Former Trump officials to join Harris campaign at debate
Two former Trump White House officials will join Kamala Harris’s campaign in Philadelphia as surrogates for Tuesday’s presidential debate, the Harris campaign announced.
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Donald Trump’s White House communications director, and Olivia Troye, who was homeland security adviser to Mike Pence and a top aide on the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, will speak out against Donald Trump and for Harris ahead of the debate, the campaign said.
Announcing the campaign’s plans to bring Scaramucci and Troye to the debate, the Harris-Walz campaign’s communications director Michael Tyler said:
Listen, don’t take it from us: Take it from the ones who know Donald Trump the best and who are telling the American people exactly how unfit Trump is to serve as president. They saw firsthand the abject failure of Donald Trump’s presidency.
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Updated at 10.50 EDT
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Robert F Kennedy Jr posted a new video on X on Tuesday, urging his followers not to vote for his name on the ballot, but to vote for Donald Trump.
This comes one day after the Michigan supreme court ruled that that Kennedy’s name will remain on the state’s ballot despite his withdrawal from the race several weeks ago.
“No matter what state you live in, you should be voting for Donald Trump” Kennedy said in the video. “That’s the only way we can get me and everything I stand for into Washington DC and fulfil the mission that motivated my campaign.”
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Project 2025 ex-director accuses Trump campaign advisers of ‘malpractice’
Robert Tait
The former head of Project 2025, a rightwing blueprint for remaking the US government that was created by many of Donald Trump’s former officials, has urged the former president to replace his two campaign managers if he wants to win November’s presidential election.
Paul Dans, who stepped down as the project’s director in July after Trump dissociated himself from it, turned his fire on Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, blaming the advisers for a series of errors that he claims have jeopardised the Republican nominee’s chances of beating Kamala Harris.
Dans accused them of being guilty of overconfidence and of failing to adequately prepare Trump for the possibility that Harris would replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. That development changed the race, which polls suggested Trump had previously been leading. Dans told the New York Times:
Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it’s a race to the wire.
He also accused Trump’s campaign advisers of “malpractice”, and said their misjudgments led to an embarrassing public about-face, in which Trump finally claimed to disown the Project 2025 document.
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Updated at 13.05 EDT
Interim summary
Two former Trump White House officials will join Kamala Harris’s campaign as surrogates for Tuesday’s presidential debate. Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director for Donald Trump, and Olivia Troye, who was homeland security adviser to Mike Pence, will speak out against Trump and for Harris ahead of the debate, the campaign said.
The White House described false claims being shared by prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance about Haitian migrants in an Ohio city eating pets and local wildlife as “dangerous” misinformation.
A new Harris-Walz campaign ad features Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump over his “weird obsession” with crowd sizes during his speech at the Democratic national convention last month.
Melania Trump, the former first lady, questioned the official account of the attempted assassination of her husband, Donald Trump, in a bizarre new video posted to X to promote her new memoir.
Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Republican governor of Florida, claimed the signature collection process for the state’s amendment on November’s ballot to protect abortion rights was fraudulent, and is reportedly sending his election police force to voters’ homes to try to gather evidence.
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Updated at 13.02 EDT
Rachel Leingang
The misinformation about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border.
The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported.
A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.
Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed into a school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.
Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.
Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.
Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.
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Updated at 12.52 EDT
JD Vance appeared to backtrack on the false claim he promoted on Monday saying that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city were eating pets and local wildlife.
The Republican Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said his office had received “many inquiries” about the false claims, adding that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
Police in Springfield, Ohio on Monday said they had received no credible reports of immigrants harming pets.
The false claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.
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White House says JD Vance false conspiracy about Haitian ‘cat-eating migrants’ is racist and ‘dangerous’
The White House described false claims being shared by prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance about Haitian migrants in an Ohio city eating pets and local wildlife as “dangerous” misinformation.
The White House’s national security adviser John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday:
This kind of misinformation is dangerous. Because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is. And they might act on that kind of misinformation and act on it in a way where somebody can get hurt so it needs to stop.
He added:
What’s deeply concerning to us is you’ve got now elected officials in the Republican Party pushing yet another conspiracy theory that’s just seeking to divide people based on lies and – let’s be honest – based on an element of racism.
Social media posts have claimed, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food.
Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town.
Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”
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Updated at 12.28 EDT
Edward Helmore
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.
Leeds has accused Trump of groping her in the first-class section of an airplane. She said she fought him off and moved to the back of the plane. At her press conference, she said she later ran into him, prompting him to exclaim, “I remember you,” before calling her a derogatory word.
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Melania Trump claims there is ‘definitely more’ to assassination attempt against husband
Melania Trump, the former first lady, questioned the official account of the attempted assassination of her husband, Donald Trump, in a bizarre new video posted to X to promote her new memoir.
“The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she said.
Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?
“There is definitely more to this story, and we need to uncover the truth, she added.
The video ends with an image of her new book, “Melania”, due to be released on 8 October.
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Richard Luscombe
The dispatching of election police to voters’ homes is not the only beef Ron DeSantis critics have with the Republican Florida governor’s efforts to upend the amendment 4 abortion ballot measure.
The official Florida health department’s website is urging voters to reject it, an unlawful use of taxpayers’ money for what amounts to political advertising, according to the ACLU of Florida.
Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement:
To our knowledge, it is unprecedented for the state to expressly advocate against a citizen-led initiative.
This kind of propaganda, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process, sets a dangerous precedent. This is what we would expect to see from an authoritarian regime.
The state’s illegal act to undermine amendment 4 is nothing more than an abuse of power, aimed at preventing voters from rejecting the cruel and extreme abortion ban in place.
DeSantis has railed against amendment 4, which would nix the six-week abortion ban he signed into law in April last year, and allow abortions until viability of the fetus.
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Richard Luscombe
There’s a new squabble in Florida over an amendment on November’s ballot to protect abortion rights.
Having failed to persuade the state’s supreme court from blocking the measure going before voters in the first place, Ron DeSantis, the state’s hard-right Republican governor, now claims the signature collection process for amendment 4 was fraudulent, and is reportedly sending his election police force to voters’ homes to try to gather evidence.
The Tampa Bay Times spoke to voters who said uniformed officers from the Florida department of law enforcement showed up at their door. One told the newspaper that the officer had a 10-page dossier on him, including a printout of his driver’s license and a copy of his signature.
After the voter confirmed he had indeed signed the petition, the officer left.
DeSantis set up his own election fraud unit in 2022 and has been busy scouring thousands of the almost one million signatures that put the abortion measure on the ballot for authenticity.
Democrats are calling foul. State representative Anna Eskamani told the Orlando Sentinel:
These tactics set a very dangerous precedent for the future of our elections where (an) election police force can be sent in to intimidate, to try to re-evaluate history and to take away our votes and to take away our voices.
At a press conference Monday, DeSantis defended his tactics. His investigators, he said, found signatures that “appeared” not to be authentic.
“It may be… that voter will say, ‘No, I actually did do that,’ maybe they signed their name. That is absolutely possible,” DeSantis conceded.
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