US elections live: Trump threatens Mexico with tariffs if they don’t stop migrants from entering US | US elections 2024

Donald Trump has finally taken the stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, and announced a new policy: he would impose tariffs on Mexico if the United States’s southern neighbor does not stop migrants from crossing their shared border.

Referring to Mexico’s recently inaugurated president Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump said: “I haven’t met her, and I’m going to inform her on day one or sooner, that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send in to the United States of America.”

“It’s only got a 100% chance of working, because if that doesn’t work, I’ll make it 50, and [if] that doesn’t work, I’ll make it 75. For the tough guys, and I’ll make it 100,” Trump said, predicting Mexico will deploy soldiers to its southern border with Guatemala and Belize to stop migrants heading north.

“You know, their southern border’s where they come in, they come right through. And by the way, there’s 100% chance of working. It’s only a question,” he said. He called Mexico America’s top trading partner, which isn’t quite right – according to the US trade representative, it is the number-two supplier and purchaser of American goods.

Conspicuously absent from Kamala Harris’s closing argument? Donald Trump.

At least in name. In the campaign’s closing ad and in the final days on the campaign trail, the vice-president has made no explicit reference to her opponent, instead opting to end on a positive, forward-looking note.

“Our campaign has not been about being against something, it is about being for something,” Harris said at a high-energy rally in Michigan on Sunday night. “A fight for a future with freedom and opportunity and dignity for all Americans.”

At a Black church in Detroit, Harris appealed to “Americans from so-called red states to so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice” and declared the country ready to “turn the page and write the next chapter of our history.

It’s a shift from just a few days ago, when the vice-president focused on Trump’s threat to American democracy and agreed with Trump’s former aides who said he was a “fascist.”

But in the final days, the Harris campaign is betting that the slice of undecided voters left need an affirmative reason to vote for Harris. If they were scared of the threat Trump poses, they’d likely have made up their minds long ago.

We expect Donald Trump to soon take the stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, kicking off his final sprint of campaigning before polls open in tomorrow’s presidential election.

The former president has four events scheduled today. After Raleigh, he’s set to appear in Reading, Pennsylvania at 2pm, then in Pittsburgh at 6pm, and finally in Grand Rapids, Michigan at 10.30pm.

Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz also has a busy day of campaigning ahead of him.

He starts in St Paul, Minnesota, capital of the state he governs, where he and his wife Gwen Walz will greet their neighbors, before heading to Wisconsin for rallies in La Crosse, Stevens Point and Milwaukee. At that last rally, they’ll have Eric Benét as their musical guest, the campaign says.

They finish the day with a rally in Detroit where they will have even more musical guests, specifically the Detroit Youth Choir, Jon Bon Jovi, and The War and Treaty.

Kamala Harris is spending all day campaigning in Pennsylvania, which is seen as potentially the most important state to win this election.

Her first stop is in Scranton, Joe Biden’s childhood hometown, where she’ll participate in a kickoff for canvassers, he campaign said. After that, she heads to Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia before finally returning to Washington DC.

Biden is not scheduled to join her in Scranton. He’s spent the weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and is heading to the White House this morning, where he will have a private call with military members involved in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Elections offices in the US have hardened their security measures this year, anticipating potential violence based on experience since 2020 and during an ongoing rise in threats and harassment focused on election workers.

Many offices have now trained their workers on de-escalation tactics. They’ve run drills for active shooters or other disturbances. They have a process for flagging the threats that could be criminal and seeking law enforcement help when needed.

Hundreds of election offices have been reinforced with bulletproof glass and steel doors. Some have increased their security details or locked down their social media in case people come looking into their lives. And new laws and added enforcement of prohibitions on such harassment have added to the response to the increased hostility.

Authorities are concerned about the rise of the right-wing election denial movement, which originated in 2020 following Trump’s rejection of his defeat to Joe Biden. Trump’s propagation of unfounded theories regarding the election mobilized large crowds to participate in “Stop the Steal” protests, which reached a climax on January 6, 2021, when supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bid to impede Congress’s confirmation of the election outcomes.

Trump has not committed to accepting the outcome, claiming without evidence that Democrats will cheat to install his opponent, Kamala Harris.

Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said her concern for her personal safety increased after Elon Musk, the owner of X, attacked her online. Before she responded to his claims about Michigan voting and her office, she called her security team to “make sure my family was safe,” she said on NBC.

You can read the full story by my colleague, Rachel Leingang, here:

Eleni Courea is a political correspondent for the Guardian:

A Trump victory would be awkward for the Labour party, which has close links with the Democrats and has seen droves of members voluntarily head to the US in recent months to campaign for Kamala Harris.

Last month, Trump’s campaign filed a formal complaint accusing Labour of foreign interference in the US election after a social media post by the party’s head of operations Sofia Patel said nearly 100 current and former staffers were travelling over to support Harris and offered to help them with accommodation.

The row was deeply frustrating for Keir Starmer, who has sought to build a good working relationship with Trump since becoming prime minister in July and was one of a few world leaders to speak directly to the former president after he suffered an assassination attempt in mid-July. The pair met in person in September for a two-hour dinner while Starmer was in New York for the UN General Assembly.

David Lammy, the UK’s foreign secretary, was present at the dinner in New York and has actively been developing links with Republican politicians. But there are questions over whether Lammy can remain in his role if Trump wins, given his strident criticism of the former president in past years — he has branded him a “neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath,” a “dangerous clown” and “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer”.

If Trump is elected, Starmer would need to try and convince him of the importance of supporting Ukraine in its defence against the Russian invasion. Trump has censured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not making concessions to Russia and has made clear he wants to see a quick end to the war.

Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter focused on misinformation for Guardian US

A group of Democratic secretaries of state are calling on social media companies to detail their plans to moderate inflammatory content and artificial intelligence on their platforms during and after election day.

Seven secretaries of state – representing Maine, Rhode Island, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and New Mexico – sent the letters to Google, X and Meta on Friday. Secretaries of state typically play some role in overseeing elections in their states.

The officials note that violent threats against election officials and disinformation about elections are already spreading online, saying they are “deeply concerned about the failure of major social media companies to clearly lay out their plans to moderate inflammatory claims and AI-generated election-related content ahead of, during and following election day”.

Throughout the 2024 election, false and misleading claims about elections have spread widely, playing on frequent myths like that noncitizens are voting en masse or that tabulation machines aren’t secure. Donald Trump often elevates these claims, as does X owner Elon Musk, as part of an ongoing narrative that Democrats can only win the election if they cheat.

Republicans in Congress and in the courts continue to go after attempts to flag misinformation during previous elections and call it censorship. In response, many platforms have taken a less active approach to moderating or removing content, and some have far fewer staff dedicated to trust and safety than they did in previous years.

Some of those signed on to the letters have been targets of threats and harassment personally for doing their jobs.

You can read the full story here: