US election live: former Republican House speaker urges Trump to ‘stop questioning’ size of Harris’s crowds | US elections 2024

The US has prepared for what could be significant attacks by Iran or its proxies in the Middle East as soon as this week, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said today.

Kirby said the US had increased its regional force posture and shared Israel’s concerns about a possible Iranian-backed attack after Iran and Hamas accused Israel of carrying out the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran last month, Reuters reports.

We have to be prepared for what could be a significant set of attacks,” he said.

Israel has been braced for a major attack since last month when a missile killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Israel responded by killing a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

A day after that operation, Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, drawing Iranian vows of retaliation against Israel.

We obviously don’t want to see Israel have to defend itself against another onslaught, like they did in April. But, if that’s what comes at them, we will continue to help them defend themselves,” Kirby said.

You can follow all of the Guardian’s coverage of the region here and here.

Joe Biden will speak at the Democratic national convention next week, the White House has confirmed.

Biden will use his remarks at the convention to focus on the issues he “cares about”, the White House’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN.

It’s an event that he views as very important. It’s an opportunity to talk about the issues that he cares about. It’s an opportunity to talk about unity.

Donald Trump appeared to be paying X to promote his interview with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, scheduled for tonight 8pm ET, the New York Times reported.

The Times said:

The hashtag #TrumpOnX landed at the top of the platform’s “Trending” section, with a disclaimer that it was promoted by Donald J. Trump — a tag that typically marks paid ad campaigns on the social media site.

Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025 is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.

The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.

A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.

Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for Donald Trump in some capacity.

The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker, said Donald Trump should stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies and instead focus on her as a candidate.

As we reported earlier, Trump has falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Trump shared a photo from a conspiracy theorist’s post to his millions of followers on Truth Social, claiming that a real image of a Harris event in Detroit was a “fake image”.

“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said in an interview on Fox News today.

Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position, when it comes to: What did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?

Donald Trump has shared a campaign video on X, his first post on the social media platform in nearly a year, just hours before his scheduled interview with X’s owner, Elon Musk.

Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, in August 2023 with a post showing his mugshot from his booking at Fulton county jail in Georgia.

He was reinstated to X after the platform’s previous owners banned him following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress.

Time magazine has put Kamala Harris on the cover of its latest issue, with the headline “Her Moment”.

Harris has “pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history” after smashing fundraising records, dominating TikTok and filling up stadiums in the past month, Charlotte Alter writes in the lead story.

A contest that revolved around the cognitive decline of a geriatric President has been transformed: Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable.

Donald Trump falsely accused Democratic nominee Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Trump shared a photo from a conspiracy theorist’s post to his millions of followers on Truth Social, claiming that a real image of a Harris event in Detroit was a “fake image”.

“There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump posted.

Disinformation experts have long warned about generative artificial intelligence’s threat to the information ecosystem, both in terms of its ability to create falsified media and for people to deny reality by claiming genuine images, video or audio is actually AI.

Trump’s post marks the highest-profile incident yet where someone has claimed a real event is AI, reflecting what researchers have called the “liar’s dividend”. That concept posits an increase in manipulated media such as deepfakes leads to general skepticism around what content is real, allowing for people like politicians to more plausibly claim authentic media is falsified.

“Entering the ‘Nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation expert and former researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, in a post on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality”.

Lauren Gambino

Kamala Harris has also laid into Donald Trump over immigration, accusing him of failing to “walk the walk” on one of his signature issues.

While she and Joe Biden supported a bipartisan border deal that would have in effect shut down the border, she accused Trump of derailing the bill for purely political reasons.

Harris said at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday:

Earlier this year, we had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades. But Donald Trump tanked the bill because he thought it would help him win an election. Well, when I am president, I will sign that bill into law.

She underlines that message in a border-focused ad that highlights her promise to hire “thousands more border agents” and “crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking”.

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” it says.

This is a far different posture than Harris adopted during her 2019 presidential campaign, when she embraced progressive ideas about border policies, including that crossing the US border should be a civil offense, not a criminal one. Republicans are running ads reminding voters of her past positions, with JD Vance calling her a “flip-flopper” on the border.

But as migration at the US-Mexico border reached record-levels under the Biden administration, many Democrats, including Harris have backed away from the more progressive stance. Her campaign said recently that Harris believes unauthorized crossings are “illegal”.

Whether Harris can flip the script without alienating immigration advocates and activists remains to be seen. Advocates say they will be watching to see if she pairs border security with promises to expand pathways to citizenship for the millions of immigrants living in the US without documentation. In Arizona, Harris said she was committed to pursuing “comprehensive immigration reform”.

But Congress has failed to address the US immigration system for decades, placing pressure on presidents to act unilaterally as Biden did recently when he in effect sealed the border to asylum claims.

Immigration remains top concern for voters

Lauren Gambino

Immigration remains a top concern for voters – and one of Kamala Harris’s biggest potential vulnerabilities.

Republicans believe this to be true, incorrectly casting her as the Biden administration’s “border czar”, even though her assignment was to deal with the root causes of migration stemming from countries thousands of miles south of the US-Mexico border.

Three weeks into her presidential campaign, Harris is attempting to reclaim the narrative. At a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Friday, Harris went on the offensive and delivered her first major pitch to border-state voters.

She emphasized her record as attorney general of the border state of California, telling supporters that she went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human smugglers.

“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said. “So I know what I’m talking about.”