“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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After a disastrous performance in the first general election debate of this cycle in June, President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, upending the campaign in its closing months and kicking off the rapid-fire process that allowed Harris to rise as Democrats’ nominee in his place.

As was the case for the June debate, there will be no audience present.

Pennsylvania is perhaps the nation’s premier swing state, and both candidates have spent significant time campaigning across Pennsylvania. Trump was holding a rally in Butler, in western Pennsylvania, in mid-July when he was nearly assassinated by a gunman perched on a nearby rooftop. Harris chose Philadelphia as the spot where she unveiled Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in August.

In 2020, it was Pennsylvania’s electoral votes that put Biden over the top and propelled him into the White House, four years after Trump won the state. Biden’s victory came after more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in votes that delayed the processing of some ballots, and the Trump campaign mounted several legal challenges.

An estimated 51.3 million people watched Biden and Trump in June. But that was before many people were truly tuned into the election, and the potential rematch of the 2020 campaign was drawing little enthusiasm.

Tuesday’s debate will almost certainly reach more people, whether or not it approaches the record debate audience of 84 million for the first face-off between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.

Here’s a look at what to expect:

When is the 2024 presidential debate?

The presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump takes place at 8 p.m. CT/9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The planned debate comes nearly three weeks after the conclusion of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, in which Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination after a turbulent month kickstarted by Biden’s withdrawal.

How to watch the presidential debate

NBC News will broadcast the full debate live and offering extensive primetime coverage beginning at 8 p.m. ET. You can watch it here on the News4 streaming channel.

NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and TODAY co-anchor Savannah Guthrie will anchor a pre-debate primetime special starting at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, followed by a live presentation of the ABC News-hosted debate at 9 p.m. ET. Holt and Guthrie will continue special coverage following the debate. 

Viewers can watch the debate live on NBC4 or on the News4 streaming channel, which is available 24/7 and free of charge across nearly every online video platform, including The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus and the NBC News app on smartphones and smart TVs.

Will mics be on or off? Full list of debate rules

The parameters now in place for the Sept. 10 debate are essentially the same as they were for the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

According to ABC News, the candidates will stand behind lecterns, will not make opening statements and will not be allowed to bring notes during the 90-minute debate. David Muir and Linsey Davis will moderate the event.

“Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion,” the network noted.

A Harris campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning around the debate, said a candidate who repeatedly interrupts will receive a warning from a moderator, and both candidates’ microphones may be unmuted if there is significant crosstalk so the audience can understand what’s happening.

After a virtual coin flip held Tuesday and won by Trump, the GOP nominee opted to offer the final closing statement, while Harris chose the podium on the right side of viewers’ screens. There will be no audience, written notes or any topics or questions shared with campaigns or candidates in advance, the network said.

Here’s the full list of rules:

– The debate will be 90 minutes with two commercial breaks.

– The two seated moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, will be the only people asking questions.

– A coin flip was held virtually on Tuesday, Sept. 3, to determine podium placement and order of closing statements; former President Donald Trump won the coin toss and chose to select the order of statements. The former president will offer the last closing statement, and Vice President Harris selected the right podium position on screen (stage left).

– Candidates will be introduced by the moderators.

– The candidates enter upon introduction from opposite sides of the stage; the incumbent party will be introduced first.

– No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate.

– Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate.

– Props or prewritten notes are not allowed onstage.

– No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.

– Candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water.

– Candidates will have two-minute answers to questions, two-minute rebuttals, and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses.

– Candidates’ microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak and muted when the time belongs to another candidate.

– Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other.

– Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks.

– Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion.

– There will be no audience in the room.

Are other debates planned?

Though the September debate is currently the only debate currently planned between Harris and Trump, Harris’ campaign said that a potential October debate was contingent on Trump attending the Sept. 10 debate.

In addition to the planned Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance also agreed to a debate, scheduled to be hosted by CBS News on Oct. 1.

When is Election Day?

Voters will officially head to the polls just over a month later Tuesday, Nov. 5, for Election Day, though early voting starts significantly earlier in many states.

Decision 2024 Sep 4

Trump and Harris campaigns agree to rules for ABC debate

After a disastrous performance in the first general election debate of this cycle in June, President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, upending the campaign in its closing months and kicking off the rapid-fire process that allowed Harris to rise as Democrats’ nominee in his place.

As was the case for the June debate, there will be no audience present.

Pennsylvania is perhaps the nation’s premier swing state, and both candidates have spent significant time campaigning across Pennsylvania. Trump was holding a rally in Butler, in western Pennsylvania, in mid-July when he was nearly assassinated by a gunman perched on a nearby rooftop. Harris chose Philadelphia as the spot where she unveiled Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in August.

In 2020, it was Pennsylvania’s electoral votes that put Biden over the top and propelled him into the White House, four years after Trump won the state. Biden’s victory came after more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in votes that delayed the processing of some ballots, and the Trump campaign mounted several legal challenges.

An estimated 51.3 million people watched Biden and Trump in June. But that was before many people were truly tuned into the election, and the potential rematch of the 2020 campaign was drawing little enthusiasm.

Tuesday’s debate will almost certainly reach more people, whether or not it approaches the record debate audience of 84 million for the first face-off between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.

Here’s a look at what to expect:

When is the 2024 presidential debate?

The presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump takes place at 8 p.m. CT/9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The planned debate comes nearly three weeks after the conclusion of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, in which Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination after a turbulent month kickstarted by Biden’s withdrawal.

How to watch the presidential debate

Will mics be on or off? Full list of debate rules

The parameters now in place for the Sept. 10 debate are essentially the same as they were for the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

According to ABC News, the candidates will stand behind lecterns, will not make opening statements and will not be allowed to bring notes during the 90-minute debate. David Muir and Linsey Davis will moderate the event.

“Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion,” the network noted.

A Harris campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning around the debate, said a candidate who repeatedly interrupts will receive a warning from a moderator, and both candidates’ microphones may be unmuted if there is significant crosstalk so the audience can understand what’s happening.

After a virtual coin flip held Tuesday and won by Trump, the GOP nominee opted to offer the final closing statement, while Harris chose the podium on the right side of viewers’ screens. There will be no audience, written notes or any topics or questions shared with campaigns or candidates in advance, the network said.

Here’s the full list of rules:

– The debate will be 90 minutes with two commercial breaks.

– The two seated moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, will be the only people asking questions.

– A coin flip was held virtually on Tuesday, Sept. 3, to determine podium placement and order of closing statements; former President Donald Trump won the coin toss and chose to select the order of statements. The former president will offer the last closing statement, and Vice President Harris selected the right podium position on screen (stage left).

– Candidates will be introduced by the moderators.

– The candidates enter upon introduction from opposite sides of the stage; the incumbent party will be introduced first.

– No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate.

– Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate.

– Props or prewritten notes are not allowed onstage.

– No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.

– Candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water.

– Candidates will have two-minute answers to questions, two-minute rebuttals, and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses.

– Candidates’ microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak and muted when the time belongs to another candidate.

– Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other.

– Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks.

– Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion.

– There will be no audience in the room.

Are other debates planned?

Though the September debate is currently the only debate currently planned between Harris and Trump, Harris’ campaign said that a potential October debate was contingent on Trump attending the Sept. 10 debate.

In addition to the planned Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance also agreed to a debate, scheduled to be hosted by CBS News on Oct. 1.

When is Election Day?

Voters will officially head to the polls just over a month later Tuesday, Nov. 5, for Election Day, though early voting starts significantly earlier in many states.

Decision 2024 Sep 4

Trump and Harris campaigns agree to rules for ABC debate

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote.

He continued, “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

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The threat was one of the most wide-ranging that he’s made while running for president after his 2020 defeat — going beyond threatening old foes and issuing warnings to those involved with the current election.

While he spent much of the 2016 campaign threatening to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton, he tends not to go after people on the periphery, like donors and election workers.

Election workers across the country have been subject to threats, most famously Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, two election workers whose entire lives were uprooted when Trump and his allies targeted them after the 2020 election with false accusations of fraud.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference that grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s election. He’s begun making similar statements ahead of the 2024 election.

He also emphasized the GOP’s focus on election integrity this cycle during a speech Saturday in Wisconsin, suggesting that if Republicans stop Democrats from cheating, he does not need to continue campaigning. 

“We gotta stop the cheating. If we stop that cheating, if we don’t let them cheat, I don’t even have to campaign anymore,” Trump said. “We’re going to win by so much. In the meantime, too big to rig, too big to rig.”

Trump and his allies filed dozens of unsuccessful cases after the 2020 election in an attempt to overturn the results. Some Democrats say that Republicans’ new legal fights in battleground states ahead of the November election raise concerns that Republicans are attempting to sow seeds doubts about the result if Donald Trump loses.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign could not immediately be reached on Saturday night to provide additional context regarding Trump’s plan.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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On Saturday, they took their campaign against the conservative Project 2025 blueprint, written by allies of Republican Donald Trump, to the sky above college football stadiums in key swing states.

Democratic National Committee -sponsored banners pulled by small airplanes flew Saturday over Michigan Stadium, where the defending national champion Wolverines lost to Texas, and at home games for Penn State and Wisconsin. A banner set to fly over Georgia’s home game was grounded due to weather.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have spent months warning about Project 2025, betting that the initiative makes Trump seem especially extreme. More than 900 pages and produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the plan lays out how Trump in his second term might do everything from firing tens of thousands of federal workers to abolishing government departments to imposing new restrictions on abortion and diversity initiatives.

Trump has rejected a direct connection to Project 2025, though he’s also endorsed some of its key ideas.

Saturday’s gambit aimed to put Democratic messaging over stadiums with a total capacity of 380,000-plus, with tens of thousands of fans more in the vicinity of each game.

“JD Vance ‘hearts’ Ohio State + Project 2025,” read the message going over Michigan Stadium, suggesting Trump’s running mate loves the project as much as he famously does Michigan’s hated archrival.

In Wisconsin, which hosted South Dakota, the message was “Jump Around! Beat Trump + Project 2025,” a nod to fans jumping with enough ferocity to shake Camp Randall Stadium when House of Pain’s “Jump Around” plays between the third and fourth quarters.

Penn State’s Bowling Green matchup got more general messages urging fans to “Beat Trump, Sack Project 2025.

Banners started flying around four hours before each kickoff, said DNC deputy communications director Abhi Rahman. The Trump campaign did not answer a message Saturday seeking comment.

Harris’ campaign and party bring up Project 2025 multiple times each day, often unprompted.

The DNC marked Labor Day by arguing that Project 2025 would undermine overtime rules and “hard-fought” worker rights. It also paid for internet ads on the initiative that flashed up for users searching “back to school.” Democrats have further pointed to Project 2025 in seemingly incongruous places, while highlighting Vance getting booed at a recent firefighters convention or slamming Trump for laying into his perceived political enemies in online posts.

“We want people to know exactly what Project 2025 is, what the ties are to Trump,” Rahman said. “Finding creative avenues to get the message out is something that we’re always trying to do.”

Democratic strategist Brad Bannon warned that Harris’ focus on Project 2025 “can’t overwhelm her positive message about the changes she wants to make.”

“She can’t afford to go overboard,” he said, “if it interferes with her establishing her own personal profile.”

A large portion of Saturday’s game crowds, meanwhile, may support Trump. Many college football fans hail from rural, more Republican areas, well beyond the confines of reliably Democratic college towns.

“One of the really interesting things when political candidates try to leverage sports is that they’re putting themselves at risk,” said Amy Bass, who is a professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University in Purchase, New York.

She pointed to Trump being surprised to get booed while attending Game 5 of the 2019 World Series — though the former president also made largely successful stops at tailgates before the Iowa-Iowa State football game in 2023 and when South Carolina hosted Clemson after last Thanksgiving.

Sports crowds have “a propensity to get loud, also have the added layer of alcohol and tailgating and all kinds of things pregame, and they haven’t curated that crowd,” Bass said.

Rahman, though, shrugged off such concerns.

“They can get rowdy all they want at a banner,” he said. “But the message is definitely there. It’s there for a reason.”

The GOP presidential nominee’s full response fell short of offering a coherent vision or policy for how he’d address child care needs, as he pivoted to promoting his proposed tariffs on imported goods to the U.S. and touting the revenue they would bring in.

Asked if he would “commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable” and “what specific piece of legislation” he would support during a Q&A session at the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Trump said:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.

“Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in.

“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

Trump’s response went viral online after the clip and transcript were shared, sparking criticism from the campaign of Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris and leaving policy experts across the ideological spectrum baffled.

“Somewhere in that incoherent word salad was a claim that the proposed tariffs could both balance the budget and pay for free child care across the country, which is of course mathematically absurd,” said Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert with the conservative Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser to prominent Republicans. “Trump sounded like the student who hadn’t studied for the test and was making up numbers.”

The Harris campaign responded by attacking Trump’s tariffs while highlighting her proposals to expand the child tax credit.

“Billionaire-bought Donald Trump’s ‘plan’ for making child care more affordable is to impose a $3,900 tax hike on middle class families,” Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said, citing estimates from two think tanks on the impact of Trump’s tariff plan. “The American people deserve a President who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris’ plan to bring back a $3,600 Child Tax Credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax cut for families with newborn children.”

The Harris proposal is less aggressive than what the Biden White House has endorsed for families with children, which includes capping child care expenses for the middle class at 7% of income, as well as universal preschool. The Harris campaign didn’t respond when asked if she’d push for those provisions if elected president.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates mocked Trump’s answer during a Friday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“If you have any idea what the hell that answer means, you’re a better detective than I am,” Bates said, before citing analyses by nonpartisan experts that Trump’s tariffs would limit economic growth.

Reshma Saujani, who asked Trump the child care question at the Economic Club of New York, told NBC News after the event that the former president’s answer “kind of blew my mind.”

“He basically said that child care was not that expensive or that tariffs would solve it,” said Saujani, who is a member of the board and said the club had invited her to ask Trump a question. “That demonstrates to me how out of touch he really is. If you’re talking to parents and moms and families on the campaign trail, they’re talking about child care and the cost of it.”

In her question to Trump, Saujani, a founder of the groups Moms First and Girls Who Code, cited statistics showing that child care costs a total of $122 billion a year and described it as “one of the most urgent economic issues facing our country.”

She asked him to mention a specific piece of legislation he would advance to address the problem.

Trump did not answer her directly. Instead, he talked about the amount of money that would come into the U.S. through tariffs on foreign countries. He seemed to be suggesting that those sums could more than pay for child care needs, although he did not outline a plan for how the government should cover them.

For her part, Saujani believes Trump was making a different point that she called “shocking”: that the cost of child care is not that a big problem for the U.S. when compared to the sums involved in tariff collection.

Asked to clarify his response, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt replied: “President Trump’s first-term economic policies uplifted families by putting more money in our pockets, while making expanded access to childcare and paid family leave top priorities in his Administration. Now in Kamala Harris’ America, hardworking families are struggling to buy basic groceries, diapers, and baby formula for their children. President Trump will make America strong, safe, and prosperous again for struggling American families when he returns to the White House.”

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During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mallory McMorrow, a 37-year-old state senator from Michigan, brought out a giant copy of the roughly 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” and slammed it on the lectern, making an expression to signal how heavy it was as she opened to start reading.

“They went ahead and wrote down all the extreme things that Donald Trump wants to do in the next four years,” McMorrow said from the stage. “We read it.”

The lengthy plan drafted by conservatives serves as a blueprint to remake the federal government in a second Trump administration. The former president, meanwhile, has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he doesn’t know anything about has “no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

However, many of Trump’s key allies and former administration officials are writers and architects of Project 2025.

“Don’t believe it when (Trump’s) playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Aug. 9 at a campaign event in Glendale, Arizona.

Here’s what to know about Project 2025:

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What is Project 2025?

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed, 920-page handbook for governing under the next Republican administration.

The document outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power. The overarching theme of Project 2025 is to strip down the “administrative state.” This, according to the blueprint, is the mass of unelected government officials who pursue policy agendas at odds with the president’s plans.

Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired and replaced by Trump loyalists.

It calls for the U.S. Education Department to be shuttered, and the Homeland Security Department dismantled, with its various parts absorbed by other federal offices.

There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation

The plan says the Department of Health and Human Services should “pursue a robust agenda” to protect “the fundamental right to life,” and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medications used in abortions should be reversed. It also calls for reviving a 19th century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any abortion medications, equipment, or materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be gutted. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would go under a microscope to ensure candidates haven’t prioritized issues like climate change or critical race theory.

On immigration, proposals include targeted raids on immigrant communities for mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship and reversing the Flores settlement to make way for family separation. It also proposes restricting legal immigration by doing away with many of the programs that offer immigrants a pathway to citizenship, including work and student visas, DACA, family-based immigration, TPS and visas for victims of crime and human trafficking.

While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.

To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.

John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”

In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.

Who is behind Project 2025?

Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials with deep GOP ties. The project’s former director, Paul Dans, served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump. Dans stepped down from the role in July after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a statement.

Trump’s former White House budget chief, Russell Vought, was a key architect of the plan and was also appointed to the Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee. Vought is likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration. And he’s been drafting a so-far secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed the plan’s implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.

John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, was a senior adviser. McEntee told the conservative news site The Daily Wire earlier this year that Project 2025’s team would integrate a lot of its work with the campaign after the summer when Trump would announce his transition team.

More than a hundred conservative organizations have contributed to the project, recruiting an “army” of Americans to go to Washington and “flood the zone with conservatives” if Republicans took back the White House.

What does Trump say about Project 2025?

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and has denied knowing who is behind the plan.

Yet he spoke highly about the group’s plans at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

Trump’s recent attempts to reject the blueprint are complicated by the connections he has with many of its contributors.

The decision to make Ohio Sen. JD Vance his running mate was taken by some as one more connection to Project 2025. Heritage’s President Kevin Roberts has said he’s good friends with Vance and that the Heritage Foundation had been privately rooting for him to be the VP pick.

Vance penned the foreword to Roberts’ own new book, which was set to be out in September but has now been postponed as Project 2025 hits turmoil. Roberts is holding off the release of his potentially fiery new book until after the November presidential election.

Stephen Miller, a former Trump White House adviser who now runs America First Legal, has also been closely involved. Miller has also sought to distance himself, insisting in a statement to NBC News that he’s “never been involved with Project 2025.”

Democrats for months have been using Project 2025 to hammer Trump and other Republicans, arguing to voters that it represents the former president’s true — and extreme — agenda.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, several weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.

It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

Merchan wrote that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he added.

Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president and current Republican nominee in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.

Trump’s lawyers argued that delaying his sentencing until after the election would also allow him time to weigh next steps after Merchan rules on the defense’s request to reverse his conviction and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

In his order Friday, Merchan delayed a decision on that until Nov. 12.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Had they been successful, Trump’s lawyers said they would have then sought to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.

Trump is appealing the federal court ruling.

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The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, deferred to Merchan and did not take a position on the defense’s delay request.

“A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts. The Manhattan D.A.’s Office stands ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court,” a spokesperson for Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg told NBC News.

Messages seeking comment were left for Trump’s lawyers.

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after the date Sept. 18.

Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case — brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat — was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current campaign.

Democrats backing their party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.

In speeches at the party’s conviction in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and one porn star to prove it.”

Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.

Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

In seeking the delay, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the short time between the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 and sentencing, which was to have taken place two days later, was unfair to Trump.

To prepare for a Sept. 18 sentencing, the lawyers said, prosecutors would be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case. If Merchan rules against Trump, he would need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” they said.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.

“When you saw 5,000 people a day crossing into a town like Eagle Pass, Texas, you could see that that was on your TV. You knew what was going on in America,” Abbott told a crowd of about 50 people gathered at a wedding venue in a Phoenix suburb. “What Harris wanted to do was to silence the critics, and they could silence the critics by making this problem go invisible.” 

“They’re doing that daily, flying people across the border or through this [asylum application program], getting them to come to a port of entry, at which time they will put them on a bus and then transport them to some other place,” he said.

An internal document obtained by NBC News in 2022 revealed a plan from the Department of Homeland Security to transport migrants awaiting immigration proceedings from U.S. cities along the southern border farther into the interior of the country. Typically, migrants who are granted asylum in the United States are transported to different parts of the country by paying for it themselves or through the charity of nongovernmental organizations after being released by Customs and Border Protection.

NBC News has contacted Abbott’s team for clarification on the programs he was referencing. In response to Abbott’s claims, the Harris-Walz campaign shared a statement from a border town mayor from Bisbee, Arizona, criticizing Trump for opposing a bipartisan border bill that Senate Republicans shot down in February. 

“The border bill would have made our country safer, made the border more secure,” said Mayor Ken Budge in a statement. “Now that it’s election time, JD Vance and Trump are here to campaign on the border — even though they’re responsible for blocking the most important bill we’ve seen to improve border security,” Budge added.

The attack from Abbott comes as the Trump campaign has sought to tie Harris to chaos surrounding migrants and the U.S. border. Since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump has repeatedly called Harris the “border czar” in attacks, seizing on the assignment Biden gave her in 2021 to work with Central American countries to tackle the “root causes” of migration.

Minutes after attacking Harris for busing migrants to other parts of the country, Abbott bragged about doing the same.

Recalling the steps he took when Texas began busing migrants in 2022 under Operation Lone Star, Abbott boasted that the program “began busing them to Washington, D.C., and then dropping them off at the address of the residence of the vice president of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.” Applause and cheers reverberated throughout the campaign event. 

“If you were a sanctuary city, you were on the list to be bused to because you volunteered,” said Abbott of his formulation of the busing program. “You said, ‘We welcome you here until you get there,’” he said. “It shows the hypocrisy of the Democrats.” 

During the Republican National Convention in July, Abbott vowed that “buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.” Buses sending migrants to blue cities have not been sent out on a consistent basis for months; in all of July no buses left Texas, according to data obtained by NBC News. 

In June, a Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that Border Patrol agents stopped roughly 84,000 migrants crossing the U.S. southern border, the lowest monthly number since Biden took office in 2021. The Biden administration attributed the low numbers to new asylum restrictions implemented earlier that month.

Didi Martinez and Laura Strickler contributed.

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The Sept. 10 event in Philadelphia will use the same rules and format as the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Both campaigns had previously agreed to hold the debate on that date, but the agreement appeared to be in jeopardy after Trump suggested he might back out and Harris’ team sought to change the rule on muted microphones.

Candidate microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak.

Trump campaign official Jason Miller said in a statement that the former president’s campaign was “thrilled that Kamala Harris and her team of Biden campaign leftovers” have “accepted the already agreed upon rules.”

“Americans want to hear both candidates present their competing visions to the voters, unburdened by what has been,” Miller said. “We’ll see you all in Philadelphia next Tuesday.”

In a letter to ABC, the Harris campaign agreed to the muted microphone rule but said she “will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President.”

“Notwithstanding our concerns, we understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accepted the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones,” the letter said, bringing an end to the stalemate.

The 90-minute debate will be held without an audience in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center at 9 p.m. ET, and will be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News. Neither candidate will be allowed notes or props, and both will stand for the entire debate. Both will have two minutes to answer questions and two-minute rebuttals, with an additional minute to each candidate for follow-up, clarification or response.

The rules mirror the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and Biden. The president’s performance in the debate was widely panned and eventually led to him exiting the race and endorsing Harris in July.

0 seconds of 2 minutes, 48 secondsVolume 89%

The standoff over muted or live microphones had threatened to derail the debate, and the Harris campaign took jabs at Trump during the impasse.

“Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates — but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!” a Harris campaign spokesperson previously said in a statement to NBC News.

Trump had told reporters that he was considering backing out of the debate because he didn’t like how Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was treated in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network.’ I want to do it,” Trump said.

He also acknowledged at the time that he didn’t have an issue with both microphones being live, but said that “we agreed to the same rules” as the June 27 debate with Biden. “I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted,” Trump said.

Trump publicly relented on ABC hosting the debate in a post on Truth Social on Aug. 27 when he said he had “reached an agreement” with the network.

A virtual coin flip on Tuesday determined podium placement and the order of closing statements for Sept. 10, ABC News said. Trump won the coin toss and decided to speak last during closing statements. Harris selected the right podium position on the screen.

NBC news’ Rebecca Shabad, Zoë Richards and Megan Lebowitz contributed.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland announced charges against two employees of the Russian-backed media network RT accused of conspiring to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in an indictment unsealed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York.

“The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power is attempting to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to send around its own propaganda,” Garland said.

While the indictment redacted the names of political parties and candidates, it was clear through the documents that the Russians sought to bolster Republican former President Donald Trump and to harm Democratic efforts — whose nominee likely would have been Joe Biden at the time.

Garland accused Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva of implementing a nearly $10 million scheme to hire a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate pro-Russian content. That company then contracted with U.S.-based social media influencers to share content on their platforms. The information was “often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the attorney general said.

Kalashnikov identified himself as RT’s “Deputy Chief of the Digital Media Projects Department,” and Afanasyeva has identified herself on social media as a “producer at RT, dealing with overseas affairs and news,” the indictment said.

“The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers as ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants and the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor, but that private investor was a fictitious persona,” Garland said.

The company published “hundreds of videos” that contained “commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy.”

At the White House briefing, when asked if high-level Russian officials were clued into RT’s activity, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the U.S. believes Russian President Vladimir Putin was aware.

“We believe Mr. Putin is weighing in on these actions,” Kirby said.

‘We have no tolerance’

The attorney general said that the investigation remains ongoing and that the DOJ is seizing 32 internet domains that the Russian government and Russian actors have used to influence the U.S. election.

The attorney general made clear that Iran has also been responsible for activities seeking to compromise former President Donald Trump’s campaign in an effort to interfere with the election outcome.

“The Justice Department’s message is clear: We have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic system of government. We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia, Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor, interfere in elections and undermine our members.”

Before Garland’s announcement, the Treasury Department announced that its Office of Foreign Assets Control had designated 10 people and two entities as part of a “coordinated U.S. government response to Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.”

The Treasury Department weighed in on the influence campaign, saying in its announcement of sanctions that RT “used a front company to disguise its own involvement or the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence U.S. audiences.”

Treasury also sanctioned a popular pro-Russian hacktivist group, RaHDIt, and said it was actually headed by current and former Russian intelligence officers. It’s run by Aleksey Alekseyevich Garashchenko, who at the time of the group’s founding was an active member of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, and still maintains direct contact with Kremlin intelligence agencies, Treasury said.

RaHDIt is one of dozens of pro-Russia hacktivist groups that has appeared since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like most of those groups, it brags about its operations on Telegram, where its channel has more than 60,000 followers. Many of its posts are devoted to revealing photographs, names and other biographical information about people it alleges work for Ukraine.

Alex Leslie, a threat intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity company Recorded Future, told NBC News that RaHDIt, unlike some other pro-Russia hacker groups, particularly focuses on hack-and-leak operations and frequently gets coverage in Russian-language media.

A history of Russian efforts

Under the new actions, all property and interests in property of the designated people that are in the U.S. or in the possession or control of Americans are blocked and must be reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department said.

The State Department also announced three related actions, including, a new visa restriction policy imposed on individuals the administration said were acting on behalf of Kremlin-supported media organizations who use those organizations as cover for covert activities. A senior State Department official said it’s also designating six RT affiliates that operate in the U.S. as “foreign missions” as well as offering a reward of up to $10 million for information regarding potential foreign efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.

U.S. intelligence agencies have previously assessed that Russia wants to interfere in the 2024 election and flagged RT as a source of Russian propaganda and disinformation and required it to register as a foreign agent.

RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan “has close ties to top Russian Government officials” and has stated publicly that “the Russian Government sets rating and viewership requirements for RT and, ‘since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state,'” according to an ODNI report released publicly in 2017 following Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election.

The office of the Director of National Intelligence specifically said in July that Russia is seeking to exert influence over the U.S. election to undermine support for the Democratic presidential nominee and American public support for arming Ukraine.

CNN was first to report the expected sanctions.

Russia was found to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election by multiple U.S. investigations, including by the team led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller. The probes determined that the efforts were intended to help Donald Trump win the election over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

In February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Biden administration had “concerns” about possible Russian interference in the 2024 election cycle.

“This is not about politics,” Sullivan said. “This is about national security. It is about a foreign country, a foreign adversary, seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”

NBC News reported that same month that U.S. officials and cyber experts said that Russia was already disseminating disinformation using bots and fake online accounts to hurt President Joe Biden, while he was running for re-election, and other Democratic candidates.

Russian outlets also helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election, but their impact was dwarfed by former President Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election himself.

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That category came in at 11% in the new NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll powered by SurveyMonkey.

Which one of the following issues matters MOST to you right now?

Among registered voters ages 18-29

• Inflation/cost of living: 31
• Threats to democracy: 11
• Abortion: 9
• Health care: 8
• Crime and safety: 8
• Isreal-Hamas war: 8
• Climate change: 6
• Immigration: 5
• Racial justice: 5
• Restrictions or bans on what is taught in the classroom: 4
• Gun policy: 4

Notes: MOE +/- 3.1, August 23-30, 2024

Source: NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll powered by SurveyMonkey

Abortion is the third most selected issue at 9%, followed by the Israel-Hamas war and “crime and safety” — both of which were selected by only 8% of young voters.

The concern about costs cut across party lines: Young Democrats, Republicans and independents were all most likely to rank inflation and the cost of living as the issue that matters most to them right now. 

And about 7 in 10 young voters said that debt has caused them to delay at least one major life milestone.

Buying a home is at the top of this list, with 38% saying that debt has delayed home ownership. In fact, 84% said that compared to their parent’s generation, owning a home is harder to achieve, including 64% who said it’s much harder.

Other major life milestones that have also been delayed by debt: Buying a car (36%), saving for retirement (33%), and moving out their own (32%). Around 1 in 4 young voters said that debt has caused them to delay having children or getting married.

The numbers provide a backdrop for the political decision facing Gen Z voters, who are lining up behind Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump — but not currently at the levels Democrats enjoyed against Trump in 2020.

As a group, they are skeptical of traditional politics: A majority, 53%, at least somewhat agreed with the statement that “what people call ‘compromise’ in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles.”

Yet the young voters surveyed showed more optimism about their personal finances than about the national economy.

Compared to one year ago, are economic conditions in the country as a whole:

Among registered voters ages 18-29

• Worse today: 56
• Better today: 22
• About the same: 22

Notes: MOE +/- 3.1, August 23-30, 2024

Source: NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll powered by SurveyMonkey

Just 2 in 10 young voters said that the national economy has improved in the last year, while 56% says that it has gotten worse. Another 22% said the nation’s economy has stayed about the same in the last year.

Meanwhile, 34% said that their personal financial situation has improved in the last year, compared to 36% who say their personal finances have gotten worse. Three in 10 said their finances have stayed the same over the last year.

Compared to one year ago, is your personal finance situation:

Among registered voters ages 18-29

• Worse today: 36
• Better today: 34
• About the same: 30

Notes: MOE +/- 3.1, August 23-30, 2024

Source: NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll powered by SurveyMonkey

Four in 10 Republicans, and the same share of independents, said inflation and the cost of living is the most important issue.

About a quarter of Democrats chose inflation, followed by “threats to democracy” (16%), abortion (12%) and the Israel-Hamas war (11%).

Among Republicans, on the other hand, immigration and crime and safety ranked second with 9% each, followed by abortion and health care with 7% each and “threats to democracy” (6).

Independents chose health care (11%), crime and safety (9%), the Israel-Hamas war (9%) as the issues that matter most to them behind inflation.

This NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll was powered by SurveyMonkey, the fast, intuitive feedback management platform where 20 million questions are answered daily. It was conducted online Aug. 23-30 among a national sample of 2,617 registered voters 18-29 years old. The data was weighted to population totals among 18-29 year olds for sex, race, census region (all from the American Community Survey), and partisanship (from the Cooperative Election Study). The estimated margin of error for this survey is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Sampling error associated with subgroup results is higher.

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Before getting into the details of her plans, she started by making comments about the deadly shooting at a Georgia high school Wednesday.

“We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

Harris then launched into details of her small business tax plan, part of what she called an “opportunity economy” where everyone gets a chance at success.

To do that, she said, she wants to expand tax incentives for small business startup expenses from $5,000 to $50,000, with the goal of eventually spurring 25 million new small business applications over four years.

She also said she plans to change the way the government taxes capital gains, expand access to venture capital, support innovation hubs and business incubators and increase federal contracts with small businesses.

“I believe America’s small businesses are an essential foundation to our entire economy,” the vice president said.

Harris also took time to drive home her differences from opponent Donald Trump, describing her campaign as the underdog in a tight race with the future at stake.

“We are witnessing a full-on attack on hard-fought hard-won fundamental freedoms and rights,” she said, citing the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and its implications for abortion rights as well as concerns about voting rights, gun control and other topics.

Harris made her stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, outside Portsmouth, to meet with co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. Their brewery got support to open its current location through a small business credit and installed solar panels using federal programs championed by the Biden administration, according to the Harris campaign.

Before leaving New Hampshire, Harris also visited a pretzel shop in Portsmouth along with all four members of New Hampshire’s all-Democratic congressional delegation.

New Hampshire has been reliably blue in recent presidential elections, but the trip could also have some benefit across state lines, since Maine splits its electoral votes, allowing candidates to win some without carrying the full state. Still, it marks a rare deviation from Harris spending most of her time visiting a tight group of Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds likely to decide November’s election.

Since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris, the vice president has focused on the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have been the centerpiece of successful Democratic campaigns.

She’s also frequently visited Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all of which Biden narrowly won in 2020, and North Carolina, which she’s still hoping to flip from Republican former President Donald Trump.

Wednesday’s stop came after Harris marked Labor Day with Monday rallies in Detroit and Pittsburgh and before she heads back to Pittsburgh on Friday — marking her 10th visit to Pennsylvania in 2024. By contrast, Wednesday was her first visit to New Hampshire in years.

Trump has called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% — a break with Biden, who in his budget proposal in March suggested setting the corporate tax rate at 28%. Harris has released relatively few major policy proposals in the roughly six weeks since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, but has not suggested she’s planning to deviate greatly from his administration on tax policy.

The small business plan Harris presented Wednesday had lots of facets that many in the business community would like. But that contrasts another proposal Harris unveiled last month, where she promised to help fight inflation by working to combat “price gouging” from food producers that she suggests have driven grocery store prices up unnecessarily.

She didn’t only focus on the economy during Wednesday’s event — she also elicited cheers from the crowd by speaking on abortion rights.

“We trust women, and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom as president of the United States I will proudly sign it into law,” she told spectators.

And in her comments on Trump, she tried to stoke fears about what Trump could do in a return to office, given a recent Supreme Court decision that found presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts.

“What this means is that, almost explicitly, he has been told no consequences and imagine, just imagine, Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.

Harris has built her campaign around calls to grow and strengthen the nation’s middle class — and suggested that rich Americans and large corporations should “pay their fair share” in higher taxes.

Biden, who similarly built his campaign around promoting the middle class, won New Hampshire by 7 percentage points in 2020, but Trump came much closer to winning it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, the Harris campaign notes that it has 17 field offices operating in coordination with the state Democratic party across New Hampshire, compared to one for Trump’s campaign.

Some of the state’s Democrats were angry that Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first state to vote in the party’s presidential primary this year — displacing Iowa’s caucus and a first-in-the-nation primary New Hampshire held for more than a century.

Despite that, New Hampshire pressed ahead with an unsanctioned primary. Though Biden didn’t campaign in it, or appear on the ballot, he still easily won via a write-in drive.

Trump is nonetheless hoping to use what happened to his advantage, posting on his social media account that Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up.”

“Additionally, the cost of living in New Hampshire is through the roof, their energy bills are some of highest in the country, and their housing market is the most unaffordable in history,” the former president wrote. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will.”

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In 2017, as a senator, she returned to her alma mater to deliver the commencement address.

In July, when she received word that she would likely be the Democratic presidential nominee, she was wearing her Howard sweatshirt in the vice president’s residence.

Howard, one of the nation’s best-known historically Black colleges, has been central to Harris’ origin story, and now, as she seeks to become the first woman elected president, the university is having a capstone moment.

The school has produced luminaries like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, whose legacy inspired Harris to attend Howard, and author Toni Morrison, among others. Some at the university see Harris’ elevation as vice president as another validation of one of the school’s core missions of service.

“There’s clearly a direct relationship between Howard and its relationship to democracy and the democracy that we envision, one that is practiced in a way that includes all of us,” said Melanie Carter, the founding director of the Howard University Center for HBCU Research, Leadership and Policy.

If Harris won the White House, she would be the first woman elected president and the first graduate of a historically Black college to hold that office. With many HBCUs, like a number of liberal arts colleges, struggling financially, her ascent has bathed Howard in a positive light.

“It empowers students to reach farther than what they thought was possible,” said Nikkya Taliaferro, a senior at Howard University from Honolulu who said the 2024 presidential election will be her first time voting. “Even if she doesn’t win, she’s already made such a big impact and I know for all of us, that alone, is unforgettable.”

To Stefanie Brown James, a Howard alumna and co-founder of The Collective PAC, which is working to increase Black political representation, said that for Howard, the rise of Harris underscores “all the pieces fitting together. At this moment, she is the personification of the leadership, the excellence, the global responsibility to service, that Howard represents.”

In her 2017 commencement address, Harris said Howard taught her to reject false choices and steered her to public service. In her memoir, she wrote that Howard taught that there is an expectation that students and graduates would “use our talents to take on roles of leadership and have an impact on other people, on our country and maybe even on the world.”

In an Instagram post where she looked back on her time at Howard, she wrote, “Along the way, Howard taught me that while you will often find that you’re the only one in the room who looks like you, or who has had the experiences you’ve had, you must remember: you are never alone.”

Earlier this year, she wrote in a Facebook post that the investment in HBCUs is an investment “in the strength of our nation for years to come,” when she welcomed Howard’s men’s basketball team to the White House as the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champions. HBCUs have historically struggled to generate investment, despite recent influxes in funding and donations, causing them to flounder financially.

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., a Howard Law graduate, said Howard’s “each one, teach one camaraderie” shaped how many alums in politics tackle the job. “It allowed us to root for each other in ways that I would not have gotten at another institution,” Lee said. “Those guidelines of being a social engineer, not being on the sidelines, and creating public policy, that’s rooted in the experiences of the most marginalized people. That is a Howard trait.”

The Howard network is also providing some financial and organizational support to Harris’ campaign. The Collective PAC utilized its HU Bison PAC, which held a virtual call for graduates with more than 4,000 attendees and raised over $150,000, according to James. The Bison PAC plans another call on Wednesday.

On campus, a group called Herd for Harris is campaigning to support her. Other student-led organizations are mobilizing students to register to vote and be engaged around presidential debates and policies that could most affect them.

“It was instantaneous and that’s just Howard,” James said. “Something’s happening, we need to respond to it, so we get to work. It’s simply a Howard thing.”

Even though Harris enjoys broad support on campus, there are students who are challenging Harris over policy, notably the war in Gaza.

“What we expect of Kamala Harris in this election is really derived from the morals that Howard instilled in us, that we are an oppressed people, and that we also need to advocate for oppressed people abroad,” said Courtney McClain, a student senator at Howard who met Harris in 2020. She said she plans to support Harris, while holding her accountable.

With the November election drawing near, Harris has been on extensive campaign travel and prepping for her first debate against Republican Donald Trump — including a mock session at Howard — on Sept. 10. Still, she made time to speak to crowd of Howard’s largest incoming first-year class in front of Cramton Auditorium.

Using a bullhorn, she told them that she was proud of them and urged that they enjoy this moment.

“You might be running for the president of the United States,” she said to roaring cheers.

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The crashed occurred shortly before 1 p.m. local time. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said she spoke with Walz shortly after the crash and that he was not injured. The campaign said the crash involved cars near the rear of the motorcade, not closer to the front, where Walz, who is also the governor of Minnesota, was riding.

A member of Walz traveling staff, who was in a van carrying reporters, was injured and being treated by medics, according to a pool report from a reporter traveling in Walz’s motorcade. The pool reporter said others in the van were shaken but appeared to be OK after being “violently thrown forward, as our van slammed into the one in front of us and was hit from behind.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the crash.

The crash occurred after Walz and his wife, Gwen, were greeted at the airport by Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin. The trio embraced, chatted and posed for a photo before the motorcade began heading to the event.

Monday’s campaign stops marking Labor Day were Walz’s first aboard the Harris-Walz campaign charter aircraft. It bears decals of an American flag, the words Harris-Walz, and “A New Way Forward.”

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Her comments came during a rally before cheering union members marking Labor Day in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, where Harris said U.S. Steel was “an historic American company and it is vital for our country to maintain strong American steel companies.”

“U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated, and I will always have the backs of America’s steelworkers,” she said.

That echoes Biden, who repeated Monday what he’s said since March — that he opposes U.S. Steel’s would-be sale to Nippon, believing it would hurt the country’s steelworkers. It also overlaps with Republican former President Donald Trump. It’s little surprise that Harris would agree with Biden on the issue, but it nonetheless constitutes a major policy position for the vice president, who has offered relatively few of them since Biden abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed his vice president in July.

Biden took the stage first and was met with chants of “Thank You, Joe” as he and Harris appeared in an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall.

The president called Harris the only “rational” choice for president in November. He said choosing her to be vice president was the “single best” decision of his presidency and told the union members that electing her will be “the best decision you will ever make.”

Biden also started to say, “Kamala Harris and I are going to build on this” as if he were still running and she was his running mate — but he corrected himself. It underscored just how much the race has changed and how Harris has been careful to balance presenting herself as “a new way forward” while remaining intensely loyal to Biden and the policies he has pushed.

Her delivery is very different — and in some cases she’s pushed to move faster than Biden’s administration — but the overall goal of expanding government programs to buoy the middle class is the same.

“We know this is going to be a tight race till the very end,” Harris told the Pittsburgh crowd.

The joint rally with Biden was Harris’ second of the day and followed Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, one of the country’s largest. It was their first joint appearance at a campaign event since the election shakeup six weeks ago.

Harris opened her Labor Day campaigning solo with an event in Detroit, where hundreds of audience members wore bright yellow union shirts and hoisted “Union strong” signs. The vice president said “every person in our nation has benefited” from unions’ work.

“Everywhere I go, I tell people, ‘Look, you may not be a union member, you’d better thank a union member,” Harris said, noting that collective bargaining by organized labor helped secure the five-day work week, sick pay and other key benefits and solidify safer working conditions.

“When unions are strong, America is strong,” she said.

The 81-year-old Biden has spent most of his lengthy political career forging close ties with organized labor. The White House said he asked to introduce Harris in Pittsburgh — instead of the usual other way around — because he wanted to highlight her record of supporting union workers.

In addition to opposing the Nippon Steel sale, Biden has endorsed expanding tariffs on imported Chinese steel — another area of policy agreement with Trump, who has cheered steeper foreign tariffs on many imports. Still, in a statement Monday, U.S. Steel said it remains “committed to the transaction with Nippon Steel, which is the best deal for our employees, shareholders, communities, and customers.”

“The partnership with Nippon Steel, a long-standing investor in the United States from our close ally Japan, will strengthen the American steel industry, American jobs, and American supply chains, and enhance the U.S. steel industry’s competitiveness and resilience against China,” the company said, noting that it employs nearly 4,000 people in Pennsylvania alone.

Nippon Steel reacted to Harris’ comments by saying it was confident that its “acquisition of U. S. Steel will revitalize the American steel rust belt, benefit American workers, local communities, and national security in a way no other alternative can.” The Harris campaign released a statement countering that sentiment from David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers union, who said Harris’ opposition to the sale “once again made it clear that she will always stand up for steelworkers.”

The 59-year-old Harris has sought to appeal to voters by positioning herself as a break from former president Trump’s acerbic rhetoric while also looking to move beyond the Biden era. Harris events feel very different from Biden’s, which usually featured small crowds. But the vice president’s agenda includes the same issues he’s championed: capping the cost of prescription drugs, defending the Affordable Care Act, growing the economy, helping families afford child care — and now her position on the sale of U.S. Steel.

The vice president has promised to work to lower grocery store costs to help fight inflation. She’s moved faster than Biden in some cases, calling for using tax cuts and incentives to encourage home ownership and ending federal taxes on tips for service industry employees. But she’s also offered relatively few specifics on major policies, instead continuing to side with Biden on top issues.

Harris appeared onstage with Biden after the president addressed the opening night of last month’s Democratic National Convention, but they had not shared a microphone at a political event since Biden himself was running against Trump. At that time, the campaign was using Harris mostly as its chief spokeswoman for abortion rights, an issue they believe can help them win in November as restrictions grow and health care worsens for women following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

For more than 3 1/2 years, Harris has been one of Biden’s chief validators. Now the tables are turned, as Harris looks to lean on Biden — a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania — to help win the potentially decisive state.

Although the vice president has appeared more forceful in speaking about the plight of civilians in Gaza, as Israel’s war against Hamas there nears the 11-month mark, she also has endorsed Biden’s efforts to arm Israel and bring about a hostage deal and ceasefire. Before she left Washington for Detroit, Biden and Harris met in the White House Situation Room earlier Monday with the U.S. hostage deal negotiating team.

“History will show what we here know: Joe Biden has been one of the most transformative presidents,” Harris said in Pittsburgh. “And as we know Joe still has a lot of work to do.”

When that event was over, Biden and Harris rode back to the airport together in the presidential limo. Air Force One and Air Force Two subsequently took off within moments of each other to return to suburban Washington — though the president and vice president never travel on the same plane for continuity of government reasons, just in case of an air emergency.

__

Weissert reported from Washington.

The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and had dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.

It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.

The man made it over a barrier ringing the media area and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers and sheriff’s deputies.

The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to say, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”

Johnstown’s police chief, Richard M. Pritchard, confirmed to The Associated Press on Saturday that the man was arrested, released and will be formally charged next week. Pritchard said the man, whose identity will be disclosed when charges are filed, will face misdemeanors in municipal court for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting a public assembly.

Pritchard, who was not directly involved in the arrest, declined to speculate on the man’s motives.

Fierce criticism of the media is a standard part of Trump’s rally speeches, and his supporters often react by turning toward the press section and booing; some use their middle finger to demonstrate their distaste for journalists.

Moments before the man ventured into the media’s designated section, Trump had reprised his familiar assertion that the media is a collective “enemy of the people.” Video of the incident does not make clear what the man was yelling as he climbed barriers or as he was being subdued and arrested.

Trump’s campaign tried to distance the former president from the man and his actions, suggesting he was a Trump opponent.

“Witnesses, including some in the press corps, described a crazed individual shouting expletives at President Trump,” said campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez. “His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area.”

Alvarez did not identify the witnesses she cited or expound on what the man may have shouted. Alvarez added that the campaign appreciates the response of local law enforcement officials and the U.S. Secret Service for acting quickly.

Shortly after the incident, police handcuffed another man in the crowd and led him out of the arena. It was not immediately clear whether that detention was related to the initial altercation.

The incident happened amid heightened scrutiny of security at Trump rallies after a gunman fired at him, grazing his ear, during an outdoor rally in July in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania. Security at political events has been noticeably tighter since the shooting.

A Secret Service spokesperson referred questions to local authorities.

Harris accused Trump of “disrespect[ing] sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”

“If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” she added.

Harris also called on Trump to “never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America,” as a result of his actions.

Her statement comes after the U.S. Army said that a member of Trump’s campaign staff “abruptly pushed aside” a staff member at the cemetery so that Trump and his campaign could take photos and videos with families of service members who passed away during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

The incident occurred in Section 60, where taking videos and photos is usually prohibited.

During an interview with NBC News Thursday, Trump defended his actions, saying a family “asked me whether or not I would stand for a picture at the grave of their loved one who should not have died.”

He claimed that he did not request to take photos and videos, but “While I was there, I didn’t ask for a picture. While I was there, they said, ‘Sir, could we have a picture at the grave?’”

In a post on X responding to Harris, Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance said, “President trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence. Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”

And Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt blasted Harris in her own post, blaming the vice president for the servicemembers’ deaths during the withdrawal, which occurred during the Biden administration.

“Kamala’s stupidity led to one of the most embarrassing events in American history and 13 brave US soldiers being killed,” Leavitt posted, adding “For this alone, Kamala does not deserve to be elected. Kamala has already proven that she would be a dangerously incompetent Commander in Chief.” 

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“In Florida, like so many other States that have already given their approval, personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults with Amendment 3,” the former president wrote, adding, “Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of the Voters, so it should be done correctly. We need the State Legislature to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities.”

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Trump framed his position as one consistent with his “Make America Safe Again” agenda, writing that criminalizing marijuana would “waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”

He added, “no one should grieve a loved one because they died from fentanyl laced marijuana. We will make America SAFE again!”

The marijuana ballot measure, if passed, would “allow adults 21 years or older to possess, purchase or use marijuana products and marijuana accessories for non-medical personal consumption.”

The state Supreme Court ruled in April to allow the measure on the 2024 ballot.

The post came after Trump’s campaign had to clarify his stance on another ballot measure in Florida, one that would guarantee a constitutional right to abortion in the state.

Florida currently has a six-week abortion ban and on Thursday, Trump told NBC News that the limit is “too short.”

“It has to be more time,” he added.

His comments drew fire from the anti-abortion rights movement, with figures like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser saying in a statement, “I spoke with President Trump this evening. He has not committed to how he will vote on Amendment 4. President Trump has consistently opposed abortions after five months of pregnancy. Amendment 4 would allow abortion past this point. Voting for Amendment 4 completely undermines his position.”

A day later, on Friday, Trump clarified his remarks, saying, “I’ll be voting no,” on the abortion rights ballot measure.

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His announcement came a day after telling NBC News that Florida’s six-week ban is “too short” and declining to take a clear stance on a state ballot measure that would expand access to the procedure.

On Friday, Trump said, once again, that women need “more time” than six weeks to decide whether to have an abortion, but that the “Democrats are radical” and he couldn’t back the amendment.

“So I think six weeks, you need more time than six weeks. I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries when I heard about it, I disagreed with it,” Trump said in comments to Fox News. “At the same time, the Democrats are radical, because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month. … So I’ll be voting no for that reason.”

The proposed amendment would bar restrictions on abortion before fetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy, while ensuring exceptions to protect the health of the mother.

The backlash from anti-abortion advocates was fierce after Trump’s interview with NBC News, with some warning that the Republican presidential nominee was risking losing support from a key bloc of the party’s base.

Alarmed by what she saw, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Trump on Thursday to ask for clarity on his comments, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. Trump told her that he didn’t state a position on an amendment on his home state’s ballot this fall.

Dannenfelser told him that “it’s imperative that you’re clear because there’s confusion now that you may be in support of this,” the source added. She also told him the amendment is “incongruent” with his opposition to late-term abortion.

During the interview with NBC News, Trump said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” when asked how he would vote on the ballot measure. It’s unclear what he meant as the Florida initiative gives voters a binary choice.

Later Thursday, Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying the former president had “not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida.”

Meanwhile, anti-abortion activists, who have provided critical support to Trump during his three presidential runs, piled on. Some also criticized his suggestion that he’d mandate that the government or insurance companies pay for in vitro fertilization treatments. 

“Former President Trump now appears determined to undermine his prolife supporters,” evangelical theologian Albert Mohler wrote on X. “His criticism of Florida abortion restrictions & his call for government funding of IVF & his recent statement about ‘reproductive rights’ seem almost calculated to alienate prolife voters.”

The clash put Trump and Republicans in uncharted waters, facing the first presidential election in half a century without Roe v. Wade on the books to protect abortion rights. The GOP was largely unified behind legislation to outlaw abortion at the state and federal levels when they were able to use it to rally anti-abortion voters with no chance of it succeeding legislatively.

But some Republicans now fear voter backlash from the majority of Americans who say in polls they want abortion to be mostly or always legal, particularly as Democrats seek to further capitalize on the issue. And Trump, who has bragged about appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, is still struggling to navigate it.

Abortion foes are caught in their own bind over whether to abandon Trump or to support him in the hope that Republicans will win in November and continue to pursue nationwide abortion restrictions, despite the former president’s claims to the contrary.

“If Donald Trump loses in November, it will be his improvisational approach to abortion that alienated the pro-life community that costs him victory,” conservative radio host Erick Erickson said.

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life — which has helped organize tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists, mostly on college campuses — wrote Thursday on X: “My phone is blowing up with @SFLAction volunteers who no longer will door knock for President Trump if this is not corrected. With polls neck and neck, this is the last thing we need right now to defeat Kamala’s pro-abortion extremism.”

She told NBC News the Trump campaign “personally” told leaders in her group that he’s undecided on the Florida measure. She said they expect him to vote “no” and warned that Trump’s waffling on the issue would likely hurt his support with many volunteers.

“When they hear the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, walking back past pro-life statements, it’s devastating to them,” she said. “And it’s shocking to them that Republicans would betray this very important part of the Republican Party.”

“He needs to be very careful with his words,” she added.

Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pushed back against Trump’s initial comments.

“Donald Trump has consistently stated that late-term abortions where a baby can feel pain should never be permitted, and he’s always stood up for parents’ rights,” Fenske said in a statement on X. “Amendment 4 would allow late-term abortions, eliminate parental consent, and open the door to taxpayer-funded abortions. It’s extreme and must be defeated.”

The governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, also weighed in, saying the initiative “would open the door to taxpayer funded abortions” and added, “We must spread the word and vote NO on 4!”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said Trump is lying about his shifts on abortion and his pro-IVF rhetoric.

“We’re going to hold Donald Trump and JD Vance accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade and their threats to access to IVF. So every day between now and Election Day, we are going to make sure that the communities that will decide this election know the fundamentals here and the fundamental choice this election,” Harris spokesman Kevin Munoz told reporters on Friday. “Kamala Harris is going to fight for your rights. Donald Trump will take them away.”

In response to Trump’s announcement Friday about how he’ll vote on the amendment, the Harris campaign issued a statement saying that Trump “will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant” and said if he’s elected, he will “limit access to birth control, threaten access to fertility treatments and ban abortion nationwide, with or without Congress.”

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Harris presented herself as a pragmatist in the long-anticipated interview, given to CNN’s Dana Bash alongside her running mate, Tim Walz. The vice president sought to strike a balance between defending the Biden-Harris administration’s legacy and charting her own path if elected president, while taking questions about how some of her policy positions have changed since the last time she ran for president.

“I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” Harris said.

Here are five takeaways from the interview.

Defending her shifting stances

Harris has changed her position on some major issues since 2019, when she ran for president and sought to win over progressive Democratic primary voters by cosponsoring Medicare for All, supporting a Green New Deal, opposing fracking and calling for decriminalizing migration.

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“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said in the interview Thursday, adding that she continues to believe “the climate crisis is real” and that the White House made strides to address it with the Inflation Reduction Act.

On fracking, Harris said she promised during the 2020 vice presidential debate that she wouldn’t seek to ban fracking, “nor will I going forward.” She continued, “I cast the tie-breaking vote that actually increased leases for fracking as vice president.”

(Harris said during her 2020 debate against Mike Pence that “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”)

Harris added that there can be “a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

On those who cross the border unlawfully, Harris said, “I believe there should be consequence. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally.” She also criticized Trump for pushing Republicans to kill a bipartisan border security bill.

“My value around what we need to do to secure our border — that value has not changed. I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations,” she said.

Brushing off Trump’s rhetoric on her race

Trump has sought to attack Harris’ racial identity, falsely claiming she previously identified as Indian American and only started identifying as Black recently.

Harris didn’t engage.

“Same old, tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”

Harris cast Trump as a politician of the past, calling him “someone who is really been pushing an agenda and an environment that is about diminishing the character and the strength of who we are as Americans, really dividing our nation.

“And I think people are ready to turn the page on that,” she continued.

It reflects Harris’ approach to the campaign since she took the baton from Biden last month: running her own race as opposed to focusing on what Trump has said day to day.

Her ‘Day One’ agenda

Harris said her “Day One” agenda as president will be to start “implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy,” citing her recent economic proposals aimed at lowering costs.

“Prices, in particular for groceries, are still too high. The American people know it. I know it,” she said. “Which is why my agenda includes what we need to do to bring down the price of groceries, for example, dealing with an issue like price gouging.”

Harris continued, “What we need to do to extend the child tax credit to help young families be able to take care of their children in their most formative years. What we need to do to bring down the cost of housing; my proposal includes what would be a tax credit of $25,000 for first-time home buyers.”

When asked why she hasn’t already done those things as vice president, Harris defended Biden’s record but said “there’s more to do.” Harris also said she doesn’t regret her remarks after the late June debate that the president could ably serve another four-year term. (Biden bowed to pressure mounting in his party and withdrew from the presidential race on July 21, less than a month later.)

Trump lashes out at Harris’ answers

Trump responded on his social media platform ahead of the interview after watching a clip of Harris defending her new stances.

“I just saw Comrade Kamala Harris’ answer to a very weakly-phrased question … her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed — The Border is going to remain open, not closed, there will be Free Healthcare for Illegal Aliens, Sanctuary Cities, No Cash Bail, Gun Confiscation, Zero Fracking, a Ban on Gasoline-Powered Cars, Private Healthcare will be abolished, a 70-80% tax rate will be put in place, and she will Defund the Police,” Trump wrote. “America will become a WASTELAND!”

Walz: ‘I wear my emotions on my sleeves’

Walz defended his prior characterizations of his service in the national guard, including suggesting while discussing gun policy that he served in combat situations. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, himself a military veteran, accused him of “stolen valor.”

Walz — who has previously said through a spokesperson that he “misspoke” when talking about handling weapons “in war” — elaborated on his remarks, blaming that and other misstatements on a habit of speaking “passionately.”

“First of all, I’m incredibly proud I’ve done 24 years of wearing the uniform of this country,” Walz said in the Thursday interview. “I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about about our children being shot in schools and around around guns. So I think people know me,” he said. “They know who I am. They know where my heart is.”

“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said. “The one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way.”

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“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said, before adding, “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

Asked to clarify whether the government would pay for IVF services or whether insurance companies would do so, Trump reiterated that one option would be to have insurance companies pay “under a mandate, yes.”

Abortion and IVF have been a political liability for the GOP this year. Democrats have blasted Republicans over IVF in recent months, saying that GOP-led restrictions on abortion could lead to restrictions on IVF as well.

In a statement, Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said that “Donald Trump’s own platform could effectively ban IVF and abortion nationwide” and added that “because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, IVF is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country. There is only one candidate in this race who trusts women and will protect our freedom to make our own health care decisions: Vice President Kamala Harris.”

The statement refers to the GOP platform’s language on the 14th Amendment in its section on abortion policy: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”

Earlier this year, the Alabama state Supreme Court ruled that embryos created via IVF were to be considered people, a move that led to the largest fertility clinics in the state pausing their IVF care.

Trump’s stance could put him at odds with anti-abortion advocates who oppose certain parts of the IVF process that involve discarding unused embryos.

Currently, few people have insurance plans that cover fertility treatments like IVF, leaving many couples to pay out of pocket for the treatment’s high costs. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates the cost per patient for one cycle of IVF at about $20,000.

According to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, its member clinics performed 389,993 IVF cycles in 2022. At a cost of around $20,000 each, that would come to $7.8 billion for that one year.

A growing number of employers have begun to offer fertility benefits over the last decade, however. Some pay for a fixed amount of a patient’s costs, while others have a lifetime maximum of a particular number of cycles.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, spoke in a recent, separate NBC News interview about his “frustration that reproductive rights is a whole suite of pro-family things that Republicans are way better at than Democrats. And the media always focus on abortion. But, you know, we’ve actually done a lot of things to try to promote fertility treatments to people who are struggling with it.”

Trump’s stance on IVF is the latest instance of him addressing criticism of his presidential administration through 2024 campaign policy proposals. After criticism from Democrats that his 2017 tax plan favored the wealthy, he announced that if elected again, he would eliminated taxes on tips for service workers.

Now, as he and other Republicans face criticism for supporting the Supreme Court justices who struck down Roe, Trump is proposing to protect IVF and address its costs.

In the interview, Trump did not explicitly say how we would vote on an upcoming ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would guarantee a right to abortion until fetal viability, which is around 24 weeks of pregnancy. He repeated past criticism that Florida’s current six-week limit on abortion, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is “too short.” Trump added, “it has to be more time.”

Pressed on how he will be voting in November, he said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Trump has long gone back and forth on his position on abortion before arriving at his current position that the issue should be up to the states.

As president, before Roe v. Wade was overturned, he once urged the Senate to pass a 20-week ban on abortion. After he left office, he celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe and the national right to abortion, at one point going as far as saying, “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” in a social media post.

But as the presidential race has taken shape this year, the former president has inched further away from other Republicans on the issue, especially as abortion has emerged as a key issue for Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies.

In a speech at the Democratic convention last week, Harris called Trump and Vance “out of their minds” and accused them of planning to “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion.”

In the interview, Trump said on abortion policy that “exceptions are very important for me,” later adding, “I believe in exceptions for life of the mother … incest, rape.”

Trump on Thursday also pushed back on criticism of his Monday visit to Arlington National Cemetery, saying that a family “asked me whether or not I would stand for a picture at the grave of their loved one who should not have died.”

The former president said that he did not initiate the photo, adding, “While I was there, I didn’t ask for a picture. While I was there, they said, ‘Sir, could we have a picture at the grave?'”

Trump’s campaign has faced criticism this week after reports emerged that a member of Trump’s staff “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery staff member who tried to prevent Trump and others from taking photo and videos in Section 60, where service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried and where filming is typically prohibited.

The former president on Thursday also blasted Harris on immigration and border security, reprising his usual language about the increased number of migrants entering the country in recent years.

“Our country is going to hell. We’ve never been in a position like this,” Trump said, adding, “There’s never been a country that’s been invaded like we have been invaded. And I think that alone loses them the election.”

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Sitting with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris was asked about changes in her policies over the years, specifically her reversals on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris replied.

The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash gave Harris a chance to try to quell criticism that she has eschewed uncontrolled environments while also giving her a fresh platform to define her campaign and test her political mettle ahead of an upcoming debate with former President Donald Trump set for Sept. 10. But it also carried risk as her team tries to build on momentum from the ticket shakeup following Joe Biden’s exit and last week’s Democratic National Convention.

“First and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to strengthen and support the middle class,” Harris said. “When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward.”

The CNN interview was taped at 1:45 p.m. Thursday at Kim’s Cafe, a local Black-owned restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, and aired in the evening.

Harris also brushed off Trump’s questioning of her racial identity after the former president said she “happened to turn Black.” Harris, who is of Black and South Asian heritage, said it was the “same old, tired playbook.”

“Next question.”

She also said she’d name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet if she were elected, though she didn’t have a name in mind.

Joint interviews during an election year are a fixture in politics; Biden and Harris, Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Biden — all did them at a similar point in the race. The difference is those other candidates had all done solo interviews, too. Harris hasn’t yet done an in-depth interview since she became her party’s standard bearer five weeks ago, though she did sit for several while she was still Biden’s running mate.

Harris and Walz are still introducing themselves to voters, unlike Trump and Biden, of whom people had near-universal awareness and opinion.

Harris said serving with Biden was “one of the greatest honors of my career,” as she recounted the moment he called to tell her he was stepping down and would support her.

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During her time as vice president, Harris has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press and many other outlets, a much more frequent pace than the president — except for Biden’s late-stage media blitz following his disastrous debate performance that touched off the end of his campaign.

Harris’ lack of media access over the past month has become one of Republicans’ key attack lines. The Trump campaign has kept a tally of the days she has gone by as a candidate without giving an interview and have suggested she needs a “babysitter” and that’s why Walz will be there.

“I just saw Comrade Kamala Harris’ answer to a very weakly-phrased question, a question that was put in more as a matter of defense than curiosity, but her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed,’” Trump posted online.

Trump has largely steered toward conservative media outlets when granting interviews, though he has held more open press conferences in recent weeks as he sought to reclaim the spotlight that Harris’ elevation had claimed.

Harris and Walz went out on a two-day bus tour through southeast Georgia that culminated with an evening rally in Savannah. Harris campaign officials believe that in order to win the state over Trump in November, she must make inroads in GOP strongholds across the state.

Democrats’ enthusiasm about their vote in November has surged over the past few months, according to polling from Gallup. About 8 in 10 Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, compared with 55% in March.

This gives them an enthusiasm edge they did not have earlier this year. Republicans’ enthusiasm has increased by much less over the same period, and about two-thirds of Republicans now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting.

But at a packed arena on Thursday, Harris cast her nascent campaign as the underdog and encouraged the crowd to work hard to elect her in November.

“We’re here to speak truth and one of the things that we know is that this is going to be a tight race to the end,” she said.

Harris went through a list of Democratic concerns: that Trump will further restrict women’s rights after he appointed three judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe, that he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act, and that given new immunity powers granted presidents by the U.S. Supreme Court, “imagine Donald Trump with no guard rails.”

Her rally was briefly disrupted by demonstrators who were protesting the U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas war.

The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, and hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.

Harris has another campaign blitz on Labor Day with Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh with the election rapidly approaching. The first mail ballots get sent to voters in just two weeks.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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“A nameless bureaucrat at Arlington whose job it is to preserve the dignity of the cemetery is doing the complete opposite in trying to make what was a very solemn and respectful event into something it was not,” said Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, a retired Marine who was with Trump at the cemetery Monday.

Trump has long portrayed himself as a champion of service members and veterans — an image bolstered by participants in Monday’s ceremony. But he has also created a pattern of disparaging service members that has led even some former aides to question the authenticity of his support for the military.

The latest episode threatens to blunt his attacks on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over a 2021 terrorist assault at the so-called Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport, which killed 13 American service members.

It was the third anniversary of the bombings, which occurred during the harried U.S. exit from Afghanistan, that took Trump to the Arlington burial ground, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, on Monday. He laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to honor those who died in the bombings and then moved to Section 60, an area reserved for participants in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Trump was joined at both sites by family members of the men and women killed at Abbey Gate. The family members invited him to participate in the commemoration, and they wanted the moment to be documented, according to two people who were present.

“I gave my permission,” Kelly Barnett, the mother of Marine Staff Sgt. Darin “Taylor” Hoover, told NBC News. “I wanted the memories. I wanted to make sure that my family at home — I have a huge family — I wanted to make sure that they were involved with it, as well, and they could see it and feel it, have the experience that we had. And so I said, yeah, in no uncertain terms, I was OK with it.”

Trump posed for a photograph beside Hoover’s grave, smiling and giving a thumbs-up gesture in a shot that included the headstones of other service members who were not part of Monday’s ceremony.

A federal regulation admonishes that memorial services at Army cemeteries “will not include partisan political activities.”

There is no greater sacrifice than giving one’s life in defense of our country. It was my solemn privilege to stand alongside the family of Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover at Arlington National Cemetery today as we paid tribute to his legacy and the 12 others who lost their lives… pic.twitter.com/tR6dhpMYsB

— Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox (@GovCox) August 26, 2024

NPR first reported Tuesday that two Trump campaign staffers had a confrontation with a cemetery official who tried to prevent them from filming.

“We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the cemetery said in a statement.

Whatever happened, Barnett and another participant — who asked to remain anonymous without authorization to speak for the families — said they noticed nothing amiss.

“We didn’t even hear about it until the next day,” the second participant said, who did not believe Trump’s participation amounted to campaign activity.

“It wasn’t politicized,” this person said.

Trump posted video that included clips from Monday’s ceremony to his TikTok account. In the video, he blamed Biden and Harris for the deaths at the Kabul airport.

Trump, like most Republican presidential candidates in recent decades, has won the majority of voters who have served in the military, according to exit polls. But his edge was smaller in his defeat in 2020 — 54% to 44% — than when he won that part of the electorate 61% to 34% in taking the presidency in 2016.

His aides have publicly dismissed the report of a physical interaction at the cemetery and accused Democrats of ignoring the anniversary, which is the most poignant reminder of a withdrawal that was politically damaging to Biden.

“They’re trying to muddle the fact that there was only one commander in chief in Arlington on Aug. 26,” LaCivita said. He noted that Biden was on vacation and that Harris did not visit Arlington on the anniversary. Both of them issued statements. 

Neither Trump nor Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, served in uniform. Their running mates, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., did.

Harris’ campaign declined to comment on the report of an altercation at Arlington, but its communications director, Michael Tyler, addressed it in a CNN interview Wednesday.

“Frankly, I think this episode is pretty sad when it’s all said and done,” Tyler said. “Listen, this is what we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump and his team. Donald Trump is a person who wants to make everything all about Donald Trump. He’s also somebody who has a history of demeaning and degrading military service members, those who have given the ultimate sacrifice.”

A Trump adviser who spoke with NBC News pointed to a statement signed by five Gold Star family members and two Purple Heart recipients who were with Trump on Monday defending him amid the firestorm. They said in the statement that they gave approval for Trump’s videographer and photographer to capture those moments so they could “cherish these memories forever.”

“Everything involved in the day was at their invitation,” this person said. “It wasn’t a campaign event. It was an event done by the families of these people, and they invited the commander-in-chief who has consistently demonstrated strong and unwavering support for them and all service members and their families.”

This person said that Trump was “grateful” for the invitation and that he would show “how committed he is when he’s back in the White House to ensure that the people who manufactured that insane and disastrous withdrawal are held accountable for it.”

The Trump campaign’s handling of the episode after details leaked to the media raised some eyebrows among Republicans, particularly a statement in which communications director Steven Cheung said “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”

A Republican operative, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the statement “so unprofessional.” A Trump ally, meanwhile, said the “behavior” outlined at the cemetery was “really out of character” for the campaign.

For years, Trump has faced accusations of showing disrespect to veterans and service members.

Early this year, he mocked the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for being unable to raise his arms because of injuries he sustained as a prisoner of war. In 2015, he also said McCain was not a “war hero” because “he was captured.”

“I like people that weren’t captured,” he said at the time.

McCain, a veteran of the Vietnam War, gained national recognition for his time as a prisoner of war in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was tortured.

This cycle, Trump also questioned why Nikki Haley’s husband was not with her on the campaign trail during the Republican primaries. Maj. Michael Haley was serving overseas at the time.

Just this month, Trump described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is a civilian honor, as “much better” than the Medal of Honor, a military honor, because recipients of the latter are often deceased or severely injured.

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said last year his former boss denigrated veterans and service members as “suckers” and “losers,” confirming remarks that were published in The Atlantic years earlier. Trump has vehemently and repeatedly denied making such comments.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat and Army veteran, pointed to Trump’s comments about the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, adding that the episode at Arlington National Cemetery appeared to be a “continuation of something that I just find really problematic.”

“There is this attacking of those with military service and this increasing politicization and disrespect for those who have chosen to serve this country,” he said, adding that he still wanted to learn more details about what happened between Trump’s staff and the cemetery official.

At their convention last week, Democrats took Trump to task over military issues, emphasizing a theme of patriotism. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that Trump “does not understand the service and sacrifice of our military” and that he was the only president since World War II who has not “honored our veterans and their sacrifices.”

But for Republicans, the episode served to further shine a light on what they see as one of the Biden administration’s biggest failings in Afghanistan, a key piece of their message on global instability over the past four years.

“The veterans that I talk to feel disrespected and disappointed, certainly at their commander in chief, in the direction of the United States militarily,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Rob Mercuri, a veteran and congressional candidate in the 17th District, which is a swing district with a large veteran population. “The only thing I would say about President Trump is that his plan is to project strength. My view is that the Reagan Doctrine of peace through strength is really important to come back to.”

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Alex Seitz-Wald contributed.

The Democratic presidential nominee will be joined by her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in an interview with CNN anchor Dana Bash in Savannah, Georgia. The interview will air Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

Harris’ lack of access has become one of Republicans’ key lines of attacks against her as she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s July 21 announcement. The CNN interview may be an opportunity for Harris to quell criticism that she is unprepared for uncontrolled environments, but it may also carry risks as her team tries to build on momentum from the ticket shakeup and Democratic National Convention.

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During her three-plus years as vice president, she has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press and many other outlets, often at a pace more frequent than Biden.

The Trump campaign has kept a tally of the days she has gone by as a candidate without giving an interview. On Tuesday, the campaign reacted to the news by noting the interview was joint, saying “she’s not competent enough to do it on her own.”

Earlier this month, Harris had told reporters that she wanted to do her first formal interview before the end of August.

Harris travels with members of the media on Air Force Two for all trips and nearly always comes to the back of the plane to speak to them for a few minutes before takeoff. Her office insists that those conversations are off the record, though, so what she says can’t be used publicly.

She will rally voters in Savannah on Thursday as part of a bus tour that kicks off on Wednesday.

FBI officials also said they had found no indication or evidence that any co-conspirators worked with 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to kill Trump just days before he accepted the 2024 Republican nomination at the RNC.

“I want to be clear: We have not seen any indication to suggest Crooks was directed by a foreign entity to conduct the attack,” FBI Assistant Director Bobby Wells told reporters.

Another official Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Pittsburgh field office, said that the shooter had searched for details of campaign events held by both Trump and President Joe Biden, who was still the presumptive Democratic nominee when Trump was shot. Crooks also searched for information on the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, Rojek said.

Crooks engaged in a “sustained, detailed effort to plan an attack” and “looked at any number of events and targets” before ultimately “hyper-focusing” on the Trump rally after it was announced in early July. The Trump rally appears to have been a “target of opportunity,” Rojek said.

Rojek said that investigators found a “mixture of ideologies” in the content the FBI recovered from Crooks’ accounts. “I would say that we see no definitive ideology associated with our subject, either left-leaning or right-leaning,” Rojek said. “It’s really been a mixture and something we’re still attempting to analyze and draw conclusions on.”

The shooter’s family had been “extremely cooperative” with the investigation, Rojek added.

A bullet whizzed by Trump’s skull and struck him in the ear during the July 13 attack, leaving the former president bleeding as the Secret Service formed a wall around him and ushered him to a vehicle. Attempted assassin Crooks was shot and killed seconds after shots rang out. A rally attendee, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, was killed in the attack, and others were injured.

Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service at the time of the shooting, stepped down last month under pressure from lawmakers. Multiple officials at the Secret Service were placed on leave as an internal investigation into rally planning unfolds, a source familiar with the decisions told NBC News.

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Last week, Trump spoke from behind bulletproof glass during an outdoor rally in Asheboro, North Carolina.

The FBI said their victim impact interview with Trump was “productive” and noted that they provided the former president with an “in-depth briefing” on the investigation.

“We’re grateful to the former president for his cooperation and his time,” Rojek said.

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The new indictment removes a section of the indictment that had accused Trump of trying to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to overturn his election loss, an area of conduct for which the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion last month, said that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution.

The stripped-down criminal case represents a first effort by prosecutors to comply with a Supreme Court opinion likely to result in a significant revision of the allegations against Trump over his efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power. It was filed three days ahead of a deadline for prosecutors and defense lawyers to tell the judge in the case how they wanted to proceed in light of that opinion, which said former presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for official White House acts.

The two sides will be back in court for a status hearing next week, the first such appearance in months given that the case had been effectively frozen since last December as Trump’s immunity appeal worked its way through the justice system.

In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump called the new indictment “an act of desperation” and an “effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt.’” He said the new case has “all the problems of the old Indictment, and should be dismissed IMMEDIATELY. ”

The special counsel’s office said the updated indictment, filed in federal court in Washington, was issued by a grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in the case. It said in a statement that the indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions.”

The central revision in the updated criminal case concerns Trump’s dealings with the Justice Department.

The original indictment included allegations that Trump tried to enlist the department in his failed effort to undo his election loss, including by conducting sham investigations and telling states — incorrectly — that significant fraud had been detected.

It detailed how Jeffrey Clark, a top official in the Trump Justice Department, wanted to send a letter to elected officials in certain states falsely claiming that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” and had asked top department officials to sign it, but they refused.

Clark’s support for Trump’s election fraud claims led Trump to openly contemplate naming him as acting attorney general in place of Jeffrey Rosen, who led the department in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Trump ultimately relented in that idea “when he was told it would result in mass resignations at the Justice Department,” according to the original indictment. Rosen remained on as acting attorney general through the end of Trump’s tenure

The new case no longer references Clark as a co-conspirator. Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means.

In its opinion, the Supreme Court held that a president’s interactions with the Justice Department constitute official acts for which he is entitled to immunity, effectively stripping those allegations from the case.

“As we have explained, the President’s power to remove ‘executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed’ may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

The justices returned other core allegations in the case to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the trial judge presiding over the case, to determine what constitutes an official act protected from prosecution — and what does not.

The new indictment still includes one of the more stunning allegations brought by Smith — that Trump participated in a scheme orchestrated by allies to enlist slates of fraudulent electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden who would falsely attest that Trump had won in those states.

It also retains allegations that Trump sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes, and that Trump and his allies exploited the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to further delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the interactions between Trump and Pence amounted to official conduct for which “Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.”

The question, Roberts wrote, is whether the government can rebut “that presumption of immunity.”

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the ruling. In an excerpt from an interview with CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” that aired Tuesday, she said: “I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances. When we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same.”

First, Vance told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that before imposing mass deportations, Trump would need to “stop the bleeding.”

“You have to stop so many people from coming here illegally in the first place, and that means undoing everything that [Vice President] Kamala Harris did practically on day one of the administration,” he added, later saying: “Before we even fix the problem, we’ve got to stop the problem from getting worse.”

Asked again by moderator Kristen Welker about whether the Trump administration’s plan would include family separation, Vance dodged again.

“I think that families are currently being separated,” he said, adding that “you’re certainly going to have to deport some people in this country.”

He argued that mass deportations under Trump would “start with the most violent criminals in our country.”

“Those people need to be deported,” Vance said. “That’s where you focus federal resources.”

Vance went on to blast Harris again, baselessly accusing her of backing policies that led to family separations and to children living with criminals.

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When President Joe Biden and Harris first took office, Biden rescinded the Trump-era zero-tolerance policy and established a family reunification task force that found that more than 5,000 families were separated under the policy.

More recently, the Biden administration worked with a bipartisan group of senators to craft a comprehensive immigration and border security plan that seemed to have buy-in from both parties on Capitol Hill.

But GOP support for the bill tanked after Trump indicated his disapproval of the plan.

Vance’s remarks Saturday came days after Trump visited the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona for a campaign event.

While there, the former president also dodged NBC News’ questions about whether his proposal for “zero tolerance” policies on the border would lead to family separations, instead saying “provisions will be made” for mixed-status families that may have some members who are American citizens and some who are undocumented.

Trump did not clarify what provisions would be made for those families.

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Harris, who accepted her party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, frequently invokes life lessons from her mother during her political speeches. One piece of advice she mentioned on Thursday night was her mother’s insistence that her daughter “never do anything half-assed,” Harris said.

Harris is the United States’ first-ever woman, Black American and South Asian American to serve as vice president. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was 19 years old when she left India for the U.S. Gopalan earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley before embarking on a career as a breast cancer researcher. She died in 2009.

Gopalan’s advice, as shared by Harris, largely falls under the “authoritative” style of parenting, which involves frequent communication and setting “clear rules and expectations” for your children, child psychologist Francyne Zeltser wrote for CNBC Make It in 2021.

The advice is also, for the most part, expert approved. Here are four pieces of guidance Harris received from her late mother, which she’s said helped shape her own career success.

‘Never do anything half-assed’

Harris has shared this blunt advice from her mother before. On Thursday night, she said it inspired her to dedicate herself fully to pursuing a law career, becoming a prosecutor to help “protect people.”

“At a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work,” said Harris.

Children who learn to fully commit to their goals, and who don’t give up at the first sign of difficulty, are more likely to achieve those goals on their way to long-term success, research shows. And parents who praise their kids’ effort, even more than the results, teach them that they’re strong enough to handle failure and bounce back, psychotherapist Amy Morin told CNBC Make It last year.

“Make sure they know that you’re just as impressed that they’re out there and trying and hustling hard,” Morin said.

‘Never let anyone tell you who you are, you show them who you are’

Harris credits her mother’s advice, which she repeated on Thursday, for giving her the confidence to ignore doubters throughout her career. People often tried to dissuade her from seeking an opportunity because she was “too young” or “no one like you has done it before,” she told MSNBC in 2021.

“I’ve heard all of those things many times over the course of my career, but I didn’t listen,” Harris said.

Mentally strong children don’t succumb to peer pressure or let other people define them, and they’re typically better equipped to confidently handle life’s challenges, Morin told Make It.

“The big part of mental strength is knowing, ‘I’m in charge of how I think, feel and behave, regardless of what’s going on around me,'” said Morin.

‘Never complain … do something about it’

Harris cited this quote from her mother on Thursday, too. In the past, she’s said that it came from her mother’s refusal to allow her children to endlessly complain without coming up with a plan of action for themselves.

“If you ever came home complaining about something, our mother would look at you with a straight face, one hand probably on a hip, and she’d say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?'” Harris told MSNBC in 2020.

Parenting experts generally advise against coddling your children, which could make them less likely to develop important traits like resilience and self-motivation. They also recommend against being harsh, and instead suggest finding a middle ground where you can hold them accountable for the clear expectations you’ve agreed upon.

“When you trust kids to make their own decisions, they start to feel more engaged, confident and empowered. And once that happens, there’s no limit to what they can achieve,” author and parenting expert Esther Wojcicki wrote for Make It in 2022.

‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’

The viral “coconut tree” quote might be the most widely known piece of advice Harris says she received from her mother.

“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” Harris said in a now-viral video clip, recorded during a 2023 White House event.

Harris’ mother was again demanding accountability from her children — by insisting they think about themselves, and their individual problems, as existing within a much larger context. Open-mindedness and empathy are key traits of the emotional intelligence that kids need to become mentally strong, according to experts like Morin and parenting coach Reem Raouda.

Emotional intelligence skills “are key predictors for happiness and success,” Raouda wrote for Make It in February.

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Asked on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” about GOP lawmakers like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham who would want to see Trump advocate for and pass an abortion ban, Vance told moderator Kristen Welker that Trump has “explicitly” said he would veto a ban.

“I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it,” Vance argued.

The latest position from the Trump campaign comes as the former president has changed his position on abortion policy over the years.

Kamala Harris Aug 24

Want to be a better public speaker? Imagine yourself on the Titanic, says Vice President Kamala Harris

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When is the upcoming Harris vs. Trump presidential debate?

In April, Trump was asked on a tarmac in Atlanta about whether he would sign a national abortion ban if it passed through Congress and he simply answered “no.”

But the former president didn’t clarify at the time what he considered a “ban.”

In 2018, when he was president, Trump called on the Senate to pass a 20-week limit on abortions that had already passed the House.

Last year, he celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.

“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said in a May 2023 social media post.

And as recently as March, Trump flirted with the notion of a 15-week federal abortion ban, telling a local radio host that “the number of weeks now — people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that, and it’ll come out to something that’s very reasonable.”

“But people are really — even hard-liners are agreeing — seems to be 15 weeks, seems to be a number that people are agreeing at,” Trump added in that interview.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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The kinetic energy powering Kamala Harris ’ whirlwind presidential campaign carries the hopeful aspirations of history and the almost quaint idea of electing the first woman to the White House. But inside it, too, is the urgent and determined refusal of many Democratic female voters to accept the alternative — again.

“Serious.” “Unapologetic.”

Listen to the women cheering “We’re not going back!” at the Harris campaign rallies. See them singing along during the dance party roll call at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Understand the mothers and daughters and sorority sisters and, yes, the men, brothers and boys who have watched and waited and winced as the country tried eight years ago to break the glass ceiling — and failed.

“Overdue.”

This time, this year, facing Donald Trump again, a certain and influential swath of the electorate is not messing around. “It’s our time,” said Denise Delegol, 60, a retired postal worker from West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

Harris campaign reignites Democratic party’s enthusiasm

The promise of a Harris presidency is shaking a sizable segment of the nation out of a political funk, reviving the idea of a milestone election and an alternative to repeating the Trump era. It’s putting the country on the cusp of what Michelle Obama, in her convention speech to Democrats, called a “brighter day.”

Once President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and embraced his vice president at the top of the ticket, some found hope where before they had felt mostly dread.

“Overnight it went from doom-scrolling to hope-scrolling,” said Lisa Hansen of Wisconsin, who led an early Trump resistance group in 2017 as her first foray into political activism.

Lori Goldman of Michigan, who founded Fems for Dems to elect Hillary Clinton two presidents ago, said, “I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.” She’s 65.

And Shannon Nash, a California attorney, co-founder of the Tech4Kamala group and, like Harris, a fellow member of the historic Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., said from the convention hall Thursday night, “The joy is coming back to politics.”

Women have been here before, in 2016, when they donned matching pantsuits, poured champagne and settled in on election night, some with friends and daughters by their side, expecting Clinton to win the White House only to be shaken by Trump’s victory.

As one woman said at the time, she threw up the next morning.

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When is the upcoming Harris vs. Trump presidential debate?

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Republican women eye history, too

To be sure, some voters had a different first female president in mind. Nikki Haley lifted Republican hopes during the GOP primary, but her moment faded after rival Trump branded his former ambassador to the United Nations “birdbrain.”

Lisa Watts, a retired business owner from Hickory, North Carolina, who was attending her fifth Trump rally this week, had little interest in Harris. “I don’t think that her record proves that she is ready to run this country,” Watts said.

The thousands of women who pack Trump rallies, and tens of millions more who are expected to cast ballots for him in November, are participating on the other side of the potential history-making.

The former president, convicted in a hush-money case and still facing a pending federal indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, would become the first felon to win the White House.

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump rejected as “insulting” the idea that Americans should vote for a woman for president because it would make history.

“If you ever give me a job because … of the fact that I’m a woman and not based on any merit or qualification, guess what? I’m turning that job down all day long,” the former president’s daughter-in-law said on her podcast in July.

Abortion, immigration and the war in Gaza

For those voting for Harris, this election feels more joyful, but also more necessary and urgent.

“We need to do this, be serious about it this time,” said Monique LaFonta, a mother of two twin girls, after attending a Harris rally in Milwaukee.

Trump’s creation of a conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned a woman’s right to abortion access produced outrage among many women who powered that year’s midterm election — and are a potentially influential force in this one.

“We are living in just such a wildly different situation,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice women. She said Harris is “unapologetic” when it comes to reproductive rights.

Harris herself carries this potentially history-making moment not as a campaign feature but a matter-of-fact representation of who she is and has always been, much the way Barack Obama often left his race merely implied to voters. Rather than reminding voters that the nation’s 47th president could become the first in its more than two-century history to not be a man, Harris is running instead on what she would do in the job and how she would do it.

In her speech Thursday night accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Harris acknowledged that she’s “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” but she did not specifically mention the historic nature of her candidacy.

Many receive her style as a brand of American optimism rooted in the generations who came before her, a Black and South Asian woman, the daughter of immigrants — a Jamaican father and Indian mother — who dared to dream in this country. She is blaring Beyonce’s “Freedom” as her campaign theme song along the way.

And yet among demonstrators calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war outside the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, pharmacist Fedaa Ballouta said that while having the first female president would mean a lot, she expects more. “I wish that that woman was pro-life when it matters regarding Palestinians.”

Clinton’s defeat paved the way for this moment

So much has changed in the American political landscape since Trump entered that scene almost a decade ago with his braggadocio and electoral momentum.

“Such a nasty woman,” he called his 2016 Democratic rival Clinton, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state. “Horseface,” he labeled a Republican primary rival, a woman. “Fat pig,” he bullied a famous female comedian. He once bragged that as a celebrity he could “grab” women by their private parts — and get away with it.

More than 1 million people in the United States and around the world filled city streets in protest the day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Many wore pink “pussy” hats. “The Resistance,” they called it.

Trump himself has stayed the course, deriding Harris as “Laffin’ Kamala,” mocking her laugh or mispronouncing her name, which means “lotus flower” in Sanskrit.

In many ways, Clinton’s defeat eight years ago set the stage for this moment. It was a crushing setback that dashed women’s hopes for bringing the U.S. into alignment with leading democracies around the world that have had a female in charge.

Angie Gialloreto of Pittsburgh was disappointed then. But the 95-year-old, attending her 13th presidential convention, is still at it, ready and waiting for the country to try again. “It’s time,” she said.

___

Many of the women interviewed by The Associated Press this week are eager for what’s next. Listen to what they have to say.

Monique Lafonta, 41, Milwaukee, health care consultant and mother of twin daughters:

“Why can’t a woman be president? Why has it taken us so long to get to this point?” LaFonta wondered the day after a Harris rally in Milwaukee. “Are we going to make the same mistake again?” LaFonta remembers celebrating election night 2016 at a birthday party with friends when Clinton lost to Trump. “It was unintentionally the worst birthday party I ever went to — everyone was crying at the end of the night,” she said. As a mother now, she said what’s happened with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the threats posed by the Project 2025 agenda are “scary.” “I have two 6-year-old daughters who have less rights than I did,” she said.

Originally from Louisiana, she recalls her parents living through the Jim Crow era in the South. “I never even thought we would see a Black president in my lifetime,” she said. “To have another glass ceiling like that in my lifetime, it’s really so special.” At the Harris rally in Milwaukee this week, it was “so electric, so contagious,” she said. “Just joy.”

Ashbey Beasley, 48, Highland Park, Illinois, stay-home mother

“We’re overdue,” Beasley said. She remembers watching one state after another fall to Trump on election night eight years ago. “I just started crying,” she said. “We turned the TV off.” The difference between then and now? “We’ve had a Trump presidency. We’ve seen the kind of chaos.” The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a “turning point” she said. “The MAGA culture came out of the closet,” and a lot of people “were like, I’m not OK with this.”

Having survived a 2022 mass shooting in her city with her son, she has become a gun safety advocate and worries Trump is too close to gun rights groups. “What I want people to know whatever you see out in the world — whatever horrific terrible tragedy — that can be you,” she said from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Just because you don’t need an abortion right now, doesn’t mean you won’t.”

Lori Goldman, Michigan, founded Fems for Dems in 2016 to elect Hillary Clinton

At 65, she said, “I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.” On Election Day 2016, Goldman had about 30 people to her house and they canvassed until the afternoon, all the while thinking it unnecessary. She said she’s less naïve now.

For Goldman and chair of Fems for Dems Marcie Paul, the difference between organizing in 2016 and now is knowing the impacts of a Trump administration. Both are mothers, and they cited their daughters’ futures as a reason to vote Harris, both for her policy on reproductive rights and for her potential to be the first female president. Paul said it’s the most important election of a lifetime. “But really — this time it is.”

Anne Hathawaya, Indiana, the state’s Republican National Committeewoman

She dismissed the potential history-making milestone as been there, done that. “We had Hillary Clinton as a candidate in 2016 so this is not a new phenomenon,” said Hathaway, who was in charge of the arrangements committee at the Republican convention. She said she is focused on the candidates’ visions, not their genders. “This is a race between two presidential candidates who have very different opinions and views and where they think this country should go.”

Holly Sargent, York, Maine

She had spent the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election campaigning for Hillary Clinton in her quiet Maine beach town, watching the rise of Trump “with horror.” But she said the despair she felt at that year’s election defeat was healed with Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention this week. Sargent teared up as she sat with Maine delegates thinking of all that has transpired, and could yet. “We’re going to do it this time. And when we do it, we do it for Hillary and for Shirley Chisholm and for Geraldine Ferraro and for all of the extraordinary women who have gone before.”

Jennifer Richardson, 44, Albany, New York, attorney

She said as a Black woman, and an attorney, having Harris atop the party’s ticket resonates so much. “I see myself in her,” she said from the Democratic convention. “I see all my friends in her.” Added Richardson, “For her to win, it’s like we all won.”

Denise Delegol, 60, West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, retired postal worker

Delegol was decked out in pearls, a purple Harris “When We Fight We Win” T-shirt and purple high-tops decorated with the word “WIN” on the toes, and curious to check out the protests at a park near the convention hall. “It’s a beautiful thing that she can lead a country that was predominantly led by old white men who think they know what’s best for all, all people, including women and our bodies,” she said. Harris, she said, “is going to change all that.”

She wants her fellow Americans to understand how important the election is, and that “this is just a time for all Americans to come together because we have more in common than not in common.” Her conversations with family and friends are all about what’s happening. “Now it’s our time,” she said. “And I don’t think nothing can stop us now, as far as women breaking the glass ceiling.”

Fedaa Ballouta, Chicago pharmacist, attending a demonstration against the Israel-Hamas war outside the Democratic convention

She said it means a lot to have a female nominee for president, and as a pharmacist who finds it heartbreaking to see people struggle to afford medication she is eager for what Harris could do to help lower the costs of prescription drugs. “I really want to support our candidate of the same gender category,” she said. But what she really wants to see from Harris is a cease-fire in the war. “Pro-Life doesn’t just refer to abortion and pregnancy,” she said. “What about the killing of innocent civilians? That’s also pro-life.”

She believes this election will be meaningful for the country. “I was just in New York City, and I’m looking at the Statue of Liberty, and I’m thinking, ‘Are we a nation that provides liberty or takes it away from others?’”

Liz Shuler, president, AFL-CIO union

Schuler recalls breaking out the champagne and popcorn with friends on election night 2016, before “people left, of course, heartbroken.” This time around, she said, “we are protecting our hearts.”

“I think every woman you talked to probably feels the same way. But I think we, as union women, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and just keep up the fight.”

Angie Gialloreto, 95, Pittsburgh, attending her 13th presidential nominating convention

Gialloreto said she was disappointed by Clinton’s loss eight years ago, but she’s excited with Harris in place to try again. “It’s time,” she said from the convention hall. Gialloreto has attended every Democratic convention since Jimmy Carter was nominated for president in 1976. She said it’s an exciting time, “not for me, I’ve lived my life — for the short time I have, I’m going to celebrate — but it’s the young ones.

“Reality is here.”

___

Associated Press writers Isabella Volmert in Michigan, Mike Householder and Farnoush Amiri in Chicago, Michelle Price in North Carolina, Ali Swenson and Aaron Morrison in New York, video journalists Martha Irvine, Serkan Gurbuz and Teresa Crawford in Chicago and photojournalist Jacquelyn Martin in Milwaukee and Chicago contributed to this report.

The vice president formally accepted the party’s nomination in a speech to close out the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night.

Harris’ nomination came less than two months after President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump squared off in the first presidential debate of this election cycle. Suffice to say, a lot has happened since in what’s been a whirlwind period for American politics.

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So, with Election Day just months away, when will Harris and Trump have their head-to-head showdown? Here’s what to know about the Harris-Trump debate:

When is the next presidential debate in 2024?

Harris and Trump will take the debate stage on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 9 p.m. ET. The debate will be hosted by ABC News.

ABC News was previously set to hold the second debate between Biden and Trump on that same debate before the president dropped his reelection bid.

Who are the moderators for the next presidential debate?

ABC News’ Linsey Davis and David Muir will serve as moderators for the second debate. Davis hosts “ABC News Live Prime” and Muir hosts “World News Tonight.”

Where is the next presidential debate being held?

The Harris-Trump debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

How many presidential debates are there?

Trump had proposed two additional debates, one on Sept. 4 hosted by Fox News and one on Sept. 25 hosted by NBC News. But Harris campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement on Aug. 15 that, “The American people will have another opportunity to see the vice president and Donald Trump on the debate stage in October.”

Tyler did not provide any additional details about that October debate. He said Trump’s campaign “accepted our proposal for three debates — two presidential and a vice presidential debate.”

“The debate about debates is over,” Tyler added.

How many presidential debates were there in 2020?

There were two Biden-Trump debates leading up to the 2020 election, one in September and one in October. A third debate was canceled due to COVID-19.

When is the VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz?

Trump running mate JD Vance and Harris running mate Tim Walz will square off in a debate hosted by CBS News on Tuesday, Oct. 1.

The Harris campaign said that the Oct. 1 showdown would be the only VP debate. Vance had previously challenged Walz to an additional debate on Sept. 18 hosted by CNN.

When is the presidential election?

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5.

“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” said a statement signed by five of the former independent presidential candidate’s siblings.

“We believe in Harris and Walz,” the statement continued. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

The statement includes signatures from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy.

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Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, reacted to the statement, sharing it on X and writing that it was “well said.”

Separately, the former candidate’s cousin Jack Schlossberg said that he has “never been less surprised in my life.”

“Been saying it for over a year — RFKjr is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it,” he posted to X. “Kamala Harris is for the people — the easiest decision of all time just got easier.”

Schlossberg is the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy.

Many members of the Kennedy family have been publicly critical of the independent’s presidential bid, instead vocalizing their support for first President Joe Biden and now Harris.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Friday that he would withdraw from the presidential race and back Trump. However, he said that he would only remove his name from the ballot in “about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler.” He encouraged voters in states where he remains on the ballot to still support him.

“These are the principled causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he said during his Friday remarks. “The causes were: Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.”

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that the Harris campaign is for “any American out there who is tired of Donald Trump and looking for a new way forward.”

“Even if we do not agree on every issue, Kamala Harris knows there is more that unites us than divides us: respect for our rights, public safety, protecting our freedoms, and opportunity for all,” she said in a bid to attract Kennedy supporters.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Meta said Friday that it blocked a “small cluster” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacking group that was targeting officials associated with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The company said in a blog post that the bogus WhatsApp accounts appeared to originate from the Iranian threat actor dubbed APT42, which other tech companies like Google previously described as an “Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage actor.” The group has targeted various activists, non-government organizations, media outlets and others.

Meta said the scheme was intended to exploit “political and diplomatic officials, and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran and the U.K.

With less than 75 days until the November election, Meta is attracting increased public attention due to ways that Facebook has been exploited and manipulated in the two prior presidential campaigns. The company said it hasn’t seen any evidence that the accounts of any WhatsApp users were compromised, and it’s sharing more information with “law enforcement and our industry peers.”

Meta said its security team was able to spot APT42’s involvement after analyzing suspicious messages that an unspecified number of users reported receiving from the fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.

“These accounts posed as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft,” Meta said in the blog post. “Some of the people targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tools.”

The Trump campaign said earlier this month that a foreign actor had compromised its network and illegally obtained internal communications. Microsoft also said at the time that it identified several Iranian hacking groups that were attempting to influence the U.S. presidential election, and that a group  affiliated with APT42 “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”

In 2019, Microsoft said it had identified several hackers linked to the Iranian government who were believed to have targeted an unspecified U.S. presidential campaign in addition to other government officials and media.

WATCH: Big Tech: too big to split

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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Hours later, Kennedy joined Trump onstage at an Arizona rally, where the crowd burst into “Bobby!” cheers.

Kennedy said his internal polls had shown that his presence in the race would hurt Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, though recent public polls don’t provide a clear indication that he is having an outsize impact on support for either major-party candidate.

Kennedy cited free speech, the war in Ukraine and “a war on our children” as among the reasons he would try to remove his name from the ballot in battleground states.

“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said at his event in Phoenix.

However, he made clear that he wasn’t formally ending his bid and said his supporters could continue to back him in the majority of states where they are unlikely to sway the outcome. Kennedy took steps to withdraw his candidacy in at least two states late this week, Arizona and Pennsylvania, but election officials in the battlegrounds of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin said it would be too late for him to take his name off the ballot even if he wants to do so.

Kennedy said his actions followed conversations with Trump over the past few weeks. He cast their alliance as “a unity party,” an arrangement that would “allow us to disagree publicly and privately and seriously.” Kennedy suggested Trump offered him a job if he returns to the White House, but neither he nor Trump offered details.

Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, this week entertained the idea that Kennedy could join Trump’s administration as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The announcement ended days of speculation and landed with heaps of confusion and contradictions from Kennedy’s aides and allies, an emblematic cap for a quixotic campaign.

Shortly before his speech in Phoenix, his campaign had said in a Pennsylvania court filing that he would be endorsing Trump for president. However, a spokesperson for Kennedy said the court filing had been made in error and the lawyer who wrote it said he’d correct it. Kennedy took the stage moments later, aired his grievances with the Democratic Party, the news media and political institutions, and extolled Trump. He spoke for nearly 20 minutes before he said explicitly that he was endorsing Trump.

Kennedy later joined Trump onstage at a rally co-hosted by Turning Point Action in Glendale, where Trump’s campaign had teased he would be joined by “a special guest.”

Kennedy was greeted by thundering applause as he took the stage to the Foo Fighters and a pyrotechnics display after being introduced by Trump as “a man who has been an incredible champion for so many of these values that we all share.”

“We are both in this to do what’s right for the country,” Trump said, later commending Kennedy for having “raised critical issues that have been too long ignored in this country.”

With Kennedy standing nearby, Trump invoked his slain uncle and father, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, saying he knows “that they are looking down right now and they are very, very proud.”

He said that, if he wins this fall, he will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts that will release all remaining documents related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

And he repeated his pledge to establish a panel — “working with Bobby” — to investigate the increase in chronic health conditions and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity and infertility.

A year ago, some would have thought it inconceivable that a member of arguably the most storied family in Democratic politics would work with Trump to keep a Democrat out of the White House. Even in recent months, Kennedy has accused Trump of betraying his followers, while Trump has criticized Kennedy as “the most radical left candidate in the race.”

Five of Kennedy’s family members issued a statement Friday calling his support for Trump “a sad ending to a sad story” and reiterating their support for Harris.

“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” read the statement, which his sister Kerry Kennedy posted on X.

Kennedy Jr. acknowledged his decision to endorse Trump had caused tension with his family. He is married to actor Cheryl Hines, who wrote on X that she deeply respects her husband’s decision to drop out but did not address the Trump endorsement.

“This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends,” Kennedy said. “But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”

In a statement, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon reached out to Kennedy’s supporters who are “tired of Donald Trump and looking for a new way forward” and said that Harris wanted to earn their backing.

At Kennedy’s Phoenix event, 38-year-old Casey Westerman said she trusted Kennedy’s judgment and had planned to vote for him, but would support Trump if Kennedy endorsed him.

“My decision would really be based on who he thinks is best suited to run this country,” said Westerman, who wore a “Kennedy 2024” trucker hat and voted for Trump in the last two presidential elections.

Kennedy first entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat but left the party last fall to run as an independent. He built an unusually strong base for a third-party bid, fueled in part by anti-establishment voters and vaccine skeptics who have followed his anti-vaccine work since the COVID-19 pandemic. But he has since faced strained campaign finances and mounting legal challenges.

At Trump’s event in Las Vegas, Alida Roberts, 49, said Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump spoke volumes about the current state of the Democratic Party.

“It says that he doesn’t trust what’s going on, that it’s not the party he grew up in,” Roberts said.

Roberts, who voted twice for Trump, said she was relieved and excited by the endorsement because she’d been “teeter-tottering” between the two candidates.

He said in an interview that he was “not suggesting there is widespread voter fraud,” but had said in an earlier interview, “Call me crazy, but I think American elections should be decided by American citizens.” 

The news quickly spread. Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson and others praised Youngkin’s order, in tweets and retweets, saying he was keeping “illegals,” “illegal aliens” or “noncitizens” from voting.

Yet the governor’s Aug. 7 order didn’t state whether any of the 6,303 people removed from the voter rolls over the past 18 months were noncitizens who actually voted or if there was an error and they later turned out to be citizens. His office didn’t provide that information when asked by NBC News. 

But months before Election Day, the Republican rhetoric around “noncitizen voting” is propagating the falsehood that masses of undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections, according to voting, civil and immigrant rights groups. Such rhetoric contributes to the erosion of confidence in the electoral process, the groups say.

Local Virginia officials who spoke to NBC News attributed much of the presence of possible noncitizens on the voter rolls to errors made when people fill out paper or online forms or when they respond to a question about citizenship on a touchpad device at the department of motor vehicles.

The same day Youngkin announced the order, Trump praised him in a Truth Social post, saying Virginia and its governor were taking a strong lead in “securing” November’s election, protecting every “legal vote and keeping illegal aliens that had been let into our country for voting.”

Massive voting by people illegally in the country is a conspiracy theory long ago debunked, but one that Trump has repeated throughout his campaigns, along with other Republicans. 

“What we are seeing is a concerted effort at the state, federal level to stoke fears about noncitizen voting, and obviously that’s tied to xenophobic rhetoric about immigration generally,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel for voting rights at the progressive Brennan Center for Justice. 

In an Aug. 9 retweet of a post by a conservative magazine writer about Virginia’s executive order, Johnson stated that Democrats “are perfectly fine with noncitizens voting in our elections.” To back that up, the Louisiana Republican pointed to how Democrats had voted against the SAVE Act bill that would require all Americans to prove citizenship when registering to vote. 

Griffin Neal, a spokesman for Johnson, said the House speaker was “making a point about the 198 House Democrats who voted against this bill, which only ensures American citizens can decide American elections,” not alleging any of the 6,303 had voted illegally. 

Voter purges, DMV forms — and possible errors

Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez referred NBC News to the governor’s previous statements saying that the process is “very transparent”  and that they “give everyone who was removed from the voter roll 14 days to come back and demonstrate that they are a citizen.”

Nearly two dozen voting, civil and immigrant rights groups have called on Youngkin to release more information about the people removed from Virginia’s voter lists, “to ensure that Virginia’s voters are not wrongfully purged from the voter rolls” ahead of November’s elections. Youngkin’s order also calls on local registrars to warn people about election offenses and their penalties, leading the groups to question how this will be done without intimidating voters.

“I would be curious to know why they are choosing to do this now, before the November election. It sounds like they are pushing this fraud message,” said Jossie Flor Sapunar, spokesperson for CASA, a national advocacy group for immigrants.

On Virginia’s DMV forms, people are asked whether they want to register to vote. Virginia requires people to provide their full Social Security numbers, a DMV credential or proof of identity and legal presence when registering, Youngkin’s order states. Spokesperson Jillian Cowherd said the voter registration process is started at the DMV, but completed at the Virginia Elections Department. 

When Virginia residents who aren’t U.S. citizens go to the DMV to apply for a license, they have to provide identifying documents including proof of residence. Youngkin’s order requires lists of people who have said they’re not citizens to be turned over daily to the Elections Department.

Virginia’s DMV checks proof of identity and “legal presence” with the Social Security Administration, Youngkin’s order states. It also uses the Department of Homeland Security system, SAVE, which is designed for checking agency records on immigrants when they’re applying for certain benefits. It’s also used to verify voter rolls.

But user and data errors in the DHS system — such as confusing people who share the same name — have led to people being inaccurately flagged on voter rolls, Clapman said. The use of immigrant records under the SAVE system to verify voter rolls has been criticized by voting rights  and immigration advocates because it’s not foolproof. 

“If a voter renews their driver’s license or completes another DMV form but neglects to check ‘yes’ to the citizenship question, checks ‘no’ or checks neither box, then this voter is flagged as a possible noncitizen and included in the list,” Tony Castrilli, a spokesman for Fairfax County in northern Virginia, told NBC News in an email.  

Fairfax County canceled 985 voters in the county over the last two years, but Castrilli didn’t know how many subsequently confirmed they were citizens and re-registered. 

Gretchen Reinemeyer, Arlington County registrar, said the wrong answers sometimes can be a result of frustration with the series of questions people have to answer when they don’t opt out of voter registration. 

“What happens is you get pop-ups asking, ‘Are you sure?’ A lot of times people start hitting no, no, no, wondering ‘what do I have to do to stop this?’” she said.

Local officials said they send letters notifying people who have been flagged that they’ve been removed from voter rolls, and give them 14 days to correct errors if they were wrongly removed.

Reese Brogdon, Manassas Park deputy director of elections, said most letters his department sends don’t get a response. But Reinemeyer said she’s experienced citizens being flagged erroneously. None of the local officials had data on how many people return to fix the errors.

“In my experience in working with voters, they know whether or not they are citizens and they know whether or not they should be voting,” Reinemeyer said. 

Virginia has same-day registration, so people mistakenly removed from voter rolls who are citizens can show up, affirm they are a citizens and vote, she said. 

It is rare for noncitizens to vote because doing so risks prison, fines and even expulsion from the country, the Brennan Center’s Clapman said. It’s been shown over and over, she said, that noncitizen voting is not a problem. 

She said Youngkin’s announcement of noncitizen voters “stokes election denial generally, undermining faith in election results. It creates momentum for legislation that would make it harder to vote,” Clapman said. 

A history of mistakes

Virginia has a history of mistakes in its voter removals. Last October, election officials under Youngkin removed nearly 3,400 legal Virginia voters from the rolls, after misclassifying probation violators as felons. Felons automatically lose their right to vote in Virginia.

The League of United Latin American Citizens of Richmond settled a 2018 defamation lawsuit it filed against a group run by Trump’s former vote fraud commissioner, J.Christian Adams, for publishing identifying information of people who were identified as noncitizens and removed from the state’s voter rolls. The group had to apologize and publicly state the people they targeted are U.S. citizens. 

In their recent letter to Youngkin, voter, civil and immigrant rights groups said,“the integrity of our electoral system depends on the protection of every eligible Virginian’s right and freedom to vote.” 

The groups said it’s critical that any election security measures don’t prevent eligible voters from “having their voices heard” or “intimidate or dissuade voters from participating or otherwise sow distrust in our democratic processes.”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Trump says his focus is ensuring Democrats ‘don’t cheat,’ not voter turnout — echoing efforts to undermine election
• Local Georgia officials equip election workers with ‘panic buttons’ to combat rising threats
• Fed Chair Powell says ‘time has come’ for interest rate cut

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Good evening.

To my husband, Doug, thank you for being an incredible partner to me and father to Cole and Ella.

And happy anniversary. I love you so very much.

To Joe Biden — Mr. President. I am forever grateful for your lifetime of leadership and your trust in me.

And to Coach Tim Walz, you are going to be an incredible Vice President.

And to the delegates and everyone who has put your faith in our campaign — your support is humbling.

America, the path that led me here in recent weeks, was no doubt… unexpected.

But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys. My mother Shyamala Harris had one of her own.

I miss her every day. Especially now. And I know she’s looking down tonight.

And smiling. My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone. Traveling from India to California. With an unshakeable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.

When she finished school, she was supposed to return home to a traditional arranged marriage. But, as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris.

A student from Jamaica. They fell in love and got married. And that act of self-determination made my sister Maya and me.

Growing up, we moved a lot. I will always remember that big Mayflower truck packed with all our belongings.

Ready to go.

To Illinois.

To Wisconsin.

And wherever our parents’ jobs took us.

My early memories of my parents together are joyful ones. A home filled with laughter and music. Aretha. Coltrane. And Miles.

At the park, my mother would tell us to stay close. But my father would just smile, and say, “Run, Kamala. Run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.”

From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless. But the harmony between my parents did not last. When I was in elementary school, they split up. And it was mostly my mother who raised us.

Before she could finally afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay. In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We, lived in the flats. A beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers. All, who tended their lawns with pride. 

My mother worked long hours. And, like many working parents, she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us.

Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris. 

None of them, family by blood. And all of them, family by love.

Family who taught us how to make gumbo. How to play chess. And sometimes even let us win.

Family who loved us. Believed in us. And told us we could be anything.

Do anything. They instilled in us the values they personified. Community. Faith. And the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated.

With kindness. Respect. And compassion.

My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent. And, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. 

But she never lost her cool.

She was tough.

Courageous.

A trailblazer in the fight for women’s health. 

And she taught Maya and me a lesson that Michelle mentioned the other night — she taught us to never complain about injustice.  But…do something about it.

She also taught us — never do anything half-assed. That’s, a direct quote.

I grew up immersed in the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. My parents had met at a civil rights gathering. And they made sure we learned about civil rights leaders, including lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley.

Those who battled in the courtroom to make real the Promise of America. 

So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work. I wanted to be a lawyer. And when it came time to choose – he type, of law I would pursue – I reflected on a pivotal moment in my life.

When I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend Wanda.

She was sad at school.

And there were times she didn’t want to go home.

So, one day, I asked if everything was alright and she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her step-father.

And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us.

And she did. 

That is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor.

To protect people like Wanda.

Because I believe everyone has a right to safety. To dignity. And to justice.

As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim. But in the name of “The People.”

For a simple reason.

In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. I would often explain this, to console survivors of crime. To remind them no one should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together. 

Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: “Kamala Harris, for the People.”

And to be clear, my entire career, I have only had one client. The People. And so, on behalf of The People, on behalf of every American. Regardless of party, race or gender. Or the language your grandmother speaks. 

On behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey. On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with. People who work hard. Chase their dreams and look out for one another.

On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth. I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.

With this election, our nation has a precious,  fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past.

A chance to chart a New Way Forward.

Not as members of any one party or faction But as Americans.

I know there are people of various political view watching tonight. And I want you to know: I promise to be a President for all Americans.

You can always trust me to put country above party and self.

To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles. From the rule of law. To free and fair elections. To the peaceful transfer of power.  I will be a President who unites us around our highest aspirations.

A President who leads and listens. Who is realistic. Practical. And has common sense and always fights for the American people.

From the courthouse to the White House, that has been my life’s work.

As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them.  As Attorney General of California, I took on the Big Banks. Delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure. And helped pass a homeowner Bill of Rights — one of the first of its kind. 

I stood up for veterans and students being scammed by big for-profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse. I fought against cartels who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings. Who threaten the security of our border and the safety of our communities.

Those fights were not easy. And neither were the elections that put me in those offices.

We were underestimated at every turn. But we never gave up. Because the future is always worth fighting for. And that’s the fight we are in right now.  A fight for America’s future.

Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives. It is one of the most important in the life of our nation. In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.

Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened, since he lost the last election. Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes.                                                                    

When he failed, he sent an armed mob into the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.

When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite. He fanned the flames.

And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans. And separately, found liable for committing sexual abuse.

And consider what he intends to do if we give him power again. Consider his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.

His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy. 

His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.

Consider the power he will have — especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled he would be immune from criminal prosecution. 

Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.

How he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life. Not to strengthen our national security. But to serve the only client he has ever had: Himself. 

And we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in “Project 2025.” Written by his closest advisors. And its sum total is to pull our country back into the past.

But America, we are not going back.

We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.

We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. When insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.

We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools.

We are not going to let him end programs like Head Start, that provide preschool and child care.

America, we are not going back.

We are charting a new way forward. 

Forward — to a future with a strong and growing middle class.

Because we know a strong middle class has alway been critical to America’s success. And building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.

This is personal for me.

The middle class is where I come from. My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means. Yet, we wanted for little.

And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us. And to be grateful for them. Because opportunity is not available to everyone.

That’s why we will create what I call an Opportunity economy. An Opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed.

Whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city. As President, I will bring together: Labor and workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs. Grow our economy. And lower the cost of everyday needs. Like health care, housing and groceries.

We will provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage and protect Social Security and Medicare.

Compare that to Donald Trump.

He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. He will give them another round of tax breaks that will add $5 trillion to the national debt.

All while, he intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax — call it, a Trump tax — that would
raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year. 

Well, instead of a Trump tax hike, we will pass a middle class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.

Friends, I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives. Especially on matters of heart and home.

But tonight, too many women iin America are not able to make those decisions.

Let’s be clear about how we got here: Donald Trump hand-picked members of the United States Supreme Court to take away reproductive freedom.

And now he brags about it.

His words: Quote – “I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.” End quote.

Over the past two years, I have traveled across our country. And women have told me their stories. Husbands and fathers have shared theirs. Stories of women miscarrying in a parking lot, getting sepsis, losing the ability to ever have children again, all because doctors are afraid of going to jail for caring for their patients.

Couples just trying to grow their family, cut off in the middle of IVF treatments.

Children who have survived sexual assault, potentially forced to carry the pregnancy to term.

This is what is happening in our country.

Because of Donald Trump.

And understand he is not done.

As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion and enact a nation-wide abortion ban with or without Congress.

And, get this, he plans to create a National anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.

Simply put: They are out of their minds.

And one must ask: Why exactly is it that they don’t trust women?

Well. We trust women.

And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.

In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake.

The freedom to live safe from gun violence — in our schools, communities and places of worship.

The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.

The freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.

And the freedom that unlocks all the others: The freedom to vote.

With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

And let me be clear. After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border.

Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.

The Border Patrol endorsed it.

But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.

Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. Here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed. And I will sign it into law.

I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants — and reform our broken immigration system.

We can create an earned pathway to citizenship — and secure our border.

America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and our values abroad. 

As Vice President, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. 

As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.

I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. And I will always honor, and never disparage, their service and their sacrifice.

I will make sure that we lead the world into the future  on space and Artificial Intelligence. That America — not China — wins the competition for the 21st century. And that we strengthen — not abdicate — our global leadership.

Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could — quote — “do whatever the hell they want.”

Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response — over 50 countries — to defend against Putin’s aggression.

And as President, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.

With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock. Because now is the time to get a hostage deal and ceasefire done.

Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again.

The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.

President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.

And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.

And I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim-Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.

They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable — because he wants to be an autocrat.

As President, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals. Because, in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand — and where the United States of America belongs.

Fellow Americans, I love our country with all my heart.  Everywhere I go —in everyone I meet — I see a nation ready to move forward. Ready for the next step n the incredible journey that is America.

I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation. That inspired the world. That here, in this country, anything is possible.

Nothing is out of reach. An America, where we care for one another, look out for one another, and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed. And that, in unity, there is strength.

Our opponents in this race  are out there, every day, denigrating America. Talking about how terrible everything is. 

Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are. 

America, let us show each other — and the world — who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities. 

We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world.

And on behalf of our children and grandchildren and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment. 

It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done.

Guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love. To fight for the ideals we cherish. And to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth. The privilege and pride of being an American. 

So, let’s get out there and let’s fight for it. 

Let’s get out there and let’s vote for it.

And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.

Thank you.

God bless you.

May God bless the United States of America.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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• Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill detained by police before Week 1 win; marks TD with handcuff celebration
• Speaker Johnson’s government funding strategy is on life support as defections mount
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Harris will be the first Black woman to serve as the presidential nominee for a major party in American history, with many female Democratic delegates marking the historic night with their attire.

There appeared to be a coordinated effort among female delegates and Democratic supporters as they arrived at the United Center on Thursday afternoon, with security lines and convention floor seats filling up with women clad in white suits, dresses and other attire.

So when Harris takes the stage to accept the Democratic presidential nomination — becoming the first Black woman, and only the second woman overall, to do so — she will be looking out across a sea filled with the color of women’s suffrage, the movement that culminated with American women securing the right to vote in 1920.

The homage is a couture callback to other momentous political events in which women wearing white have played a role, particularly for other glass ceiling moments.

But if you saw Oprah’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, you may have wondered: What did the cameraperson seemingly have against that one random woman in the crowd?

Tens of thousands of people seemed to agree with one user on X, who commented on the DNC “taking a page from Wendy Williams’ cameraman” when they cut to the crowd as Oprah cracked a joke about “childless cat ladies.”

It turns out the woman in the crowd wasn’t actually a random choice. But to fully understand why one Maryland delegate suddenly became the face of “childless cat ladies” at the DNC, we have to backtrack a bit.

During her surprise appearance, TV host Oprah called for unity regardless of background in the United States.

“Despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors,” Oprah said. “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them.”

She then continued with a quip at the expense of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.

“And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out, too.”

The use of the phrase “childless cat lady” was a reference to comments made by Vance in 2021 during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Vance stated in that interview that “childless cat ladies” have “no direct stake” in political decision-making.

Vance came under fire as those comments resurfaced, with celebrities and other politicians criticizing Vance for his take and for his stances on reproductive rights and healthcare.

But those watching the DNC on Wednesday raised eyebrows for a different reason, when just as Oprah made her joke, the camera cut to a woman standing with the Maryland delegation — implying she was a childless cat lady.

Had that been a random woman, it would have been a sticky moment.

But, as it turns out, that woman wasn’t just a delegate for the state of Maryland for the DNC — she is also Maryland State Del. Teresa S. Woorman, who called herself a childless cat lady when she was sworn into her seat in the state legislature.

Woorman took to social media as the clip of Oprah’s speech went viral, emphasizing her stance against the Republican ticket.

“Damn right this childless cat lady is 100% disgusted by J.D. Vance in general and 100% behind @KamalaHarris and @GovTimWalz!” Woorman said in a social media statement. “Also I may be childless but I do hope that’s not a permanent condition, thanks!”

Woorman went on to explain the context behind the video.

“Also- funny enough I recently got appointed to a legislative seat. And I got sworn in to the Maryland House of Delegates last week and I referred to myself as a childless cat lady during my remarks. But I’m in good company, @taylorswift13 @Oprah. 💙💪🏼🐱 #voteblue,” Woorman said.

The Maryland Democratic Party also took to social media to add context.

“That’s our amazing Delegate @Teresa_Saavedra!” the message said.

Woorman was sworn into the Maryland state legislature just over 10 days ago, on Aug. 12. She’s a Mexican immigrant, as her page in the House of Delegates directory states, and went to elementary through high school in Montgomery County before attending the University of Maryland in College Park.

She now represents District 16, part of the county where she grew up, and is a member of the Health and Government Operations Committee.

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“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill detained by police before Week 1 win; marks TD with handcuff celebration
• Speaker Johnson’s government funding strategy is on life support as defections mount
• Trump allies hope the debate will turn the page from Harris’ ‘honeymoon’

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During a recent TikTok interview between Tom Miller, host of The Bulwark podcast, and Jon Favreau, a speechwriter for Obama, Miller and Favreau broke down Obama’s famous “crowd size” comment — and rousing audience reaction.

The moment seemed to be a nod to inauguration photos from 2017 when former President Donald Trump claimed he drew more people than Obama’s. Trump then said the media had misrepresented the number of people there.

“This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” Obama said. “It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala.”

“The childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size,” Obama went on to say, making large and then small gestures with his hands.

As Obama glanced down at his hands, the crowd roared with laughter.

Miller and Favreau reacted to the clip, with Miller asking Favreau if that moment was originally in the speech — or if it was a “stunt.”

“I’ll give you a little of the back story,” Favreau said. “You know, we’d been going through the Trump section, what he’s gonna say about Trump, and most of that was led by him.”

Favreau went on to say that the speech originally had several different examples of “Trump’s whining,” but some were cut for time.

One kept making its way back into the speech — by the speaker himself.

“And the one thing that Obama kept adding back into the speech was the crowd size thing,” Favreau said. “In the last round of edits, he put it back in.”

By that time, Favreau figured it was just a “funny thing” Obama wanted to joke about.

“And then when I was watching the speech from the floor and saw him do that, I was like, ‘oh my gosh. Wow.’ Very unlike him,” Favreau said.

Favreau went on to laugh when talking about the hand gestures that accompanied Obama’s riffs.

“I will tell you that if it was a planned thing, it was planned only in his mind,” Favreau added. “…Whenever he’s, like, into a speech, and he’s like feeling the crowd, then he hams it up, right? Or he does something that he wasn’t expected to do. So I think that’s what happened.”

Below is the full text of Obama’s DNC speech from Tuesday. Thursday, the fourth and final night of the DNC in Chicago, Kamala Harris is expected to speak.

One thing is for certain: Donald Trump is not losing sleep over these questions. This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. The childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size. It just goes on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. 

Hello, Chicago! It is good to be home.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling fired up! I’m feeling ready to go – even if I’m the only person stupid enough to speak right after Michelle Obama… 

I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible. Because we have the chance to elect someone who’s spent her whole life trying to give people the same chances America gave her. Someone who sees you and hears you and will get up every single day and fight for you: the next President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris. 

It’s been sixteen years since I had the honor of accepting this party’s nomination for president. I know it’s hard to believe since I haven’t aged a bit, but it’s true. And looking back, I can say without question that my first big decision as your nominee turned out to be one of my best – and that was asking Joe Biden to serve by my side as Vice President. 

Other than some common Irish blood, Joe and I come from different backgrounds. But we became brothers. And as we worked together for eight years, what I came to admire most about Joe wasn’t just his smarts and experience, but his empathy and his decency; his hard-earned resiliency and his unshakable belief that everyone in this country deserves a fair shot.  

Over the last four years, those are the values America has needed most.

At a time when millions of our fellow citizens were sick and dying, we needed a leader with the character to put politics aside and do what was right. At a time when our economy was reeling, we needed a leader with the determination to drive what became the world’s strongest recovery – with 15 million jobs, higher wages, and lower health care costs. And at a time when the other party had turned into a cult of personality, we needed a leader who was steady, and brought people together, and was selfless enough to do the rarest thing there is in politics: putting his own ambition aside for the sake of the country.

History will remember Joe Biden as a president who defended democracy at a moment of great danger. I am proud to call him my president, but even prouder to call him my friend. 

Now the torch has been passed. Now it’s up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in. And make no mistake: it will be a fight. For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country – a country where too many Americans are still struggling, and don’t believe government can help. 

And as we gather here tonight, the people who will decide this election are asking a very simple question: 

Who will fight for me? Who’s thinking about my future; about my children’s future – about our future together?

One thing is for certain: Donald Trump is not losing sleep over these questions. This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. The childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size. It just goes on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. 

From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous. The truth is, Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to his ends. He wants the middle class to pay the price for another huge tax cut that would mostly help him and his rich friends. He killed a bipartisan immigration deal that would’ve helped secure our southern border because he thought trying to actually solve the problem would hurt his campaign. He doesn’t seem to care if more women lose their reproductive freedoms since it won’t affect his life.

Most of all, Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them; between the real Americans who support him and the outsiders who don’t. And he wants you to think that you’ll be richer and safer if you just give him the power to put those “other” people back in their place.

It’s one of the oldest tricks in politics – from a guy whose act has gotten pretty stale. We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos. We’ve seen that movie – and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse. 

America is ready for a new chapter. America’s ready for a better story. 

We are ready for a President Kamala Harris. 

And Kamala Harris is ready for the job. This is a person who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion. As you heard from Michelle, Kamala wasn’t born into privilege. She had to work for what she’s got, and she actually cares about what other people are going through. She’s not the neighbor running the leaf blower – she’s the neighbor rushing over to help when you need a hand. 

As a prosecutor, Kamala stood up for children who had been victims of sexual abuse. As Attorney General of the most populous state in the country, she fought big banks and for-profit colleges, securing billions of dollars for the people they had scammed. After the home mortgage crisis, she pushed me and my administration hard to make sure homeowners got a fair settlement. Didn’t matter that I was a Democrat or that she had knocked on doors for my campaign in Iowa – she was going to fight to get as much relief as possible for the families who deserved it.  

As Vice President, she helped take on the drug companies to cap the cost of insulin, lower the cost of health care, and give families with kids a tax cut. And she’s running for president with real plans to lower costs even more, protect Medicare and Social Security, and sign a law to guarantee every woman’s right to make her own health care decisions. 

Kamala Harris won’t be focused on her problems – she’ll be focused on yours. As president, she won’t just cater to her own voters and punish those who refuse to bend the knee. She’ll work on behalf of every American.

That’s who Kamala is. And in the White House, she will have an outstanding partner in Governor Tim Walz. 

I love this guy. Tim’s the kind of person who should be in politics – somebody who was born in a small town, served his country, taught kids, coached football, and took care of his neighbors. He knows who he is and what’s important. You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from some consultant, they come from his closet, and they’ve been through some stuff. 

Together, Kamala and Tim have kept faith with America’s central story – a story that says we’re all created equal, that everyone deserves a chance, and that, even when we don’t agree with each other, we can find a way to live with each other. 

That’s Kamala’s vision. That’s Tim’s vision. That’s the Democratic Party’s vision. And our job over the next eleven weeks is to convince as many people as possible to vote for that vision. 

It won’t be easy. The other side knows it’s easier to play on people’s fears and cynicism. They’ll tell you that government is corrupt; that sacrifice and generosity are for suckers; and that since the game is rigged, it’s ok to take what you want and look after your own. 

That’s the easy path. We have a different task. Our job is to convince people that democracy can actually deliver. And we can’t just point to what we’ve already accomplished or only rely on the ideas of the past. We need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today. 

Kamala understands this. She knows, for example, that if we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units, and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. And she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.  

On health care, we should all be proud of the enormous progress we’ve made through the Affordable Care Act – providing millions of people access to affordable coverage and protecting millions more from unscrupulous insurance practices. But Kamala knows we can’t stop there, which is why she’ll keep working to limit out of pocket costs.

Kamala knows that if we want to help people get ahead, we need to put a college degree within reach of more Americans. But college shouldn’t be the only ticket to the middle class. We need to follow the lead of governors like Tim Walz who’ve said that if you’ve got the skills and the drive, you shouldn’t need a degree to work for state government. And in this new economy, we need a president who actually cares about the millions of people all across this country who wake up every day to do the essential, often thankless work to care for our sick and clean our streets and deliver our packages – and stand up for their right to bargain for better wages and working conditions.

Kamala will be that president.

A Harris-Walz administration can help us move past some of the tired old debates that keep stifling progress, because at their core, Kamala and Tim understand that when everybody gets a fair shot, we’re all better off. They understand that when every child gets a good education, the whole economy gets stronger; that when women are paid the same as men, all families benefit. We can secure our border without tearing kids away from their parents, just like we can keep our streets safe while also building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

Donald Trump and his well-heeled donors don’t see the world that way. For them, one group’s gain is another group’s loss. For them, freedom means that the powerful can do what they please, whether its fire workers trying to organize a union or poison our rivers or avoid paying taxes like everybody else has to do.

We have a broader idea of freedom. We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you’re willing to work; the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and send your kids to school without worrying if they’ll come home. We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life – how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry. And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours.

That’s the America Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in. An America where “We the People” includes everyone. Because that’s the only way this American experiment works. And despite what our politics might suggest, I think most Americans understand that. Democracy isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws. It’s the values we live by, and the way we treat each other – including those who don’t look like us or pray like us or see the world exactly like we do.

That sense of mutual respect has to be part of our message. Our politics has become so polarized these days that all of us, across the political spectrum, seem quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or don’t bother to vote at all.

That approach may work for the politicians who just want attention and thrive on division. But it won’t work for us. To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns – and maybe learn something in the process.

After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast, and that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us. 

That’s how we can build a true Democratic majority. And by the way, that doesn’t just matter to people in this country. The rest of the world is watching to see if we can actually pull it off. 

No nation, no society, has ever tried to build a democracy as big and diverse as ours before – one where our allegiances and our community are defined not by race or blood, but by a common creed. That’s why when we uphold our values, the world’s a little brighter. When we don’t, the world’s a little dimmer, dictators and autocrats feel emboldened, and over time we become less safe. We shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, and we can’t eradicate every cruelty and injustice in the world. But America can be, must be, a force for good – discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom. That’s what Kamala Harris believes – and so do most Americans.

I know these ideas can feel pretty naïve right now. We live in a time of such confusion and rancor, with a culture that puts a premium on things that don’t last – money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones; we build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then wonder why we feel so alone. We don’t trust each other as much because we don’t take the time know each other – and in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.

But here’s the good news. All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach Little League and look out for our elderly neighbors. We still feed the hungry, in churches and mosques and synagogues, and share the same pride when our Olympic athletes compete for the gold. Because the vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and excitement we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this these past few months because, as Michelle mentioned, this summer we lost her mom.

I don’t know that anybody has ever loved their mother-in-law any more than I loved mine. Mostly it’s because she was funny and wise and maybe the least pretentious person I knew. That and she always defended me with Michelle when I messed up.

But I also think one of the reasons we became so close was she reminded me of my grandmother, the woman who raised me as a child. On the surface, the two of them didn’t have a lot in common – one was a Black woman from Chicago, the other a white woman born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas. And yet, they shared a basic outlook on life – strong, smart, resourceful women, full of common sense, who, regardless of the barriers they encountered, went about their business without fuss or complaint and provided an unshakable foundation of love for their children and grandchildren.

In that sense, they both represented an entire generation of working people who, through war and depression, discrimination and limited opportunity, helped build this country. Many of them toiled every day at jobs that were often too small for them and willingly went without just to give their children something better. But they knew what was true and what mattered. Things like honesty and integrity, kindness and hard work. They weren’t impressed with braggarts or bullies, and they didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing about what they didn’t have. Instead, they found pleasure in simple things – a card game with friends, a good meal and laughter around the kitchen table, helping others and seeing their children do things and go places that they would have never imagined for themselves.

Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between, we’ve all had people like that in our lives. People like Kamala’s parents, who crossed oceans because they believed in the promise of America. People like Tim’s parents, who taught him about the importance of service. Good, hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful, but who managed, in countless ways, to leave this country a little better than they found it.

As much as any policy or program, I believe that’s what we yearn for – a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other. A restoration of what Lincoln called, on the eve of civil war, “our bonds of affection.” An America that taps what he called “the better angels of our nature.” That’s what this election is about. And I believe that’s why, if we each do our part over the next 77 days – if we knock on doors and make phone calls and talk to our friends and listen to our neighbors – if we work like we’ve never worked before – we will elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States, and Tim Walz as the next Vice President of the United States. We’ll elect leaders up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we believe in. And together, we too will build a country that is more secure and more just, more equal and more free.

So let’s get to work. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

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“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill detained by police before Week 1 win; marks TD with handcuff celebration
• Speaker Johnson’s government funding strategy is on life support as defections mount
• Trump allies hope the debate will turn the page from Harris’ ‘honeymoon’

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In her poem, Gorman spoke about the American dream, echoing some themes of Obama’s 2006 “The Audacity of Hope” autobiography.

“Tomorrow is not written by our odds of hardship but by the audacity of our hope, by the vitality of our vote,” Gorman recited. “Only now approaching this rare air are we aware that perhaps the American Dream is no dream at all, but instead a dare to dream together.”

The 26-year-old rose to the national stage in 2017 after she became the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate. In 2021 she also became the youngest poet to write and recite her work at a presidential inauguration in 2021.

Here is the text of Gorman’s poem, “This Sacred Scene”, in full:

We gather at this hollowed place because we believe in the American dream.

We face a race that tests if this country we cherish shall perish from the Earth, and if our earth shall perish from this country.

It falls to us to ensure that we do not fall for a people that cannot stand together, cannot stand at all.

We are one family, regardless of religion, class or color. For what defines a patriot is not just our love of liberty, but our love for one another.

This is loud in our country’s call, because while we all love freedom, it is love that frees us all.

Empathy emancipates, making us greater than hate or vanity. That is the American promise, powerful and pure. Divided, we cannot endure but united, we can endeavor to humanize our democracy and endear democracy to humanity.

And make no mistake, cohering is the hardest task history ever wrote, but tomorrow is not written by our odds of hardship, but by the audacity of our hope, by the vitality of our vote.

Only now, approaching this rare air, are we aware that perhaps the American Dream is no dream at all, but instead a dare to dream together.

Like a million roots tethered, branching up humbly, making one tree, this is our country. From many, one; from battles won; our freedoms sung; our kingdom come has just begun.

We redeem this sacred scene. Ready for our journey. From it together, we must birth this early republic and achieve an unearthly summit. Let us not just believe in the American dream. Let us be worthy of it.

Though the speech served as Walz’s first impression to many American voters, Walz’s family was prominently in attendance for his remarks.

Walz thanked his wife and two children during his remarks, singling out his loved ones and telling them he loves them. The touching moment in the speech brought his 17-year-old son Gus to tears.

Gus Walz, who has an anxiety disorder and a non-verbal learning disorder along with ADHD, was overcome by emotion in the moment, and was seen standing from his seat, appearing to say, “That’s my dad.”

Tim and his wife, Gwen Walz, both spoke of their experience in parenting Gus in an exclusive article published in People Magazine earlier this month, in which they deem their son’s neurodivergence “his super power.”

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

For more from NBC Out, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill detained by police before Week 1 win; marks TD with handcuff celebration
• Speaker Johnson’s government funding strategy is on life support as defections mount
• Trump allies hope the debate will turn the page from Harris’ ‘honeymoon’

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Thank you, Vice President Kamala Harris, for putting your trust in me and for inviting me to be part of
this incredible campaign. Thank you to President Joe Biden for four years of strong, historic
leadership. And it is the honor of my life to accept your nomination for vice president of the United
States.

We’re all here tonight for one beautiful, simple reason—we love this country! So thanks to all of you
here in Chicago and watching at home tonight—for your passion, for your determination, for the joy
that you’re bringing to this fight.

I grew up in the small town of Butte, Nebraska, population 400. I had 24 kids in my high school class
and none of ’em went to Yale. Growing up in a small town like that, you learn to take care of each
other. The family down the road—they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they
may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them, just like they do for
you.

Everybody belongs, and everybody has a responsibility to contribute. For me, it was serving in the
Army National Guard. I joined up two days after my 17th birthday and I proudly wore our country’s
uniform for 24 years. My dad, a Korean War-era veteran, died of lung cancer a couple years later and
left behind a mountain of medical debt. Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits. And thank
God for the GI Bill that allowed both my dad and me to go to college—just like it has for millions of
Americans.

Eventually, I fell in love with teaching, just like the rest of my family. Heck, three out of four of us even
married teachers. I wound up teaching social studies and coaching football at Mankato West High
School. Go Scarlets! We ran a 4-4 defense, played through the whistle every single down, and even
won a state championship. Never close that yearbook, people.

It was my students who first inspired me to run for Congress. They saw in me what I hoped to instill in
them—a commitment to the common good. An understanding that we’re all in this together. And a
true belief that one person can make a real difference for their neighbors.

So there I was, a 40-something high school teacher with young kids, zero political experience, no
money, and running in a deep-red district. But you know what? Never underestimate a public school
teacher.

I represented my neighbors in Congress for 12 years and I learned an awful lot. I learned how to work
across the aisle on issues like growing rural economies and taking care of our veterans. And I learned
how to compromise without compromising my values.

Then I came back home to serve as governor and we got right to work making a difference in our
neighbors’ lives. We cut taxes for middle-class families. We passed paid family and medical leave. We
invested in fighting crime and affordable housing. We cut the cost of prescription drugs and helped
people escape the kind of medical debt that nearly sank my family. And we made sure that every kid
in our state got breakfast and lunch at school. So while other states were banning books from their
schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.

We also protected reproductive freedom because, in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the
personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, we’ve got
a Golden Rule—mind your own damn business.

That includes IVF and fertility treatments. This is personal for Gwen and me. Let me just say
this—even if you’ve never experienced the hell of infertility, I guarantee you know somebody who has. I
remember praying each night for a call with good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone would
ring, and the agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked. It took me and Gwen years.
But we had access to fertility treatments and when our daughter was finally born, we named her
Hope. Hope, Gus, Gwen—you are my whole world. I love you all so much.

I’m letting you in on how we started our family because that’s a big part of what this election is
about—freedom. When Republicans use that word, they mean that the government should be free to
invade your doctor’s office. Corporations free to pollute the air and water. Banks free to take
advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean your freedom to
make a better life for yourself and the people you love. The freedom to make your own health care
decisions. And, yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in the
halls.

Look, I know guns. I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress
and I have the trophies to prove it. But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment. But I also
believe that our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe. That’s what this is all about. The
responsibility we have to our kids, to each other, and to the future we’re building together—a future in
which everyone is free to build the kind of life they want.

But not everyone feels the same sense of responsibility. Some folks just don’t understand what it
means to be a good neighbor. Take Donald Trump and JD Vance—their Project 2025 will make things
much, much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives. They’ve spent a lot of time
pretending they know nothing about it. But look, I coached high school football long enough, I promise
you this—when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they plan on using it.

We know what they’ll do if they get back in the White House. They’ll jack up costs on middle-class
families. They’ll repeal the Affordable Care Act. They’ll gut Social Security and Medicare. They’ll ban
abortion across America, with or without Congress.

It’s an agenda that nobody asked for. It’s an agenda that serves nobody but the richest people and the
most extreme voices in our country. An agenda that does nothing for our neighbors in need. Is it
weird? Absolutely. But it’s also wrong. And it’s dangerous. It’s not just me saying so. It’s Trump’s own people. They were with him for four years. And they’re warning us that the next four years would be
much, much worse.

When I was teaching, we would always elect a student body president. And you know what? Those
teenagers could teach Donald Trump a lesson about what it means to be a leader. Leaders don’t
spend all day insulting people and blaming people. Leaders do the work. I don’t know about you all,
but I’m ready to turn the page on these guys. So say it with me: “We’re not going back.”

We’ve got something better to offer the American people. It starts with our candidate, Kamala Harris.
From her first day as a prosecutor, as a district attorney, as an attorney general, as a U.S. senator, and
then, as our vice president, she’s fought on the side of the American people. She’s taken on predators
and fraudsters. She’s taken down transnational gangs. She’s stood up to powerful corporate interests.
She’s never hesitated to reach across the aisle if it meant improving lives. And she’s always done it
with energy, passion, and joy.

Folks, we have a chance to make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States. But I think we
owe it to the American people to tell them exactly what she’d do as president before we ask for their
votes. So here’s the part you clip and save and send to that undecided relative.

If you’re a middle-class family or a family trying to get into the middle class, Kamala Harris is gonna
cut your taxes. If you’re getting squeezed by the price of your prescription drugs, Kamala Harris is
gonna take on Big Pharma. If you’re hoping to buy a home, Kamala Harris is gonna help make it more
affordable. And no matter who you are, Kamala Harris is gonna stand up and fight for your freedom to
live the life you want to lead. Because that’s what we want for ourselves. And that’s what we want for
our neighbors.

You know, I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this one in my life. But I’ve given a lot of pep talks.
So let me finish with this, team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense.
We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team to win this. Kamala Harris is tough.
She’s experienced. And she’s ready. Our job is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling.
One inch at a time, one yard at a time, one phone call at a time, one door knock at a time, one $5
donation at a time. We’ve only got 76 days to go. That’s nothing. We’ll sleep when we’re dead. And
we’re gonna leave it all on the field.

That’s how we’ll keep moving forward. That’s how we’ll turn the page on Donald Trump. That’s how
we’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the
government stays the hell out of our bedrooms. That’s how we make America a place where no child
is left hungry. Where no community is left behind. Where nobody gets told they don’t belong.

That’s how we’re gonna fight. And as the next president of the United States says, “When we fight, we
win!” When we fight, we win! When we fight, we win! Thank you, and God bless America!