Trump to reportedly name Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to transition team – live | US elections 2024

Anna Betts

Anna Betts

Anna Betts

The day so far

In other immigration news, the Biden administration suffered a setback in its attempt to allow undocumented spouses of US citizens to remain in the country, the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports:

A federal judge in Texas has temporarily blocked a Joe Biden immigration policy that allows undocumented spouses of US citizens to remain in the country while their applications for permanent residence are considered.

The so-called “parole in place” program was halted in a Monday night ruling by federal district court judge J Campbell Barker in the eastern district of Texas, a favorite venue of conservatives seeking to derail the president’s policy agenda. Barker was appointed to his position by the Donald Trump White House.

About half a million foreign-born spouses of US citizens were estimated to have been eligible for the Biden administration’s initiative that was announced in June under the banner “Keeping Families Together”. Applications opened on 19 August.

Unless or until Barker’s 14-day stay is lifted or overturned on appeal, the pre-existing requirement for applicants to seek a change in legal status from overseas remains in effect.

Immigration advocates condemned the ruling as “heartbreaking”, saying it could separate mixed-status families for years – or even permanently while their lengthy green card applications are processed.

As happy as Democrats were with last week’s convention in Chicago, NBC News reports that it may also qualify as something of a superspreader event for Covid-19.

Citing sources close to the campaign, NBC reports that two members of Kamala Harris’s campaign staff came down with the virus, and there are some concerns that the infections could affect events planned for this week. Here’s more:

One of the sources said that so far, the aides’ symptoms they’ve heard about have been mild, and a third person close to the campaign said there was no concern about staffing the events.

Since the convention wrapped up Thursday, various attendees and reporters have posted photos of positive Covid results.

“You put 20,000 people in an 18,000-person building, it’s bound to happen,” said Jaimey Sexton, a Chicago political consultant who attended the convention and was involved in multiple related events. Sexton said he knew of people who now have Covid from the convention and has heard of even more anecdotally. “You could ask anybody who was planning an event, they know somebody who has Covid,” he said.

The convention had overflow crowds at the United Center each day, particularly Thursday, the night Harris delivered her acceptance remarks. Before 8 p.m. that evening, organizers announced the venue would be closed off because it was at capacity.

There was much buzz that night that a surprise guest was to take the stage and make a big splash. Rumors were rampant even before that night that pop star Beyoncé was to appear. Harris has tapped Beyoncé’s hit “Freedom” as a theme song for her candidacy. At one point, TMZ reported the Beyoncé rumors were true — only to then retract the story.

“Maybe the DNC surprise was the COVID we got along the way,” NewsNation reporter Kellie Meyer posted on X, alongside a photo of a positive Covid test result.

In 2020 — before a vaccine was available — Democrats canceled their in-person convention because of Covid. There were no health-related requirements for attendees, including testing or wearing of masks, before last week’s convention.

While his campaign is busy bringing on high-profile supporters and attacking Kamala Harris, Donald Trump is spending today … hawking trading cards.

“By popular demand, I’m doing a new series of Trump digital trading cards,” he says in a video posted this morning to his Truth Social account (which his newly resurrected account on X has not shared).

“These cards show me dancing and even me holding some bitcoins,” he continues, adding that those who buy 15 digital cards will get a physical card mailed to them for free – which will have a piece of the suit he wore at his presidential debate against Joe Biden (which he says is known as the “knockout suit”, because it indeed proved disastrous for the Democrat’s campaign) sewn into it.

“We’ll be talking about it for a long time,” the former president promises at the video’s end.

It seems to be a repeat of a sale Trump first rolled out two years ago, which brought him a few million dollars, and plenty of mockery:

Tulsi Gabbard is a former Hawaii congresswoman who endorsed Bernie Sanders and once called Joe Biden a friend. But her days in Democratic politics are far behind her, the Guardian’s David Smith reported earlier this year, when he covered Gabbard’s speech to a major convention of conservatives:

Once a prominent backer of the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders, on Thursday she was greeted by far-right activists with a standing ovation and a group of supporters brandishing gold letters that spelled T-R-U-M-P.

Such is the journey of Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who has an entire Wikipedia page devoted to her “political positions” and is now seen as a possible running mate for Donald Trump.

There are few better examples, critics say, of how the Trump era has scrambled the ideology not only of the Republican party but opportunists seeking media cachet and a book deal. Gabbard’s isolationist foreign policy views, disdain for “wokeness” and desire for attention from the rightwing ecosystem made her a natural headline speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland.

“Today we see the Democrat elite leaders say, with great concern in their voice, that if the American people elect Donald Trump again, they warn us, he will destroy our democracy,” said Gabbard, 42, in a speech that portrayed Trump as a victim of political persecution and sounded like an audition for the vice-presidency.

“They say he will be the dictator-in-chief, that if he’s elected it will be the last election this country sees. It’s laughable. This is so crazy, it’s laughable. They’re justifying their actions by telling themselves that they need to destroy our democracy in order to save it. It’s lunacy and it’s the mindset and mentality of dictators. They are waging a multi-front battle and they will stop at nothing until they’re successful.”

Trump to name Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to transition team – report

Democrats are continuing to bask in the afterglow of their convention last week, in which Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and other party leaders delivered marquee speeches intended to boost their campaign.

Walz, in particular, is highlighting the football metaphors he deployed to rally supporters during his speech closing out the convention’s third night. The Minnesota governor is a former high school football coach, after all:

Donald Trump’s allies have also stepped up their attacks on Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, accusing him of fabricating his record, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports:

Donald Trump’s supporters have seized on misstatements and embellishments by Tim Walz about his past in an effort to depict the Democratic vice-presidential nominee as a serial liar, even amid concerns about the former president’s own track record of lies and untruthful statements.

The Republican focus on Walz has already dredged up potentially misleading descriptions of his military service, which ended nearly 20 years ago, and appears aimed at undermining Kamala Harris’s running mate’s self-proclaimed image as a plain-spoken paragon of normality.

Now the campaign appears to have expanded into more personal – even trivial – areas, including in at least one case, unsubstantiated innuendo about Walz’s character that may be in part driven by a desire to cancel out aspersions aimed at JD Vance, Trump’s running mate.

Walz has characterised Vance and Maga Republicans as “weird” and has also made reference to lewd and baseless online rumours that the GOP vice-presidential once had sex with a couch.

In the latest example of a Republican counteroffensive, Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and radio host with more than 3.3 million followers on X, posted in a now-deleted tweet that “Tim Walz is an all-time legendary liar” in response to another user’s post showing the Democratic candidate’s tweets about his dog, Scout.

Donald Trump’s campaign is seizing on the apparent contradiction between Kamala Harris’s support for a failed bipartisan deal to tighten immigration policy that would have included money for border wall construction, and her opposition to constructing the barrier when Trump was in office.

“Kamala’s RECORD proves she is pro-open border,” the former president’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As a senator, Kamala tried to block President Trump’s construction of the border wall. As Border Czar, Kamala Harris halted construction of the border wall. Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind.”

Republicans often say that Harris was appointed “border czar”, but such a position does not exit. Joe Biden did task Harris with addressing the “root causes” of migration from three Central American countries, a job at which she had mixed success:

Kamala Harris has attacked Donald Trump for interceding earlier this year to kill a bipartisan deal in Congress that would have tightened immigration policy to stem the flow of migrants crossing the southern border. But, as the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports, the GOP is accusing the vice-president of supporting a deal that would have restarted construction of a Trump-era border wall that Harris says she opposes:

Republicans have accused Kamala Harris of a policy flip-flop after she embraced an immigration crackdown that would involve expanding the controversial US southern border wall, which she once called “un-American” and “a medieval vanity project”.

Harris committed to reviving a bipartisan immigration deal that collapsed in the Senate earlier year at last week’s Democratic national convention.

The agreement, a compromise worked out between Joe Biden’s administration and congressional Republicans, would have represented the toughest clampdown on illegal immigration in years. It unravelled after GOP members withdrew support under pressure from Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for November’s election, because he did not want Democrats to win credit for a potentially vote-winning issue.

Reviving it means Harris is committing to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the border wall, one of Trump’s pet projects during his presidency, said James Lankford, a Republican US senator for Oklahoma, one of the deal’s architects.

“It requires the Trump border wall,” Lankford told Axios. “It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.”

JD Vance is on his way to make a speech about the economy in Big Rapids, Michigan, this afternoon, and is being joined by his mom, the vice-presidential candidate’s press secretary tweets:

Vance is billed to hit out at Kamala Harris for the inflation that occurred over the past three years of Joe Biden’s administration, which is seen a major liability for the vice-president and Democratic candidates nationwide.

Kamala Harris’s campaign is meanwhile focused on drawing attention to her plans to lower housing costs.

Here’s the television ad that will start airing in battleground states promoting the vice-president’s plans to drive down rents, and help first-time home buyers:

Vance says Harris ‘wants a promotion but refuses to interview for the job’

Trump campaign hits Harris for lack of interviews as vice-president rolls out plan to lower housing costs