Obama and Springsteen to join Harris rally as Trump hits back at ‘fascist’ claim – US politics live | US politics

Project 2025, the 900-page ultra-conservative roadmap that details how the former president Donald Trump and his allies would restructure the US government if he is elected, has specific implications for Black Americans, according to a new report.

The Legal Defense Fund (LDF), an organisation that fights for racial justice, recently released the most in-depth legal analysis of Project 2025’s impact on Black communities. It highlights how Black Americans would be harmed due to policies that would weaken anti-discrimination laws; dismantle the Department of Education; threaten Black political power; increase the use of the death penalty (which disproportionately affects Black people); and exacerbate health disparities caused by environmental racism.

Karla McKanders, the director of the LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI), the in-house research thinktank that produced the report, said she wanted people to understand the “larger impact that Project 2025 will have on our democracy and undermining our democracy”.

The report is written in plain language and has been shared on social media, McKanders said, as the organization wants it to be available to a wide audience. “The most important part of the report is how Project 2025 will have an impact on individual lives and how those individual lives will be upended through the policy proposals.”

Of note, she said, are the report’s chapters on education equity and political participation.

Donald Trump implored supporters at a Georgia rally to vote for him – with an early ballot or in-person on election day – in a state that will be crucial in the presidential election.

“Just vote – whichever way you want to do it,” Trump said at the event on Wednesday organised by conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk and the group he founded, reports the Associated Press (AP).

But the rest of former president’s speech and the lineup that preceded him framed the 2024 presidential election in stark terms. The Republican nominee insulted Kamala Harris while Kirk and other speakers used religious references and described the vice-president and her Democratic party as evil, reports the AP.

Democrats “stand for everything God hates,” Kirk said, calling the Trump v Harris choice “a spiritual battle”.

“This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way,” Kirk told the 10,000 or so Georgians, who at one point, the AP reports, joined Kirk in a deafening chant of “Christ is King! Christ is King!”

Harris, who is a Baptist, used a CNN town hall in Philadelphia to describe Trump as fascistic, further crystallizing the nation’s polarized posture with less than two weeks before the 5 November election.

The Trump campaign strategy of encouraging supporters to consider every voting method is a turn from when blamed his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden on mail ballots; the number of people voting early has surged this year.

Over 1.9 million voters have cast early ballots in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Biden. Voters nationwide have returned more than 23 million advance ballots in the 2024 general election. That has broken records in multiple states, partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Trump’s direction.

“You need to go to every single person you know and say, ‘Are you voting for Trump?’” Kirk told the crowd.

The AP reports that the 31-year-old Kirk has an outsize role in this year’s election, using his online presence and the organisation he founded, Turning Point Action, to make himself one of the nation’s most recognisable conservatives and a central part of Trump’s operation. The former president has put a particular emphasis on courting younger men, the “bro vote,” trying to reach them through podcasts, social media and influencers such as Kirk.

The rally, at the Gas South arena in Duluth, was filled with Turning Point’s signature pyrotechnics, reports the AP. Trump used it to feature three figures who represent the populist coalition he is trying to assemble: Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ran his own campaign for president this year before endorsing Trump; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who announced this week that she is joining the Republican Party; and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator who has attracted millions of followers with his bravado-heavy social media presence. He added country music singer Jason Aldean, whose Try That in a Small Town single was a reaction to urban protests.

Carlson whipped the crowd into a frenzy by reassuring them that liberals and political elites were the “bizarre minority” in US politics, while Trump’s “Make America Great Again” supporters comprise a “gentle, tolerant” movement.

According to the AP, Carlson cast Trump as America’s “Dad” and said a Trump victory over Harris would mean “Dad’s home! And he’s pissed!” – while also being a “big middle finger wagging” at “the worst people in the English-speaking world.”

Later in the night as Trump spoke, some in the crowd shouted out, “Daddy’s home!”

Keir Starmer’s hopes of meeting Kamala Harris before the US presidential election have faded, Downing Street has said.

The UK prime minister said last month he aimed to meet both presidential candidates before American voters go to the polls on 5 November.

He told reporters who had travelled with him to New York that it would be “very good to meet both [Trump and Harris] at some stage” before the US election. “We’ll just have to see what’s possible,” he said.

Starmer did secure a meeting with Donald Trump while in New York for the UN general assembly in September. He and the former US president had a two-hour dinner, where they were joined by David Lammy, the foreign secretary.

A government source said on Thursday that hopes of arranging a meeting between Starmer and Harris had faded. “We’re obviously a number of days out from the campaign and I suspect both candidates are focused on the election,” they said.

LA Times editor resigns after owner blocks presidential endorsement

Lois Beckett

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, refused to allow the newspaper’s editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president, the former editor of the paper’s opinion section told a media news outlet on Wednesday.

Mariel Garza, a veteran California journalist who has worked for the Times’ editorial board for nearly a decade, resigned from the paper in protest of Soon-Shiong’s decision, she told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).

“In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,” Garza told CJR.

Harris is the first presidential nominee from California in any political party since Ronald Reagan.

In a long social media post on X, apparently written in response to Garza’s comments, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation”.

Soon-Shiong wrote that the paper’s opinion editors, who typically endorse one candidate each for a range of local and national offices and explains why each candidate is the best pick, were asked to instead present “clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, [so] our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.

“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” Soon-Shiong wrote. He ended with the words: “Please #vote.”

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Luca Ittimani

Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.

Either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, more than 1.9 million voters have cast early votes in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Democrat Joe Biden, while North Carolina also set a new record of more than 1.7m despite the chaos caused by Hurricane Helene last month.

At an event in Georgia, Trump celebrated the state’s record-breaking vote levels, and at a separate rally urged his supporters to “just vote – whichever way you want to do it.”

Kamala Harris will stage a star-studded rally on Thursday alongside Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, as she launches a series of battleground state concerts to juice support in the final days of a nail-biting US presidential election.

The Atlanta rally, Harris’s first campaign stop with the only black president in US history, comes as an already bitter campaign is reaching new heights with the Democrat openly calling her Republican rival, Donald Trump, a “fascist” who presents a clear and present danger to US national security, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The contest remains a toss-up, with polling in all the swing states within the margin of error, and both campaigns have been pulling out the stops to win over undecided Americans and bank early votes ahead of 5 November.

According to AFP, the Harris campaign said it planned gigs in all seven of the swing states expected to determine who wins the White House, with Springsteen back out on the campaign trail Monday in Philadelphia with Obama.

The rock legend, whose socially conscious paeans to working-class struggle have made him one of the most popular artists in the US, has long lent his blue-collar appeal to Democratic campaigns.

Joe Biden walked out to the Springsteen song “We Take Care of Our Own” when he accepted victory in the 2020 election. The rocker – known as “The Boss” – has campaigned for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Obama in the past.

Obama has been making his own headlining appearances in support of Harris and other Democrats in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, five of the country’s most closely-fought states.

Party officials hope the former president, still one of the most popular Democrats on the national stage eight years after leaving office, will reverse eroding support among black voters, which is behind where it was for Biden in 2020.

In other developments:

• Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.

• Pennsylvania’s highest court allowed people whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to cast provisional ballots, likely affecting thousands of early voters. The decision was another defeat for the Republican National Committee’s legal campaign, after it argued some provisional ballots cast during the April primary should have been rejected.

• A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men. The Trump campaign called the allegations by Stacey Williams “unequivocally false”, calling it a fake story “contrived by the Harris campaign”.

• Trump appeared in Zebulon, Georgia, with lieutenant governor and 2020 election denier Burt Jones, at a faith-focused event his campaign dubbed a “Believers and Ballots town hall”. Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk, for providing hurricane relief where he claimed the federal government did not.

• Writing on Truth Social, Trump assailed John Kelly as a “a bad general” gripped by “pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, on Tuesday said he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. Two retired army officers said they agreed with Kelly, while Republicans including the governor of New Hampshire dismissed the comments.

• Kamala Harris denounced Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to him. In a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, the Democratic nominee jumped on Kelly’s claims. Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the president also agreed with those calling Trump a fascist.

• Harris repeated the fascist claim during a televised town hall with undecided voters in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In response to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asking her: “Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?”, Harris answered: “Yes, I do.” Trump was invited to attend the same town hall but declined.

• Trump stayed in Georgia for a rally in Duluth with guests Tucker Carlson, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. He escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris, saying she was “crazy” and inviting voters to tell his opponent: “‘You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.’”

• China-linked social media bots are targeting Republicans including Marco Rubio, according to new research from Microsoft, while a senior US intelligence official said groups in Russia created and helped spread viral disinformation targeting Tim Walz.

• The US justice department warned Musk’s Super Pac that the billionaire and Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports. Musk, who has thrown his support behind Trump, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.

• Harris’s campaign announced she will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021.

• Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz voted early along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus. Leaving the voting booth in St Paul, Minnesota, Walz said his vote was “an opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward”.

• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, rallied Democrats in Florida, marking a break from his recent stumping in more competitive states including Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both parties expect the Sunshine state to once more swing for Trump, but the Harris campaign’s rare foray drew attention to the close Senate race between the Republican incumbent and Democratic challenger.

• The Los Angeles Times opinion editor resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the masthead from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Mariel Garza said she was standing up against the decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner. In a social media post, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House”.