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There’s no indication that any of the recipients responded, officials said, and several media organizations approached over the summer with leaked stolen information have also said they did not respond. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity” that were received by only a few people who regarded them as spam or phishing attempts.

The emails were received before the hack of the Trump campaign was publicly acknowledged, and there’s no evidence the recipients of the emails knew their origin.

The announcement is the latest U.S. government effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran.

U.S. officials in recent months have used criminal charges, sanctions and public advisories to detail actions taken by foreign adversaries to influence the election, including an indictment targeting a covert Russian effort to spread pro-Russia content to U.S. audiences.

It’s a stark turnabout from the government’s response in 2016, when Obama administration officials were criticized for not being forthcoming about the Russian interference they were seeing on Trump’s behalf as he ran against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In this case, the hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The agencies have said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord.

The FBI informed Trump aides within the last 48 hours that information hacked by Iran had been sent to the Biden campaign, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to speak because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.

The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.

Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.

In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.

“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” Finkelstein said. “We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the effort to dangle stolen information to the Biden campaign “further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help Harris.

Intelligence officials have said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.

Iran’s intrusion on the Trump campaign was cited as just one of the cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns identified by tech companies and national security officials at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Executives from Meta, Google and Microsoft briefed lawmakers on their plans for safeguarding the election, and the attacks they’d seen so far.

“The most perilous time I think will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers during the hearing, which focused on American tech companies’ efforts to safeguard the election from foreign disinformation and cyberattacks.

“Neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

He added, “We sought commitments from both [former president Donald] Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union’s decision comes two days after senior leaders met with Harris as they weighed whom to endorse.

The Teamsters, which represents truck drivers, freight workers and others, held similar meetings with Trump and President Joe Biden when he was still seeking re-election.

The union, which at 1.3 million members is one of the largest in the world, collected input on an endorsement from its members through straw polling and a QR poll from a code printed on a union magazine, a vice president at large of the union, John Palmer, said.

On Wednesday, the union released the results of their survey, which was conducted after Biden dropped out of the race. It found that almost 60% of rank-and-file union members preferred to endorse Trump, while 34% backed Harris, according to an electronic member poll. A phone poll indicated similar margins, with 58% supporting Trump and 31% supporting Harris.

The union has not released the number of poll participants or the margin of error.

The Teamsters have for decades endorsed Democratic presidential candidates. The union supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. They also backed Barack Obama in both of his presidential runs, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

In an email Wednesday, the Trump campaign highlighted the Teamsters polling.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear— they want President Trump back in the White House!” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “These hardworking men and women are the backbone of America and President Trump will strongly stand up for them when he’s back in the White House.”

The former president addressed the union’s decision not to endorse a candidate when talking with reporters on Wednesday, saying that it is “a great honor.”

“The Teamsters carry a lot of weight. The Democrats cannot believe it,” Trump said. “Look, it was always automatic that Democrats get the Teamsters, and they said, ‘We won’t endorse the Democrats this year,’ so that was an honor for me.”

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt pointed to local Teamsters chapters that endorsed the vice president.

“The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor,” Hitt said in a statement. “As the Vice President told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

Over the course of his presidency, Biden has promoted his support for organized labor and has frequently weighed in on disputes between union workers and corporate leaders. In 2021, he expressed support for the right to unionize in a direct-to-camera video as Amazon workers in Alabama were about to vote on whether to organize.

Then-Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2021 credited Biden with including an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he visited striking autoworkers in Michigan.

But despite calling himself “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden drew criticism from organized labor two years ago when he worked with Congress to pass a law that averted an impending rail strike.

The law forced union workers to accept a union contract that had been brokered by the Biden administration. At the time, four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the deal.

As he signed the legislation, Biden called it “a tough [vote] for me,” but cited the need “to keep the supply chains stable around the holidays.”

The International Association of Fire Fighters is the most prominent union that has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate this year. The union endorsed Biden in 2020.

The AFL-CIO, which represents dozens of unions and millions of workers, and the United Auto Workers union have each endorsed Harris.

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Hadley Duvall says in voiceover that she’s never slept a full night in her life — her stepfather first started abusing her when she was five years old, and impregnated her when she was 12. As she speaks, images of Duvall as a child flash on the screen. The soundtrack of the ad is a song by Billie Eilish, who endorsed the vice president on Tuesday.

“I just remember thinking I have to get out of my skin. I can’t be me right now. Like, this can’t be it,” Duvall says. “I didn’t know what to do. I was a child. I didn’t know what it meant to be pregnant, at all. But I had options.”

The ad is part of a continued push by the Harris campaign to highlight the growing consequences of the fall of Roe, including that some states have abortion restrictions with no exceptions for rape or incest. Women in some states are suffering increasingly perilous medical care and the first reported instance of a woman dying from delayed reproductive care surfaced this week. Harris lays the blame squarely on Republican nominee Donald Trump, who appointed three of the conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court who helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Duvall blames Trump, too.

“Because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, girls and women all over the country have lost the right to choose, even for rape or incest,” she says in the ad. “Donald Trump did this. He took away our freedom.”

During the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Trump repeatedly took credit for appointing the three Supreme Court justices and leaned heavily on his catchall response to questions on abortion rights, saying the issue should be left up to the states. He said he would not sign a national abortion ban.

“I’m not signing a ban,” he said, adding that “there is no reason to sign the ban.”

But he also repeatedly declined to say whether he would veto such a ban if he were elected again — a question that has lingered as the Republican nominee has shifted his stances on the crucial election issue.

Duvall of Owensboro, Kentucky, first told her story publicly last fall in a campaign ad for the governor’s race in her home state supporting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Duvall’s stepfather was convicted of rape and is in prison; she miscarried.

Beshear won reelection, and Democrats have said Duvall’s ad was a strong motivator, particularly for rural, male voters who had previously voted for Trump.

Duvall is also touring the country to campaign for Harris along with other women who have been telling their personal stories since the fall of Roe, joining Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro last week.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday laid out how her economic proposals could specifically help young Black men, a key Democratic voting bloc that polls show Republican former President Donald Trump gaining ground with in this election cycle.

“I think it’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris said in a sit-down interview with a panel from the National Association of Black Journalists. “I’m working to earn the vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I am Black.”

A new poll by the civil rights group NAACP released Friday found that more than a quarter of Black men under 50 years old support Trump over Harris.

To win those votes, Harris is focused on an economic argument. At NABJ, she described embarking on an “economic opportunity tour focused on Black men” earlier this year, before she was a candidate for president.

She also pointed to her work “getting billions more dollars” into community banks to expand access to startup capital.

“We have so many entrepreneurs in the community who do not have access to capital, but they’ve got great ideas, an incredible work ethic, the ambition, the aspiration, the dream … but don’t have the relationships, necessarily” to get financing or grow a small business, Harris said.

The Democratic presidential nominee cited proposals like a $50,000 small business tax deduction and the elimination of medical debt from credit scores — both of which she believes would target historic economic disparities within Black communities.

“When they do better economically, we all do better,” said Harris.

Proposals like these could help Harris address two distinct vulnerabilities for the Democratic party in this election cycle: public perceptions of the economy, and young Black men who lean toward voting for Trump.

Before Harris took over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden in July, NBC News polling found 25% of Black voter respondents ages 18 to 49 favored Trump over Biden.

Biden won 92% of Black voters in the 2020 election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. The prospect that Democrats could lose a quarter of prime voting age Black adults to a Republican set off alarm bells.

Polls suggest that Trump’s unusual strength with Black voters this election cycle could be due in part to nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy that he presided over.

Over the course of the Biden-Harris administration, high costs of living became the utmost voter concern, as the U.S. economy precariously recovered from the sky-high inflation in the wake of the pandemic.

As Harris works to pitch herself as the candidate of economic relief, her campaign is simultaneously working to shore up Black voter support.

During his own sit-down with NABJ journalists in July, Trump drew backlash for impugning Harris’ racial identity and calling her a “DEI hire.” He also scolded the interviewers for their questions about his past remarks about Black people, which both Democrats and Republicans have said were racist.

“It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect,” Harris said Tuesday about Trump’s NABJ appearance. “And let me just say, the American people deserve better.”

Kerr took the stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, an arena he is familiar with from his time playing with the Bulls, and addressed a crowd of approximately 26,000-plus attendees and millions watching from home, endorsing current Vice President Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election while channeling Steph Curry’s viral “night night” celebration in speaking out against former President Donald Trump.

The Warriors coach joined “The Dan Le Batard” show on Tuesday, where he was asked about the opportunity to speak at the convention and his nerves leading up to it.

“Yeah, that was an interesting experience,” Kerr said. “They asked me to do it a couple days before I went on and I really gave it a lot of thought because I knew I was going to take a lot of heat for it. But I wanted to make sure I got the right message across, what was most important to me. After thinking about it I realized ‘Hey, they asked me for a reason. They think it matters that I speak my mind.” And so I decided to do it and it was very nerve-wracking and I’m glad I did it. Met a lot of great people, there’s a lot of great energy in the building. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.”

Kerr received some criticism for his appearance but the feedback overall for his speech was positive as he aimed to convey a message of unity in a divided political climate.

“I got some emails. But generally speaking, the vast majority of people who contacted me were very supportive,” Kerr shared. “I wanted to make sure my message was one of unity, especially coming off the Olympic gold medal performance by the team in Paris.

“I just think the political rhetoric, really the national rhetoric on a lot of platforms is just so ugly these days and divisive and I just wanted to make sure my message was a reminder to people that when we come together in a lot of different ways we can accomplish a lot. I think it applies to sports, it applies to our country too and we need to come together.”

Despite playing in numerous NBA Finals games, including Game 6 of the 1997 series where he hit the game-winning shot to deliver the Bulls their second of three consecutive titles, Kerr felt out of place in a different kind of arena.

“I just felt like a fish out of water because it was such a different realm for me,” Kerr explained. “I’m used to game nerves and those actually feel good. Competing in sports is so much fun because you have to lay it on the line and you do everything you can to win but you kind of know you’re going to lose your fair share.

“There’s going to be nights where you lose sleep because of decisions you made, backfired, all that kind of stuff … but the political spectrum is different, the setting was different. Having teleprompters on either side of me, addressing the crowd, knowing there were millions of people watching on TV. It was definitely nerve-wracking.”

Kerr cherished the opportunity and appreciated the chance to convey his message to such a large audience but certainly is looking forward to returning to the arena he is far more comfortable in.

Republican nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi next week.

Speaking at his first public appearance following Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt, Trump said Modi is “fantastic” but also called India a “very big abuser” as he criticized several countries for their trade policies with the U.S.

“So when India, which is a very big abuser- he happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he’s fantastic. I mean, fantastic, man,” Trump said at at town hall in Flint, Michigan. “These, a lot of these leaders are fantastic … You know the expression, they’re at the top of their game, and they use it against us. But India is very tough.”

Trump did not provide further details on the meeting. The Indian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

As president, Trump visited India in 2020, vowing to boost trade ties between the two countries. The U.S. is currently India’s second-largest trading partner, behind China.

Modi is scheduled to visit the U.S. from Sept. 21 to 23, and will partake in the fourth Quad Leaders’ Summit in Wilmington, Delaware hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden. The Indian prime minister is also slated to attend and speak before the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

This will be Modi’s first visit to the U.S. since he won a historic third term in office in June.

During Modi’s state visit to Washington in June 2023, the U.S. and India signed a slew of technology and defense deals signaling a new era of bilateral relations.

Since then, cooperation between the two countries has deepened. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of State announced it will partner with the India Semiconductor Mission and India’s electronics and IT government body to improve the global semiconductor value chain.

“The United States and India are key partners in ensuring the global semiconductor supply chain keeps pace with the global digital transformation currently underway. This collaboration between the United States and India underscores the potential to expand India’s semiconductor industry to the benefit of both nations,” the release said.

“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said during a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday.

NBC News reported on Sunday that Trump planned to visit the city “soon,” according to a source familiar with the former president’s planning, after amplifying during a presidential debate a baseless claim that had circulated in right-wing spheres online for weeks, saying Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and cats of local residents.

Officials in Springfield have said the allegations were meritless, with city police issuing a statement that said there were “no credible reports” of pets being harmed by Haitian immigrants.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, had also panned the claims as “garbage” and visited Springfield Tuesday as the city responds to dozens of bomb threats, deemed hoaxes that have led to temporary closures and evacuations of schools and city buildings.

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DeWine said that a campaign visit from a presidential candidate is “generally very, very welcomed,” but acknowledged that it would pose challenges.

“I have to state the reality though that resources are really, really stretched here,” DeWine said.

DeWine said he hasn’t spoken to Trump or Vance and hasn’t heard about the candidates potentially visiting Springfield.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee who has also spread the false claims about pets in Springfield, told reporters on Tuesday that he hasn’t made plans to visit the city.

Asked on Tuesday whether he would be joining the former president on the trip or if he had his own travel plans, Vance said a trip had not been formalized, but safety would be a top concern.

“I haven’t made plans to go just in the last few days,” Vance said. “I know the president would like to go but also hasn’t made any explicit plans.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“It’s a crying shame. Literally,” Harris said in her most extensive remarks to date about her Republican opponent’s baseless claims.

“I know that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield, Ohio, and it’s got to stop,” she said during a discussion hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Follow live campaign coverage here

The city has been hit with dozens of bomb threats, some at elementary schools, after Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, promoted false rumors that immigrants were eating residents’ pet dogs and cats.

“I mean, my heart breaks for this community. You know there were children, elementary school children,” who had to be evacuated on what was supposed to be school picture day, Harris said.

 “A whole community put in fear,” she added.

During last week’s presidential debate, which was viewed by more than 67 million people, Trump said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Harris said of Trump on Tuesday, “When you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand how much your words have meaning.”

“You say you care about law enforcement? Law enforcement resources being put into this because of these serious threats,” Harris said.

“The American people deserve and, I do believe, want better than this,” she added.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Harris’ remarks.

Vance, speaking at an event in Michigan, said he and Trump are not to blame for the threats to Springfield.

“The governor of Ohio came out yesterday and said every single one of those bomb threats was a hoax, and all of those bomb threats came from foreign countries. So the American media for three days has been lying and saying that Donald Trump and I are inciting bomb threats when, in reality, the American media has been laundering for this information. It is disgusting,” he said Tuesday.

In his statement Monday, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said that “many of these threats are coming from overseas,” but he did not say all of them originated abroad. He also announced he was deploying dozens of state troopers to help sweep schools.

DeWine was in Springfield on Tuesday and visited elementary school students accompanied by a therapy dog.

In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, DeWine said the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, that there is no evidence that they have been eating pets and that the conspiracy theories were “garbage.”

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, told reporters Tuesday that school attendance is down and that “there’s a high level of fear in our community,” which has been plagued by threats to government offices, as well.

“We did not have threats seven days ago,” Rue said, referring to the Sept. 10 presidential debate, at which Trump amplified the baseless claims.

“We need those on the national stage to stop this and tell the truth,” he said.

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Trump is holding a town hall in Flint, Michigan, and has appearances later in the week in New York, Washington and North Carolina. Harris will participate in a Philadelphia gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists. She skipped the group’s recent gathering in Chicago, but an openly antagonistic appearance there by Trump sparked an uproar when he questioned the vice president’s racial identity.

Harris has her own stops in Washington, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, planned in coming days, with both sides zeroing in on the industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all battleground areas that could swing an election expected to be exceedingly close.

Trump has claimed, without evidence, that months of criticisms against him by Harris and President Joe Bideninspired the latest attack. That’s despite the former president’s own long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy for jailing or prosecuting his political enemies.

Both Biden and Harris have so far avoided politics in reacting to the attack. Harris has condemned political violence while Biden has called on Congress to increase funding to the Secret Service.

Authorities say Ryan Wesley Routh camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach, where Trump was playing on Sunday, for nearly 12 hours with food and a rifle but fled without firing shots when a Secret Service agent spotted and shot at him.

Subsequently arrested, Routh’s past online posts suggest the suspect has not been consistent about his politics in terms of supporting Democrats or Republicans.

That attack came barely two months after Trump was wounded during a rally in Pennsylvania. In fundraising emails, he’s implored supporters, “Fear not.” During an interview on the X social media platform, Trump recounted his experience Sunday, saying he was golfing with a friend and heard “probably four or five” shots being fired in the air.

Philadelphia voters on Tuesday will fill two vacant state House seats in special elections, and in both cases a Democratic candidate is the only person on the ballot.

Keith Harris is seeking to replace Rep. Donna Bullock, while Andre Carroll is in line to succeed Rep. Stephen Kinsey. Bullock and Kinsey both resigned in mid-July. Bullock took a job with Project HOME, a nonprofit that works to address homelessness, while Kinsey, who had not been planning to run for reelection, moved up his departure date and took another job.

Neither Harris nor Carroll has an opponent in the Nov. 5 general election, where they are seeking full two-year terms.

Harris, 63, is a Democratic ward leader and community activist who has worked to clean up graffiti in Philadelphia. The district is in the northern area of the city.

Carroll, 33, has worked in city and state government. The northwest Philadelphia district has overwhelmingly Democratic voter registration and is older and less affluent than the state as a whole.

The House has a 102-101 Democratic majority, counting the Bullock and Kinsey seats.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Click here to find your polling place.

Trump did not discuss specifics about World Liberty Financial or how it would work, pivoting from questions about cryptocurrency to talking about artificial intelligence or other topics. Instead, he recounted his experience Sunday, saying he and a friend playing golf “heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five.”

“I would have loved to have sank that last putt,” Trump said. He credited the Secret Service agent who spotted the barrel of a rifle and began firing toward it as well as law enforcement and a civilian who he said helped track down the suspect.

World Liberty Financial is expected to be a borrowing and lending service used to trade cryptocurrencies, which are forms of digital money that can be traded over the internet without relying on the global banking system. Exchanges often charge fees for withdrawals of Bitcoin and other currencies.

Other speakers after Trump, including his eldest son, Don Jr., talked about embracing cryptocurrency as an alternative to what they allege is a banking system tilted against conservatives.

Experts have said a presidential candidate launching a business venture in the midst of a campaign could create ethical conflicts.

“Taking a pro-crypto stance is not necessarily troubling; the troubling aspect is doing it while starting a way to personally benefit from it,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said earlier this month.

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During his time in the White House, Trump said he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrency and tweeted in 2019, “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” However, during this election cycle, he has reversed himself and taken on a favorable view of cryptocurrencies.

He announced in May that his campaign would begin accepting donations in cryptocurrency as part of an effort to build what it calls a “crypto army” leading up to Election Day. He attended a bitcoin conference in Nashville this year, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and create a bitcoin “strategic reserve” using the currency that the government currently holds.

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who has done research on cryptocurrencies, said she was skeptical of Trump’s change of heart on crypto.

“I think it’s fair to say that that reversal has been motivated in part by financial interests,” she said.

Crypto enthusiasts welcomed the shift, viewing the launch as a positive sign for investors if Trump retakes the White House.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has not offered policy proposals on how it would regulate digital assets like cryptocurrencies.

In an effort to appeal to crypto investors, a group of Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, participated in an online “Crypto 4 Harris” event in August.

Neither Harris nor members of her campaign staff attended the event.

____

Gomez Licon contributed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In the presidential debate and in recent TV interviews, Trump and Sen. Vance, R-Ohio, have depicted the former president as selflessly choosing to protect the ACA, or “Obamacare,” during his four years in office as a way to put country over politics.

“Obamacare was lousy health care. Always was. It’s not very good today. … I had a choice to make when I was president: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt I had an obligation, even though politically it would have been good to just let it rot and let it go away,” Trump said at the recent ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. “And I saved it. I did the right thing.”

On NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Vance echoed his remarks by saying Trump “actually protected those 20 million Americans from losing their health coverage” and “chose to build upon” the ACA when he “could’ve destroyed” it. Vance added: “It illustrates Donald Trump’s entire approach to governing, which is to fix problems.”

Both Trump and Vance are misrepresenting the facts.

As president, Trump fought to repeal and undo the ACA using executive action, legislation and lawsuits.

“Trump was not successful as president in undoing the ACA, but it was not for lack of trying,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan research group. “Trump encouraged congressional efforts to repeal and replace the ACA, and then took administrative steps to try to weaken it when the legislative route failed.”

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order proclaiming: “It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

He ordered agencies to “exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of provisions they deemed burdensome.

Trump made good on his promise to pursue repeal. It was the first major item on the Republican-led Congress’ agenda in 2017. In May, the House passed the American Health Care Act, a bill to undo ACA subsidies and regulations, which was projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to lead to 23 million fewer people with insurance. Trump celebrated its passage in a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony alongside House Republicans.

“Make no mistake: This is a repeal and replace of Obamacare,” Trump said at the time.

The effort fell one vote short in the Senate as three Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain of Arizona — joined Democrats to vote it down. Trump has since repeatedly criticized McCain for his now-iconic thumbs down on the Senate floor.

The legislative push was never revived, with one exception: Trump and Republicans succeeded at zeroing out the ACA’s tax penalty for most Americans who failed to buy insurance.

But Trump persisted in seeking other ways to take aim at the ACA.

He leaned on his executive power and his administration slashed funding for programs to advertise and promote ACA sign-ups. Enrollment dipped the following year, in 2018, with some blaming the cuts in funding.

“He cut outreach by 90% and funding for community-based navigators by 84%, making it harder for people to sign up,” Levitt said, referring to individuals who helped Americans sign up for Obamacare plans. “He expanded short-term insurance plans that do not have to follow the ACA’s rules, including coverage of pre-existing conditions.”

That fall, Democrats put a dagger in the legislative efforts to undo President Barack Obama’s signature achievement when they won control of the House, in part by campaigning on protecting the ACA.

But even as other Republicans sought to abandon what they came to see as a losing political fight, Trump was undeterred.

In 2020, he endorsed a lawsuit that would have wiped out the ACA entirely. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration formally asked the justices to rule for the challengers and terminate the law, despite the political risks as he sought re-election.

The court upheld the ACA the following year. By then, Trump had lost the election and Joe Biden was president.

Now, as he seeks a comeback in 2024, Trump has occasionally brought up his desire to revisit the ACA battle, calling for replacing the law last fall and declaring that “Obamacare Sucks.” This year, Trump’s campaign has softened its rhetoric against the ACA while still calling for alternatives.

Trump admitted he doesn’t have a replacement plan.

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump said at last week’s debate, adding that there are “concepts and options” for a better and cheaper system that he’ll outline “in the not-too-distant future.”

Asked when Trump will roll out his plan, campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt did not provide a timeline. “As President Trump said, he will release more details but his overall position on health care remains the same: bring down costs and increase the quality of care by improving competition in the market place,” Leavitt said. “This is a stark contrast to Kamala Harris’ support for a socialist government takeover of our health care system which would force people off their private plans and result in lower quality care.”

Harris is running on a platform of preserving the ACA, without offering specifics on how she would make good on her call for expanding coverage. She has abandoned her 2019 position of putting all Americans in Medicare. On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominee is seizing on Trump’s debate remarks.

“He has ‘concepts of a plan.’ Concepts of a plan,” she said Thursday at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Which means no actual plan.”

“And 45 million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “So, understand what that means. He’s going to end it based on a concept and take us back when folks were suffering.”

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“Neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

He added, “We sought commitments from both [former president Donald] Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union’s decision comes two days after senior leaders met with Harris as they weighed whom to endorse.

The Teamsters, which represents truck drivers, freight workers and others, held similar meetings with Trump and President Joe Biden when he was still seeking re-election.

The union, which at 1.3 million members is one of the largest in the world, collected input on an endorsement from its members through straw polling and a QR poll from a code printed on a union magazine, a vice president at large of the union, John Palmer, said.

On Wednesday, the union released the results of their survey, which was conducted after Biden dropped out of the race. It found that almost 60% of rank-and-file union members preferred to endorse Trump, while 34% backed Harris, according to an electronic member poll. A phone poll indicated similar margins, with 58% supporting Trump and 31% supporting Harris.

The union has not released the number of poll participants or the margin of error.

The Teamsters have for decades endorsed Democratic presidential candidates. The union supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. They also backed Barack Obama in both of his presidential runs, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

In an email Wednesday, the Trump campaign highlighted the Teamsters polling.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear— they want President Trump back in the White House!” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “These hardworking men and women are the backbone of America and President Trump will strongly stand up for them when he’s back in the White House.”

The former president addressed the union’s decision not to endorse a candidate when talking with reporters on Wednesday, saying that it is “a great honor.”

“The Teamsters carry a lot of weight. The Democrats cannot believe it,” Trump said. “Look, it was always automatic that Democrats get the Teamsters, and they said, ‘We won’t endorse the Democrats this year,’ so that was an honor for me.”

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt pointed to local Teamsters chapters that endorsed the vice president.

“The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor,” Hitt said in a statement. “As the Vice President told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

Over the course of his presidency, Biden has promoted his support for organized labor and has frequently weighed in on disputes between union workers and corporate leaders. In 2021, he expressed support for the right to unionize in a direct-to-camera video as Amazon workers in Alabama were about to vote on whether to organize.

Then-Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2021 credited Biden with including an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he visited striking autoworkers in Michigan.

But despite calling himself “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden drew criticism from organized labor two years ago when he worked with Congress to pass a law that averted an impending rail strike.

The law forced union workers to accept a union contract that had been brokered by the Biden administration. At the time, four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the deal.

As he signed the legislation, Biden called it “a tough [vote] for me,” but cited the need “to keep the supply chains stable around the holidays.”

The International Association of Fire Fighters is the most prominent union that has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate this year. The union endorsed Biden in 2020.

The AFL-CIO, which represents dozens of unions and millions of workers, and the United Auto Workers union have each endorsed Harris.

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Biden announced additional federal investments at HBCUs totaling $1.3 billion while speaking at the National HBCU Week Conference in Center City. He also said the new investments combined with the previously announced $16 billion set a record of over $17 billion in federal investments in HBCUs from 2021 through 2024.

“The Biden Harris Administration has advanced racial equity, economic opportunity, and educational excellence through HBCUs since Day One, including by reestablishing the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” a spokesperson for the Biden Administration wrote. “The Biden-Harris Administration is the most diverse administration in history and many members are HBCU graduates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Willie Phillips.”

In addition to the HBCU announcement, Biden also addressed and condemned the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Florida over the weekend.

“I’ve always condemned political violence,” Biden said. “In America we resolve our differences peacefully at the ballot box, not at the end of the gun. America has suffered too many times the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet. It solves nothing and just tears the country apart. We must do everything we can to prevent it and never give it any oxygen.”

Biden in his speech added that Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the Secret Service, was in Florida “assessing what happened and determining whether any further adjustments need to be made to ensure” Trump’s safety.

Prior to his stop in Philadelphia, Biden also told reporters outside the White House that he was thankful Trump was OK. He also stated he believed the Secret Service needed more help and that Congress should look into their needs.

Trump, meanwhile, claimed without evidence on Monday that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ previous comments calling him a threat to democracy inspired the assassination attempt on his life.

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out,” Trump said in comments to Fox News Digital.

The Republican former president’s statements are a sharp departure from how he reacted after an assassination attempt in July during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in which a bullet grazed his ear.

Then, Trump called for national unity, saying in a social media post that “it is more important than ever that we stand United.” A few days later, though, the former president returned to his usual commentary where he has sharply criticized Democrats and relishes political bombast.

While authorities continue to investigate the motives of both the gunman in Pennsylvania and the person arrested Sunday in Florida, Trump has made clear that he sees attempts on his life as politically motivated — and blames his rivals for them.

That’s despite Trump himself drawing repeated criticism for his rhetoric. He has talked about prosecuting his political rivals and alleged without evidence that Democrats have brought the felony cases against him for political reasons.

In a post on his social media site on Monday, Trump again claimed that he had been the target of politically motivated attacks, writing that the left “has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.” He said “it will only get worse” and then veered into comments about immigration, even though there is no evidence the person arrested in connection with the apparent assassination attempt was an immigrant.

That follows the former president during last week’s debate and in the days after it amplifying false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets. The community days later evacuated schools and government buildings amid bomb threats, adding to the sense of an especially unstable and tense moment in America even before Sunday’s stunning development.

“Neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

He added, “We sought commitments from both [former president Donald] Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union’s decision comes two days after senior leaders met with Harris as they weighed whom to endorse.

The Teamsters, which represents truck drivers, freight workers and others, held similar meetings with Trump and President Joe Biden when he was still seeking re-election.

The union, which at 1.3 million members is one of the largest in the world, collected input on an endorsement from its members through straw polling and a QR poll from a code printed on a union magazine, a vice president at large of the union, John Palmer, said.

On Wednesday, the union released the results of their survey, which was conducted after Biden dropped out of the race. It found that almost 60% of rank-and-file union members preferred to endorse Trump, while 34% backed Harris, according to an electronic member poll. A phone poll indicated similar margins, with 58% supporting Trump and 31% supporting Harris.

The union has not released the number of poll participants or the margin of error.

The Teamsters have for decades endorsed Democratic presidential candidates. The union supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. They also backed Barack Obama in both of his presidential runs, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

In an email Wednesday, the Trump campaign highlighted the Teamsters polling.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear— they want President Trump back in the White House!” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “These hardworking men and women are the backbone of America and President Trump will strongly stand up for them when he’s back in the White House.”

The former president addressed the union’s decision not to endorse a candidate when talking with reporters on Wednesday, saying that it is “a great honor.”

“The Teamsters carry a lot of weight. The Democrats cannot believe it,” Trump said. “Look, it was always automatic that Democrats get the Teamsters, and they said, ‘We won’t endorse the Democrats this year,’ so that was an honor for me.”

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt pointed to local Teamsters chapters that endorsed the vice president.

“The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor,” Hitt said in a statement. “As the Vice President told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

Over the course of his presidency, Biden has promoted his support for organized labor and has frequently weighed in on disputes between union workers and corporate leaders. In 2021, he expressed support for the right to unionize in a direct-to-camera video as Amazon workers in Alabama were about to vote on whether to organize.

Then-Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2021 credited Biden with including an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he visited striking autoworkers in Michigan.

But despite calling himself “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden drew criticism from organized labor two years ago when he worked with Congress to pass a law that averted an impending rail strike.

The law forced union workers to accept a union contract that had been brokered by the Biden administration. At the time, four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the deal.

As he signed the legislation, Biden called it “a tough [vote] for me,” but cited the need “to keep the supply chains stable around the holidays.”

The International Association of Fire Fighters is the most prominent union that has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate this year. The union endorsed Biden in 2020.

The AFL-CIO, which represents dozens of unions and millions of workers, and the United Auto Workers union have each endorsed Harris.

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Local authorities said the U.S. Secret Service agents protecting Trump fired at a man pointing an AK-style rifle with a scope as Trump was playing on one of his Florida golf courses in West Palm Beach.

Here are five things to know about what happened Sunday to the Republican presidential nominee.

Who is the suspect?

Law enforcement officials said the man who pointed the rifle and was arrested is Ryan Wesley Routh.

Records show Routh, 58, lived in North Carolina for most of his life before moving in 2018 to Kaaawa, Hawaii, where he and his son operated a company building sheds, according to an archived version of the webpage for the business.

Routh frequently posted on social media about the war in Ukraine and had a website where he sought to raise money and recruit volunteers to go to Kyiv to join the fight against the Russian invasion. Routh previously told other news outlets that he had been in Ukraine to help its war effort, NBC News reports.

In June 2020, he made a post on X directed at then-President Trump to say he would win reelection if he issued an executive order for the Justice Department to prosecute police misconduct. That year, he also posted in support of the Democratic presidential campaign of then-U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has since left the party and endorsed Trump.

However, in recent years, his posts suggest he soured on Trump, and he expressed support for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In July, following the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, Routh urged Biden and Harris to visit those wounded in the shooting at the hospital and to attend the funeral of a former fire chief killed at the rally.

Voter records show he registered as an unaffiliated voter in North Carolina in 2012, most recently voting in person during the state’s Democratic Party primary in March 2024. Federal campaign finance records show Routh made 19 small political donations totaling $140 since 2019 using his Hawaii address to ActBlue, a political action committee that supports Democratic candidates.

Records show that while living in Greensboro, North Carolina, Routh had multiple run-ins with law enforcement, including a conviction for possessing a machine gun in 2022. He was convicted in 2002 of possessing a weapon of mass destruction, according to online North Carolina Department of Adult Correction records.

The records do not provide details about the case. But a News & Record story from 2002 says a man with the same name was arrested after a three-hour standoff with police. The story says he was pulled over during a traffic stop, put his hand on a gun and barricaded himself inside a roofing business. He owned the roofing company, according to state incorporation filings.

How did this happen?

Local authorities said the gunman was about 400 yards to 500 yards away from Trump and hiding in shrubbery while the former president was playing a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

Ric Bradshaw, sheriff of Palm Beach County, said that when people get into the shrubbery around the course, “they’re pretty much out of sight.” Bradshaw said the entire golf course would have been lined with law enforcement if Trump were the sitting president, but because he’s not, “security is limited to the areas the Secret Service deems possible.”

Trump’s protective detail has been higher than some of his peers because of his high visibility and his campaign to seek the White House again. His security was bolstered days before the July assassination attempt in Pennsylvania because of a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, U.S. officials said.

What has Trump said since the attempt?

In an email to supporters, Trump said: “There were gunshots in my vicinity, but before rumors start spiraling out of control, I wanted you to hear this first: I AM SAFE AND WELL!”

His running mate, JD Vance, and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said they spoke with Trump after the incident, and both said he was in “good spirits.” Trump also checked in with several Fox News hosts.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, a close friend of the former president’s, said on air that he spoke with Trump and his golf partner, Steve Witkoff, afterward. They told Hannity they had been on the fifth hole when they heard a “pop pop, pop pop.” Within seconds, he said Witkoff recounted, Secret Service agents “pounced on” Trump and “covered him” to protect him.

Moments later, Witkoff said, a “fast cart” with steel reinforcement and other protection was able to whisk Trump away.

Hannity said Trump’s reaction after this happened — and when it was clear that everyone, including Witkoff, was safe — was to quip that he was sad he hadn’t been able to finish the hole since he “was even and had a birdie putt.”

What is Vice President Kamala Harris saying?

Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the presidential election, posted on X that she had been briefed on the reports of gunshots fired.

“I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.”

The White House said President Joe Biden and Harris would be kept updated on the investigation. The White House added it was “relieved” to know Trump is safe.

What’s next?

Trump has not announced any changes to his schedule and is set to speak live on X on Monday night from his Mar-a-Lago resort to launch his sons’ crypto platform.

Meanwhile, the leaders of a congressional bipartisan task force investigating the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump said they have requested a briefing by the Secret Service.

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“We are thankful that the former President was not harmed, but remain deeply concerned about political violence and condemn it in all of its forms,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., said in a statement. They said the task force will share updates.

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat who is part of the task force, said he “will seek answers about what happened today and then.”

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So when some of the industry’s biggest names endorsed former President Donald Trump and the onetime VC he picked for a running mate, JD Vance, people took notice.

Then hundreds of other VCs — some high profile, others lesser-known — threw their weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris, drawing battle lines over which presidential candidate will be better for tech innovation and the conditions startups need to thrive. For years, many of Silicon Valley’s political discussions took place behind closed doors. Now, those casual debates have gone public — on podcasts, social media and online manifestos.

Venture capitalist and Harris backer Stephen DeBerry says some of his best friends support Trump. Though centered in a part of Northern California known for liberal politics, the investors who help finance the tech industry have long been a more politically divided bunch.

“We ski together. Our families are together. We’re super tight,” said DeBerry, who runs the Bronze Venture Fund. “This is not about not being able to talk to each other. I love these guys — they’re almost all guys. They’re dear friends. We just have a difference of perspective on policy issues.”

It remains to be seen if the more than 700 venture capitalists who’ve voiced support for a movement called “VCs for Kamala” will match the pledges of Trump’s well-heeled supporters such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But the effort marks “the first time I’ve seen a galvanized group of folks from our industry coming together and coalescing around our shared values,” DeBerry said.

“There are a lot of practical reasons for VCs to support Trump,” including policies that could drive corporate profits and stock market values and favor wealthy benefactors, said David Cowan, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. But Cowan said he is supporting Harris as a VC with a “long-term investment horizon” because a “Trump world reeling from rampant income inequality, raging wars and global warming is not an attractive environment” for funding healthy businesses.

Several prominent VCs have voiced their support for Trump on Musk’s social platform X. Public records show some of them have donated to a new, pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC, whose donors include powerful tech industry conservatives with ties to SpaceX and Paypal and who run in Musk’s social circle. Also driving support is Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency and promise to end an enforcement crackdown on the industry.

Although some Biden policies have alienated parts of the investment sector concerned about tax policy, antitrust scrutiny or overregulation, Harris’ bid for the presidency has reenergized interest from VCs who until recently sat on the sidelines. Some of that excitement is due to existing relationships with Silicon Valley that are borne out of Harris’ career in the San Francisco area and her time as California’s attorney general.

“We buy risk, right? And we’re trying to buy the right type of risk,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder of “VCs for Kamala” said in an interview. “It’s really hard for these companies that are trying to build products and scale to do so in an unpredictable institutional environment.”

The schism in tech has left some firms split in their allegiances. Although venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the firm that is their namesake, endorsed Trump, one of their firm’s general partners, John O’Farrell, pledged his support for Harris. O’Farrell declined further comment.

Doug Leone, the former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, endorsed Trump in June, expressing concern on X “about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues.” But Leone’s longtime business partner at Sequoia, Michael Moritz, wrote in the Financial Times that tech leaders supporting Trump “are making a big mistake.”

Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, posted on X that he donated $300,000 to Trump’s campaign after supporting Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Federal Election Commission records show that Maguire donated $500,000 to America PAC in June; Leone donated $1 million.

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“The area where I disagree with Republicans the most is on women’s rights. And I’m sure I’ll disagree with some of Trump’s policies in the future,” Maguire wrote. “But in general I think he was surprisingly prescient.”

Feinzaig, managing director at venture firm Graham & Walker, said that she launched “VCs for Kamala” because she felt frustrated that “the loudest voices” were starting to “sound like they were speaking for the entire industry.”

Much of the VC discourse about elections is in response to a July podcast and manifesto in which Andreessen and Horowitz backed Trump and outlined their vision of a “Little Tech Agenda” that they said contrasted with the policies sought by Big Tech.

They accused the U.S. government of increasing hostility toward startups and the VCs who fund them, citing Biden’s proposed higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and regulations they said could hobble emerging industries involving blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio who spent time in San Francisco working at Thiel’s investment firm, voiced a similar perspective about “little tech” more than a month before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate.

“The donors who were really involved in Silicon Valley in a pro-Trump way, they’re not big tech, right? They’re little tech. They’re starting innovative companies. They don’t want the government to destroy their ability to innovate,” Vance said in an interview on Fox News in June.

Days earlier, Vance had joined Trump at a San Francisco fundraiser at the home of venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, a longtime conservative. Vance said Trump spoke to about 100 attendees that included “some of the leading innovators in AI.”

DeBerry said he doesn’t disagree with everything Andreesen Horowitz founders espouse, particularly their wariness about powerful companies controlling the agencies that regulate them. But he objects to their “little tech” framing, especially coming from a multibillion-dollar investment firm that he says is hardly the voice of the little guy. For DeBerry, whose firm focuses on social impact, the choice is not between big and little tech but “chaos and stability,” with Harris representing stability.

Complicating the allegiances is that a tough approach to breaking up the monopoly power of big corporations no longer falls along partisan lines. Vance has spoken favorably of Lina Khan, who Biden picked to lead the Federal Trade Commission and has taken on several tech giants. Meanwhile, some of the most influential VCs backing Harris — such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, an early investor in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — have sharply criticized Khan’s approach.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat whose California district encompasses part of Silicon Valley, said Trump supporters are a vocal minority reflecting a “third or less” of the region’s tech community. But while the White House has appealed to tech entrepreneurs with its investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and semiconductors, Khanna said Democrats must do a better job of showing that they understand the appeal of digital assets.

“I do think that the perceived lack of embrace of Bitcoin and the blockchain has hurt the Democratic Party among the young generation and among young entrepreneurs,” Khanna said.

Naseem Sayani, a general partner at Emmeline Ventures, said Andreessen and Horowitz’s support of Trump became a lightning rod for those in tech who do not back the Republican nominee. Sayani signed onto “VCs for Kamala,” she said, because she wanted the types of businesses that she helps fund to know that the investor community is not monolithic.

“We’re not single-profile founders anymore,” she said. “There’s women, there’s people of color, there’s all the intersections. How can they feel comfortable building businesses when the environment they’re in doesn’t actually support their existence in some ways?”

They told her that Donald Trump had been posting on social media about a false and racist rumor that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The former president might mention it during the debate, they said.

The warning, described by two people with knowledge of the conversation, proved spot on.

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While answering a question about immigration policy, Trump said migrants in Springfield were “eating the dogs” and “they’re eating the cats.” Harris laughed, shook her head and stared at her Republican opponent in amazement. “Talk about extreme,” she said, and then moved on.

It was easily the most bizarre moment from last week’s debate, spawning an explosion of online memes and parody videos. Now, Harris is trying to use her performance as an ongoing source of momentum, hoping to rekindle the kind of energy that she generated when she replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

It is unclear whether the debate will affect the outcome of the Nov. 5 election. In a flash poll of viewers conducted by CNN afterward, opinions of Trump were unchanged and Harris received only a slight bump in the share of people who view her favorably. But her team is making the most of it, turning key points into television advertisements and flooding the internet with clips. No equivalent effort is apparent from Trump’s side, despite his repeated insistence that he came out on top.

There almost certainly will not be another debate; Trump has said he will not do one. That means the debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia may be the only chance that voters will have to see the candidates side by side.

This story is based on interviews with five people close to Harris, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and reveal new details about how she prepared for and handled the debate. It was her first time meeting Trump in person.

Harris spent five days getting ready at a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh after a breakneck few weeks of campaigning.

Her team recreated the set where she would debate Trump on the night of Sept. 10. It was a far more professional setup than Harris had used eight years earlier as she was running for Senate in California, when campaign staff taped together cardboard boxes to serve as makeshift lecterns.

Two communications aides — one man, one woman — stood in for David Muir and Linsey Davis, the ABC News debate moderators.

Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, reprised his role as Trump, which he played when the former secretary of state ran for president. Reines wore a dark suit, a long red tie and orange bronzer to embody Trump.

One challenge would be the microphones.

When Biden was running, his team agreed that the debate microphones should be muted when it was not a candidate’s turn to speak. But Harris’ staff wanted the microphones hot at all times, which would allow her to jump in and create more opportunities for Trump to make outbursts.

But their campaign could not reach an agreement to change the rules, and the original plan remained in place.

Harris decided to make the most of the split screen format, where each candidate would be on camera at all times. Biden had flubbed the visual test when he debated Trump in June, often looking aimless with his mouth slightly agape. Harris provided silent commentary through her expressiveness — laughing, raising her eyebrows, bringing her hand to her chin with a quizzical look.

At one point during preparations, staff members suggested practicing mannerisms that Harris could use. The vice president waved them off, saying she would be fine without that kind of rehearsal.

Harris rarely left the hotel during preparations. On Sept. 7, she took a field trip to Penzeys Spices, where she picked up some seasoning mixes. One woman in the store wept as Harris hugged her. On Sept. 8, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, went to a military airbase and took a walk for about a half hour. Because of security considerations, the tarmac was the only place where they could stretch their legs.

Asked if she was ready for the debate, Harris gave reporters a thumb’s up and said “ready.”

She ended up leaving Pittsburgh on Sept. 9 rather than the day of the debate, canceling an extra mock debate and getting to Philadelphia earlier than expected.

As the clock ticked down to the start of the debate, dozens of staff members in the campaign’s Delaware headquarters assembled in assigned seats in front of four television screens. Some were nervous, still rattled from watching Biden implode in his own debate with Trump.

But Harris’ opening move, striding toward Trump to shake his hand as they took the stage, helped ease those jitters.

Throughout the debate, Harris mocked and needled Trump, throwing him off balance with jabs about the size of crowds at his campaign rallies. She pounced on questions about abortion and promised the country a new generation of leadership, while Trump became increasingly agitated and missed opportunities to press his case against her.

During the final commercial break, Trump departed the stage with a sigh. Harris stayed at her lectern, writing on her notepad, reviewing her words and taking a sip of water.

In her closing statement, she told viewers that “I think you’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country — one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past.”

Trump ended his remarks by calling Harris “the worst vice president in the history of our country.”

There was no live audience in the room to react to the candidates, and it was not always clear whether certain lines or expressions were hitting their marks.

So when Harris left the stage, she had a question for her staff: How did I do?

He was the CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund, a world-traveled executive who was sought after for speaking engagements and prominent board positions.

His wealth and connections got him flagged by Republicans as someone who could both raise campaign cash and pay his own way for a Senate campaign.

But McCormick’s Wall Street days haven’t been such an asset of late. They provided grist for attacks by Republican primary rivals in McCormick’s failed 2022 run for Senate and now by Democrats in his challenge to third-term Sen. Bob Casey.

Casey, in speeches and ads, hammers away at investments made by Bridgewater Associates while McCormick was CEO, including in Chinese companies that are considered part of Beijing’s military and surveillance industrial complex.

“While I was fighting for union rights and fighting for working families in Pennsylvania, he was making a lot of money investing in China,” Casey recently told a union crowd at a Teamsters hall in suburban Harrisburg. “He not only invested in Chinese companies, he invested in companies that built the Chinese military.”

McCormick declined an interview request.

The need to fend off accusations that he profited at America’s expense comes at an unfortunate time for McCormick as China’s relationship with Washington has grown increasingly tense.

But Bridgewater was hardly alone.

U.S. investment in Chinese companies surged while McCormick was Bridgewater’s CEO as hedge funds, institutional investors and fund managers plunged money into those same companies.

Some still do, according to a congressional report released this year after both the Trump and Biden administrations tried to block American investment in what they viewed as China’s military and surveillance apparatus.

America’s political community soured on China as early as 2016, but the U.S. financial sector “plowed right through that,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington who served on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The economic ties extend beyond Wall Street. Semiconductor companies, farmers, tech and others in manufacturing rely on China for customers or components, Scissors said.

As Bridgewater’s CEO in 2019, McCormick described China as America’s “most defining bilateral relationship of our time,” even as calls began in Washington to block American investments in Chinese companies that could pose a threat to U.S. security.

As a candidate, McCormick has described China as an “existential” threat to the United States. He called for the federal government to develop a comprehensive strategy for America to outperform China economically and technologically, and said his experience with China means he can go “toe to toe” with its government on trade issues.

But McCormick also defends himself, both minimizing Bridgewater’s investments in China, saying it was 2% of the company’s assets, and describing investment in China as “unavoidable” because of client expectations and the rapid growth of that country’s economy.

In a book he published last year, he wrote: “As is, U.S. dollars finance Communist China’s most egregious acts and ambitions.”

While campaigning, McCormick barely talks about his time at the hedge fund. If he mentions it at all, he tells audiences he ran a “financial firm” or an “investment firm.”

Instead, he dwells on other entries on his resume. Those include playing football and wrestling in high school, graduating from the U.S. military academy at West Point and serving with the Army in the first Gulf War, where he won a Bronze Star.

But if he is not talking up his Wall Street days, Wall Street does not seem to care. In his two campaigns for Senate, super political action committees that support McCormick have raised tens of millions of dollars and counting from the finance world.

McCormick, 59, earned a Ph.D from Princeton University, ran the online auction house FreeMarkets Inc., which had its name on a skyscraper in Pittsburgh during the tech boom, and served in senior positions in President George W. Bush’s administration.

There, he likes to say, he gained a reputation as a tough negotiator with the Chinese when tasked with Commerce Department policy over export controls of sensitive technologies.

When Bridgewater Associates hired McCormick in 2009 to be president, its founder, Ray Dalio, had a reputation for being bullish on China.

Today, Bridgewater is as prominent as any foreign investment firm in China.

Regulatory disclosures in China show that it has at least 10 billion renminbi — or at least $1.4 billion, and maybe much more — invested in Chinese assets there, said Harry Handley, a senior associate at Z-Ben Advisors, a financial advisory firm based in Shanghai.

That is the most of any foreign firm, Handley said.

McCormick, who was an executive at Bridgewater for 12 years, joined the company when investment banks, venture capital firms and hedge funds were fueling an investment boom in a growing Chinese economy.

“The Chinese economy was doing well for a long time and there was money to be made there,” said Greg Brown, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of finance who researches hedge funds.

McCormick spent his last five years at Bridgewater as co-CEO or CEO, and those were big years for investing in China. That is when Chinese regulators relaxed restrictions over foreign investment in stocks and bonds, unleashing several years of particularly heavy investment, Brown and others say.

Bridgewater forged a reputation among foreign firms as an aggressive investor in Chinese companies — “over the past few years they’ve kind of dominated among the global firms in China,” Handley said — and reputedly handled money for the Chinese government.

In early 2022, McCormick left Bridgewater to run for Senate in Pennsylvania in a seven-way GOP primary.

Bridgewater’s connections with China followed him.

In one attack by a Republican primary rival, a video by Mehmet Oz ‘s campaign showed “finance bros” Chad and Tad at a bar when Tad asks Chad, “Do you think saying ‘I invest in China’ is a good pickup line?” Chad responds, “Investing in foreign adversaries always plays!”

At a rally days before the 2022 primary, former President Donald Trump, aiming to help Oz, his endorsed candidate, derided McCormick as having been with a company that “managed money for communist China.”

McCormick lost narrowly to Oz.

This summer, Casey’s campaign launched two ads that ran in Pennsylvania’s major TV markets attacking McCormick over Bridgewater’s investments in companies tied to China’s military.

“Dave McCormick sold us out to make a fortune,” say hard-hatted speakers in one ad. “That’s the real Dave McCormick.”

McCormick has tried to tie Casey to China, saying Casey had money invested in Chinese companies through mutual funds and that the Casey-supported clean-energy policies of the Biden administration are making the U.S. more reliant on Chinese lithium batteries and solar panels.

Meanwhile, each candidate is trying to show that he is the tougher one on China. That has put the contrast between McCormick the CEO and McCormick the candidate into sharp relief, with McCormick explicitly calling for an end to U.S. investment in technologies in China that are critical to national security or tied to its military.

“McCormick has changed his tune because he’s a political type,” Scissors said. “If he was in the business community, he’d still be pushing for relations with China. Because that’s what they do.”

___

Follow Marc Levy at https://x.com/timelywriter.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported. 

Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.

Lee said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post. 

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An Ohio city reshaped by Haitian immigrants lands in an unwelcome spotlight

Other posts have also contributed to the false allegations, including a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio, but was spread by some online as evidence of the claims about Springfield. Graphic video of a woman who allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat was also found not to have originated in Springfield but in Canton, Ohio, and does not have any connection to the Haitian community.

Local police and city officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence of such crimes in Springfield, but that hasn’t stopped the lies from spreading across the country and igniting a national frenzy that landed on the presidential debate stage this week. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who was born less than an hour away from Springfield, have repeated the baseless allegations.

Lee said she never imagined her post would become fodder for conspiracy theories and hate.

“I’m not a racist,” she said through heavy emotion, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”

The anti-immigrant fervor in Springfield led to school and municipal building closures on Thursday and Friday after city officials received bomb threats. 

Lee said she pulled her daughter out of school and is now worried about her safety with so much attention on her family. She is also concerned for the safety of the Haitian community, which she said she did not intend to villainize en masse. 

“I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I was in the Haitians’ position, I’d be terrified, too, worried that somebody’s going to come after me because they think I’m hurting something that they love and that, again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”

Immigrant advocacy groups have said these kinds of claims can be dangerous.

“The Haitian-American community in Springfield, OH and around the country is feeling targeted and unsafe because dehumanizing, debunked and racist conspiracies are being advanced at the highest levels of American politics and are still being repeated,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for immigration refor said in an email. “The false claim that Black immigrants are violently attacking American families by stealing and eating their pets is a powerful and old racist trope that puts a target on people’s backs, and it is turbo-charged in the era of MAGA when political violence has become commonplace and we have already witnessed violent incidents incited by such rhetoric.”

Lee said that there are very real problems related to Springfield’s population boom that caught the struggling city off guard. Springfield was not prepared to address the housing, health care and other service needs that came with the sudden increase of new residents over the last five years when Haitians arrived, many of them with protected status under federal law. 

Still, she never imagined that her Facebook post would set off a national news cycle.

“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield,” she said.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Far-right activist Laura Loomer’s access to Trump reveals a crisis in his campaign
• Before Trump, neo-Nazis pushed false claims about Haitians as part of hate campaign
• For Haitians, disparaging tropes are an opportunity to share ‘the beauty of our country and people’

The image, which caused controversy in August after being shared by the former president on Truth Social, originally circulated with text reading, “Taylor wants you to vote for Joe Biden,” and was posted in a pro-Biden Facebook group with just 8,000 members in December 2023. That post was viewed by NBC News. A reverse-image search conducted by NBC News did not find any earlier incidences of the image being posted online.  

After the pro-Biden image featuring the AI-generated Swift was first posted on Facebook, it began to travel around the pro-Biden internet, particularly among Gen X and baby boomer supporters of the then-candidate. The Facebook group it was initially posted in is largely a place for Democrats to share memes and information in support of Biden and against Trump. 

The image also traveled to X and Instagram’s messaging platform, Threads. S. E. Hinton, author of “The Outsiders,” shared it on X in December. It was posted in a liberal subreddit the same month.

“I am a Boomer for Biden,” one X post of the image was captioned in January. 

The image’s creator, a Democrat, asked NBC News to keep his identity private, wanting to avoid backlash. Inspired by Swift’s 2020 endorsement of Biden, he said he used a generative AI platform to create an image from the text prompt “Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam,” then used Photoshop to add text over it.

On Aug. 17, around nine months after it was posted with the pro-Biden text, a pro-Trump X account with over 340,000 followers posted an edited version that read, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” The X account did not respond to a request for comment about whether it edited the image itself or where it came from. The next day, Trump posted a screenshot of the X post on his Truth Social account with the caption, “I accept!”

“I woke up one morning and I got a text message from somebody who sent me a picture of the altered version and said, ‘Was this you?’ I was like, ‘Yeah that’s an altered version of my original,’” the person who created the AI image of Swift endorsing Biden told NBC News in a phone interview. “I didn’t think much of it until I sat down and started looking at the news. It started blowing up from there, with people saying Taylor might sue him and I thought, ‘Holy crap, what did I do?’”

On Tuesday, after the presidential debate between Trump and Harris, Swift posted an endorsement for Harris on Instagram. In the caption, she cited the AI-generated image Trump posted as one of the reasons why she wanted to make her stance known publicly. 

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”

Swift included a link to the official voter registration website in the Instagram Story announcing her endorsement. In the 24 hours that followed, more than 400,000 people clicked the link from her account.

“I agree with Taylor that AI, when used by bad actors, can be a danger to democracy,” the AI image creator said. “If this leads to stronger regulation, I’m not only happy to comply, but I’ll be happy that it makes the world a safer place.”

The AI image creator, an artist, said he initially started experimenting with AI to stay in step with technological advancement he perceived as a threat to his career. He said he realized it could be a useful way to create political satire. 

His public Facebook group is where he posts content in support of Democrats, starting with Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and now in support of Harris’ presidential campaign. 

“I didn’t think it would go down this way,” he said. “The intent of it was to boost support for Joe Biden because his communication was poor and his polls were low and Trump was a looming threat and I just couldn’t stand idly by.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,″ Francis said.

The Argentine Jesuit was asked to provide counsel to American Catholic voters during an airborne news conference while he flew back to Rome from his four-nation tour through Asia. Francis stressed that he is not an American and would not be voting.

Neither Republican candidate Donald Trump nor the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, was mentioned by name.

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But Francis nevertheless expressed himself in stark terms when asked to weigh in on their positions on two hot-button issues in the U.S. election — abortion and migration — that are also of major concern to the Catholic Church.

Francis has made the plight of migrants a priority of his pontificate and speaks out emphatically and frequently about it. While strongly upholding church teaching forbidding abortion, Francis has not emphasized church doctrine as much as his predecessors.

Francis said migration is a right described in Scripture and that anyone who does not follow the Biblical call to welcome the stranger is committing a “grave sin.”

He was also blunt in speaking about abortion. “To have an abortion is to kill a human being. You may like the word or not, but it’s killing,” he said. “We have to see this clearly.”

Asked what voters should do at the polls, Francis recalled the civic duty to vote.

“One should vote, and choose the lesser evil,” he said. “Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know.

“Everyone in their conscience should think and do it,” he said.

It’s not the first time Francis has weighed in on a U.S. election. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Francis was asked about Trump’s plan to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Francis declared then that anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants “is not Christian.”

In responding Friday, Francis recalled that he celebrated Mass at the U.S.-Mexico border and “there were so many shoes of the migrants who ended up badly there.”

Trump pledges massive deportations, just as he did in his first White House bid, when there was a vast gulf between his ambitions and the legal, financial and political realities of such an undertaking.

The U.S. bishops conference, for its part, has called abortion the “preeminent priority” for American Catholics in its published voter advice. Harris has strongly defended abortion rights and has emphasized support for reinstating a federal right to abortion.

In his comments, the pope added: “On abortion, science says that a month from conception, all the organs of a human being are already there, all of them. Performing an abortion is killing a human being. Whether you like the word or not, this is killing. You can’t say the church is closed because it does not allow abortion. The church does not allow abortion because it’s killing. It is murder.”

However, cells are only beginning the process of developing organs in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that by 13 weeks, all major organs have formed. For example, cardiac tissue starts to form in the first two months — initially a tube that only later evolves into the four chambers that define a heart.

In other comments, Francis:

— denied a French media report that he would travel to Paris for the December inauguration of the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, saying flat-out he would not be there. But he confirmed he would like to go to the Canary Islands to highlight the plight of migrants.

— tamped down renewed speculation that he might finally return to Argentina later this year, saying he wants to go but that nothing had been decided. He added: “There are various things to resolve first.” Francis has not been home since before the 2013 conclave that elected him pope.

— declared that China was “a promise and a hope” for the Catholic Church and hoped to one day visit.

— called sexual abuse “demonic” and weighed on the latest revelations of assault against a legendary French priest, Abbe Pierre.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

“Laura has been a supporter of mine. Just like a lot of people are supporters, and she’s been a supporter of mine. She speaks very positively of the campaign. I’m not sure why you asked that question,” Trump told reporters at a press conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle blasted Loomer, who repeatedly appeared alongside Trump this week — including at a Sept. 11 memorial event — as she promoted baseless and inflammatory remarks about immigrants on her social media accounts. Loomer lashed out at Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in response to their criticisms.

“I don’t control Laura. Laura — she’s a, she’s a free spirit. Well, I don’t know. I mean, look, I can’t tell Laura what to do,” Trump added on Friday.

Loomer’s relationship with Trump came under particular scrutiny after the former president mentioned a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday.

Loomer did not immediately return a request for comment about Trump’s remark Friday. Representatives for the Trump and Harris campaigns also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The baseless theory, which city officials and police have denied, originated online and spread through far-right circles.

Several of Loomer’s posts on social media this week came under fire, including one where she nodded to a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks.

“23 years later, and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions,” Loomer posted Friday, alongside a video of Trump in 2001 questioning whether airplanes could cause explosions like the ones that happened at the Twin Towers on 9/11.

In another post, Loomer alleged that the “White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center” if Harris wins the presidential election.

That statement earned her condemnation from Greene, who called the comment “appalling and extremely racist.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Thursday of Loomer, “No leader should ever associate with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this kind of racist poison.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Far-right activist Laura Loomer’s access to Trump reveals a crisis in his campaign
• Before Trump, neo-Nazis pushed false claims about Haitians as part of hate campaign
• For Haitians, disparaging tropes are an opportunity to share ‘the beauty of our country and people’

The comment by Harris, a longtime climate hawk who backed the original Green New Deal, surprised supporters and opponents alike — and conflicted with frequent boasts by Harris and President Joe Biden that they are champions in the fight to slow global warming.

After former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Biden-Harris administration reentered the global pact aimed at reducing emissions. The administration also set a target to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and moved to accelerate renewable energy projects and shift away from fossil fuels.

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Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, said it was notable that at a debate in energy-rich Pennsylvania, Harris chose to “brag about something that President Biden has barely acknowledged — that domestic fossil fuel production under the Biden administration is at an all-time high.″ Crude production averaged 12.9 million barrels a day last year, eclipsing a previous record set in 2019 under Trump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The statement was “another sign of Harris’ sprint to the middle″ on energy policy and other issues, Donovan said.

Harris went one step further, rebranding the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — the administration’s signature climate law — as a boon to fracking and other drilling, thanks to lease-sale requirements inserted into the bill by independent West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key swing vote in the Senate and a strong supporter of the fossil fuel industry.

Harris’s comments disappointed some in the environmental community.

“Harris missed a critical opportunity to lay out a stark contrast with Trump and show young voters that she will stand up to Big Oil and stop the climate crisis,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, one of the groups behind the Green New Deal.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” O’Hanlon said. “Young voters want more from Harris” on climate change, she added. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Her group is working to turn out young voters, “but we hear people asking every day, ‘What are Democrats going to do for us?’” O’Hanlon said. “To win, Harris needs to show young people she will fight for us.”

Other environmental groups were less critical, citing the looming threat to climate action posed by Trump, who rolled back more than 100 environmental protections during his term as president.

“There is only one presidential candidate who is a champion for climate action and that is Kamala Harris,” said Alex Glass, speaking for Climate Power, a liberal advocacy group. Harris “laid out a clear vision to invest in clean energy jobs and lower costs for working families,” Glass said.

By comparison, she said, Trump “will do the bidding of his Big Oil donors.”

Glass cited the conservative Project 2025, written by Trump allies, saying it will put millions of clean-energy jobs at risk and let oil companies “profiteer and pollute.” Trump has denied a direct connection to Project 2025 but has endorsed some of its key ideas.

Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, said Harris’ comment in support of fracking reflected political reality in the closely contested election. “You have to be for fracking to be elected president in 2024,” he said. “That’s good news for our industry and great news for American consumers.”

Asked why he was so confident about the need to support fracking, Sommers offered a one-word answer: “Pennsylvania.”

Not only is it a key swing state in the election, Pennsylvania also “is the beating heart of the natural gas industry in this country,” Sommers said, second only to Texas in total production.

“You don’t win Pennsylvania without supporting fracking, and you don’t win the presidency without Pennsylvania,” Sommers said.

In the debate, Trump disputed Harris’s claim that she will not try to ban fracking, but Sommers said he takes Harris at her word and welcomes her support for fracking and oil drilling more generally.

Asked if he was concerned about Harris’ past actions suing oil companies, Sommers said no. The oil and gas industry supports 11 million jobs, he said, and the price of gasoline “is determined by economics — supply and demand. There is no man behind the curtain” rigging prices.

As California attorney general, Harris “won tens of millions in settlements against Big Oil and held polluters accountable,” her campaign says. Her platform includes a promise to ”hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.”

Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to rescind unspent funds from the climate law and other programs, and said he will target offshore wind projects. He said Harris would move to restrict onshore oil and gas production if elected.

“They’ll go back to destroying our country, and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” Trump said.

A president’s power to restrict fracking, even on federal lands, is limited, and barring the practice on private land would require an act of Congress.

Former President Donald Trump will campaign Friday in Western states as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris keeps her focus on one of the biggest battleground prizes in the East, Pennsylvania.

Trump is scheduled to hold what’s being billed as a news conference at his Los Angeles-area golf club. He’ll speak at the seaside club perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean before heading to northern California for a fundraiser, followed by a rally in Las Vegas, the largest city in swing state Nevada.

Harris, meanwhile, heads to Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre on Friday, campaigning in counties where Trump won in 2016 and 2020, as she tries to capitalize on her momentum after Tuesday night’s debate.

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It’s her second day of back-to-back rallies after holding two events in North Carolina, another swing state, on Thursday. Her campaign is aiming to hit every market in every battleground state over four days, with stops by Harris, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and other surrogates in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.

While speaking in Charlotte, Harris took a victory lap for her debate performance in which she needled Trump and kept him on the defensive. Recounting one moment while campaigning in North Carolina, she mocked Trump for saying he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing the Affordable Care Act.

“Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan. Concepts,” she said as the crowd roared with laughter.

Her campaign said she raised $47 million from 600,000 donors in the 24 hours after her debate with Trump.

Harris said the candidates “owe it to voters to have another debate.” But Trump said he won’t agree to face off with her again.

Trump’s morning event will mark the second Friday in a row that the Republican has scheduled a news conference, though at his last appearance in New York, the former president didn’t take any questions. Instead, the Republican for nearly an hour railed against women who have accused him of sexual misconduct over the years, resurrecting the allegations in great detail before his debate with Harris.

It’s unclear whether Trump plans to speak about any subject in particular at Friday’s news conference, but his campaign has added more to his schedule since early August as he tries to contrast himself with Harris. She has not held a news conference since becoming a presidential candidate and the Democrat has sat for just one in-depth interview.

Her campaign has said she will start doing more interviews with local media outlets in battleground states.

After appearing at his golf club in upscale Rancho Palos Verdes, Trump will head to a fundraiser in the afternoon in the Bay Area town of Woodside that is being hosted by billionaire software developer Tom Siebel and his wife, Stacey Siebel. Tom Siebel is the second cousin once removed of Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and surrogate for Harris.

Attendees will pay at least $3,300 per person or raise $10,000 for the campaign, according to an invitation. Top-tier donors will get a photo, reception and roundtable, paying $500,000 for a couple to be on the host committee or $150,000 per person to be a co-host.

It’s Trump’s second fundraising stop in California in as many days as he tries to make up fundraising ground against Harris.

Even before she raked in cash after the debate, the vice president reported raising $361 million in August from nearly 3 million donors, her first full month as a candidate after replacing President Joe Biden. Trump brought in $130 million over the same period. Harris’ campaign reported that it started September with $109 million more on hand than Trump’s did.

On Friday night, Trump heads to Las Vegas, where he’ll have a rally in the city’s downtown area. Trump was in the city last month for a brief stop to promote his proposal to end federal taxes on workers’ tips, something that’s expected to especially resonate in the tourist city, where much of the service-based economy includes workers who rely on tips. He announced a new proposal Thursday to end taxes on overtime pay.

The swing state is one that Trump narrowly lost in 2016 and 2020 and is among about half a dozen that both campaigns are heavily focused on.

The Republican presidential ticket has visited Clark County, Nevada, four times since June. Trump has held campaign events in Las Vegas three times, while his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, held a rally in suburban Henderson in July.

The Democratic ticket also has visited four times, although two of those campaign events were by President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race. Harris and Walz held a joint rally in Las Vegas last month, and Walz visited the city again Tuesday.

Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles, Chris Megerian in Washington and Tom Verdin in Sacramento contributed to this report.

“Neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

He added, “We sought commitments from both [former president Donald] Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union’s decision comes two days after senior leaders met with Harris as they weighed whom to endorse.

The Teamsters, which represents truck drivers, freight workers and others, held similar meetings with Trump and President Joe Biden when he was still seeking re-election.

The union, which at 1.3 million members is one of the largest in the world, collected input on an endorsement from its members through straw polling and a QR poll from a code printed on a union magazine, a vice president at large of the union, John Palmer, said.

On Wednesday, the union released the results of their survey, which was conducted after Biden dropped out of the race. It found that almost 60% of rank-and-file union members preferred to endorse Trump, while 34% backed Harris, according to an electronic member poll. A phone poll indicated similar margins, with 58% supporting Trump and 31% supporting Harris.

The union has not released the number of poll participants or the margin of error.

The Teamsters have for decades endorsed Democratic presidential candidates. The union supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. They also backed Barack Obama in both of his presidential runs, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

In an email Wednesday, the Trump campaign highlighted the Teamsters polling.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear— they want President Trump back in the White House!” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “These hardworking men and women are the backbone of America and President Trump will strongly stand up for them when he’s back in the White House.”

The former president addressed the union’s decision not to endorse a candidate when talking with reporters on Wednesday, saying that it is “a great honor.”

“The Teamsters carry a lot of weight. The Democrats cannot believe it,” Trump said. “Look, it was always automatic that Democrats get the Teamsters, and they said, ‘We won’t endorse the Democrats this year,’ so that was an honor for me.”

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt pointed to local Teamsters chapters that endorsed the vice president.

“The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor,” Hitt said in a statement. “As the Vice President told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

Over the course of his presidency, Biden has promoted his support for organized labor and has frequently weighed in on disputes between union workers and corporate leaders. In 2021, he expressed support for the right to unionize in a direct-to-camera video as Amazon workers in Alabama were about to vote on whether to organize.

Then-Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2021 credited Biden with including an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he visited striking autoworkers in Michigan.

But despite calling himself “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden drew criticism from organized labor two years ago when he worked with Congress to pass a law that averted an impending rail strike.

The law forced union workers to accept a union contract that had been brokered by the Biden administration. At the time, four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the deal.

As he signed the legislation, Biden called it “a tough [vote] for me,” but cited the need “to keep the supply chains stable around the holidays.”

The International Association of Fire Fighters is the most prominent union that has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate this year. The union endorsed Biden in 2020.

The AFL-CIO, which represents dozens of unions and millions of workers, and the United Auto Workers union have each endorsed Harris.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“We just don’t think it’s necessary,” Trump told Telemundo Arizona in an exclusive interview ahead of his campaign rally in Tucson Thursday.

“I had one with as you know, Joe, it was quite a famous debate, and then we had another one the other day and it was both very successful. In fact, my poll numbers went up since the debate and we think we’ve discussed everything and I don’t think they want it either.”

The former president in a Truth Social post earlier Thursday claimed that he won his first debate against Harris on Tuesday night, citing as evidence the fact that Harris’ campaign had challenged him to another debate shortly after the first one ended.

The post read in part, “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”

Harris said at a rally in North Carolina on Thursday that she and Trump “owe” voters another debate, NBC News reported.

“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate, and I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate, because this election and what is at stake could not be more important,” Harris said.

The presidential running mates, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are still set to meet on Oct. 1 for their only vice-presidential debate.

In the interview Thursday, Trump was also asked about the sensational and baseless claim he made during the debate that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been eating dogs and other pets; he did not back down, saying he’d heard the information “from local authorities, but also from the newspapers.”

Baseless rumors have spread on social media for days claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are abducting and eating pets. Police there knocked down the stories Monday in a statement saying they hadn’t seen any documented examples.

“There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the statement said.

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Both political parties’ national conventions, the presidential inauguration and the U.N. General Assembly already have this designation, but it’s the first time the Jan. 6 vote count and certification have received it.

The Secret Service said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the designation following a request from the mayor of Washington, D.C. The move means these are particularly high-profile events that might be targets for terrorists or criminals.

The Secret Service is in charge of running security for such events in a planning process that kicks off many months in advance. A steering committee for the Jan. 6 certification has been formed and will begin meeting in the coming weeks, the Secret Service said.

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The goal is to improve planning and coordination, especially when it comes to pulling in resources across the federal government.

“National Special Security Events are events of the highest national significance,” Eric Ranaghan, the special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s Dignitary Protective Division, said in a statement. The agency and its partners “are committed to developing and implementing a comprehensive and integrated security plan to ensure the safety and security of this event and its participants,” he said.

Rioters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election descended on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. They scaled walls, shattered windows, beat police and hunted down lawmakers in the halls of Congress. About 140 police officers were injured that day. One officer collapsed and died. Four others later died by suicide. A Trump supporter seeking to climb through a broken window was shot and killed by authorities.

In the aftermath of the riot, 1,500 criminal cases have been brought to court with more than 900 people pleading guilty and roughly 200 convicted.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Thursday that House Democrats are “committed to protecting the democracy, we’re committed to free and fair elections and we’re committed to the peaceful transfer of power that will begin on Jan. 6.”

Asked if the special security designation was needed, he said that given what happened in 2021, “and the refusal by many extreme MAGA Republicans to stop something like that from ever happening again … this designation by national security professionals seems to have been necessary.”

It’s a high-profile job for an agency struggling to defend its reputation in the wake of the assassination attempt against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The Secret Service has been criticized for failing to secure the building that Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed on top of and opened fire as Trump spoke. A bullet nicked Trump on the ear. The agency’s director, Kim Cheatle, resigned after a heated congressional hearing, and the agency’s decisions and planning are the subject of multiple investigations.

___

AP Writer Lisa Mascaro contributed reporting.

Vice President Kamala Harris raised $47 million in the first 24 hours following her Tuesday night debate against former President Donald Trump, a Harris campaign spokesman told CNBC.

The massive figure represents another boost to Harris’ fundraising operation, which has been a juggernaut since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her for president in July.

The $47 million sum came from nearly 600,000 individual donors who contributed to one of several campaign committees and PACs backing the ticket of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the campaign said.

Harris was widely considered the winner of the debate, held in Philadelphia and hosted by ABC News. Both Democratic and Republican strategists and elected officials agreed that Trump let himself be rattled by Harris’ confrontational style and several instances where the ABC News moderators fact-checked him in real time.

The newest Harris fundraising numbers mark the latest blow for the Trump campaign, which has been lagging behind Harris in the fundraising game.

The Harris political operation recently announced that it raised $361 million in August, more than double the $130 million Trump’s team raised the same month.

The news of Harris’ $47 million day was first reported by The New York Times.

New York startup company Kalshi began taking what amounts to bets on the outcome of the November congressional elections after a judge refused to block them from doing so.

The ruling enabled the company, at least temporarily, to offer prediction contracts — essentially yes-or-no bets — on which party will win control of the Senate and the House in November.

“The Kalshi community just made history, and I know we are only getting started,” said Tarek Mansour, a co-founder of the company. “Now is finally the time to allow these markets to show the world just how powerful they are at providing signal amidst the noise, and giving us more truth about what the future holds.”

It was not clear whether the company intends to offer bets beyond the ones posted Thursday for congressional races, including potentially taking bets on the presidential race.

It also was not immediately clear whether sports books or online casinos would seek to offer similar political bets in light of the ruling.

Prices on Kalshi’s so-called predictive contracts varied throughout the early afternoon. As of mid-afternoon, a bet on the Republicans to win control of the Senate was priced at 76 cents; a $100 bet would pay $129. A bet on the Democrats to win control of the House was priced at 63 cents, with a $100 bet paying out $154.

It was not clear how long such betting might last; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which last year prohibited the company from offering them, said it would appeal the ruling as quickly as possible.

Better Markets, a nonprofit organization that says it advocates for the public interest in financial markets, called the development “a dangerous move that opens the floodgates to unprecedented gambling on U.S. elections, eroding public trust in both markets and democracy.”

Contrasting his client with foreign companies who take bets from American customers on U.S. elections without U.S. government approval, Roth said Kalshi is trying to do things the right way, under government regulation.

“It invested significantly in these markets,” he said during Thursday’s hearing. “They spent millions of dollars. It would be perverse if all that investment went up in smoke.”

But Raagnee Beri, an attorney for the commission, said allowing such bets could invite malicious activities designed to influence the outcome of elections and undermine already fragile public confidence in the voting process.

“These contracts would give market participants a $100 million incentive to influence the market on the election,” she said. “There is a very severe public interest threat.”

She used the analogy of someone who has taken an investment position in corn commodities.

“Somebody puts out misinformation about a drought, that a drought is coming,” she said. “That could move the market on the price of corn. The same thing could happen here. The commission is not required to suffer the flood before building a dam.”

Thursday’s ruling will not be the last word on the case. The commission said it will appeal on an emergency basis to a Washington D.C. circuit court, and asked the judge to stay her ruling for 24 hours. But the judge declined, leaving no prohibition in place on the company offering election bets, at least in the very near term.

The company already offers yes-no positions on political topics including whether a government shutdown will happen this year, whether a new Supreme Court justice will be confirmed this year, and whether President Joe Biden’s approval rating will be above or below a certain level by the end of the year.

The Kalshi bets are technically not the first to be offered legally on U.S. elections. West Virginia permitted such bets for one hour in April 2020 before reversing itself and canceling those betting markets, deciding it had not done the proper research beforehand.

___

Follow Wayne Parry on X at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday said there will not be another debate against his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The former president in a Truth Social post claimed that he won his first debate against Harris on Tuesday night. He cited as evidence the fact that Harris’ campaign had challenged him to another debate shortly after the first one ended.

Numerous conservative commentators and some of Trump’s own supporters have said Harris outperformed him.

But Trump in Thursday’s post wrote, “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.'”

“Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate,” Trump wrote.

Multiple post-debate polls actually show audiences by a sizable margin believe Harris won. In the wake of the debate, Trump and his allies lashed out at host network ABC News and accused the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, of political bias.

The showdown in Philadelphia was Trump’s second presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle. He debated in late June against President Joe Biden, who performed so badly that he ultimately withdrew his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as his replacement.

Trump in his Truth Social post wrote, “KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”

Less than an hour after that post was sent, Harris again called for another debate.

“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate,” she said at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“And I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate because this election and what is at stake could not be more important.”

The two presidential running mates, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are still set to meet Oct. 1 for their one and only vice presidential debate.

The campaigns have publicly squabbled over the debate schedule since Harris took over the Democratic ticket.

Trump had previously tried to push Harris to accept an early-September debate on Fox News. He also said at one point that he was game for another debate hosted by NBC News on Sept. 25. Harris’ campaign did not immediately agree to that debate.

Trump had waffled on whether to participate in an ABC-hosted debate, claiming that his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos created a “conflict of interest.”

The campaigns also traded barbs about the debate rules, with Harris’ team unsuccessfully pushing for both candidates’ microphones to stay on even when it was not their turn to answer.

Trump and Harris ended up facing off for the first, and possibly only, time Tuesday night.

Moments after the debate ended, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called for a second debate in October.

“Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?” she said.

Trump claimed victory in the debate, and quickly cast doubt on whether he would agree to another round.

In a Truth Social post Wednesday, he wrote, “Why would I do a Rematch?”

The presidential debate this week was the final affront to Rosie Torres’ lifelong Republicanism. She said her allegiance to Donald Trump, already strained by his stand on abortion, snapped in the former president’s “eye opener” encounter with Kamala Harris.

It’s time to put “country before party,” Torres, 60, said Wednesday in Bristol, a riverfront town in suburban Philadelphia. Trump left her frustrated after his appearance recently at Arlington National Cemetery when a member of his staff pushed a cemetery official, she said.

“I still was willing to vote for Donald Trump,” Torres said. “But you know, I think that what he did at the cemetery for the veterans — that was very disrespectful. I feel like our country is being disrespected.”

In Bucks County, a critical area in a vital swing state, the debate is producing a lot of hard thinking about what to do in November. Millions of Americans elsewhere have made up their minds but in purple Pennsylvania, plenty of voting choices are still in play.

In interviews in Bristol and Langhorne, another longtime Republican came away from the debate intrigued but not sold on Harris, a young first-time voter is going for Trump, and a Democrat is still trying to shake the image in his head of people eating pets after Trump’s “moronic” talking point on that subject Tuesday night.

A closer look at what voters in a key part of the country are thinking after what could be the only presidential debate:

She’s still shopping

There’s Mary Nolan, 70, of Bensalem, a registered Republican for 50 years who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020. She has more thinking to do after a debate in which Harris both impressed and frustrated her.

“I wasn’t happy with Biden-Trump,” she said of the options before President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection campaign. “I didn’t feel we had any good choices. And I’m still not sure we do. We might. But I still want to see more about Kamala Harris.”

She said she and her husband, who’s registered as a Democrat, split their party registrations so they could have a say as a family in primary elections. Immigration, the economy (she said she had just paid $6 for a pound of butter) and the infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law were her top issues.

“I like that Kamala Harris does say I am going to be the president for everyone,” Nolan said. “I don’t think our politicians say that often.”

She figures she’ll make her voting decision by the end of October, just days before the election. Meantime, she’s aggressive about collecting information.

“I take different opinions from all over. I don’t do any blogs. It’s simply news. Different interest groups like AARP.”

Her political ideology? “I think the world is changing fast, and I’m still in my values from 1960,” Nolan said.

What values?

“Family, home, morals. You know, our kids don’t have the upbringing that you did or I did because the streets are different now. I think if someone would say, you know, this is what I’m going to do to improve life in the United States, I definitely would vote for them.”

She said she thought Harris had a good debate, but dodged some things.

“I did not like that she avoided questions. She talked around them when they asked her direct questions about abortion. There was one about abortion. There was another about immigration. And there were a couple that said, hey, you’ve been here three and a half years, but you haven’t done those things that you’re saying are so important. Why not? She ran off into her talking points and never gave a direct answer.”

But Harris gave her a good impression. Trump did not.

“I think yesterday, definitely Kamala Harris presented herself very well. She’s dignified. … She would be a good representative of our country.”

Trump? “I think his policies are good. I just want a more stable, dignified president.” She wants “someone that doesn’t yell and scream and call people names.”

This Democrat saw history unfold

Terry Culleton, 68, of Langhorne, Pennsylvania, is a retired high school English literature teacher and was reading “Autocracy, Inc.” by Anne Applebaum at a cafe Wednesday morning. His support for labor, then for civil rights and human rights, made him a Democrat.

He thought Harris held her own against Trump and articulated her plans well.

But what really stuck with him was Trump’s false comments about immigrants in Ohio eating pets.

“So moronic a thing to say and to repeat that I just can’t get it out of my head that somebody would go on national TV and state that,” he said.

He said he got a sense of history unfolding watching the debate last night.

“I think it’s democracy versus something close to totalitarianism. I think it’s a matter of supporting democratic governments as opposed to supporting the kind of governments that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is trying to export, which Trump has no problem with, as far as I can tell.”

Inflation led her to Trump

Kelli Surline of Langhorne was at a café with her fiancé and young daughter who wore an Eagles kelly green T-shirt. She described herself as politically unengaged until the pinch of higher prices got to her. She didn’t watch the debate, in part, because she’s made up her mind.

“I’m 28 years old and I’ve never seen the country this bad ever,” she said. “So I made the choice to get my voter’s registration, and I’m definitely voting for Trump.”

She talked about how difficult it has been to get ahead.

“We wanted to get a place together,” Surline said, motioning to Geoffrey Trush, 40, her fiancé. “We’re not able to do that.” Instead, she’s living with her mom. Unaffordable prices make it “a struggle every week.”

He was once a Democrat

Ron Soto, 86, of Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a longtime Trump supporter and retired tractor-trailer driver and Army veteran who left the Democratic Party in the 1990s for the GOP after coming to realize he disagreed with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s positions.

He said he tuned into the debate Tuesday, his hound dog, Sam, by his side, after watching the Phillies game.

Illegal immigration is a major issue for him and Harris didn’t win him over.

“The biggest issue is I don’t like her, and I don’t like Joe Biden.”

Saying he served in the Army from 1955 to 1963, Soto asked: “What the hell did I stick my neck out for? Why? So you can give it away? The Democrats can open the gates, the floodgates, and tell the whole world. You’re welcome. Come on in.” He added: “These people have ruined this country.”

She had her fill of politics

Christine Desumma, 50, a former Trump voter and the owner of a salon on Bristol’s quaint shop-lined street, expressed frustration with both parties and said she won’t be voting at all in November. She said her taxes were lower when Trump was in office and recalled the sting of COVID-19 shutdowns.

She got fed up, particularly with social media and Facebook. Online debates, she said, were driving a wedge within her own family, and she’s washing her hands of it.

“I just made the decision that I’m not going to vote and I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Now I choose to not watch, not pay attention.” She’s found another pursuit.

“I’m studying yoga,” she said. “I got myself back.”

The General Services Administration, which oversees the website, confirmed to NBC News that as of 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, 337,826 people have visited a custom URL that Swift posted on Instagram when she announced she was endorsing Harris.

The custom URL directs people to vote.gov, a website that helps visitors to register to vote in their state. The site also breaks down Americans’ voting rights, explains election processes and provides a roadmap to frequently asked questions.

Swift’s Tuesday post, which has garnered more than 9.6 million likes, urged voters to do their own research and remember to register to vote.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” she said. “Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.”

In a boost to the Harris campaign, Swift unveiled her endorsement to her massive Instagram following of 283 million accounts after the debate.

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Swift said in her post. “I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Swift Tuesday posted on Instagram her official endorsement of Kamala Harris as the next president following the debate with former President Donald Trump.

It was an announcement so highly anticipated that it garnered over one million likes in 13 minutes, with 10 million on the horizon.

Among the millions of likes fans observed was WNBA star Caitlin Clark, the 22-year-old who is making major waves in women’s sports and the sporting spectrum in general.

Clark on Wednesday explained why she liked Swift’s endorsement, citing the need to bolster her own platform for political awareness.

“I have this amazing platform, so I think the biggest thing would be to encourage people to register to vote,” Clark said. “…I think that’s the biggest thing I can do with the platform that I have and that’s the same thing Taylor did.

“And I think continue to educate yourself with the candidates that we have, the policies that they’re supporting…that’s what I would recommend to every single person that has that opportunity in our country.”

Clark did not outright endorse either candidate when asked in the same question.

Along with her post, Swift also shared a link to a government website that directs users to state-specific voting information, which saw at least 337,000 people visit it.

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The 31-year-old provocateur and influencer posted photos from ground zero and shared a video of Trump talking with firefighters in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday morning, writing, “They were thrilled to see him.” She also accompanied the former president to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the planes crashed 23 years ago after crew members and passengers fought back against the hijackers.

“HAPPENING NOW: President Trump just visited the Shanksville Fire Department after visiting the memorial site of United Flight 93 and meeting with family members of 9/11 terrorist attack victims in Shanksville, Pennsylvania,” she posted on X on Wednesday afternoon. “NEVER FORGET!”

Loomer said in a text message to The Associated Press that she doesn’t work for the Trump campaign and that she was “invited as a guest.” She did not respond to questions about her past statements about 9/11.

The Trump campaign responded with a statement from an unnamed campaign official. “Today, President Trump put politics aside and stood beside Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to honor those who lost their lives during the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history. The day wasn’t about anyone other than the souls who are no longer with us, their families, and the heroes who courageously stepped up to save their fellow Americans on that fateful day,” it read.

Loomer was also spotted departing Trump’s plane when he landed in Philadelphia for Tuesday’s debate.

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Trump has a long history of elevating and associating with people who trade in falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and he regularly amplifies posts on his social media site shared by those like Loomer, who promote QAnon, an apocalyptic and convoluted conspiracy theory centered on the belief that Trump is fighting the “deep state.” During the debate, Trump pushed baseless claims about migrants stealing and eating cats and dogs and later defended his comments by saying he was repeating things he’d seen on TV.

She frequently makes anti-Islam and anti-immigrant posts on social media and has been targeting Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with vile racist and sexist attacks. Last year, she shared a video on X that said “9/11 was an Inside Job!” and claimed it was somehow related to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcing $2.3 trillion in “lost” government funds on Sept. 10, 2001.

The post misrepresented Rumsfeld’s remarks, which were about a challenge in tracking funds due to outdated technology. The day before 9/11 was not the first time the problem had been discussed.

The conspiracy theory that U.S. officials are hiding information about the Sept. 11 attacks or were somehow involved in the planning has taken hold among a segment of determined “truthers,” but many of their most prevalent claims have fallen apart upon further scrutiny.

Loomer’s stepped-up presence in Trump’s entourage comes as he has made a number of staff changes in recent weeks, including bringing back veterans of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, like former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski was known for the mantra “Let Trump be Trump.”

She has long served as one of Trump’s fiercest supporters in the Make America Great Again wing of the Republican Party. She led attacks against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Trump’s behalf during the primary phase of the 2024 campaign and has been deeply involved in pro-Trump politics — and the more extreme elements it has attracted — for years.

Some Trump allies would prefer the former president to distance himself from Loomer, but Trump has welcomed her as a semi-regular presence in recent months.

When she ran as a Republican for Congress in Florida in 2020, Loomer celebrated her primary win at a party attended by controversial figures including Gavin McInnes, the founder of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. She later lost the 2020 House race to Democrat Lois Frankel. She also ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022.

“Neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

He added, “We sought commitments from both [former president Donald] Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union’s decision comes two days after senior leaders met with Harris as they weighed whom to endorse.

The Teamsters, which represents truck drivers, freight workers and others, held similar meetings with Trump and President Joe Biden when he was still seeking re-election.

The union, which at 1.3 million members is one of the largest in the world, collected input on an endorsement from its members through straw polling and a QR poll from a code printed on a union magazine, a vice president at large of the union, John Palmer, said.

On Wednesday, the union released the results of their survey, which was conducted after Biden dropped out of the race. It found that almost 60% of rank-and-file union members preferred to endorse Trump, while 34% backed Harris, according to an electronic member poll. A phone poll indicated similar margins, with 58% supporting Trump and 31% supporting Harris.

The union has not released the number of poll participants or the margin of error.

The Teamsters have for decades endorsed Democratic presidential candidates. The union supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. They also backed Barack Obama in both of his presidential runs, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

In an email Wednesday, the Trump campaign highlighted the Teamsters polling.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear— they want President Trump back in the White House!” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “These hardworking men and women are the backbone of America and President Trump will strongly stand up for them when he’s back in the White House.”

The former president addressed the union’s decision not to endorse a candidate when talking with reporters on Wednesday, saying that it is “a great honor.”

“The Teamsters carry a lot of weight. The Democrats cannot believe it,” Trump said. “Look, it was always automatic that Democrats get the Teamsters, and they said, ‘We won’t endorse the Democrats this year,’ so that was an honor for me.”

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt pointed to local Teamsters chapters that endorsed the vice president.

“The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor,” Hitt said in a statement. “As the Vice President told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

Over the course of his presidency, Biden has promoted his support for organized labor and has frequently weighed in on disputes between union workers and corporate leaders. In 2021, he expressed support for the right to unionize in a direct-to-camera video as Amazon workers in Alabama were about to vote on whether to organize.

Then-Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2021 credited Biden with including an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he visited striking autoworkers in Michigan.

But despite calling himself “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden drew criticism from organized labor two years ago when he worked with Congress to pass a law that averted an impending rail strike.

The law forced union workers to accept a union contract that had been brokered by the Biden administration. At the time, four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the deal.

As he signed the legislation, Biden called it “a tough [vote] for me,” but cited the need “to keep the supply chains stable around the holidays.”

The International Association of Fire Fighters is the most prominent union that has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate this year. The union endorsed Biden in 2020.

The AFL-CIO, which represents dozens of unions and millions of workers, and the United Auto Workers union have each endorsed Harris.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“I don’t want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate or do whatever, either way,” Mahomes said before heading out to practice for Sunday’s game against Cincinnati. “I think my place is to inform people to get registered to vote. It’s to inform people to do their own research and then make the best decision for them and their family.”

The comments from the three-time Super Bowl champion came less than a day after Taylor Swift, who is dating his Chiefs teammate Travis Kelce and has become friends with the Mahomes family, endorsed Harris for the presidency.

Swift’s endorsement led Trump to say in a phone interview with Fox News on Wednesday: “I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan. I like Brittany. I think Brittany is great.”

Trump began referencing Brittany Mahomes last month, after she had liked — and then unliked — an Instagram post by the Republican presidential nominee outlining the “2024 GOP platform.” Trump posted soon afterward on Truth Social: “I want to thank beautiful Brittany Mahomes for so strongly defending me.”

Brittany Mahomes has since stayed out of the political spotlight except to respond to critics on social media, saying in a post: “To be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep rooted issues you refuse to heal from childhood.”

Patrick Mahomes sidestepped a question Wednesday specifically about Trump’s references to his wife, saying instead that “at the end of the day, it’s about me and my family and how we treat other people.”

“I think you see Brittany does a lot in the community. I do a lot in the community to help bring people up, and give people an opportunity to use their voice,” he said. “In political times people are going to use stuff here and there, but I can’t let that affect how I go about my business every single day of my life, and trying to live it to the best of my ability.”

Swift became close with the Mahomes family last year, when she began to date Kelce, often sharing the same suite during games at Arrowhead Stadium. Some thought a rift had developed between them when they were not seen together during the Chiefs’ season-opening win over the Ravens last week, but they showed up together in New York last weekend to watch the U.S. Open.

“Whenever I’m hanging out with whoever, I’m not thinking about their political views or anything like that,” Patrick Mahomes said. “I’m thinking about the people and how they treat other people, and I was with a lot of great people this week.”

Swift offered her support to Harris shortly after the presidential debate ended Tuesday night, a potentially significant coup for the Democratic nominee given Swift’s dedicated following among young women, an important demographic for the November election. The endorsement also came after Trump’s campaign shared a collage of AI-generated images purporting to show Swift fans supporting him.

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“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post, which had been liked more than 9 million times by Wednesday afternoon.

Trump’s posts “brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” Swift wrote. She added that “I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice.”

Mahomes declined to speak specifically about his own political beliefs, instead talking more broadly about national unity.

“You’ve seen my history. I’ve come up with people from every aspect of life, from every background,” the Chiefs quarterback said, “and the best thing about football locker rooms and kind of how I’ve grown up in baseball locker rooms is people can come together and achieve something, and achieve a common goal. We talked about it a while back. If we can do that as a nation, we can get the best out of each other, so that’s something I do every single day.”

Within moments of leaving the debate stage on Tuesday night with a performance that some Republicans were quick to pan, Trump began dismissing the idea he would participate in another debate — a reversal from his previous talking point that he was willing to do several debates and it was Harris who was hiding.

Trump’s campaign said before the debate that he had already accepted debate invitations from Fox News and NBC News, and that Harris had not. But in post-debate interviews, Trump was noncommittal. He claimed victory on Truth Social, saying, “Why would I do a Rematch?”

“When you win the debate, I don’t know that I want to do another debate,” the former president told Fox News on Wednesday morning.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Trump said he would participate in debates with NBC News or Fox News.

Trump viewed his first debate of the season against Joe Biden as a resounding success — not only did Republicans say he demonstrated restraint, but Biden’s performance ultimately led to him stepping aside. Fresh off the perceived win, pushing Harris into several debates seemed like a strategic goal for Trump, and Harris rebuffed a request for one on Fox News in early September.

But Tuesday night’s debate did not go like the earlier faceoff.

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“She was exquisitely well prepared. She laid traps and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally turned critic, said in an interview with ABC News after the debate.

Trump’s allies who were more defensive of his performance dismissed criticism that he had a bad debate by blaming the moderators. One said that the highlight of the evening was the final minute, when he delivered a closing statement. Trump told reporters on Tuesday night that he might consider another if it were run by a “fair” network.

Harris has not accepted a second debate with Trump, but her campaign appeared more open on Wednesday.

“That was fun,” Brian Fallon, a top spokesperson, wrote on X. “Let’s do it again in October.”

Failure by the candidates to meet for more than one debate would defy modern historical precedent.

Trump’s campaign had warned in a pre-debate call that Tuesday’s showdown might be the “the one and only debate” that Trump and Harris took part in, placing the onus on Harris.

Now Trump’s campaign said he is waiting to make a final decision.

“We accepted Fox, they rejected it. We accepted ABC, they waffled on the rules and finally agreed. We accepted Sept. 25 NBC and they rejected,” Trump senior advisor Brian Hughes said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday. “So President Trump said he will determine it later.” (A spokesperson for NBC News did not respond when asked if the invitation from the network still stood and who has accepted.)

Hughes said Harris had “missed the moment” and still not accounted for her record in the White House, and said this was the reason for any enthusiasm by her team for a rematch.

“But the most important indication here is that Harris failed to explain why she hasn’t already done the things she claims she cares about. A failed record of nearly 4 years is on view, and she failed to lie her way out of owning it,” Hughes said. “She missed the moment and lost, so it’s no wonder her team is scrambling to try a do over.”

Eric Levine, a New York-based Republican fundraiser, said Trump needed to return to the debate stage if only to squeeze out better answers from his opponent after the moderators on Tuesday failed to do so.

“He missed opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to eviscerate her,” said Levine.

Still, Levine said he appreciated the challenge awaiting Trump if they face off again. “She’s like a hologram. Getting substance from her is like trying to nail jello to a wall,” he added.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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• Harris-Trump debate nabs at least 57.5M viewers, per early ratings
• Trump’s conspiracy-laced debate performance concerns some allies

Its story of economic renewal and related growing pains has been thrust into the national conversation in a presidential election year — and maliciously distorted by false rumors that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets. Donald Trump amplified those lies during Tuesday’s nationally televised debate, exacerbating some residents’ fears about growing divisiveness in the predominantly white, blue-collar city of about 60,000.

At the city’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center on Wednesday, Rose-Thamar Joseph said many of the roughly 15,000 immigrants who arrived in the past few years were drawn by good jobs and the city’s relative affordability. But a rising sense of unease has crept in as longtime residents increasingly bristle at newcomers taking jobs at factories, driving up housing costs, worsening traffic and straining city services.

“Some of them are talking about living in fear. Some of them are scared for their life,” Joseph said.

A “Welcome To Our City” sign hangs from a parking garage downtown, where a coffee shop, bakery and boutique line Springfield’s main drag, North Fountain Street. A flag advertising “CultureFest,” the city’s annual celebration of unity through diversity, waves from a pole nearby.

Melanie Flax Wilt, a Republican commissioner in the county where Springfield is located, said she has been pushing for community and political leaders to “stop feeding the fear.”

“After the election and everybody’s done using Springfield, Ohio, as a talking point for immigration reform, we are going to be the ones here still living through the challenges and coming up with the solutions,” she said.

Ariel Dominique, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy, said she laughed at times in recent days at the absurdity of the false claims. But seeing the comments repeated on national television by the former president was painful.

“It is so unfair and unjust and completely contrary to what we have contributed to the world, what we have contributed to this nation for so long,” Dominique said.

The falsehoods about Springfield’s Haitian immigrants were previously spread online by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. It’s part of a timeworn American political tradition of casting immigrants as outsiders whose strange behavior is a shock to American culture.

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“This is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame,” Trump said at Tuesday’s presidential debate after repeating the falsehoods. When challenged during the debate by ABC News moderator David Muir over the false claims, Trump held firm, saying “people on television” said their dogs were eaten, but he offered no evidence.

Officials in Springfield have tried to tamp down the misinformation by saying there have been no credible or detailed reports of any pets being abducted or eaten. State leaders are trying to help address some of the real challenges the city faces.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said Tuesday that he would send law enforcement and millions of dollars in health care resources to Springfield as it faces a surge in Haitian arrivals.

Many Haitians have come to the U.S. to flee poverty and violence. They have embraced President Joe Biden’s new and expanded legal pathways to enter, and have shunned illegal crossings, accounting for only 92 border arrests out of more than 56,000 in July, the latest data available.

The Biden administration recently announced an estimated 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. on June 3 could remain in the country at least through February 2026, with eligibility for work authorization, under a law called Temporary Protected Status to spare people from being deported to strife-torn countries..

Springfield, about 45 miles from the state capital of Columbus, suffered a steep decline in its manufacturing sector toward the end of the last century. But its downtown has been revitalized in recent years as more Haitians arrived and helped meet the demand for labor. Officials say Haitians now account for about 15% of the population.

The city was shaken last year when a minivan slammed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver was a Haitian man who recently settled in the area and was driving without a valid license. During a city commission meeting on Wednesday, the boy’s parents condemned politicians’ use of their son’s death to stoke hatred.

Last week, a post on the social media platform X shared what looked like a screengrab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The post claimed without evidence that the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” saw a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, outside a house where it claimed Haitians lived. It was accompanied by a photo of a Black man carrying what appeared to be a goose by its feet.

On Monday, Vance posted on X. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he said. The next day, he posted again on X about Springfield, saying his office had received inquiries from residents who said “their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Long-time Springfield resident Chris Hazel, who knows the park and neighborhood where the pet and goose abductions were purported to have happened, called the claims “preposterous.”

“It reminds me of when people used to accuse others and outsiders as cannibals. It’s dehumanizing a community,” he said of the accusations against the city’s Haitian residents.

Sophia Pierrilus, the daughter of a former Haitian diplomat who moved to the Ohio capital of Columbus 15 years ago and is now an immigrant advocate, agreed, calling it all political.

“My view is that’s their way to use Haitians as a scapegoat to bring some kind of chaos in America,” she said.

With its rising population of immigrants, Springfield is hardly an outlier. So far this decade, immigration has accounted for almost three-quarters of U.S. population growth, with 2.5 million immigrants arriving in the United States between 2020 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Population growth is an important driver of economic growth.

“The Haitian immigrants who started moving to Springfield the last few years are the reason why the economy and the labor force has been revitalized there,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which provides legal and social services to immigrants across the U.S.

Now, she said, Haitians in Springfield have told her that, out of fear, they are considering leaving the city.

Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writer Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida, and Noreen Nasir in New York, contributed.

In an alarming letter, the officials said that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mailed ballots that were postmarked on time were received by local election offices days after the deadline to be counted. They also noted that properly addressed election mail was being returned to them as undeliverable, a problem that could automatically send voters to inactive status through no fault of their own, potentially creating chaos when those voters show up to cast a ballot.

The officials also said that repeated outreach to the Postal Service to resolve the issues had failed and that the widespread nature of the problems made it clear these were “not one-off mistakes or a problem with specific facilities. Instead, it demonstrates a pervasive lack of understanding and enforcement of USPS policies among its employees.”

The letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy came from two groups that represent top election administrators in all 50 states. They told DeJoy, “We have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns.”

“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” they added. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”

A message seeking a response from the U.S. Postal Service was not immediately returned.

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The two groups, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, said local election officials “in nearly every state” are receiving timely postmarked ballots after Election Day and outside the three to five business days USPS claims as the standard for first-class mail.

The letter comes less than two weeks after DeJoy said in an interview that the Postal Service was ready to handle a flood of mail ballots expected as part of this November’s presidential election and as former President Donald Trump continues to sow doubts about U.S. elections by falsely claiming he won in 2020.

That year, amid the global pandemic, election officials reported sending just over 69 million ballots in the mail, a substantial increase from four years earlier.

While it’s likely that number will be smaller now, many voters have embraced mail voting and come to rely on it. And both Democrats and Republicans have launched efforts to push supporters to vote early, either in person or by mail to “bank” their votes before Election Day on Nov. 5.

The letter went out on the day the first mailed ballots of this year’s general election were being sent, to absentee voters in Alabama.

Postal Service officials told reporters last month that almost 98% of ballots were returned to election officials within three days in 2020, and in 2022, the figure was nearly 99%. DeJoy said he would like to inch closer to 100% this election cycle and that the Postal Service is better positioned to handle ballots than four years ago.

But officials in rural states have been critical of the Postal Service for years as it has consolidated mail-processing centers to cut its costs and financial losses.

In addition to being signed by the current and incoming presidents for both groups of election officials, the leaders of groups that represent local election officials in 25 states were listed.

The election officials warned that any election mail returned to an election office as undeliverable could trigger a process outlined in federal law for maintaining accurate lists of registered voters. That means a voter could be moved to “inactive” status and be required to take additional action to verify their address to participate in the election, the officials said in the letter.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, the recent past president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, sent his own letter in recent days to DeJoy. He said nearly 1,000 ballots from his state’s Aug. 6 primary election couldn’t be counted because they arrived too late or without postmarks — and more continue to come in.

“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point,” Schwab posted on the social media platform X in late August.

Schwab and other Kansas election officials also have said some ballots arrive on time but without postmarks, which keeps them from being counted under Kansas law. What’s more, Schwab told DeJoy, local postal clerks have told election officials that they can’t add postmarks later even if it’s clear that the Postal Service handled the ballot ahead of the mail-in deadline.

Kansas will count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day if they arrive within three days. The Republican-controlled Legislature created that grace period in 2017 over concerns that mail delivery had slowed after the Postal Service shut down seven mail-processing centers in the state. That left much of the state’s mail handled through larger centers in Denver, Amarillo, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri.

Schwab has promoted the use of local ballot drop boxes for voting in advance, breaking with other Republicans who have suggested without evidence that they can be sources of fraud. Schwab has long said the boxes are more secure than the U.S. mail.

“Keep your ballot out of the hands of the federal government!” he advised voters in a post on X after the August primary.

In their letter Wednesday, election officials said colleagues across the U.S. have reported that Postal Service staff, from managers to mail carriers, are uninformed about the service’s policies for handling election-related mail, give them inconsistent guidance and misdeliver ballots.

“There is no amount of proactive communication election officials can do to account for USPS’s inability to meet their own service delivery timelines,” the officials wrote. “State and local election officials need a committed partner in USPS.”

Cassidy reported from Detroit.

Before the ceremony started, Trump and Harris shook hands and greeted each other.

President Joe Biden and vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance flanked the two candidates. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared to make the connection between Harris and Trump on Wednesday.

The night before, the candidates sparred in their first, and possibly only, debate.

It was the first time the two political leaders had met each other.

As they walked on stage Tuesday night, Harris walked towards Trump, held out her hand and introduced herself.

“Kamala Harris,” she said. “Let’s have a good debate.”

Trump shook her hand and said, “Nice to see you. Have fun.”

The two candidates then took their spots behind their podiums.

In their debate in June, Biden and Trump did not shake hands with each other.

Wednesday morning in New York, Trump and Harris shook hands once again. It was unclear what they said to each other.

“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post, which included a link to a voter registration website.

Swift has a dedicated following among young women, a key demographic in the November election, and her latest tour has generated more than $1 billion in ticket sales. In a half hour, the post received more than 2.3 million likes.

The viral post also included an intentional sign off.

Swift included a picture of herself holding her cat Benjamin Button, and she signed the message “Childless Cat Lady.” The remark is a reference to three-year-old comments made by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, about women without children not having an equal stake in the country’s future.

During Vance’s 2021 bid for the Senate in Ohio, he said in a Fox News interview that “we are effectively run in this country via the Democrats,” and referred to them as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He said that included Harris, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat.

“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vance had said.

Harris became stepmother to two teenagers when she married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014. And Buttigieg announced he and his husband adopted infant twins in September 2021, more than a month before Vance made those comments.

A Harris senior campaign official said the endorsement was not coordinated with the campaign. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, appeared to learn about the endorsement in the middle of a live interview on MSNBC. As Rachel Maddow read the text, Walz broke into a smile and patted his chest.

“That was eloquent. And it was clear,” Walz said. “And that’s the kind of courage we need in America to stand up.”

Swift wrote that her endorsement was partially prompted by Trump’s decision to post AI-generated pictures suggesting that she had endorsed him. One showed Swift dressed as Uncle Sam, and the text said “Taylor wants YOU to VOTE for DONALD TRUMP.”

Trump’s posts “brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” Swift wrote. She added that “I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice.”

The Trump campaign dismissed Swift’s endorsement.

“This is further evidence that the Democrat Party has unfortunately become a party of the wealthy elites,” said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.

“There’s many Swifties for Trump out there in America,” she said, herself included.

Swift’s endorsement was not exactly a surprise. In 2020, she supported President Joe Biden, and she cheered for Harris in her debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence. She also was openly critical of Trump, saying he had stoked “the fires of white supremacy and racism.”

Swift is a popular figure nationwide, but especially among Democrats. An October 2023 Fox News poll found that 55% of voters overall, including 68% of Democrats, said they had a favorable view of Swift. Republicans were divided, with 43% having a favorable opinion and 45% an unfavorable one.

AP VoteCast suggests that a partisan divide on Swift was apparent as early as 2018. That’s the year Swift made her first political endorsement, supporting Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen for Senate over Republican Marsha Blackburn.

VoteCast found that among Tennessee voters that year, 55% of Democrats and just 19% of Republicans said they had a favorable opinion of Swift. Blackburn won by a comfortable margin in the deep red state.

Swift is the leading nominee at Wednesday’s MTV Video Music Awards. While it’s unclear whether Swift will attend the show in New York, she could use any acceptance speeches to elaborate on her support of Harris.

The event was shifted a day later to accommodate Tuesday’s debate, and MTV has a long history of encouraging voter participation.

The comments Tuesday night underscored the Republican’s refusal, even four years later, to accept the reality of his defeat and his unwillingness to admit the extent to which his falsehoods about his election loss emboldened the mob that rushed the Capitol, resulting in violent clashes with law enforcement. Trump’s grievances about that election are central to his 2024 campaign against Democrat Kamala Harris, as he professes allegiance to the rioters.

In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and there was no widespread fraud, as election officials across the country, including Trump’s then-attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia, crucial to Biden’s victory, vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by judges, including two tossed by the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices.

An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump found fewer than 475. Biden took Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 electoral votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

In the ABC debate, Trump was asked twice if he regretted anything he did on Jan. 6, when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and exhorted them to “fight like hell.” On the Philadelphia stage, Trump first responded by complaining that the questioner had failed to note that he had encouraged the crowd to behave “peacefully and patriotically.” Trump also noted that one of his backers, Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot inside the building by a Capitol Police officer.

Trump suggested that protesters who committed crimes during the 2020 racial injustice protests were not prosecuted. But an AP review in 2021 of documents in more than 300 federal cases stemming from the protests sparked by George Floyd’s death found that more than 120 defendants across U.S. pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy.

When the question about his actions on Jan. 6 arose again, Trump replied: “I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech.”

But he ignored other incendiary language he used throughout the speech, during which he urged the crowd to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory. Trump told the crowd: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That’s after his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, declared: “Let’s have trial by combat.”

Trump didn’t appeal for the rioters to leave the Capitol until more than three hours after the assault began. He then released a video telling the rioters it was time to “go home,” but added: “We love you. You’re very special people.”

He also repeated an oft-stated false claim that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “rejected” his offer to send “10,000 National Guard or soldiers” to the Capitol. Pelosi does not direct the National Guard. As the Capitol came under attack, she and then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. called for military assistance, including from the National Guard.

Decision 2024 Sep 11

Fact-checking the presidential debate between Trump and Harris

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Harris pledged to “turn the page” from Jan. 6, when she was in the Capitol as democracy came under attack.

“So for everyone watching, who remembers what January 6th was, I say, ‘We don’t have to go back. Let’s not go back. We’re not going back. It’s time to turn the page.”

Though Trump had seemed to acknowledge in a recent podcast interview that he had indeed “lost by a whisker,” he insisted Tuesday night that that was a sarcastic remark and resumed his boasts about the election.

“I’ll show you Georgia, and I’ll show you Wisconsin, and I’ll show you Pennsylvania,” he said in rattling off states where he claimed, falsely, that he had won. “We have so many facts and statistics.”

Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer and Melissa Goldin contributed to this report.

The combative showdown saw Trump advance a number of debunked conspiracy theories related to migration, crime and voting, while Harris made misleading statements on manufacturing jobs and whether U.S. troops are in combat zones.

Here’s what Harris and Trump got right and wrong on the debate stage in Philadelphia.

Fact check: Trump calls Harris’ dad a Marxist

“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well,” Trump said.

That’s not what his students say.

In interviews, three of Professor Donald Harris’ former students, who are now economists themselves, told NBC News that they disagreed that Harris’s father was a Marxist. Professor Harris taught at Stanford University for nearly three decades until he retired in 1998, and while there, he studied Karl Marx’s economic philosophy among other different thinkers, his students recall. While Harris has spoken about her father’s influence in her early childhood, she has credited her mother for being the parent who shaped her into the person she is today.

Fact check: Did the U.S. leave $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan?

“We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand-new, beautiful military equipment behind,” Trump said.

This is false.

The Taliban did gain possession of U.S.-made military equipment when they retook power in 2021, but the $85 billion figure is grossly exaggerated. It is a rounding up of the approximately $83 billion in total assistance appropriated for the Afghan military and police during the two-decade war, including training, equipment and housing.

According to a 2022 Pentagon report, the Taliban seized much of the estimated $7.12 billion in U.S.-funded equipment that was in the hands of the former Afghan government when it collapsed, the condition of which was unknown. The report said the U.S. military had removed or destroyed almost all the major equipment it was using in Afghanistan in the months leading up to the U.S. withdrawal.

Fact check: Trump claims Harris ‘wants to confiscate your guns’

“She wants to confiscate your guns,” Trump claimed.

This is false.

Online posts have advanced a similar false claim. Harris has advocated for gun safety laws, proposing requirements for “anyone who sells more than five guns a year” to conduct background checks and for unlawful gun dealers to face penalties.

Harris responded moments later: “This business about taking everyone’s guns away? Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”

Fact check: Harris says Trump oversaw manufacturing job losses

“Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs,” Harris said.

This needs context.

Before the onset of the pandemic, the U.S. added about 500,000 manufacturing jobs during the Trump administration. But by the time Trump left office at the height of the pandemic, the U.S. had given up virtually all those gains as a result of the worldwide economic devastation from the virus.

Meanwhile, Trump actually understated the number of manufacturing jobs lost last month: It was 24,000, not 10,000.

Fact check: Would Trump end the Russia-Ukraine war by giving up Ukrainian interests?

“I believe Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours. It’s because he would just give it up. And that’s not who we are as Americans,” Harris said.

This needs context.

Harris’ comments came during a lengthy exchange that was kicked off when Muir asked Trump, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”

Trump responded by saying only that “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly, people being killed by the millions.” He added that “I will get it settled” because “what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other, I’ll get them together.”

Harris responded with the above quotation and brought up that the Biden administration had helped bring dozens of countries together to support Ukraine’s defense.

“Because of our support, because of the air defense, the ammunition, the artillery … that we have provided, Ukraine stands as an independent and free country. If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”

Trump hasn’t publicly discussed what his specific plan to end the war would be. The Washington Post reported in April that the plan was essentially a land-for-peace deal.

Citing people who discussed the plan with Trump and his advisers, the Post reported that Trump would plan to push Ukraine to hand over control of Crimea and the Donbas region to Russia in any future deal, which would effectively formalize the gains Putin made during his illegal invasion. In exchange, the Post reported, Putin would stop the war. The report attracted criticism across the political spectrum and from Kyiv, with many lawmakers and international figures saying that the deal amounted to appeasement.

Regardless of whether such a plan would ever bear fruit, Harris’ latest comments build on the narrative that Trump continues to seek cozy ties with Moscow. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump praised Putin as “genius” and “savvy” for declaring his intention to invade. 

In addition, it’s important to note that Trump did not say in his direct response to Muir that he wanted Ukraine to win in the war. He said only that he wanted the war to stop.

And even if Trump won and tried to stop the war, U.S. and European governments say Russia has shown no sign it is genuinely interested in any peace negotiations.

Fact check: Harris says no U.S. military members are on active duty in a combat zone

“And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,” Harris said.

This is false.

While Congress hasn’t formally declared a war in decades, American troops are certainly in combat zones across the world.

They’re serving in places like Iraq and Syria, where they work with local troops to fight terrorist networks. And they also conduct missions in both places — we saw that in Iraq’s Anbar province in late August, where an operation killed 15 ISIS fighters and saw two U.S. soldiers medevaced for injuries (and five more injured). And also last month in Syria, a drone attack injured eight U.S. service members.

U.S. troops are also in Somalia and other parts of Africa where they support local troops fighting terror groups, and they’ve been shooting down Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea.

Fact check: Trump claims he saved Obamacare

“Do I save it and make it as good as it can be, or do I let it rot, and I saved it,” Trump said.

This is false.

During Trump’s term in office, he made several attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While those efforts were unsuccessful, Republicans in Congress did repeal its individual mandate, which required people to have health insurance or face fines.

Fact check: Did Trump’s election cases fail on standing?

“No judge looked at it. … They said we didn’t have standing. That’s the other thing. They said we didn’t have standing. Can you imagine a system where a person in an election doesn’t have standing? The president of the United States doesn’t have standing? That’s how we lost if you look at the facts, and I’d love to have you do a special on it. I’ll show you Georgia, and I’ll show you Wisconsin, and I’ll show you Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

This is false.

Trump falsely claimed that the more than 50 lawsuits brought by his supporters claiming widespread fraud were rejected by judges because the president did not have legal “standing.”

The majority of the lawsuits were rejected because of a lack of evidence of voter fraud, a finding that Attorney General William Barr supported. Judges in Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania rejected the claims of widespread voter fraud. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeal due to a lack of standing. There is extensive proof that the 2020 election was not marred by fraud. 

Fact check: Is ‘migrant crime’ happening at high levels?

“They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country. Millions of people let in and all over the world, crime is down all over the world, except here, crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country’s through the roof, and we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. I like that. It’s happening at levels nobody thought possible,” Trump said.

This is misleading.

The rate of violent and property crimes dropped precipitously in the first three months of 2024 compared with the same period last year, according to quarterly statistics released yesterday by the FBI known as the Uniform Crime Report. The murder rate fell by 26.4%, reported rapes decreased by 25.7%, robberies fell by 17.8%, aggravated assault fell by 12.5%, and the overall violent crime rate went down by 15.2%, the statistics indicate.

Pressed about the FBI crime rates’ contradicting him, Trump claimed the FBI didn’t “include the cities with the worst crime; it was a fraud.” And while it’s true that some cities data is not included in the FBI crime data, city-level data shows similar trends. For example, New York City data compiled by the police department indicates that crime was down overall in the first quarter of 2024 there, too.

Under Biden, over 112,000 migrants with criminal backgrounds have been apprehended at the border, compared with over 63,000 under Trump. The number of people who are on the terrorist watchlist stopped at the border has largely stayed the same, with an estimated 1,400 encounters under Trump and 1,800 under Biden. But the government has acknowledged the difficulty of vetting migrants coming from countries that won’t share criminal history data with the U.S., and investigators have opened more than 100 investigations into the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that has spread into the U.S.

Fact check: Are noncitizens being encouraged to vote?

“We have to have borders, and we have to have good elections. Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” Trump said.

This is false.

It is a crime to register or vote as a noncitizen in all state and federal elections, though Washington, D.C., and a handful of municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow noncitizen voting in local elections. Few people break those laws.

There’s no evidence of “people” trying to get undocumented migrants to vote, either.

Fact check: Trump says ‘fossil fuel will be dead’ under Harris

“If she won the election, the day after that election, go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills, and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400-500 acres of desert soil,” Trump said.

This is false.

Oil and gas production is at an all-time high under the Biden administration, and the U.S. is the world’s top oil producer.

Meanwhile, wind and solar power are rapidly expanding across the country. The U.S. Energy Information Association projects the amount of new solar power coming online will grow by 75% from 2023 to 2025. New wind power is also increasing by 11%.

In the context of cost of living for Americans, solar and onshore wind are also significantly cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuel. Solar power, on average, costs nearly half the price of fossil gas energy, according to the EIA.

Fact check: Did Trump threaten there would be a ‘bloodbath’ if he doesn’t win the 2024 election?

“Donald Trump, the candidate, has said, in this election, there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking. Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back. Let’s chart a course for the future and not go backwards to the past,” Harris said.

This is true, though Trump says differently.

During the debate, Trump hit back at Harris, saying: “Let me just it was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business. … That story has been, as you would say, debunked.”

Harris was referring to comments Trump made at a rally in Andalia, Ohio, in March.

At the rally, Trump vowed there would be a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected in November — comments that came during a broader tirade that included his referring to the possibility of an increasing trade war with China over auto manufacturing.

At the Ohio rally, Trump said, “If you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends — but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now … you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected.”

“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it,” he added. “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.”

Later, Trump said, “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”

Trump has continued to refuse to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. The doubt he cast on the results of the race helped sow the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

In response to the comments in March, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told NBC News at the time that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”

Fact check: Who is responsible for the botched troop exit from Afghanistan?

“They didn’t fire anybody having to do with Afghanistan and the Taliban and the 13 people who were just killed, viciously and violently killed. And I got to know the parents and the family. They didn’t fire, they should have fired all those generals, all those top people, because that was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen,” Trump said.

This is true, but additional context is needed.

It’s true that no one in the Biden administration was held accountable for the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, a chaotic event that resulted in 13 deaths.

But Trump and Biden share responsibility for the withdrawal and its consequences. Both publicly supported pulling U.S. troops out and rejected advice from military commanders to keep a small U.S. force on the ground.

Trump and his supporters have tried to solely blame Biden and Harris for the chaotic pullout. The Biden administration, in a National Security Council report last year, tried to pin most of the blame on the Trump administration, arguing that Biden was “severely constrained” by Trump’s decisions.

In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, reduced U.S. troops levels from 12,500 to 2,500, freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners in a prisoner exchange and required all U.S. troops to withdraw by May 1, 2021.

In return, the U.S received an ambiguous pledge from the Taliban not to allow Afghanistan to become a base for terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies. 

Trump then scaled back U.S. troop levels over the course of 2020 from about 13,000 to 2,500 as part of the deal, even though the Taliban did not keep its commitment to reduce violence and it maintained ties with Al Qaeda. Republican lawmakers in November expressed alarm over the troop reductions, with Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida, warning of a “Saigon-type situation.”

The February 2020 Doha agreement and the troop drawdown presented Biden with difficult choices. Some administration officials were concerned that if the U.S. chose to renege on the Doha agreement, the administration would have to deploy additional U.S. troops in Afghanistan to bolster the small contingent remaining. That, in turn, risked triggering an intensified war with the Taliban.

The head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, recommended keeping a small force of 2,500 in place to counter the terrorist threat from the country and to support the Afghan army. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, agreed with the recommendation.

Biden eventually moved up the timeline for full troop withdrawal to Aug. 31 (from Sept. 11) as the Taliban made dramatic advances across the country.

In August, Taliban forces seized Kabul without a fight, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country amid chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport. Desperate Afghans climbed onto the wings of a U.S. cargo plane and fell from the sky after it took off. 

On Aug. 26, a bombing at the airport’s Abbey Gate during the final days of withdrawal killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans and wounded many more people. The attack was carried out by ISIS. 

Fact check: Trump says Harris ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’

“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said.

This needs context.

CNN recently reported that in her response to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in 2019, Harris said transgender people who rely on the state for care, including federal prisoners and detainees, should have access to gender transition treatment. The Harris campaign did not answer questions from CNN on whether she still supports that position.

Fact check: Trump says Democrats support ‘execution after birth’

“You can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia — not the current governor, who is doing an excellent job, but the governor before — he said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute it. And that’s why I did that, because that predominates, because they’re radical. The Democrats are radical. … Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth is execution no longer abortion because the baby is born OK, and that’s not OK with me,” Trump said.

This is false.

While some Democrats, including Walz, support broad access to abortion regardless of gestation age, infanticide is illegal, and no Democrats advocate for it. What’s more, just 1% of abortions are performed after 21 weeks’ gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they are typically due to serious medical causes.

This is a frequent falsehood from Trump dating to 2019, referring to something former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, said on a radio program. NBC News debunked the claim then, reporting that Northam’s remarks were about resuscitating infants with severe deformities or nonviable pregnancies. 

Asked what happens when a woman who is going into labor desires a third-trimester abortion, Northam noted that such procedures occur only in cases of severe deformities or nonviable pregnancies. He said that in those scenarios, “the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Fact check: Are pets being harmed by migrants?

This is false.

Baseless rumors have spread on social media for days claiming that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets. Most of the rumors involve Springfield, Ohio, which has a large number of Haitian immigrants, but police there knocked down the stories yesterday in a statement saying they hadn’t seen any documented examples.

“There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the statement said.

Republicans, including Vance, have pointed to the claims as evidence that immigrants are causing chaos. Vance, though, hedged somewhat in a statement on X earlier today, saying, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Immigration is a potent subject in the presidential face. In an NBC News poll in April, 22% of voters put immigration and the border as the most important issue facing the country, second only to inflation and the cost of living at 23%.

John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesperson, denounced the claims about Haitians in Ohio as a dangerous conspiracy theory that could inspire anti-immigrant violence.

“There will be people that believe it no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is, and they might act on that kind of information and act on it in a way where somebody could get hurt,” he told reporters today.

Fact check: Have the jobs created under the Biden administration been ‘bounce-back’ jobs?

“[T]he only jobs they got were bounce-back jobs. These were jobs bounce back, and it bounced back, and it went to their benefit, but I was the one that created them,” Trump said.

This is false.

The U.S. regained all the jobs lost during the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2022. Since then, more than 6 million jobs have been created.

Fact check: Trump says inflation is ‘probably the worst in our nation’s history’

“Look, we’ve had a terrible economy because inflation has— which is really known as a country buster. It breaks up countries. We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before, probably the worst in our nation’s history,” Trump said.

This is false.

Inflation is at 2.9%, the lowest it has been since March 2021, although the rate did reach a peak of 9.1% during June 2022 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Inflation was at that level at multiple points of the Trump presidency, as well, in June and July 2018.

Fact check: Trump says he has ‘nothing to do with Project 2025’

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas, I guess, some good, some bad, but it makes no difference,” Trump said.

This is misleading.

Trump has spent weeks trying to push back against associations with Project 2025, a 900-page policy wish list put out by the Heritage Foundation.

It’s true that Trump has disavowed some of the policies in the document and did not write it, but many of his allies and former aides are behind it and have advanced the positions proposed in it.

The Heritage Foundation also had significant influence in the Trump administration. In 2018, it boasted that Trump and his administration “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations” it advanced in a similar document. 

Fact check: Are 21 million migrants coming into the U.S. monthly?

“But when you look at what she’s done to our country, and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly, where it’s I believe 21 million people, not the 15 that people say,” Trump said.

This is false.

According to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there have been an estimated 10 million encounters across U.S. land borders during the Biden administration. In Jul, CBP recorded 170,273 national encounters between and at U.S. ports of entry. The most national encounters recorded since the start of FY24 has been 370,887.

Fact check: Would Trump tax cuts create a $5 trillion deficit?

“My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year,” Harris said.

This is true.

A May report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that extending the Trump tax cuts for 10 years would add $4.6 trillion to the federal deficit.

Harris’ reference to Trump’s “sales tax” actually refers to his proposal to raise tariffs on all nearly all imported basic goods by 10% and by up to 60% on basic goods imported from China. Economists, including from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, have said those levels of tariffs would pass costs on to consumers, amounting to about $3,900 in additional costs for an average middle-class family.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Trump glares angrily ahead as Harris stares him down during tense debate
• Trump pushes baseless claim about immigrants ‘eating the pets’
• Sarah McBride is one step closer to becoming the first trans lawmaker in Congress

Heading into the debate, Harris appeared to have more to gain — and more to lose. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 28% said they “need to learn more about Kamala Harris,” compared to just 9% who said the same about Trump. Overall, Trump led Harris by 1 point among likely voters, with 5% unsure or not backing either.

The debate covered a wide range of issues and featured a series of intense exchanges between the two bitter rivals. Harris presented herself as a pragmatic problem-solver and diminished Trump as a wannabe dictator who can’t keep his rally crowds engaged. Trump attacked Harris as a radical and frequently returned to his theme of criticizing migration, sometimes veering into conspiracy theories.

Here are five key takeaways from the debate.

Harris leans in quickly on lowering costs

Harris used the first question to lean into her plan for an “opportunity economy,” seeking to cut into Trump’s advantage on the issue with swing voters by presenting herself as the candidate of the middle class while calling Trump a corporate tax-cutter.

“I was raised as a middle-class kid, and I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America,” Harris said. “We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children, and I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time, so that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children.”

Trump for his part, blasted the Biden-Harris economy, saying, “I’ve never seen a worse period of time.” He also defended his tariff plans and called Harris “a Marxist,” even as he accused her of copying his policies: “I was going to send her a MAGA hat.”

Both candidates seek the mantle of change

In the opening minutes of the debate, both rivals sought to claim the mantle of change in a country full of voters who are hungry for it.

“In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook: a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” Harris said of Trump. “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected.”

Harris returned to that message later in the debate: “The American people are exhausted with the same entire playbook.” Harris went back to it later when criticizing Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 riot.

“Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back,” she said.

Trump, meanwhile, sought to portray Harris as a continuation of President Joe Biden on immigration and the economy.

On migrants coming into the United States illegally, Trump said, “These are the people that she and Biden led into our country, and they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous.”

And on the economy, Trump said: “She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences. Run, spot, run.”

Trump attacks as Harris defends policy shifts

A significant weakness for Harris in her 2024 campaign has been the left-wing positions she took as a Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2020 that she has since abandoned or backtracked from — such as banning fracking, a mandatory buyback of semi-automatic firearms and decriminalizing border crossings. She was asked about her evolution again.

“I made that very clear on 2020 I will not ban fracking,” Harris said. “I have not banned fracking as vice president. In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases for fracking.”

Harris added, “My values have not changed.”

Trump sought to capitalize.

“She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this. She wants to confiscate your guns and she will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one.”

Trump dodges on vetoing federal abortion ban

Trump and Harris engaged in a lengthy clash on abortion, during which the former president declined twice to say whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one.

“Well, I won’t have to,” Trump replied. He said he’s “not signing” such a ban because there’s “no reason to,” arguing that “everybody” is happy with the termination of Roe v. Wade.

When told that his vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, said he would veto such a ban, Trump contradicted Vance. the Ohio senator made his comments recently on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

“Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness. JD — and I don’t mind if he has a certain view, but I think he was speaking to me,” he said, arguing that Congress won’t pass any major abortion bill.

“I pledge to you: when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it in to law,” she said. “But understand, if Donald Trump were to be reelected, he will sign a national abortion ban.”

Harris baits Trump into missed opportunities

Harris came into the debate with the hope of rattling Trump, and she appeared to succeed at some moments, baiting the president into a defensive posture rather than highlighting his strongest issue: concerns about inflation and the cost of living.

She attacked him on abortion rights, linked him to the right-wing policy blueprint Project 2025, highlighted his praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping around the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Both times, he jumped in to defend himself. She invited Americans to watch a Trump rally.

“He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer.’ And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said, looking into the camera.

That didn’t sit well with Trump, who said he has “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics” and went on a tangent by citing a debunked conspiracy theory about some migrants eating pets. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said.

Trump bashes Biden, sparking pithy Harris reply

Trump’s performance included a wide sprinkling of attacks on Biden, who dropped out after his disastrous late-June debate showing against Trump. He criticized Biden’s handling of classified documents, knocked him for opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and called the Biden’s administration “the most divisive presidency in the history of our country.”

“Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s the president,” Trump said toward the end of the debate. “They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don’t even know. Is he our president? We have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Harris replied, “It is important to remind the former president: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you are running against me.”

When Trump later said, “She is Biden,” Harris responded: “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden. And I am certainly not Donald Trump.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Trump glares angrily ahead as Harris stares him down during tense debate
• Trump pushes baseless claim about immigrants ‘eating the pets’
• Sarah McBride is one step closer to becoming the first trans lawmaker in Congress

She signed the post “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady,” in reference to resurfaced JD Vance’s statements that have become a rallying cry among some women voters, and shared a photo of her with one of her well-known cats.

Swift’s political leanings have been the subject of speculation for weeks, heightened after former President Donald Trump re-shared a fake AI image to his Truth Social account suggesting he had her support.

Swift previously gave her support to President Joe Biden and Harris during the 2020 presidential race.

“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,” Swift wrote.

Swift, 34, also told her 283 million Instagram followers that she had “I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make,” before calling on them to make sure to register to vote.

In late August, Trump posted “I accept!” on his Truth Social account, along with a carousel of images that appeared to be of Swift, and at least some of which appeared to be AI-generated.

Swift seemed to confirm this in her post.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” she wrote.

The Swift endorsement came as a surprise, two Harris campaign officials told NBC News.

One official said this added to what they view as a “decisive victory” tonight and speaks to Harris’ ability to attract support.

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The Democratic vice president moved to get under the skin of the former Republican president, provoking him with reminders about the 2020 election loss that he still denies and delivering derisive asides at his other false claims. Harris’ needling prompted Trump to launch into the sort of freewheeling personal attacks and digressions that his advisers and supporters have tried to steer him away from.

The high-pressure matchup after a tumultuous campaign summer offered Americans their most expansive look at a campaign that’s been dramatically changed just hours before the first early presidential ballots will be distributed.

The vice president moved to far more effectively press the Democratic case against Trump than President Joe Biden did in June, presaging a more contentious and competitive race now that Harris is the one taking on Trump.

The pair outlined sharply opposite visions of where the nation is and where they intend to take it if elected. Harris promised tax cuts aimed at the middle class and said she would push to restore a federally guaranteed right to abortion overturned by the Supreme Court two years ago. Trump said his proposed tariffs would help the U.S. stop being cheated by allies on trade and said he would work to swiftly end the Russia-Ukraine war, even if it meant Ukraine didn’t achieve victory on the battlefield.

Harris at times shook her head derisively as Trump spoke, occasionally staring at him with a hand on her chin, while Trump seemed to avoid looking toward the Democrat. Trump hewed closely to his rally talking points and the familiar attacks that have proven popular with his Republican base but his advisers worry don’t appeal to a broader cross section of voters.

In one moment, Harris turned to Trump and said that as vice president, she had spoken to foreign leaders, “And they say you’re a disgrace.”

Trump again denied his loss to President Joe Biden four years ago, when his efforts to overturn the result inspired the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris said, “So let’s be clear about that. And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”

Trump in turn tried to link Harris to Biden, questioning why she hadn’t acted on her proposed ideas while serving as vice president. “Why hasn’t she done it?” he said. Trump also focused his attacks on Harris over her assignment by Biden to deal with the root causes of illegal migration.

The Republican pledged anew to deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally and warned that Harris was “worse than Biden” and her policies would turn the U.S. into Venezuela.

He repeatedly dismissed her and Biden as weak, and cited the praise of Hungary’s nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán to show that he is a widely respected by leaders around the world, saying Orbán calls him the “most feared person.”

Saying it’s “time to turn the page,” Harris delivered an appeal to Republicans and independents turned off by Trump’s style and his efforts four years ago to overturn the 2020 presidential election, saying there’s a place in her campaign for them “to stand for country, to stand for our democracy, to stand for rule of law and to end the chaos.”

Trump twice declined to say that it was in the best interest of the U.S. for Ukraine to win its war against Russia. Harris said it was an example of why America’s NATO allies were thankful he was no longer in office, as she and Biden have sent tens of billions of dollars to help Kyiv fend off Russia’s invasion.

As the former president made a series of false claims about migrants, Harris seemed to smirk as he said that migrants are “taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics.”

“Talk about extreme,” Harris responded, when Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims that immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

The candidates met in a small, blue-lit amphitheater converted into a television studio, with no live audience, meaning there was no rowdy applause, cheers or jeers. The intimate setting — with the candidates’ lecterns positioned less than 10 feet from each other — belied the contentious debate to follow.

As Harris seemed to try to interject during one of his responses, Trump replied, “I’m talking now, sound familiar?” harkening back to a moment when shut down an interruption from then-Vice President Mike Pence.

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News Sep 10

Trump wants to make IVF free. Democrats, Republicans and experts are dubious

Harris sharply criticized Trump for the state of the economy and democracy when he left office, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the nation and after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess,” Harris said. She opened her answer by saying she expects voters to hear “a bunch of lies, grievances and name calling” from her GOP opponent during their 90-minute debate.

Trump, meanwhile, quickly went after Harris for abandoning some of her past liberal positions and said: “She’s going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat.” Harris smiled broadly and laughed.

Harris has sought to defend her shifts away from liberal causes to more moderate stances on fracking, expanding Medicare for all and mandatory gun buyback programs — and even backing away from her position that plastic straws should be banned — as pragmatism, insisting that her “values remain the same.”

As the debate opened, Harris walked up to Trump’s lectern to introduce herself, marking the first time the two had ever met. “Kamala Harris,” she said, extending her hand to Trump, who received it in a handshake — the first presidential debate handshake since the 2016 campaign.

Harris, in zeroing in on one of Trump’s biggest electoral vulnerabilities, laid the end of national abortion rights at Trump’s feet for his role in appointing three U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving more than 20 states in the country with what she called “Trump abortion bans.”

Harris gave one of her most impassioned answers as she described the ways women have been denied abortion care and other emergency care and said Trump would assign a national abortion ban if he wins.

Trump declared it “a lie,” and said, “I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”

The Republican has said he wants the issue left to the states.

Harris used a question about her plans to improve the economy by saying she would extend the tax cut for families with children and a tax deduction for small businesses while attacking Trump’s plans to impose broad tariffs as a “sales tax” on goods that the American people will ultimately pay.

Trump was stone-faced during her answer but retorted: “I have no sales tax. That’s in incorrect statement. She knows that.”

Trump, who is trying to paint the vice president as an out-of-touch liberal while trying to win over voters skeptical he should return to the White House continued to call Harris a “Marxist,” and said “Everyone knows she’s a Marxist.”

Trump, 78, has struggled to adapt to Harris, 59, who is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The Republican former president has at times resorted to invoking racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Trump to focus instead on policy differences with Harris.

“I read where she was not Black,” Trump said when asked about comments questioning Harris’ race, and then he added a minute later, “and then I read that she was Black.” He seemed to suggest her race was a choice, saying twice, “That’s up to her.”

“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris responded.

Harris said Trump has a long history of racial division, going back to when his family’s company was investigated for refusing to rent to black people decades ago. She also mentioned that he called for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” who were falsely accused of rape, and spread false “birther” theories about President Barack Obama.

“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” she said, nodding toward Trump.

Harris hit Trump on one of his biggest sources of pride, his freewheeling campaign rallies. Harris noted how at the events, Trump, as he meanders through subjects, will sometimes muse on “fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and whether “windmills cause cancer,” and then said that if you watch his events “you will also notice that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

“The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. Your needs, your dreams and your desires.”

Trump tried to use his next question to respond by accusing Harris of having no one attending her rallies except the people that he claimed, without evidence, that she has bused in and paid to be there.

“She can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” he said.

In rapid fashion after the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden, the incumbent bowed out of the race after his disastrous performance, Trump survived an assassination attempt and bothsides chose their running mates.

The debate subjected Harris, who has sat for only a single formal interview in the past six weeks, to a rare moment of sustained questioning.

Trump at one point launched into an attack on Biden, questioning his mental acuity by making the claim that Biden “doesn’t even know he’s alive.”

Harris quickly tried to turn it around to make Trump look less than sharp.

“First of all, I think it’s important to remind the former president, you’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me,” she said.

The senator from Ohio, as well as other Republican lawmakers and several conservative commentators, have in recent days asserted without evidence that the arrival of thousands of immigrants from Haiti had created chaos in Springfield. 

In a post on X, Vance wrote Monday that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” 

The Springfield Police Division said in a statement that they were aware of the “rumors” and had no information to support them. 

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the police said in a statement emailed to NBC News. 

They added that they had no information to support similar assertions about immigrants squatting or disrupting traffic. 

“Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic,” the police said. 

After NBC News asked the Vance campaign about the lack of evidence for his claim, a spokesperson said that the senator had received “a high volume of calls and emails over the past several weeks from concerned citizens in Springfield” and that “his tweet is based on what he is hearing from them.” 

The spokesperson did not say, however, whether any of those calls or emails had included evidence of violence against pets, and did not offer proof of Vance’s statements.

There is a long history of conservative politicians and pundits denigrating Haitian immigrants in particular, including with baseless allegations of cannibalism, according to historians who have studied the former French colony. 

Viles Dorsainvil, president of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, a nonprofit organization in Springfield, condemned the recent rumors as uninformed and racist. 

“It’s just bigotry, discrimination and racism,” he said. “There is a group of people who have been fabricating some news just to denigrate Haitians.” 

Dorsainvil said his organization helps immigrants with job applications, legal support and more. He added that Haitians have moved to Ohio because of the gang conflict and political turmoil in their home country. 

“They are looking for a place to raise their family and look for a job. But it happens that the city has not been prepared for the influx of Haitians coming here,” he said. 

The false claims about threats to pets began going viral on social media over the weekend, fueled in part by a fourth-hand story that appeared to come from a Facebook group focused on local crime in Springfield. 

The group was set to private on Monday, but according to screenshots posted on X, someone in the Facebook group posted that “my neighbor informed me that her daughters friend had lost her cat.” The poster went on to describe Haitians allegedly taking the cat for food. 

Conservative pundit Charlie Kirk posted a screenshot of the Facebook post Sunday on X, and within 24 hours, it had received more than 3 million views. 

The rumor was picked up by other right-wing commentators, including Jack Posobiec, who posted about it on X more than 30 times Sunday and Monday. Others echoed the allegations, including X owner Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. 

“Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us,” Cruz wrote on X, as a caption on a photo of cats. 

By midday Monday, Haitians were the No. 1 trending topic in the U.S. on X. 

In his post on X, Vance attributed his information about pets to unspecified “reports” and suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame for Haitian immigrants’ “generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” In 2021, President Joe Biden tasked Harris with tackling the “root causes” of migration. 

Vance also asserted without evidence that the Haitian population in question is made up of illegal immigrants. 

A Springfield city website says that’s not true. “Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program,” the website says, referring to a federal humanitarian program for migrants. 

Representatives for Kirk, Posobiec, Musk, Cruz and Jordan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

X and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

As many as 20,000 Haitian immigrants have arrived in the Springfield area in recent years, and although they’ve helped to revitalize the city, there have been protests, The New York Times reported this month. In May, a jury found a Haitian immigrant guilty of causing a school bus crash that killed an 11-year-old boy.

NBC News’ Alec Hernández contributed.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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