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      ‘A different level than 2020’: Trump’s plan to steal election is taking shape

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      There wasn’t anything particularly controversial about Georgia’s presidential primary in March this year. Donald Trump won the Republican contest – picking up a little more than 400,000 more votes than Nikki Haley, who had long dropped out of the race.Nonetheless, two Republicans on the five-person Fulton county election board refused to certify the election.Julie Adams and Michael Heekin didn’t point to specific irregularities. Instead, they said they needed more information from election administrators, like chain-of-custody documents for ballots. Adams and Heekin were outvoted.But it didn’t end there. In May, Adams, who is a part of an election activist network founded by Cleta Mitchell, voted against certifying another Georgia primary election. Again, despite no irregularities, she said she needed more information. With the backing of a group closely aligned with Donald Trump, Adams had also recently sued the Fulton county board, asking a judge to declare that she and other commissioners could choose not to certify the election.It was an unusual request – verification of ballot totals happens in the extensive process that leads up to certification and state laws generally do not permit those responsible for certifying them the discretion to investigate.In early August, the Republican-controlled state election board in Georgia adopted a new rule that essentially gave Adams what she wanted. It requires local election board members to conduct an undefined “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies before they can certify the election. There are concerns that officials could use that discretion to hold up certification of the election.The episode in Fulton county, and the new rule in Georgia, could be an alarming dress rehearsal for how Donald Trump and his allies will try to challenge the election results in November if he loses.Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results, declining multiple times to do so during a 27 June debate. He has suggested that Christians would “never have to vote again” if he wins. The anti-democratic sentiment has been echoed by other prominent conservatives, including Mike Howell, the director of the oversight project at the Heritage Foundation, who said earlier this year there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.“I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election,” he said at a Heritage Foundation event this summer.The effort poses a challenge that again would test the strength of the US’s voting system and its democratic institutions. It could probably stretch from little-known county election officials to the Congress.In some ways, Trump’s attempt to challenge the election result in 2024 could look a lot like his effort in 2020. It has begun months before election day with the seeding of doubt about the integrity of the election and could continue after.There are two key differences.First, Trump may be better prepared. Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections. And the Republican National Committee’s election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race. The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting.“I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed,” said Marc Elias, a top Democratic voting rights lawyer. “I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted.”But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican party. A January poll from PRRI found that 66% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. “The most important thing we have to do is protect the vote. You have to keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and, frankly, it’s the only thing they do well,” Trump said in a prerecorded video that played all four nights during the Republican national convention in July.The belief in stolen elections, Elias said, was “no longer the provenance of crazy people like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators.“It has become now the standard position of the Republican party.”Seeds of doubt in 2020 to bloom in 2024Trump began seeding doubt in 2020 by pointing to mail-in voting as evidence the election was being stolen months beforehand. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many states were quickly changing the rules around voting by mail, allowing expanded access because it was not clear if it would be safe to vote in person on election day.This year, Americans are unlikely to use mail-in voting at the same levels they did during the pandemic, and Republicans are now encouraging their supporters to take advantage of it. But Trump and allies are using a new messaging tactic in its place: that there are scores of non-citizens and other ineligible people on the voter rolls.Mitchell has played a key role in leading a coalition of groups that has pushed the false idea that there is a serious threat of non-citizens voting in US elections. Her coalition has supported federal legislation championed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and others to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Such a restriction would probably do little to prevent fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Instead, it would probably make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. Nearly one in 10 eligible voters – 21 million Americans – lack easy access to proof of citizenship documents, according to one study released earlier this year.Even though Johnson’s congressional bill passed the House, it will probably go nowhere in the Senate. But it helps create an impression that something is amiss with American elections. To make matters worse, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Republicans also immediately sought to suggest her candidacy was illegitimate, calling the effort a “coup”.A constellation of groups – including the RNC, the Public Interest Legal Foundation and United Sovereign Americans – has also filed several lawsuits in various states to create the false impression that voter rolls are not properly being cleaned in several swing states. These lawsuits use misleading methodology and legal claims to suggest that there are a suspiciously large number of people registered in certain jurisdictions. Among other issues, they compare up-to-date voter registration information and outdated data from the American Community Survey.View image in fullscreen“They’re hanging the hooks to later hang their hat on,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the top voting rights expert at the Brennan Center.“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, ‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’ or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy who works on voting rights issues. “I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period.”‘Tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans’Any effort to challenge the election results will probably start at the local level.Just as there was in 2020, there’s likely to be a period of uncertainty after election day when votes are still being counted in key swing states. Two of those, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, still do not allow election officials to begin to process mail-in ballots until election day.“I’m definitely concerned that you’re gonna have a lot of efforts to disturb the process of counting those votes, if we go into the late evening, early hours of the next day and all of that,” said Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University who specializes in election law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe observers amassed by Mitchell and the RNC could have a significant role. In 2020, chaotic confrontations at polling sites offered misleading evidence that Trump and allies used in their effort to try to overturn the election. Trump’s effort to challenge the election results in Arizona, for example, was undergirded by affidavits from observers and poll watchers who falsely claimed they saw ballots being rejected because of the type of pen voters were using.In Georgia, Trump pointed to reports from observers in Atlanta falsely claiming they were removed from the facility where mail-in ballots were counted. In Michigan, Trump’s team used as evidence an “incident report” from an election observer who falsely said she heard workers giving instructions to count a rejected ballot.Accusations of fraud may find a receptive audience at county boards responsible for certifying elections. Until 2020, no one gave much thought to these positions, sometimes filled by elected officials and other times by little-known party loyalists. In 2020, Trump’s campaign made a strong effort to try to delay certification at the local and state level as part of his effort to overturn the election.In Wayne county, home of Detroit, Trump personally called two Republican canvassers on the board responsible for certifying the vote there. The two officials briefly refused to certify, then reversed themselves and did. At the state level, Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican on the state board of canvassers, faced pressure not to certify the vote, but decided to anyway.In Wisconsin, Republicans nearly got the state supreme court to block certification of the state’s election. In Arizona, Trump called the then governor, Doug Ducey, as he was certifying the vote amid a pressure campaign to stop the certification of votes there.Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.The first red flag came in 2022, when county commissioners in Otero county, New Mexico, refused to certify the results of a primary election, citing vague concerns about voting equipment. The secretary of state eventually went to court to force the commissioners to certify the election.In July of this year, two Republicans on the county commission in Washoe county, Nevada – a key county in a battleground state – refused to certify its primary vote, setting off alarms. The commissioners who refused to certify eventually reversed themselves. Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, has since asked the state supreme court to clarify that county commissioners have an obligation to certify votes.Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome. In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election. So there’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced,” said Berwick, the Protect Democracy lawyer.The timeline for certifying the vote is important because, under federal law, states must have an official election result by 11 December, six days before the electoral college meets. Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.“If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans,” Berwick said.Pildes, the NYU professor, said that while he was concerned about efforts to block certification at the local level, he was confident that state courts could resolve any disputes by the time the electors meet.A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion. The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states. Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote. That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.Prepared for challengesAfter Donald Trump nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, is the US better prepared to stop a similar effort in 2024?Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020. Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts, where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the voteYet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether. The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024, and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. “That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.” More

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      Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

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      When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.“Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and run through the mail voting processes.“You can go into all the rooms. You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound,” Richer said.It wasn’t the only time Richer has sought to correct election misinformation Musk had shared. He previously tried to fix misunderstandings of Arizona voter data and rules for proof of citizenship.Social media platforms overall have taken less aggressive stances on fact-checking election falsehoods after an ongoing campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to attack the ways information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and how platforms responded.“I think X really kind of sticks out as a place where that change has been striking, and for it to come from the very top kind of just shows how much of an issue it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections & government program.Musk shared a video that used an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, which raised concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video creator defended it as parody.He has also written multiple times claiming that non-citizens are voting in US elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few instances of non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren talking about a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. “As I was saying, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to “great replacement” theory.Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-biased chatbots, has spread false information that ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice-president couldn’t get on the ballot in those places, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix this issue for the chatbot that doesn’t have election information guardrails that other chatbots, like ChatGPT, do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”Off the platform, a political action committee Musk created is mining personal information from voters in key states in what appears to users to initially look like a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s enormous wealth, is targeting swing states voters. The data scraping is now being investigated by at least two states.Despite his endless claims about election fraud, Musk told the Atlantic this month he would accept the results of the 2024 election – with a caveat.“If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.” More

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      ‘She makes us proud’: Harris raises over $12m in California as Pelosi welcomes her home

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      Kamala Harris returned home to the San Francisco Bay area for a Sunday fundraiser that drew top California Democrats and captured more than $12m for the conclusion of a swing state tour by the vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and California governor Gavin Newsom attended the event in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel, where nearly 700 people had purchased tickets that cost at least $3,300 and as much as $500,000.“This is a good day when we welcome Kamala Harris back home to California,” Pelosi said of the former US senator, attorney general and district attorney from the state.“She makes us all so proud. She brings us so much joy. She gives us so much hope,” Pelosi said at the fundraiser. She went on to describe Harris as a person of “great strength” and someone who is “politically very astute”.Harris and Walz, the Minnesota governor, have just finished a tour of multiple political swing states, packing rallies with thousands of people and building on the momentum that has propelled her since she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket.Pelosi, the longtime lawmaker and Washington power broker, is credited with helping usher Joe Biden out of the presidential race.The president, 81, stepped aside last month after a poor debate performance against Donald Trump sparked turmoil within the Democratic party and concerns that he could not beat the former president nor complete a second four-year term.Pelosi’s comments in a television interview suggesting that Biden had not yet decided whether to step aside were viewed as giving an opening to worried Democratic lawmakers to urge him to leave even as Biden said he was staying.Pelosi has praised Biden’s achievements while criticizing his former campaign. On Sunday she connected Harris, 59, to the accomplishments of Biden’s administration.“She knows the issues. She knows the strategy. She has gotten an enormous amount done working with Joe Biden,” Pelosi said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris acknowledged the enthusiasm but cautioned against getting caught up in it.“We can take nothing for granted in this critical moment,” she said, after thanking Pelosi for her friendship and support. “There is so much about the future of our country that has relied on leaders like Nancy Pelosi that have the grit, the determination, the brilliance to know what’s possible and to make it so,” Harris said.“The energy is undeniable,” Harris said of her campaign. “Yes, the crowds are large.”Her campaign hauled in $36m in the 24 hours following Walz’s selection as running mate and raised $310m in July, according to a campaign spokesperson.Harris, making her own case against Trump, said that if Trump got back into office, he would sign a national ban on abortion into law and warned that California would not be immune. Trump has sought to distance himself from Republican efforts to ban abortion, saying it should be up to individual states.Harris noted that some states’ laws don’t include exceptions for rape and incest, and said it’s “immoral”. “When this issue has been on the ballot, the American people have voted for freedom,” Harris said. More

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      Trump and Vance are unmatched in ‘the Olympics of lying’, says Pete Buttigieg

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      The Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance might be slipping in the polls, but remains unmatched in “the Olympics of lying”, according to transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.The senior Democrat was responding Sunday, the final day of the Paris Olympics, to remarks by the Ohio senator criticizing Tim Walz for misstating his military service in an interview six years ago.The Minnesota governor, announced this week as running mate to Democratic candidate and vice-president Kamala Harris, served 24 years in the army national guard, but never in a combat zone, which he seemed to suggest in the 2018 interview.In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Buttigieg assailed Vance, himself a former marine corps journalist, for disparaging Walz’s military record at a rally this week and moments earlier on the same show.“I watched that interview and watched JD Vance present himself as suddenly very particular about precision in speech and very concerned about honesty,” Buttigieg said.“He’s running with Donald Trump, somebody who has set records for lying in public life. He just gave a press conference where fact-checkers estimate that he told 162 distortions or lies. That, frankly, is just impressive in terms of being able to physically do that. It’s like the Olympics of lying.”It was quite the zinger from Buttigieg, a former intelligence officer in the US navy reserve who has established a reputation for eloquent takedowns of Republican political positions.“The fact a veteran wants to go out and disparage another veteran just goes against certainly everything I learned during my time in service,” he said.“The fact they have to go back to find a clip from 2018 to find the one time that he slipped up when he talks about the weapons of war that he carried and said something instead about carrying a weapon in war, it’s kind of an exception that proves the rule in terms of how hard you have to look to find Tim Walz saying anything that isn’t precise and accurate.”On State of the Union, Vance insisted he was not impugning Walz’s military service, but “the fact that he lied about his service for political gain”.“I think that’s what Tim Walz did. That’s what I was criticizing. And, yes, I do think it’s scandalous behavior,” he said.A statement from the Harris-Walz campaign on Saturday turned Vance’s earlier criticism around. “Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country. In fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way,” it said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.”Buttigieg, on CNN, also condemned Vance’s much-maligned commentary that senior Democrats were “a bunch of childless cat ladies”. As part of his clean-up effort for those remarks, Vance claimed Sunday he was not criticizing people for not having children, but for “being anti-child”.“I don’t know which part of that is worse, the lie that he just told when he says he never criticized people for not having kids, because of course he very much did, including Kamala Harris and me and a lot of other people, millions of Americans, in fact, who he disparaged as childless cat ladies,” said Buttigieg, who has two adopted sons with his husband.“The other part, just as troubling, is saying that anybody who disagrees with him is anti-child. It’s part of just who he is, right? He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up, or building people up, or helping people out.” More

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      The Guardian view on the politics of joy: Democrats are embracing the sunny side | Editorial

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      “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz told Kamala Harris in his first speech after agreeing to become her running mate. He has continued to invoke the emotion, describing himself and Ms Harris as “joyful warriors” against opponents who “try and steal the joy”. Donald Trump has attacked Ms Harris’s ready laughter, but the Democrats are embracing an upbeat coconut-and-brat-meme atmosphere while Republicans invoke American carnage.Rarely have two presidential campaigns had such contrasting moods. Asked by a reporter what made him happy, Mr Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, retorted that “I smile at a lot of things including bogus questions from the media”, and that he was “angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country”. Mr Trump – along with other rightwing populists globally – has channelled fear and rage to extraordinary effect.“Visceral states and feelings appear at the forefront of the political conversation” in this era, writes Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Voters are less rational and more emotional than we like to believe. Feelings may also have different effects upon different parts of society. US research suggests that dissatisfaction with politicians is more likely to send white voters to the polls and minority voters to other forms of activism.In the past, Democrats have tried to counter lies and loathing with facts. Though fear of Mr Trump motivated voters in 2020, warnings about his return have not proved as effective. People can be indifferent or passive in the face of threats such as the climate crisis. (In contrast, deliberative democracy – such as citizens’ assemblies or community activism – can generate a sense of political agency and re-engage them.) Giving people something to fight for, not just against, may be potent. But there is more research on how emotions such as anger affect politics than there is on emotions such as hope.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Jair Bolsonaro’s dark vision of Brazil in 2022 with hope, and Rahul Gandhi walked the length of India with a message of love and solidarity, an appeal that cost India’s divisive prime minister, Narendra Modi, his parliamentary majority this year. In Britain, the joy of the Liberal Democrats’ successful election campaign bubbled over. But critiques of “cruel optimism” and “hopium” note that invoking positive emotions can sometimes encourage people to feel good about bad political choices. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos won the Filipino presidency in 2022 with a feelgood social media campaign glamourising his family and his father’s dictatorship.In the US, Ronald Reagan’s sunny “morning in America” advert won plaudits, but Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” didn’t win the Democrat the presidency. For Ms Harris – like Humphrey, a vice-president aspiring to the top job – urging voters to get happy when they’re worrying about bills could be counterproductive. The wrongfooted Trump campaign appears to be pivoting towards attacking her record.Ms Harris seems to recognise the problem, tempering the buoyant mood by acknowledging that grocery prices are too high, for instance. But if a recession hits, striking the right note will be even tougher, and policy will be still more pressing. The Democrats are hoping for the best – but even in a short campaign, vibes will only carry them so far. More

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      Jill Stein reportedly seeks Palestinian Americans as potential running mate

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      Green party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seeking Palestinian Americans as potential running mates for her long shot White House bid, according to reports.Speaking to NBC on Friday, several potential candidates said that they had multiple conversations with Stein about the vice-president position.Stein, who is expected to announce her running mate next Friday, has been a fierce critic of Israel’s ongoing deadly war on Gaza which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians since Hamas’s attack last October that killed 1,200 Israelis.One candidate is Noura Erakat, a prominent human rights lawyer and professor at Rutgers University. On Friday, Erakat took to X to announce that Stein’s team “approached me to run as her vice-presidential candidate & I am seriously considering it”.“The [Kamala] Harris team is demanding our votes to ‘save our democracy’ but has been oblivious to the fact that supporting a #genocide poses the most significant threat to it,” Erakat added.Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the Washington DC-based American-Arab anti-discrimination committee, announced that he has also been approached by Stein’s team, calling it an “honor to be considered for the VP position”.“Since the start of the genocide I have made a commitment to stick to our shared principles, even if this means being disinvited from meetings, losing access, and being sidelined by establishment,” Ayoud wrote on X.“Dr Stein has consistently held the right position on Gaza, Palestine, and human rights throughout this campaign. Being considered is a testament to the fact that there are still politicians and candidates out there who value integrity and the willingness to stand on the side of justice,” he added.Another among the people interviewed for the job is Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, NBC reports. According to the outlet, Hammoud’s spokesperson confirmed that Stein had asked if he was interested in being considered for the position before realizing that the 34-year old is too young to be eligible for the position. Under the US constitution, vice-presidents are required to be at least 35 years old.Speaking to NBC, political activist and comedian Amer Zahr revealed that he has also spoken with Stein about the position.“I am honored by the consideration and I think it’s important that the Stein campaign is making that kind of direct outreach to Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans, especially in Michigan,” Zahr said.“It shows that, unlike the Harris campaign, she is serious about addressing the core issues in this campaign,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionZahr’s comments came after Harris sparked criticism earlier this week over her handling of anti-war demonstrators who protested during her rally in Detroit, Michigan.In response to the demonstrators who chanted, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide,” Harris, who does not support an arms embargo on Israel, raised her eyebrows and said, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”“She could have said, ‘I hear you, we’re going to address this, and if you want it to get better, elect me instead of Donald Trump,’” Zahr told NBC, calling Harris’s response “really disrespectful.“But instead she suggested we want to help get Trump elected … as if we owe her something and she doesn’t owe us,” he continued. More

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      ‘Maybe I’ve gotten worse’: Trump’s attempt at discipline unravels

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      His name was spelled out in bright lights reminiscent of a Broadway show. Donald Trump thanked God for sparing him from an assassin’s bullet. To thousands of devoted fans, the carefully stage-managed Republican national convention felt like the coronation of a man poised for victory over an ageing, ailing incumbent.But Trump’s long and grievance-filled address that night hinted at trouble to come. For months his US presidential election campaign had been praised as tighter, smoother and more professional this time around. Then, when Democrats upended the race by replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their nominee, the wheels came off.For the past three weeks the former president has been lashing out, pushing lies, hurling insults, trialling nicknames, trafficking in racism and trotting out nonsense as he struggles to regain the narrative from Vice-President Harris.“The campaign is disciplined; their candidate is not,” said Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster who has a long track record of advising Republican campaigns. “Their candidate is single-handedly destroying his chance for re-election. This is the weakest Democratic nominee in terms of record in a long time but [Trump’s] insistence on making the attacks personal and vicious are blunting their impact and, in fact, backfiring on him.”Although Trump has amply demonstrated his inability to change, he seemed easier to rein in when times were good. The leaders of his third consecutive White House campaign, the veteran operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, earned applause from Republicans as the former president steamrollered opposition during this year’s primary elections.The new sense of command and control seemed to hold as Trump, 78, held a consistent edge over 81-year-old Biden in opinion polls. The Republican nominee’s preposterous riffs about sharks and Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail raised eyebrows but did nothing to blunt his momentum.Even criminal charges and convictions were rapidly turned into opportunities to raise money and galvanise his base. When Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month, and responded by raising his fist and urging supporters to “fight”, headline writers asked: “Did Donald Trump just win the election?”Some wondered if the brush with death would produce a softer, more contemplative candidate. But seasoned Trump watchers pointed out that there have been many false dawns and, ultimately, Trump is always Trump. His 92-minute convention address in Milwaukee recycled old false claims and recriminations and was by the far the longest of any nominee in history.Three days later, everything changed. Bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats, Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and threw his weight behind 59-year-old Harris, around whom the party quickly coalesced. A Trump campaign that had been honed to target Biden’s age was suddenly wrongfooted and trying to define a new opponent. His running mate JD Vance described it as “a political sucker punch”.John Zogby, a pollster and author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should, said: “The campaign was much more disciplined than last time and so disciplined that it had its message perfected, which was ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Crooked Joe’. It was all based on Joe Biden. To a large degree Vance was correct when he said they were sucker-punched because this is a whole new situation.“Age and mental acuity are off the table. It’s all going to be about Kamala Harris’s record but she’s in a much better position to control that message than Biden would be. You do see Donald Trump flailing here and being reduced much more to those one-liners – and you wonder if people are getting tired of hearing them.”LaCivita and Wiles appeared to lose control of their candidate. Trump tossed around strange nicknames for his rival such as “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and “Kamabla”. He unleashed a tirade on his Truth Social platform, describing her as too “low IQ” and “dumb” to debate him. His speeches have become increasingly unhinged.At a rally in Atlanta, he castigated Brian Kemp, the Republican Georgia governor whose support he needs in the swing state. Speaking to evangelicals in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said: “Christians, get out and vote just this time. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”At a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump turned on his interviewers and falsely questioned Harris’s mixed race heritage, saying: “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday, Trump again demeaned Harris’s intelligence, falsely claimed that no one died at the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 and asserted he had a bigger crowd that day than Martin Luther King when he spoke at the 1963 March on Washington.The Republican also insisted that he continues to lead Harris but polls suggest otherwise as the Democratic nominee and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, ride a wave of voter energy and enthusiasm. She raised $310m in the month of July alone, comfortably ahead of Trump’s $138.7m.Luntz said: “Right now she’s the frontrunner. Right now I think Trump’s gonna lose because he’s incapable of sticking to a message about inflation or immigration. His administration is considered much more successful on the two issues that matter to people yet he’s now tied with or losing to the vice-president of that administration. Why is that? It’s he himself.”The withdrawal of Biden following his dismal debate performance in June did not take Republicans entirely by surprise. Speakers at the convention often referred to the “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and the Trump campaign had prepared anti-Harris videos to swap in just in case Biden stepped down sooner.Their central argument is that Harris carries the baggage of Biden’s biggest failures on border security – she was tapped to lead efforts to tackle the migration challenge – as well as inflation and foreign policy. It is a message that needs to be prosecuted with scalpel-like precision. But Trump has come at the problem with a jackhammer.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “In the words of Britney Spears, oops! he did it again. While all these people want to remake who Donald Trump really is, he consistently shows us who he is and we should learn that old lesson from the south: there’s no education in the second kick of the mule.”The new Trump turns out to be the same old Trump. Reflecting on the assassination attempt during a recent rally in Minnesota, the former president commented: “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’ No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually.” More

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      Biden says it was his ‘obligation to the country’ to drop out of presidential race

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      Joe Biden has said it was his “obligation to the country” to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and prevent what he said would be “a genuine danger to American security” if Donald Trump won a second term of office.The US president gave his reasoning for stepping aside in at-times an emotional interview with CBS News on Sunday, his first since quitting the race in July. He explained that losing the confidence of senior House and Senate Democrats, who feared his unpopularity would hurt them at the polls in November, had weighed on his mind.Ultimately, Biden said, it was a combination of circumstances that led him to make his momentous decision not to seek re-election, which subsequently saw Vice-President Kamala Harris taking over the Democratic ticket and catching or surpassing Trump in several battleground states, according to new polling data.“Although I have the great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.Biden said he did not take the decision lightly, and made it in consultation with his family at home in Delaware. At the time, he said, he still believed he could win in November, but events had “moved quickly” after weeks of pressure and growing unease inside his party that, at 81, he was too old for the rigors of a second term.Those fears were heightened by his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. “I had a really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem,” Biden said, denying he was impaired by any cognitive issue.“The polls we had showed that it was a neck and neck race, it would have been down to the wire. But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races and I was concerned if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.“I thought it would be a real distraction. [When] I ran the first time I thought of myself being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. Things got moving so quickly. And the combination was… a critical issue for me still… is maintaining this democracy.”Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the senior Democrats whose cooling support for Biden was believed to have hastened his decision, gave her own interview Sunday to MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.“I did not think we were on a path to victory,” she said, adding that she “wanted the decision to be a better campaign so that we could win”.Pelosi praised Biden as a “pre-eminent” president. “He’s right there among the top few, a very consequential president,” she said.Biden became emotional as he recalled a promise he made to his late son Beau about remaining in politics. “He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re gonna want to quit. You’re not gonna stay engaged. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden. When I go, you’ll stay engaged. Give me your word.’ And I did.”Later in the interview, recorded last week with CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa in the White House treaty room, Biden expressed his fear for the country if former US president Trump won in November.“Mark my words, if he wins watch what happens. He’s a genuine danger to American security,” he said, adding that he was “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost.“We are at an inflection point in world history. We really are. The decisions we make in the next three or four years are going to determine what the next six decades look like, and democracy is the key.“That’s why I made that speech in Johnson Center about the supreme court. The supreme court is so out of whack, so I propose that we limit terms to 18 years. There’s little regard by the Maga (make America great again) Republicans for the political institutions. That’s what holds this country together. That’s what democracy is about. That’s who we are as a nation.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president also had praise for Harris and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor she named this week as her running mate.“If we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends. He’s my kind of guy. He’s real, he’s smart,” Biden said of Walz.“I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”He said he would be campaigning with Harris in the weeks before the election, and was working with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, at one time a frontrunner to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick, on winning the key swing state.“I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well. I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most,” he said.Other topics during the interview included Biden’s belief that a ceasefire and peace deal in Gaza were still possible before he leaves office in January, despite escalating civilian casualties there and in Lebanon.Asked how he thought his presidency would be remembered, Biden cited leading the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic successes.“When I announced my candidacy I said we’ve got to do three things, restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together. No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done,” he said.“The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying: ‘Joe did it!’” More