Harris pokes fun at Trump’s ‘concept’ of a health care plan as Biden receives award from Black caucus: Live

Laura Loomer, a notorious far-right conspiracy theorist long known for her outrageous comments, has regularly been seen close to Donald Trump in recent weeks – sparking anger among some of his most prominent supporters.

Offline, Loomer flew to Pennsylvania with the former president ahead of his debate. Trump also let her accompany him to events to mark the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks – a surprising decision given her 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Now Trump supporters like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham – hardly strangers to controversy themselves – are sounding the alarm that Loomer’s influence could end up costing the Republican Party dearly.

When Paige Cognetti first ran to become mayor of Scranton, she was told she couldn’t win because she did not have an Irish last name. She also had to overcome the fact that no woman had held the position in the city’s history.

Her victory in a special election in 2019, and again two years later, was seen by many as a sign of shifting tides.

Richard Hall reports from Scranton.

When Donald Trump was asked about the concerns voiced by his Republican colleagues regarding his recent associations with far-right activist Laura Loomer, the former president stumbled to provide a concrete answer, instead calling her a “supporter” five times.

“Coach” Tim Walz took a moment during a fired-up speech in Superior, Wisconsin, to give a shout-out to the Harris-Walz campaign’s most high-profile supporter — and reference a song off her Tortured Poets Department album.

Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, accompanied by his wife Gwen, was in full pep-talk oratorical flow on Saturday afternoon when he decided to share some advice with the men in the crowd.

A scathing report from the Secret Service details failures by agents in the hours leading up to the shooting of Donald Trump -including breakdowns in communication and haphazard securing of the site.

The findings are part of a Secret Service probe into the July 13 shooting at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooting wounded Trump in the ear. It also left one spectator dead and two more hurt.

Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to climb onto the roof of a building only a few hundred yards away and fire at Trump with an AR-style rifle. Crooks was shot dead by snipers, but not before wounding the Republican nominee for president.

He is trailing Harris in fundraising, in most polls taken following their face-off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and now in the poll-of-polls averages that political forecasters look to when making their predictions of who will win the November presidential election.

Perhaps most importantly, he is beginning to fall behind Harris in nearly all of the key states where voters will, under America’s byzantine electoral system, determine who shall serve atop the country’s executive branch for the next four years.

It’s a stunning and quick reversal of fortune for the former president, who has spent most of the time since he announced his third presidential campaign leading in those same polls.

Despite the candidate’s messaging troubles, the Trump campaign still believes they are ahead.

“He said a lot of weird stuff too, so I’m just going to say that,” the Minnesota governor told the crowd.

“You tell me that you had this on your bingo card: ‘And they’re eating cats’.”

A chorus of “we don’t eat cats” erupted from the crowd, as Walz jubilantly looked on from his podium.

James Liddell has the story.