Trump slammed for garbled childcare plan as Harris goes after Vance: Live updates

Sadly, this is very much not the Minnesota Governor grooving to Beyonce.

But the real Walz was back out there on the campaign trail yesterday, once more sticking it to Trump in fine style.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has claimed that he wants Kamala Harris to win November’s US presidential election because Joe Biden endorsed her – and because she has an “expressive and infectious laugh”.

Speaking during the Eastern Economic Forum on Thursday, Putin claimed that Biden was his “favorite” candidate but that, since he has dropped out, he will now support the new Democratic nominee.

“Our favorite, if you can call it that, was the current president Mr Biden,” Putin said, with a smirk.

Ariana Baio reports.

At the same event in New York yesterday, Trump again joked about relocating to Venezuela, praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, dismissed the threat posed by climate change, suggested Elon Musk could oversee “drastic” government efficiency cuts and told his audience of financiers: “A couple of nukes and your bank doesn’t mean a thing.”

Here’s Alex Woodward’s report on what Trump has planned for Musk, who appears to be his new best friend.

The Republican presidential nominee also got into difficulties on Thursday as he delivered a garbled speech to the New York Economic Club in which he was stumped by a question about how to make childcare more afforable for American families, delivering a meandering, nonsensical answer.

Here’s Alex Woodward on the meaningless word salad the great business titan presented in lieu of a coherent policy that might make a palpable difference in the lives of voters.

Kamala Harris has rebuked Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance for suggesting that mass shootings are simply “a fact of life” in response to the deadly attack on a high school in Winder, Georgia, earlier this week.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Harris wrote on social media in response to a clip of the Ohio Senator making the remark on the campaign trail in Arizona. “We can take action to protect our children – and we will.”

Two teenage students and two teachers were shot dead at Apalachee High School on Wednesday.

Here’s Vance saying it and Harris’s response:

And here, incidentally, is a recent picture of Vance that has a certain amount of relevance to the present discussion.

You can follow live coverage on all the latest from Georgia below.

Earlier this week, Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told the New York Times that the former president “believes anyone convicted of a crime should spend time behind bars.”

Leavitt made the comment in response to the re-conviction of Jamie Davidson, whose domestic violence sentence Trump commuted in 2021.

Trump’s own logic would condemn him to jail after he was convicted in May by a Manhattan jury on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. He’ll be sentenced on September 18.

NBC News asked Leavitt about the comment and questioned whether Trump would apply it to his own conviction.

Graig Graziosi reports.

A new survey has found that Latino voters in Arizona and other battleground states do not like Vance, at all.

On Wednesday, BSP Research released a survey with UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy nonprofit, that surveyed voters of Latin American descent. The survey included 3,000 eligible voters — 2,800 of whom were registered and 200 who were not registered — with oversamples in Georgia, California, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Texas.

Eric Garcia has the story.

Judge Tanya Chutkan said at this morning’s status hearing in the federal election interference case brought against Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith that she would not be factoring in the presidential election when determining the schedule for the case going forward.

And she was not kidding.

The new deadlines ensure that Trump and Smith will be making high-profile filings — potentially filled with never-before-seen details — in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Trump will not be happy.

Here’s the new timeline:

• Special counsel’s evidentiary disclosures are due September 10
• Trump’s reply briefs are due September 19
• Special counsel’s brief on immunity due September 26
• Trump’s supplementary motion to dismiss on statutory grounds due October 3
• Special counsel’s reply due October 17
• Trump response to the special counsel’s immunity brief due October 17
• Special counsel’s reply to that is due October 29
• Trump’s request to argue the case should be dismissed based on the special counsel’s appointment is due October 24
• Special counsel’s reply is due October 31
• And Trump’s reply to that is due November 7

The above dates are subject to delays and rescheduling as things progress. The presidential election is November 5.

This blog will, as always, cover every step of the case.

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election interference case will not let the 2024 presidential election get in the way of prosecuting the former president, after months of delays over his “immunity” appeal effectively froze the case in Washington DC.

Reconvening in a courtroom for the first time in nearly a year, District Judge Tanya Chutkan held a status conference with federal prosecutors and lawyers for Trump to determine next steps in the case, in which Trump is criminally accused of trying to subvert his election loss and then failing to stop a mob of his supporters who tried to do it by force.

Gustaf Kilander and Alex Woodward report.

Former First Lady Melania Trump teased the release of her upcoming memoir in an intense black-and-white video, emphasizing she feels she has a “responsibility to clarify the facts” after her profile was launched into the public eye as the wife of Donald Trump.

Despite being a “private person,” she issued a rare public statement to promote her forthcoming memoir, titled Melania — set to be released on September 24 — just two months before the 2024 presidential election.

Maybe wait for the movie?