Closing summary
This blog is closing soon, thanks for joining us. Here’s a recap of today’s main developments:
Donald Trump announced he would not participate in a second debate with Kamala Harris, saying she has turned down previous opportunities to meet and alleging she lost their Tuesday night face-off. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found Harris the overall winner of the Tuesday evening face-off, and slightly improving her lead nationally.
Republicans blamed the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for Trump’s botched debate performance on Tuesday. The Semafor website quoted an unnamed source close to Trump’s campaign as saying they were “100%” concerned about Loomer’s sway over the Republican nominee.
The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, said a bomb threat that forced the evacuation of the city hall and other buildings on Thursday, had used “hateful language” towards Haitians and other immigrants. Springfield was thrust into the spotlight this week after Donald Trump and other Republicans including JD Vance promoted the false rumour that immigrants in the city are eating people’s pets.
Donald Trump had two counts tossed from his criminal case in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, after the presiding judge decided on Thursday they fell under the supremacy clause in the US constitution that bars state prosecutors from charging federal crimes.
Donald Trump has failed in his latest attempt to lift the limited gag order imposed on him by Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the trial in which the former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments. New York’s appeals court declined Trump’s request today “upon the ground that no substantial constitutional question is directly involved”.
A North Dakota judge struck down its near-total ban on abortions, saying the state constitution protects some access to the procedure, and the law as written is vague, the Associated Press reports. District judge Bruce Romanick’s decision comes in a lawsuit filed by North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic, which has moved to neighboring Minnesota since the ban was signed by Governor Doug Burgum in 2022.
The joint session of Congress scheduled for 6 January 2025 to count and certify electoral votes will be considered a “national special security event” by the homeland security department, all because of what happened last time.
Alberto Gonzales, a Republican who served as attorney general under George W Bush, announced he will vote for Harris. “As the United States approaches a critical election, I can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump – perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation – eyes a return to the White House,” he wrote in a column for Politico.
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The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, has said a bomb threat that led to the evacuation of City Hall and numerous buildings on Thursday “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
“Springfield is a community that needs help,” mayor Rob Rue told the Washington Post. The mayor added that national leaders should provide that help and not “hurt a community like, unfortunately, we have seen over the last couple of days.”
Springfield was thrust into the spotlight this week after Donald Trump and other Republicans including vice presidential candidate JD Vance promoted the false rumour that immigrants in the city are eating people’s pets.
Kamala Harris took the stage in Greensboro, North Carolina, and immediately brought up this week’s debate and Donald Trump’s decision not to take part in another.
We “owe it to the voters” to have another, she said, to big applause from the crowd.
She also talked more about her past as a prosecutor and her plans for new home-owners and small businesses: “From the courtroom to the White House, my client have been the American people,” she said.
“I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first, I know where I came from,” she said. “I’m clear about that.”
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The White House has rebuked Donald Trump for his association with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has been traveling with him this week and who has been identified as a key promoter of the false rumour that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets.
Before Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Loomer made racist comments about Harris, who is of Indian descent, saying that if she won the 5 November election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”.
“It is repugnant, these types of comments, it is un-American to say these types of things, exactly the kind of hateful and divisive rhetoric that we should denounce,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson, said on Thursday, according to Reuters.
“No leader should ever associate with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this kind of racist poison,” Jean-Pierre said.
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At the Tucson rally, Trump also promised to eliminate taxes on overtime pay.
But it is unclear how such a policy would work. It is also worth noting that Project 2025, the platform devised for a second Trump term, seeks to make overtime – also known as time-and-a-half pay – more confusing for workers to navigate and would likely reduce the number of workers eligible for overtime.
From PolitiFact:
The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.
The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
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Robert Reich, the former US labor secretary, responded to Trump’s incendiary claims about immigrants by noting that immigrants make up about a fifth of the country’s essential workforce.
A 2020 report from the bipartisan immigration and criminal justice reform group Fwd.us estimated that one in five essential workers were immigrants, including in the medical, agriculture and food service industries. The group also estimated that “more than two-thirds of all undocumented immigrant workers serve in frontline jobs in essential industries”.
America is prosperous largely BECAUSE of immigrants.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 12, 2024
Nearly 23 million immigrants are considered essential workers — that's 1 in 5 individuals in the total U.S. essential workforce.
They should be lauded for their importance and commitment to our country, not demonized. https://t.co/Fog9ip5ytx
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At his event in Tucson, Donald Trump is repeating many of his rote lines about the US-Mexico border, accusing arrivals at the southern border of “stealing” jobs and falsely accusing immigrants overall of driving up crime rates.
In a city that is not far from the border, Trump doubled down on his racist denigration of immigrants and asylum seekers.
He also repeated misinformation about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “walking off” with geese in the town’s public parks and with residents’ pets. The hoax can be traced back to a Facebook post that has been debunked. Trump’s assertion during the debate that immigrants “are eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” has been widely ridiculed.
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Markwayne Mullin, the US senator from Oklahoma, would not say whether he would accept a peaceful transfer of power if Trump were to lose and every state certified the result.
In an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, Mullin repeated election misinformation and made vague references to “irregularities”.
I asked Sen. Markwayne Mullin if he would vote to certify November's election results once every state has certified them.
— Pamela Brown (@PamelaBrownCNN) September 12, 2024
His response: "It's hard to say." pic.twitter.com/SLHHIfTohR
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Trump speaks in Tucson at first post-debate rally
Donald Trump is now in Tucson, Arizona, for a rally – his first since his debate with Kamala Harris.
Arizona is a key swing state that both candidates will want to secure. Tucson, however, leans heavily Democratic. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff also scheduled a visit to the city today on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign.
The former president, who is widely judged as having fumbled his debate against Harris, began by airing his frustrations on stage.
“Polls clearly show that I won the debate against Comrade Kamala,” Trump said. Early or flash polls after the debate found that, in fact, viewers largely thought that Harris had won the debate. Trump also called moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis “lowlives” for fact-checking him during the debate.
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Donald Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow has released a statement on the ruling.
“President Trump and his legal team in Georgia have prevailed once again. The trial court has decided that counts 15 and 27 in the indictment must be quashed/dismissed,” he said.
Two of the charges brought against Trump by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 elections were dropped.
The dropped charges dealt with filing false documents in federal court. But the judge in the case allowed eight other allegations against the former president to stand.
Correction: A previous version of this post quoted Sadow saying that counts 15 and 17 were dismissed. Sadow corrected the quote and we updated this post to reflect that the counts were actually 15 and 27.
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“It is important that the vice-president continues to define and expose Trump,” Bernie Sanders wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian. “But it may not be enough to secure a victory. Voters are hungry for a candidate that will deliver meaningful, material change to their lives.”
The Vermont senator writes:
I applaud Harris for laying out the fundamentals of her economic vision: she promised to cap the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans at $2,000, address the severe housing crisis we face by building 3m units of affordable housing, eliminate medical debt, and take on corporate price gouging that has made it impossible for working families to afford groceries and other basic necessities.
The American people want change, and that’s what Harris must deliver
These are valuable policies. I believe, however, that her chances of winning improve if she expands that agenda to include popular solutions to the most important economic and political realities facing this country.
The American people want change, and that’s what she must deliver.
Read more:
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Kamala Harris, riding high off Donald Trump’s poor debate performance, has honed in on one line from her opponent:
Kamala Harris: "He said! He said! Concepts of a plan!" pic.twitter.com/pMTCNU1Rf5
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2024
During the debate this week, moderator Linsey Davis asked Trump to detail his new approach to healthcare – which he had repeatedly promised to deliver in his previous two presidential runs.
When Trump equivocated, Davis doubled down: “So just a yes or no,” she said. “You still do not have a plan?”
“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied.
The fumble was especially unfortunate given that surrogates and advisers talked up the president’s dedication to talk policy.
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Harris says 'we owe it to the voters to have another' debate with Trump
Kamala Harris just took the stage at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she continued to push Donald Trump to debate again, despite his announcement that he would not do so.
“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate, And I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate, because this election and what is at stake could not be more important,” the vice-president said to applause.
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Georgia judge dismisses some charges against Trump in election meddling case
An Atlanta-area judge dismissed two of the charges brought against Donald Trump by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 elections, but allowed the rest of the case to proceed, Reuters reports.
The charges dismissed by judge Scott McAfee deal with filing false documents in federal court. McAfee allowed eight other allegations against the former president to stand.
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Trump says he will not debate Harris again
Donald Trump announced he will not participate in a second debate with Kamala Harris, saying she has turned down previous opportunities to meet and alleging she lost their Tuesday night face-off.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate,” the former president wrote on Truth Social.
Trump restated his much-repeated claim that Harris and Joe Biden have “destroyed our Country”, then said:
Everyone knows this, and all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe - It was discussed in great detail during the First Debate with Joe, and the Second Debate with Comrade Harris. She was a no-show at the Fox Debate, and refused to do NBC & CBS. KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!
The Harris campaign has previously said she would be willing to debate Trump again sometime in October. Trump’s running mate JD Vance remains scheduled to debate Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on 1 October in New York.
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Trump campaign says support is increasing in swing states following debate
Donald Trump’s pollsters say support for the former president has increased in swing states since his debate against Kamala Harris.
In a memo, Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis write that the candidates were tied before the debate, but after surveying 1,893 likely voters in seven swing states, Trump now leads Harris 48% to 46% when third-party candidates are included, and 50% to 47% in a head-to-head matchup.
“Clearly, target state voters were not impressed by Kamala Harris’ empty platitudes and while the media would have people believe she is cruising to victory, this couldn’t be farther from the truth,” the pollsters write.
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A bomb threat prompted the evacuation and closure of the city hall in Springfield, Ohio, which has been thrust into national focus after Donald Trump and Republicans pushed false and unsubstantiated claims of Haitian immigrants in the city eating pets and local wildlife.
The bomb threat “was issued to multiple facilities throughout Springfield”, the city said.
We ask the community to avoid the area surrounding City Hall vicinity while the investigation is ongoing and to report any suspicious activity to the Springfield Police Division.
The city’s mayor, Rob Rue, indicated that the threat included complaints about Haitian immigrants in the city, according to NBC News.
Local police and officials have said there were no credible reports of Haitian immigrants stealing pets to eat them.
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Republicans are blaming the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for this week’s botched debate performance by Donald Trump, which included the former president repeating a bizarre and unfounded claim that pet cats and dogs were being eaten by Haitian immigrants.
Loomer flew with Trump on his private plane to Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia and has been identified as a key promoter of the pets rumour, which has been dismissed as false by authorities in Springfield, Ohio, where the practice was alleged to have been taking place.
The Semafor website quoted an unnamed source close to Trump’s campaign as saying they were “100%” concerned about Loomer’s sway over the Republican nominee. “Regardless of any guardrails the Trump campaign has put on her, I don’t think it’s working,” the source said.
Trump this year proposed giving Loomer an official role on his campaign, but the idea was resisted by staffers. Loomer, who styles herself as an “investigative journalist”, last year promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that 9/11 was an “inside job”. On Wednesday she posted an unfounded allegation that Harris had worn earphones disguised as earrings during the debate.
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Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris following the debate on Tuesday drove hundreds of thousands of people to voter-registration resources, according to multiple reports.
Swift’s Instagram post included a link to Vote.gov, the federal government’s voting registration site. According to the General Services Administration:
There were a total of 405,999 visitors referred to vote.gov from the custom URL created and shared by Ms Swift during the 24 hour period the post was live.
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The day so far
It’s back to the campaign trail for both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, two days after their first and perhaps only debate. The vice-president has two events planned for this afternoon in North Carolina, while Trump will be in Arizona. Speaking of the debate, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Harris the overall winner of the Tuesday evening face-off, and slightly improving her lead nationally. In the legal arena, a New York appeals court just rejected another attempt by Trump to get the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case lifted.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
North Dakota’s strict ban on abortion was tossed out by a judge who said it ran afoul of the state constitution and was vague.
The joint session of Congress scheduled for 6 January 2025 to count and certify electoral votes will be considered a “national special security event” by the homeland security department, all because of what happened last time.
Alberto Gonzales, a Republican who served as attorney general under George W Bush, announced he will vote for Harris.
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Polls finds Harris victorious in debate, building lead over Trump nationally
Reuters is out with one of the first polls since Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated on Tuesday evening, and found voters view the vice-president as the winner in the debate, where Trump came off as the less sharp candidate.
Harris is also building her lead among registered voters nationally to 47% over Trump’s 42%, a slight jump from previous weeks, according to the survey, which was conducted with Ipsos. Here’s more about it:
The two-day poll showed Harris with a five percentage point lead among registered voters, just above the four-point advantage she had over Trump in an Aug 21-28 Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Among voters who said they had heard at least something about Tuesday’s debate, 53% said Harris won and 24% said Trump won. Some 52% of respondents said that Trump stumbled and didn’t appear sharp, while 21% said that of Harris.
Harris, 59, put Trump, 78, on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office and his myriad legal woes.
The poll surveyed 1,690 US adults nationwide, including 1,405 registered voters. It had a margin of error of around three percentage points for registered voters.
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Joe Biden traveled to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, yesterday on somber business: laying a wreath at the site where Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, crashed.
He then traveled to the local fire station, where the mood lightened considerably when the 81-year-old president met a similarly mature resident, who was wearing a Trump cap.
Biden offered the man, whose name reporters did not catch, a hat with the presidential seal on it, prompting the old-timer to ask the president for an autograph.
“You remember your name?” he asked the president. “I don’t remember my name, I’m slow,” Biden replied. “You’re an old fart!” the resident told him. “Yeah, I know, man, I’m an old guy,” the president gamely replied.
After more banter, the pair traded hats, with Biden putting a red Trump cap over one he was already wearing, before advising the room not to eat dogs or cats (cuisine that is not so bad, the elderly resident advised him).
Watch the exchange here:
A White House spokesperson later said Biden had put on the hat in a show of “bipartisan unity”:
At the Shanksville Fire Station, @POTUS spoke about the country's bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that.
— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) September 11, 2024
As a gesture, he gave a hat to a Trump supporter who then said that in the same spirit, POTUS should put on his Trump cap. He briefly wore it. https://t.co/7VKZnkVMY7
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Judge strikes down North Dakota's abortion ban
A North Dakota judge struck down its near-total ban on abortions, saying the state constitution protects some access to the procedure, and the law as written is vague, the Associated Press reports.
District judge Bruce Romanick’s decision comes in a lawsuit filed by North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic, which has moved to neighboring Minnesota since the ban was signed by Governor Doug Burgum in 2022. Burgum made a failed run for the Republican presidential nomination this year, and has since become a top surrogate to Donald Trump.
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Appeals court rejects Trump's attempt to lift gag order in hush-money case
Donald Trump has failed in his latest attempt to lift the limited gag order imposed on him by Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the trial in which the former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments.
New York’s appeals court declined Trump’s request today “upon the ground that no substantial constitutional question is directly involved”.
Trump has repeatedly complained about the gag order, which prevents him from making public statements about the case’s prosecutors, court staff and their families.
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The top House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, said the homeland security department’s designation of the upcoming January 6 joint session of Congress as a “national special security event” is “necessary”.
He cited Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in his 2020 election loss, and the possibility he may make the same allegations if he loses in November:
.@RepJeffries on @DHSgov designating January 6th Election Certification as a National Special Security Event: "Yes. I think evaluating the facts...that this designation by national security professionals seems to have been necessary." pic.twitter.com/4HY9rg7HHc
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 12, 2024
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Homeland security gives Congress top protection for upcoming 6 January 2025 joint session
The Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that the joint session of Congress scheduled for 6 January 2025 to certify the winner of the November election will be given high-level protection as a “national special security event”.
The January event be the first gathering of senators and House representatives to count electoral votes since Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol on the same day in 2021.
The designation puts the Secret Service in charge of security for the day and allows “significant resources from the federal government, as well as from state and local partners”, to be deployed, the homeland security department said.
“National special security events are events of the highest national significance,” the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s dignitary protective division, Eric Ranaghan, said in a statement.
“The US Secret Service, in collaboration with our federal, state and local partners, are committed to developing and implementing a comprehensive and integrated security plan to ensure the safety and security of this event and its participants.”
Capitol police officers battled Trump’s supporters throughout the building in 2021, and had this to say about the designation:
This national special security event (NSSE) designation will help us build on the plans that we have already put into place to protect the members of Congress and the constitutional process on January 6. Our department has made more than 100 improvements during the last few years to prepare for anything. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners, as we do during other NSSEs such as the State of the Union, to ensure the legislative process goes smoothly.
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Perhaps the most important viewers of Tuesday’s evening’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were voters living in the swing states expected to decide the election.
The Guardian’s Rachel Obordo and Nyima Jobe heard from several about who they thought came out on top. Here’s what they had to say:
The occupant of the White House is not all that voters will decide in the November election.
Thirty-four Senate elections will be held in states nationwide, which will determine if Democrats hold on to their 51-seat majority in the chamber. It has long been viewed as a difficult task for the party, since they are believed to have slim chances of picking up a seat, and are almost certain to lose one thanks to Democrat Joe Manchin’s retirement in deep-red West Virginia.
The Cook Political Report today forecast that the Senate is likely to flip to GOP control, thanks to polling that shows Republican Tim Sheehy overtaking Jon Tester, the Democrat running for a fourth term in red state Montana:
But today we are making a major shift – moving the Montana Senate race from Toss Up to Lean Republican. This means that Republicans are now an even heavier favorite to win back control of the Senate, regardless of the result at the top of the ticket.
Montana Sen Jon Tester has been a political unicorn for nearly two decades, but in a presidential year with an even more polarized electorate, he is now the underdog heading into the final stretch of the race to his Republican opponent, former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
In Ohio, Sen Sherrod Brown has consistently led in public polling over his GOP challenger, Bernie Moreno, but it’s within the margin of error. While Sheehy appears to have consolidated enough Republican and Trump voters behind him – an easier lift given the state’s far deeper red hue – there is still work for Moreno to do in the final weeks. And the key difference may be that Sheehy has been doing work to hone his positive image with voters while Moreno has left many attacks on his character and business record unanswered.
A loss in only Montana would give Republicans an outright majority of 51 seats, and their ranks could possibly climb as high as 54. The range of possible pickups is now between one and four for Republicans. At this point, a GOP gain of two to three seats is the likeliest scenario, but this could change in the coming weeks once polls tighten and candidates solidify their bases and woo undecided voters.
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The vice-president is also planning to sit for media interviews with local news outlets across the battleground states, the memo said. Next week she will participate in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
Harris was unable to attend the group’s convention in July, which took place just days after she became the Democratic nominee. Trump participated, however, and shocked the room of NABJ reporters by attacking Harris’s biracial identity and insulting the hosts.
During the debate on Tuesday, Trump was asked about his comments, in which he suggested Harris had “turned Black”. Trump replied that he didn’t care how Harris identified, then repeated his claim that the vice-president, the daughter of a Jamaican economist who graduated from one of the nation’s most prestigious Black colleges, hadn’t identified as Black until recently.
Harris, who is Black and south Asian, did not engage with Trump’s false assertions about her identity. Instead she called it a “tragedy” that he sought to use “race to divide the American people”.
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Harris sets 'aggressive' campaign schedule after debate
The Harris campaign is embarking on an “aggressive” new phase, building off of the vice-president’s commanding performance in Tuesday night’s debate against Donald Trump.
According to a memo released this morning, the campaign is launching a “New Way Forward” tour that begins on Thursday with two stops in North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state where Harris has shown strength. On Friday, Harris will return to Pennsylvania for events in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre.
The stepped-up battleground state travel will be paired with a series of new TV and digital advertisements featuring moments from the debate, the first of which, Leadership, aired on Wednesday night.
It features moments from the debate, including the vice-president saying Americans are seeing “two very different visions for the country: one that is focused on the future, one that is focused on the past”. The ad then cuts to Trump saying: “We’re a failing nation. A nation that is dying. We’re a nation that’s in serious decline.”
The campaign, newly energized after Harris’s performance, said it spent hours on Wednesday reviewing footage of the debate, culling what it believes are revealing exchanges that show Trump on the defensive and Harris’s offering a vision for the future.
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Kamala Harris is spending today in North Carolina, where she’ll hold campaign events in Charlotte and Greensboro.
The first appearance begins at 3.40pm ET, and the second at 5.40pm.
Joe Biden is at the White House, and will hold an event to mark the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act at 5.45pm. The press briefing is scheduled for 2.30pm.
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Tens of millions of Americans watched Tuesday evening’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – and so, too, did European diplomats looking for an idea of which direction the country might take under whoever wins, the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour reports:
The TV debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was as keenly watched by European diplomats and politicians as by US voters, eager to see who may be next in the White House and – crucially – the direction that a vital ally may next take.
One diplomat said they empathised when Harris adopted a series of poses that ranged from pity, bemusement and genuine curiosity about what craziness would emerge from Trump’s mouth next as she listened to his conspiracy-laden theories. However, the diplomat said they still did not underestimate Trump and the hold he had over one part of a divided America, adding: “Never write him off.”
Another European observer judged Harris to have been the victor in the debate. “Objectively on any count she won. She showed her teeth, broke with [Joe] Biden and showed she is a leader, and that is something Americans love,” they said.
In Germany, Michael Roth, the Social Democratic party chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee, said Harris had succeeded in making Trump seem “like an ageing incumbent, old, angry and confused”, despite having been in government herself for much of the past four years. “Harris has dismantled Trump on the open stage and positioned herself as a candidate of change. She deliberately provoked Trump, and he fell into the trap,” Roth said.
Conservative billionaire Leonard Leo announces push to 'crush liberal dominance' in US
In an interview with the Financial Times, Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who was involved in the effort to build the current rightwing supermajority on the supreme court, says he will spend $1b to fight liberal cultural influence in the United States.
“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the FT in a rare interview.
“Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.”
In a separate letter obtained by Axios, Leo writes that his 85 Fund will review its support of rightwing groups, saying it wants to prioritize efforts to “weaponize the conservative vision”.
“The 85 Fund intends to gap-fill by placing much, much greater emphasis on projects and leaders that operationalize or weaponize ideas and policies, much in the same way the Left has,” Leo wrote.
Senate Democrats have attempted to get Leo to testify about his activities, but he has so far frustrated them:
Republican former attorney general Gonzales says he will vote for Harris
Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general under Republican president George W Bush, says he will vote for Kamala Harris.
Gonzales made the announcement with a column in Politico, where he wrote:
As the United States approaches a critical election, I can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump – perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation – eyes a return to the White House. For that reason, though I’m a Republican, I’ve decided to support Kamala Harris for president.
His reasons center less on support for Harris’s policies than disgust with Donald Trump’s actions, including his involvement in January 6:
Trump failed to do his duty and exercise his presidential power to protect members of Congress, law enforcement and the Capitol from the attacks that day. He failed to deploy executive branch personnel to save lives and property and preserve democracy. He just watched on television and chose not to do anything because that would have been contrary to his interests. Trump still describes that day as beautiful. And as for those subsequently convicted of committing crimes, he describes them as hostages.
His felony convictions:
Any discussion about fidelity to the rule of law has to include Trump’s 34 state felony convictions, his state civil financial judgment of libel based on sexual abuse, as well as the pending federal elections interference case, not to mention the recently dismissed federal documents case that Special Counsel Jack Smith is continuing to pursue. Standing alone, these charges, convictions and judgments show that Trump is someone who fails to act, time and time again, in accordance with the rule of law.
And the fact that so many of the former president’s senior officials have turned against him:
To be fair, I have spoken with Trump only once. I do not really know him. It is telling, however, that several senior officials who worked for him in the White House now refuse to support him, including his vice president, chief of staff, defense secretary and national security adviser. Their unwillingness to endorse their former boss is an indictment of his character at a level equal to his many, many criminal indictments.
Gonzales, interestingly, also says he thinks the supreme court should adopt “a tougher ethics code of disclosure”.
Here’s the latest on the ongoing controversy over the justices’ ethics:
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Axios has obtained a letter from the White House News Photographers Association to Kamala Harris’s top aides, complaining about a lack of access to the vice-president as she campaigns for the White House:
New: In an Aug. 28 letter obtained by Axios, the WH News Photographers Association said Harris' team was engaging in an "unprecedented reduction in access.”
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) September 12, 2024
The VP’s team didn’t respond until last night after we asked about the letter
W/ @sarafischer https://t.co/OOch8LDqWX pic.twitter.com/qkl5MaStBr
Jessica Koscielniak, the president of the WHNPA, wrote to Harris' top aides last month protesting that "the four independent news photographer seats have been downgraded to one."
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) September 12, 2024
She proposed either adding a "chaser plane" for additional media or the WHCA reorganizing who gets a… pic.twitter.com/OZL99bKHwy
The complaints are reminiscent of those made by reporters at the Democratic national convention in Chicago last month, where there were fewer accommodations for the press in the venue than at July’s Republican national convention.
The first ballots of the presidential race were mailed to voters yesterday in Alabama, the Associated Press reports.
North Carolina was expected to be the first state to mail out its ballots, but Robert F Kennedy Jr’s successful court challenge to remove his name caused a delay.
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Young women are more liberal than they have been in decades, the Associated Press reported.
Over the past few years, about 4 in 10 young women between the ages of 18 and 29 have described their political views as liberal, compared with two decades ago when about 3 in 10 identified that way, according to a Gallup analysis of polling data.
The share of young women who hold liberal views on the environment, abortion, race relations and gun laws has also jumped by double digits, Gallup found.
X’s AI chatbot spread voter misinformation – and election officials fought back
Soon after Joe Biden announced he was ending his bid for re-election, misinformation started spreading online about whether a new candidate could take the president’s place.
Screenshots that claimed a new candidate could not be added to ballots in nine states moved quickly around Twitter, now X, racking up millions of views. The Minnesota secretary of state’s office began getting requests for fact-checks of these posts, which were flat-out wrong – ballot deadlines had not passed, giving Kamala Harris plenty of time to have her name added to ballots.
The source of the misinformation: Twitter’s chatbot, Grok. When users asked the artificial intelligence tool whether a new candidate still had time to be added to ballots, Grok gave the incorrect answer.
Finding the source – and working to correct it – served as a test case of how election officials and artificial intelligence companies will interact during the 2024 presidential election in the US amid fears that AI could mislead or distract voters. And it showed the role Grok, specifically, could play in the election, as a chatbot with fewer guardrails to prevent the generating of more inflammatory content.
Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests
Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.
Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”
He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”
McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.
Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but aides privately express doubts
Donald Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory in the debate against Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, but at least some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Will tonight benefit us? No, it will not,” one Trump aide said.
The sentiment summed up the predicament for the Trump campaign that with 55 days until the election, Trump is still casting around for a moment that could allow his attack lines against Harris to break through and overwrite her gains in key battleground state polls.
And it was an acknowledgment that despite their hopes of getting Happy Trump on stage, they got Angry Trump, who seemingly could not shake his fury at being taunted over his supporters leaving his rallies early and being repeatedly fact-checked by the moderators.
Harris and Trump to campaign in battleground states after debate
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are focusing on swing states today.
Harris is scheduled to hold rallies in North Carolina – in Charlotte and Greensboro, the Associated Press reported.
Trump is heading west to Tucson, Arizona.
Yesterday, the candidates marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
At a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, close to where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, Trump posed for photos with children who wore campaign shirts. Joe Biden and Harris visited the same fire station earlier in the day.
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Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown
Hello and welcome back to our rolling US political coverage.
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 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.
There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.
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