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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Helen Sullivan (now); with Maanvi Singh ,Chris Stein, Léonie Chao-Fong, Tom Bryant, Martin Belam and Amy Sedghi (earlier)

Harris-Trump debate watched by 15m more than Biden clash – as it happened

Donald Trump Kamala Harris United States JD Vance Taylor Swift Abortion
Republicans gather at a wine bar in Nevada to watch the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Republicans gather at a wine bar in Nevada to watch the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Photograph: Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

This blog is closing now, thanks for following along. Here is our latest on the Trump campaign’s reaction to that debate:

Election Day is less than two months away. The first mail ballots of the general election were sent out Wednesday, the day after the first debate between Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump. Early in-person voting will start as soon as 20 September in some states.

The first batch of ballots typically sent out are ones to military and overseas voters. Under federal law, that must happen at least 45 days before an election — which this year is 21 September.

Election offices in North Carolina had been scheduled to begin sending mail ballots to all voters who requested them on 6 September. But that has been delayed because presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. successfully sued to have his name removed from the state’s ballot after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. That allowed Alabama to become the first state to send out absentee ballots for the presidential election cycle.

Voter registration deadlines vary by state, with most falling between eight and 30 days before the election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The deadline is 7 October in Georgia, one of this year’s most prominent presidential battlegrounds.

Nearly all states offer some version of in-person voting, though the rules and dates vary considerably.

While we haven’t yet seen data that shows the uptick in the number of voters who registered after Taylor Swift’s endorsement, hundreds of thousands visited the voter registration website vote.gov after Swift shared the link.

More than 306,000 people have visited the website since Swift’s endorsement:

The father of an 11-year-old boy who was killed last year when a minivan driven by an immigrant from Haiti collided with his school bus has asked Donald Trump and JD Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.

During a city commission meeting on Tuesday in Springfield, Ohio, Nathan Clark, the father of Aiden Clark, addressed the forum alongside his wife, Danielle. Speaking at the meeting, Clark said: “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the Springfield News-Sun reports.

Clark went on to list politicians including Trump and Vance, who he said have been using his son’s name for “political gain”.

About 67m people watch debate, roughly 15m more than Trump-Biden clash

An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.

The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.

Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.

With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticising ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.

No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there’s been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.

Tuesday’s debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden’s withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.

Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an “excellent” job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said, “this is how you know they’re complete s—-.”

While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime.

This is Helen Sullivan taking over the Guardian’s live US elections coverage.

Updated

Kamala Harris stridently backed new fracking and expanded US gas production in comments that raised eyebrows among some environmentalists as, yet again, the unfolding climate crisis was largely overlooked during a set piece presidential debate.

Harris, in a televised debate with Donald Trump on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, rebuffed the former president’s claim that she will end fracking “on day one” if elected by touting booming levels of drilling during her term as vice-president, in which US oil and gas production has hit record highs.

“I will not ban fracking,” Harris said, dismissing a past campaign promise to do so. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

Harris pointed to “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and said “we have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil”.

Regardless of the calculations of winning over moderate US voters in battleground states, scientists are clear that the use of fossil fuels, including oil and gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, needs to be drastically cut if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The US, along with countries around the world, has committed to not breaching a global temperature increase of 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial times, a threshold that is likely to be breached within a decade amid ongoing record-breaking temperatures.

Some green groups, many of which have enthusiastically endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee, were left disappointed by her strong embrace of fracking, which was similar in tone to the “all of the above” energy rhetoric common during Barack Obama’s presidency, since which alarm has mounted over climate breakdown.

Updated

The afternoon so far

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s campaigns continue to look for an advantage over the other after last night’s debate, which may be the only such event before the election. While Harris’s team says she would be happy to duke it out with the former president again, Trump said he would be “less inclined” to do so. Surprisingly, the candidates today crossed paths at a ceremony in New York City to commemorate 9/11, where they shook hands. Meanwhile, Trump’s surrogates are being asked about their unproven claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio town, which his running mate JD Vance insists is true. Separately, a father from the town, whose son’s death in a bus crash has been seized on by conservatives to argue that immigrants are dangerous, has called for them to stop using the tragedy for “political gain”.

Here’s what else has happened so far today:

  • Frank Luntz, a pollster known for his work with Republican campaigns, said Trump “lost” last night’s debate by focusing on topics irrelevant to voters – like unproven allegations of immigrants eating pets – rather than more important topics like inflation.

  • Joe Biden spent the day commemorating 9/11 alongside Harris, and at one point donned a Trump cap handed to him in Pennsylvania, which the White House described as a show of “bipartisan unity”.

  • Arizona Republicans have paid for a billboard in Phoenix that attempts to win over voters by referencing the pet-eating claim.

  • Inflation was a major topic at last night’s debate, but the latest government data shows price growth slowing to levels last seen at the start of Joe Biden’s term.

  • Trump said pop superstar Taylor Swift will “pay the price” for endorsing Harris after the debate.

Updated

On the campaign trail and at last night’s debate, Donald Trump has repeatedly alleged that crime is down in Venezuela – proof, he says, that immigrants from the troubled South American country who enter the United States are criminals.

Stephen Miller, an architect of the hardline immigration policies Trump enacted as president, made the assertion to reporters in Philadelphia after the debate. But José María Del Pino of Colombia’s NTN24 wanted to know where Miller was getting his data on crime in Venezuela, and asked specifically whether he was relying on figures released by the president, Nicolás Maduro, whom the United States has repeatedly accused of fraudulently holding on to power, including in July’s elections.

Miller, who may return to the White House if Trump wins the November elections, grew angry as Del Pino pressed him for the source of his numbers, which Miller wouldn’t provide. The full exchange is worth watching:

Updated

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris just laid a wreath at the Pentagon, concluding a day spent commemorating the three sites of the 9/11 attack.

During the ceremony, they were joined by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff Charles Q Brown Jr:

Updated

State officials warn 'trust in the election process' at risk over postal service struggles

With just weeks remaining until the 5 November election, groups representing state-level poll administrators have warned that the US postal system is not ready to handle the flood of ballots that will be sent by mail.

In a letter to Louis DeJoy, a Donald Trump appointee who has remained as the US postal service postmaster general under Joe Biden, the groups warn that USPS employees are “uninformed” about how to handle election mail, creating misdeliveries of ballots that leave “voters disenfranchised”.

The officials, who include the leaders of the National Association of State Election Directors, the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the heads of 29 election official associations, add that ballots are taking much longer than expected to be delivered, and that too many ballots are being returned as undeliverable – raising the possibility that voters will have their registrations canceled.

“State and local officials need a committed partner in USPS. We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service. Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the electoral process,” the letter reads.

Here’s more:

Updated

White House says Biden donned Trump hat in show of 'bipartisan unity'

During his visit to the rural Pennsylvania village where one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 crashed, Joe Biden put on a Trump cap, in what a White House spokesperson said was an attempt to encourage a return to the “bipartisan unity” the country felt following the attacks 23 years ago.

Trump’s campaign was quick to put out a photo of the Democratic president wearing one of the iconic red hats:

Biden’s senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates confirmed that the moment happened, and explained how the president came to be wearing the cap:

Updated

Donald Trump made many assertions on the debate stage last night, including that Germany tried and failed to implement decarbonization policies that Kamala Harris supports.

“You believe in things like, we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to make this country strong. Whether you like it or not, Germany tried that, and, within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” the former president said to Harris in his closing statement.

Berlin apparently did not like what it heard on the debate stage last night, and tweeted the below this morning:

This post has been corrected to note that Germany’s tweet appears to reference Trump’s comments about its decarbonization, not the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Updated

Donald Trump also attended the 9/11 memorial ceremony in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where CBS News reports he repeated to the press his uncertainty over whether he will accept Kamala Harris’s invitation for a second debate:

It’s unclear whether he crossed paths with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who also visited the site today.

Updated

More than 300,000 people visit voter registration site from Taylor Swift post

The Vote.org website has recorded more than 300,000 visitors referred from Taylor Swift’s Instagram post last night in which she endorsed Kamala Harris, according to NPR’s Elena Moore.

After Swift encouraged her fans to vote in 2023, Vote.org recorded more than 35,000 registrations in a single day.

Updated

Accompanying Donald Trump and JD Vance at an event today commemorating the anniversary of 9/11 was a far-right conspiracy theorist who has previously claimed that the attacks were an “inside job”.

Laura Loomer, who once described herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and who has also spread conspiracy theories about mass shootings, traveled with Trump to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday after accompanying him to Philadelphia yesterday for the presidential debate.

Trump has praised Loomer as “terrific” and “very special” and endorsed her failed Florida House primary run in 2020.

Updated

Donald Trump’s campaign was in damage control mode on Wednesday amid widespread dismay among supporters over a presidential debate performance that saw Kamala Harris repeatedly goad him into going wildly off-message and missing apparent opportunities to tackle her on policy.

Even with Trump insisting to have won the debate “by a lot”, Republicans were virtually unanimous that Trump had come off second best in a series of exchanges that saw the vice-president deliberately bait him on his weak points while he responded with visible anger.

“Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night,” the Fox News analyst Brit Hume said immediately after the debate. “We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically.”

“She was exquisitely well-prepared, she laid traps and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about,” Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for his 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton, told ABC.

“Trump was unfocused and poorly prepared,” agreed Guy Benson, editor of the conservative website Townhall on X . “[Harris] basically accomplished exactly what she wanted to here. I suspect the polls about the debate will show that she won it.”

Congressional Republicans voiced disappointment over Trump’s inability to discipline himself and press home key policy issues. “I’m just sad,” one House Republican told the Hill. “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin. Just overall disappointing that he isn’t being more composed like the first debate. The road just got very narrow. This is not good.”

Updated

Earlier this afternoon, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Flight 93 memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to mark the 23rd anniversary of 9/11.

Biden and Harris also visited Shanksville’s volunteer fire department to meet with firefighters and the families and friends of Flight 93 victims.

More than an hour later, Donald Trump also paid a visit to the site.

As we reported earlier, Trump and Harris – who met in person for the first time during last night’s debate – shook hands as they attended a memorial service in New York City.

Updated

Among the conservatives amplifying the unproven story of immigrants eating pets in Ohio is Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who endorsed Trump weeks ago.

Reacting to pop superstar (and fellow billionaire) Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris yesterday, Musk said:

Musk has at least 12 children, including one from whom he is estranged. Here’s more about that:

Updated

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said Trump 'lost' debate by focusing on issues unimportant to voters

Frank Luntz, a veteran pollster who has worked for Republican campaigns, told CNBC Donald Trump was in a good position at the start of last night’s debate, but the former president effectively “lost” by focusing on topics voters aren’t interested in – like the unproven story of migrants eating pets in Ohio.

Luntz argued that Trump missed opportunities to sway voters by talking about the issues where he’s strongest, such as inflation, though he also did not believe Kamala Harris won the face-off.

Here’s the full interview:

Luntz also said Harris appeared more presidential in the debate. He criticized both candidates for “slim” details on their economic policies, suggesting voters were “disappointed” about lack of information.

Luntz accused Trump of “missing a golden opportunity” to get across his message, saying the former president failed to convince undecided voters to lend him their vote.

Updated

The day so far

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s campaigns continue to look for an advantage over the other after last night’s debate, which may be the only such event before the election. While Harris’s team says she would be happy to duke it out with the former president again, Trump said he would be “less inclined” to do so. Surprisingly, the candidates crossed paths at a ceremony in New York City to commemorate 9/11, where they shook hands. Meanwhile, Trump’s surrogates are being asked about their unproven claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio town, with his running mate JD Vance insisting that the story is true. Separately, a father from the town whose son’s death in a car crash has been seized on by conservatives to argue that immigrants are dangerous has called for them to stop using the tragedy for “political gain”.

Here’s what else has happened so far today:

  • Arizona Republicans have paid for a billboard in Phoenix that attempts to win over voters by referencing the pet eating claim.

  • Inflation was a major topic at last night’s debate, but the latest government data shows price growth slowing to levels last seen at the start of Joe Biden’s term.

  • Trump said pop superstar Taylor Swift will “pay the price” for endorsing Harris after the debate last night.

In an interview with CNN earlier today, top Donald Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller gave a different answer than Vance, when asked about the former president mentioning on the debate stage allegations of migrants eating pets in an Ohio town.

Miller said the story stemmed from reporting by the Federalist, which he described as both a “news outlet” and “a very well-respected research organization”. He neglected to mention that the Federalist is thoroughly rightwing, and promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Responding to a question about whether it was a good strategy for Trump to promote the story at the debate, Miller claimed that the moderators were biased, then said: “This issue of illegal immigration that there is many of as 20 million illegals been brought in the country, many of them airlifted to the middle of America, making every community a border community, that that was the issue that we should have been talking about.”

Updated

Vance doubles down on claim of migrants eating pets in Ohio city

After the debate last night, NBC News asked JD Vance, the Ohio senator who is running alongside Donald Trump, why he kept insisting that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in an Ohio town, despite local officials’ insistence to the contrary.

In response, the senator said he had heard from his constituents that the story was true, and cast doubt on the Springfield, Ohio, town manager’s refutation of the claim. Here’s that moment, from NBC:

Updated

Arizona GOP amplifies false claims about migrants with 'Eat less kittens' billboard

Republicans nationwide are leaning into the baseless claim that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town are eating pets, with Arizona GOP buying a billboard in Phoenix that references the conspiracy theory:

Here’s more from the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang on the campaign by conservatives to demonize Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community, which was amplified by Donald Trump on the debate stage last night:

Prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance are sharing false and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating pets and local wildlife.

The salacious and often racist social media posts claim, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food. Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”

The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.

The claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.

The misinformation about migrants in Springfield comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border. Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.

Father of child killed in crash involving Haitian driver asks Republicans to stop using tragedy 'political gain' - report

Over the past few days, conservatives have fixated on the town of Springfield, Ohio, which is home to a large number of Haitian migrants who they have baselessly claimed pose a danger to the community.

Immigration is a major topic of this election, but in this case, the claims have veered into the outlandish, with Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, alleging that the Haitians have been eating people’s pets.

Town authorities have said there is no proof of that happening, but a tragedy did occur in the town last year, involving a Haitian driver who caused a car accident that killed an 11-year-old boy, Aiden Clark. Republicans have used his death to bolster their claims against the immigrant community, something his father, Nathan Clark, condemned publicly at a city commission meeting yesterday, the Springfield News-Sun reports.

“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” Clark said during an open forum at the meeting.

Here’s more:

On Tuesday, Nathan Clark denounced multiple Republican politicians, including vice presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno for statements that Clark said “used his death for political gain.”

“This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members,” Clark said. “However, they are not allowed nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.”

There are an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants living in Springfield now according to data from the Clark County Combined Health District and other partners, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said at a press conference earlier Tuesday.

Clark said Aiden was not murdered but killed by accident. He said the community is still deeply affected by the accident.

“This tragedy is still all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” Clark said. “In order to live like Aiden, you need to accept everyone, choose to shine, make the difference, lead the way and be the inspiration. What many people in this community and state and nation are doing is the opposite of what we should be doing. Sure we have our problems here in Springfield and in the U.S., but does Aiden Clark have anything to do with that?”

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former press secretary for Donald Trump who has turned on him, said the following about the ex-president’s claim that the moderators of last night’s debate were biased against him:

Updated

Reuters checked in with 10 undecided voters who watched last night’s debate, and asked them which candidate they were leaning towards.

Donald Trump turned out to be the winner of this very small sample poll, with several voters saying they found Kamala Harris to be vague when it came to which policies she supported. Here’s more, from Reuters:

Kamala Harris was widely seen as dominating Tuesday’s presidential debate against Republican former president Donald Trump, but a group of undecided voters remained unconvinced that the Democratic vice-president was the better candidate.

Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the 5 November election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.

Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will probably be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters.

Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds.

Five said they found Harris vague during the more than 90-minute debate on how she would improve the US economy and deal with the high cost of living, a top concern for voters.

The encounter was particularly important for Harris, with a weekend New York Times/Siena College opinion poll showing that more than a quarter of likely voters feel they do not know enough about her, in contrast to the well-known Trump.

Updated

If you're a swing state voter, read this

The November presidential election will probably be decided by voters in seven states where polls show a close race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

And if you happen to vote in one of those states, we want to hear your thoughts on last night’s debate between the two candidates. Fill out our survey here:

Updated

US inflation continues to decline in weeks before November election

At his debate with Kamala Harris last night, Donald Trump took pains to mention inflation, which rose to levels not seen since the 1980s as the US economy recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic over the past three years.

All signs point to prices for consumer goods being a potent political issue, but economically speaking, they’re on the decline – US government data released this morning shows that the inflation rate has receded to where it was when Biden took office.

Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Callum Jones:

Philippe Reines, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who played Donald Trump during Kamala Harris’s debate prep, posted to X an image of him in his costume and makeup.

“To do: facial, hair cut, spiritual cleanse,” Reines wrote.

Key takeaways from last night's debate

1. Trump repeatedly spewed misinformation: Throughout the debate Trump spread misinformation to make his points, repeating already debunked rhetoric on everything from the results of the 2020 election to his involvement in Project 2025 – a conservative-backed plan to change the US government from the inside out.

The former president distanced himself from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saying he was there only to make a speech, and blamed the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for not beefing up security. He also incorrectly said crime rates had risen in the US when they have in fact fallen.

2. ... and was frequently fact-checked by the moderators: ABC’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were largely praised for delivering a strong performance. They effectively rerouted discussions back to the questions they had asked on key topics including the economy, immigration, abortion rights and the peaceful transfer of power, and made important clarifying fact-check statements when they were warranted.

3. Harris defended Democrats’ position on reproductive rights: When challenged on his changing take on access to abortion care, Trump made some alarming – and easily refuted – claims that Democrats supported executing babies after they are born. He also took credit for overturning of Roe v Wade, a decision made by the supreme court after he appointed three members to make a 6-3 conservative majority, that was unpopular with the majority of Americans. Trump did clarify his position, though, that he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the mother’s life.

Harris called his stances “insulting to the women of America”, and countered his statements that he delivered on a promise to bring the issue back to the states by saying “the people of American have voted for freedom”. She highlighted the difficult realities faced by women in states with abortion bans and would-be mothers who would struggle to access IVF care.

4. The candidates both touted their work to improve the economy: Harris was quick to tout her “opportunity economy”, a plan that includes tax reductions for those starting small businesses, relief for new parents and first-time homebuyers, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging.

Trump, meanwhile, claimed that he oversaw the “best economy”, even with the downturn caused by the Covid pandemic, and accused his opponent of increasing costs on American families. “People can’t go out and buy cereal, or bacon, or anything else,” he said. Inflation did spike under the Biden-Harris administration, but it has fallen just as quickly. As of August, the US inflation rate settled at 2.9%.

5. Trump spouted salacious and sometimes racist claims about immigrants: Throughout the debate, Trump pivoted his talking points to immigration, spouting salacious claims about criminals being welcomed into the country and towns where pets are eaten by incoming immigrants.

While debate moderators attempted to counter the claims, challenging Trump on the validity and also on how he would execute the deportation of millions as he’s promised to do, Harris took the offensive. Highlighting her record as “the only person on the stage who has prosecuted transnational organizations”, she also accused her opponent of calling on the GOP to oppose legislation to bolster the border. “He preferred to run on a problem rather than fixing a problem,” she said.

6. The candidates sparred over Ukraine and how they would handle the war: Harris said that if Trump were currently in office, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would have taken Kyiv, saying Putin would “eat you for lunch”. “I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris also said.

When Trump was asked by Muir how he would end the war – and specifically if he wanted Ukraine to win – the former president did not offer a clear answer. “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being lost uselessly. People being killed by the millions,” he said.

7. Harris baited Trump by attacking him where it hurts: As moderators pushed Harris to respond to criticisms she and Biden have faced over border policy, the vice-president expertly derailed her opponent’s rhetoric on what is perhaps his favorite issue to discuss by deriding his performances at rallies.

She invited voters to view the speeches for themselves, saying that attenders can be seen leaving out of exhaustion and boredom, and characterized the events as a platform for Trump’s complaints and not plans that put the American people first.

The jab landed well. An offended and flustered Trump jumped on the chance to defend attendance at his rallies, claiming Harris pays attenders at her own campaign events, and then pivoted to insults that failed to hit their mark. He accused Harris of planning to turn the country into “Venezuela on steroids”, and called the US a “failing nation”, before resurfacing false claims that immigrants were eating people’s pets.

A top Harris campaign official said Kamala Harris was open to a second debate with Donald Trump in October.

Quentin Fulks, the Harris campaign’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN this morning:

I think that both campaigns are going to have to agree to a time but I think the vice-president is open to a debate in October.

Asked whether the vice-president would agree to a 25 September debate on NBC, Fulks declined to commit, adding that the “two campaigns are going to have to agree on a date.”

A senior Trump campaign adviser, also speaking to CNN, refused to definitely say whether Donald Trump would take part in an NBC debate on 25 September. Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior adviser, said:

I thought this was a bit perplexing because President Trump has already said that he is going to do three debates. We had the September 4 debate, which was going to be on Fox, and Kamala Harris was a no-show. We had last night. And President Trump already said that on September 25, we would do a debate on NBC.

Miller continued:

But now Kamala Harris seems to have memory holed that and rather than just saying, we’ll see you on September 25 on NBC, is now throwing out some fictional day in October.

“So very clearly, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board,” he added.

Updated

Harris and Trump shake hands at 9/11 memorial service

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump shook hands as they attended a memorial service to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 in New York City.

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, appeared to facilitate the handshake between Harris and Trump, according to AP.

Updated

Just hours after meeting in person for the first time, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have crossed paths again as they attend commemoration events marking the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Joe Biden, Harris, Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, attended the traditional memorial service in New York City’s Memorial Plaza at Ground Zero.

Biden and Harris are then expected to travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Flight 93 memorial. They are then expected to travel to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, for another wreath-laying ceremony.

Trump will also travel to Shanksville today, according to reports.

Updated

Trump says he is 'less inclined' to participate in another debate

Donald Trump, speaking to Fox and Friends, said he didn’t know if he wanted to debate Kamala Harris again, claiming he “won the debate” last night.

Well, I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate.

Trump had previously agreed to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News, moderated by Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier. But this morning, he said:

I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Bret. I’d love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret.

Donald Trump was asked on Fox & Friends this morning why he believed the country would be safer under him. “Because I deal with foreign policy,” Trump replied.

The former president repeated his attacks blaming the Biden administration on the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, claiming that the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, was “incompetent” and should have been “fired and reprimanded like you’ve never seen”.

Updated

On Fox and Friends Donald Trump has said that today he will be attending memorial events for 9/11 in New York and in Pennyslvania with his VP pick JD Vance.

It was put to him that Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden would also be there, and he was asked “You guys are going to be at the site together. Are you going to say anything to them?”

Trump said: “Oh I don’t know. I’m not sure. It’s, you know, look, everybody should be very angry at how badly they’ve run this country.”

The former president then launched into a familiar diatribe about immigration.

Updated

Donald Trump expressed frustration that factcheckers corrected him more in last night’s TV debate than they corrected Kamala Harris.

In a call to Fox & Friends this morning, the former president cited his use of the word “bloodbath”, his comments after the murder of Heather Danielle Heyer in the Charlottesville car attack and his position on IVF treatment as areas where he claims he was wrongly corrected by moderators.

Trump maintained his use of the word “bloodbath” solely pertained to the economy, saying:

Bloodbath was referring to the economy. Everybody loved the term, because as soon as they heard the word, it’s sort of a vicious word, but referring to the economy. They have created an economy [sic]. Bloodbath was the word that I used, and it was fine in that context. They were trying to make it sound like it was a riot or something.

On IVF, Trump said:

IVF. I was a leader on IEF [sic]. The IVF. The IVF, which is fertilization. I was a total leader on that, when I first heard about it, like right from the beginning, I was one of the leaders on it, and the Republican party has been a leader on it.

He then complained he had been corrected six times in his statements about abortion during the debate, saying “the whole thing with abortion. What he said, I mean, it was incredible. I think he corrected me six times, and each time I was right. I believe each time I was right. Didn’t correct her at all.”

He also unexpectedly cited Laura Ingraham while defending his comments about Charlottesville, saying, “she said that in fact it makes it [sic] angry. She makes … she gets angry when people hear about Charlottesville.”

He said it was wrong to say he did not condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville because people do not refer to the full quote.

Trump said at the time: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” and then later said: “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

Updated

Donald Trump has called for ABC to lose their broadcasting license after the way the network moderated last night’s TV debate. Saying the network took “a big hit last night”, Trump said “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that. I think they lost a lot of credibility.”

He told viewers of Fox & Friends that he had polls showing he had won the debate “by 80-20, 90, we we have one here, 92 to seven. And I sort of believe that’s right.” Trump did not name the polls.

He continued his attack on ABC, saying: “From the standpoint of ABC, they’re the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization, and that’s saying a lot, because they’re all essentially really dishonest.”

He also managed to aim a jibe at his hosts this morning, insisting that he would not want to do a debate on Fox if Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were the moderators, and he said that Fox’s Harold Ford Jr must have been watching a different debate, and was “just as dishonest as ABC in my opinion”.

Updated

Trump claims he won presidential debate ‘by a lot’ and that Taylor Swift will ‘pay the price’ for endorsing Harris

Donald Trump is currently being interviewed on Fox & Friends. We will have more detail on that interview soon. But he has told the show that it was his “best ever” debate, and that he won it by “a lot”.

He attacked the ABC news network and claimed “they kept correcting me”, saying that Kamala Harris told “outright lies” and was not corrected. In a familiar diatribe, he claimed the debate was “totally rigged”.

“So many things I said were debunked, like totally debunked,” he told the news programme. “But she could say anything she wanted. My stuff was right, but they would correct you.” He accused ABC, without evidence, of being the “most dishonest news organization” and that the debate was stacked against him.

Responding to Taylor Swift announcing she would vote for the Harris campaign, he said: “She’s a very liberal person, she always seems to endorse a Democrat and she will probably pay the price for that in the market.”

Updated

During the debate, Donald Trump repeated an unsubstantiated claim that immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio town, forcing the moderator to tell him that there is no proof of that.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” said Trump during the debate. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

As Alice Herman reports

Trump’s claims about immigrants allegedly killing and eating the pets of US citizens originated, apparently, with a viral video of a resident of Springfield, Ohio, claiming before the town’s council that immigrants in the community had killed ducks from a local park for food. The unsubstantiated and inflammatory video was shared widely on rightwing accounts, evolving quickly into a viral meme featuring AI-generated images of Trump surrounded by cats and dogs, appearing to protect them.


As our Fact Check makes clear:

The story of migrants allegedly eating pets has circulated in rightwing media in recent days and been repeated by Trump’s running mate JD Vance. These are false and unsubstantiated claims.

“You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” moderator David Muir told Trump.

The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.

The Harris-Walz campaign quickly capitalised on Taylor Swift’s support after she endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a post on Instagram.

Quickly available on the Harris-Walz campaign site were Taylor Swift-inspired friendship bracelets. Swift fans are famous for swapping friendship bracelets during concerts, tours and events inspired by her song You’re on Your Own, Kid, which includes the lyrics “so make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it”.

“As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can,” Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers late on Tuesday, adding: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election”.

“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

Updated

'It's just sad': Republicans express dismay at Trump performance as polling suggests Harris won debate

House Republicans have expressed dismay at former president Donald Trump’s debate performance against Kamala Harris, as snap polling suggested she was widely seen by the public to have won last night’s presidential election TV debate.

“It’s just sad,” one House Republican told website The Hill, adding “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin”. Trump allowed himself to get distracted from key talking points as Harris got him to talk about the size of the crowds at his rallies, or make false claims about abortion after birth.

“[It is] just overall disappointing that he isn’t being more composed like the first debate,” the anonymous House Republican told the Hill, adding “The road just got very narrow. This is not good.”

A CNN flash poll after the debate suggested that two-thirds of the watching public believed that Harris had out-performed Trump, with the news network reporting that “96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.”

Another House Republican source speaking anonymously told the Hill website “She talks to us like toddlers but is doing a good job provoking him. Many are disappointed he couldn’t stay focused or land a punch. Not sure much changes but it wasn’t a good performance,” while a third said “It’s not devastating – but it’s not good.”

The conservative Fox News political analyst Brit Hume also contended that Harris had won, telling viewers “She baited him, successfully. She came out ahead in this, in my opinion. No doubt.”

The CNN polling margin – 63% for Harris, 37% for Trump – marks a sharp reverse of the numbers Trump achieved when debating Joe Biden earlier in the year, which led to the sitting president pulling out of the race, and comes as megastar Taylor Swift announced she was endorsing Harris, signing her message as from a “childless cat lady”, a dig at Trump’s VP pick JD Vance.

Russia has accused both presidential candidates of using Vladimir Putin’s name as part of a domestic political fights, saying: “we really, really don’t like it”.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the US was hostile and negative towards Russia, Reuters reports, and the Kremlin hoped that candidates would drop such references to Putin.

Last week the White House said Putin should stop commenting on the US election after he said in an apparently teasing comment that he favoured Harris over Trump and that her “infectious” laugh was one of the reasons why.

Trump Media & Technology Group shares fell 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the combative presidential debate between the former president and Kamala Harris.

After the debate, pricing for a Trump victory slipped by 6 cents to 47 cents on online betting site PredictIt, while Harris’s odds climbed to 57 cents from 53 cents.

Harris’s candidacy also received a boost after pop star Taylor Swift said she will vote for the Democratic candidate to her 280m on Instagram.

Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent of Truth Social app, which is popular among retail traders and is often sensitive to the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 US election, Reuters reports.

Majority of those watching debate say Harris outperformed Trump - CNN poll

According to a flash poll by CNN, registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agreed that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump.

This is based on a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, that also found that Harris “outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year”.

The CNN snap poll found:

  • Watchers said, by 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia

  • 96% of Harris supporters who watched said that their chosen candidate had done a better job

  • A smaller 69% of Trump’s supporters thought he had done a better job

  • Voters who watched the debate found their views of Harris were improved

  • Trump was seen to have an advantage on the economy, immigration and being commander in chief. Harris was more trusted on abortion and protecting democracy

However, the vast majority who tuned in said the debate had no effect on who they were going to vote for in the November election.

Following the debate between Trump and Biden in June, watchers said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed the president.

• This post was amended at 11.48 BST. The CNN poll found that 63% of watchers thought that Kamala Harris had a better performance, not 67% as an earlier version said.

Updated

And finally, the fifth key exchange of the night was on the Biden legacy, writes Bland:

Donald Trump: Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president.

Kamala Harris: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.

This line from Harris, clearly scripted, was nonetheless a useful shorthand for the way she wants the race to be framed: as a chance to move on from the political division that has exhausted Americans for the last eight years, with her as a candidate who is not wedded to every aspect of the Biden record. In her closing statement, she said: “You’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country: one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past, and an attempt to take us backward. But we’re not going back.’”

In his own closing statement, Trump finally did what his team would have wanted him to do throughout – blame Harris relentlessly for everything voters dislike about Biden. “She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said. “They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”

But by then, it felt like the narrative of the night was irreversibly set. And when Trump rambled into the claim that “we’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” it merely seemed like normal service had been resumed.

The third key exchange, writes Bland, is on abortion. Namely, the last night’s factcheck on a wild claim that Democrats will execute babies after birth.

Donald Trump: Her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth … and that’s not OK with me.

Moderator Linsey Davis: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.

While it’s not exactly a Woodward and Bernstein moment to observe that murdering babies is illegal in America, it was significant that Trump was much more thoroughly factchecked by the debate moderators than he was when he faced Biden. And it was part of a section on abortion rights, up there with the economy as one of the key issues driving this election, which did him few favours.

Meanwhile, if you had “baby killers” on your bingo card, you may nonetheless have been caught unawares by Trump’s other truly wild lie of the night: his reference to false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating -- they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris turned to a visual shorthand she used repeatedly over the course of the debate (above) – cocking her head and looking at Trump with a bemused look on her face and her chin resting on her hand. You will certainly see this memed endlessly in the days ahead.

The Spingfield city manager said that there have been no such reports, moderator David Muir noted. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten,” Trump replied. After the debate, Trump and his supporters characterised this kind of exchange as evidence of a “three-on-one” debate, which you can make your own mind up about. Harris, for her part, responded by saying “talk about extreme” and immediately pivoting to her own attack lines – the inverse of Trump’s approach.

The fourth key exchange was on healthcare:

Linsey Davis: So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?

Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan.

By coincidence, this is exactly what I told my editor when she asked how close I was to filing about an hour ago. It is also the kind of wafty answer on a matter of substance that is likely to be clipped up and used in Harris attack ads repeatedly over the next few weeks.

Trumps “concepts of a plan” refer to how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, the popular Obama era law that mandated the availability of health insurance to low-income families. There were other evasions, too, like his complicated language on abortion, and on whether he had any regrets about January 6. On Ukraine, Trump would not say that he wanted Kyiv to win, instead saying “I want the war to stop” and claiming that he would end it before even taking office by making Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to each other.

Archie Bland writes that there are five key exchanges that are likely to dominate the campaign in the days ahead. The first is on the economy, as Kamala Harris promised to lift up the middle class while Donald Trump blamed her for high inflation.

Moderator David Muir: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

Kamala Harris: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.

Donald Trump: We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history.

The debate kicked off with a section on the economy, arguably the toughest section of the night for Harris, who must contend with the fact that many voters blame the Biden administration for years of high inflation. While Harris set out more details of her own agenda, from a $6,000 child tax credit to a tax deduction for small businesses, her point that she and Biden were dealing with the Trump legacy of “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression” did not really make an affirmative case for the record of the last four years.

Trump did land his points about inflation and the dubious claim that he created “one of the greatest economies in the history of our country” in his first term. But he also got distracted: by Harris calling his plan to raise tariffs a “Trump sales tax”, and by his own digression into a claim that “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”. That was a hint of what was to come.

Second, writes Bland, is Harris tempting Trump into going off topic:

Kamala Harris: You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about “windmills cause cancer”. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.

Donald Trump: People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.

Can it really be this easy to wind him up? Again and again, Harris chose lines that keyed into Trump’s personal preoccupations – and managed to goad him into responding to them at length instead of focusing on the kinds of issues that matter to voters. This exchange about crowd sizes, during a section of the debate that was supposed to be about immigration, meant that he had less time to talk a subject that is one of the areas where voters have the most doubts about Harris.

Similarly, during a section about Harris’ changing position on fracking, he allowed himself to be sidetracked by her claim that he was given $400m by his father. Then there was the sales tax thing; the controversial conservative roadmap for a second Trump term, Project 2025; and the way he let a discussion about the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal turn into one about his invitation to Taliban leaders to come to Camp David for talks.

None of these subjects would have been on his campaign managers’ list of the talking points they would have wanted him to hit – and none of them mean very much to swing voters.

After a period of undoubted momentum for Kamala Harris, the vice-president came into this debate having stalled somewhat. Recent polls suggest that the race is effectively tied, both nationally and in most of the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome. Because the way voters are distributed gives Republicans an advantage in the electoral college, and because you would usually expect to see Harris’ post-convention bump fade somewhat, polling experts like Nate Silver have recently seen Donald Trump as the favourite to prevail.

Many presidential candidates have “won” debates and ultimately lost the race – but there is little doubt that Harris had a good enough night to change those odds in her favour. Trump’s team wanted him to hang the Biden administration’s unpopular policies around her neck, but instead he repeatedly lapsed into rambling and extreme Maga talking points that seem likely to have left many voters nonplussed.

The problem is not so much that he revealed himself as an erratic character, which any swing voter surely already knows: the problem is that he gifted Harris, who appeared supremely well-prepared, the chance to present him as the exhausting candidate of the all-too-familiar past – and herself as the optimist with a vision for the future.

In the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, Archie Bland writes that even Fox News said Kamala Harris won last night’s presidential debate. Bland writes:

Democrats’ moods can only have been improved by the news, a few minutes after it ended, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris, and signed her post “childless cat lady”. And CNN’s snap poll suggested that voters thought Harris won by a margin of 63% to 37% – nearly as big a margin as Trump achieved over Biden last time around. Key to Harris’ success was baiting her opponent into rants on marginal topics, instead of talking about the issues that voters are interested in.

But while millions watched, Harris and Trump will reach millions more through the clips that will now be distributed through news and social media. For further reading on the debate, take a look at Gabrielle Canon’s key takeaways and this factcheck on both candidates.

Investors were watching for any market impact from the debate between the US presidential candidates, vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that the yen hit a nine-month high after a Bank of Japan official hinted at more monetary tightening. But, the news agency reports, the Japanese unit was also boosted by bets on a Harris presidency after she was considered to have come out on top in the US presidential debate.

According to AFP, The chances of Trump losing also weighed on bitcoin after he had previously vowed to be a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.

Kamala Harris puts Donald Trump on the defensive in head to head debate

US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.

Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.

A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.

At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.

The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.

No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.

More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates:

Updated

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