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

Harris showcases Springsteen in star-studded swing state stop

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.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at the Turning Point PAC campaign rally at the Gas South arena, in Duluth, Georgia, on Wednesday evening. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

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”.

Key events

Show key events only

Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature

Eleni Courea

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

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.

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.”

Donald Trump is expected to address Kamala Harris’s economic policy at an afternoon rally in Tempe, Arizona, his campaign announced in a statement that said the vice-president had “made the American Dream of home ownership unreachable for young Americans and families.”

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the pro-Trump Turning Point political action committee will then host the Republican ex-president at a Las Vegas rally aimed at recruiting volunteers and celebrating the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

“These are voters whose values closely align with the conservative platform but have been given too little attention by our movement,” Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk said in a statement.

AFP reports that Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Tuesday that former president Barack Obama was “a real jerk” and shrugged off his support for Harris.

“Over the last couple of days I’ve watched him campaign,” said the Republican, who held a spate of stops across Georgia on Wednesday. Trump said:

What a divider he is. He divides this country. He couldn’t care less, him and his little group of people.”

Harris and former first lady Michelle Obama are set to hold a rally this Saturday in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Harris showcases Springsteen in star-studded swing state stop

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.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at the Turning Point PAC campaign rally at the Gas South arena, in Duluth, Georgia, on Wednesday evening. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

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”.

Explore more on these topics