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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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