Trump and Poland's Duda may meet in battleground state of Pennsylvania, sources say
Polish president Andrzej Duda might hold talks on Sunday with Donald Trump in the US election battleground state of Pennsylvania, a senior Polish official said on Wednesday, confirming an earlier Reuters report that the two men may meet.
Any such meeting would mark a rare instance of a foreign leader appearing alongside a US presidential candidate on the campaign trail. Pennsylvania, which is home to a sizeable Polish US population, is one of several key battleground states in a tight race for the 5 Novermber US presidential election.
Duda, a nationalist who forged close ties with Trump when he was US president in 2017-21, will attend the unveiling of a Solidarity monument, the senior Polish official said, adding that Trump had also been invited to the event. However, it was not yet known whether Trump would attend, reports Reuters.
“If President Trump comes, then of course there will definitely be an opportunity to exchange a few words and talk about the most important topics,” the Polish official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. These topics would include Polish-US relations, Poland’s security and the war in Ukraine.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the organisers of the event in Pennsylvania responded immediately to Reuter’s requests for comment.
Two sources, also speaking on condition of anonymity, had earlier told Reuters that Trump planned to appear with Duda in Pennsylvania on Sunday, though they stressed that the joint appearance had not yet been finalised.
One of those sources said Trump and Duda were expected to appear at a Polish-US Catholic shrine in the suburbs north of Philadelphia. News of the visit was first reported by LevittownNow.com, a local outlet in Pennsylvania.
The chief of Duda’s chancellery, Małgorzata Paprocka, later clarified that both Duda and Trump had been invited by organisers to the same event. “Whether President Trump will be there, I do not have one hundred percent confirmation at this moment. We, as the president’s office, are not organisers of this meeting,” she said.
Trump and Duda, whose term in office expires in 2025, have described themselves as friends. The two men last met in New York in April.
American politics often has wild deviations from the norms of other major democracies and one of the most striking differences is set to be on display in this year’s election – the performance of its domestic Green party.
There are elected Greens at the national level in the UK, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and Australia, sometimes helping form governments, and yet the US Green party has only ever had a handful of state-level representatives (it currently has none) and has never had a federal election winner.
Of about 500,000 elected positions in the US, from school boards and township supervisors to the presidency, the Green party holds just 149. There’s little indication there will be an influx of left-leaning Greens in November’s elections, which will include local and state polls, as well as the headline presidential race in which Jill Stein is the party’s nominee for a third time.
“It’s been a story of complete failure,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who argued the most consequential Green party impact has been as “spoilers” helping Republicans in close elections, such as Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000 and Stein’s in 2016. There’s a small chance such a scenario could play out again in this year’s tight contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. One poll this month had Stein leading Harris among Muslim-American voters in three key swing states of Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Middle East Eye reported.
“Normally the Greens aren’t important but they were in 2016, they cost Hillary Clinton a couple of blue wall states, and they were in 2000,” Sabato said. “Why vote for them when Democrats are also concerned about climate change? All you’re doing is helping Republicans. Without them we might not have had the Iraq invasion, we might not have had Donald Trump.”
Others are more sympathetic, pointing to the winner-takes-all nature of US politics and the well-funded machinery of the two-party system that makes it hard for third parties, including the Green party and the Libertarian party, to break through. Notably, however, the UK’s Green party did win four seats in first-past-the-post Westminster elections in July.
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The US House will vote Wednesday on a government funding bill that appears doomed to fail, with less than two weeks left to prevent a partial shutdown starting 1 October.
Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced Tuesday that the chamber would move forward with the vote, despite vocal opposition from members of his own conference. The announcement came one week after that opposition forced Johnson to delay a planned vote on his bill, and the speaker has only faced more resistance in the days since.
Johnson’s proposed bill combines a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
“Congress has an immediate obligation to do two things: responsibly fund the federal government, and ensure the security of our elections,” Johnson said Tuesday. “I urge all of my colleagues to do what the overwhelming majority of the people of this county rightfully demand and deserve – prevent non-American citizens from voting in American elections.”
Critics of the Save Act note that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and they fear such a law would hinder legitimate voters’ efforts to cast their ballots. House Democrats remain overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal, and only a few of them are expected to support Johnson’s bill on Wednesday.
Given Republicans’ narrow House majority and Democrats’ widespread opposition to the bill, Johnson can only afford a handful of defections within his conference on Wednesday. But a number of hard-right Republicans have already indicated they will vote against the bill, as many of them have rejected any kind of continuing resolution amid demands for more budget cuts.
Hard-right Republicans worry that, once the vote fails on Wednesday, Johnson will turn his attention to passing a more straightforward continuing resolution without the Save Act attached, although the speaker has dismissed those concerns.
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Teamsters to meet on Wednesday to consider potential US presidential endorsement
The Teamsters executive board is meeting on Wednesday in Washington as the 1.3 million-member union decides who to endorse in the 2024 US presidential election, reports Reuters.
The Teamsters’ endorsement could be a factor in a handful of battleground states that will decide the 5 November election, including Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, where union membership is strong.
Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said on Monday the union could make its pick as early as Wednesday after union representatives met with vice-president Kamala Harris. They met her Republican rival Donald Trump in January.
“We can’t kick this can down the road,” O’Brien said, according to Reuters.
The Teamsters, one of the country’s largest unions, represents truck drivers and a wide range of other workers including airline pilots and zookeepers.
The union endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, as well as Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It picked Republicans in some earlier elections.
Most major unions have endorsed Harris, including the United Auto Workers union. The AFL-CIO, which represents 60 unions and 12.5 million workers, endorsed Harris in July.
O’Brien spoke to the Republican National Convention in July, but also criticised Trump for suggesting that workers who go on strike could be fired.
Reuters reports that the union will present the results of polling of its members to the executive board on Wednesday, which is one factor in its decision making.
Asked if the union could opt not to make an endorsement, O’Brien said:
We are going to look at any and all options … We need to make sure we make the right decision.”
A 22-year-old woman who became an abortion rights advocate after she was raped by her stepfather as a child tells her story in a new campaign ad for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, reports the Associated Press (AP).
Hadley Duvall says in voiceover that she has never slept a full night in her life – her stepfather first started abusing her when she was five years old, and impregnated her when she was 12. As she speaks, images of Duvall as a child flash on the screen. The soundtrack of the ad is a song by Billie Eilish, who endorsed the vice-president on Tuesday.
“I just remember thinking I have to get out of my skin. I can’t be me right now. Like, this can’t be it,” Duvall says. “I didn’t know what to do. I was a child. I didn’t know what it meant to be pregnant, at all. But I had options.”
The ad is part of a continued push by the Harris campaign to highlight the growing consequences of the fall of Roe, including that some states have abortion restrictions with no exceptions for rape or incest. The AP reports that women in some states are suffering increasingly perilous medical care and the first reported instance of a woman dying from delayed reproductive care surfaced this week. Harris lays the blame squarely on Republican nominee Donald Trump, who appointed three of the conservatives to the US supreme court who helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
The AP reports that Duvall blames Trump, too. “Because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, girls and women all over the country have lost the right to choose, even for rape or incest,” she says in the ad. “Donald Trump did this. He took away our freedom.”
Her name is Hadley Duvall, and you need to hear her story. pic.twitter.com/ub5Kmhi5pD
— Dr. Jill Biden (@DrBiden) July 17, 2024
During the presidential debate on 10 September, Trump repeatedly took credit for appointing the three supreme court justices and leaned heavily on his catchall response to questions on abortion rights, saying the issue should be left up to the states. He said he would not sign a national abortion ban.
“I’m not signing a ban,” he said, adding that “there is no reason to sign the ban.”
But he also repeatedly declined to say whether he would veto such a ban if he were elected again – a question that has lingered as the Republican nominee has shifted his stances on the crucial election issue.
Duvall of Owensboro, Kentucky, first told her story publicly last autumn in a campaign ad for the governor’s race in her home state supporting Democratic governor Andy Beshear. Duvall’s stepfather was convicted of rape and is in prison; she miscarried.
Beshear won reelection, and Democrats have said Duvall’s ad was a strong motivator, particularly for rural, male voters who had previously voted for Trump, reports the AP.
Duvall is also touring the country to campaign for Harris along with other women who have been telling their personal stories since the fall of Roe, joining Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro last week.
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Harris calls Ohio bomb threats ‘crying shame’ in talk with Black journalists
On Tuesday, 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”.
She said that her “goals” are that there be no reoccupation of Gaza, no changing of the territorial lines in Gaza and “an ability to have security in the region for all concerned in a way that we create stability”.
Harris was also asked about the false and racist tropes that Donald Trump and JD Vance have espoused about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which has resulted in bomb threats and lockdowns in the city.
“It’s a crying shame. I mean, my heart breaks for this community,” Harris said. “There were children, elementary schoolchildren, [for whom] it was school photo day. Do you remember what that’s like, going to school on picture day? Dressed up in their best, got all ready, knew what they were going to wear the night before. And had to be evacuated. Children. Children.”
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Trump rejects 'rambling' label and mocks climate change
Donald Trump touched on a range of topics during his town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that included – according to The Hill – the fate of the US auto industry, climate change (which he mocked) and a rejection of the ‘rambling’ label he’s been given by Kamala Harris.
The Hill reports that, after giving a long and winding answer on Tuesday during which Trump spoke about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, appeared to confuse Bagram airbase with an oil reserve in Alaska and threatened to impose a 200% tariff on cars imported from Mexico, the Republican presidental nominee argued his words were more “productive” than what Harris says on the campaign trail.
“The fake news likes to say, ‘Oh he was rambling.’ No, no. That’s not rambling. That’s genius,” Trump said of his own comments. “When you can connect the dots. Now, Sarah, if you couldn’t connect the dots, you got a problem. But every dot was connected. And many stories were told in that little paragraph.”
Trump also mocked climate change. According to The Hill, Trump said that the biggest threat to the public was not climate change but nuclear warfare.
“Not that the ocean is going to rise in 400 years an eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Is that good or bad?’ I said, isn’t that a good thing if I have a little property on the ocean? I have a little bit more property, I have a little bit more ocean.”
Donald Trump held his first campaign event on Tuesday since the thwarted assassination attempt over the weekend, telling a packed 6,000-seat arena in Flint, Michigan that the assassin “couldn’t even get a shot off” while describing the Secret Service’s “great” response to the threat.
During a town hall moderated by former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump took audience questions about manufacturing and the economy, among other issues. Like his first appearance after the attempt on his life in July – also a rally in Michigan – Trump appeared ready to return to business as usual on the campaign trail, and his supporters were eager to see him in action.
Susan Moore and Christopher Moore, who came to the rally from Mundy Township, Michigan, got in line at 9.30am for a chance to get inside their first Trump event, where doors didn’t open until 3pm. “The atmosphere is just electric,” Susan Moore said.
Clark Grognan, a career auto worker from Whiteford, Michigan, said Bill Clinton’s “horrible” presidency convinced him to vote Republican, and that it was “exciting” to meet so many like-minded people.
“God is not done with President Trump,” Huckabee Sanders said as she opened the event, calling Trump “what our country desperately needs”.
Auto workers were among the most common attendees. Several people wore “Unions for Trump” merchandise, and some had UAW T-shirts.
Flint, like much of Michigan’s east side, has been a bastion of the US auto industry. Trump began the night by lamenting the rise of Mexican car manufacturing. He championed new tariffs, saying about Mexico: “We’re not going to let them sell one car in the USA.”
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'Only consequential presidents get shot,' says Trump, at first public event after assassination bid
Good morning and welcome to our coverage of the run-up to the US presidential election.
The fallout from Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump is continuing. Last night the former president made his first public appearance since the incident, which occurred while he was playing golf in Florida.
“It’s been a great experience,” the Republican presidential nominee said in an evening town hall in Flint, Michigan, about holding events with thousands of supporters. But he also went on to call running for president “a dangerous business” akin to car racing or bull riding.
“Only consequential presidents get shot at,” he said.
The crowd chanted “God bless Trump!” and “fight, fight, fight” as US Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect him.
Sunday’s incident, for which a suspect has been charged with possession of a firearm as a felon, comes two months after Trump was lightly injured when a gunman opened fire on him at a Pennsylvania rally.
In other developments:
On Tuesday, 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.
JD Vance defended his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets during a Tuesday rally, saying that “the media has a responsibility to factcheck” stories – not him. The rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, came two days after the Ohio senator told CNN host Dana Bash it was OK “to create stories” to draw attention to issues his constituents care about, regarding inflammatory and unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had eaten residents’ pets.
The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service on Tuesday were investigating the origin of suspicious packages that have been sent to or received by elections officials in more than 15 states, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or that any of the packages contained hazardous material. The latest packages were sent to elections officials in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Rhode Island.
Donald Trump is planning to appear with Polish President Andrzej Duda in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Sunday, according to two sources familiar with the plan, reports Reuters. The dual appearance is not yet finalised, said one of the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss plans that are still private. But if the dual appearance goes forward, it would mark a rare instance of a foreign leader appearing alongside a US presidential candidate on the campaign trail.
A false claim circulating on social media that Kamala Harris was involved in an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft dubs Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.
America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its voter turnout operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter. The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election.
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