US elections live: Donald Trump claims he is the ‘opposite of a Nazi’ as anger continues over Puerto Rico comments | US elections 2024

The National Park Service has said that it is expecting about 40,000 people in attendance for Kamala Harris’s speech this evening on the Ellipse in Washington DC, according to the New York Times.

Kamala Harris will lay out her vision for the presidency in a speech this evening near the White House to underscore the “gravity” of the choice before Americans this November, her campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters in a call previewing the speech.

A former prosecutor, Harris will lay out the speech as she would a closing argument, with the American people as the jury, campaign co-Chair Cedric Richmond. She has been laying out the evidence for the last 100 days, and now she is prepared to rest her case.

Richmond said Harris will use the speech, from a site where Trump spoke to his supporters before they stormed the Capitol on January 6, to remind Americans that the former president is “so all-consumed by his grievances and his power and his endless desire for revenge that he is not focused on the needs of the American people.”

Harris is also expected to lay out her personal story and her vision for building up the economy and working across party lines to serve “all Americans” – including, in contrast to Trump, she will argue, those who did not support her.

O’Malley Dillon said the speech is dedicated to reaching voters who have yet to make up their minds- or aren’t sure they will vote – young people, those who haven’t tuned in and suburban women, and independents. O’Malley Dillon said Trump’s rhetoric in the final weeks and especially his Madison Square Garden rally appears to have created even more openings for the campaign to reach these voters. Support among their targeted Puerto Rican voters is growing.

“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” O’Malley Dillon said. The campaign, she said, considers the contes a “margin-of-error race.”

USA Today has reportedly joined the Washington Post and the LA Times in deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 election.

USA Today, which has over 200 US news outlets under it, including the Arizona Republic, The Des Moines Register, and the Detroit Free Press, is one of the largest daily newspapers by circulation in the country.

On Monday, the company said it would not be backing candidates “in presidential or national races” this year, a spokesperson told the Hill.

Last election, USA Today endorsed Joe Bien for president.

The spokesperson said on Monday that while the company will not endorse for president, “local editors at publications across the USA TODAY Network have the discretion to endorse at a state or local level.”

Former president Donald Trump has reportedly told ABC News that he didn’t hear any of the comments made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s rally in New York on Sunday, including when the comedian called Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage.”

When asked about the comments, Trump allgedly did not denounce them but rather repeated that he didn’t hear them.

Trump also said that he didn’t know Hinchcliffe, saying: “I don’t know him; someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”

As of 8:45am ET on Tuesday, more than 48.6 million Americans have voted early in this year’s presidential election that’s just a week away, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Of the total number of early votes, 25,257,519 were cast in person and 23,469,957 were returned by mail.

As outrage continues over the remarks from Donald Trump’s Sunday rally in New York, Angel M Cintrón, the president of the Republican party’s branch in Puerto Rico, has said that he will not vote for Trump unless Trump apologises for the racist remarks made at his rally, where a speaker referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.

“Right now we have no business and no relationship with Trump,” Cintrón said on Monday during a Puerto Rican talkshow. “If Donald Trump doesn’t apologise, we won’t vote for him.”

Read more here:

Tony Hinchcliffe – the comedian who delivered offensive and racist jokes during the Donald Trump rally on Sunday in New York where he referred Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” – reportedly practised the line the night before at a Manhattan comedy club, according to a new NBC News report.

At the comedy club, the joke did not draw laughs, NBC reports, instead prompting only a few “awkward chuckles.”

During his set, Hinchcliffe reportedly mentioned to the audience that he was going to be performing at the Madison Square Garden Trump rally the next day.

Hinchcliffe allegedly stated multiple times throughout his routine that he expected to receive a better reaction “tomorrow at the rally.”

Kamala Harris will give her closing argument speech later today at the Ellipse in Washington DC, just one week before election day.

She is expected to deliver a hopeful and optimistic message that’s focused on moving forward.

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is scheduled to deliver remarks in Georgia today.

Robert Tait

The Democrats are fending off a Republican offensive aimed at overturning their tiny majority in the Senate.

Retaking control of the US Congress’s upper chamber may represent the GOP’s best opportunity of success in November’s election, according to analysts, surpassing their chances of retaking the White House or even retaining control of the House of Representatives.

But with a burst of enthusiasm from Kamala Harris’s campaign, Democrats are still competitive…

Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon has been released from prison after serving a four-month sentence.

Bannon, 70, was jailed for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. When he began serving his sentence in July, Bannon called himself a “political prisoner”.

“I am proud of going to prison,” he said at the time, adding that he was standing up to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and a “corrupt” justice department.

Bannon will have to answer further charges at trial in New York. He is accused of tricking donors who gave money to help build Trump’s notorious wall along the US-Mexico border. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering, conspiracy, fraud and other charges. The trial begins in December.

Campaigning is ramping up in the race to the White House as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump continue to exchange barbs on the campaign trail. Only seven days remain until Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, 5 November. On Monday, Harris and Tim Waltz courted young voters in Michigan, while Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen spoke in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Georgia, Donald Trump railed against being compared to Hitler, telling voters that he was the “opposite of a Nazi” in response to Democratic opponents, who likened him to the Nazi dictator after a slew of racist remarks were made at his rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Trump will hold a news conference at Mar-a-Lago at 10am ET – where he is likely to face questions about racist remarks about Puerto Rico at the New York event.

He is then heading to Allentown, Pennsylvania – home to tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans.

• Campaigning for Harris in Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders said: “You have Mike Pence saying I can’t support the guy I worked with for four years” and “We cannot allow someone to be president of the United States who is a pathological liar and who is working night and day to undermine American democracy.”

• Sanders also released a video addressing voter concerns over the Biden-Harris administration’s record on Gaza, saying: “After Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change US policy towards Netanyahu.”

• Before performing at a rally with Obama in Pennsylvania, Bruce Springsteen said: “I’m Bruce Springsteen and I’m here today to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and to oppose Donald Trump and JD Vance … I want a president who reveres the constitution, who does not threaten but wants to protect and guide our great democracy, who believes in the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power, who will fight for women’s rights … [and] create a middle-class economy that works for all our citizens.”

• Anita Hill, a former clerk to the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexistinsults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”. In a New York Times opinion piece published on Monday, the Brandeis University professor – who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators – wrote that she sympathises with the US vice-president.