This blog is closing now, thanks for following along. You can find the latest US elections coverage here.
Donald Trump says he’s meeting next week with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Associated Press reports.
Modi is scheduled to be in the United States next week for the Quad Summit in Delaware in addition to events in New York, according to Indian media reports. There was no meeting with Trump previously reported.
Trump referenced his meeting with Modi for the first time while speaking at an unrelated event in Michigan.
Indian officials did not immediately confirm the meeting when asked.
Trump ends, stopping to take selfies with people, shaking hands, to the tune of YMCA. This event appeared from the livestream to be well-attended and energetic, with loud cheers – and boos, for the Democrats –from the crowd.
Trump veered between topics, as he often does, offering confusing and unsubstantiated answers to questions.
A voter says he is concerned about taxes.
Trump says Harris will double your taxes, which is not true.
There are, however, big boos from the crowd.
Trump is winding down. He says “Michigan is going to be the most fun” if he wins. He talks about car imports, saying “you can’t flood” the market with imported cars, to energetic cheers.
“This will be like taking candy from a baby,” he says. It is unclear whether he is talking about the election or car imports.
“The only thing that never gets obsolete is a wall and a wheel. A wall is what we’re talking about right now,” he says.
“Just to finish with the border, when I talk about energy, he says, “I believe the border is of the greatest interest.”
It is difficult to follow this response to a question from a voter about the cost of food and groceries, which is veering between energy and immigration.
Trump is asked by a nurse how he will bring down the cost of food and groceries.
“So we have to start always with energy,” he says. “If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make.”
He says is plan is to reduce energy bills by 50% in 12 months. He does not explain how he will do this.
“We’re going to do what we have to do with the farmers,” he says. He appears to be trying to talk about exporting food.
“Interest rates, energy, and common sense,” he says. Then the talks about the border again.
On American women’s feelings about Trump, via the Washington Post:
President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016. Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last Sunday. Before the Democratic National Convention last month, the same poll found her leading him by six points among women.
He talks about the civilian who took a photograph of the suspect’s number plate, who was a woman. He says “women are smarter than men”.
“This woman was unbelievable,” Trump says. “She did an amazing job.”
Huckabee Sanders says the takeaway is that the “women of this country love Donald Trump.”
Trump talks now about the apparent assassination attempt yesterday.
He again thanks the secret service. “These guys do a great job. Now, they do need more people,” he says.
“Closing the border” and “drill, baby drill” are two things Trump will get done, he says.
He says, “unless you have the death penalty for drug dealers you’ll never get rid of that problem.”
The voter asks what the major threat is to manufacturing in Michigan.
Trump responds, confusingly, by talking about the threat of nuclear weapons.
“You’re not going to care so much about making cars” if that starts to happen, he says.
Updated
Trump is asked his first question from someone in the crowd, who starts by noting that he attended one of Trump’s rallies and did not fall asleep or leave early.
Trump is repeating false, unsubstantiated or unprovable claims about Covid, the 7 October attacks in Israel, inflation, the stock market, immigration, the price of oil, and the amount of oil in America.
“This is the world’s longest answer to a question,” he says.
Shortly after taking office in January last year, Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a powerful salvo in the so-called war on woke being waged by Republicans.
She is from a well-known Republican family. Her father, Mike Huckabee, was Arkansas’s governor for more than a decade, from 1996 to 2007.
She served as Trump’s press secretary for two years.
Updated
A refresher on how US presidents are elected:
The popular vote is the overall number of qualified voters who voted for a given candidate: in other words, the number of ballots cast for one candidate or another. The main thing to know about the popular vote is that winning it does not mean you win the presidency. The presidency is won by the candidate who gains the majority of electoral college votes. In other words: the US election is decided by races in individual states. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but still won the presidency and in 2000, George W Bush received fewer votes than Al Gore but also won.
The electoral college is a group of 538 people, called electors, who officially cast their votes for the US president after citizens have voted. This is a requirement outlined in the US constitution. The electors are chosen by political parties in each of the US’s 50 states ahead of the election.
Different states have different numbers of electoral college votes, with the number decided based on the census. The number of votes is equal to its total congressional delegation: the number of senators plus the number of representatives. While not a state, the District of Columbia – as in Washington DC – is allocated three electoral college votes.
A candidate needs more than half – or at least 270 – of the electoral college votes to win.
In most states, all of the electoral college votes from the state go to the same candidate. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which “allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district”, according to 270towin.
This post was clarified on 19 September to explain that Maine and Nebraska have a different way of allocating electoral college votes.
Updated
Trump is claiming falsely that he “did much better” in 2020 than 2016.
Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College in 2020 and had a 4-point margin in the popular vote.
In 2016, Donald J. Trump won the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton, and Trump lost the popular vote.
Trump is being interviewed by Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
She says that Trump will win because America “needs a fighter”. She asks why he wants to be president.
“Thank you everybody. A lot of love in this room. I love you, you love me,” Trump says.
Updated
Trump speaks at town hall in Flint, Michigan.
Trump is speaking now in Michigan. He claims that there are 8,000 people in the audience, and the same number “walking away”, who could not get in. This seems unlikely, and Trump has made false claims about his crowd sizes before.
Obama has said Trump is obsessed with the sizes of his crowds.
Trump is due to speak at town hall in Flint, Michigan
Trump will speak soon at a town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the town of Flint, in the swing state of Michigan – which has 15 electoral college votes.
Updated
“I support the second amendment,” he says, referring to America’s “right to bear arms”.
Walz is a gun owner and skilled marksman.
“But we don’t get to hide behind that when our first responsibility is to protect children,” he says.
“These guys talk all the time about families, today they had a vote to protect IVF and they killed it,” Walz says of the Republicans.
He talks about his own experiences with IVF, which led to the birth of his daughter, Hope.
Freedom is not just a song Kamala Harris comes out to on stage, “although it is very cool” when she does that, says Walz.
Republicans want to invade your bedroom, who you love, your school library, he says, as well as the freedom to make decisions about your own body.
Some people choose to live their lives differently, he says.
The lesson is, “Mind your own damn business,” he says, as he has before – a lesson from Minnesota.
Walz suggests Trump's 'concept of a plan' on healthcare is 'weak answer'
Walz says, “after nine long years” Donald Trump, when asked about healthcare during the debate, “gave us a concept of a plan, seriously, none of my students ever gave that weak an answer.”
He has compared Trump to the high school students he used to teach a few times during this speech.
Updated
Walz says Trump lost 'thousands of manufacturing jobs' in North Carolina
Walz talks about JD Vance saying he is willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumours of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.
Walz says “no kidding” and that that has been happening for years.
“You know who Donald Trump is, you know the pain that he caused, he killed thousands of manufacturing jobs across this state,” he says.
Updated
Walz is speaking now.
He has brought up Donald Trump’s false claims that images of crowds at Harris events are AI. “You know what won’t be AI?” he says: “Your ballots”.
As we wait for Tim Walz to start speaking in the swing state of North Carolina, here is a refresher on the electoral college:
The electoral college is a group of 538 people, called electors, who officially cast their votes for the US president after citizens have voted. This is a requirement outlined in the US constitution. The electors are chosen by political parties in each of the US’s 50 states ahead of the election.
North Carolina has 16 Electoral College votes, or almost 6%.
Different states have different numbers of electoral college votes, with the number decided based on the census. The number of votes is equal to its total congressional delegation: the number of senators plus the number of representatives. While not a state, the District of Columbia – as in Washington DC – is allocated three electoral college votes.
This is why the total is 538: 100 senators plus 435 representatives plus three for DC.
A candidate needs more than half – or at least 270 – of the electoral college votes to win. All the votes from a given state go to the same candidate.
The party that wins a state has its electors formally vote for its candidate. This happens a few weeks after the November election – and after US states have certified their election results – on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.
In 2020 Donald Trump tried to remove electors in some states ahead of the electoral college vote but the US supreme court rejected that attempt the week before.
Tim Walz to address crowd in Asheville, North Carolina
Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is about to begin speaking in Asheville in the swing state of North Carolina – which has 16 electoral college votes.
We will bring key points from those remarks to you live.
Updated
Meanwhile, if you’re just tuning in, Kamala Harris was interviewed by a panel of three National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) members, during which the vice-president talked about the anti-immigrant sentiment toward Haitians in Springfield, Ohio; Israel’s war in Gaza; domestic economic issues; gun violence; and reproductive rights. The conversation was one of the few interviews Harris has done since becoming the Democratic nominee, and it served as an opportunity for her to reaffirm policies.
When asked about “where [she] sees the line in terms of aggression and defense” in regards to the war, she said that she supported the Biden administration’s one-time pause on the delivery of 2,000lb bombs to Israel as “leverage” that they “have had and used”, but that achieving a deal was the real means to ending the war.
“We have to agree that not only must we end this war, but we have to have a goal of a two-state solution because there must be stability and peace in that region,” she said, “inasmuch as our goal must be to ensure that Israelis have security and Palestinians in equal measure have security, self determination, dignity”.
When asked what mechanisms the US has to support Palestinian self-determination, and whether or not it was even possible, as Israel’s ally, to support such a goal, Harris responded saying that she believed that it was. She described meetings with Israeli and Arab leaders to “talk about how we can construct a day-after scenario”.
Updated
JD Vance is speaking during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
The Guardian’s Alice Herman is there. She writes:
Vance has spoken at length about immigration, invoking a crime committed by an undocumented immigrant in the town of Prairie du Chien that Republicans in the state have already seized on to bolster GOP claims about immigrants committing violent crimes. (In fact, research shows immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than people born in the US).
“We are closer, in this moment, to a nuclear war, or a third world war, than at any time in our country’s history and we have the chaos and incompetence of Kamala Harris to thank for it,” Vance said.
“Every community is a border state,” he said. “The problems that Kamala Harris has imported through that American Southern border have now gone nationwide.”
He also blamed Harris for the recent apparent assassination attempt at Mar-a-Lago.
“The American media, the Democrats, the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve gotta cut this crap out or they’re gonna get somebody killed,” said Vance, alleging that Democrats, who have highlighted Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, are to blame for the two assassination attempts that Trump has faced so far during his 2024 campaign.
Updated
Today so far
Senate Republicans defeated a bill that would have protected access to IVF care, brought by Democrats seeking to pressure Republicans over the politically volatile topic that is sure to be on voters’ minds when they head to the presidential polls in 49 days. Kamala Harris said Republicans’ refusal to vote in favor of protecting IVF despite claiming to support access “is not an isolated incident”.
Over in the House, the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, announced plans for the chamber to vote tomorrow on a spending bill that will prevent a partial government shutdown but be paired with legislation aimed at cracking down on non-citizen voting, which rarely happens. Democrats have come out against the latter part of the bill, with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer saying today that Johnson’s proposal will likely meet “a dead end”, though that could increase the possibility of a government shutdown.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Kamala Harris just said she called Donald Trump after the Secret Service on Sunday fended off a gunman discovered outside a golf course where he was playing. “I checked on him to see if he was okay, and I told him what I have said publicly – there’s no place for political violence in our country,” she said.
In a conversation with the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris also condemned the campaign against the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, waged by Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and conservative commentators. “It’s a crying shame,” the vice-president said.
In a statement responding to the shocking report in ProPublica, Harris also said anti-abortion laws supported by Trump were to blame for the death of a 28-year-old Georgia woman.
In an interview with popular Spanish radio host Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis, Harris warned that Trump’s policies would result in the separation of migrant families at the southern border.
Trump said Joe Biden was “very nice” when the president called him after the second assassination attempt against him on Sunday, and asked if he had any suggestions for how to improve his security.
Updated
Arizona’s top elections official said Tuesday that a newly identified error in the state’s voter registration process needs to be swiftly resolved, as early ballots are scheduled to go out to some voters as soon as this week.
Election staff in the Maricopa county recorder’s office identified an issue last week, which concerns voters with old drivers licenses who may never have provided documentary proof of citizenship but were coded as having provided it and therefore were able to vote full ballots. The state has a bifurcated system in which voters who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship cannot vote in local or state elections, only federal ones.
Because of the state’s very close elections and status as a swing state, the issue affecting nearly 100,000 voters will likely be the subject of intense scrutiny and litigation in the coming weeks. Arizona has more than 4.1 million registered voters.
Governor Katie Hobbs directed the motor vehicles division to fix the coding error, which the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said was already resolved going forward.
It’s not clear if any of these voters have unlawfully cast a ballot or if they have already provided proof of citizenship. People who register to vote check a box on registration forms, under penalty of perjury, declaring they are citizens.
“We have no reason to believe that there are any significant numbers of individuals remaining on this list who are not eligible to vote in Arizona,” Fontes said in a press conference Tuesday. “We cannot confirm that at this moment, but we don’t have any reason to believe that.”
The error, reported by Votebeat on Tuesday, relates to several quirks of Arizona governance.
Since 1996, Arizona residents have been required to show proof of citizenship to get a regular driver’s license. And since 2004, they have been required to show proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections.
State drivers licenses also do not expire until a driver is age 65, meaning for some residents, they will have a valid license for decades before needing renewal. These factors play into the error.
The issue has split the Republican recorder in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, and the Democratic secretary of state. Recorder Stephen Richer is arguing that these voters should only be able to cast a federal-only ballot, while Fontes says the state should keep the status quo of allowing them to vote full ballots given how soon the election is. Fontes directed counties to allow these residents to cast full ballots this year.
Read more here:
Updated
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has said that Republicans would do well to help avert a looming government shutdown.
.@LeaderMcConnell: "The one you cannot have is a government shutdown. It would be politically beyond stupid for us to do that right before the election because certainly we'd get the blame." pic.twitter.com/Al0yD8ztLM
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 17, 2024
The path to preventing a shutdown, as ever, remains shrouded. House leader Mike Johnson’s current proposal – which extends funding while also folding in a Republican measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in national elections – lacks even enough Republican votes to pass.
Non-citizen voting is already illegal and voter fraud by non-citizens is virtually non-existent, and the inclusion of the measure, which would add barriers to voting for US citizens, is a nonstarter for Democrats in the Senate.
Meanwhile, far-right Republicans say Johnson’s proposal doesn’t go far enough in pushing their agenda, and see the threat of shutdown as an opportunity to push Democrats to compromise on immigration and other issues.
Updated
Why Republicans are raising double the money in down-ballot races
Since Kamala Harris launched her presidential bid in July, Democrats have showered her campaign with cash. Last month alone, the vice-president raised $361m, tripling Donald Trump’s fundraising haul of $130m for the month. According to Harris’s campaign, she brought in $540m in the six weeks after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race.
Democratic congressional candidates appear to be benefiting from this financial windfall as well, as Republicans sound the alarm about their fundraising deficit in key races that will determine control of the House and Senate in November.
But in one crucial area, Republicans maintain a substantial cash advantage over Democrats: state legislative races. In recent years, Republicans have controlled more state legislative chambers than Democrats, giving them more power over those states’ budgets, election laws and abortion policies.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which supports the party’s state legislative candidates, has raised $35m between the start of 2023 and the end of this June, the committee told the Guardian. In comparison, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which invests in an array of state-level campaigns, such as supreme court races, in addition to legislative campaigns – has raised $62m in the same time period.
That resource gap is now rearing its head in key battleground states, the DLCC says. In Pennsylvania, a crucial state for the presidential and congressional maps, Republican state legislative candidates have spent $4.5m on paid advertisements, compared with $1.4m for Democratic candidates.
“When we think about the context of what’s at stake, we think about more than 65 million people being covered by our target map this year,” said Heather Williams, president of the DLCC. “And that means that the rights of all those people will be determined by who’s in power the day after the election.”
Read more here:
Updated
A national voter poll from Monmouth has found that there are fewer “double haters” – voters that dislike both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates – since Kamala Harris joined the race.
Only 7% of voters polled in this latest round favored neither Donald Trump nor Harris – compared to 16% of disliked both Trump and Joe Biden.
NATIONAL VOTER POLL: The double-haters are less of a factor now than they were in the Biden-Trump race. Just 7% have an unfavorable opinion of both Trump and Harris, while 16% dislike both Trump and Biden.https://t.co/U2OgSVCw45 pic.twitter.com/LWbtiI19SP
— MonmouthPoll (@MonmouthPoll) September 17, 2024
Updated
“Senate Republicans put politics first and families last again today by blocking the Right to IVF Act for the second time since June,” said Emilia Rowland, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.
Rowland warned that Donald Trump, who claimed to be a “leader” on IVF during his debate against Kamala Harris last week, would jeopardize access to fertility treatments if he wins in November.
“Voters know the difference between words and actions,” she said. “And between now and November, they will turn out against Republicans from the top to bottom of the ballot.”
JD Vance is scheduled to speak in an hour at an event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
The last time I was at this event space was for one of Kamala Harris’s inaugural rallies, which was held on the sprawling grounds adjacent to the hall where Vance will speak today.
Cathy Weber, a retired farmer and military serviceperson, said she came to see Vance speak to get a better sense of who he is as a politician. When I asked about Vance’s comments about Haitian immigrants, she said she thought “he misspoke,” and chalked it up to being a younger politician – which she viewed as an asset.
“He’s 39,” said Weber. “I said to my son: ‘That’s your generation, that’s our future.’”
Updated
As the Guardian’s Robert Tait reported earlier this month, JD Vance has a history of opposing IVF – in contradiction to the Republican party and Donald Trump’s current stance that they support it:
In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure.
The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade and annulling the federal right to abort a pregnancy.
The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.
IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.
Updated
Harris says Republicans 'have once again made clear' they won't protect IVF access
Kamala Harris said that Senate Republicans refusal to vote in favor of protecting IVF “is not an isolated incident”:
Every woman in every state must have reproductive freedom. Yet, Republicans in Congress have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.
Congressional Republicans’ repeated refusal to protect access to IVF is not an isolated incident. Extremist so-called leaders have launched a full-on attack against reproductive freedom across our country. In the more than two years since Roe v Wade was overturned, they have proposed and passed abortion bans that criminalize doctors and make no exception for rape or incest. They have also blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception and proposed four national abortion bans.
Their opposition to a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her own body is extreme, dangerous and wrong. Our administration will always fight to protect reproductive freedoms, which must include access to IVF. We stand with the majority of Americans – Republicans and Democrats alike – who support protecting access to fertility treatments. And we continue to call on Congress to finally pass a bill that restores reproductive freedom.
Updated
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, pointed to the failure of the IVF bill today as proof that Republicans’ promise to protect access to in vitro fertilization is hollow:
.@SenSchumer on IVF vote: "Today Republicans will be called on to answer a very simple question -- do they support Americans family's access to in-vitro fertilization or not." pic.twitter.com/LQLCzDQpYl
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 17, 2024
Meanwhile, John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, called the bill “an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn’t one”.
.@SenJohnThune on IVF vote: "The outcome of that show vote is not going to be any different than it was when we had this same vote three months ago...Republicans support IVF...this is an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn't one." pic.twitter.com/mk7HFBzt3P
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 17, 2024
Before its convention this year, the Republican party adopted a policy platform that supports states establishing fetal personhood, while also, contradictorily, encouraging support for IVF. But the platform does not explain how IVF could be legally protected if frozen embryos are given the same rights as people.
Updated
Senate Republicans blocked bill to protect IVF
Senate Republicans voted to block a bill that would have ensured access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.
Every Republican, except Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the measure. Though a majority of 51 voted in favor, the bill needed 60 votes to pass.
Democrats had brought the measure back to the floor after Republicans previously blocked it from advancing in June.
Democrats have been pushing the issue this year after the Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered children under state law, leading several clinics in the state to suspend IVF treatment.
Republicans, including Donald Trump, have scrambled to counter what could be a deeply unpopular stance against IVF.
Republicans just blocked a bill to protect IVF nationwide. For the second time this year.
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) September 17, 2024
It’s proof positive: Congressional Republicans cannot be trusted when they say they support IVF.
Updated
Another celebrity endorsement for Harris: Billie Eilish
Pop music superstar Billie Eilish along with her brother, producer and musician Finneas O’Connell, have announced their support for Kamala Harris.
In a video posted on X, where Eilish has 7.5 million followers, and Instagram, where her followers number 119 million, the siblings say they will vote for Harris because she supports for keeping abortion legal, and fighting the climate crisis:
It’s National Voter Registration Day. We are voting for Harris-Walz. The choice is clear. Check your voting status here: https://t.co/ZPKcYDR7aF pic.twitter.com/PiFfQpkARW
— billie eilish (@billieeilish) September 17, 2024
They are the last pop megastars to back the Democratic vice-president, after Taylor Swift announced she would vote for Harris following her debate with Donald Trump last week.
Updated
Earlier in her conversation with the National Association of Black Journalists, Kamala Harris was asked about her message to the young Black voters who polls show are leaning towards voting for Donald Trump because they believe he will provide more economic opportunities.
If that dynamic plays out, it could have severe consequences for both Harris and Democrats nationwide, since Black voters have long been a cornerstone voting bloc.
“I think it’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris replied. “Black men are like any other voting group. You got to earn their vote. So I’m working to earn the vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I am Black, but because the policies and the perspectives I have understands what we must do to recognize the needs of all communities, and I intend to be a president for all people, specifically as it relates to what we need to do.”
Updated
Harris says she spoke to Trump after second apparent assassination attempt
Kamala Harris just said she called Donald Trump earlier today after the Secret Service on Sunday fended off a gunman discovered outside a golf course where he was playing.
“I checked on him to see if he was okay, and I told him what I have said publicly, there’s no place for political violence in our country,” Harris said. “I am in this election and this race for many reasons, including to fight for our democracy. And in a democracy, there is no place for political violence. We can and should have healthy debates and discussion and disagreements, but not resort to violence to resolve those issues.”
Harris also responded “I do”, when asked if she had confidence in the Secret Service, then said that rightwing attacks have made groups including migrants and LGBTQ+ people feel unsafe.
“Yes, I feel safe. I have Secret Service protection, but that doesn’t change my perspective on the importance of fighting for the safety of everybody in our country and doing everything we can to again, lift people up and not beat people down so they feel alone and are made to feel small and made to feel like they’re somehow not a part of it or us,” she said.
At that, the conversation wrapped up.
Updated
Harris calls attacks on Ohio Haitian community 'a crying shame'
Kamala Harris has condemned the campaign against the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, waged by Donald Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and conservative commentators.
“It’s a crying shame,” the vice-president said in her ongoing conversation with Black journalists in Philadelphia. “My heart breaks for this community.”
Without mentioning Trump or Vance, Harris described the baseless allegations that Haitians who moved to the Ohio city were eating people’s pets as irresponsible:
When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that. That is an extension of what should not be lost in this moment, this concept of the public trust, to then understand what the public trust means. It means that you have been invested with trust to be responsible in the way you use your words, much less how you conduct yourself, and especially when you have been and then seek to be again president of the United States of America.
She also decried the wave of threats that have closed schools and other buildings in Springfield, noting the toll it has taken on law enforcement:
It’s a crying shame, literally, what’s happening to those families, those children in that community, not to mention what is happening in terms of, look, you say you care about law enforcement, law enforcement resources being put into this because of these serious threats that are being issued against a community that is living a productive, good life before this happened, and spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age old.
More on the threats that have disrupted daily life in Springfield for days:
Updated
Kamala Harris defends record on Israel-Gaza war
Kamala Harris was pressed by her interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists event about what specific changes she would make to US policy towards Israel and its invasion of Gaza.
“In the way that we send weapons, in the way that we interact as their ally, are there specific policy changes?” asked Politico reporter Eugene Daniels, one of three interviewers on the panel.
Harris replied:
For example, one of the things that we have done that I am entirely supportive of, is the pause that we put on the 2,000lb bombs. And so there is some leverage that we have had and used, but ultimately, the thing that is going to unlock everything else in that region is getting this deal done. And I’m not going to disclose private conversations, but I will tell you, I’ve had direct conversations with the prime minister, with the president of Israel, with Egyptian leaders and with our allies, and I think we’ve made ourselves very clear this deal needs to get done in the best interest of everyone in the region, including getting those hostages out.
Washington has supplied many of the bombs used in Israel’s assault on the enclave, but recently blocked a shipment of 2,000lb munitions blamed for strikes that have killed scores of people in Gaza. Here’s more on that:
Updated
Harris holds live interview with Black journalists
Kamala Harris is on stage now in Philadelphia, taking questions from three reporters in a live conservation organized by the National Association of Black Journalists.
In July, Donald Trump spoke at the group’s annual convention, where he said Harris was lying about her racial identity. Here’s our coverage of that infamous moment:
Updated
Vance pointing finger at Democrats over Trump assassination attempts 'dangerous' – White House
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has condemned as “dangerous” comments made by JD Vance that the difference between Democratic rhetoric and Republican rhetoric in this election is that only Donald Trump – the Republican party nominee for president – has been shot at.
Vance, the Republican nominee for vice-president, has pointed out on the campaign trail that nobody has tried to assassinate Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president, only her rival, Trump.
Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July and a man was arrested pointing a rifle through the fence of Trump’s golf course this last Sunday, as the former president was playing a round.
Vance said at a rally in Sparta, Michigan, moments ago that “what’s one-sided is that it’s Donald Trump who’s getting shot at” and he said at a previous event that the difference between the effects of both parties’ rhetoric is that “no-one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months”.
Jean-Pierre said at the ongoing press briefing just now: “When you are a national leader and you have a community that looks up to your leadership … and when you have that type of language out there, it’s dangerous … [and] it opens up an opportunity for people to listen to you and potentially take you very seriously.”
"Big difference between conservatives & liberals: No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in last couple of months. And 2 people have tried to kill Donald Trump last couple months. That's pretty strong evidence left needs to tone down the rhetoric & cut this crap out"
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) September 16, 2024
- JD Vance pic.twitter.com/SzBmmyetAc
Updated
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden would travel to New York City next week to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
The press briefing just got under way at the White House. Jean-Pierre made the announcement about the US president at the top of the briefing and will take journalists’ questions shortly.
World leaders will descend on the UN headquarters in New York for the annual gathering.
Israel’s war in Gaza will probably be a headline issue at this year’s gathering. The attack on southern Israel lead by Hamas last 7 October occurred after last fall’s UNGA event.
Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, has raged since and a lasting ceasefire remains elusive. The death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory.
The Guardian is covering the latest events in this war and the current news out of Lebanon today in this live blog.
Updated
JD Vance has called for stepped-up security for Donald Trump following two apparent assassination attempts on the former president in the last two months, asking for him to have Secret Service resources equivalent to those afforded to Joe Biden, the sitting US president.
Vance, Trump’s running mate on the Republican ticket for this November’s presidential election, also blamed Democratic party rhetoric criticizing Trump for armed individuals targeting the former president.
“Democrats have got to cut this crap out,” he said.
He repeatedly criticized Kamala Harris, the Democratic party nominee for president, across policy platforms ranging from energy to taxes. She said, after a man was arrested on Sunday after pointing a rifle through the fence at Trump’s golf course in Florida as the former president was playing a round: “I will be clear: I condemn political violence.”
Asked by a journalist if the rhetoric was all one-sided, Vance said “there are absolutely people on our side who say ridiculous things”, but he added that “what is one-sided” is that only one person was being targeted by known gunmen.
“It’s Donald Trump who’s getting shot at,” he said, reiterating that Democrats should stop talking in tones of eliminating him as a threat.
“They are going to get someone killed,” he said.
Updated
The Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, is on the campaign trail talking in Sparta, near Grand Rapids in central Michigan, the vital swing state, right now.
The White House daily media briefing, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, has been moved back to 2pm, from its previous schedule of 1.30pm.
Vance is talking about prices, the cost of food, gas, housing, saying “the number one thing” the US has to do to get “this crazy inflation” under control is to have better energy supply from the US.
“Drill, baby, drill,” Vance said. He said the US has “abundant American energy” and natural resources that are the envy of other countries.
Updated
The day so far
Senate Democrats will later this afternoon hold a vote on protecting access to IVF care, as they seek to pressure Republicans over the politically volatile topic that will sure to be on voters’ minds when they head to the presidential polls in 49 days. Over in the House, the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, announced plans for the chamber to vote tomorrow on a spending bill that will prevent a partial government shutdown but be paired with legislation aimed at cracking down on non-citizen voting, which rarely happens. Democrats have come out against the latter part of the bill, with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer saying today that Johnson’s proposal will likely meet “a dead end”, though that could increase the possibility of a government shutdown.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Kamala Harris said anti-abortion laws supported by Donald Trump were to blame for the death of a Georgia woman.
In an interview with popular Spanish radio host Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis, Harris warned that Trump’s policies would result in the separation of migrant families at the southern border.
Trump said Joe Biden was “very nice” when the president called him after the second assassination attempt against him on Sunday, and asked if he had any suggestions for how to improve his security.
Updated
Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat who conceived her daughters using IVF and sponsored the bill coming up for a vote today to protect the fertility treatment, accused Trump and Vance of “lying about their records on IVF, and pretending to champion this cause”.
Speaking on the campaign call, Duckworth said Vance’s decision to campaign instead of returning to Washington to vote for her bill was proof that “when given the chance, they’ll never actually do anything to support IVF”.
“I’m not going to sit quietly while Donald Trump and JD Vance run on a platform that would threaten access to IVF,” she said, “because every American deserves their right to be called mommy or daddy without being treated like a criminal.”
Updated
On the call, Democratic lawmakers said Americans should not trust Donald Trump when he says he does not support an abortion ban, and noted that he has bragged about appointing the supreme court justices whose votes were decisive to overturning Roe.
“This is somebody who has started a complete crisis, healthcare crisis for women in this country, and now he’s trying to scramble and somehow, as he always does, say it’s not his fault,” Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow said.
Even if Republicans fail to muster the 60 votes needed to enact a federal abortion ban, she pointed to the conservative blueprint, Project 2025, which was created by former Trump officials and suggests invoking an archaic law to ban the distribution of the pills used in medical abortions. Trump has sought to distance himself from the lengthy policy document.
“Everything that we have seen so far – the efforts by states that he has supported – would indicate to us that that’s very much a part of his toolbox,” Stabenow said.
Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue, on which she holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump, a national poll of likely voters by the New York Times and Siena College found. Yet there were some signs Trump’s mixed signals over his stance on abortion had muddied the waters. According to the survey, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.
The Harris campaign has responded with a swing state ad buy highlighting Trump’s comments bragging about his role overturning Roe.
“Make no mistake: Donald Trump is to blame for, you know, what we are seeing across this country,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the Harris-Walz campaign manager, said on the call.
Updated
Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, said Donald Trump was “scrambling” to rewrite his position on reproductive rights amid a political backlash and fears that a Republican administration would curtail access to IVF.
“There’s no way in the world that I believe that Donald Trump is serious about this,” Staebnow said. The former president last month announced plans, without offering any detail, to require the federal government or health insurance companies to cover the cost of fertility treatments, which can be tens of thousands of dollars.
Stabenow, on a call organized by the Harris campaign, said Tuesday’s vote was all the more important after Trump’s claim that he is a “leader on IVF”.
“Be great if he was,” she said. “And the way to find out if he’s serious? Was he on the phone last night, calling our colleagues, urging them to vote yes, just like he was on the phone last weekend, urging the US House to shut the government down, just like he was on the phone telling people to vote against the effective border bill. If he was on the phone last night urging people to vote yes, then I’ll take him seriously.”
Republicans are expected to block the procedural measure to open debate on the Democrats’ bill to protect IVF. JD Vance, the Ohio senator who voted against the bill earlier this year, is campaigning in the midwest and will miss the vote.
Senate Democrats are holding a press conference on the steps of the Capitol, where they are pushing Republicans to allow passage of legislation protecting access to IVF care nationwide.
The party holds a majority of 51 seats in the chamber, but most legislation needs at least 60 votes to overcome filibusters.
“Here’s what we’re asking our Republican friends: do you support American families’ access to in vitro fertilization or not?” the majority leader, Chuck Schumer said, as he was flanked by lawmakers holding up pictures of families who had children through IVF.
“For many Americans, starting a family is one of the greatest joys there is. Yet millions of Americans struggle with the defeating battle of infertility every single year.”
He accused the GOP of being insincere about protecting access to the care:
In Alabama this year, we saw just how vulnerable IVF has become as the next target of ultra conservatives. Since then, we’ve seen Republicans tie themselves in knots over their support for IVF, claiming they support access to IVF, support insurance paying for IVF treatments, support helping families pay for IVF. And then when the rubber hits the road, they vote no, because here’s the secret, Republicans want people to think they support IVF because they know how unpopular that position is. They want to keep their true agenda hidden from the public.
Updated
Senate Democrats plan vote on bill to protect IVF access, again
The Senate’s Democratic majority will today try once again to pass legislation protecting access to IVF care nationwide, but Republicans are likely to block its passage.
Democrats have seized on the issue every since Alabama’s supreme court earlier this year handed down a ruling that cut off most access to the treatment used to start families, until its Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that restored access.
In remarks today on the Senate floor, the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, warned that IVF remained under threat, and federal legislation was necessary to guarantee access across the country.
“Sadly, access to IVF can no longer be taken from granted. From the moment the Maga supreme court eliminated Roe, the hard-right made clear that they would keep going. As we saw earlier this year in Alabama, IVF has become the next target of ultra-conservatives, and access to this incredible treatment is more vulnerable than ever,” Schumer said.
He tied the GOP’s opposition to the bill to Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint to remake the US government authored by conservatives with ties to Donald Trump.
“If Senate Republicans vote no today, and strike IVF protections down yet again, it will be further proof that Project 2025 is alive and well,” Schumer said. “If people want to see how strong Project 2025’s grip is on the GOP, the outcome of today’s IVF vote will be very, very revealing.”
In June, Senate Republicans blocked the Right to IVF act, which Schumer is moving to reconsider today. Here’s more on that:
Updated
Democratic Senate leader Schumer says House GOP funding vote will run 'into a dead end'
Responding to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to tomorrow hold a vote on a six-month government funding bill paired with a new federal law against non-citizen voting, the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, implied that the proposal would go nowhere in his chamber.
“Speaker Johnson is reportedly going to hold a vote on his six-month CR tomorrow, but the only thing that will accomplish is make clear that he’s running into a dead end – we must have a bipartisan – a bipartisan – plan instead,” Schumer said.
The majority leader said he was “heartened” that Johnson’s spending proposal did not contain sweeping budget cuts, but said it was otherwise not acceptable to Democrats. The party opposes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, though Schumer did not name the bill in his remarks.
“I hope it’s a sign that the speaker realizes that these bipartisan funding levels must be part of any solution moving forward. But beyond that, the speaker’s CR [continuing resolution] is too unworkable,” Schumer said.
“I urge him to drop his current plan, and to work together to reach a bipartisan agreement with the other leaders – Leader McConnell, Leader Jeffries, and myself, as well as the White House. We do not have time to spare.”
Updated
In an interview Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis’s show Nueva Network, the vice-president said Latino voters “have the power to determine the outcome of the election”.
“Don’t let anyone silence you or tell you your vote doesn’t matter,” Harris said, a nod to the aggressive misinformation campaigns targeting Spanish speakers in the United States.
She also touted her economic agenda, saying she would expand the child tax credit and called growing small businesses “one of my passions”. She noted the explosion of Latino and Latina-owned small businesses.
Harris also emphasized her personal biography as the daughter of immigrants, raised by a working mother. She said her mother – “a five-foot tall woman with an accent” – arrived in the US alone at 19. She raised two daughters while working as a breast cancer researcher.
Kamala Harris answered questions about the economy and immigration on Chiquibaby’s radio show, telling the popular Spanish radio host about the work the Biden administration has done to secure the border but also support immigrants already in the country.
“He wants to run on the problem instead of fixing the problem,” she said about Trump during the interview, which was translated from English into Spanish.
“His policies would separate families,” she added. “I have already stood, and will always stand, with the belief that we have to keep families together.”
Republican House speaker Johnson announces vote on government funding bill paired with non-citizen voting ban
The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, announced that he would tomorrow hold a vote on legislation to head off a partial government shutdown that would begin 1 October, and ban non-citizens from voting.
The proposal is unlikely to become law, since Senate Democrats and Joe Biden have both said they are opposed to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers have nonetheless made the legislation a priority, raising the possibility of a standoff that could bring the government to the brink of a shutdown just weeks before the 5 November presidential election.
Here’s what Johnson said about tomorrow’s vote:
Congress has an immediate obligation to do two things: responsibly fund the federal government and ensure the security of our elections. Because we owe this to our constituents, we will move forward on Wednesday with a vote on the six-month CR with the Save Act attached. I urge all of my colleagues to do what the overwhelming majority of the people of this country rightfully demand and deserve – prevent non-American citizens from voting in American elections.
The speaker’s announcement is something of an about-face, since just last week, he scrapped a vote on the bill after several Republicans objected:
Updated
In her interview with Hispanic radio host Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis thus far, Kamala Harris has discussed her background and time as a prosecutor, and her plan to lower inflation.
Himonidis posed the questions to the vice-president in Spanish, and she is responding in English, with a Spanish translation of her responses playing on the broadcast simultaneously.
Updated
Harris sits for interview with Hispanic radio host
We expect to hear from Kamala Harris soon, when an interview conducted yesterday with Hispanic radio host Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis airs at 10am.
It’s the vice-president’s second interview this year with Himonidis, and first since she became the Democratic nominee for the president.
Updated
Also dodging questions about Donald Trump’s support for a federal abortion ban is JD Vance, his running mate.
He has previously said that the former president would not sign such legislation, but in an interview with NBC News over the weekend, Vance’s response to the question amounts to one big “no comment”:
JD Vance claims on Meet the Press that he hasn't actually talked about abortion with Trump and dodges questions about whether Trump would sign a national abortion ban pic.twitter.com/UnzeyYaZTh
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2024
Whether or not he would sign a federal law banning abortion was one of several questions Donald Trump did not directly answer at his debate with Kamala Harris last week.
“Would you veto a national abortion ban?” ABC News moderator Linsey Davis asked Trump.
The former president equivocated, saying that such a ban would never pass Congress and implying he preferred the issue be decided by states individually – which is the case after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
“She’s not going to get the vote. She can’t get the vote. She won’t even come close to it. So it’s just talk,” Trump said. “The fact is that for years, they wanted to get it out of Congress and out of the federal government, and we did something that everybody said couldn’t be done, and now you have a vote of the people on abortion.”
Updated
Harris says Trump's anti-abortion policies to blame for death of mother in Georgia
Vice-president Kamala Harris said the policies of her opponent Donald Trump were to blame for the death of a 28-year-old mother in Georgia who was denied lifesaving abortion care under the state’s six-week ban.
“These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions,” she said in a statement responding to the shocking report in ProPublica.
A state medical review committee deemed Thruman’s death “preventable”, and determined that there was a “good chance” she would have survived had she been provided a D&C – a procedure to remove fetal tissue from inside the uterus – earlier, according to ProPublica. As reported, Thurman’s last words to her mother before she died were: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” said Harris, who has made protecting what’s left of abortion access a prominent feature of her presidential campaign. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies,” she continued. “And now women are dying.”
Harris warned Americans not to trust Trump as he tries to recast himself as a moderate on abortion. As president, he appointed three conservative supreme court justices who were decisive in overturning Roe.
As a candidate, Trump has alternately bragged about his role delivering abortion foes the biggest political victory in a half-century, and complaining that Republican extremism on the issue could cost them the election. He has said he would not sign a federal ban on abortion, but his position has shifted.
“If Donald Trump gets the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban, and these horrific realities will multiply,” Harris said. “We must pass a law to restore reproductive freedom. When I am President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law. Lives depend on it.”
Updated
In an interview with Washington Post conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, Donald Trump reflected on being targeted by two assassins in just under two months.
“I try not to think about it,” the former president replied. “But people ask me that question a lot, and I try not to think about it. This was different from the first one, but this one in a certain way was, I mean, the gun was even more violent. And the bullets were from Secret Service, and they caught him. They caught him before anything happened. But it would have happened. I mean, he’s somebody that it would have happened.”
He then attempted to steer blame for the attempts on his life to the Democrats, who have called Trump a threat to democracy. Trump’s opponents have used that language because of his continued insistence, without evidence, that he won the 2020 election, and his vows to take revenge on his political opponents if returned to the White House.
Here’s more on that:
Joe Biden has one public event on his schedule today: a briefing on wildfires at 11.15am ET, which are right now burning swaths of land around southern California.
He will later in the day meet behind closed doors with World Bank president Ajay Banga, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will take questions from reporters at 1.30pm. Here’s more on the fires that continue to burn in the mountains not far from Los Angeles:
Updated
Steve Witkoff, a businessman and friend of Donald Trump, who was on the golf course on Sunday when Secret Service agents opened fire on suspected gunman Ryan Wesley Routh, has told NBC News more about what he witnessed.
He told the network’s Today show:
[Trump has] a guy who follows him right behind him, but there’s also people perched next to him. The entire team converged on top of him, except for the snipers. The snipers separated and they came within three yards of me, put the tripods down, and they were aiming right at the spot where the shots had come from.
He said he had recognised the “pop” sound as shots right away, and that after the incident Trump checked whether everybody was OK. Witkoff says Trump values the protection officers around him, but added that “mistakes could have been made, and in this case, lives could be lost because of such, because of a mistake”.
Updated
Later today Kamala Harris will participate in a Philadelphia forum organized by the National Association of Black Journalists. The event has been scheduled after the vice-president did not attend the group’s convention held in Chicago during the summer.
Donald Trump did appear at that event in July – with a typically contentious performance during which he repeated lies and attacked Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Some journalists were critical of the organisation for inviting him.
Reuters reports that, as Trump did, Harris will face a panel of three journalists in the session. The location is also significant – Pennsylvania is often regarded as a “must win” swing state in order to take the presidency.
My colleague Rachel Leingang has this report on misinformation and conspiracy theories that have sprung up in the wake of the apparent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump while he was playing golf at the weekend:
As details of his passion for Ukraine have emerged, some on the far right have claimed Routh may have ties within the US military, with some going even further to say the arrested suspect could have been part of a larger plot. There is no evidence to suggest either – and none of those spreading the rumors have put forth any proof.
“What are the odds that this shooter, who spent months fighting in Ukraine, has zero links to anyone in US military or intelligence circles?” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, wrote on X. “Find them.”
Questions surrounding how Routh knew Trump would be golfing that day, given that the round wasn’t on a public schedule, led some to suggest that those tasked with protecting the president could be in on the attempt. The former president praised the Secret Service in the aftermath of the apparent thwarted shooting.
Another conspiracy theory claimed Routh appeared in a video for the investment firm BlackRock. The video footage circulated along with the claim shows him at a protest in Ukraine, though the video is unaffiliated with the firm, the company said, adding that Routh “has never been an employee of BlackRock nor has he appeared in any BlackRock ads”.
The theory attempted to tie Routh to Thomas Crooks, the shooter in the first assassination attempt against Trump in July, who did appear in a BlackRock commercial when he was a student at Bethel Park high school in Pennsylvania.
Read more here: Far-right conspiracies abound after second apparent Trump assassination attempt
Harris focuses on youth voter turnout on National Voter Registration Day
As far as the election campaign is concerned, this week the Kamala Harris team has its focus on youth turnout to coincide with today’s National Voter Registration Day.
In a statement campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said: “The stakes this November couldn’t be higher, and vice-president Harris knows our democracy is stronger when we all vote. We are focused on meeting young Americans where they are to drive home the stakes of this election on the issues they care most about.”
During the week Harris’s VP pick Tim Walz and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro will be among those campaigning on campus in battleground states.
Recent polling has shown that Harris has a significant lead over Trump in those all important swing states – provided people come out to vote. “When we vote, we win,” said Chávez Rodríguez.
Updated
The charges facing Ryan Wesley Routh after his apparent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at the weekend are possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. Yesterday Ronald Rowe Jr, acting director of the Secret Service, confirmed that Routh did not fire any shots, and that he did not have the former president in his line of sight when a Secret Service agent opened fire at him.
Updated
The New York Times has spoken to Beth Celestini, a former Secret Service agent who previously protected President Barack Obama. She said she had concerns about “reports that the suspect allegedly was in the bushes for 11 hours,” adding: “The Secret Service has protocols where if enacted, this suspect should have been discovered before the incident.”
Another retired security agent, Ronald Layton, said to the paper that the question for the agency was: “Was this just luck that you caught this guy, or did you have the appropriate mechanisms in place for these kinds of things on the threat spectrum?”
Updated
Trump calls Biden 'very nice' after president's remarks on apparent assassination attempt
During his appearance on a social media channel to promote a new cryptocurrency venture, former president Donald Trump had some conciliatory words about Joe Biden’s response to an apparent second assassination attempt on Trump in the space of a few weeks.
Trump said:
He was very nice today, he called up to make sure I was OK, to make sure, [and ask] do I have any suggestions. We do need more people on my detail, because we have 50,000, 60,000 people showing up to events, and, you know, other people don’t have that, but he couldn’t have been nicer.
It was in marked contrast to the inflammatory words earlier on Fox News Digital, where he had described Biden and his election opponent Kamala Harris as “the enemy within”. On that occasion Trump said:
Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out. These are people that want to destroy our country. It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.
Updated
Suspicious packages sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday
Suspicious packages were sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday, Associated Press reports, but there was no indication that any of the packages ultimately contained hazardous material.
Powder-containing packages were sent to secretaries of state and state election offices in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, Wyoming and Oklahoma, officials in those states confirmed. The FBI and US Postal Service were investigating. It marked the second time in the past year that suspicious packages were mailed to election officials in multiple state offices.
The packages forced an evacuation in Iowa. A state office building in Topeka, Kansas, was also evacuated due to suspicious mail sent to both the secretary of state and attorney general.
Suspicious letters were sent to election offices and government buildings in at least six states last November, including the same building in Kansas that received suspicious mail on Monday.
Updated
In his press conference on Monday, the acting director of the US Secret Service proposed that the agency needs a radical overhaul in order to meet the challenge of protecting presidents in the current climate.
“Coming out of Butler [where Trump was shot at in Pennsylvania], I have ordered a paradigm shift. The Secret Service’s protective methodologies work and they are sound, and we saw that yesterday. [But] we need to get out of a reactive model, and get to a readiness model,” Ronald Rowe Jr said.
The Washington Post is among those calling for tighter security around former president Donald Trump. In an editorial overnight the paper wrote:
Trump is not receiving the level of protection he did when he was president. This needs to change. Fifty days before a neck-and-neck election, after what are now two attempts on his life, Trump ought to get presidential-level coverage. Protecting Trump as he campaigns is as essential a part of ensuring political stability and continuity of government as one could imagine.
Elsewhere in its reporting, the paper says that Trump’s penchant for golf has long been a concern of the security services. It reports:
Trump aides and Secret Service agents have long worried about his possible exposure while golfing. The issue, they say, is twofold. He selects locations to golf – his own clubs – that are particularly difficult to secure. And then he follows a highly predictable routine on any given weekend.
Bill Gage, a former Secret Service agent, said the armed man probably didn’t need to do “very sophisticated surveillance”. “He just had to sit and wait for Trump to arrive,” he said. “You don’t have to do a lot of guessing to know where he is going to be, and that gives a bad guy time to prepare,” he said.
During his call on social media yesterday evening, the former president Donald Trump also had praise for the witness who led to the identification of suspected gunman Ryan Wesley Routh, who was subsequently arrested on I-95.
While promoting a new cryptocurrency business venture, Trump said:
The civilian did a phenomenal job. A woman. I mean, who would think … how many people would have the brainpower to follow him and take pictures of the back of his truck so that they end up getting, and the key was the license. So they got the license, and after they had the license, you know, there’s all sorts of technology where they can literally pinpoint where this truck is. I never knew something like that existed. And they pinpointed him on the highway.
It was quite something, but it worked out well and Secret Service did an excellent job, and they have the man behind bars, and hopefully he’s going to be there for a long time. Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person.
Donald Trump recounts events of shooting attempt
Here is how the former president Donald Trump recounted the events of the weekend while speaking on social media on Monday. He told listeners:
I was playing golf with some of my friends, it was on a Sunday morning and very peaceful, very beautiful weather, everything was beautiful, it’s a nice place to be. And all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets. But what do I know about that? But Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me.
Everybody just, we got into the carts, and we moved along pretty, pretty good. I was with an agent, and the agent did a fantastic job. There was no question that we were off that course. I would have loved to have sank that last putt, but we decided, let’s get out of here.
He started shooting at the barrel, started shooting in the bushes. Could only see the barrel. How good is that? Right? Could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot, I mean, those were the shots we heard. The other one never got a shot off.
The acting head of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr, has confirmed that the suspected gunman, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, did not fire any shots.
Trump was speaking as he launched a new cryptocurrency business, having previous derided cryptocurrencies, saying in 2021: “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam.”
Updated
Welcome and opening summary …
Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics, as the country comes to terms with a second attempted assasination bid aimed at one of the presidential election candidates in the space of a few weeks. Here are the headlines …
The suspect in the second apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump in as many months was charged in federal court on Monday morning with two gun-related crimes, as urgent investigations began into how he was able to get so close to the former US president.
Cellphone records showed Ryan Wesley Routh camped out near the golf course for about 12 hours, with food, before being confronted by a Secret Service agent. Ronald Rowe Jr, the US Secret Service acting director, said Routh did not fire any shots.
Trump added to the already tense atmosphere around the US election campaign by making highly inflammatory remarks, explicitly blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for inciting the attack and calling them “the enemy within”.
Biden told reporters on Monday that he did not yet have a full report of the Sunday incident at Trump’s Florida golf course, and was thankful Trump was “OK”. He said: “There is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the state was launching its own investigation.
Updated
