<The prospect of a President Kamala Harris facing down a Republican-controlled Senate is coming into focus as she rises in the 2024 contest, even as GOP hopes of capturing the Senate grow because of improving polling in a pivotal Montana race.

A Republican-controlled chamber could thwart Harris’ nominees to fill out her administration and the courts, along with her legislative agenda. Top Senate Republicans told NBC News she would need their sign-off to secure votes on any judicial nominees, including for the Supreme Court. And some Harris supporters worry that without a united Congress, she would struggle to get much done legislatively.

“I honestly believe she has to have both the House and the Senate in order for her to be able to get anything done. Anything at all,” said Frankie Veltri, a retired 77-year-old voter in Goodyear, Arizona. “And if she doesn’t have one or the other, putting more emphasis on the Senate ... she will never be able to do anything that she said she would do, and then it will be the same old grind. You know, ‘She made all these promises and she didn’t do them.’ I mean, that’s evident with Biden.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a Judiciary Committee member who is running to be Senate GOP leader when Mitch McConnell retires after this year, said Harris would “absolutely” have to negotiate judicial and Supreme Court nominees with his party if Republicans control the Senate — and not assume they would get votes.

“They’re not going to be able to nominate the most radical people like they would under their current scenario. So if they want them to get any floor time, they would have to enter into a negotiation with us,” Cornyn told NBC News in an interview.

The prospect of a split Congress looms over a possible Harris win even if Democrats have a strong year and sweep every swing state. To capture the Senate, Republicans have to flip just two seats in solidly red states — West Virginia, which Democrats have conceded, and Montana, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester trails in most polls — while holding seats in GOP-friendly Florida and Texas.

Under that divided-government scenario, Harris would be the first president since 1989 to enter office without her party controlling both chambers of Congress. It would put her in uncharted waters given the polarization between the two parties in recent decades, with no guarantee that any major judicial nominees, Cabinet picks or legislative items would get a vote.

While a split Congress would require the two parties to negotiate on must-pass bills like funding the government and authorizing the Pentagon, Harris’ other legislative pursuits — including Medicare drug price negotiations, cracking down on grocery price gouging and new investments in housing — would be at the mercy of a Republican Party that has aggressively criticized her ideas.

“It’s always a challenge when you’ve got divided government like that,” said Rep. Nanette Barragán, D-Calif.

She said capturing the House would at least help Democrats “set the agenda” for a Harris presidency. But, she added, “it definitely poses a challenge if we don’t have the Senate.”

Charlie Veltri, the husband of Frankie and an Arizona voter, projected confidence that Harris at the top of the ticket will help Democrats down the ballot. But he said what happens in Montana, which could be the tipping-point Senate race, affects everyone.

“I think about [Democratic Sen.] Jon Tester and the fight he’s going through, and some of the other people. And it’s not enough just to have Ruben [Gallego, the Democratic congressman and Arizona Senate nominee] win. We’ve got to have the rest of them, because if we don’t, we don’t control the Senate,” he said. “It’s not enough just to win the presidency. She’s got to have control of the Senate, at the very minimum.”....>

<....On the Supreme Court, it’s unclear when another vacancy will occur. But history suggests Harris would get at least one — the last president who didn’t get any new justices was Jimmy Carter. And if it’s a GOP-led Senate, Republicans would control a floor vote.

“Particularly with the judiciary, because we have the power of confirmation, I think they’re going to have to think long and hard about who they submit and whether or not they think they could get them cleared through the Senate,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., who is also running for leader.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would have seniority to be the next Judiciary Committee chair and said he intends to claim the position if Republicans win control. He declined to say how he would handle picks for judges and justices in a potential Harris administration.

“I’m not going to presume doom and gloom, but needless to say it’ll be more difficult” to confirm judges in a Republican-led Senate, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a Judiciary Committee member.

Asked if he worries about a repeat of Merrick Garland in 2016, when a GOP Senate refused to give President Barack Obama’s nominee a vote, Blumenthal said, “I worry about it, but there’s a limit to how irresponsible they can be.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., another Judiciary Committee member, said, “I don’t know that they’d confirm none, but they’d certainly make it an obstacle course for her.”

A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment when asked about the importance of the Senate, the prospect of divided government and how she would seek to work with Republicans if they win control.

Henry Wade, a Maricopa, Arizona, City Council member, said he’s “confident but concerned” about Democrats’ prospects of holding the Senate.

“I think that they can do it. ... I know I’m out working hard, canvassing and talking to people and passing out signs,” he said. “We’ll see what happens. I’m going to keep doing my part.”

Louis Olivas, a retired professor in Tempe, Arizona, acknowledged that Republicans could “potentially” stop Harris’ Supreme Court nominees if they took the Senate. But he said he’s “not worried at all” about them stonewalling, because “she’s a great negotiator.”

“They’re not going to shut her down for four years,” Olivas said>

Don't count on it.

<By any honest assessment, there are millions of people living in the United States who are not authorized to be here. Some of them crossed the southern border from Mexico. Many arrived on visas and never left.

When Donald Trump left office in January 2021, there were probably about 10.5 million foreign-born residents of the United States who were here illegally. Analysis from the Migration Policy Institute suggests that nearly two-thirds of them had been here for at least a decade. About a third have kids who are citizens.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, like to talk about a much larger number of immigrants, however. Vance, for example, lamented at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday that the United States “cannot import 25 million illegal aliens and expect that that is going to be the path to prosperity.” We will get to the point about prosperity in a bit, but let’s focus for now on that number: 25 million, an increase of nearly 140 percent over the figure in 2021.

It is flatly wrong, a combination of misrepresenting data on immigration and rhetorical inflation. There have been millions of immigrants stopped at the border since President Joe Biden took office — but the operative word there is “stopped.” Many were turned away, particularly under a covid-era policy allowing the government to do so. Many remain in detention. There have been several million who have been granted release by government officials to await adjudication of their requests for asylum, but because of that allowance, they are not in the country illegally even if they entered the country illegally.

There have been immigrants who entered the country illegally and remain without authorization, perhaps 2 million of them since 2021. For obvious reasons, this figure is hard to estimate, but the government has methods for doing so.

Among those in the country legally are the Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, who have been the focus of Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent weeks. Unrest and natural disasters in that country drove an increase in Haitians seeking to move to the United States, an increase that was accommodated in part by granting them temporary protected status (as articulated under federal law). The Biden administration also extended an immigration parole program to cover immigrants from Haiti, as the Migration Policy Institute explained in November.

At that same rally in North Carolina, though, Vance rejected the idea that these administrative decisions equaled legality.

“The media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … are here legally,” he said. “What they mean is that [Vice President] Kamala Harris used two separate programs — mass parole and temporary protective status — she used two programs to wave a wand and to say, ‘We’re not going to deport those people here.’ ”

“Well,” he continued, “if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

Complaints about the way in which the administration extended parole were originally used in the House impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Then, the complaint was that Mayorkas “paroled aliens en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention.” Now, since Harris is the person Trump’s running against, Vance has her doing the wand-waving.

Regardless, the slippery slope here is immediately obvious. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier pointed out, even if the decisions made by the administration were overturned, “the people who entered under are certainly not here illegally under any interpretation of the law.” Vance, he added, is “abolishing the difference between legal and illegal.” Which is the point. It is up to Vance and Trump to decide who counts as “illegal,” not the law — and therefore it is Vance and Trump who can decide which people will be subject to the massive deportation effort that Trump has authorized....>

<....Immediately, we see the threat posed to the Haitian immigrants living and working legally in the United States. In a number of small cities and towns, including Springfield, Ohio, right-wing agitators have targeted immigrant workers for criticism online, even in the face of pushback from Republican elected officials and local leaders. There’s a fundamental presentation of immigrants as undesirable, even when local communities are eager for workers — seeing them as a path to prosperity, to use Vance’s words — and the immigrants used legal channels to remain in the United States.

Were Trump president, would his deportation force follow guidelines articulated by government lawyers? Or would they target those who attract Trump’s and Vance’s attention?

When Trump was president, his administration implemented a process by which foreign-born naturalized citizens could see their citizenship stripped away, a process that Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted in October. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that thousands of U.S. citizens had come into the Trump administration’s sights; just because the government had said they were American and welcome to stay did not mean that Trump’s government would grant them those same accommodations. This process, Miller promised, would be “turbocharged” if Trump wins in November.

Vance’s comments in North Carolina were an effort to pivot the criticism he’s faced since his rhetoric and that of his allies preceded a spike in threats against people and property in the state he represents. But the rhetoric isn’t subtle. As with citizenship, a second Trump administration would determine what pathways to residency are “illegal” and therefore invalid and, presumably, those immigrants would then be targeted for potential deportation. It’s inherently subjective — which would probably be seen by many Trump supporters as a benefit. If immigrants think they might be next to have their status rescinded, to hear a knock on the door from federal agents, those individuals might decide to leave the country of their own volition.

Vance’s allies and supporters are already on the hunt for examples of other immigrants who fail to adhere to their standard of acceptability — often Black and Hispanic immigrants fleeing unrest and insecurity. The message the potential next vice president offered them Wednesday was simple: All bets are off.>

<To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you wage mimetic warfare with the unsubstantiated smear you’ve got, not the one you want. It just so happens that the one most recently deployed by Donald Trump is the kind that proliferates these days on X.

When Trump declared, seemingly out of nowhere, during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets of the people that live there,” he drew incomprehension, followed by widespread ridicule, from mainstream audiences. What came next was a furious and revealing national conversation on important questions of immigration, race, assimilation, work ethic, diet, traffic violations, duty (to struggling native-born constituencies and to newcomers alike), the limits of tolerance, the inevitability of its opposite, the nature of truth, and much else besides. But on the social-media platform that had provided him with the paranoid talking point in the first place, the discussion and reproduction of Trump’s outburst immediately gave way to the naked and sustained expressions of racism that have become emblematic of the website over the past two years.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference.

“If I had to summarize the intent of X’s algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” Sam Harris remarked this week on his Making Sense podcast. “The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is. And the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist. If you could pipe the X algorithm into your brain through Neuralink, I think you’d probably jump off the table and go out and buy a Cybertruck and then join a white-supremacist militia. That’s the vibe I get when I spend a few minutes scrolling the homepage.”

Consider a story shared, in the aftermath of Trump’s tirade, by a woman named Rebecca Christophi posting under the handle @rquietlyreading. She generated 1 million views and 11,000 likes for an anecdotal screed about her undergraduate experience sharing a dorm room with an older Haitian student. The roommate had a boyfriend back in Haiti whom she talked with on the room’s landline until very late at night: “It was torture. I could not sleep, I was barely able to stay awake in classes, but I was afraid to say anything to her.” When she finally confronted her roommate, asking her to take the phone out the door to talk, the young Haitian woman “started to cry—how she was affecting me seemed to never have occurred to her. The complete lack of consideration and her shock when I addressed it was hard to wrap my head around. It’s just not how most Americans function.”

The post continues: “This is the issue, isn’t it? If you are bringing in thousands of ppl from other countries whose values/ideals differ drastically from yours, you are inevitably going to change your homeland.” At the end, she adds a “side-note” accusing the roommate of stealing clothes from her, and saying she “also cried when I asked her about it.”

When one user pushed back—“I am sorry that your parents did not prepare you to tell your roommate when you wanted to go to bed. They failed you. You are projecting this failure onto the American value system in a way that is quite unfair”—that response led to a round of even more vehement and explicit racial hatred. “You’re so smug when you know the problem is that blacks are loud, obnoxious, and inconsiderate. They also struggle with impulse control. You wouldn’t tell a black that was loudly and rudely blasting music on the subway to cut that s*** out because he’ll probably try to kill you,” someone wrote. “Nigs are gonna nig,” wrote another account that was verified through a paid subscription.....>

<....I reached out to Christophi to ask if she’d intended her post to be read as invective against Haitians, and she replied in an email that no, it was just “a story,” its telling triggered by “the recent happenings in Springfield”; she “certainly did not expect so many people to see it or to respond with the hatred and vitriol that they did.” She said that people have since threatened her life and livelihood—which of course is egregious.

And yet, in her message to me, she also doubled down on what she said were “accurate details about the effect of mass immigration.” If, she wrote, “the details coming out of Springfield are conveyed accurately, they only support my statements, for example, the mayor and city council appear to be receiving financial kickbacks for replacing a third of the population of their town with immigrants.” This is a perfect example of the “Great Replacement” theory in action—the idea that immigrants are being welcomed as part of a plot to steal control of the country away from white voters—and it is not true. There is no evidence that the residents of the town are being in any sense replaced.

The choice of a quote from G. K. Chesterton that she shared at the end of the email dampened the sympathy her message might have otherwise elicited: “The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.”

I am far from a hypersensitive snowflake on constant lookout for racial grievance, nor am I someone who could plausibly be accused of a lack of concern over creeping censoriousness particularly on the previous iteration of Twitter. On the contrary, I believe that maximal tolerance of free expression is crucial to American democracy, and I am deeply skeptical of both formal and informal censorship. I believe that it is vital for all of us—not just college students—to be put in contact with views we passionately disagree with. But through his revealed beliefs and example, Musk has debased the argument about the value of free speech and reduced the terms of this debate to its crudest possible units. With his nearly 200 million followers—a sizable portion of whom amount to cultists—he is responsible for tuning X’s digital culture into a gratuitously repulsive frequency. Astonishingly active and available on the platform that he so bombastically controls, he not only enables bad actors; he also personally praises and promotes them.

Just a week before the presidential debate, Musk wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” about a conversation between Tucker Carlson and the amateur historian and Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper. In that talk, Cooper claimed that Hitler had killed millions of Jews unintentionally, and that Winston Churchill was the real villain of the Second World War. Musk has since deleted the post, but such an endorsement from X’s apex user makes the spread of anti-Semitism not just likely but inevitable.

One noxious meme that has been circulating lately depicts a smirking, hook-nosed figure wearing a kippah and rubbing his hands together. Behind him is a wall of cardboard boxes labeled Open Borders, Feminism, Cultural Decay, Globalism, “The Holocaust,” Hate Crime Laws, Climate Change, Gender Bending, Usury, Porno, and so on. “It’s all Jewish. Literally all of it,” a verified account claimed.

This image, too, is a reference to the Great Replacement theory, and the idea that Jews are behind it. These sorts of grotesque posts predate Musk. But under his stewardship, they have absolutely lost their taboo. How could they not? As my colleague Yair Rosenberg has reported, Musk has endorsed that conspiracy theory himself.

Last year, a Jewish user responded to anti-Semitic content on X by posting, “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right’: You got something you want to say? Why don’t you say it to our faces.”....>

<....A small-time white-nationalist account wrote back to attribute anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:

Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s*** now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

You want truth said to your face, there it is.

Rosenberg pointed out that “his exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six words: ‘You have said the actual truth.’”

Here’s something else that Musk, Trump’s wealthiest and most prominent backer, lamented not long ago: “Racism against white people is the only kind of discrimination that’s allowed.” As the depressing discussions of Haitians—and Jews and Black people in general—have made so inescapably plain, from the top of the Republican ticket down to the most obscure account on X, that is anything but true.>

<The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Friday that nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races.

The court’s decision comes after officials uncovered a database error that for two decades mistakenly designated the voters as having access to the full ballot.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder, had disagreed on what status the voters should hold. Richer asked the high court to weigh in, saying Fontes ignored state law by advising county officials to let affected voters cast full ballots.

Fontes said not allowing the voters who believed they had satisfied voting requirements access to the full ballot would raise equal protection and due process concerns.

The high court agreed with Fontes. It said county officials lack the authority to change the voters’ statuses because those voters registered long ago and had attested under the penalty of law that they are citizens. The justices also said the voters were not at fault for the database error and also mentioned the little time that’s left before the Nov. 5 general election.

“We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer stated in the ruling.

Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters can demonstrate citizenship by providing a driver’s license or tribal ID number, or they can attach a copy of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization documents.

Arizona considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, a system coding error marked nearly 98,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996 — roughly 2.5% of all registered voters — as full-ballot voters, state officials said.

The error between the state’s voter registration database and the Motor Vehicle Division would not have impacted the presidential race. But that number of votes could tip the scales in hotly contested races in the state Legislature, where Republicans have a slim majority in both chambers.

It also could affect ballot measures, including the constitutional right to abortion and criminalizing noncitizens for entering Arizona through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry.

In a post on the social platform X, Richer thanked the court for quickly reviewing the case and Fontes for partnering with him to address the error.>

There is reason to believe so if he comes up loser at the ballot box:

<During an early August appearance on ITK, radio host Charlamagne tha God predicted that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the 2024 presidential race, the "corrupt" and "illegitimate" U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the election results and put GOP rival Donald Trump back in the White House. And Charlamagne isn't the only one who fears that possibility.

In an article published on September 20, Salon's Heather Digby Parton also warns that because of the Roberts Court, Trump could lose the election yet return to the White House anyway.

Parton argues that if MAGA Republicans stir up enough chaos after the election and the matter is litigated to the High Court, the GOP-appointed justices cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

"The election deniers had hoped to have some secretaries of state and other top election officials in their pocket for this election, but they have failed to win at the ballot box. So being reduced to the county level is something of a failure," Parton explains. "Still, there is little doubt that this could cause delays and dissension — which is part of the plan. We know what Trump is capable of after a loss when it comes to riling up his voters. He's already planting seeds everywhere about the election being rigged against him. He did the same in 2016 and 2020."

Parton also examines "concerns about the role of the House speaker should the Republicans maintain their majority."

"The current Speaker Mike Johnson wrote an amicus brief back in 2020 on behalf of Trump asking the Supreme Court to essentially overturn swing-state results," Parton notes. "There are concerns that if he is the speaker next January 6, he will use the power of his office for Trump's benefit once again. Politico reports there are several possibilities, ranging from changing the rules, which merely exist by tradition, for the counting of the votes on January 6 to asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the ECRA (Electoral Count Reform Act). That would inevitably end up in the Supreme Court as well."

Parton adds, "In fact, it appears that if they really push this, all roads lead to the High Court, which is terrifying…. This is not a court I would trust to be judicious when it comes to this presidential election."

The good news, according to Parton, is that "Democrats are prepared with legal responses every step of the way."

"But if the election is very close and it ends up in the Supreme Court as Bush v. Gore did, there is a very good chance they will hand the presidency to (Trump)," Parton warns. "They clearly have no care for whatever legitimacy they once had.">

<Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance during her first (and now only) debate against Donald Trump last Tuesday was one of the most dominant in modern American history. In many ways, it was a mirror image of President Biden’s massive failure of a debate against Trump months earlier. Harris utterly exposed the corrupt ex-president for the racist, ignorant, demagogue, and blusterous aspiring dictator that he truly is.

As I and others have explained, Donald Trump is best understood as a political version of a professional wrestling heel (villain) who lies, cheats, steals, and will do anything to win as he gains power from the boos and ire of the crowd. Trump is truly excellent in the role; the mainstream news media and political class are still unable to effectively grapple with Trump and his MAGA movement because they refuse to understand fascism and Trumpism as forms of performance theater.

In the context of professional wrestling, Kamala Harris would be what is known as a “shooter”: someone who has actual fighting skills, usually from boxing, martial arts, or Olympic wrestling, and can force an opponent to submit during a match if need be. In the world of professional wrestling “shooters” are among the most feared opponents because they have the potential to embarrass and cause serious physical harm to their opponents if they choose to.

During their debate, Harris metaphorically did exactly that. She is a former prosecutor who deftly presented her case against Trump as being unfit for office before an audience of tens of millions. In all, “The Prosecutor” versus “The Felon” was and is a marquee matchup right out of professional wrestling — and it more than lived up to its billing.

However, during the debate, there was something else happening with the 78-year-old Donald Trump. What transpired was disturbing and all too familiar for Black and brown Americans (especially those of a certain age with the lived experience of surviving the Jim and Jane Crow white supremacist terror regime). Trump’s face and overall emotions and demeanor were a portrait of White (male) rage. Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman, was humiliating Trump publicly and showed no outward fear of him. This was a type of narcissistic injury to the country’s first White president, his MAGA supporters, and others who are materially and psychologically invested in the white authoritarian political project. For many Black and brown folks (and I imagine a good number of white people too), watching Trump be made so uncomfortable by a Black woman was beautiful even though his menace and threat were palpable.

It has been reported that Trump uses misogynistic language when he talks about Harris in private. Trump’s nephew alleges that he uses racial slurs when discussing Black people in private as well. One does not have to be psychic to imagine what two-word phrase was repeatedly going through Trump’s mind during his losing debate against Harris on that Tuesday evening.

In the week or so since his defeat by Kamala Harris, Trump and his campaign had a choice to make. Would they pivot to “the issues” and be more “disciplined”? Or would they double and triple down on their feral horror politics? Digging deeper into that old ugly offal and waste-filled bucket of racism, white supremacy, hatred against Black women, and other vile things and smearing it on themselves as they attack Harris, the Democratic Party, and by extension its voters, and specifically Black and brown people?

The question is, will that approach backfire among those potential voters who are outside of the 47 percent of Americans who consistently support Trump and the MAGA political cult? The political polls and other data strongly suggest it may – but that is far from guaranteed.

As part of their feral racist white supremacist attack strategy, Trump and his agents have both explicitly stated and implied Harris is dumb and have repeatedly attacked Harris’ personhood, suggesting that she is some type of racial “fraud” or trickster who cannot be trusted because she identifies as a Black woman whose mother is South Asian....>

<....On Sunday, Vance echoed a racist slur about Harris, fried chicken, and curry. Trump and Vance are now going so far as to advance the conspiracy theory that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio are stealing (white) people’s dogs, cats, and other pets and eating them like some type of barbaric savages. This is an extension of the now standard right-wing talking point that President Biden, and specifically Harris in her role as the fictive “border czar,” have orchestrated an “invasion” across the “Southern border” of brown and Black migrants, refugees, and undocumented immigrants who are rampaging in white communities, as they rape, murder, “steal jobs” and commit all manner of crimes like a band of “Hannibal Lecters” and drug cartel members against (white) Americans.

JD Vance has been forced to publicly admit that his attacks on the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio that they are stealing people's dogs and cats and eating them is a lie. But this has not stopped him: Vance is now saying that Haitians are disease carriers who are polluting and infecting the United States with HIV and tuberculosis.

Trump and his agents’ race war fantasies and weaponized conspiracy lies have, predictably, resulted in bomb threats and other terrorist menacing in Springfield against the Haitian community and other non-whites. Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time before a Haitian or other person of color is injured or killed because of Trump and his propagandists’ racist lies and provocations. In a powerful new essay in the Financial Times, Ed Luce condemns Trump and his hate campaign, writing that “Trump and Vance are playing roulette with real human beings."

Trump’s feral political campaign is an example of what is known as “old-fashioned” racism. This type of racism was largely believed to have been vanquished from the mainstream of American life by the successes of the civil rights movement.

Social scientists and other experts have shown that since the 1960s American society was changing to one where the “new racism” (“symbolic racism”) with its code words and dog whistles about Black people and their supposed “bad culture,” “laziness,” “welfare queens”, and how they violate traditional norms of patriotism and “American values” would be the predominate language of white racism in this country.

The Age of Trump with its white backlash politics and resurgent white supremacy combines both the new racism and the old racism. As seen on Jan. 6, and in Charlottesville, Buffalo, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and many other places across America, this mix is synergistic and highly combustible. As philosopher Jason Stanley explained to me in a recent conversation here at Salon, “Donald Trump has made explicit xenophobia acceptable, and explicit racism more acceptable. But it is still the case that in America you need some code words for racism.”

In the last week or so since their debate, I have been returning to how Harris publicly humiliated Trump, a very rich, very powerful, and very dangerous White Man, during their debate. If Harris defeats Trump and the MAGA movement in November that will be a historically supreme humiliation for him and those who flock to his banner. Not too long ago, for a Black person, especially a woman, to humiliate, resist, or otherwise assert their dignity, humanity, and autonomy against a white man in public (or private) would have been de facto illegal and punishable by death and the lynching tree (and even worse acts for a woman).

This fact and experience live simultaneously alongside the reality that America is no longer that country in the same way because of the great triumphs and sacrifices of the Black Freedom Struggle and the leading role that Black women played in it.

Vice President Harris is very brave as she carries that legacy and burden on her shoulders, risking her health and safety as she is marching forward against the tides of American history while also being propelled forward by them to become the country’s first Black and South Asian woman president.

On Election Day the American people will decide if they are going to channel the best parts of who they are as a people and protect multiracial democracy and freedom by supporting Kamala Harris or will they succumb to their worst impulses and some of the worst parts of their past and national character by putting Donald Trump back in the White House.

Who are we really? We will soon find out.>

<The ratfcking of Georgia's elections got a big boost on Friday when, as expected, (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution):

The Georgia Election Board’s Republican majority voted Friday to require a hand count of all ballots after polls close on election night, a new requirement that could delay results of the presidential race.

County election directors universally opposed the eleventh-hour counting mandate, saying it would undermine voter confidence in the election results. They said results will come in more slowly, ballot box seals would be broken and manual counts could be inaccurate.

Which is, of course, the point. The State Elections Board was hijacked by election-denying MAGA fanatics who dedicated their service to rectifying the mistake Georgia made by not voting for the former president* back in 2020. They sought out anything that would work to mess with the results the next time around, preferably anything that would delay the count and, therefore, the certification of a Democratic victory. The ultimate goal would be to toss the election into the House of Representatives which, by rule, could vote to hand the election over to the former president*. Hence, the move to hand-count is little more than a way to throw sand in the gears. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has not been shy about what he's seeing in plain sight. From his office:

“Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “The General Assembly knew that quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence and passed S.B. 202, but misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.” But this Elections Board doesn't care what Raffensperger thinks. It answers to a higher authority—and a lower class of human being—down in Florida.

Eric Hovde is a smiling stretch of California that the Republicans parachuted into Wisconsin in an attempt to beat incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. Hovde's campaign was sucking wind even before Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel came along to drop this rock on its head.

Banco Azteca, the 10th largest financial institution in Mexico, has had its share of problems in recent years. Accused in past news stories of having links to the Mexican drug cartel.

Dropped as a financial partner by some U.S. banks because of "risk and compliance concern. And now caught up in a Texas bribery scheme with an American congressman. But Sunwest Bank, the Utah-based financial institution run by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, doesn't mind doing business with it. In December, Banco Azteca sent $26.2 million in cash to Sunwest on four airplane flights as part of a massive currency conversion called "repatriation," records show. This sounds like an institution with which you don't want to do any kind of business whatsoever if you plan on running for the Senate from a state where you neither live nor work. It's tough to bail out once you've bailed in....>

<....The strangest story of the week comes to us from Kentucky, where a local sheriff allegedly took his complaints about a local judge to...another level. From the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle:

Stines allegedly walked into the judge’s outer office, told court employees and others gathered there that he needed to speak with Mullins alone. The two then went into the inner office, closed the door and those outside heard shots. Stines walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. Court employees were on the sidewalk outside the courthouse in shock following the shooting. Stines was handcuffed in the foyer of the courthouse. Officials expected the investigation to continue for several more hours.

In 2022, a lawsuit was filed in the local U.S. District Court by a woman alleging that a local deputy offered to trade sexual favors for "favorable treatment." From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

In the suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court, Sabrina Adkins says Deputy Ben Fields met her in a district judge’s chambers late at night six times last year and forced her to engage in unwanted kissing, oral sex and intercourse. “Plaintiff was coerced and compelled to comply with defendant Fields’ advances” given his “position and power and because she could not afford to pay for the ankle monitor and did not want to return to Letcher County Jail,” the suit says.

The suit said the abuse occurred in Mullins's chambers, and Stines was a named defendant in that he was charged with failing to train the deputy properly.

In late June, the suit says, he asked her to meet at the courthouse after dark and took her into a judge's chambers, telling her there were no cameras there. He allegedly then took off her ankle bracelet and told her she would not have to pay any fees but could remain on home incarceration. Between late June and December, Fields met her there at night or in the early morning about six times and allegedly sexually abused her there. The suit says he would put her bracelet on before court appearances. She said after certain unnamed persons at the courthouse reported Fields was having inappropriate contact with her and provided text messages proving it, he filed a complaint against her that she wasn’t complying with the terms of home incarceration to punish her and “in an attempt to save his reputation.”

It's still too early in the current investigation to conclude that this previous episode had anything to do with what happened this week. But we'll be keeping our eyes on it....>

<For Las Vegas homeowner Yolanda Perkins, the threat of foreclosure constantly looms over her head.

“The cost of living is so high, I live from paycheck to paycheck and I can barely make it,” she told Las Vegas ABC affiliate KNTV. “I make over $5,000 a month and I can not make it.”

Perkins’ situation is one that’s becoming increasingly common across the state, reflecting bigger nationwide trends. The latest data from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau shows 1.4% of Nevada homeowners are between 30 and 89 days delinquent on their mortgages — a number that has been trending upward since the lowest point in June 2021.

Moreover, foreclosure activity in the Silver State is climbing. Research from real estate data aggregator Attom shows through the first half of 2024, Nevada was fourth in foreclosures nationwide, with 0.19% of homes in active foreclosure, ranking behind New Jersey, Illinois and Florida. The rate is higher than the national average, where 1-in-794 homes are in foreclosure.

Although mortgage defaults and foreclosures are on the rise, it doesn’t mean homeowners are powerless to do anything about it. Here’s what you need to know about default and foreclosure, and what options are available to stay in your home.

Homeownership is a major investment which requires significant assets to maintain each month. According to UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate, the average household income for homeowners is $90,979 per year. But between inflation, cost of living data, and home sales data, that money may not have the same spending power compared to years ago.

Complicating things is the rate of inflation in Nevada — the one thing all experts agree is weighing homeowners down. Inflation is the measurement of price increases on goods and services, such as groceries, energy, and medical care compared to a previous point in time. The U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee shows Nevada ranks 11th in increased monthly inflation costs, spending $31,369 more annually compared to the same time in 2021.

With inflation rapidly increasing, it complicates how homeowners budget for their residences. When calculating how much mortgage a homeowner can afford, the FDIC recommends homeowners budget for two to three times their annual income, with a target mortgage payment of between 25% and 28% of their monthly income. At the average income of $90,979, that puts the target price range between around $182,000 and $273,000.

Is this a realistic target price? Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that this may not be the case anymore in Nevada. As of June 2024, the Zillow home value index for all homes in Nevada was up to $443,103 — down from the peak of $459,325 in July 2022. At the current prices, the Lied Center says nearly 1-in-4 are paying 35% or more of their monthly income on mortgage payments each month.

A mortgage can go into default when a homeowner breaks the terms of their contract, with the most common reason being missed payments. Each contract differs on how many payments a homeowner needs to miss before they enter into default.

The most current data from the CFPB shows 1.4% of Nevada homeowners are between 30 and 89 days delinquent on their mortgages, which can put them in default. Only 0.6% are 90 days or more delinquent, matching the national serious delinquency rate.

If your home is in default and at threat of foreclosure in Nevada, you have time to work with your lender to find an alternative to eviction. The process of foreclosure can only start after 120 days have passed since missing their payment. In the first notice of non-payment, lenders must provide homeowners a list of alternatives to explore to keep them in their home.

The first step towards resolving a default is calling your lender and asking for options to work with them on getting back to current. The CFPB says you should have information prepared to explain your situation, such as why you’re behind on payments, how long you anticipate the problem will last, and how much you have in current assets.

If they cannot provide you with a mortgage assistance program, assistance is still available through housing counseling agencies approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A counselor can help you determine what programs you may qualify for, what help may be available from other organizations, and assist you with budgeting to help get back on track.>

<The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced on Friday it will conduct a probe on potential "fraud and illicit financial activity linked" to Democratic Political Action Committee (PAC).

The organization in question is ActBlue. The committee said in a statement that recent reports about the organization "raise concerns about the threat of fraud and evasion of campaign finance law by individuals exploiting online contribution platforms."

"ActBlue had not implemented standard procedures to guard against identity theft and fraud such as requiring a Card Verification Value (CVV) to process online transactions until it received criticism for not doing so," the body added in a publication on X where it justifies the probe.

As a result, the body led by Rep. James Comer gave Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen a hard deadline to provide information that could shed light on the matter. Concretely, the requested any Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) "filed or relating to transactions occurring on or after January 1, 2023, to the present, containing the term 'ActBlue,' which relate to money laundering, counterfeit credit/debit card, credit card or debit card fraud, false statements, wire transfer fraud or identity theft." The deadline to do so is October 4.

In another passage of the document, the body says that the PAC is being investigated in several states in relation to "contributions allegedly made via the platform fraudulently without the reported contributor's awareness." "In Virginia, reports of contribution activity facilitated through the ActBlue platform included 'some cases in which single donors made tens of thousands of separate donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,'" the letter adds.

The letter comes just a day after a high profile event in which the PAC was involved and featured a conversation between former talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Vice President Kamala Harris. The PAC's last publication on X calls users to join the event, saying that it was "excited to help power" it. It did not publicly react to the investigation at the moment of writing this article.>

<The FBI intercepted a threatening letter intended for Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson’s staff office on Friday morning, according to a statement released by the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.

The letter contained a white powder and was signed, “United States Traitor Elimination Army,” the statement said. The FBI seized the letter in Reno, Nevada, where there is a U.S. Postal Service distribution center. Law enforcement officials are investigating the threat and testing to identify the substance.

“This incident is the latest tactic in a nationwide trend of threats and intimidation toward election officials. But we will not be intimidated,” Henderson said. “I am grateful for the swift action of postal workers and law enforcement and the perseverance of election workers who show up and do their jobs every day despite all the rhetoric and risk. We love them. We owe them. They are heroes.”

The chairs of both the state Republican and Democratic parties responded to news of the threat on Friday.

“This is ridiculous and inexcusable,” said Rob Axson, chair of the Utah Republican Party. “There is no place for violence and dangerous intimidation or threats.”

Axson said the nation’s “founding principles celebrate discourse and disagreement.”

“I commend all those who are investigating threats and attacks against candidates and officials. It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum one finds themselves, this behavior of violence and political terrorism we see playing out these last few months is inexcusable evil and unjustifiable,” he said.

Utah Democratic Party Chair Diane Lewis said she “wholeheartedly” condemned the attempt at intimidating the state’s election workers.

“The professionals who handle our votes are integral to the democratic process, and threats made against election workers undermine the foundations of our democracy,” she said. “I am grateful that those at the Lieutenant Governor’s Office are safe, and that United States Postal Workers and the FBI were able to address the situation.”

Lewis said the “culture of political intimidation, stoked” by former President Donald Trump “must end.”

“Election-denying conspiracy theories put us all at risk, and I call on people of all political affiliations to condemn those who spread them,” she said.

Lewis did not address the recent assassination attempts against the former president.

The FBI has launched an investigation after suspicious packages were sent to election offices in more than 20 states this week, according to reporting from CNN, The Associated Press and Axios.

The states include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Wyoming and now Utah.

During his PBS press conference on Thursday, Gov. Spencer Cox expressed concern over the increase in threats of political violence in Utah, saying there has been a “significant increase in threats of violence” against Utah officials, Cox said, including to himself and his family, and against lawmakers and judges.

“(I’m) concerned about our country right now — the extremes that we’re seeing in political discourse that is leading, of course, to political violence,” Cox said.

As of July 15, the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center had recorded 73 threat incidents toward Utah elected officials in 2024. Despite only covering 7½ months of the year, this total far exceeds the 49 threats recorded in 2023 and the 55 incidents recorded in 2022 and 2021.

The number of threats against members of Congress have increased tenfold over the last several years, jumping from 900 in 2016 to nearly 4,000 in the first year of the Trump presidency, to over 9,600 in 2021 following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, per reports.

The number of United States Capitol Police threat assessment cases fell to 7,500 in 2022 and rose again to 8,000 in 2023, the agency reported. Federal judges have also experienced an increase in serious threats against federal judges across the country — rising from 179 in 2019 to 457 in 2023. More than 40% of state legislators have experienced direct threats over the past three years, according to one national survey.>

<It didn’t take long for someone to bring up the cats.

Only minutes into Vivek Ramaswamy’s town hall last night in Springfield, Ohio, a man who identified himself as Kevin raised his hand. He felt awful seeing news clips of children in Haiti with “flies in their eyes,” he said. But what about the people here in Ohio? And what about “the motherless kittens in the alleys of Springfield. Where are the mothers?”

Kevin was referring, of course, to the pets—the cats and dogs and birds—that some Springfield residents allege have been eaten by Haitian immigrants in town. There is zero evidence that this is occurring, as city officials have repeatedly stressed. Still, the rumor persists—as one woman told me ominously, “You don’t see as many geese and ducks” in the park these days. And Ramaswamy—the failed Republican-primary candidate turned Donald Trump surrogate, who stood in the center of it all wearing a dark suit, his hair combed into a demi-bouffant—was not exactly there to fact-check. He’d come, he said, as a unifier. “My hope is that, through open conversations, through actually speaking without fear, we actually not only solve the problems of this country but, dare I say, unite this country as well,” he told his audience. Yet Ramaswamy’s purported unity play felt more like a Festivus-style airing of grievances: a “community reconciliation” event that reconciled nothing, and from which nobody was going to benefit—other than, of course, Ramaswamy. Even as Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have seized on the Springfield pet rumor to attack Democrats on immigration policy, the falsehood has also become a handy vehicle for this hungry young Republican to audition for political promotion. And with Trump promising to make his own appearance in Springfield, last night’s “conversation” attained the status of a warm-up act.

It takes a potent blend of chutzpah and ambition to run toward a fire set by your own allies, and declare yourself the hero who will put it out. Ramaswamy, a native Ohioan, had announced himself the man for the job over the weekend. “I live less than an hour from here,” he told the crowd. “I don’t actually blame any of the 70,000 people in Springfield” for the problems in town, he said. “I blame the federal policies.” Last night, he promised an “open, unfiltered conversation”—although he encouraged people to be respectful, he asked them not to censor themselves.

They heard him. Some 300 people, mostly white, squeezed into a hot basement meeting hall—plus an overflow room—at the Bushnell Event Center downtown. Roughly half of the attendees wore MAGA gear. Earlier, I’d seen a man carrying an AR-15-style rifle who’d posted himself outside the venue, lending the proceedings a deeply sinister vibe.

Ramaswamy had met with a few leaders in the Haitian community beforehand, he said, and he’d invited them all to his town hall. But no Haitian immigrants spoke up at the event, and I saw none. (“I think I saw one in the back,” Ramaswamy told me afterward.)

That the community of Springfield faces challenges is not in dispute. According to estimates from city officials, some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have come to this once economically depressed town in recent years, welcomed by employers looking for workers. Primary-care facilities have been overloaded. Schools are struggling to handle the influx of students for whom English is a second language. Traffic has gotten worse.

But these were not the problems that Trump referenced during the presidential debate when he declared, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”—thus aiming a 10,000-watt spotlight on this small city west of Columbus, and causing a string of frightening threats, school closures, and canceled community events.

Ramaswamy, whose Indian-born parents were the beneficiaries of U.S. immigration policy, last night refused to directly address the accounts repeated by Trump and Vance. “I’m not here to talk about the issues that the media has really loved to obsess over,” he told me and a handful of other journalists before the town hall. I could almost hear my fellow reporters’ eyeballs rolling.

Instead, as he explained, Ramaswamy was determined to engage in a more noble effort: promoting harmony in Springfield—though, if that sentiment was in good faith, he was soon disabused of the notion. “I was a little concerned about the topic of this conversation, the vow for unity,” one man told Ramaswamy. “One thing we should be united on is there simply are too many mass migrants in this town."....>

<....The town hall’s moderator was a MAGA celebrity in her own right: Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty. But her only job during the event appeared to be passing the mic around, and reining in unruly speakers with a gentle pat on the shoulder. One after another, locals stood to share their concerns—about skyrocketing rent, bad Haitian drivers, and the new Amazon facility, which would bring only more newcomers to town. One woman said a 22-year-old Haitian man was in her daughter’s high-school class; another claimed that her daughter had been chased by a Haitian man wielding a machete.

Springfieldians are tired of being called racist, speakers said. They’re not angry at the Haitians for wanting a better life, but the community doesn’t have the infrastructure to support them. Most Haitian immigrants in Springfield came legally; still, the audience cheered when Ramaswamy suggested that a second Trump administration would bring about historically large deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“Git ’em gone!” a man wearing a cowboy hat said, from a row behind me. “If it was up to me,” another man said, “we’d send them away and start all over.” One of the few Black people in the audience, a woman named Chrissy, took the mic to say she understood that the Haitians were struggling in their home country, but there really were too many here: “The biggest problem is they don’t know how to drive!” she said.

At one point, a man named Bruce Willmann, who is affiliated with a religious nonprofit called the Nehemiah Foundation, made a pitch to Ramaswamy: Would he donate to the group’s new program to teach English to Haitian immigrants? The crowd erupted in boos. “Those are lies!” someone shouted. An angry-looking woman grabbed the mic after Willmann. Organizations like his “have contributed” to bringing in immigrants, she said. “When does it stop?” To Ramaswamy, she pleaded, “You’re here, Vivek. What do we do when you’re not here anymore?”

“When will you come back?” attendees asked Ramaswamy over and over again—during the event, and in the hallway afterward. Some of the people I spoke with had expected specifics. “It was a step in a direction. I don’t know if it was the right one,” Brock Engi, a 28-year-old biracial Springfield native, told me. “I think it may get worse in the city before it gets better.”

The only solution Ramaswamy urged was Trump. Joe Biden’s administration caused the problems in Springfield, he told the crowd, which murmured its agreement. “You don’t always have a chance to change things, but this time, in about 50 days, you actually do,” he said.

Ramaswamy didn’t commit to donating to Willmann’s organization, but he did pledge to donate $100,000 to a local nonprofit. After that, Ramaswamy said, “I don’t know what comes next for me.” But he seems to have a pretty good idea. Ramaswamy has been angling for a status upgrade, telling reporters that he’s interested in a “substantial” administration role if Trump wins the election in November. He’s also open to filling Vance’s seat for Ohio in the Senate. “I think there’s a role for Vivek to do anything he wants,” Justice, his Moms for Liberty co-host, told me.

I found Willmann, the director of Nehemiah, outside looking frazzled. There are two “legitimate” discussions to be had about the problems in Springfield, he said. One is about immigration rules and limits. “On the flip side, there are 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in our city, and they’re here, and they have needs,” he said. “What are we going to do about them?” Wellman’s organization has set up free English classes with child care so that Haitian parents can attend with their children. As a result, he has received threats on social media, and someone on X doxxed his wife.

I asked Willmann whether the town hall would have been more productive if some members of the Haitian community had shown up. He shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t come here if I was a Haitian.”

After the event, I walked with Ramaswamy through the kitchen of the event hall, surrounded by beefy security guards. How did it go? I asked. “I feel like it went well,” he said. “I thought it was productive.” When we emerged from the back entrance, a throng of attendees was waiting, snapping photos and screaming praise for Ramaswamy, who waved and smiled like a starlet on a red carpet. “We need you!” people begged. “Run for governor!” “I love you guys,” he told them, before ducking into a waiting black car.

The town hall may not have been a success for Springfield, but it was certainly a win for its instigator.>

<Donald Trump’s top advisers have insisted for months that his 2024 bid for the presidency is the most disciplined campaign he has ever run. They pointed to fewer leaks, less infighting and a more deliberate strategy honed by seasoned professionals and driven by data.

But with just 45 days left until the election, the past three weeks reveal whatever control and self-restraint helped launch Trump’s third presidential campaign has largely disappeared in the crucial final stretch.

On the Monday before Trump’s first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, his running mate shared on social media, without evidence, the claim that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets — one Trump repeated the following night on the debate stage, in a moment that instantly went viral. Trump’s chaotic and widely criticized debate performance coincided with an already tumultuous period for the former president. He had recently welcomed back into his orbit Corey Lewandowski — his former 2016 campaign manager who was exiled after allegations of sexual assault by a donor — and had begun traveling around the country with Laura Loomer, a far-right ally who has spread conspiracy theories. Two failed apparent assassination attempts, as well as additional threats against him, have also left the freewheeling president constrained by a mushrooming security presence and has made staging campaign events more challenging.

Meanwhile, after Taylor Swift endorsed Harris following the debate, Trump picked a fight with the international icon, posting last Sunday on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — the sort of impulsive, impetuous display that has become increasingly common in recent weeks. In a single 24-hour span at the end of last month, for example, he amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act; falsely accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden; promoted tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory; hawked digital trading cards; and became embroiled in a public feud with staff and officials at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Swift attack was especially concerning to Trump’s advisers, who are worried about attracting female voters. But Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump was more popular than Swift — citing a Siena poll — and that Gold Star families who had lost loved ones serving in the military had invited Trump to Arlington Cemetery.

By early last week, Trump and his No. 2, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), found themselves trying to reverse-engineer evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, arguing they were simply trying to draw attention to the real problem of immigration. They also used inflammatory rhetoric to blame Biden and Harris — whom Trump called “the enemy from within” — for what the Republican ticket claimed was inflammatory rhetoric that lead to the apparent attempts on Trump’s life.

“The through-line,” said one Trump confidant, “is his campaign is 96 percent him.”

“It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump,’” this person continued, referring to the oft-quoted unofficial motto of Trump advisers. “It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

This account of the Trump campaign’s recent frenetic period is based on interviews with nine aides, advisers and others familiar with the situation, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details.

In many ways, the past three weeks or so have been quintessentially unruly and turbulent, and hark back to Trump’s first, quixotic presidential bid in 2016, when he alarmed allies and party elders before pulling off an improbable victory.

In addition to the shenanigans and controversies that have become a hallmark of Trump’s political career, the current period has also ushered in a degree of policy incoherence. He has vacillated on abortion — an issue that has bedeviled him since Roe v. Wade was overturned with the help of Supreme Court justices he appointed — while abruptly announcing a proposal for federal coverage of IVF treatment.

Facing pressure to compete with Harris, who is promising various tax credits if elected, Trump promised Tuesday in a social media post to “get SALT back” — an apparent reversal of the 2017 law on state and local tax deductions that he implemented as president. He also offered an incoherent answer recently on how he would handle child care expenses, suggesting that his proposed sweeping tariffs would bring down those costs.>

<....With polls continuing to show a close contest, Trump’s team remains optimistic he will prevail in November. They privately point to what they believe are sufficient organizing and canvassing efforts, despite having outsourced much of the activity. They believe strong voter registration numbers, especially in Pennsylvania, and early ballot requests favor them, as well as the fact that the economy remains the top issue for many voters. They also remain confident that immigration will be a leading issue and one where the American public prefers Trump over Harris.

Tony Fabrizio, the campaign’s pollster, has continually shared internal data that is more promising than public data, which has shown Harris receiving a modest bounce after the Democratic convention, campaign advisers say.

And there is a sense among some strategists, both Democratic and Republican, that Trump is impervious to the sort of chaos and controversies that might sink another politician. Marc Short, chief of staff to former vice president Mike Pence, described the recent events as “a wash.”

“It’s a statement to the loyalty among his core voters that, despite however rocky events may be, it doesn’t falter,” Short said. “There’s definitely a core audience that loves him, and I think there’s also an audience that’s tuned out the drama.”

But some advisers have also tried to remind mid-level staffers that the race is going to be close no matter what, saying that Trump is “in a position to win” and urging them to “tune out the noise.”

“President Trump has built the most powerful and most professional team in political history and, under his leadership, has overcome every single obstacle in his way,” Cheung said. “From the illegal witch-hunts to the weaponization of the justice system to an assassination attempt to the political coup of replacing Biden, the enemies of America will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House.”

Heading into the summer and especially as the polls have tightened following Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from the race, Trump’s top advisers — including Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — have been thrust into the very tumult and knife-fighting that defined his past campaigns and which they explicitly sought to avoid, multiple advisers said.

Wiles and LaCivita are still in charge — and most Trump allies expect them to survive until Election Day — but critics say their more tenuous hold on the campaign has led them to weigh concerns about self-preservation over attempting to rein in their boss.

Some on the campaign blame the newfound drama on the arrival of Lewandowski who — still fresh from 2021 allegations of unwanted sexual advances — was already viewed with skepticism by some of Trump’s family members and allies.

Lewandowski soon began telling others he was in charge of the campaign as the chairman, which was not true. He raised questions with Trump and others about how Wiles had spent money, particularly on advertisements, forcing her to spend time defending herself internally. Others on the campaign defended Wiles as frugal. And he also began calling staffers in swing states and asking if the campaign was being well-run — outreach that filtered back to Wiles and rattled other staff.

Privately, Wiles has told allies that it has been difficult to see the close-knit, disciplined operation that she helped build face such tumult and infighting in the final months — and that the past few weeks have been among her least favorite since joining the operation in 2021.

Lewandowski did not respond to detailed questions but slammed The Washington Post for its reporting.

“Same old nonsense that has already been written by the Washington Compost,” he wrote in a text message. “Your obsession with my volunteer efforts just demonstrates your continued hatred of Donald J. Trump and prove you will stop at nothing to try and prevent him from becoming the 47th President of the United States.”

Cheung, meanwhile, said the campaign was all “rowing in the same direction.”

Loomer, too, has been a source of much frustration within Trump’s orbit. She accompanied him to the presidential debate in Philadelphia, and she also joined him the following day at events commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite previously pushing the false conspiracy theory that the attacks were an “inside job.”

Some outside advisers and donors called Trump to express their concern that her unofficial role is detrimental to the campaign. Trump finally distanced himself from her in milquetoast public remarks describing her as “a supporter” and a “free spirit.” He also promised advisers he would not regularly invite her to travel with him on his plane, and last weekend he privately referred to her as “crazy” to several people, according to someone familiar with comments....>

<....Trump has also begun to privately criticize Lewandowski, downplaying his role on the campaign and their relationship, three people familiar with his comments said.

Some campaign advisers are eager to move on from Trump’s and Vance’s unverifiable claims about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs — a potentially detrimental news cycle that has stretched into its second week — but also acknowledge that Trump rarely retreats, even when it might be politically advantageous to do so.

Baseless claims about immigrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets had already gone viral in far-right circles when Vance — who had also received several calls from concerned constituents — shared the allegation in a post on X on the Monday before the debate.

Though Trump and Vance did not talk about the issue before the debate — and though the topic never came up in debate prep — Trump repeated the claim following an exchange in which Harris mocked the size of his rally crowds.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

A campaign adviser said they were not shocked Trump mentioned it — “it was so salacious, and it was all over the news,” this person said — and added that the general issue of immigration is one that Trump and his team think ultimately benefits him.

A second campaign adviser added that the operation does not internally view the eating pets claims as damaging as many outsiders do. And Trump himself has said he plans to visit Springfield in coming weeks.

“President Trump and Senator Vance are highlighting the failed immigration system that Kamala Harris has overseen, bringing thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into communities like Springfield and many other across the country,” Cheung said.

Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist, said Trump is running a campaign intended to turn out his base, and he’s not surprised Trump and Vance have doubled down on the false immigration claims.

“Trump is directly communicating with millions of small-town voters that feel crime and immigration is totally out of control,” Reed said. “And he’s communicating with them in a way that normally they’re neglected. It’s an item in the news, he glommed onto it, he nationalized it, and he’s probably going to keep it up.”

Still, the campaign has found itself scrambling to alternately explain away or come up with excuses for the litany of false claims; a Post analysis found that Vance repeatedly shared misinformation about Springfield, despite his staff being told on the day of his first post that there was no verifiable evidence or news reports to support the claim.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN host Dana Bash last Sunday, when pressed on the issue. “Because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

He quickly sought to clarify his comments to Bash, telling her he was referring to “first hand accounts from my constituents.” “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning that we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he said.

Other turmoil has also bubbled up, and aides have recently struggled to focus the former president. Inside and outside the campaign, advisers and confidantes have urged Trump to define Harris more aggressively, including a few who say they are unconvinced that his chosen nicknames — “Comrade Kamala” and the deliberate mispronunciation of her name as “Kamabla” — are the right ones.

Campaign advisers also have been battling for weeks over sending out mailings to voters, according to multiple advisers. Trump is skeptical of the strategy entirely and would prefer to spend the money on television ads, the people said, while there have been disagreements over how much to spend on mail and what the messaging should be.

Allies have grown concerned that Trump and the Republicans are being outspent in almost every state — some by large margins — and that Democrats are far outraising Republicans. “The campaign has been smart with its resources and is implementing a strategic plan to maximize turnout and media impressions,” Cheung said.

Trump also spent part of last Saturday discussing whether he should participate in another debate against Harris, after saying he was not going to do it, according to people who spoke to him. Some, including adviser Kellyanne Conway, have privately been pushing him to do another debate, and he has not ruled it out despite publicly saying he won’t....>

<....Trump also spent several days after the debate calling allies to tell them how well he’d done, which struck some as defensive.

“I personally hope he debates again,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally. “I think the narrative is she’s smart, she’s talented, and I think she’s a mile wide and an inch deep, and it’s mostly happy talk.”

Trump has also struggled to adjust to his new reality of facing Harris, a Black and Indian American woman who is faring better against him in the polls than Biden was, according to someone familiar with his thinking.

On a recent Saturday night, Trump continued to complain to advisers that Biden had stepped aside.

“I don’t think he is ever going to give it up,” said one person who heard the gripes.>

<Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance faced immediate pushback Saturday over his promotion of false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, after issuing a provocative "challenge" during a campaign rally that overlooked a key fact.

Speaking at the Berks County Fairgrounds in Bern Township, Pennsylvania, Vance doubled down on controversial assertions about the immigrant community in Springfield that have been repeatedly debunked by local officials and journalists who have visited the city.

"I challenge you to go to Springfield, Ohio which has been overwhelmed by 20,000 Haitians. Go to any community that has been overwhelmed by Kamala Harris' illegal alien policies and tell me that these are stories made up by politicians," Vance told supporters.

However, Vance's "challenge" glosses over a crucial fact: numerous officials, including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and journalists throughout the nation, have actually visited Springfield and found no evidence to support the sensationalized "pet-eating" claims about Haitian immigrants that Vance and his running mate, Donald Trump, continue to promote.

Newsweek contacted Vance's campaign via email on Saturday for comment.

Online users took to X, formerly Twitter, immediately to fire back at Vance for continuing to spread the false rumors.

Denver Riggleman, a former GOP congressman from Virginia who split with Trump over Jan. 6 and has endorsed Kamala Harris for president posted a response to Vance's unsubstantiated claims following the rally. "These are stories made up by racist a*******," the ex-lawmaker said.

MSNBC analyst and journalist, David Corn responded to the clip of Vance while laying out his call to action: "The Republican governor of Ohio, who is born in Springfield and lives nearby it, says Vance and Trump have been lying about this city."

Veteran Jared Ryan Sears also responded to Vance's "challenge" by posting a link to a Wall Street Journal report refuting the claims in Springfield:

The Ohio senator's remarks come amid escalating tensions surrounding immigration rhetoric in the 2024 presidential race.

Springfield has found itself at the center of a firestorm after baseless rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets gained national attention, fueled in part by comments from Vance and Trump.

City officials have repeatedly refuted these claims, with Mayor Rob Rue expressing concern over the impact of such damaging rhetoric on the entire community. "All of these federal politicians who have negatively spun our city need to know they're hurting our city, and it was their words that did it," he told local media last week.

Governor DeWine, who visited Springfield in March, emphasized the positive impact of the Haitian community, stating, "They're working. They're contributing. They're part of the community."

The controversy has had real-world consequences for the entire community in Springfield. On Thursday, the city hall, county courthouse, and two elementary schools were evacuated following bomb threats containing "hateful language toward immigrants and Haitians," according to officials. Wittenberg University also faced disruptions due to a separate threat.

Despite these incidents and the fact-finding visits by state and local officials, Vance has continued to defend his stance.

In a recent CNN interview with host Dana Bash, he argued he was simply "surfacing the complaints" of his constituents. When pressed on the lack of evidence for the pet-eating claims, Vance made the startling assertion that he would "create stories" if necessary to draw attention to what he views as problems stemming from immigration policies.

Springfield's Haitian community, estimated between 15,000 to 20,000 individuals, has grown significantly over the past four years. However, city officials note that these immigrants are in the country legally, many under the Immigration Parole Program.

The origin of the false "pet-eating" rumor has been traced to a Facebook post by Springfield resident Erika Lee, who shared unverified suspicions about her neighbor's missing cat. Lee has since expressed regret over the post's unintended consequences, telling NBC News, "It just exploded into something I didn't mean to happen.">

<Sen. JD Vance on Saturday reacted for the first time to the bombshell report about Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, saying that the allegations against Robinson "aren't necessarily reality."

“The allegations are pretty far out there, of course, but I know that allegations aren’t necessarily reality,” Vance said of Robinson’s reported comments on a porn site.

In Vance's interview with NBC Philadelphia, he said that it is "ultimately up to Mark Robinson and North Carolina whether he’s going to be their governor and whether he wants to stay in the race."

Robinson years ago made comments on a porn website where he called himself a "black NAZI," expressed support for slavery and referred to Martin Luther King Jr. with a racial slur, among other remarks, according to a CNN report published Thursday.

Some members of his own party have expressed concern over the allegations. The North Carolina Republican Party on Thursday issued a statement reiterating that Robinson has "categorically denied the allegations."

Robinson has denied the report and said he will stay in the race.

When asked whether Vance believes Robinson's denial that the comments were made by him, Vance said that the situation needed to "play out."

"I don’t <not> believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion," Vance said. "He’s going to make whatever arguments he wants to make. I’m sure the news media and others are going to investigate these comments further."

Vance also said that his ticket does not have plans to campaign with Robinson, who is currently North Carolina's lieutenant governor. The vice presidential nominee is scheduled to be in North Carolina on Monday.

NBC News previously reported that there were no plans for Trump to formally withdraw his endorsement of Robinson. The former president previously heaped praise on Robinson, calling him "Martin Luther King on steroids."

North Carolina is considered a crucial state for Republicans to win in order to secure the White House. Trump won the state narrowly in 2020, but Democrats have been ramping up resources in North Carolina in hopes of flipping it blue. Polling indicates that Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are locked in a tight race. In the gubernatorial contest, Robinson is polling well behind his Democratic opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein.>

<After months of refusing to comply with court orders and being slapped with hefty fines, Elon Musk folded in his free speech battle in Brazil — and a corporate law expert says he'll have to be choosy about where he picks his fights in the future.

Access to Musk's social media platform, X, should be restored in Brazil within the next week once the company appoints a legal representative to respond to government requests to restrict or remove content on the site following local laws, The New York Times reported. X had been blocked across the country since late August, and over the last several weeks, Brazil's Supreme Court imposed substantial fines on X and Starlink — a subsidiary of Musk's SpaceX — for refusing to obey the court's demands.

Musk framed the months of legal back-and-forth as a principled battle for free speech, painting Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes as an overstepping tyrant bent on censoring his political opponents.

The Brazilian high court last week seized over $3 million from X and SpaceX to settle the fines levied against X, and earlier this month telecom regulators in the country threatened to revoke Starlink's license to operate in Brazil. The Times reported that a loss of revenue in one of X's largest markets could have contributed to the company's decision to comply with court orders now.

But an expert on corporate law told Business Insider that there's a reason the billionaire isn't taking his battle of free speech principles to, say, France.

"All you have to see is what happened to Telegram, with Pavel," Anat Alon-Beck, a researcher focused on corporate law and governance at Case Western Reserve University's School of Law, told BI.

In August, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with six crimes related to illegal content being hosted on his messaging platform, including "complicity" in the distribution of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking on Telegram, as well as refusing to cooperate with an official investigation into the platform.

Durov's arrest raised international questions about tech executives' responsibility for the content hosted on their sites. Telegram, in a statement released shortly after his arrest, said Durov has "nothing to hide" and called the CEO's detainment "absurd."

Outside the US, Alon-Beck noted, there's more privacy protection for consumers, more enforcement of content moderation laws, as well as different types of regulation, which forces tech executives to reconsider their approach to content moderation on their platforms to mitigate the risk of overstepping local laws and facing legal consequences — as Musk did in Brazil, and Durov did in France.

"In those markets, you have to comply. Nobody is above the law — not even Elon Musk," Alon-Beck said, adding that it doesn't matter what Musk feels about international laws, or how they compare to American regulations: "The point is, when you have global businesses and you're operating outside the US, you do have to listen to those laws or pay the price. If Elon wants to be able to travel freely, he'll have to comply, just like others will have to."

Musk has previously complied with content moderation requests from other governments, including the increasingly authoritarian nations of Turkey and India. In 2023, he indicated he would abide by the European Union's rulebook on content moderation, known as the Digital Services Act, Politico reported.

Alon-Beck said Durov's arrest served as a warning by French authorities to all tech executives who try to skirt local regulations, especially those related to content moderation on social media.

"I think that point was very well taken — or should be taken — by others," Alon-Beck said.

After the Telegram CEO was arrested, Musk quickly chimed in on the situation with a series of posts on X, including adding a "FreePavel" hashtag to a clip of Durov being interviewed by Tucker Carlson.

Alon-Beck told BI that, in countries like France with strict laws around content moderation, Musk is no different than Durov, and she would expect he could be arrested if he continues to push the boundaries of local content moderation laws.

"It doesn't matter whether it's Instagram, or X, or Telegram — they're all platforms in those countries that are doing things differently than what we do here in the US," Alon-Beck said. "It doesn't matter if I agree or disagree. The point is, they have those enforcement systems — and as you can see, they're strict about them."

Representatives for X, Telegram, and the Brazilian Supreme Court did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.>