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      Iranian group used ChatGPT to try to influence US election, OpenAI says

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      OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said.Investigation by the Microsoft-backed AI company showed ChatGPT was used for generating long-form articles and shorter social media comments.OpenAI said the operation did not appear to have achieved meaningful audience engagement.The majority of the identified social media posts received few or no likes, shares or comments and the company did not see indications of web articles being shared across social media.The accounts have been banned from using OpenAI’s services and the company continues to monitor activities for any further attempts to violate policies, it said.Earlier in August, a Microsoft threat-intelligence report said the Iranian network Storm-2035, comprising four websites masquerading as news outlets, was actively engaging US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum.The engagement was being built with “polarizing messaging on issues such as the US presidential candidates, LGBTQ rights, and the Israel-Hamas conflict”, the report stated.The Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, are locked in a tight race, ahead of the presidential election on 5 November.The AI firm said in May it had disrupted five covert influence operations that sought to use its models for “deceptive activity” across the internet. More

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      Trump reportedly considers endorsing expanded child tax credit after Harris unveils economic plan – live

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      Trump is considering endorsing an expanded $5,000 child tax credit for parents of all income levels, an official at his campaign told Semafor.“President Trump will consider a significant expansion of the child tax credit that applies to American families,” a Trump campaign official told Semafor. “President Trump respects and listens to his running mate Senator Vance.”The news comes just hours after Harris announced her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit, and days after Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit during a CBS News interview.Cornel West will not appear on Michigan’s presidential ballot this fall, election officials told the Washington Post today. The independent presidential candidate’s ballot access was denied over notary issues, the state’s director of elections said in a letter.“The charges regarding procedural errors in our filings, such as notarization specifics, are trivial technicalities being weaponized to distract from substantive policy debates,” West’s adviser Edwin DeJesus said in a statement to the Post. “We are confident that these accusations will be seen for what they are – frivolous and unfounded attempts to stifle opposition and debate.”West’s campaign says it will appeal the decision, but must do so in five days as it did not previously respond to a notification from election officials in July.Engaging with young voters. Very mindful. Very demure. Very cutesy. Just hours after VP hopeful Tim Walz joined TikTok, the White House is joining in on attempts to connect with gen-Z voters by playing along with the latest meme sweeping social platforms.For more on the origins of the meme, read Alaina Demopoulos’s postmortem of brat summer:The White House has released a new statement from Joe Biden on the Middle East.In it, Biden states: “Earlier today, I received an update from my negotiating team on the ground in Doha and directed them to put forward the comprehensive bridging proposal presented today, which offers the basis for coming to a final agreement on a ceasefire and hostage release deal. I spoke separately with Amir Sheikh Tamim and President Sisi to review the significant progress made in Doha over the past two days of talks, and they expressed the strong support of Qatar and Egypt for the US proposal as co-mediators in this process. Our teams will remain on the ground to continue technical work over the coming days, and senior officials will convene again in Cairo before the end of the week. They will report to me regularly. I am sending Secretary Blinken to Israel to reaffirm my iron-clad support for Israel’s security, continue our intensive efforts to conclude this agreement and to underscore that with the comprehensive ceasefire and hostage release deal now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process.”For more on the status of ceasefire negotiations, read Jason Burke’s and Bethan McKernan’s reporting:For those following along, JD Vance has landed in Cincinnati after an earlier midair emergency forced his plane to return to the Milwaukee airport.According to the New York Times, which had a reporter onboard the flight, the plane sat on the Milwaukee tarmac for about an hour before continuing on its way to Cincinnati.In an apparent response to Kamala Harris’s speech in North Carolina today, Trump has taken to Truth Social.The former president writes: “Kamala Harris wants to raise your taxes and make you pay for free healthcare and free housing in luxury hotels for her millions of illegal aliens. Meanwhile, our Veterans are sleeping on the streets and Kamala’s running mate, Weirdo Tim Walz, voted against my VA Mission Act that made healthcare more affordable and accessible for our Nation’s Heroes! Kamala and Walz will put Criminals, Terrorists, and Illegal Aliens FIRST. I will always put law-abiding, hardworking, patriotic AMERICANS First!”For more on the steps Harris proposed to fight child poverty, housing instability and inflation, check out George Chidi’s report:In lighter news, you may have seen the author Malcolm Harris’s tweet earlier this week that he accidentally acquired a Project 2025 swag bag.The Washington Post caught up with the Marxist journalist, who apparently was visited by police after posting on X:After seeing Harris’s tweets, a woman who describes herself on LinkedIn as a Project 2025 staffer called the police and filed a complaint for theft, according to a police report obtained by the Post.The cliff notes? Harris ultimately returned the duffle bag to the Heritage Foundation himself.Tim Walz has joined TikTok, or as he prefers to say, “TimTok”. The Minnesota governor’s first post features his dog Scout at a dog park along the banks of the Mississippi.In under a month, the Harris-Walz campagin has reignited gen-Z enthusiasm for the 2024 election, largely through memes and videos shared on TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms. Scout featured prominently in one post that began circulating in gen Z and millennial circles as Harris considered VP candidates earlier this month:Although Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok, or force its Chinese owners to sell it, Democrats have flocked to the app in recent months to drum up support from younger voters.Trump is considering endorsing an expanded $5,000 child tax credit for parents of all income levels, an official at his campaign told Semafor.“President Trump will consider a significant expansion of the child tax credit that applies to American families,” a Trump campaign official told Semafor. “President Trump respects and listens to his running mate Senator Vance.”The news comes just hours after Harris announced her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit, and days after Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit during a CBS News interview.Another plank of Kamala Harris’s economic platform was a promise to lower housing costs by expanding the housing supply.Here’s the moment where she announced it, in her just-concluded speech in Raleigh, North Carolina:Joe Biden had sought to increase the supply of affordable housing with his ill-fated Build Back Better plan, but that did not make it through Congress.Last month, shortly before he dropped out of the presidential race, the president proposed capping annual rent increases for some landlords at 5%. But, as is the case with much of his agenda, Congress would need to pass a new law to make that happen, and the Republicans controlling the House have shown no interest in doing so.A charter plane carrying JD Vance, dubbed Trump Force Two, made an emergency landing in Milwaukee after a malfunction with its door, CNN reports. Then plane then took back off and continued its flight:Vance earlier in the day held a campaign event at a police union office in the city.The GOP is teeing up their counterattack to Kamala Harris’s economic proposals.Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump’s campaign announced that JD Vance will deliver remarks on the economy on Monday in Philadelphia, where he’ll undoubtedly criticize the vice-president. And on X this afternoon, Republican congressman Mike Collins accused Harris of, essentially, trying to “buy votes”:As she wrapped up her speech, Kamala Harris debuted a proposal to bring back a tax credit that was credited with dramatically reducing child poverty in the single year it was in effect, and expanding it further.The expanded child tax credit cut poverty for children by about half in 2021, but expired the following year, when negotiations over renewing it broke down. Harris told voters that she would bring back the credit, and make it even more generous:
      As President, I’ll not only restore that tax cut, but expand it. We will provide $6,000 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child’s life. Now, think what that means. Think what that means. That is a vital, vital year of critical development of a child, and the cost can really add up, especially for young parents who need to buy diapers and clothes and a car seat and so much else.
      She argued that she could reduce the federal budget deficit while implementing this plan, though did not quite say how, instead hitting Donald Trump over his policies towards lowering taxes:
      And we will do this while reducing the deficit. Compare my plan with what Donald Trump intends to do, he plans to give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year, and he plans to cut corporate taxes by over a trillion dollars, even as they pull in record profits. And that’s on top of the $2tn tax cut he already signed into law when he was president, which, by the way, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly went to the wealthiest Americans and corporations and exploded the national deficit.
      You know, I think that if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.
      And then Harris came at Donald Trump with a tried-and-true attack used by Democrats everywhere, by warning that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act.There’s lots to say about the law, which polling from health policy research firm KFF indicates is generally popular, but which most Republicans continue to oppose. But here’s one thing to keep in mind: it was first passed in 2010, which means there are lots of voters out there who never experienced what the American health insurance system was like before its changes took effect.Harris warned the crowd that repealing the law “would take us back to a time when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions”, she said, adding that 45 million Americans rely on the law for health coverage.At that point, the crowd began chanting, “We’re not going back!”Donald Trump has made levying new tariffs on foreign imports a key part of his platform, but Kamala Harris is warning the crowd in North Carolina that the idea amounts to “a national sales tax” on everyday goods.“He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries. That will devastate Americans. It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs. A Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication. And, you know, economists have done the math. Donald Trump’s plan would cost a typical family $3,900 a year,” the vice-president said.“At this moment when everyday prices are too high, he will make them even higher.” More

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      Kamala Harris has made a dream start. But it’s too early to count out Donald Trump | Jonathan Freedland

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      Everything is going right for her and wrong for him. Kamala Harris has the encouraging poll numbers and, more precious still, the momentum. Donald Trump has the serial errors, the maudlin introspection and wobbling campaign team. In less than three weeks, the Democrats have pulled off one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in US political history, replacing a candidate who was shuffling towards near-certain defeat with one apparently soaring towards possible victory. And yet, even as Harris speaks of bringing the joy, contained within is a lurking danger – a peril that should be all too familiar.The sources of joy are not mysterious. Democrats are heading to Chicago for a convention that will feel like a party but was set to be a wake. Before 21 July, they were tied to Joe Biden, a man whose presidency has proved far more consequential than most predicted but who was on course to lose and lose badly in November. His passing of the baton to his number two has gone better than anyone had any right to expect.All but seamlessly, the campaign has switched over – equivalent to rebuilding a plane in mid-air, say seasoned election hands – and the candidate herself has taken to the task with unexpected ease. Twenty years younger and a whole lot more vigorous than her opponent, she has turned what had been Trump’s most potent weapon against Biden – age – against Trump himself. He is now the candidate of the past, she the face of the future. Never mind that Harris is a senior member of the present administration, she has shaken off the burden of incumbency – currently a negative in most democracies across the world – and cast herself as the turn-the-page option, aided by a powerful slogan: “We’re not going back.”The evidence that it’s working is in the headline poll numbers, which show her edging ahead in the very battleground states where Biden had been trailing. Almost overnight, she is winning back the voters who propelled Biden to victory in 2020 but were drifting away from him in 2024: young, Black and Hispanic Americans. Drawing big crowds, inspiring a thousand social-media memes, she is generating something Democrats have not seen since the first Barack Obama campaign of 2008: excitement.All this is having an equal and opposite effect on Trump. The better her numbers or crowds get, the more gloomy and rattled he becomes, consoling himself with the delusion that photos of Harris’s massive audiences are AI fakes. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser depicts Trump as bereft, missing Biden as he pines for the return of the man he knew how to run against. That contest was simple: it was strong v weak, with Biden’s age doing the work.But now Trump faces Harris, and he can’t quite work out how to take her on. He can’t fix on a nickname, he can’t settle on a target. His team wants him to run on immigration and inflation – both Democratic vulnerabilities – but he keeps returning to the terrain he knows best: culture wars and race baiting. Just as he once falsely claimed that Obama was not born in the US, Trump initially offered his theory that only late in life did Harris happen “to turn Black”. He also regularly describes the vice-president as a “low IQ individual”, a phrase he has long applied to Black female politicians. His base may like this talk, but it repels everyone else.An illustration of the unsettling effect Harris is having on Trump came in the mutual back-scratch he conducted with X magnate Elon Musk this week. “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” Trump said about a drawing of Harris on the cover of Time magazine. “She looked very much like our great first lady, Melania,” he added, referring to his wife. Along with any listener to that exchange, Trump doesn’t know where to put himself.Because he is knocked off balance, he keeps stumbling. The Musk encounter was a case in point. After the embarrassment of a tech breakdown that led to a start delayed by 40-plus minutes, Trump rambled for two hours, straying into baffling tangents and frankly weird claims. One example: “global warming” is no threat, because rising sea levels mean “more oceanfront property”. (The real danger, he said, is the warmth of nuclear weapons.) What’s more, Trump seemed to speak with a heavy lisp throughout. None of this might matter much in itself, but it shows that Trump is beginning to get some of the same scrutiny of his cognitive and physical capacities that drove Biden to step aside. Put simply, age is now his problem.So this race is going exactly the way Harris would want it to go. Trump is lashing out at allies and, always a sign of a troubled campaign, shaking up his team. He is saddled with a running mate whose back catalogue would make a Gilead commander blush, while he paints an ever-darkening picture of a US in decline, a nation riddled with crime and overrun by scary invaders. All the while, she is beaming about a brighter tomorrow. As the Republican sage Mike Murphy puts it, “He’s doing Voldemort and she’s doing Ted Lasso.”Where, then, is the danger? First, the polling is not quite as rosy as Democrats want it to be. Dig further into the numbers and you see that, despite everything, Donald Trump is more popular now than he was at this same, mid-August point in either 2020 or 2016. His approval rating currently stands at 44%. In August 2016, a paltry 33% of Americans had a positive view of him – but he went on to win.What’s more, in each of the three crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Harris is ahead by only four points, according to the latest survey. That’s welcome progress, to be sure, but it’s not enough when you recall that Trump put on nine points between August and November in those states in 2016 and closed the gap to a photo-finish in 2020.Harris may be more charismatic than either of the Democratic standard-bearers in those earlier contests, but she has vulnerabilities of her own. She is clearly a figure of the “coastal elites”: a wealthy Californian, she has no equivalent of the Scranton Joe persona available to Biden. Both she and her running mate, the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have a history of progressive positions that anyone with a memory knows Republicans can twist into a caricature of leftwing radicalism. True, Walz’s vibe is cuddly midwestern dad – and there’s good evidence that, these days, a politician’s vibe matters more than their record – but there’s still a job to do. It’s almost a universal truth of contemporary politics that any party not of the right has to go much further than it would like to reassure voters in the centre. (Just ask Keir Starmer.) By that measure, the Democratic nominee may still have some distance to travel.Above all, and paradoxically, it’s Harris’s astonishing early success that contains risk. It has encouraged Democrats to believe that, in ditching Biden, the hard work has already been done, that the menace of a second Trump presidency has been averted. But this remains a perilously close contest in a sharply divided nation. As we have seen twice in recent years, Republicans enjoy a structural advantage in the electoral college that means that a Democrat can win the popular vote by a resounding margin – and still lose.So, yes, Harris has made a dream start. Trump is flailing. But it is far, far too early to celebrate. In the autumn, Americans will take their traditional second look at the two candidates. There will be TV debates and the hard yards of getting voters not to share memes on TikTok but off the couch and to the polling booth. This race is far from over – and if the last, turbulent decade has taught us anything, it’s that it is always too soon to count out Donald Trump.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      Ceasefire talks are on their last legs, and Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame | Mohamad Bazzi

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      Joe Biden is making a last-ditch effort to salvage the Gaza ceasefire agreement he has been pushing for months. The US president, along with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, have called on Israeli and Hamas negotiators to resume indirect talks on Thursday to hammer out an agreement. But Biden and his administration won’t name and shame the biggest obstacle to reaching a deal: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. For months, Netanyahu has tried to block an agreement by backtracking and adding new conditions, prompting Israeli security officials to accuse him of sabotaging the negotiations to stay in power.Since a week-long truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on 1 December, Biden has invested nearly all of his administration’s efforts into resurrecting a ceasefire. But Biden refuses to impose any cost on Netanyahu for his obstinacy and prolonging the conflict. Since Israel launched its brutal war on Gaza 10 months ago, Biden has failed to use the two most effective levers of power at his disposal: withholding billions of dollars in US weapons shipments, and denying Israel political cover at the United Nations security council and other international bodies.Even as US officials privately leak that Biden is angry at Netanyahu for lying to him about wanting to secure a ceasefire, the Biden administration continues to send massive new transfers of weapons to Israel. On Tuesday, the state department approved $20bn in new arms sales, which include dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tactical vehicles and missiles, as well as tens of thousands of explosive mortar and tank cartridges.This is one of the largest weapons transfers to Israel in US history – and it will be mostly funded by American taxpayers. The biggest part of the deal is nearly $19bn for up to 50 new warplanes, which won’t be delivered for at least five years. But the thousands of rounds of ordnance could be shipped sooner. Washington is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, providing $3.8bn in military aid a year. In April, after intense lobbying by Biden, Congress approved an additional $14bn in military assistance to Israel, which will fund the latest purchases approved this week.With this level of Israeli dependence on US military aid, Biden should have significant leverage over Netanyahu. Instead, Biden is clinging to a failed policy of trying to exert behind-the-scenes influence on the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies. Netanyahu has consistently defied and humiliated Biden – and yet the US president won’t call out Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire agreement that would lead to the release of more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas after its 7 October attacks on Israel.Biden outlined the parameters of a deal in late May, when he spoke at the White House to publicly endorse a three-phase Israeli plan to end the war. By essentially adopting Israel’s proposal, Biden hoped to break a months-long deadlock in negotiations that were mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar. For months, the Biden administration blamed Hamas for refusing to accept a truce – and rarely mentioned Netanyahu’s intransigence. In early July, the Biden administration called Hamas’s response to the US proposal a “breakthrough”, raising hopes that a deal was imminent.But as talks dragged on, Netanyahu ordered Israeli negotiators to add five new conditions to the outlines of a proposal that Israel had accepted in late May and which formed the basis for Biden’s plan. In a letter sent to mediators in late July, Israel demanded that it maintain military control of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, an area known as the Philadelphi Corridor, which had been a major point of contention during earlier rounds of negotiations.Netanyahu’s attempts at blocking the ceasefire agreement infuriated members of Israel’s security establishment, and they began leaking details of recent high-level security meetings to show the prime minister’s obstinacy and his lack of interest in the fate of the remaining hostages. On 2 August, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on a tense meeting between Netanyahu and his security chiefs days earlier, which devolved into a shouting match as multiple officials accused the premier of torpedoing any ceasefire deal with his latest demands. Netanyahu reportedly accused his top security officials of being “soft” and poor negotiators.The prime minister is trying to prolong the Gaza war to avoid early elections, which his Likud party is likely to lose, and multiple investigations into his government’s security failures leading up to the October attacks. If he’s forced out of power, Netanyahu would also face a long-delayed corruption and bribery trial stemming from an earlier stint as premier. Despite Netanyahu’s interest in clinging to power and criticism of his negotiating tactics by Israeli security officials, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to avoid blaming Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire.Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation, as the Israeli military continues to block aid deliveries. Researchers fear the death toll could eventually reach 186,000 – due to “indirect casualties” of war, such as food shortages, a widespread cholera epidemic and the destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure.With the US and other western allies continuing to provide the weapons that sustain Israel’s war machine, Netanyahu has had little incentive to stop the bloodshed. Instead, he has escalated the conflict in recent weeks, risking a wider regional war that could involve Israel and the US against Iran and its network of allied militias in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.Late last month, two assassinations in Beirut and Tehran revived fears that the Gaza war could spiral into a regional conflagration. On 30 July, an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut killed a senior commander in Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported by Iran that has been fighting a low-level conflict with Israel since October. The next day, an explosion in Tehran killed the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. While Israel did not claim responsibility for that assassination, it’s widely assumed to be behind the attack that humiliated the Iranian leadership, which was hosting Haniyeh and dozens of other foreign officials for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Iran vowed to retaliate for Haniyeh’s killing on its soil, and US and western officials have been scrambling to avoid an escalating series of attacks and reprisals.A ceasefire is the only way to stop the bloodshed in Gaza and to ensure that the conflict won’t expand into a regional war that could entangle Iran and the US. But since Netanyahu has not faced the loss of US support or other consequences for his belligerence, he has little incentive to agree to a truce or to refrain from attacks that destabilize the region.Already, there are signs that Biden’s ceasefire summit on Thursday will end in yet another deadlock: Hamas has not committed to participating in the talks, while a member of Israel’s negotiating team told Israeli media that there was no point in traveling to the summit unless Netanyahu expands the team’s mandate. In other words, Netanyahu can continue to obstruct the negotiations – and pay no price for it.So far, the Israeli prime minister has gotten everything he’s wanted by prolonging the war and escaping blame from the Biden administration for stalling a ceasefire deal. After the administration approved $20bn in new arms deals this week, Biden is signaling that he will continue sending weapons to Israel no matter what Netanyahu does.It doesn’t have to be this way: since Biden dropped out of the US presidential race last month, he no longer risks paying a political cost for restraining Netanyahu and Israel. The president can finally stand up to Netanyahu – and salvage a ceasefire plan that ends 10 months of American complicity.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) More

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      Donald Trump is in full meltdown mode. Could he destroy his own campaign? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What do you think Donald Trump does for stress relief? Massages, maybe? Or perhaps he binge-drinks Diet Coke while bed rotting. Maybe he writes down his grievances on pieces of paper and then flushes them down the toilet. It’s also possible he lets off steam by smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs and throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans. That feels very on-brand.Whatever Trump does to manage his stress, I imagine he’s doing a lot of it right now. The convicted felon has had a terrible three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, things have been going rapidly downhill for Trump. His campaign had been built around bashing Biden, whose frailty and questionable mental acuity made him an easy target. With the far more energetic and coherent Kamala Harris as his opponent, Trump clearly doesn’t know what to do. His campaign now seems to consist of nothing but racism, the revival of old grudges, conspiracy theories and insults.This strategy isn’t exactly working out for him. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday found Harris four points ahead in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This is a big deal: when Biden was the nominee, Trump was either always slightly ahead in those states or the two men were neck and neck. It’s not just the polls that have shifted, media coverage has, too. A month ago, every headline seemed to be questioning Biden’s mental competence; now, headlines are focused on Trump’s unhinged rambling.While Harris’s campaign has huge momentum and exudes competence, Trump is embroiled in chaos. One of the latest debacles? He was hacked. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the hack was “by the Iranian Government” and added: “Never a nice thing to do!” No – but it provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that Trump’s Twitter (now X) account was compromised in 2020 by Victor Gevers who successfully guessed the password was “maga2020!” This was after the ethical hacker hacked Trump’s Twitter in 2016 by guessing the password was “yourefired”, the catchphrase from The Apprentice. The man who wants voters to think he can manage national security can’t even manage his own passwords.Even an interview on Monday night with his pal Elon Musk was a rambling, grievance-filled disaster. It was also beset by serious technical issues, leading a Harris spokesman to quip that Trump’s campaign is in service of “self-obsessed rich guys who … cannot run a livestream in the year 2024”.Trump isn’t dealing with his stream of setbacks very well; according to Republican sources quoted in a recent Axios report, he “is struggling to get past his anger”. The New York Times has similarly reported that a seething Trump repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private – claims that Trump has denied, despite the fact that he’s happily called the vice-president all manner of names in public. Essentially, he’s in full meltdown mode.So, too, are Trump’s allies, who are desperately begging their candidate to get a grip and start focusing on actual issues, rather than personal attacks. Instead of heeding this advice, however, Trump seems intent on alienating the people who can help him win. At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Georgia is an important state to win and, before Biden dropped out, it seemed as though it was in the bag for Trump. Now he’s polling the same as Harris. Making an enemy of Kemp is a terrible strategy.While it’s highly satisfying to think of a furious Trump setting his own campaign on fire, it’s important not to be complacent. As we know, things change quickly. Harris may be on the up now, but she hasn’t won this election yet. It’s also important not to underestimate the dangers a desperate Trump poses. There’s a chance he might implode, yes. But there’s also a chance he might explode, leaving a hell of a lot of collateral damage in his wake. In an interview this weekend, Biden said that, if Trump loses, he’s “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Nor am I.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn case you were wondering, by the way, there is a real answer to the question about how Trump manages his stress. During a 2004 interview with Larry King, he said: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters … That’s how I handle stress.” I wish I could give that technique a go myself. The problem is, if you’re keen on things such as bodily autonomy and democracy, then this election really does matter. More

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      Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

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      Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.Here are key takeaways from the event.1. A terribly slow startThe event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyberattack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.2. The greatest hits Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.His most dangerous lies were about immigration and climate change. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is reelected.He also dismissed climate change as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees. 3. Trump derides HarrisTrump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.  4. Musk the enablerThroughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. More

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      Trump rehashes vitriol and falsehoods in rambling talk with Musk – as it happened

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      Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.This blog is closing now – thanks for following along. You can read our full story on the interview here:Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at Musk’s request. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.Trump then pivoted to discussing his usual anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter the country through the US-Mexico border.“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” Trump said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterization of her policy portfolio. He repeatedly mocked Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator.And he bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.Hello, this is Helen Sullivan wrapping up our coverage of that interview.Let’s take another look at Trump’s claim on the numbers. His campaign Twitter / X account claimed it was the biggest interview in history, which is wrong by tens and tens of millions of viewers / participants.That interview had around 1.2 million people watching, which is less than the average Fox prime time viewership in May this year.At one point, Trump tried to claim that 60 million people were watching, and Musk did not correct him, but laughed nervously, and said instead that a hundred million would probably watch the recording.A few that were much bigger than that interview: Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in 1995, which had at least 28 million.Or Oprah and Michael Jackson in 1993, which about 90 million people watched worldwide.Emily Maitlis’s 2019 interview with Prince Andrew was watched by more than two million people.Donald Trump’s conversation with the world’s richest person, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was less of an interview and more of a chat between two ideologically aligned men who felt at ease talking for more than two hours before an audience of about a million accounts. After a belated start caused by what Musk said was a cyber-attack, they discussed Trump’s experience after an assassin opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania, Musk’s views on the climate crisis, and the former president’s take on just about anything. One thing they did not do was break much news. The ex-president stuck to well-worn rhetoric on familiar topics, with little push back from Musk, who has endorsed his presidential campaign.Here are some highlights:

      Trump leveled baseless attacks against migrants, as he often does, describing them as “murderers”.

      The former president said that in October, he would return to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where a gunman opened fire on his rally last month.

      Musk prodded Trump to establish something called a “government efficiency commission”. The ex-president replied with praise for the Tesla boss’s penchant for laying off workers.

      In an attack that you can expect to hear from Republicans a lot in the months to come, Trump decried Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal”.

      Harris’s campaign replied that Trump’s “extremism” is a “feature not a glitch of his campaign”.
      Now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are off the air, Kamala Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello had this to say about their interview:
      Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.
      After just over two hours, Donald Trump has wrapped up his interview with Elon Musk.The conversation was wide-ranging and often rambling, with the former president and the Tesla CEO expressing their admiration for each other and discussing their political views. Trump repeatedly exaggerated various ills the country faced, as well as his record as president, while also attacking Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.The interview’s scheduled start time was delayed by about 40 minutes due to what Musk said was a cyber-attack on X. There were no further technical glitches once the conversation started.Conservative accounts are circulating these photos, saying it’s Trump talking with Elon Musk on X:Are they wrapping up? It’s been nearly two hours, and the conversation seems to be heading in that direction.The two men are trading compliments, with Musk saying to Trump: “Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next. And that’s the kind of future that I think you will bring as president. And that’s why I endorse you.”To which Trump replied: “Well, I appreciate that. That endorsement meant a lot to me. Not all endorsements mean that much. To be honest, your endorsement meant a lot.”One wonders what endorsements Trump doesn’t think much of.There are more than a million people listening in to Trump’s interview with Musk, according to X’s counter.The number caught the attention of the former president: “I’m looking at the numbers, you get a lot of people listening. I hope you don’t get nervous, because you got a lot of people listening to you right now.”There was a brief pause as Trump seemed to read the number of people listening in. He then remarked: “I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”Trump seemed to imply that the listener count was up to 70m, but that’s much higher than what X’s counter shows.In an attack that you can expect to hear repeated by Republicans quite a lot over the next three months, Donald Trump assailed Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal” who “destroyed” California.“She’s going to be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to Joe Biden.“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California,” he then said of Harris, who was the city’s district attorney before becoming the state’s prosecutor.But, as he often does, the former president overreached, implying that the sun shined over the famously sunny state no longer. “We’re talking about the sun. There’s nothing better than California. She has destroyed that,” Trump said.Fact checks: the economy and CovidTrump returned to many of his favorite lies about the economy while he was president, claiming he had the “best economy ever, maybe in the world”. That’s a complicated claim to fact check, because it is simply so broad. But to start – GDP growth was so-so under Trump, though unemployment was low. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was generally good – it was far from the most booming time in US history, let alone in the world …Trump blamed the Covid pandemic on China. There is still no determination on the origins of the pandemic.Musk and Trump are now discussing the climate crisis, with the Tesla CEO saying his views on the subject are “moderate in this regard”.Musk, who credits much of his wealth to the success of his electric car company, argues that fossil fuels are still essential for prosperity, but warns that their supplies are finite, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses its own risk.Trump replied by telling Musk that he fossil fuel-generated electricity powers the factories that produce his Teslas: “I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants … so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment.”Trump mentioned AI – and the amount of energy it requires. And he was kind of right.As companies seek to build out AI technologies, the US will “need a lot of tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it”, Trump said.Indeed, the new computing infrastructure needed to power tech companies’ ramping up of AI technologies will eat up a lot of energy.As my colleagues reported last month, Google admitted that its data centers, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. Because AI programs are so complex, they require more energy than other forms of computing. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much.The conversation took a chummy turn after Musk brought up establishing something called a “government efficiency commission”.The Tesla CEO is clearly among the ranks of those who think that Washington overspends and under-delivers, and has gently prodded Trump to do something about that, if re-elected.“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard earned money, is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said.“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump replied, in an apparent reference to Musk’s penchant for pushing out staff at companies he’s taken over, including X. More

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      in US Politics

      Feel the groove: Trump keeps on dancing – does it help his cause?

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      Amid the lies, the vindictiveness, the dystopian portrayal of an America in decline, one aspect of Donald Trump’s political rallies tends to get overlooked: the dancing.At many campaign stops, the former president engages in what has become a signature dance: to the tune of Village People’s YMCA, Trump pumps his arms alternately, while staring blankly into the crowd.Unusually for a dance performance, there is a sort of malevolence to Trump’s movements. It’s rare to see someone dancing with a scowl on their face. But his supporters love it. A compilation video of Trump dancing proved a big hit at the Republican national convention, where it was played on big screens to fawning supporters every night. But why does Trump do this? And is his dancing any good?No it is not, said Brandon Chow, the founder of Hip Hop Dance Junkies, a company with dance schools in several states across the US.“On a scale of one to 10, I would say three. Three or four max,” Chow said.“The arms are there, the arms are very stiff, though – they’re not really moving. It’s literally him with his fists tight and his arms to his side. I mean, there is no movement where he’s leaving his comfort zone or his space. He’s literally just stepping in place, side to side, hips swaying.”View image in fullscreenChow, who predominantly deals in one-on-one coaching, suggested Trump could incorporate his feet more, and experiment with other arm movements.“He should get more steps involved, as opposed to stepping in place. Or if you aren’t going to travel outside of your zone, at least get some arms going instead of locking them to your sides, maybe even just, like a hand in the air every now and then, or doing an arm wave, or a turn or something. It just seems very repetitive, like it’s a robot staying in place,” Chow said.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, said Trump’s characteristic performance is less an irrepressible expression of glee and more a way for him to show his supporters, and his party, who is boss.“It’s a sign of his need for power and control: that if he can lie with impunity, if he can dance oddly whenever he wants to, that’s a sign that, basically, he has enough power to be able to do whatever he pleases without anybody being able to stop him,” Hershey said.“Goodness knows he’s not in control of his dancing, but the fact that he feels this is a sign he’s cool, and it’s something he feels perfectly at ease to demonstrate, shows how he thinks he’s in total control of the Republican party: and he’s right.”View image in fullscreenIt is uncommon to see national leaders dance in public. And when they do, it hasn’t always proved to be a political benefit.Theresa May, while prime minister of the UK, became a figure of fun in August 2018 after performing an odd, stilted dance in front of a group of scouts in Nairobi. A couple of months later, at the Conservative party conference, May attempted to reclaim the narrative by dancing on to the stage to the tune of Abba’s Dancing Queen. The routine was widely panned.Boris Yeltsin, the former president of Russia, was known as someone who enjoyed a good time. During a campaign stop in 1996, he appeared on stage with a rock band and performed a spirited dance composition, which incorporated sashaying hips, under-knee claps, and a fists-clenched, arm pumping motion. Yeltsin won re-election, although questions were raised about the legitimacy of the vote.Barack Obama rarely danced while in office, but in a 2007 appearance on the Ellen show, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination, the former president briefly sashayed along to Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love. To the untrained eye, Obama appeared to display significantly more rhythm than Trump, May or Yeltsin.Joe Biden has had his own issues with musical performance. At a concert to celebrate Juneteenth earlier this year, the president stood frozen in place, arms rigid at his sides, as other people danced beside him.View image in fullscreenUnlike Yeltsin or Obama, Trump never looks to be enjoying himself while dancing. A review of at least 20 videos of Trump performing his signature dance at campaign rallies and, this week, during an interview with the questionable internet personality Adin Ross, failed to find a single instance of Trump smiling.“I would love to see him smile while he dances,” said Rhonda Malkin, a former member of the Rockettes dance troupe and the owner of Fusion Exercise and Professional Dance Coaching, who has tutored scores of professional dancers.Malkin said she suspected Trump was uninterested in a career in dance, but if he were, “he probably should work on his footwork”.“If he’s into moving his hands, then he should move his feet accordingly, with either a side-to-side motion or a step touch,” Malkin said. A step touch involves the dancer stepping one foot to the left or the right, and bringing the other foot next to it. The move is then repeated in the opposite direction.Trump may not have time to work on his footwork, or even arm movements, given he is facing, for the first time in months, serious challenges in his bid to win a second presidential term. Trump has fallen behind Kamala Harris in an average of national polls, as Harris has galvanized previously weary Democratic supporters.View image in fullscreenHe continues to face legal issues, too. He is due to be sentenced on 16 September after being found guilty on 34 felony fraud charges, while a judge presiding over Trump’s election interference case in Washington recently rejected his efforts to throw out the case. In context Trump’s continued jigs seem almost defiant – and now Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, has proved a huge hit, whereas JD Vance, Trump’s VP choice, has faced questions over past remarks and actions.In that context, at least Trump can rely on his ever-adoring base – the type of supporter who is thrilled when the former president does his idiosyncratic dance on stage, and believes Trump can do no wrong.“This does not look like a typical political attachment of even strong partisans to a candidate. I just haven’t seen before mentions of a candidate as the second coming of Christ, or that somehow he was divinely protected from a stray bullet by God,” Hershey said.Trump, Hershey said, has spent years “fundamentally fearmongering” about immigration, crime and “the other” to secure his relationship with his fans. The dancing, however lackluster it may be, is just some rather odd icing on a largely disgruntled cake. More