US elections live: Trump says he will fire Jack Smith ‘within two seconds’ if elected

Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to win over male voters and by some measures, his efforts appear effective.

Trump is besting Kamala Harris among men 53 to 37 percent, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, while the vice president is winning women 53 percent to his 36 percent.

Trump’s far-right politics seem especially appealing to white male voters, and there have been various explanations for this trend. Some have opined that it’s sheer sexism; others believe that it’s due to a purported male loneliness epidemic and uncertainty about their role in American society.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone spoke with residents of Middletown, Ohio–GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s hometown– in an effort to learn why gender is a watershed issue in this election.

Here is their eye-opening report.

With less than two weeks to go before election day, data indicates that early voting has hit massive numbers in several key swing states.

Some 25 million Americans have already cast their ballots. At least part of this surge was prompted by Republicans deciding to vote early due to Donald Trump’s direction.

In the battleground state of Georgia, which Trump lost by just 11,779 votes in 2020, more than 1.9 million Americans have either cast their votes via mail-in ballots or in person. North Carolina saw 1.7 million voting early in spite of the disastrous Hurricane Helene in September.

While Trump has emphatically urged his supporters to hit the polls, saying at a Georgia rally “just vote – whichever way you want to do it,” Democrats and progressives are also encouraging early voting. Senate Democrats on Tuesday released a report urging Americans to vote as early as possible, and to answer questions about why the results might not be known on election night.

On college campuses, advocates are working to increase early voting access for students. At the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, for example, the undergraduate student government organized a one-day pop-up polling site.

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The day so far
Donald Trump made clear that he would end the effort to hold him legally accountable for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents, saying in an interview that he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds”, if elected. The comment drew an uproar from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which is seeking to convince voters that Trump would govern as a dictator in a second term. Meanwhile, the vice-president is gearing up for her rally in Houston tomorrow, where she will reportedly be joined by Beyoncé. We will see her later today in Georgia at a campaign event scheduled for 7pm, while Trump holds a rally in Arizona at 4pm.

Later on in Donald Trump’s interview with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, the former president attacked special counsel Jack Smith as “a scoundrel”, and says he does not think he would be impeached for firing him.

“Now, they will impeach you again on day one if you fire Jack Smith or you pardon yourself. Are you prepared to be impeached again and again and again if they have the House, because they just will?” Hewitt asked, referring to the Democrats who could recapture that majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the upcoming election.

Trump responded:

No, I don’t think they will impeach me if I fire Jack Smith. Jack Smith is a scoundrel, he’s a very dishonest man in my opinion, very dishonest man, and he’s a mean man, a mean man, but his problem is he’s so mean that he always goes too far, like the raid of Mar-a-Lago.

The latter part is a reference to the second case Smith brought against Trump, for allegedly hiding classified materials at his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in south Florida. Over the summer, Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed federal judge who was assigned to the case, threw out Smith’s indictment, which the special counsel is appealing.

In his interview with Hewitt, Trump said, “We had a brave, brilliant judge in Florida”, apparently a reference to Cannon. ABC News reports that his feelings go deeper than that: Cannon’s name is on a list of potential attorney general candidates for his second administration, and was added after she dismissed the classified documents indictment.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was delayed for months as the supreme court dealt with the former president’s claim of immunity, and is only now getting back on track. As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported earlier this month, Smith’s team appears to want to center its case on how Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence handled the then-president’s effort to keep Joe Biden out of the White House. Here’s more:

Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and efforts to recruit fake Trump electors the centerpiece of the criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.

The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.

And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.

The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.

Democrats have been loudly condemning Donald Trump for rhetoric they call dictatorial, as well as steering voters’ attention to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he meets the definition of a fascist.

In an interview with the New Republic, Ben Wikler, who as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party is hoping to deliver the electoral votes of one of the swingiest swing states to Kamala Harris, explains why he believes such allegations may tip the scales in the vice-president’s favor:

This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.

Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.