US election live: Kamala Harris more trusted than Donald Trump on the economy, says poll | US elections 2024

Donald Trump falsely accused presumptive 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.”

Jessica Glenza

When Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as veep for the Democratic presidential ticket, advocates for healthcare reform felt a jolt of electricity.

Here, they saw a man who proclaimed healthcare a “basic human right”, reformed medical debt collections, and who laid the groundwork for expanded government insurance and denied corporate health insurers contracts with Medicaid, a state-run health insurance program for the poor. Walz even once joined Harris at an abortion clinic in support of abortion rights.

It was a sense of possibility some had not felt since the Obama era, and hard for some to contain their excitement.

Read the full story here: Tim Walz pick excites hopes of taking US healthcare beyond Obamacare era

Two Democratic lawmakers with experience on intelligence and security committees have called for information about the latest breach to be released publicly.

The California Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell, posted on social media that he was seeking a briefing on the breach, and that while he considered Donald Trump “the most despicable person ever to seek office” – someone who had also called for hacking in the past – “that doesn’t mean America ever tolerates foreign interference”.

Adam Schiff, the Democrat of California, urged Department of Homeland Security officials to declassify information on the foreign nature of the hack. Schiff said the US intelligence community “moved much too slow to properly identity the hacking and dumping scheme carried out by Russia” in 2016 and “should act quickly here”. He also said that in that year:

The Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, took advantage of it and then sought to deny it, much to the detriment of the country.

The New York Times has confirmed it received the same or similar trove of Donald Trump presidential campaign documents as other media outlets did, after Microsoft confirmed that a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.

For the third US election in a row, hacked campaign information by a foreign power is now likely to feature as potential disruption. The Trump campaign has said its email systems were breached by hackers working for Iran.

Politico reported getting emails from someone who identified themselves only as “Robert” and sent internal campaign communications and a 271-page-long research dossier on Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, that was part of his vetting process. The news organisation said the Vance profile was “based on publicly available information”.

Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, will hold his first solo campaign event in Los Angeles on Tuesday where he will deliver remarks to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 2024 convention.

Later that day, Walz will deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport Beach, California, the campaign said.

On Wednesday, he will speak at a campaign reception in Denver and then later that day, in Boston.

On Thursday, he will speak at campaign reception in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.

Donald Trump plans to sue the US justice department for $100m for executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate to retrieve classified government documents, according to a report.

The former president’s lawyers intend to sue the department for its conduct during the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022, amid the federal investigation into his alleged retention of classified records, Fox News reported on Monday.

Trump’s legal team will argue that the DoJ was engaged in a “clear intent to engage in political persecution” when it searched his property, the report says. It quotes Trump attorney Daniel Epstein as saying:

What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself – he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law and believe that you should hold the government accountable when it wrongs you.

Rachel Leingang

When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.

Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.

The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.

Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracy theories.

Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.

Read the full story here: Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

Donald Trump will sit down with Elon Musk for an interview tonight, nearly a month after the tech billionaire and owner of X officially endorsed the Republican presidential candidate.

Trump will participate in the interview on X, scheduled for 8pm ET on Monday, from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida while Musk will be in Austin, Texas.

According to Musk, the interview will be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!”

Following Musk’s takeover of X, formerly Twitter, he restored Trump’s account, which was suspended by the platform’s former owners following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress by his supporters.

Good morning US politics readers. More Americans trust Kamala Harris with the US economy than they do Donald Trump, according to a new poll that suggests the former president losing the advantage he had over Joe Biden.

The poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that 42% of voters trust Harris on economic issues – one percentage point ahead of Trump.

The survey “marks a sharp change in voter sentiment following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the White House race” last month, the Financial Times reported. While Trump’s numbers were unchanged from last month’s poll results, Harris’s standing was a seven percentage point improvement compared with Biden’s numbers in July.

But three weeks into her presidential campaign, Harris has yet to unveil her economic policy platform, and Democrats are warning the Democratic presidential candidate and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, that they must solidify their economic message before Republicans bring it back to the forefront of the campaign. On Saturday, Harris said she would be releasing an official economic policy platform in the coming days. She told reporters:

It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy.

Here’s what else we’re watching today: