US election briefing: Trump escalates anti-immigrant rhetoric as Harris promises bipartisan council

Donald Trump doubled down on his anti-immigrant and xenophobic messaging at a rally in Colorado, calling for the death penalty for migrants who kill US citizens and announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans.

“The invasion will be stopped. The migrant flights will end and Kamala’s app for illegals will be shut down immediately within 24 hours,” he said in the city of Aurora, which he claims has been overrun by Venezuelan gang members, despite pushback from local officials, including Republicans.

Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was focusing on a more positive message, telling an event in Phoenix that if elected president she would create a bipartisan council of advisers to provide her feedback on her policy initiatives and appoint a Republican to her cabinet.

“I love good ideas wherever they come from,” said Harris, who is making a push to get Republicans with doubts about Trump to support her.

Here is what else happened on Friday:

• Harris landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that reads: “The candidate for our times.” “Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, vice-president Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which has previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”

• Trump’s team reportedly asked for officials to provide him with a dramatic array of military protections as the presidential campaign wraps, including travel in military aircraft and vehicles. Trump’s campaign has also requested ramped-up flight restrictions around his residences and rallies, and “ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states” for his team’s use, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests, adding that they were both “extraordinary and unprecedented”.

• The longtime Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist. The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.

• The US justice department said on Friday it was suing the state of Virginia for violating the federal prohibition on systematic efforts to remove voters within 90 days of an election. On 7 August, Republican governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the commissioner of the Department of Elections to certify that the department was conducting “daily updates to the voter list” to remove, among other groups, people who are unable to verify that they are citizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

• Harris will next week highlight her economic policies that benefit Black men, hoping to energize a voting bloc that some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s advisers fear has embraced Republican rival Trump in large numbers, three sources familiar with the plans told Reuters. The report comes a day after former president Barack Obama questioned Black men’s unwillingness to vote for Harris at an event in Pennsylvania.

• Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Harris next month and return to power. “He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

• JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, again refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election over Trump, evading the question five times in an interview with the New York Times, the newspaper reported on Friday. The Ohio senator repeated the response he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, saying he was “focused on the future”.

• The criminal trial of two rural Arizona county supervisors who initially refused to certify election results in 2022 will not occur before this year’s elections after it was again delayed. Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of the three supervisors in the Republican-led Cochise county, face charges of conspiracy and interfering with an election officer. Despite the county’s typically low profile, the trial is being watched nationally as elections experts anticipate a potential wave of local officials refusing to certify results if Trump loses. The red county, set on the US-Mexico border, has a population of about 125,000.

• A solid majority of Hispanic women have a positive opinion of Harris and a negative view of Trump, but Hispanic men are more divided on both candidates, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

• X was “alert” to any platform manipulation attempts, the Elon Musk-owned site told Agence France-Presse on Friday, following a report that hundreds of apparent pro-Russian bot accounts were amplifying US election misinformation. In a study shared exclusively with AFP earlier this week, the Washington-based American Sunlight Project said it found nearly 1,200 accounts on X that pushed pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Trump and misinformation about Harris.