Kamala Harris calls Trump ‘not very serious’ on economy and condemns him over abortion rights – as it happened | US elections 2024

New polling of Pennsylvania and North Carolina confirms Trump and Kamala Harris remain locked in a close race to win the swing states’ electoral votes. In a speech in Pittsburgh, and in a one-one-one network interview MBSNC, Harris doubled down on her economic message – outlining policies to to boost businesses and middle class families.

• A bipartisan Senate report found the Secret Service made “preventable” errors in securing Donald Trump’s July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassin opened fire, killing an attendee and wounding the former president.

• Trump said he will return next month to the Butler, Pennsylvania venue where a gunman tried to assassinate him in July.

• Congress is on track to pass legislation to fund the government until 20 December, with the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer saying he hopes to send Joe Biden the bill by the end of the day.

• One of the country’s largest Muslim voter-mobilization groups, Emgage Action, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president in what it said “represents an especially difficult moment for Muslim Americans.”

• A new CNN poll published on Wednesday, has leading Trump by 12 points among likely voters under the age of 35. Polls have also suggested that Trump is losing his edge on economic issues.

• The AARP found that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, was trailing his Democratic challenger in a survey taken before news broke of his history of making lewd statements on pornography websites.

Kamala Harris’s first network one-on-one covered familiar ground – her proposals for the economy, her vision to protect and restore reproductive rights, and the dangers her opponent would pose should he win a second term.

The interview was generally softball, on a friendly network – though MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle did gently push back on Harris’s points about the Trump vs Biden economy.

Harris’s strongest point came at the end of the half hour, when she discussed reproductive rights. “Donald Trump is also the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they rightly should be able to make about their own body and future,” she said – saying that women couldn’t trust the former president.

On the economy, Harris is once again shifting her tone to one that is empathetic to Americans’ struggle to make ends meet.

While Joe Biden struggled to convince voters that the underpinnings of the economy were strong, even as they struggled to keep up with the cost of living, Harris has focused on addressing the issues head on.

In the interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, she said:

Homeownership for too many people in our country now is elusive. You know, gone is the day of everyone thinking they could actually live the American dream. So part of my vision for the economy is: let’s deal with some of the everyday challenges that people face, and address them with commonsense solutions such as affordable housing.

MSNBC is now airing a rare one-on-one interview with Kamala Harris, her first solo network interview since she became the Democratic presidential nominee.

We’ll be following along here.

The bill will now go to Joe Biden for a signature. The 78-18 vote quickly followed the House’s approval.

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the legislation this weekend, this time without Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. Donald Trump had urged Republicans to double down on their demand to include the measure.

But this version of the bill will avert a pre-election shutdown, punting it until December 20.

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has demanded that Ukraine fire its ambassador to Washington as the feud between Donald Trump and Volodymr Zelenskyy escalated and Republicans accused the Ukrainian leader of election interference.

In a public letter, Johnson demanded that Zelenskyy fire the Ukrainian ambassador, Oksana Markarova, over a visit to a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week where the Ukrainian president thanked workers for providing desperately needed shells to his outgunned forces.

Johnson complained that Markarova had organised the visit to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant as a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”. The event was attended by the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has campaigned in support of Kamala Harris.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – on purpose – no Republicans were invited,” Johnson wrote in a letter on congressional letterhead addressed to the Ukrainian embassy.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” the letter continued. “This shortsighted and intentionally political move has caused Republicans to lose trust in Ambassador Markarova’s ability to fairly and effectively serve as a diplomat in this country. She should be removed from her post immediately.”

On the same day, Trump in a campaign event in North Carolina attacked Zelenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.

Later this evening, Kamala Harris will sit down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle for her first one-on-one network interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

In a preview of the pre-recorded interview, Harris discusses corporate taxes. Earlier on MNSBC, Ruhle signaled that the vice president would delve into details and specifics of her plans and the impact of Donald Trump’s economic plans (including his proposed tariffs).

“She is laying out a detailed economic plan, because she’s got a problem,” Ruhle said, namely that voters keep saying they don’t know enough about her proposals. “So her challenge and what she did today and what she did when we sat down, is trying to make people understand her vision … serves everyone,” she said.

US House passes government funding package to avert shutdown

Joan E Greve

The US House passed a three-month government funding package on Wednesday, sending the bill to the Senate with just days left to avert a shutdown set to begin next Tuesday.

The vote was 341 to 82, with 132 Republicans and 209 Democrats supporting the legislation. All 82 votes against the bill, which will extend government funding until 20 December, came from House Republicans.

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson revealed the legislation on Sunday after his original funding proposal failed to pass last week. Johnson’s original bill combined a six-month funding measure with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. Fourteen House Republicans and all but two House Democrats voted against that bill last Wednesday, blocking its passage.

Read the full story here:

In Racine county, Wisconsin, the Guardian’s Callum Jones looked at Donald Trump’s promises to “rebuild the economy” and how they panned out.

Less than 30 miles south of the Fiserv Forum, the Wisconsin convention center where Republicans confirmed Donald Trump as their nominee for president for the third time, lies the site of a project Trump predicted would become “the Eighth Wonder of the World”.

While still in office, the then president traveled to Mount Pleasant in Racine county to break ground on a sprawling facility that the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn had agreed to build – in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies.

Flanked by local allies and executives from the company, Trump planted a golden shovel in the ground. “America is open for business more than it has ever been open for business,” he proclaimed in June 2018, as FoxConn promised to invest $10bn and hire 13,000 local workers.

Highways were built and expanded. Homes were razed. The area – a former manufacturing powerhouse – was primed for revitalization in a deal that seemed to underline the executive prowess of America’s most famous businessman, an image that has helped maintain many voters’ confidence that he could steer the US economy more competently than his rival, Kamala Harris, and could win him the White House again come November.

But on a recent drive around the site, fields of long grass and weeds stretched as far as the eye could see. Trees marked where houses used to stand. The Eighth Wonder was nowhere to be seen.

“Everyone was very skeptical it was going to happen,” said Wendy DeBona, a local Uber and Lyft driver, 53. “And then, of course, look what happened.”

Foxconn all but pulled the plug in April 2021, blaming “unanticipated market fluctuations” as it drastically cut back its plan and struck a new deal, through which it committed to spend $672m on a campus that would create about 1,400 jobs.

Today, a striking glass globe stands over what the firm did, eventually, build. What work is actually taking place there is the subject of local speculation; the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump had left office by the time Plan A fell through. “They dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it,” Joe Biden, his successor, suggested earlier this year. “Foxconn turned out to be just that: a con.”

But one section of the site is a hive of activity, with cranes, diggers, trucks, lorries and tractors visible from the road. Biden himself visited in May, as Microsoft announced it would invest $3.3bn into a new data center on part of the land abandoned by Foxconn. The project is set to create 2,300 union construction jobs, and the tech giant has also pledged to build a new academy with a local technical college, through which more than 1,000 students will be trained in five years “to work in the new data center and IT sector jobs created in the area”.

So did Biden do what Trump didn’t? It depends on whom you ask. Who is better for the economy will be a crucial question in Wisconsin, a must-win swing state in the race for the White House. The state backed Barack Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. As Trump pledges to “rebuild” the US economy by cutting taxes, boosting wages and creating jobs, those attempting to persuade Racine county to reject him believe his role in the Foxconn debacle has shifted the dial.

Mark Cuban, who attended Harris’s speech at the Economic Club in Pittsburgh, praised the vice-president’s pitch as “better for business”.

Cuban, the entrepreneur and investor who rose to prominence as owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and star of the reality TV show Shark Tank, lauded Harris for discussing AI and other emerging technologies and her plans to encourage entrepreneurs in an interview with MSNBC.

“Every single person in this country has that entrepreneur in them,” he said. “And she’s going to lift them up.”

Trump meanwhile, “has no interest in really finding out what it takes to be successful with any policy,” Cuban said.

Cuban has been a big supporter of Harris.

Harris, in turn, had largely catered this speech to business owners and centrists who may have identified with pro-business Republican candidates in the past, and may be turned off by Donald Trump’s inscrutable economic agenda.