 25m new small business applications by the end of her first term, if she is elected.To help achieve this, Harris says she will lower the cost of starting a new business. It costs about $40,000 to start a new business, she says, and the current tax deduction for a startup is just $5,000.Harris proposes to expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000, which she says is essentially “a tax cut for starting a small business”.Kamala Harris, speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, begins her remarks by talking about the high school shooting in Georgia.“We’re still gathering information about what happened, but we know that there were multiple fatalities and injuries,” Harris told her supporters. “Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families.”She said Wednesday’s shooting is “a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies”, adding that it is “outrageous” that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether they will come home alive.
      It’s senseless. It is. We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.
      Kamala Harris has just taken to the stage at a campaign event outside a brewery in New Hampshire, where she is reportedly expected to announce her economic plans including a smaller increase in taxes on capital gains.Harris is speaking from behind bulletproof glass enclosure, after the Secret Service added protective measures for outdoor campaign events in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July. More

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      Republican-led House panel subpoenas Tim Walz over $250m Covid relief fraud

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      A Republican-led US House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The US House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, to say it had been investigating the US Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.Walz’s increased prominence in national politics has brought fresh scrutiny of his role as Minnesota’s top executive and whether the state education department, which is under his purview, should have caught the fraud.The committee’s Republican chairwoman, Virginia Foxx, wrote to Walz: “You are well aware of the multimillion-dollar fraud that has occurred under your tenure as governor.”A spokesperson for Walz said the Feeding our Future case was “an appalling abuse of a federal Covid-era program”.“The state department of education worked diligently to stop the fraud and we’re grateful to the FBI for working with the Department of Education to arrest and charge the individuals involved,” the spokesperson said.Walz has previously defended the department but acknowledged there were improvements to be made in oversight, after a state audit found the department’s lacking oversight “created opportunities for fraud”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should’ve,” Walz said after the audit report.Foxx claimed the committee had made voluntary requests to Minnesota’s education department for documents but “has been unable to obtain substantive responsive materials”.Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      ‘We captured magic’: the telenovelas reaching Latino voters in swing states

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      “Una chingona always knows when to use her own voice.”So begins the first installment of a telenovela geared toward young Latina voters. Chingonas, which means empowered women in Mexican Spanish, are the target audience for the non-profit Poder NC Action – a Latino North Carolina-based voter engagement group. This year, the largest ever cohort of young North Carolina-born Latinos will be eligible to vote in a presidential election.The unique eight-part series released last month on YouTube was created to close the gap between registration and turnout for Latino voters, who have historically voted less than some other groups, in the key battleground state. In the short films, the main character Alexia is a young Latina who goes from struggling to voice her opinions with her community and family to encouraging strangers to turn out to vote.“We captured magic somehow,” Irene Godinez, the executive director of Poder NC Action, said about the telenovelas. “The fact that 18-year-old boys to a 70-something-year-old woman feel seen in this and are excited about it is unheard of.”Now, the films’ reach has extended beyond North Carolina, with voter engagement organizations in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Colorado featuring them on social media platforms. The videos appear in Hulu and YouTube TV ads; the non-profit Voto Latino will use them in a digital public service announcement ahead of the election, and in the fall, Latino fraternal chapters, such as Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc and Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc, will screen the telenovelas on campuses around the country.Nationwide, an estimated 36.2 million Latino voters will be eligible to vote this year, nearly 15% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Godinez foresaw the large swath of eligible voters coming to age when she launched the non-profit in 2020: “My calculation was, if we start talking to them right now that they’re in high school and we can get them in as volunteers,” said Godinez. “Then by the time that they become actual voting age, they’ll be not only informed, but they’ll be willing to inform their peers.”Before Poder NC Action’s inception in 2020, political parties and advocacy groups did not invest in voter engagement efforts for Latino voters in North Carolina, said Godinez. She sought to create culturally relevant voter engagement initiatives that spoke directly to young Latino voters.“The people who absolutely are being neglected, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested,” Godinez said. “It just means that no one has made an effort to reach out to them.”The organization’s strategy has been to focus on courting around 150,000 Latino voters who have voted twice or less since registering to vote in 2016. Their outreach consists of political mailers, phonebanking, canvassing, and monthly social hours where voters meet local politicians.In 2020, Poder NC Action hand delivered 4,000 voter information cards throughout the state, made over 1m calls, delivered over 1m mailers, and worked with 130 young Latino volunteers. Godinez said that their efforts helped North Carolina Latino voters become 40% of the overall Latino voter turnout in 2020.And in 2022, a quarter of the organization’s targeted voters voted in the midterm election. The organization is taking cue from its members on whether they will endorse a presidential candidate. “It’s even likely that we would endorse Kamala Harris,” Godinez said, “but it will boil down to what our membership determines”.In February, Poder NC Action hosted a Barbie movie-themed event where volunteers escorted the 50 attendees down a pink carpet that led to a barbie photo booth so they could post photos on social media. It was the second time that the organization hosted the voter registration event called Ballots y Belleza, where attendees get free beauty services including makeup and waxing as they study sample ballots and volunteers inform them about voting issues. In September, the group will host another Ballots y Belleza event for Latinx Heritage Month that focuses on the theme “Poder (Power) is our Heritage, too,” said Godinez.View image in fullscreenThe event was inspired by a 15-year-old who begrudgingly attended one of the group’s social hour events with an older sibling last summer. The teen told Godinez that she would willingly sit through a daylong civic engagement meeting if she could simultaneously get her nails done. “We wanted to create a space where folks could come and learn and build community with each other,” Godinez said, “and then create some sort of connection with us as well”.Following Poder NC Action’s events, attenders have told Godinez that they feel “seen” in her programming. “Organizations create different types of programming tailored to voters, but they do it as if voters are different from their loved ones. They don’t look at voters particularly as an extension of themselves,” Godinez said. “We see our families in our voters. We see ourselves in our voters.”The work that Poder NC Action is doing to engage Latino voters could serve as a model for organizations in other states throughout the nation, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic party strategist and president of consulting firm Solidarity Strategies. As a consultant to the organization for the past six years, Rocha said that Poder NC Action’s work stood out because it was rooted in the Latino community: Poder NC Action is run by a Latina woman, while the staff, consultants and artists that work on products are also Latino.“There’s lots of Spanish ads made by congressional candidates or governors candidates, but it’s just made by their same white consultants, normally translated from English,” Rocha said. “They’re all well-meaning, but it just doesn’t have the same look and feel when it’s made from the community, by the community, for the community.”At the end of September, Poder NC Action will launch another telenovela series that focuses on reproductive justice. Starting in mid-October, the organization will host a mobile Ballots y Belleza on a party bus where young voters will receive beauty services at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as public universities around North Carolina.Ultimately, Godinez hopes that Poder NC’s initiatives will help inspire a new generation of voters to become civically engaged. “We’re creating a paper trail of everything so that we can share it with organizations that our values align no matter where they are, so that way, if something is working well here, there’s no reason that we would hold on to it and not share it.” More

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      Anti-Trump Republican group spends $11.5m in ads in ‘blue wall’ states to boost Harris

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      Republican Voters Against Trump, the group of disaffected Republicans devoted to stopping Donald Trump from returning to the White House, is stepping up its efforts with an $11.5m ad buy in critical battleground states.The group is rolling out a new advert featuring former Trump voters vowing never again to back him. They give a range of reasons for their decision, ranging from Trump’s role in instigating the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021, his demeaning of women and his 34 felony convictions.The ads are being focused on the three so-called “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and which Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president and the Democratic presidential candidate, must retain in November. The group will be investing $4.5m in Pennsylvania, $3m in Michigan and $2.2m in Wisconsin, the Hill reported.Ads will also be placed in Arizona and Nebraska, along with about 80 billboards strategically located in swing states that promote former Trump voters who now intend to vote for Harris.The executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, Sarah Longwell, told MSNBC that the thinking behind the ad buy was to give former Trump voters who are thinking about switching to Harris a “permission structure”. She said that focus groups had shown a “tremendous openness” among some Trump voters to backing the vice-president.“We are taking Trump-voting voices and elevating them so it sends a signal to other Trump voters who are Kamala-curious,” Longwell said. “They are interested in voting for her either because Donald Trump presents such a threat, or because people are bored by Trump – they are bored with all the drama and tired of the insults.”The Guardian’s poll tracker underlines how painfully close the presidential race is within the seven or so key battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome of the 5 November election. Harris is now up on Trump in all the blue wall states – by 0.5% in Pennsylvania, 1.1% in Michigan and 1.4% in Wisconsin – but those figures are well within the margin of error, meaning the contest is essentially neck-and-neck.The launch of the new adverts tallies with a push by the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign to highlight former Republicans who have endorsed the Democratic ticket.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt last month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, several Republican speakers were invited on to the main stage, including Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Adam Kinzinger, a former Congress member from Illinois who sat on the January 6 House committee. More

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      Clarence Thomas’s wife thanks group for efforts to block court ethics reforms

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      Ginni Thomas, the far-right activist wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has thanked a religious liberties group for its efforts to block reforms of the court aimed at reining in the justices’ ethical breaches, including those of her husband.A new recording obtained by the investigative website ProPublica and the watchdog Documented discloses a July email in which Ginni Thomas thanked First Liberty Institute for fighting to oppose supreme court reforms. She specifically referred to White House proposals from Joe Biden designed to rein in wayward justices on the country’s highest court, of which her husband is the prime example.“I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the supreme court. Many were so depressed by the lack of response by R[epublican]s and conservatives,” she said.Writing in all caps, she added: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”The email was read out by the head of First Liberty Institute, Kelly Shackelford, on a 31 July call with donors to the group. He said the email had been written by Ginni Thomas that same day.Two days previously, Biden had called for sweeping changes to the court, including term limits for the nine justices and a code of ethics that would be enforced by an outside body. Under current arrangements, the justices are liable to a voluntary code which they individually police themselves.In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, the US president explained why he thought a tougher code of ethics was now necessary. He pointed to “scandals involving several justices” that had damaged public confidence in the court, including “undisclosed gifts to justices” and “conflicts of interest connected with Jan 6 insurrectionists”.Biden did not mention names, but Clarence Thomas has been implicated in both types of ethically questionable behaviour. ProPublica has exposed the lavish international travel that the justice enjoyed courtesy of the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow.A conflict of interest relating to the 6 January 2021 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump has also been revealed by the House committee investigating the insurrection. It showed that Ginni Thomas was deeply implicated in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the lead-up to January 6, writing several messages to the then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the conspiracy unfolded.When the supreme court was asked to adjudicate on Trump’s request that White House records – which, it was later found, included Ginni Thomas’s messages – should not be disclosed to the House committee, only one justice sided with Trump: Clarence Thomas.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFirst Liberty Institute is an influential player in rightwing judicial circles. With income of $25m, it has regularly argued cases before the supreme court calling for greater involvement of religion in the public square.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, used to work as a lawyer for the group and has called Shackelford a mentor. More

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      Tucker Carlson lost his platform but crucially he still has Donald Trump’s ear

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      In spring of last year, Tucker Carlson was on the outs.The former prime-time host had been booted from the Fox News channel where he had made his name. Ensconced in his remote Maine home, Carlson launched a new show on what was then called Twitter, but as his viewer figures quickly plunged, consensus opinion was that Carlson’s position as a news and political tastemaker, someone capable of creating Republican stars and taking down careers, was over.It turns out that wasn’t quite right.The eponymous network that Carlson has since created, where he hosts interviews and delivers screeds to subscribing viewers, certainly lacks the reach of his Fox News show. But he has remained a key figure behind the scenes in Republican politics, someone with the ear of Trump and the ability to influence key positions. He had a headline slot at the Republican national convention, and next month is going on a tour that will feature JD Vance, Trump’s running mate.“He’s a confidant of Trump, and the GOP is the party of Trump now,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor at Northwestern University’s school of communication whose work focuses on television news and conservative and rightwing media.That relationship has allowed Carlson to become, if not a kingmaker, then certainly a prince-maker – playing a key role in Vance’s ascendancy to vice-presidential candidate. Vance was a frequent presence on Tucker Carlson Tonight during his run for Senate in Ohio, hopping on to pontificate on all manner of issues that Carlson’s far-right audience like. It was on Carlson’s show that Vance characterized Kamala Harris and others “childless cat ladies”, a comment that resurfaced in July.The pair stayed close, and Carlson had a key role in one of the most important decisions Trump had to make: choosing his running mate. The New York Times reported that Trump was “wavering” on choosing Vance in June, considering instead the more experienced Marco Rubio or the rich, inoffensive Doug Burgum. Carlson intervened in bombastic fashion, warning Trump that such a move could see him assassinated, according to the Times, and briefing that neither Rubio, the Florida senator, nor Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, could be trusted.“[Trump’s decision to pick Vance] is kind of backfiring for him now, because Vance keeps revealing his strange attitudes about women, childless women and childless women with cats. So it’s not really helping him that much, and Trump’s team isn’t really pleased about it, I’m sure,” Hendershot said.“It’s interesting that he had Trump’s ear for that, and his rationale was very sort of strange, or weird, is the word we’re using now, and kind of conspiratorial.”The conspiratorial aspect has long been key to Carlson’s appeal, and if his influence with Trump has increased – even in the face of texts emerging in 2023 that Carlson had said of Trump: “I hate him passionately” – it has done so as Carlson has become more fringe.In February, he aired an interview with Vladimir Putin in which he allowed the Russian autocrat to drone on for two hours about everything from a ninth-century Scandinavian prince to how he was allegedly prepared to end his invasion of Ukraine, and also gave a platform to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who was ordered to pay $1.5bn to the families of the Sandy Hook victims after he claimed the 2012 elementary school shooting was faked.“If anything, he appears to have descended into even more public crackpottery since he left Fox News,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.“Someone like that having a direct line to the former president of the United States, who could be the president again, is certainly a matter of great concern.”Carlson has retained that direct line even as his ability to reach the public appears to have declined. His Tucker Carlson Network has only 200,000 subscribers, the Wall Street Journal reported, while at its peak, his Fox News show attracted millions of viewers a night, although Carlson is popular on other platforms: his podcast is the second most popular on Spotify, behind only Joe Rogan, and his interview with Putin, while widely panned, was a success in terms of numbers: it received more than 200m views when Carlson posted it to X, although it is unclear how many people watched the entire thing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“His media influence has diminished substantially since he left Fox, but his political influence is still quite potent,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson was really the most powerful single figure in the rightwing media. He was someone who was capable of swinging Republican primary elections, but also someone who was capable of swinging news cycles, of creating messages that would be broadly used by the right.”Gertz said that wasn’t the case any more, although Carlson remained “a potent political force”.“His relationship with Donald Trump seems to be the key factor here, he has been able, by publicly supporting him so loudly, to ensure that he still apparently has the ability to contact Donald Trump directly and advise him on key issues.”Along with the questionable guidance Carlson gave Trump over Vance, he was also key to bringing together Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr for a meeting at the GOP convention, and Vanity Fair reported that it was Carlson and Donald Trump Jr who helped organize Kennedy’s subsequent withdrawal from the presidential race and endorsement of Trump. The New York Times reported that Carlson connected Trump and Kennedy “on a three-way text message” hours after the attempted assassination on Trump, a message chain that led to the pair speaking on the phone that night.Where Carlson’s influence ultimately leads will probably depend on whether Trump can win in November. But in the meantime, despite the low views for Carlson’s shows and his lack of a wide public platform, his position as a key figure is demonstrated from “Tucker Carlson live”, a 16-date tour he will embark on in September.Trump Jr and Vance, two of the people closest to the former president, will appear with Carlson in Florida and Pennsylvania respectively, for a tour that Carlson claims is “going to be interesting and fun as hell”.While the latter will depend on an individual’s politics and taste, Carlson’s continuing influence at the top of Republican politics is certainly interesting – and could be worrying should Trump be re-elected president. More

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      Donald Trump is deeply threatened by Kamala Harris – and desperately flailing | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “Kamala, you’re fired!” shouted Donald Trump. Then he pleaded: “You’re fired. Get out. Get out. Get out, Kamala!” The crowd cheered at his rally on 26 August in Glendale, Arizona, as though approving his order. But the invocation of the magic words he recited at the climax of every episode of The Apprentice failed to make her phantom disappear.Trump’s advisers sneak policy material into his stump speech that he must read as it scrolls on his teleprompter. They want to channel him into speaking about “the issues”. But he has revolted against them and “the issues”. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,” he complained to a rally. He turned to his Maga masses to give him license. “Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?” The crowd cheered as he knew it would. It was the poll result he wanted. “My advisers are fired!”Trump’s narcissism is his grand strategy. No adviser trying to calibrate him to polls can dislodge it. Both Kamala Harris and his advisers constrain and threaten him. He views the vice-president’s presence as an injustice. He had beaten Joe Biden. His withdrawal and her emergence were the implementation of the far-right replacement theory. The entire scenario has left Trump on the stage in a play for which his only new lines added to the script are that he is transparently faking it to be sort of for abortion before he is against it as he always was. He announced he will vote to uphold a ban after six weeks in Florida and against the state’s abortion referendum to overturn it. He cries that he is the victim, as he is always the victim when he does not get his way. His irrepressible impulse is to trash the woman. The advisers who seek to tamp him down are his adversaries.Trump believes in the marrow of his bones that his intuition, his sixth sense, is his secret power. Acting out has been his winning ticket. He is certain that is why his moment came and why it must come again. He gives no credence to circumstances or any other person, which would diminish him. He has achieved godlike status by being true to himself. It’s not just that he’s incapable of being other than himself, but that he feels it is the only way he’s won. He’s extinguished self-doubt, if he ever entertained it. He can’t be anything else. At his core, he believes idolatry of his personality is the key to his success. Without it, he is obliterated. He can never accept losing, being the loser.“We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told the crowd assembled on January 6. “It doesn’t happen.”Now against a candidate of change (a woman), his resistance to change (attacking the woman) is his only way to cling to his authenticity. Above all, he fears self-neutralization. If he cannot act out, he’s a nullity to himself, his most terrifying prospect. Anything that could be construed as criticism threatens his manhood, his mental equilibrium and evokes a reflexively hostile response. It is an impossible task to pry him away from his impulses, especially when it’s a survival instinct.His advisers’ version of “the issues” is a straight and narrow negative campaign to stain his opponents, combined with deceptive flip-flops to smudge Trump’s position on abortion. They want clean distortions and falsehoods without Trump’s accompanying mess. The architect of his ratfucking operation, Chris LaCivita, was behind the Swift Boat lies about war hero John Kerry in 2004, funded by the far-right billionaire Harlan Crow, who happens to be the big-hearted benefactor of Clarence Thomas. LaCivita has hoped to repeat his mudslinging triumph now against Tim Walz in order to undermine an alternative example of masculinity. Trump, however, keeps stumbling over his campaign’s well-laid smears.The more his advisers attempt to curb him, the more he acts out to reassert his essential nature under pressure from within his campaign. His discontent has led him to bring back his oft-disgraced goon, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly physically assaulted a female reporter during the 2016 campaign and sexually molested the wife of a major Republican donor in 2021, among other lowlights. (Prosecutors ultimately declined to charge Lewandowski in the first case; in the second he was fined and sentenced to community service and “impulse control training” after accepting a plea deal without admitting guilt.) Lewandowski claims to be the genius who invented the slogan “Let Trump Be Trump.” Trump has brought him back from his political planet Pluto as an enabler to help him avoid impulse control.Trump is on the horns of a dilemma. If he is advised that to save himself he must deny himself, he will feel that he must deny the advice to save himself. He can’t respond to a different world. His “greatness” is to reject the modern and now normal world to be led by a mixed-race woman who is also a relentless prosecutor bringing the political case against him. He’s increasingly deviant. His campaign must be to define Trump down. He must force her into subservience.Harris is an exponentially greater threat to Trump than E Jean Carroll. The Carroll defamation judgment didn’t strip him of his manhood, but could be interpreted as an affirmation: the adjudicated rapist as alpha dog. Losing to Harris would be the extinction of his virility. She compounds his existential crisis. If he loses, he will not be able to use presidential powers to be a criminal on the loose. The federal cases against him will proceed, even if the US supreme court has eviscerated the constitution in granting him “absolute” official immunity for attempting to overthrow the government.A defeated Trump will face years of trials, undoubtedly receive guilty verdicts and likely jail time. He will be a depleted convict. His fear of his fate accelerates his impulses to lie, smear and violate all norms to an uncontrollably frantic level. An aide of Trump’s, or possibly two, even allegedly physically assaulted a female employee to get the photo-op of him giving a thumbs-up over a grave in a forbidden section at Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s spokesman smeared her as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode”, while LaCivita, drawing on his Swift Boat playbook, dubbed her “despicable”. The woman declined to file charges, reportedly out of fear of retaliation.Harris has become the personification of “nasty” women to Trump. She encompasses the women beyond his decayed appeal who do not aspire to be his ornaments and are therefore his tormentors. He naturally wants to reduce all women to vulnerable and undefended figures he can subjugate at will in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, or leap on by surprise in a Bel Air hotel suite. His explanation of his charm in the Hollywood Access tape was that as a star he was irresistible to women who allowed him to “grab ’em by the pussy”. But the Carroll and Stormy Daniels cases have exposed his methods, punished and humiliated him. As Daniels testified in the trial for which he was convicted for 34 felonies: “Was it brief?” “Yes.” For Trump, that was a worse judgment than the convictions for business fraud. The thrill is gone.Trump’s need to assault Harris is even more intense than it was toward Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Trump hadn’t been president before. He launched his bid as a branding exercise that went haywire. Now, he’s desperate to claw back his lost status, not least to gain the pardon power to remove the extensive federal charges against him. His restoration, which he thought was a snap until 21 July, when Biden withdrew, has been interrupted by a dangerous woman he can’t subdue and an allure he can’t fathom.Harris is a mystery woman to him. The campaign is astoundingly abbreviated. He lacks time to rehearse a degrading story to drag her down. The media, despite frequently leaning on the mindless formula of false equivalence, doesn’t seem in the same gleeful mood to join in his rampant cruelty that it was in 2016. Yet even the fair-minded Dana Bash of CNN in her interview of Harris felt compelled to earnestly ask her reaction to Trump’s racist claim that she had “turned Black” for political purposes as if it were a legitimate question. “Same old tired playbook,” Harris replied. “Next question.” Her succinct dismissal instantly reduced Trump to an exhausted, sputtering blowhard past his sell date. The younger woman swipes left.Trump has a preternatural sense it’s slipping away. The gift of the demagogue is to grasp the currents of the masses that he can exploit for his self-aggrandizement. His compulsion to attack Harris increases every day his invective falls flat.He began with a twisted pronunciation of her name, then called her “Kamabla” and moved to “Comrade Kamala”. Baffled by her self-assurance, he did not rely on his usual stable of insults hurled at those women who had testified to his sexual assaults: “horseface”, “face of a pig”, “crazed, crying lowlife”, “dog”.Trump could not surprise her as he did the young women in the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants he owned when he barged into the dressing rooms. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes,” he told Howard Stern in 2005. “‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”But what can the predatory voyeur now “get away with”? Before the Democratic convention, Trump began bargaining with his Maga masses about the terms on which he should assault Harris. He warily circled her. “Don’t ever call a woman beautiful, because that’ll be the end of your political career, please,” he said mockingly.Trump started to circulate debasing sexual innuendo about Harris on 18 August with a retweet of a video consisting of a warped version of Alanis Morissette’s song Ironic to suggest that Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee through oral sex: “She spent her whole damn life / Down on her knees / To be commander in chief / That’s how you say please / Isn’t it moronic …”The video depicts Harris holding a sign reading, “I Am A Moron.” Then the face of Willie Brown, the former speaker of the California assembly, whom she once dated, pops up behind a sofa on which she is sitting with her husband, Doug Emhoff.Trump continued his obsessive theme on 29 August, retweeting a picture of Harris and Hillary Clinton with the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”Trump’s campaign of sexual insinuation that launched with the phony Morissette song has been reliant on a far-right, mainly anonymous social media group called the Dilley Meme Team, which advertises itself as producing “the dankest memes and original content for Maga brands and campaigns”. During the Republican primaries, the group made crude videos of Nikki Haley as a prostitute and Casey DeSantis, the wife of Ron DeSantis, as a pornographic actor. It also created a video of Biden as a pedophile. The group was behind a video that Trump retweeted in May hailing his return to power with a mock newspaper headline proclaiming the “Creation of a Unified Reich”.Trump has worked closely on these productions, “privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content”, according to the New York Times.Trump’s quandary is that in trying to demean Harris, his old techniques have lost their fascination. Now he perceives himself as the nervous contestant in a beauty pageant. “But I say that I am much better-looking. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.” “They said, ‘No, her biggest advantage is that she’s a beautiful woman.’ I’m going, huh? I never thought of that. I’m better-looking than she is.”If this is a fairytale, he’s the jealous evil witch from Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?After Harris strode on to the stage of the Democratic national convention in a navy blue suit radiating confidence and expressing command, he fretted about his waning attractiveness. “I was sort of like a hot guy. I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now, and I became president. OK. I don’t know. I said to somebody, was I hotter before or hotter now? I don’t know. Who the hell knows?”Time and again, Trump repeats that Harris is “not smart” and “not very smart”, which only reveals his insecurity about facing her in a debate he has variously refused and accepted. His campaign’s insistence that his microphone be shut off only underscores his advisers’ dread of his unmonitored mouth. After her CNN interview, he accused her both of being “boring” – that is, he couldn’t figure out a point of criticism – and of “rambling incoherence”, his obvious projection.“I think I am entitled to personal attacks,” he says. “I do not have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president … And whether the personal attacks are good, bad – I mean, she certainly attacks me personally. She actually called me weird. ‘He’s weird.’ She’s not smart. I don’t believe she loves our country. Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me. They want to put me in prison. They don’t want me to be a little bit nasty. They want to put me in prison. Me!”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More