Trump gives thumbs up at soldier’s grave as poll shows Harris widening gap: Live

Kamala Harris has taken a seven-point national lead over Donald Trump, according to a new poll.

The vice president continues to see her popularity soar after stepping on to the Democratic ticket last month following President Joe Biden’s abrupt departure from his re-election campaign.

Harris is now said to be leading her Republican rival by 50 per cent to 43 percent across the nation, according to a survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University found.

Gender and race play a central role in Harris’s recent success, according to pollsters.

Trump “does reasonably well among nonwhite voters,” Fairleigh Dickinson University professor Dan Cassino said in a statement. However, he noted that he saw his strongest support among men “who hold traditionally masculine identities”.

Donald Trump was photographed smiling and flashing a thumbs up beside the grave of a deceased Marine at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday.

The former president visited Virginia to commemorate the third anniversary of the terror attack that killed 13 US service members outside Kabul, Afghanistan.

Trump has now faced backlash for his striking his seemingly insensitive pose, with former Republican lawmaker and lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard Adam Kinzinger deeming it “unusual,” on X.

With the conventions behind them, the campaigns are heading into a busy stretch before the Labor Day holiday with stops this week in midwest battleground states and a bus tour in Georgia.

On Wednesday, the vice president and her running mate Tim Walz will kick off a bus tour in southern Georgia.

“This part of the Peach State represents the diverse coalition that makes up the Harris-Walz coalition, including rural, suburban, and urban Georgians — with a large proportion of Black voters and working class families,” according to a memo from campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.

Harris will rally in Savannah on Thursday night.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, meanwhile, is heading to Grand Rapids, Michigan on Thursday.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance will deliver remarks on “the economy and energy” in Erie, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, followed by a trip to De Pere, Wisconsin to speak on the “economy, inflation and energy” that same night.

The former president will be holding a “town hall” in La Crosse, Winconsin, on Thursday.

He will also rally in Pennsylvania on Friday.

Tulsi Gabbard has been selected as a guest moderator for Donald Trump’s town hall event in Wisconsin – less than 24 hours after the former Democratic congresswoman pledged her support to his presidential campaign.

The former president will host the event in La Crosse on Thursday in a bid to “share his promising agenda to make America affordable again,” the Trump campaign said.

Gabbard, a former Democratic Representative from Hawaii and Iraq veteran, has now been slated to moderate the three-hour long meet, the former president’s campaign team announced late on Monday.

It just hours after Gabbard announced her backing of Trump’s presidential bid at the National Guard Association in Detroit, Michigan, on Monday.

Wisconsin is a key battleground state which vice president Kamala Harris is currently leading 49.5 per cent to Trump’s 46.2 per cent, according to an analysis by The Hill. 

Donald Trump reflected on his choice of cabinet members from his first term and said he now knows how to pick the “smart ones” from the “dumb ones”.

The former president sat down with former Navy Seal-turned-YouTuber Shawn Ryan for a video released on Monday. Trump looked back on his first four years in office from 2016, and laid out a roadmap for a potential return to the White House ahead of November’s election.

“I didn’t really know anybody in Washington, I was a New York person… And all of a sudden I’m president,” he said of his 2016 presidential win.

He continued: “But I didn’t know anybody in Washington and I had to rely on people to give me names, and many were really good… but I also picked people in retrospect I wouldn’t have picked.

“But now I know the smart ones, the dumb ones, the weak ones, the solid ones.”

Trump didn’t explicitly mention any names of government members.

Special counsel Jack Smith is urging a federal appeals court to revive the classified documents case against Donald Trump, after a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the charges in a shock ruling that argued Smith’s office was unlawfully created.

Monday’s filing with a Florida appeals court cites several longstanding precedents and Supreme Court rulings that appear to contradict District Judge Aileen Cannon’s conclusion, which Smith’s team calls “nonsensical.”

Prosecutors did not ask the court to recuse Cannon from the case — at least not yet.

Donald Trump is set to release a new book of “hand-selected” photographs from his first term in the White House.

The book, titled Save America, will be published on September 3 and can be purchased online for $99, with a signed version costing $499.

The publishing house, Winning Team, was co-founded by the former president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr and long-term ally Sergio Gor.

“In ‘SAVE AMERICA’, President Donald J. Trump offers an unparalleled look into his four years as the 45th President of the United States, and a vision for his next term,” the blurb on the publisher’s website reads.

Trump’s latest attempt to pivot his campaign towards policy-oriented attacks on Kamala Harris saw him fall back into a familiar pattern of offering concessions to Vladimir Putin and Russia as he attempted to paint Joe Biden and the vice president as pushing America towards a third world war.

John Bowden and Andrew Feinberg report:

JD Vance lives near the Judy Lowe Neighborhood Park in Alexandria, Virginia, and locals are not thrilled that the park will temporarily close to provide protection for Trump’s running mate.

“I am all for protecting people, but if that park is such a danger, he should probably move,” one person suggested. “The park belongs to the city and the people of Alexandria, not his protection staff. And to be perfectly honest, a true Republican would not want the government infringing on other people’s rights.”