US election briefing: Trump escalates anti-immigrant rhetoric as Harris promises bipartisan advice | US elections 2024

Donald Trump At a rally in Colorado, he doubled down on his anti-immigrant and xenophobic messages, calling for the death penalty for migrants who kill U.S. citizens and announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans.

“The invasion will be stopped. “The migrant flights will be stopped and Kamala's app for illegals will be shut down immediately within 24 hours,” he said in the city of Aurora, which he said has been overrun by Venezuelan gang members despite opposition from local officials, including Republicans.

Kamala HarrisMeanwhile, she focused on a more positive message, telling an event in Phoenix that if elected president, she would create a bipartisan council of advisers to give her feedback on her policy initiatives and appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.

“I love good ideas, wherever they come from,” said Harris, who works to get Republicans who have doubts about Trump to support them.

Here's what else happened on Friday:

• Harris landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photo of Annie Leibovitz that read: “The candidate of our time.” “Only rarely are individuals summoned to national rescue operations, but in July, Vice President Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which had previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to do so ended his re-election campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”

• Trump's team reportedly asked officials to give him extensive military protections as he concluded the presidential campaign, including travel on military aircraft and vehicles. Trump's campaign has also called for increased flight restrictions around his residences and rallies and has “pre-positioned ballistic glass in seven battleground states” for use by his team, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests, adding They were both “extraordinary and unprecedented.”

• Longtime Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage from an undercover journalist. The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows a bitter Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president's legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.

• The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that it is suing the state of Virginia for violating the federal ban on systematic attempts to remove voters within 90 days of an election. On August 7, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the commissioner of the Department of Elections to certify that the department is conducting “daily voter roll updates” to remove people who cannot be verified, among other groups Citizens of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

• Harris will next week highlight her economic policies that benefit black men, hoping to bolster a voting bloc that some of the Democratic presidential candidate's advisers fear has embraced Republican rival Trump in large numbers, three with the plans said sources familiar told Reuters. The report comes a day after former President Barack Obama questioned the unwillingness of black men to vote for Harris at an event in Pennsylvania.

• Mark Milley, a retired U.S. Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and Joe Biden, fears he will be recalled to uniform and court-martialed if Trump defeats Harris and returns to power next month. “He is a walking, talking poster child of what he intends to do,” Milley recently warned “former colleagues,” writes veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in a forthcoming book. “He says it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

• JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, once again refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election over Trump, dodging the question five times in an interview with The New York Timesthe newspaper reported on Friday. The Ohio senator repeated the answer he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, saying he was “focused on the future.”

• The criminal trial of two rural Arizona county supervisors who initially refused to certify the 2022 election results will not take place until this year's election after it was postponed again. Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of three supervisors in Republican-run Cochise County, are charged with conspiracy and interference with a poll worker. Despite the county's typical low profile, the process is being watched nationwide as election experts anticipate a potential wave of local officials refusing to certify results if Trump loses. The red county lies on the U.S.-Mexico border and has about 125,000 residents.

• A clear majority of Hispanic women have a positive opinion of Harris and a negative opinion of Trump. But Hispanic men are more divided on both candidates, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

• X is “on guard” against attempts at manipulation on the platform, Elon Musk-owned website Agence France-Presse said on Friday, after reports that hundreds of apparently pro-Russian bot accounts were amplifying misinformation about the US election. In a study shared exclusively with AFP earlier this week, the Washington-based American Sunlight Project said it had almost 1,200 accounts