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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
World
Cecilia Nowell (now); Chris Stein, Maya Yang and Amy Sedghi (earlier)

Kamala Harris says Trump is a fascist at town hall - as it happened

Kamala Harris Donald Trump CNN Adolf Hitler Chris Sununu Georgia Pennsylvania Anderson Cooper Elon Musk Gabe Sterling
Woman man on stage
Kamala Harris and CNN moderator Anderson Cooper in Aston, Pennsylvania, today. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Closing Summary

This blog is closing now, thanks for following along. You can read our US elections coverage here. Here are the major developments from today:

  • Kamala Harris attended a CNN town hall with undecided voters in Pennsylvania while her opponent Donald Trump held a rally in Georgia after rejecting an offer to participate in the town hall. At the town hall, Harris repeatedly returned to news that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly claimed his one-time boss “falls into the general definition of fascist”. Harris herself called Trump a fascist when asked if she believed the ex-president qualifies as one during the town hall. Speaking from her residence in Washington DC earlier in the day, Harris accused Trump of seeking to subvert the independence of the military.

  • A former model told the Guardian that Donald Trump groped her at his Manhattan tower in 1993, after she was introduced to the real estate mogul by notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Stacey Williams said Trump put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and buttocks in their brief meeting, unwanted touching that left her “deeply confused”.

  • The Harris-Walz campaign announced that Harris will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021. According to a senior campaign official, Harris will speak at the Ellipse on 29 October – exactly one week before the 5 November election.

  • The justice department warned Elon Musk’s Pac that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, just days after Musk pledged to give away $1m a day to registered voters in battleground states in the US who sign a petition by his America Pac in support of the first and second amendments.

  • A new report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center detailed steps that Chinese operatives have taken to discredit Republican members of Congress and that Russian agents are taking to undermine the Harris-Walz campaign. Meanwhile, the justice department announced updates in four cases brought by its Election Threats Task Force today, sending a stern message one week before the 5 November presidential election.

  • On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”

  • A campaign event that saw Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Lucas Kunce shoot an AR-15 went awry, after a reporter was hit by a bullet fragment.

Updated

Kamala Harris has concluded her appearance on CNN’s town hall. Over the course of the evening, Harris avoided giving direct answers to several questions (calling Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall “stupid”, for example, but then declining to commit to not building any more wall herself) instead seeking to define her opponent as dangerous.

Immediately following the town hall, CNN commentators noted that “she focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president.”

Updated

The Trump campaign has responded to Kamala Harris saying she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist during the ongoing CNN town hall. Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has told the Associated Press, “Kamala will say anything to distract from her open border invasion and record high inflation.”

Donald Trump has concluded his rally in Duluth, Georgia, while Kamala Harris continues answering questions from undecided voters at a live CNN town hall in Pennsylvania.

In Georgia, Trump delivered a characteristically rambling speech, joined by former independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr and former representative Tulsi Gabbard.

Meanwhile, Harris answered questions from voters on the economy, abortion, immigration, the war in Gaza, support for Israel and how she will distinguish herself from Joe Biden. Harris suggested she would look into eliminating the filibuster to pass reproductive rights protections, called for comprehensive immigration reform and criticized Trump for declining to appear at the town hall.

Asked the classic interview question, to identify one of her greatest weaknesses, Harris said: “I may not be quick to have the answer as soon as you ask it about a specific policy issue sometimes, because I’m going to want to research it, I’m going to want to study it.” She added: “I’m kind of a nerd sometimes.”

Updated

The Pennsylvania supreme court ruled today that voters should be allowed to cast their ballots in person if their mail-in ballots are rejected for certain reasons. The decision is a loss for the Republican National Committee, which appealed the case to the state’s highest court, and could allow thousands of Pennsylvanians to vote if their mail-in ballots are disqualified for lacking “secrecy envelopes”. The court ruled 4-to-3 that the Butler county board of elections must allow voters to cast provisional ballots in Pennsylvania – a crucial swing state where voters could determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

Updated

Harris says Trump is a fascist at CNN town hall

Kamala Harris has taken the stage at a live town hall with undecided voters in Pennsylvania, and is emphasizing recent comments from prior Trump administration officials saying the ex-president has authoritarian tendencies.

“I do believe that Donald Trump is unstable, increasingly unstable and unfit to serve,” Harris said.

“The people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans, by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security adviser, former secretaries of defense and his vice-president, have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as president of the United States.”

In response to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asking her: “Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?”, Harris answered: “Yes, I do.”

Updated

With Donald Trump still speaking at his rally in Duluth, Georgia, Kamala Harris is about to take the stage for a live town hall with undecided Pennsylvania voters on CNN. Trump was invited to attend the same town hall but declined.

The justice department announced updates in four cases brought by its Election Threats Task Force today, sending a stern message one week before the 5 November presidential election. The updates involved the charging and sentencing of four men – in Colorado, Alabama, Florida and Pennsylvania – for threats directed at elections officials spanning from 2019 to this year.

This week, Richard Glenn Kantwill of Tampa, Florida, was charged for allegedly threatening an elected official in February (Kantwill was already facing charges from 2019 and 2020), while John Pollard of Philadelphia was charged with threatening to kill a Pennsylvania elected official in September.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Teak Brockbank pleaded guilty today to threatening Colorado and Arizona elections officials between September 2021 and July 2024. And, in Alabama, Brian Jerry Ogstad was sentenced to 30 months in prison for threatening election workers in Phoenix in 2022.

For more on the rising rates of violence against election officials, consider Sam Levine’s reporting:

Updated

Donald Trump has taken the stage in Duluth, Georgia, escalating his personal insults against Kamala Harris.

“This woman is crazy,” the former president said of the vice-president. He said voters should stand up to Harris and tell her: “‘You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.’” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”.

Trump has been facing scrutiny over his vicious attacks on Harris’s intelligence, which have played into racist tropes. His rally comes amid growing criticism surrounding reports that he repeatedly praised Hitler and said he wanted generals who would display loyalty in a manner similar to Nazi commanders.

Updated

Georgia election officials say the state fended off a cyberattack against the state’s absentee ballot website, which they believe originated from a foreign country, CNN reports.

“It slowed our systems down for a little bit, but it never stopped our systems from working,” Gabe Sterling, an official in Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, told CNN. The attack had “the hallmarks of a foreign power or a foreign entity [acting] at the behest of a foreign power,” Sterling added.

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office repelled the attack, and there was no disruption to voters’ ability to request absentee ballots.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again since 2016: no matter what Donald Trump says or is reported to have said, powerful Republicans refuse to condemn him.

The latest example came today from New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu, who was asked on CNN about John Kelly’s condemnation of the former president, and the story of him asking for generals like those who served under Adolf Hitler. Here’s what Sununu said:

Updated

Trump to rally supporters in Georgia

We expect to hear from Donald Trump in about 10 minutes, when he is scheduled to take the stage in what looks to be a packed arena in Duluth, Georgia.

The former president’s speeches are more freewheeling and random than ever these days, but don’t be surprised to hear him condemn his ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times yesterday that he believes Trump is a fascist.

As for the allegations of groping brought against him by Stacey Williams, his campaign has denied them, but we will be looking out for any comments he makes.

And, of course, Trump will undoubtedly say plenty about undocumented immigrants and inflation, the two issues he has put at the center of his campaign.

Donald Trump has faced allegations of unwanted touching stretching as far back as the 1970s, the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports:

Donald Trump sexual abuse accuser Jessica Leeds says she ruefully “laughed out loud” when the former president recently disputed her sworn testimony that he grabbed her, tried to kiss her and ran his hand up her skirt on a plane in the 1970s by insisting “she would not have been the chosen one”.

“He assaulted me 50 years ago and continues to attack me today,” Leeds said alongside her attorneys during a press conference in New York on Monday. “It was like he had 47 arms – like an octopus, but not a sound was spoken.”

Her remarks came after Trump appeared at an appeal hearing on the sexual abuse case brought by E Jean Carroll, which resulted in a jury finding Trump liable of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.

Leeds, 82, came forward in 2016 and later testified in the Carroll trial, which centered on Carroll’s testimony that the Republican nominee in November’s election had assaulted her at a department store in the 1990s. That set the stage for Trump to go into a lengthy rebuttal of both Carroll and Leeds.

With respect to Leeds, Trump said it was a “totally made-up story” that “never happened”, and he insinuated that she supported Democrats.

“And frankly – I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say – but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And she would not have been the chosen one.”

Trump campaign spokesperson denies Williams' allegation

Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt denied Stacey Williams’ allegation of unwanted touching by Donald Trump.

She said:

These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.

Updated

Stacey Williams’ allegation that Donald Trump groped her is the latest instance of the former president being accused of inappropriately touching women without their consent.

As our story notes:

About two dozen women have accused the former president and convicted felon of sexual misconduct dating back decades. The allegations have included claims of Trump kissing them without their consent, reaching under their skirts, and, in the case of some beauty pageant contestants, walking in on them in the changing room.

A former model named Amy Dorris shared allegations about Trump similar to what Williams described in an interview with the Guardian in 2020. Trump denied ever having harassed, abused or behaved improperly toward Dorris.

Last year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996 and awarded her $5m in a judgment.

Trump has been appealing the judgment in the E Jean Carroll case, but a federal judge recently sounded skeptical:

Updated

Stacey Williams’ allegation of groping by Donald Trump is a reminder of how close he once was with Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump has claimed that they had a falling out and had not spoken in 15 years around the time of his death in 2019, but up to the early 2000s, the real estate mogul spoke highly of Epstein.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Here’s more, from the Guardian’s story detailing Williams’s allegation, on their relationship:

No evidence has surfaced that Trump was aware of or involved in Epstein’s misconduct.

But Trump and Epstein knew each other for decades and were photographed at the same social events in the 1990s and early 2000s, years before Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

After Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Trump told journalists in the Oval Office that he “knew him, like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” but that he had a “falling out” with Epstein in the early 2000s.

“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” Trump said. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

Asked whether she had considered coming forward in the past, as other women were making allegations against Trump, Williams said she was a person who wanted to avoid negative attention or risk the backlash many other survivors have faced.

“I left the business,” she said. “I disappeared on purpose because I love being anonymous and I love my life of being a private citizen. Then I watched what has happened to women who come out and it is so horrifying and abusive. The thought of doing that, especially as a mother with a child in my house, was just not possible,” she told the Guardian.

“I just chose in my own way – comments on social media to contradict people who said he didn’t do anything,” she said.

Updated

Former model Stacey Williams also shed more light on the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex offenses and killed himself in prison in 2019.

Williams briefly dated Epstein, and knew Trump as his friend. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said.

One day in 1993, Epstein suggested stopping by Trump Tower while on a walk with Williams, and was present when the real estate mogul groped her, she said.

Here’s what she said happened:

Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said, she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other.

… After the alleged incident, Williams said that she and Epstein left Trump Tower, and that she began to feel Epstein growing angry at her.

“Jeffrey and I left and he didn’t look at me or speak to me and I felt this seething rage around me, and when we got down to the sidewalk, he looked at me and just berated me, and said why did you do that?” she said on the Zoom call.

“He made me feel so disgusting and I remember being so utterly confused,” she said.

She described how the alleged incident seemed to her to be part of a “twisted game”.

“I felt shame and disgust and as we went our separate ways, I felt this sensation of revisiting it, while the hands were all over me. And I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated. I felt like a piece of meat,” she said in an interview with the Guardian.

Updated

Former model tells of being groped by Trump after Epstein introduction

A former model has told the Guardian that Donald Trump groped her at his Manhattan tower in 1993, after she was introduced to the real estate mogul by notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Stacey Williams said Trump put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and buttocks in their brief meeting, unwanted touching that left her “deeply confused”.

Here is the just-released story by the Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Lucy Osborne:

Updated

Trump calls Kelly 'a bad general' after former chief of staff accuses him of fascism

Donald Trump has assailed John Kelly as a “a bad general” gripped by “pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred” after his former White House chief of staff called the ex-president a fascist.

Kelly, a former general in the Marine corps, made the comment in an interview with the New York Times yesterday, which Kamala Harris seized on today as the latest evidence that Trump is seeking “unchecked power”.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump laid into Kelly:

Thank you for your support against a total degenerate named John Kelly, who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred! This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together. He was tough and dumb. The problem is his toughness morphed into weakness, because he became JELLO with time! The story about the Soldiers was A LIE, as are numerous other stories he told. Even though I shouldn’t be wasting my time with him, I always feel it’s necessary to hit back in pursuit of THE TRUTH. John Kelly is a LOWLIFE, and a bad General, whose advice in the White House I no longer sought, and told him to MOVE ON! His wife once told me, at Camp David, John admires you tremendously, and when he leaves the Military, he will only speak well of you. I said, Thank you!

Updated

We’re going to be hearing even more from Donald Trump later this evening, when he speaks before a packed rally in suburban Atlanta.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, former independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is among the warm-up acts, and is downplaying the recent comments from John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, who described him as a fascist:

A new report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center details steps that Chinese operatives have taken to discredit Republican members of Congress and that Russian agents are taking to undermine the Harris-Walz campaign.

Microsoft found a series of videos and social media posts targeting Representative Barry Moore of Alabama, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida – three of the most vocal Republican critics of China. “While not always resulting in high levels of engagement, these efforts demonstrate China’s sustained attempts influence US politics across the board,” Clint Watts, who heads the Threat Analysis Center, wrote in a post accompanying the report.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also found that Russian actors had continued creating AI-enhanced deepfake videos about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. “While most of these videos received minimal engagement, they underscore Russia’s ongoing use of both traditional and AI-generated content to influence US audiences and stoke political discord,” Watts added. “We have also seen some actors shifting their content publishing strategy from Telegram to X to reach US. audiences.”

The news came the same day that the Washington Post reported that a former Florida sheriff is aiding the Kremlin in its efforts to spread misinformation and deepfakes about Harris.

Updated

Kamala Harris to deliver 'closing argument' at site of January 6 rally

Kamala Harris will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021. According to a senior campaign official, Harris will speak at the Ellipse, a public park just south of the White House, on 29 October – exactly one week before the 5 November election.

The vice-president is expected to emphasize her New Way Forward campaign, and call on voters to move past the chaos and division of the Trump era. The campaign’s decision to hold a “closing argument” address harkens back to Harris’s history as a prosecutor – who is now taking her case to the “jury”, or American voters.

Updated

Los Angeles Times editorials editor resigns

Following news that the owner of the Los Angeles Times had prohibited the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate, the editorials editor resigned today.

The editorial board had planned to endorse Kamala Harris.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

The paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, told the editorial board that the paper would not endorse a candidate on 11 October. By then, Garza had already drafted a proposed editorial endorsing Harris on behalf of the board.

Updated

Supporters of Kamala Harris are gathering at a rally in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Hallandale Beach, Florida, for an early evening speech by her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

It’s a rare foray into the Sunshine state by a principal in her campaign.

Harris trails Trump by about six points in a state he won in both 2016 and 2020, and Democrats privately concede the Republican is in line for its 30 electoral college votes this time too. Much of Emhoff’s time in recent days has been spent in more competitive states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

But the US Senate race between incumbent the Republican Rick Scott and her Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is a closer affair, with Scott leading by about three points. Emhoff is expected to address Florida’s draconian six-week abortion ban, the overturning of which in a ballot initiative called amendment 4 has become a central plank of her campaign.

Mucarsel-Powell is among this evening’s speakers. Emhoff will follow his appearance here with a fundraising event and rally in Coral Gables, Florida, tonight before returning to stump for the vice-president in the battleground states.

Updated

With election day less than two weeks away, a top House Democrat is warning that Donald Trump has failed to engage with customary presidential transition procedures.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Donald Trump and JD Vance today warning that the two are “breaking the precedent set by every other presidential candidate since 2010” by not signing the memorandum of understanding that typically governs the transition of power. The memorandum of understanding triggers government transition funding and planning assistance, which allows nominees to access office space and equipment, information technology and staff assistance.

In the letter, Raskin wrote that Trump’s refusal to sign the documents “may be at least partially driven by your intent to circumvent fundraising rules that put limits on private contributions on the transition effort and require public reporting. You may also be acting out of a more general aversion to ethics rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest in the incoming administration.”

In a press release, the House Oversight Committee added that Trump’s failure to sign the documents “is particularly troubling in light of the fact that he has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power”.

Updated

Police have arrested two men for fomenting election-related violence in Colorado and Arizona.

Last night, Tempe police arrested Jeffrey Michael Kelly for allegedly shooting at Democratic party offices in Tempe, Arizona, in September and October. Meanwhile, a Colorado man named Teak Ty Brockbank pleaded guilty today to transmitting interstate threats, for making online threats about killing elected officials in Colorado and Arizona.

Kelly was charged with seven felony counts and three misdemeanor counts, including terrorism and unlawful discharge, the Arizona Republic reports. Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy adds that police found 120 guns and 250,000 rounds of ammunition in Kelly’s home.

Charges against Brockbank, meanwhile, were brought by the justice department’s Election Threats Task Force over threats Brockbank made in 2021 and 2022, including calling for elections officials to be hanged. Brockbank will be sentenced in February.

Updated

Kamala Harris has told NBC News that she’s preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump will declare victory before the election is complete.

“We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that,” she said.

Speaking at a Believers and Ballots town hall in Zebulon, Georgia, today, Donald Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk for providing hurricane relief where he says the federal government did not.

The former president has returned to his scapegoating of immigrants, saying that the federal government would have more funds for hurricane relief if it were not supporting non-citizens.

“You know who did help us though? Elon Musk,” he said. After Hurricane Helene hit, he said: “They needed Starlink badly in North Carolina.” Trump added that Musk “saved a lot of lives”.

False information has swirled in the communications blackout that followed Hurricane Helene’s devastation. Phone and power lines were down across the south, the Guardian’s Blake Montgomery reports.

Musk has a history of inserting himself into rescue operations. He accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of blocking his satellite internet company, Starlink, from delivering to parts of North Carolina decimated by the hurricane, a claim both Fema and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said was false.

The justice department has warned Elon Musk’s America Pac, which has donated millions of dollars to support Trump’s bid for the presidency, that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, CNN reports.

Updated

Unions have vexed Democrats lately, with the Teamsters notably declining to endorse a candidate in the presidential election, after supporting Joe Biden in 2020. But the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports that swing state members of the United Auto Workers, another important union, are on board with Harris’s candidacy:

United Auto Workers (UAW) members in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada support the presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 22 points, according to a poll conducted by the union.

UAW members in Michigan – the center of the US auto industry – support Harris over Trump by 20 percentage points, with 54% supporting Harris over 34% supporting Trump, the poll found. The union claimed in 2020 that UAW members accounted for 84% of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan.

The poll also found that support among non-college-educated men – a key demographic where Harris has been lagging – gave Harris a 14-point margin over Trump.

Both Trump and Harris have courted the UAW’s members. The UAW president, Shawn Fain, has backed Harris and become a target of Trump’s ire. Biden supported the UAW in its strike against the US’s big three auto companies last year, becoming the first president to walk a picket line.

Updated

Justice department warns Elon Musk's Pac against paying people to vote - report

The justice department has warned Elon Musk’s Pac that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, CNN reports.

The billionaire behind electric car manufacturer Tesla and social media network X has stepped up his support for Donald Trump in recent months, after endorsing him following his near-assassination at a Pennsylvania rally in July. Over the weekend, he said that his America Pac would give $1m every day to a signatory of a petition that appears to be a ploy to battleground state Republicans to register to vote.

Prominent Democrats, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, said law enforcement should investigate, which appears to have happened. Here’s what CNN reported:

The Justice Department warned Elon Musk’s America PAC in recent days that his $1 million sweepstakes to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, people briefed on the matter told CNN.

Musk, who has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump and is spending millions of dollars supporting his candidacy, has publicized the $1 million prize by his political action committee aiming to increase voter registrations in hotly contested states.

Musk’s initial promise to pay prizes to registered voters immediately raised concerns from election law experts and some state officials who questioned whether it ran afoul of the law.

Federal law bars paying people to register to vote. The language of the petition currently promises $1 million prizes to people chosen at random for signing a petition in support of First and Second Amendment freedoms. But to sign the petition, you must be registered to vote in specific states.

A letter from the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to Musk’s political action committee, according to people briefed on the matter.

Updated

Trump campaign accuses Harris of fomenting violence, peddling 'outright lies and falsehoods'

Donald Trump’s campaign has released a furious statement attacking Kamala Harris, saying the vice-president is “LYING and LOSING” and accusing her of spreading falsehoods that fueled the two assassination attempts against the former president.

It comes after the vice-president warned earlier today that Trump was seeking “unchecked power” in his campaign for another four years in the White House. Here’s what Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung had to say:

Kamala Harris is a stone-cold loser who is increasingly desperate because she is flailing, and her campaign is in shambles. That is why she continues to peddle outright lies and falsehoods that are easily disproven. The fact is that Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics. She is despicable and her grotesque behavior proves she is wholly unfit for office.

Trump may respond personally to Harris in a few minutes, when he begins his Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall in Zebulon, Georgia.

Updated

Does Biden agree Trump is a fascist? 'Yes,' his spokesperson says

At her briefing today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden agreed with those who say Donald Trump is a fascist.

“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre replied, when a reporter put the question to her in the White House briefing room. She went on to argue that Trump himself has made no secret of how he would like to govern:

The former president has said he is going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that … we cannot ignore or forget what happened on January 6, 2021.

Updated

While the debate around UK Labour party staff volunteering to go to the United States to help campaign for the Democratic party continues, in London some expat Americans are out in the streets of English capital tonight, asking passerbys if they are American, and if they have voted yet.

The dozen-strong group, some wearing T-shirts saying “Democrats abroad for Harris, Walz,” explained to me why they are so keen to reach out to their fellow compatriots in the UK, telling me that in such a tight contest for the US presidency, “Every vote counts.”

With polls suggesting that the race for the presidency is pretty much neck and neck, they could well be right.

Updated

Bob Casey campaign’s new attack ad against Republican Dave McCormick comes as the Pennsylvania Senate race has grown increasingly competitive in its final days, further complicating Democrats’ path to maintaining their majority in the upper chamber.

While Casey had previously been favored to win re-election, the Cook Political Report recently moved his race from “lean Democrat” to “toss up”. According to the Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average, Casey’s lead now stands at 3 points compared with 10 points in mid-August.

Speaking to the Guardian last month, Casey acknowledged the race would be a tough fight, but he predicted Pennsylvania voters would ultimately send him back to Washington for another six years.

“I think people know they have a stake in this election,” Casey said, adding, “I think it’ll be close – but I think we’re going to win.”

Updated

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, has released a new campaign ad attacking his opponent, Republican Dave McCormick, over allegations that McCormick fostered a toxic work environment as CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater.

The ad highlights claims, outlined in the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, that McCormick attempted to silence and retaliate against female employees who came forward with allegations of sexual harassment.

“Reports made it clear that under Dave McCormick the world’s largest hedge fund is a dangerous place for women to work,” the narrator of the Casey ad says. “They were groped, sexually harassed or worse. But instead of protecting his female employees, McCormick protected his profits.”

The ad specifically cites claims that McCormick told one employee who had been harassed that she would “be in litigation for the rest of her life” if she spoke out. The Fund also recounts numerous complaints of gender pay discrimination among female employees of Bridgewater.

The Casey ad concludes: “That’s ugly. That’s Dave McCormick.”

Updated

Former national security adviser John Bolton has come to former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s defense after the latter said that Donald Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government”.

In an interview with CNN, Bolton, a former Trump ally turned critic, said:

The campaign has attacked John’s credibility. In any comparison of what John Kelly might say versus what Donald Trump might say about a particular event or what these munchkins on the Trump campaign are saying about John Kelly, you can take what John says to the bank. I didn’t hear many, probably most of these statements myself, but if John says that Donald Trump said them, I believe it implicitly.

Bolton added:

Certainly this recitation of what he’s done should be compelling to people not to vote for Trump. Trump … after leaving office, said it publicly, he would suspend the constitution or terminate it because of the unfairness, the effort to steal the 2020 election. That statement alone, if he said nothing else, if he never mentioned the words ‘Adolf Hitler’, that alone is disqualifying, in my point of view.”

Earlier today, the Atlantic reported that Trump allegedly said that he wanted the kind of generals that Adolf Hitler had.

Updated

Donald Trump has furiously accused the UK’s Labour party of interfering in the US election, calling it ‘far left’, after party activists travelled to campaign for his opponent.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland and Michael Safi report:

Walz on his early vote: 'An opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump'

Tim Walz headed to the voting booth on Wednesday in St Paul, Minnesota, to cast his early ballot along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus.

After he voted, Walz said:

Beautiful Minnesota day, super exciting. Cast my vote for Kamala Harris, [Democratic senator] Amy Klobuchar, [Democratic representative] Betty McCollum and to have my son with me, Gus, to vote for the first time, exciting. An opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward …

Look, Donald Trump made it very clear that this election is about Donald Trump taking full control of the military to use against his political enemies, taking full control of the Department of Justice to prosecute those who disagree with him, taking full control of the media on what is told and what is told to the American public …

The opportunity here, and the absolute requirement of Americans, is to understand that this rhetoric has not been used in this country, certainly not by a party’s presidential nominee, and the opportunity here is to elect Kamala Harris.

Updated

Seeking to break election deadlock, Harris accuses Trump of wanting 'unchecked power'

Kamala Harris’s surprise speech from her Washington DC residence represented the vice-president’s latest attempt to achieve a decisive advantage over Donald Trump with less than two weeks to go until election day.

Speaking before she set off for the Philadelphia suburbs to take part in a CNN town hall with undecided voters, Harris seized on Trump’s recent comments, as well as those of his former chief of staff John Kelly, to persuade voters that he would be more dangerous than ever in a second term.

She noted that over the past week, Trump has described his political adversaries as “the enemy from within” and publicly mulled sending the military after them. Referencing reporting that came out today from the Atlantic, Harris said: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in,” Harris continued.

“So, the bottom line is this: we know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?” the vice-president said. She left without responding to a question from a reporter who appeared to ask about Joe Biden yesterday saying Trump should be locked up.

It’s not the first time that Harris and other Democrats have warned the voting public that Trump is a threat, and is certain not to be the last, but if it will work is another question. While Harris’s entry into the race in July was greeted with an outpouring of Democratic enthusiasm and a bump in her polls compared to Biden, more recent surveys show her neck-in-neck, and in some places trailing, Trump, both in swing states and nationally.

Theories abound as to what she could do to turn voters away from Trump’s appeal, which has centered on vows to lower prices that rose during Biden’s presidency and throw migrants out of the country. In an interview earlier today on CNN, noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that the very sort of message Harris pushed this afternoon was not working.

“What’s interesting is that [when] Harris focused on why she should be elected president, that’s when the numbers grew,” Luntz said.

“And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused onto him and said, don’t vote for me, vote against him, that’s when everything froze.”

Harris says Trump 'wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally'

Speaking for her residence in Washington DC, Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of seeking to subvert the independence of the military, citing comments made by his former chief of staff and retired marine corps general John Kelly.

“Yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Harris said.

“Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States constitution. He wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States.”

The day so far

We’re going to be hearing from Kamala Harris today quite a bit earlier than expected, when she delivers remarks from her Washington DC residence at 1pm, in an appearance that was not previously scheduled. The vice-president then heads to the Philadelphia suburbs for a town hall with undecided voters at 9pm, while Donald Trump has two campaign events planned today in Georgia, including a town hall with lieutenant governor and 2020 election denier Burt Jones. Meanwhile, CNN reports that Trump’s own co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, is among the many Republicans who criticized him after the January 6 Capitol attack but then made amends. In LaCivita’s case, one wonders if it wasn’t because doing so has been quite lucrative.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

  • Retired army officers said they agreed with Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly that the former president met the definition of a fascist and would act as such if re-elected.

  • Nate Silver and James Carville, two veteran US politics watchers, shared their thoughts on who might win the presidential election, with Silver assessing the emotions of his gut, and Carville advising Democrats not to worry.

  • A campaign event that saw Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Lucas Kunce shoot an AR-15 went awry, after a reporter was hit by a bullet fragment.

Updated

Retired US army Brig Gen Steve Anderson said it was important to not only express opposition to Trump, but to endorse Harris, who he said had the “temperament”, “intelligence” and “experience” to be the commander-in-chief.

By contrast, he noted that Trump’s 34 felony convictions would disqualify him from serving in the military.

Anderson said he wished Kelly would go further than he has, and publicly endorse Harris.

“You are now in the political fray, regardless of whether you want to or not,” he said of Kelly. “And so you owe it to the American people that tell us not just that you oppose somebody, but you also support Kamala Harris.”

“I’m frankly disappointed that John Kelly won’t come up and actually say that,” he added.

Updated

Harris adds last-minute speech to schedule before Pennsylvania town hall

Kamala Harris has just announced she will make a speech from her residence in Washington DC at 1pm.

The remarks were not previously scheduled, and the White House did not say what she would talk about. Harris’s only public appearance today was to be her CNN town hall with undecided voters in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, at 9pm.

Updated

Retired army officers warn of the dangers of Trump returning to White House

Two retired US army officers urged Americans to heed John Kelly’s extraordinary public warnings about Donald Trump, the president he formerly served as chief of staff.

“The only reason Trump was stopped the last time was because people like Gen Kelly stood in the breach and acted as a check to Trump’s worst impulses. A second time around, those guardrails won’t exist,” retired army reserve Col Kevin Carroll, a former Trump homeland security official and self-described conservative who is backing Harris, said on a press call organized by her campaign.

In a recent New York Times interview, Kelly said Trump met the definition of a fascist and expected that he would govern like a dictator if he returned to power and surrounded himself with loyalists. He also confirmed previous reports that Trump made admiring statements about Hitler.

“He’s going to want all the leaders from the [secretary of defense] all the way down to general officers and senior leaders in the military to swear to some sort of loyalty test that they’re loyalty is to him and not the constitution,” Steve Anderson, a retired US army brigadier general and a lifelong Republican, said on the call.

He added: “We’re concerned that he wants to use the military to suppress his opposition in the country and man the US border, which are things that the military is not supposed to do.”

Updated

There is, however, one swing state where we have more than just polling to go on when it comes to the question of which presidential candidate might win.

Jon Ralston, a veteran reporter in Nevada and editor of the Nevada Independent, has been tabulating early voting data from the state, which can serve as a preview of how it might end up swinging on 5 November. So far, the GOP is performing a bit more strongly than Democrats, despite not having won Nevada in a presidential election in 20 years.

But that certainly could change, and Ralston updates his blog multiple times a day. You can read it here.

Underscoring the 50-50 nature of the presidential race, Monmouth University has just released new national polling that once again confirms the race for president is tied:

In the words of the Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray:

Presidential election polling this fall can best be characterized as stable uncertainty. Major events like an assassination attempt and a high-profile debate barely caused the needle to stutter. Shifts of a single point can be consequential to the outcome but are beyond the ability of most polls to capture with any precision. The bottom line is this race is a toss-up and has been since August.

The second piece the New York Times published comes from James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist who boldly declares that Kamala Harris is going to win the White House.

“Today I am pulling my stool up to the political poker table to throw my chips all in: America, it will all be OK. Ms Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain,” Carville says.

He then lists three reasons:

  • Mr Trump is a repeat electoral loser. This time will be no different.

  • Money matters, and Ms Harris has it in droves.

  • It’s just a feeling.

To go a little deeper into Carville’s rationale for the first bullet point, he argues that Trump has a lower ceiling in terms of voter support than Harris, and that the GOP has been on a losing streak for the past two years that is set to continue:

The biggest reason Mr Trump will lose is that the whole Republican Party has been on a losing streak since Mr Trump took it over. See 2018: the largest House landslide for Democrats in a midterm election since Watergate. See 2020: He was decisively bucked from the White House by Joe Biden. See 2022: an embarrassment of a midterm for Republicans off the heels of Dobbs. And the Democrats have been performing well in special elections since Trump appointees on the Supreme Court helped take away a basic right of American women. Guess what? Abortion is on the ballot again – for president.

There simply do not seem to be enough voters – even in the battleground states – who turn out at Mr Trump’s behest anymore when he’s simply preaching to his base. He has not learned from his electoral losses nor done the necessary work to assemble a broad electoral coalition in 2024. Let’s not forget that seven weeks after Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican primary, she received 158,000 votes in Pennsylvania – and some disaffected Haley voters are currently looking to move to Ms Harris. Although Ms Haley has endorsed Mr Trump, losing even a fraction of those voters leaves Mr Trump running the final leg of this race with a fundamental fracture of the femur. To add a cherry to the pie, most voters think Mr Trump is too old to be president, but instead of easing their concerns, he’s spending the final days of the campaign jiving to the Village People and canceling interviews.

Updated

The New York Times today published two separate articles from noted American politics watchers who share what their instincts tell them about the presidential race.

We’ll tell you about both of them, beginning with the piece authored by polling wizard Nate Silver. He confides that “my gut says Donald Trump” will win, before noting that “I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut – including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50.”

He then gets into some of the reasons why Trump may ultimately prevail:

If Mr Trump does beat his polling, there will have been at least one clear sign of it: Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification – about as many people now identify as Republicans.

There’s also the fact that Ms Harris is running to become the first female president and the second Black one. The so-called Bradley effect – named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who underperformed his polls in the 1982 California governor’s race, for the supposed tendency of voters to say they’re undecided rather than admit they won’t vote for a Black candidate – wasn’t a problem for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. Still, the only other time a woman was her party’s nominee, undecided voters tilted heavily against her. So perhaps Ms Harris should have some concerns about a ‘Hillary effect’.

And why Kamala Harris may end up as our next president:

A surprise in polling that underestimates Ms Harris isn’t necessarily less likely than one for Mr Trump. On average, polls miss by three or four points. If Ms Harris does that, she will win by the largest margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College since Mr Obama in 2008.

How might that happen? It could be because of something like what happened in Britain in 2017, related to the ‘shy Tories’ theory. Expected to be a Tory sweep, the election instead resulted in Conservatives losing their majority. There was a lot of disagreement among pollsters, and some did nail the outcome. But others made the mistake of not trusting their data, making ad hoc adjustments after years of being worried about ‘shy Tories’.

Polls are increasingly like mini-models, with pollsters facing many decision points about how to translate nonrepresentative raw data into an accurate representation of the electorate. If pollsters are terrified of missing low on Mr Trump again, they may consciously or unconsciously make assumptions that favor him.

Updated

The Guardian’s George Chidi has uncovered more offensive social media posts made by Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. His campaign has been ailing ever since CNN reported last month that he had a history of making lewd comments on a pornography website’s message board. Here’s what else he said:

Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate, suggested that people who can’t take care of their children should be sterilized, according to one of a series of incendiary and racist social media posts from 2014 through 2019.

The commentary made in reference to Black families, which used terms a white supremacist would find appropriate, predates his time as the state’s lieutenant governor, but much of it came after his rise as a public figure on the right. Most of the social media posts have not previously been reported.

“I have more respect for loyal DOGS than I do for PEOPLE who don’t take care of their children,” Robinson wrote on his Facebook page in 2014. The post contained the hashtag “#haveyourdeadbeatsspayedandneutered”.

Robinson has been in a state of damage control for the last few weeks. Last month, CNN revealed old posts made under his profile on pornographic websites, in which the conservative candidate for governor purportedly described himself as a “Black NAZI” and pined for a return to the days of slavery.

Robinson has denied making the comments, castigated his detractors, attacked his opponent, attorney general Josh Stein, and launched a defamation lawsuit against CNN.

But the other comments remain public on his social media page.

Updated

Guardian to co-host event in Georgia focused on voting access nationwide

With less than two weeks to go until the 5 November presidential election, the Guardian and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University are co-hosting an event in Georgia focused on the past, present and future of voting rights in the United States.

That includes the swing state’s own measures making it harder to get an absentee ballot, and easier to challenge the validity of voters. Find out more about it, and how to watch it live, below:

Click on over to our poll tracker and you will see a very close race between the two candidates, with Donald Trump carrying a narrow advantage in several swing states.

That does not mean the former president is poised for victory – many polls show the two candidates within the margin of error in the seven states that are expected to decide the election. But it does speak to a dynamic that Harris’s campaign has struggled with in recent weeks, which is that the burst of enthusiasm and polling momentum that accompanied her entry into the race in July seems to have petered out.

In an interview with CNN today, Frank Luntz, a veteran pollster known for his work with Republicans, has offered some thoughts as to why. Here’s what he said:

It is heading towards Trump, but what’s interesting is that with Harris focused on why she should be elected president. That’s when the numbers grew. She’s had the best 60 days of any presidential candidate in modern history. And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused onto him and said, don’t vote for me, vote against him, that’s when everything froze.

And the fact is Donald Trump is defined. He’s not gaining. He’s not losing. He is who he is, and his vote is where it is. She is less well-defined, and if she continues just to define this race as vote against Trump, she’s going to stay where she is now. And she may lose.

Trump to hold town hall with Georgia election denier

Donald Trump will today at 3pm hold a town hall with Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who was a participant in the former president’s failed plot to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in the state four years ago.

Jones avoided criminal charges for his involvement in the scheme that saw him and 15 others sign a document saying that Trump won the state’s electoral votes. In 2022, he was elected to the No 2 position in the statehouse.

Trump’s campaign dubbed the event to be held in the town of Zebulon as “a Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall”. It seems like it will focus on his approach to religion, with the campaign noting that “President Trump has stood firmly for religious freedom and the protection of all religions”.

Updated

Reporter hit with bullet fragment after Democratic Senate candidate's shooting event goes awry – report

An errant bullet fragment left a reporter bleeding yesterday in Missouri at a shooting event held by Lucas Kunce, the Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri, the Kansas City Star reports.

The fragment, apparently from a bullet Kunce fired from an AR-15, struck KSHB 41 reporter Ryan Gamboa in the arm. Kunce, who is running to unseat incumbent Republican Josh Hawley, applied first aid, and Gamboa was able to continue covering the event.

Here’s more, from the Star:

Kunce, a Democrat, was at a private residence near Holt north of Kansas City with former US Rep[resentative] Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, when a fragment appeared to have ricocheted off a target. Kunce was shooting an AR-15 at the time, and was the only person shooting when the injury occurred.

The reporter, KSHB-TV’s Ryan Gamboa, began bleeding from his arm. Kunce, who spent 13 years in the Marines, wrapped gauze and his belt around the reporter’s arm to help stop the bleeding. The wound was later wrapped with medical tape. Gamboa remained at the range and continued on his assignment.

‘You never know what’s going to happen – shrapnel can ricochet off anything, and you’ve got to be prepared,” Kunce said in a written statement. “We were able to handle the situation, and I’m grateful Ryan is okay and could continue reporting.’

The shooting range event came with two weeks until Election Day. Kunce has emphasized his military background in campaign ads, some of which show him firing a gun.

As the Star notes, Kunce is badly trailing Hawley in the polls, with Emerson College Polling and the Hill last month finding the Democrat with 40% support to Hawley’s 51%.

Updated

One reason why Chris LaCivita may have changed his mind about Donald Trump: working for him is very lucrative.

Last week, the Daily Beast reported that LaCivita has brought in tens of millions of dollars by working for the former president over just the last two years:

The co-manager of Donald Trump’s White House campaign has raked in $22 million and counting from the Republican nominee’s political operation in just two years, the Daily Beast has learned.

Chris LaCivita, an influential GOP operative, reaped a $19 million financial windfall in 2022 when he served as a “strategic consultant” to two Trump-affiliated super PACs, campaign finance records show. Then, after joining the Trump campaign, he negotiated three contracts that gave his tiny LLC a generous cut of Trump’s TV and digital ads, direct mail and other campaign spending. He also collected retainers that at times amounted to $75,000 a month, according to multiple sources familiar with the campaign’s finances and campaign finance records.

That has netted LaCivita’s consulting firm $3 million from the campaign, records show, and there are plans to award his firm nearly $5 million more by the time the election is over—including a $150,000 bonus if Trump wins, according to a source familiar with an informal and controversial “audit” ordered up by another campaign senior adviser, Corey Lewandowski. The campaign disputes the figure for the additional monies owed to LaCivita, but did not offer an alternative estimate.

By contrast, the campaign’s other co-manager, Susie Wiles, has been paid $685,000 from the campaign through her own consulting firm with monthly retainers that ranged between $25,000 and $30,000. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, is paid $13,442 a month, campaign finance records show.

Trump campaign manager shared posts critical of January 6 - report

Chris LaCivita is currently co-managing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but CNN reports that in the aftermath of January 6, he was among the many Republicans who condemned the attack and the then-president’s embrace of the lies that fueled it.

On X, LaCivita, who these days uses the account to promote Trump’s campaign, retweeted posts that condemned the violent assault on the Capitol by his supporters:

LaCivita’s shared posts included a statement on January 6 from former President George W. Bush, who expressed “disbelief and dismay” at the violent assault on the Capitol, calling it “a sickening and heartbreaking sight.”

“I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement,” read the statement by Bush that LaCivita shared. “The violent assault on the Capitol – and disruption of a Constitutionally-mandated meeting of Congress – was undertaken by people whose passions have been inflamed by falsehoods and false hopes.”

The post, which was shared on the evening of January 6, was later deleted from LaCivita’s feed.

CNN also reviewed a video showing a screen recording of posts that LaCivita liked on January 6, including one from Republican former Rep. Barbara Comstock of Virginia, who called for Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment.

“Twitter locked @realDonaldTrump for 12 hours. Now the Cabinet needs to lock him down for the next 14 days. #25thAmendmentNow,” Comstock wrote on the evening of January 6.

Although X has since removed the ability to view likes, a user whose tweet was liked by LaCivita confirmed to CNN that his post had indeed been liked by Trump’s campaign manager on January 6.

In response to CNN’s digging, LaCivita had this to say:

Retweets and likes are not endorsements. I’m focused on winning the election two weeks from now, and not distractions from CNN.

We will be seeing quite a bit of Tim Walz today, Kamala Harris’s running mate who has planned a blitz of interviews and as well as a stop in an unlikely state.

The Harris-Walz campaign says he is set to make an unspecified appearance in St. Paul, Minnesota, the state he governs, then record interviews with television stations in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, all swing states. An interview he recorded on Univision Radio’s El Bueno, La Mala y El Feo will also air at some point this morning.

This evening, Walz will head to Louisville, Kentucky, which is not at all a swing state, and deliver remarks at a campaign reception.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk pledged to give away $1m a day to registered voters in battleground states in the US who sign a petition by his America Pac in support of the first and second amendments. He awarded the first prize, a novelty check the size of a kitchen island, at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday and the second on Sunday in Pittsburgh. He says he’ll keep doing it until the election on 5 November. The stunt is potentially illegal, experts say.

After endorsing Donald Trump in July, Musk quickly founded America Pac and funded it with $75m. For the past several weeks, he’s been making multiple in-person campaign appearances per day, focusing especially on Pennsylvania, a swing state.

But, what does Musk want from all this politicking? My US colleague, Blake Montgomery, delves into this in the below explainer:

In addition to worrying that the election will be rigged, now people in Saginaw county are nervous that violence will accompany it.

Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him.

But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters.

“I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra.

The most consequential US presidential election of recent times is also likely to be the most disputed, particularly if the results are as close as opinion polls suggest.

Republican officials are gearing up to stall and overturn the count if it goes against Trump. Meanwhile, the former US president has warned of a bloodbath if he loses again next month, which voters have reason to take seriously in the wake of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol after he lost the last election.

Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was rigged against him – including at a rally in Saginaw earlier this month – and that Democrats are plotting to steal next month’s election, has left its mark.

In Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016 and then lost to Joe Biden four years later, one in five people say they do not have confidence that votes will be counted accurately.

Across the US, just 8% of Trump supporters say they have a great deal of confidence there will be a fair election and only 16% are very confident that their own vote will be counted accurately, according to YouGov. Kamala Harris’s supporters are much more trusting, with 72% having a great deal of confidence in the conduct of the election, although that still leaves large numbers of Democrats also questioning the process.

Labour party rejects claim its activists campaigning for Democrats have broken US electoral law

The Labour party has put out a statement rejecting allegations that it broke US election law because activists and staff members have been volunteering to help the Democrats.

A Labour spokesperson said:

It is common practice for campaigners of all political persuasions from around the world to volunteer in US elections.

Where Labour activists take part, they do so at their own expense, in accordance with the laws and rules.”

On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”

Both were speaking at a rally in Madison, a growing Democratic party stronghold, to encourage early voting and warn of the perils of a second Trump presidency. Obama went on to campaign for Kamala Harris in Detroit on Tuesday evening, alongside rapper Eminem, in an effort to drum up support in Michigan where polls suggest Harris and Trump are in a virtual deadlock.

The Democratic vice-presidential candidate ripped into Trump ally and Silicon Valley billionaire Musk, warning that he could be charged with regulating his own businesses if Trump were elected. Musk has also promised the chance to win $1m to voters in swing states who sign a petition linked to efforts to return Trump to power.

Walz also slammed Trump, who this week served meals at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, accusing him of “cosplaying” as a working-class person and noting that the restaurant had closed to accommodate the presidential candidate. “It was a stunt,” said Walz. “Fake orders for fake customers.”

“He is not the 2016 Donald Trump,” said Walz, describing Trump’s promise to prosecute his political enemies. “He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.”

Obama, who won in Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012, urged his Madison audience to get to the polls and spent much of his speech attacking Trump.

“I wouldn’t be offended if you just walk out right now and go vote,” he said.

“When he’s not complaining, he’s trying to sell you stuff,” he added, referring to Trump, who has raised funds by selling gold-colored sneakers, bibles and $100,000 watches. “Who does that? You’re running for president, and you’re hawking merchandise.”

Updated

Facebook page with racist posts still visible for Republican Mark Robinson

Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate, suggested that people who can’t take care of their children should be sterilized, according to one of a series of incendiary and racist social media posts from 2014 through 2019.

The commentary made in reference to Black families, which used terms a white supremacist would find appropriate, predates his time as the state’s lieutenant governor, but much of it came after his rise as a public figure on the right. Most of the social media posts have not previously been reported.

“I have more respect for loyal DOGS than I do for PEOPLE who don’t take care of their children,” Robinson wrote on his Facebook page in 2014. The post contained the hashtag “#haveyourdeadbeatsspayedandneutered”.

Robinson has been in a state of damage control for the last few weeks. Last month, CNN revealed old posts made under his profile on pornographic websites, in which the conservative candidate for governor purportedly described himself as a “Black NAZI” and pined for a return to the days of slavery.

Robinson has denied making the comments, castigated his detractors, attacked his opponent, the attorney general, Josh Stein, and launched a defamation lawsuit against CNN.

But the other comments remain public on his social media page.

“If you need a court order to tell you to take care of your children, then you probably need an operation to make sure you don’t have any more,” Robinson posted on Facebook in 2016.

Updated

It was billed as a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders, but the reality of Donald Trump’s appearance at his Doral golf club in Miami on Tuesday was a succession of adulatory monologues from his most loyal Latino supporters, interspersed with familiar, lengthy rants from the former president laden with grievances and insults.

Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 5 November election, also courted Latino voters on Tuesday in an interview with Telemundo, touching on creating economic opportunity for Latino men.

Little of Trump’s conversation, such as it was, related to issues directly affecting Latino voters, with whom Trump falsely claimed he was leading in the polls despite significant evidence to the contrary.

His remarks about immigration, for example, were largely limited to baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons.

And, his comments addressed to the many business owners and leaders present were distinctly light on policy, apart from a promise to maintain the generous tax cuts from his first term in office.

“We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country,” he said. “We have a great foundation to build on so we have a lot of companies coming in very fast.”

Trump trails Harris in all battleground states among Latinos, a poll for Voto Latino published Monday and cited by the Hill, found, while the most recent AS/COA poll tracker shows a 56-31 preference for Harris nationally among the 36 million eligible Latino voters.

Harris, in Tuesday’s Telemundo interview, emphasised the economy, saying she would work to bring more funds to community banks to help Latino men secure small business loans. “We need to construct a strong economy that supports the working class,” she said.

“I know that Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said in an interview in English that was translated into Spanish. “For that reason, I’m focused on seeing what we can do to bring more capital to community banks that better understand the community so we can give them that kind of loans.”

Updated

Ahead of the upcoming presidential election, one large US bank is supplementing its global overnight team with a full trading desk in New York to handle the expected greater demand from clients, a source at the bank who is familiar with the situation has told Reuters.

This bank also plans to adjust staffing needs as necessary if a presidential decision is delayed.

Separately, a large retail brokerage is making sure staff are on hand to respond to investor questions around-the-clock and is keeping tabs on social media sites such as Reddit for signs of anything unexpected, a person familiar with the firms’ plans told Reuters.

It has undertaken reviews of its systems to ensure they can cope with any sudden increase in either volatility or trading volume, the person, who requested anonymity to speak about his company’s plans, told the news agency.

Chris Isaacson, chief operating officer at exchange operator Cboe Global Markets, said past volatility events such as the pandemic, the 2020 US election and, recently, the fallout from the yen carry trade, have tested the company’s systems.

“We build our markets to be able to handle at least two times the biggest peaks we’ve ever seen. So, we feel quite good about our resiliency and business continuity leading into the election,” he said. Still, along with 24/7 staff, “we’ll have bolstered staff watching during the key hours here,” he said.

A large US broker dealer is adjusting new hire training schedules and limiting any activities and meetings that take staff away from their phones, a source at the firm told Reuters.

For Joe Hoffman, chief executive officer at Mesirow Currency Management in Chicago, it will be crucial to have access to relationship banking as it can be “really important during times of stress” when liquidity might dry up on the screens.

Brian Hyndman, CEO of Blue Ocean Technologies LLC, whose automated trading system powers overnight trading for Robinhood and dozens of other brokerage clients, said he was prepared for increased trading and volatility, but couldn’t predict in which assets, according to Reuters.

“We’ll probably have more hands on deck than in a typical overnight session to address and resolve technical issues, and more management and support staff,” said Hyndman.

Wall Street ramps up staffing as election nears

Banks, brokerages, investment managers and exchanges are adding staff to handle high trading volumes on and around election day with markets expected to become volatile as results come in, reports Reuters.

Political events can trigger wild gyrations that can force market participants to quickly unwind bets, raising market, liquidity and other risks that could pressure trading systems and market infrastructure.

With Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump neck-and-neck in many polls ahead of the 5 November vote, the prospect of no immediate winner being clear is heightening concerns among investors and traders, reports Reuters.

There is also the risk of a contested election following Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in 2020. Trump has indicated he might not accept the results of this election if he loses.

This election is seen as pivotal as Harris and Trump have markedly different views on policy that could have major implications for the economy, foreign relations, markets and global trade.

“We are preparing here from a market standpoint, for at least a week of uncertainty, of not knowing who that president is,” said Grant Johnsey, regional head of client solutions for Capital Markets, at Northern Trust.

“This just means ensuring we have sufficient coverage to handle more volume and volatility, managing vacation schedules accordingly, and that we are prepared for intraday ups and downs as election news unfolds,” he said.

Market participants are trying to make sure they are not caught off guard by surges in volatility. Recent surprises have included when the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, as well as when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton later that same year.

Updated

Former Trump chief of staff says ex-boss is 'definition of fascist'

Two weeks out from election day, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff has claimed his one-time boss “falls into the general definition of fascist”.

John Kelly, a former Marine general and presidential aide from 2017 to 2019, made the extraordinary intervention on Tuesday in a series of coordinated interviews. Speaking to the New York Times, he said the former Republican president “prefers the dictator approach to government” and is the “only president that has all but rejected what America is all about”. Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, told the Times that Kelly’s accounts were “debunked stories” and that Kelly had “beclowned” himself.

Speaking to the Atlantic, Kelly recounted Trump saying he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Nazi generals showed Adolf Hitler. Trump’s campaign denied the exchange, with an adviser telling CNN:

This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz said the reported comments about Hitler’s generals “makes me sick as hell”. “Folks, the guardrails are gone,” Walz told a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “Trump is descending into this madness.”

Updated

Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.

He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city:

It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”

Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”

He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”

The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.

Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020:

Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”

He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying:

You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

Starmer insists he can have a ‘good relationship’ with Trump despite election ‘interference’ claim

Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.

The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

The letter, which was sent to the US Federal Election Commission, said that these volunteering efforts and reports of contact between Labour and the Harris campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.

A statement on DonaldJTrump.com on Tuesday night claimed that the “far-left” Labour party has “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.

In response Starmer insisted he had a “good relationship” with Trump which would not be jeopardised by the complaint.

The prime minister said that party officials volunteering for Harris ahead of the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time” rather than in their capacity working for Labour.

Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Starmer said:

The Labour party … volunteers, have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.

That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”

Asked if the complaint risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, the UK prime minister said:

No. I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did, and we’re grateful for him for making the time.”

We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president in their elections which are very close now.”

Updated

Harris to hold CNN town hall on Wednesday while Trump headlines rally in Georgia

US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.

Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.

Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.

Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.

Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.

Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

  • Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

  • UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

  • Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

  • Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

  • Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

  • At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

  • Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

  • Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

  • JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

  • Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

  • Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.

Updated

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