Jonathan Freedland

Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception.

It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say.

Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelilan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps, “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.”) The photo op was born.

Joe Biden promised a “recovery for everybody” as he prepared to take over an economy ravaged by the pandemic four years ago. Few predicted what would follow.

One of two candidates – Kamala Harris, his vice-president, and Donald Trump, his predecessor – will succeed Biden in January. As millions prepare to elect the next US president, here is how the world’s largest economy fared under Biden.

The shock waves unleashed by Covid-19 were still rippling across the world when Biden took office in January 2021. In the US, and many other economies, they set the stage for an extraordinary rise in inflation.

For months, the White House and Federal Reserve insisted the factors driving this surging price growth were “transitory”. By the time the consumer price index peaked, reaching its highest level in a generation in June 2022, officials had changed their minds.

The Fed embarked upon an aggressive campaign to tackle inflation in March 2022. Interest rates – cut to close to zero at the outset of the pandemic – were increased at 11 meetings, to a two-decade high.

Suddenly the central fear looming over the US economy was not runaway inflation, but the specter of recession. As the Fed scrambled to cool activity in an attempt to tackle prices, warnings of a prolonged downturn cast a shadow.

Moira Donegan

There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger.

Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.

On the other end, writers and commentators point to more recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men, making them feel attacked or unnecessary. They point, apparently seriously, to the fact that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity,” which they say makes men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings are an emergency for the nation. They point to those t-shirts that were popular in 2017 that said, “The Future Is Female.” This, too, is reflective of a great social pathology, a sign that we as a nation have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?

Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump head to North Carolina on Saturday to try to clinch support in the south-eastern battleground state just three days before Tuesday’s US presidential election.

It will be the fourth day in a row that vice-president Harris and former president Trump visit the same state on the same day, underlining the critical importance of the seven states likely to decide the race, which opinion polls show to be on a knife’s edge, Reuters reported.

More than 70 million Americans have already cast ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, below the record early-voting pace in 2020 during Covid-19, but still indicating a high level of voter enthusiasm.

Saturday also marks the last day of early voting in North Carolina, where over 3.8m votes have been cast, while the state’s western reaches are still recovering from Hurricane Helene’s deadly flooding.

Harris plans appearances with rock star Jon Bon Jovi in Charlotte, the biggest city in North Carolina, which is tied with Georgia for the second-biggest prize of the swing states. Each has 16 votes in the Electoral College, where 270 are needed to secure the presidency.

North Carolina backed Trump in 2020 but elected a Democratic governor on the same day, giving hope to both parties.

David Smith

Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.

If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.

For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.

“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”

The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.

Officials in the US battleground state of Michigan said they worry that the Democratic-leaning city of Warren could lag behind the rest of the state in reporting the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, raising early doubts about the state’s vote count.

Warren, unlike Detroit and most other cities in Michigan, opted not to take advantage of changes enacted in a 2022 state law allowing for up to eight days of pre-processing of absentee ballots, Reuters reported. Instead, the city of 135,000 people will wait until election day to verify and tabulate more than 20,000 mail-in ballots.

The potential delay from Warren has worried some Democratic leaders that it could leave the results appearing artificially high for Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday evening, and that the former president would seek to exploit the situation by falsely declaring victory in the state before all votes were in.

“If the state is close at all and we don’t have returns from Warren, which is our third-largest city, it’s going to create all kinds of concerns,” said Mark Brewer, an attorney and the former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. “It’s very, very worrisome.”

Are the polls ‘improbably tight’? Some experts think so

Robert Tait

The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.

At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Guardian and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being levelled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, with voter loyalty to their chosen candidate appearing relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.

Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over her Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week. Such an advantage is well with the margin of error of most polls.

The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, often seen as the most important swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). Harris has single-point leads in the two other blue-wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is marginally ahead in the Sun belt: up by 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average advantage in the polls is less than a percentage point.

Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introducing corrective weighting.

Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 – nearly 40% – showed margins of a single point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troubling” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.

This indicated “not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race”, according to Clinton and Lapinski.

Read the full piece here:

Nataliya Gumenyuk

Around a month before the US elections, in the Kharkiv region, I sat down with a group of Ukrainian infantry soldiers together with the American historian Timothy Snyder. I suggested they ask questions of him not only as an American historian, but also as an American citizen.

The servicemen were curious about the upcoming election, but mainly the chances of receiving significant military aid any time soon. They expressed pity that many Americans still don’t understand that the Ukrainian fight is not just about us. It’s in the world’s interests to support the fight against blatant breaches of the international order.

The anxiety of the American elections is felt more strongly in Kyiv among Ukrainian officials and civil society leaders because Ukraine has become a partisan issue, and part of US domestic politics. These groups have been trying for years to be on good terms with both Democrats and Republicans in the US. This was especially true during the long delays in Congress over the vote for security assistance to Ukraine.

But engaging with the Maga camp has become difficult. This only got worse when it was revealed what Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said in 2022: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” During the race, Vance has characterised Vladimir Putin as an “adversary” and “competitor”, rather than an enemy, and has generally argued that the US should be focusing on China, not Russia.

George Monbiot

This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.

A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.

Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.

Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.

They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.

Comer and Stefanik said:

The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.

We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.

At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.

“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.

“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.

On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.

“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.

Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.

“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.

“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.

Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”

The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.

“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”

Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”

He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.

“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.

“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.

In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”

“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.

“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.

We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.

Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.

At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.

He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.

Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.

“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”

“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.

He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”

For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:

In other news:

• Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

• Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

• Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

• At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

• Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

• The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

• A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

• Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

• A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons.