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Walz speaks to donors at fundraising event in Newport
Tim Walz has wrapped up his 30 minute appearance at an event in Newport that donors paid between $1000 and 100,000 to attend.
The Orange Country register reports that his speech was “peppered with Midwest jokes and self-deprecating quips”.
Here is the local news outlet’s report:
Standing before a large ballroom at the Balboa Bay Resort, a waterfront hotel in Newport Beach, Walz ran through his resume: governor, congressman, educator, coach — “We won the damn state championship,” he reminded a cheering audience. He ran through his platform — supporting gun ownership when balanced with certain regulations, paid family leave and clean air regulations.
‘They keep talking about these are radical things, and I’m like, go ahead and label me whatever you want because I’ll damn sure guarantee you 80% of people in Minnesota and across the country want those things,’ said Walz to applause.
‘You know better than anybody in this state what we’ve got in the vice president,’ Walz said. ‘She’s found her voice.’
One of the fundraiser’s hosts, attorney Wylie Aitken, said he had never seen so much enthusiasm in all the years he’d been doing this:
'“It’s amazing that when everybody was kind of down and out and feeling, legitimately, concern with Biden, etc., then suddenly to have this reversal and to see this incredible enthusiasm that’s energised everyone.”
Abortion will be on ballot in at least eight states in November
Missouri voters will decide in November whether to guarantee a right to abortion with a constitutional amendment that would reverse the state’s near-total ban on the procedure.
Missouri has become the eighth state to have abortion on the ballot in November.
The secretary of state’s office certified Tuesday that an initiative petition received more than enough signatures from registered voters to qualify for the general election. It will need approval from a majority of voters to become enshrined in the state constitution.
Missouri will join at least seven states voting on abortion rights during the presidential election.
Arizona’s secretary of state certified an abortion-rights measure for the ballot on Monday. Measures also will go before voters in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and South Dakota.
While not explicitly addressing abortion rights, a New York ballot measure would bar discrimination based on “pregnancy outcomes” and “reproductive healthcare,” among other things.
Harris and Walz are planning to hold a rally in Milwaukee while the DNC is happening in Chicago next week, the New York Times reports – in the venue where Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month.
The rally is planned for Tuesday, according to the report, which cites four people briefed on the discussions.
The Fiserv Forum, where the rally will reportedly take place, is 80 miles, or 128km, from the United Center in Chicago, where the DNC is taking place all week.
The move is not unusual, but is interesting because it will serve as a direct comparison of crowd size and energy to Trump’s event. Trump has claimed, falsely, that Harris’s crowd sizes are fake.
Meanwhile Joe Biden says Ukraine’s military incursion into Russia has “created a real dilemma” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He added that US officials are in constant touch with the Ukrainians about the move.
About 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of 6 August, with tanks and armoured vehicles, Reuters reports. A US official said late on Tuesday that the goal of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion appears to be to force Russia to pull troops out of Ukraine to defend Russian territory against the cross-border assault.
Answering questions from reporters upon arrival in New Orleans, Biden said he has been briefed every four to five hours for the last six to eight days on Ukraine’s action.
“It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin,” he said in his first substantive comments about the operation, which appeared to have caught the Russians off guard.
The US has provided billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine intended largely for defensive purposes, as Ukraine tries to repel the Russian invasion launched in February 2022.
In May, Biden authorised Kyiv to launch US-supplied weapons at military targets inside Russia that are supporting an offensive against the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
The White House said Ukraine did not provide advance notice of its incursion, which took place in the Kursk region of Russia. Russian forces on Tuesday struck back at Ukrainian troops with missiles, drones and airstrikes.
As we await news of Walz’s appearance at a fundraiser in California, here is AP’s look at his first solo appearance since being named the Democratic vice presidential nominee last week:
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz warned cheering union members Tuesday that Donald Trump would wage war on working people while threatening Medicare and Social Security as he kicked off a five-state fundraising swing.
Speaking in a cavernous, dimly lit ballroom to thousands of members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Walz said he and Vice President Kamala Harris want to spread collective bargaining and other worker protections to “every state in the union.”
“When unions are strong, America is strong,” Walz, a former school teacher and union member, said.
The Democratic campaign chose to kick off Walz’s national swing on the safest of political terrain — heavily Democratic California, home to Vice President Harris and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans about 2-1.
Updated
Though Harris is gaining ground in the polls, Trump is still more popular than he was at this point in 2016 or 2020:
Point 2 has been overlooked for a year https://t.co/uQpsRi38iS
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 13, 2024
Tim Walz due to appear at California fundraiser
Tim Walz is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California this afternoon. On Wednesday, he will address fundraisers in Denver and Boston, and then wrap up his trip on Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.
Walz’s focus on fundraising this week comes after he stormed through a series of battleground states with Harris last week to introduce himself to voters nationally. The two held rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.
His speeches so far have been built around key themes for Democrats in 2024: support for abortion rights, lifting the middle class and characterizing Trump as “weird” — an attack line Walz has been credited with authoring.
Updated
Democratic voter registration surges since Biden drops out - report says
Democratic voter registration has surged following Biden dropping out – and Harris stepping in, the New York Times reports.
This follows an almost year-long trend of more people registering as Republicans than Democrats in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, including a spike after the Trump assassination attempt.
But after Biden dropped out, weekly Democratic registrations outnumbered Republican nominations in North Carolina.
Pennsylvania saw the largest Democratic margin for new registrations since late last year.
The paper’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, points out that the Democrats nonetheless still need to catch up:
A bit of a shift in new voter registration in PA/NC since Biden dropped out, though Democrats still have a big deficit to makeup here - from @fparises https://t.co/QArpHqRIEo
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 13, 2024
Updated
AP has important apostrophe news:
Whatever possessed Vice President Kamala Harris to pick Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it probably wasn’t a desire to inflame arguments about apostrophes. But it doesn’t take much to get grammar nerds fired up. They’re all over social media debating rules for possessive proper names ending in S. Some agree with The Associated Press, which says just add an apostrophe to Harris to make it possessive. Others agree with The New York Times and other outlets that add an apostrophe S. Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, says the AP guidance reflects how English was spoken and written centuries ago but a shift is underway. For now, he says both are acceptable.
“The lower the stakes, the bigger the fight,” Ron Woloshun, a creative director and digital marketer in California told AP.
If we don’t agree on these rules right now, it’s going to be a very long eight years:
— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) August 6, 2024
Let’s do an S after the apostrophe after Harris, and an S after the apostrophe after Walz.
“Harris’s pick vindicates Walz’s message.”
I will not be taking further questions at this time.
The resident punctuation guru on my desk, Warren Murray, has this rule: you use apostrophe and -s when that is the way you say it. Otherwise, it is an apostrophe. So it is Harris’s, and Walz’s. (At my Anglican high school the rule was that only Jesus got an apostrophe -s).
The Guardian’s style guide says: The possessive in words and names ending in S normally takes an apostrophe followed by a second S (Jones’s, James’s), but be guided by pronunciation.
Updated
Tuesday’s Minnesota Democratic primary is the last in a series of heated primaries for the progressive “Squad” of House Democrats who have been vocal in their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Fellow Squad members Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were recently defeated by candidates supported by a deluge of pro-Israel spending. But Omar faces a lower-key race.
The two-term congresswoman became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in the US House of Representatives in 2019. While in office, she has allied herself with the left wing of the Democratic party, serving as the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and backing key progressive measures such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Even before the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing offensive, Omar had established herself as a vocal critic of Israel. She memorably drew criticism in 2019 for quipping that US politicians’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins”, in reference to donations from the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (Aipac). The comment drew accusations of antisemitism and she later apologized for it.
In the wake of the 7 October attacks, and as Israel escalated its retaliatory war, Omar was among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire. She has spoken out in support of the university encampments in solidarity with Gaza. Her daughter was suspended from Barnard College for taking part.
These together would seem to make Omar a natural target of pro-Israel groups, but Samuels, a former Minneapolis city councilman has not drawn support from Aipac or its affiliated Super Pac, United Democracy Project. In contrast, UDP dropped more than $20m to unseat Bowman and Bush.
The lobby groups have not said why they have not gotten involved in the Minnesota primary – but it is possible that Omar just did not provide them the fodder.
Updated
Hello, this is Helen Sullivan taking over our live US politics coverage. Coming up today, we’re expecting Tim Walz to speak at a Harris-Walz campaign reception in Newport Beach, California.
And Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is defending her seat in the state Democratic primary, a rematch against Don Samuels that comes two years after she barely eked out a victory against him. Polls close at 8pm Minnesota time – in about three hours.
I’ll take you through the latest – stay tuned.
Updated
The evening so far
Elon Musk is basking in the afterglow of the interview he conducted on Twitter/X with Donald Trump last night. The Tesla CEO said their conversation had attracted 1bn views and comments, a number that was impossible to verify, while adding he would be willing to hold a similar event with Kamala Harris. But a remark the ex-president made during the interview about firing employees who strike has spurred the United Auto Workers to file a federal labor law complaint against both Trump and Musk, while Harris’s campaign dismissed last night’s event as a chat between “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024”. The campaign also went public with news that it had received warning from the FBI of foreign hackers trying to breach its systems, but does not think they have been successful.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who is Harris’s running mate, made his first solo campaign appearance at a union convention, and defended his military service.
Harris has no public events scheduled today, but her campaign continues to face questions over why the vice-president hasn’t held a press conference or granted a sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the White House.
Musk has a long history of opposing unions, including at Tesla, where the UAW has been trying to encourage workers to organize.
Trump has been flying around to campaign events in a plane once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator, warned that Trump was “laying the groundwork” to dispute the November election, if he loses.
Updated
In the further annals of Republicans who broke with Donald Trump returning to the fold, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr said he will vote for the ex-president in November.
Burr, who declined to seek re-election and left the Senate in 2022, was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to the January 6 insurrection.
The conviction ultimately failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate required to be approved, and North Carolina’s GOP censured Burr for his vote.
In an interview with Spectrum News, Burr said:
Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.
Updated
Donald Trump’s campaign is facing accusations of racism over this post on Twitter/X earlier today:
Import the third world
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 13, 2024
Become the third world pic.twitter.com/MVawiHQSpm
It appears to be in line with the former president’s messaging around undocumented people, who he has baselessly blamed for causing crime, and sparked a wave of condemnation from users of X:
Racist motherfucking weirdos
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) August 13, 2024
Well, at least you aren't hiding it behind dog whistles any more.
— Bricki 🏳️⚧️ (@ohbricki) August 13, 2024
racist bullshit
— Tab - A Lot of Shark (@Tejana_Tab) August 13, 2024
Updated
Tim Walz is set to become one of the most prominent Democrats in the country – at least for the next three months, as he campaigns alongside Kamala Harris. Here’s a look at his record in Minnesota, from the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang:
Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.
After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.
“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.
In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.
But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.
Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?
Well, he’s Tim Walz.
When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.
Walz defends military service in first solo campaign appearance
Speaking of the Harris campaign, the vice-president’s newly minted running mate, Tim Walz, today made his first solo campaign appearance at a convention of union members.
The Minnesota governor gave a wide-ranging speech in which he attacked Donald Trump and cheered the power of organized labor, while also taking time to respond to attacks from the former president and his supporters, who say Walz has exaggerated his military service.
Here’s what he said in response, at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s annual convention:
"I am damn proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record."
— The Recount (@therecount) August 13, 2024
— Amid GOP attacks, Tim Walz defends the timing of his decision to retire from the National Guard in 2005 pic.twitter.com/zEXTt2cXLA
The attacks on Walz’s military service, from Trump allies including his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, have centered on the timing of his decision to retire after 24 years of army national guard service. Here’s more on that:
Harris campaign says FBI warned of foreign hacking, but systems were not breached
Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.
“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.
Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:
Democrats in Arizona received some good news yesterday, when the secretary of state approved a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports. The party hopes the initiative will bring out voters who will also cast ballots for Kamala Harris in a state that could prove decisive to her hopes to winning the White House:
Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.
Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.
On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.
Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.
Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.
Arizona’s Republican former governor Doug Ducey has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election bid, after he was censured by the state GOP near the end of his term for not being sufficiently loyal to the former president.
Ducey cited his support for tougher immigration policies and a continuation of Trump-era tax cuts in his endorsement:
Much is on the line this election year & I’m encouraging all eligible Arizonans to vote & prioritize the issues that most affect our state & nation.
— Doug Ducey (@DougDucey) August 13, 2024
I will be voting for Republicans up & down the ballot in November — and both Donald Trump and Kari Lake have my endorsement.
1/
Three years ago, the state Republican party reprimanded Ducey after it was taken over by rightwing officials who retaliated against politicians from the state that had clashed with Trump:
Donald Trump’s campaign is out with a new statement claiming that the former president’s interview with Elon Musk last night “breaks the internet”.
It says 25 million users on X have listened to the entire two-hour-plus interview as of noon today, and that the conversation generated 9.6m posts, among other statistics. It also hit out at Kamala Harris for not having done any interviews since launching her campaign.
“While weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has avoided answering questions for 23 days, President Trump delivered his message directly to the people in a historic, two-hour interview that generated millions of posts and impressions related to President Trump and Elon Musk’s unfiltered conversation,” the statement reads.
Here’s more, from the Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung:
President Trump will do everything he can to bring his unscripted message directly to the people, something the fake news media refuses to do. While Kamala Harris enjoys the luxury of hiding from the press, President Trump accepted Elon’s invitation to have an unfiltered conversation about his America First policies with voters and people around the world. The media can lie, but the numbers don’t: Americans are eager to hear from President Trump and his momentum is only growing as we get closer to November 5.
Updated
Sanders warns Trump is 'laying the groundwork' to dispute election loss
The prominent progressive senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Donald Trump is preparing to once again dispute the results of the 2024 election, should he lose.
Trump has never publicly conceded his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and engaged in a months-long effort to prevent the Democrat from taking office that culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection.
In a just-released statement, Sanders cites the former president’s recent language to argue that he is preparing to do the same this year:
Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent”.
This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
Updated
The former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges last night.
Peters, a one-time hero to those denying that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with the My Pillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, access to the Mesa county election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity, the Associated Press reports.
Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to “steal” the election from Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial.
Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.
Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state. She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation.
She will be sentenced on 3 October.
Updated
Trump and Musk talk on climate labeled 'dumb' by top expert
Sea level rise will help create “more oceanfront property”, carbon pollution is only a problem once it starts causing “headaches and nausea” and we should be more worried about “nuclear warming” than global warming.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s conversation on X, which Musk owns, last night featured several incoherent and baseless statements on the climate crisis, prompting both confusion and derision among environmental advocates.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate group 350.org, labeled it the “dumbest climate conversation of all time.”
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in this election, said that rising seas will help create “more oceanfront property” and complained that “people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” in reference to potential nuclear war.
During the often disjointed exchange, Trump also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration hadn’t opened up the Arctic to oil drilling and baselessly claimed that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle” because of climate edicts.
Musk, meanwhile, said that he is “helping the environment” by making electric cars via Tesla but said that he didn’t want people to “vilify” the oil and gas industry that is driving the climate crisis and that the real dangers were, he felt, an increase in CO2 that will cause “headaches and nausea” and the world potentially running out of oil.
“We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that,” Musk said about the urgency of climate change. “Like leave the farmers alone.”
Scientists are clear that the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid worsening and disastrous climate impacts such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts.
The exchange did little to assuage concerns that a second Trump term will only help accelerate dangerous global heating.
Updated
Kamala Harris’s campaign team has posted a clip of the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, praising her support for workers’ right to strike, in contrast to Donald Trump’s lack of such support.
“In 2019, GM [General Motors] was on strike for 40 days, Donald Trump was nowhere to be found, didn’t say nothing, didn’t do nothing. Now, let’s look at Kamala Harris … you want to know where she was? On the picket line … she stood with workers on strike,” Fain said.
He praised job retention and creation in the auto and auto parts industry by Joe Biden and his vice-president, Harris, and criticized Trump for promising to save workers’ jobs but then “leaving them behind” as jobs transferred away from factories “left for dead”.
The UAW reposted the post on X, formerly Twitter.
Updated
The United States was not engaged in any aspect of planning or preparation for Ukraine’s incursion in Russia, the state department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters a little earlier today.
Ukraine blindsided Moscow by pouring thousands of troops into the western Russian region of Kursk last week in a surprise operation that Kyiv says has seen its forces take 1,000 sq km of land, its largest gains since 2022, Reuters reports.
You can read our global coverage here.
Updated
The fraud trial against the former congressman George Santos, slated to start in a matter of weeks, is coming into focus after a federal judge ruled today that jurors will have their identities kept secret from the public.
They won’t, however, be required to fill out a written questionnaire gauging their opinions of Santos when they arrive for jury selection on 9 September, as his lawyers had requested, the Associated Press reports.
Judge Joanna Seybert said during a brief hearing in federal court on Long Island that she agreed with the government’s assessment that a questionnaire would only bog the proceedings down.
She said questioning each potential juror in person would allow her and both sides to ask more varied and probing questions to elicit more truthful responses.
Prosecutors told the judge the trial could last three weeks. Santos has pleaded not guilty to a range of financial crimes, including lying to Congress about his wealth, collecting unemployment benefits while actually working, and using campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses.
Santos declined to speak with reporters outside court after the hearing, the last expected before the trial.
For all intents and purposes, Santos has already been found guilty in the court of public opinion,” read a memo from Santos’s defense team, filed last week.
After Santos, a Republican, was ousted from Congress, Democrat Tom Suozzi won the House seat.
Updated
Wilma Liebman, chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the former US president Barack Obama, said that the fact that Elon Musk chuckled but did not respond to Donald Trump’s comments about firing strike workers, during their online conversation last night, makes it harder for the NLRB to find the electric vehicle entrepreneur liable for making illegal threats to workers at his companies, Reuters reports.
Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, the UAW auto workers union said in a statement. Trump called Musk “the greatest cutter” for his swathing job losses.
The NLRB has limited power to punish unlawful labor practices. In cases involving illegal threats, the board can order employers to cease and desist from such conduct and to post notices in the workplace informing workers of their rights. Unions can also use favorable rulings from the NLRB to engage workers they are trying to organize.
It’s trying to expose more than anything politically what Donald Trump is about in terms of workers, and Musk as well. Everyone knows the NLRB remedies are toothless to start with, but it’s not so much for the remedy as for sending both a political message and an organizing message,” Liebman said.
The UAW has filed separate complaints against Musk and Trump with the NLRB.
Updated
'Trump is a scab' – union
The United Auto Workers union (UAW) leadership is going all in against Donald Trump for this presidential election.
In addition to the statement from the union president, Shawn Fain, the association has posted on X: “He’s for the billionaires. Not for you. Donald Trump is a scab.”
He's for the billionaires. Not for you.
— UAW (@UAW) August 13, 2024
Donald Trump is a scab. #StandUpUAW pic.twitter.com/hj10zDPbzw
And, with a skeptical inquiring face emoji, the union re-posted a message from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign X account, @KamalaHQ: “Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions.”
The UAW has endorsed Harris for president, as the presumptive Democratic nominee against Trump, the Republican nominee. It is also trying to unionize workers at Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company.
— UAW (@UAW) August 13, 2024
Updated
The day so far
Elon Musk is basking in the afterglow of the interview he conducted on X with Donald Trump last night. The Tesla CEO said their conversation had attracted 1bn views and comments, a number that was impossible to verify, while adding he would be willing to hold a similar event with Kamala Harris. But a remark Trump made during the interview about firing employees who strike has spurred the United Auto Workers to file a federal labor law complaint against both the former president and Musk, while Harris’s campaign dismissed last night’s event as a chat between “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024”.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Harris has no public events scheduled today, but her campaign continues to face questions over why the vice-president hasn’t held a press conference or granted a sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the White House.
Musk has a long history of opposing unions, including at Tesla, where the UAW has been trying to encourage workers to organize.
Trump has been flying around to campaign events in a plane once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
Updated
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has no public events scheduled today, but continues to face questions over why she won’t talk to reporters.
The vice-president has not granted a proper interview or held a press conference since announcing her bid for the White House late last month, a decision her campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod was asked about today, in an interview with CNN.
Elrod replied:
She has said on the campaign trail that she would be doing an interview at some point. She said that, I think, last week during – a during a rope line or when she was talking to reporters. But look, what is important here … is that she is taking her message directly to the American people. She hit a number of battleground states. I think we had 15,000 people in Detroit last week, 12,000 to 13,000 in Nevada. She’s been taking her message to the voters and drawing large crowds. So, she’s actually having those direct conversations.
Among those calling for Harris to talk to the press is the Guardian’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan. Here’s what she has to say:
As the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reported earlier this year, Elon Musk is part of a group of powerful business interests that have turned to the courts to blunt efforts to organize workers nationwide. Here’s more:
A multi-pronged legal attack under way by Elon Musk, large corporations, business groups and anti-union litigators threatens to “raise havoc” with US labor law and hobble a resurgent labor movement, according to experts.
So far efforts to scale back or undermine workers’ rights through the US courts have centered on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – the US top workplace watchdog and overseer of union elections. But other laws – including trademark and property rights statutes – are also being used.
Both Musk and Starbucks are pursuing cases that would undermine the NLRB.
Musk’s company SpaceX filed a lawsuit championed by the Federalist Society and other conservative groups against the NLRB in January. The lawsuit claims the board is unconstitutional because its members can only be removed for cause, not at will, and claims the board violates due process protections. The suit was filed in Texas by Musk’s attorneys with the union avoidance law firm Morgan Lewis in response to a board complaint that SpaceX fired workers in retaliation for writing a letter over concerns about Musk’s behavior.
United Auto Workers files labor charge over Trump comments on strikes
The United Auto Workers labor union, which is trying to organize workers at Tesla, has filed a federal labor charge over comments Donald Trump made last night in his interview with Elon Musk.
The union, which has endorsed Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House, said this comment from Trump to Musk ran afoul of federal law against threatening to fire workers who go on strike: “You walk in, you say, You want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”
Here’s more, from UAW president Shawn Fain:
Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45m a month to a Super Pac to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal and totally predictable from these two clowns.
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In addition to Elon Musk, Donald Trump was also a friend to the late convicted sex offender and New York socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that the former president has been using a plane Epstein once owned to travel to campaign events:
Donald Trump used a plane that was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, to fly to several presidential campaign events last weekend, it has been revealed.
The former president flew on a Gulfstream G-550 jet whose previous ownership was subsequently traced to Epstein after Trump’s own private plane – a Boeing 757 known colloquially as Trump Force One – encountered engine troubles.
The former Epstein jet was emblazoned with the slogan “Trump 2024” for the duration of the ex-president’s use.
According to the Miami Herald, Trump flew from Bozeman, Montana, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then to Aspen, Colorado, before a final trip to Denver on the jet to attend fundraisers as the Republican presidential nominee for November’s election.
The Trump campaign said it was unaware of the plane’s previous ownership when it chartered it from Private Jet Services Group, a charter jet vendor it occasionally uses, after the technical problems with the former president’s own aircraft.
Elon Musk yesterday succeeded in getting Donald Trump to use X, the platform that he wielded as a bully pulpit throughout his presidency, but has generally avoided ever since, even after Musk reversed a ban placed on his account in response to the January 6 insurrection by the company’s then owners.
But Trump’s return to X may not last. The former president has not tweeted since his interview with Musk last night, though he has made several posts on Truth Social, the X-like platform that he owns, and which has become one of his primary mouthpieces over the past four years. We’ll let you know if that changes.
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Elon Musk also said that his interview with Donald Trump generated 1bn in both views and discussions:
Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion https://t.co/s8x8QmdmnY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
It was impossible to verify Musk’s statement, but it’s worth noting that Trump, in the interview yesterday, implied that Musk showed him that tens of millions of accounts were listening in, when X’s public count showed that number was closer to 1m.
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Musk says he would be willing to interview Harris, too
Following his conversation with Donald Trump last night, Elon Musk said he would be willing to host a similar interview with Kamala Harris:
Happy to host Kamala on an 𝕏 Spaces too
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Musk proposed using X’s Spaces feature, which allows live audio broadcasts. Should Harris take him up on the offer, one wonders if he will first fix whatever issue caused the more than 40-minute delay in beginning his interview with Trump last night.
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George Santos, the former Republican New York congressman, is appearing in court for a pre-trial hearing today in the federal fraud case against him.
Santos has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding supporters, illegally receiving benefits and lying to Congress.
The trial is set to begin with jury selection on 9 September, and the parties have proposed for opening statements to begin 16 September.
Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota will defend her seat on Tuesday in the state Democratic primary, a rematch against Don Samuels that comes two years after she barely eked out a victory against him.
Tuesday’s race is the last in a series of heated primaries for the progressive “squad” of House Democrats who have been vocal in their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Her fellow squad members Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were recently defeated by candidates supported by a deluge of pro-Israel spending. But Omar faces a lower-key race.
The two-term congresswoman became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in the US House of Representatives in 2019. While in office, she has allied herself with the left wing of the Democratic party, serving as the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive caucus and backing key progressive measures like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Even before the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing offensive, Omar had established herself as a vocal critic of Israel. She famously drew criticism in 2019 for quipping that US politicians’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins”, in reference to donations from the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (Aipac). The comment drew accusations of antisemitism and she later apologized for it.
In the wake of the 7 October attacks, and as Israel escalated its retaliatory war, Omar was among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire. She has spoken out in support of the university encampments in solidarity with Gaza. Her daughter was suspended from Barnard College for taking part.
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The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, will address union members in Los Angeles today as part of his first solo campaign stop since he was announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Walz is scheduled to deliver remarks at the convention of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the nation’s largest public sector unions, in Los Angeles today at 12.35 pm PT.
He is also expected to deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport, California, at 2.30pm PT today.
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Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable.
The men’s joint appearance in an audio conversation on X on Monday night was, as expected, a display of two planet-sized egos, toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity. More surprisingly it was also dull, like sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights over more than two hours.
The main message: if Trump doesn’t win the election, and if Musk doesn’t become the emperor of the universe, you’re not going to have a country any more.
Musk and Trump’s banal chatter about subjects such as radioactive vegetables and the defeat of Napoleon made you crave a return to what came first: a blissful 40 minutes of wallpaper music. That was because crippling technical glitches left thousands of people unable to join.
Read the full sketch from our Washington DC bureau chief: The Musk-Trump X interview: a surprisingly dull meeting of two planet-sized egos
Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that turbocharged his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.
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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 – who at times appeared to have a lisp – 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.
Trump told Musk:
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.
Here’s a clip from the interview:
Harris campaign condemns Trump's 'extremism and dangerous agenda' after Musk interview
Good morning US politics readers. On Monday night, Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk for an interview on X that began 45 minutes late, featured the Republican presidential nominee’s greatest hits and biggest lies, in which he denigrated immigrants and attempted to paint Kamala Harris as a “radical” leftist, repeatedly mispronounced her name, and called the Democratic presumptive nominee “beautiful”.
Throughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other and at the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. Here are key takeaways from the event.
The Harris campaign condemned the interview as an example of Trump’s “extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda”. Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said:
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 live stream in the year 2024.
The interview came as Harris has pulled ahead in polls following the launch of her campaign last month. The Decision Desk HQ and the Hill’s national polling average now shows Harris with a 0.3% lead over Trump, who had a 3.3% advantage over Joe Biden before the president withdrew from the race.
Harris appears to be in an even stronger position in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which will likely determine the outcome of the election in November. According to a recent set of surveys conducted last week by the New York Times and Siena College, Harris now leads by four points in those three states, while prior polls showed a virtual tie or a slight Trump advantage in those states.
Here’s what else we’re watching:
12.20pm ET. Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, will depart the White House en route to New Orleans.
3.35pm. Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, will deliver remarks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Convention in Los Angeles. He will later deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport, California.
