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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Cecilia Nowell (now), Joanna Walters and Léonie Chao-Fong (earlier)

Former Republican House speaker urges Trump to ‘stop questioning’ size of Harris’s crowds – as it happened

Crowd at Kamala Harris’s Detroit airport rally.
Crowd at Kamala Harris’s Detroit airport rally. Photograph: Rena Laverty/UPI/REX/Shutterstock

US politics recap

Here’s a look at where things stand:

  • Donald Trump will sit down with Elon Musk for an interview tonight, nearly a month after the tech billionaire and owner of X officially endorsed the Republican presidential candidate. Trump shared a campaign video on X, his first post on the social media platform in nearly a year, just hours before his scheduled interview with Musk. Trump appears to be paying X to promote the Musk interview.

  • In an open letter, the EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Elon Musk that he must abide by European hate speech laws in his interview with Trump this evening. Musk responded with characteristic maturity and the Trump campaign told the EU regulators to “mind their own business”.

  • Time magazine has put Kamala Harris on the cover of its latest issue, with the headline “Her Moment”. Harris has “pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history” after smashing fundraising records, dominating TikTok and filling up stadiums in the past month, Charlotte Alter writes in the lead story.

  • Joe Biden will speak at the Democratic national convention next week, the White House has confirmed. The Democratic National Committee has also announced its first ad campaign since Harris selected Walz as her running mate.

  • Donald Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker, said Trump should stop questioning the size of Harris’s crowds and instead focus on her as a candidate.

  • More Americans trust Kamala Harris with the US economy than they do Donald Trump, according to a new poll that suggests the former president losing the advantage he had over Joe Biden. The poll found that 42% of voters trust Harris on economic issues – one percentage point ahead of Trump.

  • Donald Trump plans to sue the US justice department for $100m for executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate to retrieve classified government documents. The former president’s lawyers intend to sue the department for its conduct during the FBI’s raid on 8 August 2022, amid the federal investigation into his alleged retention of classified records.

  • Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025 is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials. Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for Trump in some capacity.

The Guardian is launching a separate liveblog for tonight’s interview with Elon Musk and Trump. Follow along here:

A Trump campaign spokesman told EU regulators to “mind their own business” in response to a letter urging Elon Musk to abide by hate speech and disinformation regulations in his interview with Trump scheduled for this evening.

“Only in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ America can an un-Democratic foreign organization feel emboldened enough to tell this country what to do,” Steven Cheung wrote on X. “They know that a President Trump victory means America will no longer be ripped off because he will smartly utilize tariffs and renegotiated trade deals that puts America First. Let us be very clear: the European Union is an enemy of free speech and has no authority of any kind to dictate how we campaign.”

The Trump campaigned shared the same statement with supporters by email this afternoon.

The Digital Services Act, which the EU adopted in 2022, requires large social networks, like X, to aggressively police disinformation and hate speech, or face fines of up to 6% of its global turnover.

Updated

In an open letter, EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Elon Musk today that Musk must abide by European hate speech laws in his interview with Trump this evening.

Because the interview will be available to EU users, Breton said, Musk must comply with regulations under the Digital Services Act to stop the “amplification of harmful content”.

“DSA obligations apply without exceptions or discrimination to the moderation of the whole user community and content of X (including yourself as a user with over 190 million followers) which is accessible to EU users and should be fulfilled in line with the risk-based approach of the DSA, which requires greater due diligence in case of a foreseeable increase of the risk profile,” Breton wrote.

In response, Musk shared a meme that was as mature as only Musk can be:

Musk has recently faced pushback from EU regulators, who ruled last month that X breached the DSA in its use of blue checkmarks. In response, Musk threatened to sue.

Read more about it here:

Updated

A pro-Trump Super Pac will fund $100m in TV ads, starting next week as the Democratic national convention kicks off. The Maga, Inc Super Pac is planning to air commercials calling Harris a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House”, the organization’s top strategists, David Lee and Chris Grant, write in the memo, which Politico first reported. The ads will air in seven Rust belt and Sun belt states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

The memo also announced that the leader of Maga, Inc, Taylor Budowich, is leaving the Super Pac to join the Trump campaign.

The news comes as conservative groups try to ramp up funding for Trump, following Harris’s recent record-setting fundraising. Last month, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that he had founded the America Pac to raise additional funds for Trump.

Read more here:

Updated

Here are some campaign images from the weekend that you might not have seen. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were in the swing state of Nevada on Saturday.

What was that about crowds?

Donald Trump campaigned in Montana on Friday night.

Updated

The Pentagon said yesterday that defense secretary Lloyd Austin had ordered the deployment of a guided missile submarine to the Middle East and for the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to accelerate its deployment to the region.

But a US official told Reuters the Lincoln carrier strike group was currently close to the South China Sea and would likely take more than a week to reach the Middle East.

Oil prices jumped by more than 3% on Monday, rising for a fifth consecutive session on expectations of a widening Middle Eastern conflict that could tighten global crude supplies.

Israeli forces pressed on with operations near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis today amid an international push for a deal to halt fighting in Gaza and prevent a slide into a wider regional conflict with Iran and its proxies.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reports, British prime minister Keir Starmer held a call with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian today, asking him to refrain from attacking Israel and saying that war was not in anyone’s interest, the prime minister’s office said. Starmer called on Iran to stop its “destabilizing actions”.

Updated

US prepares for attacks by Iran in Middle East

The US has prepared for what could be significant attacks by Iran or its proxies in the Middle East as soon as this week, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said today.

Kirby said the US had increased its regional force posture and shared Israel’s concerns about a possible Iranian-backed attack after Iran and Hamas accused Israel of carrying out the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran last month, Reuters reports.

We have to be prepared for what could be a significant set of attacks,” he said.

Israel has been braced for a major attack since last month when a missile killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Israel responded by killing a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

A day after that operation, Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, drawing Iranian vows of retaliation against Israel.

We obviously don’t want to see Israel have to defend itself against another onslaught, like they did in April. But, if that’s what comes at them, we will continue to help them defend themselves,” Kirby said.

You can follow all of the Guardian’s coverage of the region here and here.

Updated

Biden to speak at Democratic national convention, White House confirms

Joe Biden will speak at the Democratic national convention next week, the White House has confirmed.

Biden will use his remarks at the convention to focus on the issues he “cares about”, the White House’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN.

It’s an event that he views as very important. It’s an opportunity to talk about the issues that he cares about. It’s an opportunity to talk about unity.

Updated

Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks on the opening night of the Democratic national convention next Monday alongside the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, according to a report.

Former president Barack Obama is down to speak on Tuesday, and former president Bill Clinton is scheduled for Wednesday, NBC is reporting, citing sources. One of the sources told the outlet that the schedule was still tentative.

Kamala Harris is to deliver an acceptance speech on Thursday, and her running mate, Tim Walz, is to speak Wednesday, as is customary.

Trump appears to be paying X to promote Musk interview

Donald Trump appeared to be paying X to promote his interview with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, scheduled for tonight 8pm ET, the New York Times reported.

The Times said:

The hashtag #TrumpOnX landed at the top of the platform’s “Trending” section, with a disclaimer that it was promoted by Donald J. Trump — a tag that typically marks paid ad campaigns on the social media site.

Updated

As we reported earlier, the former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy said Donald Trump should stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies and instead focus on her as a candidate.

Here’s the clip from McCarthy’s interview on Fox News, where he urged Trump to “start questioning [Harris’s] positions”, highlighting several of the Democratic presidential candidate’s policy positions that have shifted over the years.

“This is a perfect person to run against,” McCarthy said.

You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She is the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you got a short time frame to do it. So don’t sit back, get out there and start making the case and use her own words to do it.

Debbie Dingell, the Democratic congresswoman for Michigan, has dismissed Donald Trump’s false claims that crowds at Kamala Harris’s campaign in her state were generated by artificial intelligence.

“Sorry, Donald Trump, you’re wrong again,” Dingell, who attended the Michigan rally and spoke before Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, went on, told MSNBC. She added:

I was really there. And I haven’t seen that large a crowd in a long time, and it was great to feel the energy, the enthusiasm.

Donald Trump, who on Monday posted to X for the first time in nearly a year, has followed up with a subsequent post about the economy and immigration.

“Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Trump wrote on X.

Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline. Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again. Make America SAFE again. Make America GREAT Again!

Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025 is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.

The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.

A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.

Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for Donald Trump in some capacity.

The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

Updated

McCarthy urges Trump to 'stop questioning' size of Harris’s crowds

Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker, said Donald Trump should stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies and instead focus on her as a candidate.

As we reported earlier, Trump has falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Trump shared a photo from a conspiracy theorist’s post to his millions of followers on Truth Social, claiming that a real image of a Harris event in Detroit was a “fake image”.

“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said in an interview on Fox News today.

Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position, when it comes to: What did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?

Trump returns to X ahead of Musk interview

Donald Trump has shared a campaign video on X, his first post on the social media platform in nearly a year, just hours before his scheduled interview with X’s owner, Elon Musk.

Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, in August 2023 with a post showing his mugshot from his booking at Fulton county jail in Georgia.

He was reinstated to X after the platform’s previous owners banned him following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress.

Updated

Donald Trump will hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, his campaign has announced.

In a press release, the Trump campaign said the Republican presidential nominee is “devastated to see Pennsylvanians and all American suffer because of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and radical Democrats”.

Updated

‘Her Moment’: Harris makes Time magazine cover

Time magazine has put Kamala Harris on the cover of its latest issue, with the headline “Her Moment”.

Harris has “pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history” after smashing fundraising records, dominating TikTok and filling up stadiums in the past month, Charlotte Alter writes in the lead story.

A contest that revolved around the cognitive decline of a geriatric President has been transformed: Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable.

The House’s bipartisan taskforce investigating the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month made its first official acts today with a series of requests for documents and briefings from key agencies involved with and investigating the shooting.

The chair of the taskforce, Republican Pennsylvania congressman Mike Kelly and ranking member, Democrat congressman for Colorado Jason Crow, sent a letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and FBI director Christopher Wray, and another to the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Secret Service acting director Ronald Rowe Jr, Punchbowl News reported.

The panel is requesting a staff briefing from both the Justice and Homeland Security departments no later than 16 August “to discuss the Task Force’s priorities with respect to documents and information moving forward,” it said.

The departments and agencies should provide “all documents and information that have been produced to date” in response to other House committees and members so far, the letters said.

Trump falsely accuses Harris of faking a crowd with AI

Donald Trump falsely accused Democratic nominee Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Trump shared a photo from a conspiracy theorist’s post to his millions of followers on Truth Social, claiming that a real image of a Harris event in Detroit was a “fake image”.

“There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump posted.

Disinformation experts have long warned about generative artificial intelligence’s threat to the information ecosystem, both in terms of its ability to create falsified media and for people to deny reality by claiming genuine images, video or audio is actually AI.

Trump’s post marks the highest-profile incident yet where someone has claimed a real event is AI, reflecting what researchers have called the “liar’s dividend”. That concept posits an increase in manipulated media such as deepfakes leads to general skepticism around what content is real, allowing for people like politicians to more plausibly claim authentic media is falsified.

“Entering the ‘Nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation expert and former researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, in a post on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality”.

Updated

Kamala Harris has also laid into Donald Trump over immigration, accusing him of failing to “walk the walk” on one of his signature issues.

While she and Joe Biden supported a bipartisan border deal that would have in effect shut down the border, she accused Trump of derailing the bill for purely political reasons.

Harris said at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday:

Earlier this year, we had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades. But Donald Trump tanked the bill because he thought it would help him win an election. Well, when I am president, I will sign that bill into law.

She underlines that message in a border-focused ad that highlights her promise to hire “thousands more border agents” and “crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking”.

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” it says.

This is a far different posture than Harris adopted during her 2019 presidential campaign, when she embraced progressive ideas about border policies, including that crossing the US border should be a civil offense, not a criminal one. Republicans are running ads reminding voters of her past positions, with JD Vance calling her a “flip-flopper” on the border.

But as migration at the US-Mexico border reached record-levels under the Biden administration, many Democrats, including Harris have backed away from the more progressive stance. Her campaign said recently that Harris believes unauthorized crossings are “illegal”.

Whether Harris can flip the script without alienating immigration advocates and activists remains to be seen. Advocates say they will be watching to see if she pairs border security with promises to expand pathways to citizenship for the millions of immigrants living in the US without documentation. In Arizona, Harris said she was committed to pursuing “comprehensive immigration reform”.

But Congress has failed to address the US immigration system for decades, placing pressure on presidents to act unilaterally as Biden did recently when he in effect sealed the border to asylum claims.

Updated

Immigration remains top concern for voters

Immigration remains a top concern for voters – and one of Kamala Harris’s biggest potential vulnerabilities.

Republicans believe this to be true, incorrectly casting her as the Biden administration’s “border czar”, even though her assignment was to deal with the root causes of migration stemming from countries thousands of miles south of the US-Mexico border.

Three weeks into her presidential campaign, Harris is attempting to reclaim the narrative. At a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Friday, Harris went on the offensive and delivered her first major pitch to border-state voters.

She emphasized her record as attorney general of the border state of California, telling supporters that she went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human smugglers.

“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said. “So I know what I’m talking about.”

Updated

When Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as veep for the Democratic presidential ticket, advocates for healthcare reform felt a jolt of electricity.

Here, they saw a man who proclaimed healthcare a “basic human right”, reformed medical debt collections, and who laid the groundwork for expanded government insurance and denied corporate health insurers contracts with Medicaid, a state-run health insurance program for the poor. Walz even once joined Harris at an abortion clinic in support of abortion rights.

It was a sense of possibility some had not felt since the Obama era, and hard for some to contain their excitement.

Read the full story here: Tim Walz pick excites hopes of taking US healthcare beyond Obamacare era

The Democratic National Committee has announced its first ad campaign since Kamala Harris selected Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate.

The DNC will run more than 80 billboards in English and Spanish in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, it said.

The billboards will show Harris and Walz with the words “fighting for you”, and claim that Donald Trump and JD Vance are “out for themselves”.

Two Democratic lawmakers with experience on intelligence and security committees have called for information about the latest breach to be released publicly.

The California Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell, posted on social media that he was seeking a briefing on the breach, and that while he considered Donald Trump “the most despicable person ever to seek office” – someone who had also called for hacking in the past – “that doesn’t mean America ever tolerates foreign interference”.

Adam Schiff, the Democrat of California, urged Department of Homeland Security officials to declassify information on the foreign nature of the hack. Schiff said the US intelligence community “moved much too slow to properly identity the hacking and dumping scheme carried out by Russia” in 2016 and “should act quickly here”. He also said that in that year:

The Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, took advantage of it and then sought to deny it, much to the detriment of the country.

Updated

The New York Times has confirmed it received the same or similar trove of Donald Trump presidential campaign documents as other media outlets did, after Microsoft confirmed that a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.

For the third US election in a row, hacked campaign information by a foreign power is now likely to feature as potential disruption. The Trump campaign has said its email systems were breached by hackers working for Iran.

Politico reported getting emails from someone who identified themselves only as “Robert” and sent internal campaign communications and a 271-page-long research dossier on Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, that was part of his vetting process. The news organisation said the Vance profile was “based on publicly available information”.

Updated

Tim Walz to hold first solo campaign event on Tuesday

Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, will hold his first solo campaign event in Los Angeles on Tuesday where he will deliver remarks to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 2024 convention.

Later that day, Walz will deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport Beach, California, the campaign said.

On Wednesday, he will speak at a campaign reception in Denver and then later that day, in Boston.

On Thursday, he will speak at campaign reception in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.

Updated

Trump to sue DoJ for $100m over Mar-a-Lago raid – report

Donald Trump plans to sue the US justice department for $100m for executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate to retrieve classified government documents, according to a report.

The former president’s lawyers intend to sue the department for its conduct during the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022, amid the federal investigation into his alleged retention of classified records, Fox News reported on Monday.

Trump’s legal team will argue that the DoJ was engaged in a “clear intent to engage in political persecution” when it searched his property, the report says. It quotes Trump attorney Daniel Epstein as saying:

What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself – he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law and believe that you should hold the government accountable when it wrongs you.

When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.

Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.

The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.

Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracy theories.

Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.

Read the full story here: Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

Elon Musk to interview Trump on X

Donald Trump will sit down with Elon Musk for an interview tonight, nearly a month after the tech billionaire and owner of X officially endorsed the Republican presidential candidate.

Trump will participate in the interview on X, scheduled for 8pm ET on Monday, from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida while Musk will be in Austin, Texas.

According to Musk, the interview will be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!”

Following Musk’s takeover of X, formerly Twitter, he restored Trump’s account, which was suspended by the platform’s former owners following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress by his supporters.

The Financial Times/the University of Michigan poll, which found that voters felt more positive about Kamala Harris’s handling of the US economy than Joe Biden says “as much about how badly Biden was doing as it does about how well Harris is doing”, Erik Gordon, a professor at the university, told the paper.

The poll is good news for previously-anxious Democrats, but their worries aren’t over because voters still see themselves better off with [Donald] Trump as president, and most voters think of their interests first and grand policy questions second.

Harris trusted more than Trump on US economy, poll finds

Good morning US politics readers. More Americans trust Kamala Harris with the US economy than they do Donald Trump, according to a new poll that suggests the former president losing the advantage he had over Joe Biden.

The poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that 42% of voters trust Harris on economic issues – one percentage point ahead of Trump.

The survey “marks a sharp change in voter sentiment following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the White House race” last month, the Financial Times reported. While Trump’s numbers were unchanged from last month’s poll results, Harris’s standing was a seven percentage point improvement compared with Biden’s numbers in July.

But three weeks into her presidential campaign, Harris has yet to unveil her economic policy platform, and Democrats are warning the Democratic presidential candidate and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, that they must solidify their economic message before Republicans bring it back to the forefront of the campaign. On Saturday, Harris said she would be releasing an official economic policy platform in the coming days. She told reporters:

It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

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