When Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as veep for the Democratic presidential ticket, advocates for healthcare reform felt a jolt of electricity.
Here, they saw a man who proclaimed healthcare a “basic human right”, reformed medical debt collections, and who laid the groundwork for expanded government insurance and denied corporate health insurers contracts with Medicaid, a state-run health insurance program for the poor. Walz even once joined Harris at an abortion clinic in support of abortion rights.
It was a sense of possibility some had not felt since the Obama era, and hard for some to contain their excitement.
Read the full story here: Tim Walz pick excites hopes of taking US healthcare beyond Obamacare era
The Democratic National Committee has announced its first ad campaign since Kamala Harris selected Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate.
The DNC will run more than 80 billboards in English and Spanish in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, it said.
The billboards will show Harris and Walz with the words “fighting for you”, and claim that Donald Trump and JD Vance are “out for themselves”.
Two Democratic lawmakers with experience on intelligence and security committees have called for information about the latest breach to be released publicly.
The California Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell, posted on social media that he was seeking a briefing on the breach, and that while he considered Donald Trump “the most despicable person ever to seek office” – someone who had also called for hacking in the past – “that doesn’t mean America ever tolerates foreign interference”.
Adam Schiff, the Democrat of California, urged Department of Homeland Security officials to declassify information on the foreign nature of the hack. Schiff said the US intelligence community “moved much too slow to properly identity the hacking and dumping scheme carried out by Russia” in 2016 and “should act quickly here”. He also said that in that year:
The Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, took advantage of it and then sought to deny it, much to the detriment of the country.
Updated
The New York Times has confirmed it received the same or similar trove of Donald Trump presidential campaign documents as other media outlets did, after Microsoft confirmed that a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.
For the third US election in a row, hacked campaign information by a foreign power is now likely to feature as potential disruption. The Trump campaign has said its email systems were breached by hackers working for Iran.
Politico reported getting emails from someone who identified themselves only as “Robert” and sent internal campaign communications and a 271-page-long research dossier on Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, that was part of his vetting process. The news organisation said the Vance profile was “based on publicly available information”.
Updated
Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, will hold his first solo campaign event in Los Angeles on Tuesday where he will deliver remarks to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 2024 convention.
Later that day, Walz will deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport Beach, California, the campaign said.
On Wednesday, he will speak at a campaign reception in Denver and then later that day, in Boston.
On Thursday, he will speak at campaign reception in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.
Trump to sue DoJ for $100m over Mar-a-Lago raid – report
Donald Trump plans to sue the US justice department for $100m for executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate to retrieve classified government documents, according to a report.
The former president’s lawyers intend to sue the department for its conduct during the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022, amid the federal investigation into his alleged retention of classified records, Fox News reported on Monday.
Trump’s legal team will argue that the DoJ was engaged in a “clear intent to engage in political persecution” when it searched his property, the report says. It quotes Trump attorney Daniel Epstein as saying:
What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself – he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law and believe that you should hold the government accountable when it wrongs you.
When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.
Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.
The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.
Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracy theories.
Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.
Read the full story here: Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation
Elon Musk to interview Trump on X
Donald Trump will sit down with Elon Musk for an interview tonight, nearly a month after the tech billionaire and owner of X officially endorsed the Republican presidential candidate.
Trump will participate in the interview on X, scheduled for 8pm ET on Monday, from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida while Musk will be in Austin, Texas.
According to Musk, the interview will be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!”
Live conversation on 𝕏 with @realDonaldTrump & me at 8pm ET tomorrow
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2024
This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2024
If you have specific questions & comments, post them under the chat.
Following Musk’s takeover of X, formerly Twitter, he restored Trump’s account, which was suspended by the platform’s former owners following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress by his supporters.
The Financial Times/the University of Michigan poll, which found that voters felt more positive about Kamala Harris’s handling of the US economy than Joe Biden says “as much about how badly Biden was doing as it does about how well Harris is doing”, Erik Gordon, a professor at the university, told the paper.
The poll is good news for previously-anxious Democrats, but their worries aren’t over because voters still see themselves better off with [Donald] Trump as president, and most voters think of their interests first and grand policy questions second.
Harris trusted more than Trump on US economy, poll finds
Good morning US politics readers. More Americans trust Kamala Harris with the US economy than they do Donald Trump, according to a new poll that suggests the former president losing the advantage he had over Joe Biden.
The poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that 42% of voters trust Harris on economic issues – one percentage point ahead of Trump.
The survey “marks a sharp change in voter sentiment following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the White House race” last month, the Financial Times reported. While Trump’s numbers were unchanged from last month’s poll results, Harris’s standing was a seven percentage point improvement compared with Biden’s numbers in July.
But three weeks into her presidential campaign, Harris has yet to unveil her economic policy platform, and Democrats are warning the Democratic presidential candidate and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, that they must solidify their economic message before Republicans bring it back to the forefront of the campaign. On Saturday, Harris said she would be releasing an official economic policy platform in the coming days. She told reporters:
It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy.
Here’s what else we’re watching today:
The Senate and House are out.
8pm ET. Donald Trump will sit down for a conversation with the tech billionaire and owner of X, Elon Musk, who has become a vocal supporter of the Republican presidential nominee.
