A six-year federal investigation into Hunter Biden will culminate this week as the president’s son faces trial for a second time.

He was convicted this summer on gun charges. Now he faces allegations of criminal tax evasion — and a judge has excluded one of his key lines of defense.

During the trial in Los Angeles — where jury selection is scheduled to start on Thursday — prosecutors plan to tell a story about greed, decadence and entitlement. Biden’s lawyers, meanwhile, will argue it’s actually a tale of addiction and redemption.

The political stakes of the trial, expected to last about two weeks, have lessened now that Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection. But evidence in the case is expected to highlight his son’s foreign business dealings — an issue that became a centerpiece of Republican attacks on the Biden family.

The trial also will revisit the younger Biden’s past struggles with drug abuse. Prosecutors intend to argue that, while he was dodging his taxes, Biden was spending lavishly on drugs, strip clubs, sports cars and other trappings of a lifestyle filled with partying. Some of the details of his drug addiction emerged during the gun trial three months ago, and reliving them has been a source of pain to the president and the rest of the Biden family.

In the courtroom, Biden’s defense lawyers may face an uphill battle. The judge overseeing the trial, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, has issued a series of pretrial rulings unfavorable to the defense. Perhaps most critically, Biden wanted to tell jurors that, after he got sober, he belatedly paid all the taxes he owed. But Scarsi has blocked the defense team from making that argument.

The president said in June that he would not pardon his son or commute an eventual prison sentence. Biden is scheduled to be sentenced in November in the gun case, where federal sentencing guidelines recommend up to 21 months in prison. If he is convicted in the tax case, he could face up to 17 years in prison, according to the Justice Department.

Here’s how we got here and what to expect.

The allegations against the president’s son

Federal prosecutors led by special counsel David Weiss, who also brought the gun case, have charged Biden with three tax felonies and six tax misdemeanors. The charges include evading a tax assessment, filing a false tax return and failing to file and pay taxes.

In a 56-page indictment, prosecutors said that he intentionally avoided paying $1.4 million in taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019. During that time, prosecutors say, Biden earned more than $7 million, including for work with the controversial Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings Limited, a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company, and a Romanian oligarch facing bribery allegations.

Also during that time, Biden was grappling with addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine and grieving the 2015 death of his brother, Beau. In his memoir, Beautiful Things, Biden described partying with drug dealers and strippers at a series of Los Angeles hotels and Airbnbs in the spring and summer of 2018. But when he worked with an accountant to settle his tax affairs in 2020, he allegedly identified some of those hotel stays as business expenses — resulting in a tax write-off.

He also claimed that a $1,248 payment to fly a stripper from LA to New York was a business expense, as was a payment of $3,852 to rent a Lamborghini, according to prosecutors.

His lawyers have argued his addiction hamstrung his ability to manage his personal affairs, including his taxes. They wanted to introduce an expert witness to testify about the link between trauma and addiction. But prosecutors asked Scarsi to block that person from testifying, and the judge did so.

Prosecutors also retort that Biden’s addiction wasn’t so debilitating as to keep him from earning millions of dollars. And, they argue, if he was capable of making and spending all that money, he was also capable of paying taxes.

How investigators built their case

The federal probe of Biden stretches back to late 2018, when an IRS agent began investigating him for apparent financial crimes, according to congressional testimony.

As his father was preparing to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 election, IRS and FBI agents drilled down on Biden’s finances. The probe, which had not yet become public, found a home base in the office of Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware.

As the investigation proceeded in secret, Trump urged the Ukrainian government to open its own investigation of Biden, citing his presence on the board of Burisma, the scandal-dogged Ukrainian energy conglomerate. Trump’s pressure campaign, which included thinly veiled threats to withhold military aid if Ukraine didn’t publicly announce a probe, led to Trump’s first impeachment.

In December 2020, a few weeks after his father defeated Trump in the presidential election, the Biden investigation became public. Biden confirmed on Dec. 9, 2020, that the feds were investigating his tax affairs. But Weiss’ probe eventually expanded to include other matters, including Biden’s purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was frequently using crack cocaine.

Two and a half years later, prosecutors announced they had reached an agreement with Biden to resolve the allegations of tax and gun crimes: Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and receive a deal related to the gun that was intended to ultimately result in charges being withdrawn. Biden would also get protection from future potential charges. But after a judge questioned its details at a hearing in July 2023, the plea deal fell apart.

Just a few weeks later, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Weiss a special counsel, empowering him to bring criminal cases anywhere in the country. Later that year, Weiss secured two indictments of Biden: one in Delaware for owning a gun as a drug user and lying about his drug use on a gun-purchase form; the other in California on the tax allegations.

The gun case went to trial in June. It showcased the destruction caused by Biden’s addiction, including with testimony from his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle. His brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, also testified that he introduced her to crack cocaine and that she became addicted to the drug. First Lady Jill Biden and numerous other members of the president’s family attended much of the trial. A jury convicted him on all charges, and he is set to be sentenced on Nov. 13.

Key defenses taken off the table

In the tax case, Biden’s main lines of defense have been twofold: first, that he was debilitated by his addiction when he allegedly committed the tax crimes, and second, that after he got sober, he paid off his tax debt with penalties and interest.

Biden’s lawyers said in court filings that they wanted to cite the belated payment of his tax debt to undermine prosecutors’ argument that he willfully failed to pay. But Scarsi wasn’t convinced, and on Aug. 27 granted prosecutors’ motion to bar Biden from citing the payment.

“In tax cases, courts routinely exclude evidence that a defendant untimely filed tax returns or untimely paid outstanding tax debts,” he wrote.

That ruling wasn’t the Biden team’s first difficult episode with the judge, a Trump appointee and former patent lawyer. Earlier in the summer, they tried to have the case thrown out, citing Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling in the Florida-based prosecution of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith. Cannon ruled that Smith’s appointment as a special counsel was unconstitutional, and Biden’s legal team, helmed by Mark Geragos and Abbe Lowell, made a similar argument. In doing so, they wrote that Weiss waited until he became a special counsel to bring criminal charges against Biden.

But, without prompting from prosecutors, Scarsi threatened to sanction Biden’s lawyers for making false statements. The noted that Biden had faced criminal charges before Weiss was made special counsel — namely, in court documents filed in Delaware as part of the failed 2023 plea deal.

“This Court has little tolerance for lack of candor from counsel,” Scarsi wrote in a document ordering Biden’s lawyers to show why they shouldn’t be punished for lying.

In their response, Biden’s lawyers said that they “never tried to mislead the Court,” that their wording was inartful and that they should have said Weiss waited until he was made special counsel to bring “indictments,” rather than “charges.”

Scarsi replied that he doubted “the veracity of that explanation,” because changing the word “charges” to “indictments” wouldn’t have made sense. But, acknowledging that Geragos was new to the Biden case, he said he wouldn’t order sanctions.

Ultimately, Scarsi rejected the defense’s constitutional argument that the case should be tossed.

New allegations of influence peddling

In another unwelcome development for the president’s son, prosecutors revealed in pretrial skirmishes that they have evidence indicating that Biden agreed to lobby the U.S. government for Romanian oligarch Gabriel Popoviciu.

Biden’s team had moved to block the prosecutors from introducing evidence of alleged corruption, and prosecutors replied that they plan to call one of Biden’s former business associates as a witness. That person — unnamed in court papers — is expected to testify that, while Biden’s father was vice president, Popoviciu looked to hire Biden to get the U.S. government to investigate Romanian authorities who were investigating the Romanian. But Biden worried that lobbying would damage his father’s political career. So instead, prosecutors say, his associate signed a deal with Popoviciu to provide real estate management services — when, in fact, Popoviciu knew the associate would funnel money from that deal to Biden and expected Biden to lobby the U.S. government for him. That deal resulted in a $3.1 million payment to the associate, who passed on roughly a third of it to Biden, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors added that Biden also worked with CEFC China (a Chinese energy conglomerate) and Burisma. But, they emphasized, they are not charging him with illegal lobbying.

“Rather,” they wrote, “the evidence will show the defendant performed almost no work in exchange for the millions of dollars he received from these entities.”

The court filing about Popoviciu, made public less than three weeks after the president bowed out of the 2024 campaign, showed just how bruising the trial could have been for Biden’s reelection campaign. It was the first public statement from the Justice Department alleging that the younger Biden made money — around $1 million — from a client who was led to believe that the then-vice president’s son would work to shape U.S. government policy on his behalf.

Painful personal details

Beyond their focus on Biden’s finances, prosecutors also plan to highlight episodes that have been painful and embarrassing for the Biden family.

Lunden Roberts, an Arkansas woman who is the mother of one of Biden’s children, is under subpoena and is expected to testify next week, according to her lawyer. Biden initially disputed that he was the child’s father, and the president did not publicly acknowledge the grandchild until last year, when she was 4. Roberts sought child support in court, and those proceedings delved into how Biden managed his finances, including his tax affairs.

Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow, was also subpoenaed to testify and was granted immunity. Her sister, Elizabeth Secundy, has been subpoenaed and granted immunity as well. Prosecutors have not revealed any significant detail about the women’s anticipated testimony. But congressional Republicans have said they obtained financial documents showing Biden paid tens of thousands of dollars to both of them.

And a court filing on Aug. 29 indicated that Biden’s sexual history could also be a focus. The document listed names and entities that prosecutors and defense lawyers believe could come up in the trial so that the court stenographer could confirm their spellings. The list included a strip club, a members-only sex club, the sex club’s founder, and an entity called “Emerald Fantasy Girls.” It also named two lawyers who have helped Biden’s ex-wife navigate her divorce. One of those lawyers previously wrote that Biden’s profligate spending, including on prostitutes, drugs and alcohol, created financial hardship for the family.

Biden has said he got sober in the summer of 2019. He has remarried and has a young son, and he credits his sobriety to his wife and family.

“What I’ve been through — what I’ve done — is something I can never purge, never forget,” he wrote in his memoir. “But I’m learning to live in the moment without constantly feeling guilt or shame.”

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said Wednesday that she will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for president because of the “danger” she believes former President Donald Trump poses.

Her remarks, during an appearance at Duke University, came after the Wyoming Republican briefly flirted with her own third-party bid for president. Once the No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference, Cheney has long warned of the threat she says the former president poses to American democracy.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said to applause and a standing ovation from the audience.

The former Wyoming representative, who had not previously said how she planned to vote in November, said that voters in swing states, like North Carolina, who dislike Trump need to do more than just not vote for him — but actively cast their ballots for Harris.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize not only is what I’ve said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” she said.

Her announcement comes after more than 200 staffers for four Republican presidential nominees — former President George H.W. Bush, former President George W. Bush, former Arizona Sen. John McCain and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney — last week endorsed Harris for president.

Cheney, a fierce Trump critic, was ousted from her seat after she refused to temper her criticisms of Trump following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. She served as the vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee, which probed the attack.

The former president’s political operation was crucial to Cheney’s 2022 primary defeat. Her opponent ran with Trump’s support, was advised by those in his camp and was funded by his donors.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, criticized Cheney on Wednesday night during an event in Arizona, accusing her of “sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts and her ridiculous ideas.”

“Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney make very, very interesting partners,” he said. “They get rich when America's sons and daughters go off to die.”

In a statement, Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, praised Cheney as a patriot and said the vice president is proud to have her vote.

In December, Cheney published a book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” which details how her former Republican colleagues, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, laid the groundwork for the events that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.

Donald Trump’s campaign reported raising $130 million in August — a whopping number that is still unlikely to close the money gap with Vice President Kamala Harris.

That total includes money received through joint fundraising committees, as well as Trump’s official campaign and the Republican National Committee. Harris has not yet released a similar number for August. Full reports covering August for campaigns and party committees are due Sep. 20.

Trump’s operation said it had nearly $300 million cash on hand at the end of the month, down from $327 million the prior month as campaigning continues to pick up heading into the final months of the election.

“These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement and will propel President Trump’s America First movement back to the White House,” Brian Hughes, Trump campaign senior advisor, said in a statement.

Trump’s August total is notably lower than the nearly $139 million his operation raised in July — when it was buoyed by the Republican National Convention — and less than the $210 million that his team raised in August 2020, when he was running as the incumbent.

Trump’s campaign overtook that of President Joe Biden in fundraising after the former president’s New York conviction in late May spurred massive fundraising. But Democratic donor enthusiasm for Harris quickly propelled her past Trump, with the Biden-turned-Harris operation more than doubling Trump’s July fundraising total.

In a memo on Sunday, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Harris’ operation had brought in $540 million since she entered the race — a total that is likely to keep them comfortably ahead of Trump.

A federal judge on Wednesday shaved 15 months off of a Jan. 6 defendant's sentence, a direct result of the Supreme Court's recent ruling limiting the scope of an obstruction charge used to prosecute hundreds of rioters.

U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper sentenced former police officer Thomas Robertson — who was sentenced two years ago to 87 months in prison after a jury convicted him for his role in the mob attack — to 72 months. Robertson’s resentencing came after prosecutors dropped the obstruction charge against him, one of the first examples of the impact of the high court’s ruling on Jan. 6 sentences.

Cooper said Wednesday the decision was not a reflection of any change in his thinking on the seriousness of Robertson’s crimes — he emphasized that what occurred on Jan. 6 is “not hyperbole – it was a real harm.” But he said he “struggled” to see how he could maintain the original sentence in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Prosecutors had urged Cooper, however, to reimpose the 87-month sentence Cooper initially handed down, arguing that despite the Supreme Court’s decision to alter the legal landscape, the original sentence was still an accurate reflection of the gravity of Robertson’s offenses. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Aloi said the “damage done to the country must not be treated as just another crime” and that the defendant was prepared to start a “rebellion and attack the nation’s democracy.”

Aloi assured the court that “nothing” Robertson did changed. “His offense targeted the peaceful transfer of power,” Aloi said. “There’s no reason to second guess that decision.”

Robertson traveled to Washington, D.C., with fellow officer Jacob Fracker, who later pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge, on Jan. 6. Both officers with the Rocky Mount, Virginia, Police Department were off-duty.

Prior to attending the rally near the Washington Monument, the defendants left their police badges and firearms in the car. Robertson stormed the Capitol wearing a gas mask with a wooden stick in his hand that jurors said he had used as a weapon to confront police. A few months before Jan. 6, Robertson made a post on Facebook suggesting he spent his life “fighting a counter insurgency,” and that he was about to become a part of a “very effective one.”

Prosecutors argued that Robertson was a leader who organized and recruited two people, came dressed for the occasion and destroyed both his and Fracker’s phones to bury evidence. They said his offenses affected the investigation and are the reason they were unable to charge the third person.

Aloi cited Cooper’s concerns during Robertson’s sentencing in 2022, when the judge said Robertson might engage in another call of violence because of his lack of remorse. “He was not a bystander, he was a willing participant, he had an oath to uphold,” Aloi said, quoting Cooper’s 2022 sentencing remarks.

Robertson approached the bench wearing an orange uniform to give remarks before Cooper resentenced him.

“Jan. 6 was a bad day,” Robertson said. “My participation allowed bad things to happen that should not have.” Robertson then recalled Cooper’s observation that he would likely revert back to the same activity.

“You didn’t think I was properly dissuaded from doing this again,” Robertson said to the judge. “I promise you, you will not have the same concern.”

Cooper replied: “Your conduct halted the certification of a government function. … I would be hard-pressed to increase back to 87 if this were a clean slate.”

The debate around Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery has been confusing to many Americans. What’s the big deal with taking photos in a cemetery? Didn’t Trump have a right to pay a visit, especially accompanied by the family of someone buried there?

In this case there’s confusion over not only what happened, but what norms were upended.

A quick recap: Trump and his team were invited to take part in a wreath-laying ceremony by families of troops killed in the last days of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. His team included people who took photos and filmed at the cemetery in ways that violated Army regulations and federal law, including using the cemetery for political purposes. When an Arlington staffer tried to intervene, members of Trump’s team reportedly pushed the staffer aside and continued to photograph.

In the aftermath, Trump’s team released political material using the photos and footage and said it was acceptable because the families had invited him. Those families have defended Trump, with one saying “we invited him to be there.” (That statement was posted on Trump’s social media account along with footage gathered at Arlington which closes with the Trump-Vance campaign designation.)

Why does Arlington have those rules? How badly did Trump break them? And does the families’ defense matter?

Here are five facts about Arlington that can help provide some clarity.

1. Arlington is a special kind of cemetery — even more than you might think.

America has no national religion, but there are a few things in our country that the vast majority of Americans understand as sacred. If death in combat is considered the ultimate civic sacrament, then Arlington is our cathedral.

Visitors to Arlington are welcomed by signs noting the cemetery is “America’s most sacred shrine” and admonitions to “conduct yourselves with dignity and respect at all times.” Army directives say the cemetery aims to “represent the American people for past, present and future generations by laying to rest those few who served our nation with dignity and honor while immersing guests in the cemetery’s living history.”

That means the cemetery is governed by a broad mandate that’s bigger than anything happening in the current moment. The cemetery represents the American people as a whole, not just certain political factions. This unity of mission across the ages is conveyed by the simplicity and conformity of the headstones, showing how each individual sacrifice is part of a larger landscape that unites Americans who served their country from the Revolutionary War to the present.

Arlington isn’t just a monument to past wars. A visit to the cemetery’s 639 acres is an exercise in active remembrance. Though it commemorates the dead, Arlington is a living place that conducts about 30 funeral services and 12 wreath-laying ceremonies a day. That’s nearly 3,000 ceremonies each year that are conducted without incident, according to an Army spokesperson.

2. Arlington does not allow the grounds to be used for politics.

Long-established rules govern who can take photos and film at the cemetery. Those rules are written into federal law and Army directives.

Army regulations state: “Filming or photographing will not be permitted if it conveys the impression that cemetery officials or any visitor or family member is endorsing any product, service or organization. Additionally, ANC will not authorize any filming for partisan, political or fundraising purposes.”

It’s not just blatant partisan activity that is forbidden but anything that gives the impression of partisan or political activities. That means you can’t film an ad for your favorite cola, personal-injury lawyer or politician on those sacred grounds. It’s not just Army regulations that govern the matter, but the Hatch Act, which is federal law. And these rules and laws apply to everyone — including vice presidents and former presidents.

Those rules are drawn up with military exactitude. Every media engagement is coordinated with cemetery staff and officials well in advance, and the staff makes sure people know the rules before events begin.

Arlington officials said they informed all participants in Trump’s visit of the long-standing rules and regulations.

3. Trump’s team violated the rules.

Trump’s visit was part of a wreath-laying ceremony organized by the family of a service member killed by a suicide bomber during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. (Family members of those killed in war are known as Gold Star families. Family members of those serving in the military are known as Blue Star families.)

After the wreath-laying ceremony, Trump went with Gold Star families to a part of the cemetery called Section 60. At some point, according to Arlington officials, a cemetery staffer intervened to make sure Trump’s team was adhering to media rules. Neither the Army nor Trump’s team has made clear what prompted the intervention but Army officials have said a member of Trump’s team pushed the cemetery staffer aside when she attempted to “assure adherence to these rules.”

Rather than continue to actively enforce the rules, the staffer who’d been pushed chose to minimize disruption to the cemetery. Her mandate was to respect not only the families hosting the president, but also everyone else visiting the cemetery and the overall dignity of the place.

As a presidential candidate, Trump currently travels with a pool of press photographers. Those photographers did not take pictures of much of his visit in accordance with the cemetery’s rules. That’s why there’s no readily available video or photographs of the altercation.

Trump’s campaign also has its own photographer. In an email, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump’s photographer was authorized by Arlington officials to accompany Trump on the visit, and a post he published on X said Trump's team could include a "photographer and/or videographer."

Trump’s campaign has said it is prepared to release video that will exonerate it. However, Cheung did not respond to requests to provide video of the altercation and instead provided videos of military family members supporting Trump and a link to a Trump social media post with the former president saying there was “no conflict or ‘fighting’ at Arlington,” despite the campaign’s previous acknowledgment that some sort of incident took place.

Any argument the Trump team could have made that the campaign photographer wasn’t filming for political purposes was belied when the Trump campaign posted the photos and video on social media and other sites affiliated with his campaign after the event.

Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita insulted the Army further by sending out a social media post of footage from the ceremony with the note that he was “hoping to trigger the hacks” in the Army.

The Army spokesperson, who responded to emails on condition of anonymity, said the service considers the matter closed.

4. Gold Star families can’t change the rules.

Nobody has the power to change or bend Arlington’s rules — not even the family members of the fallen.

Arlington is a place to honor those who have died — people who can no longer voice their beliefs, opinions or preferences. We can’t know whether those men and women buried at Arlington would support any particular political candidate. This is one of the reasons the rules are in place.

If a single family can grant permission for Trump to campaign today in the cemetery then there’s nothing to stop a family from giving permission for another candidate to do the same thing tomorrow. Who’s to stop a family from saying they give permission to do just about anything they want in the cemetery?

Gold Star families can bury their loved ones anywhere. When they choose Arlington they make an active decision to adhere to the rules, regulations and laws of the place. In fact, the reason families choose to bury their kin in Arlington is, in large part, because of those long-established rules and norms. To be interred in Arlington Cemetery is to become part of something larger than oneself and one’s family.

When a family chooses to break established regulations and to use their loved one’s headstone as part of a political exhibition, they’re betraying the very reasons they chose to have their service member buried in Arlington. They’re ignoring the graves to the left and right of their loved one. They’re disregarding all the other people who are visiting the cemetery.

5. These rules matter most in Section 60.

Section 60 is where the war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. It’s the section in Arlington where the most recent generation of troops is memorialized.

When you go to Arlington you find all sorts of people visiting on a given day. You see tourists looking for history, visitors from other countries and Amercians who are just interested in seeing the famous cemetery.

But in Section 60 you find wives, husbands, mothers and fathers. You’ll find sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and comrades who fought in conflict alongside those who now lie beneath the white-marble headstones.

Arlington’s Section 60 is where you find people who come to the cemetery not to reconnect with a lost and distant memory, but to make sure their own recent memories remain alive.

In Section 60, any unauthorized photo op likely includes headstones of someone whose immediate relatives still remember them as a living, breathing person. It includes visitors and the headstones of troops who might not want to be in a political photo op.

For this reason, in addition to the ban on using photos for political purposes Arlington regulations require organized media to get permission from the next of kin before photographing headstones. The family of at least one deceased service member has objected to his headstone appearing in the photos distributed by the Trump campaign.

Cheung did not respond to questions about whether the campaign sought or received authorization to film headstones, including in Section 60.

Confusion is a hallmark of the Trump campaign apparatus: Create a hubbub, raise questions about what actually happened and in the fog of it all get away with an unprecedented breaking of long-held norms. The confusion over Arlington isn’t a byproduct of that effort, it’s at the center of it.

For a former president who received multiple draft deferrals during a time of war, reverence for Arlington cemetery and the Americans buried there might not make sense. This is the man who reportedly referred to the war dead as “suckers and losers” and recently said the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top medal for combat valor, wasn’t as good as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian honor that’s been turned into a bauble that any president can confer on his supporters.

The continued fallout from the Arlington visit shows that many Americans feel differently, that they want to ensure America’s war dead are honored and Arlington’s sancity preserved.

Hackers apparently breached the social media accounts of Lara and Tiffany Trump on Tuesday, distributing what the former president’s son said were two fake posts touting a family cryptocurrency venture.

The posts on the social network X appeared to come from the accounts of Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and Tiffany, the younger of the former president’s two daughters.

Eric Trump quickly declared them a hoax in his own X post.

“This is a scam!!!” Eric Trump said. “@LaraLeaTrump and @TiffanyATrump‘s Twitter profiles have been compromised!!” The posts by Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump were then deleted.

Eric Trump then posted “@twitter was amazing” and the accounts of Lara and Tiffany Trump were locked down “within minutes.”

It was an embarrassing breach for the family considering former President Donald Trump’s close relationship with Elon Musk, who acquired the platform previously known as Twitter in 2022 and supports him in the presidential race.

Both phony posts referenced World Liberty Financial, a Trump family cryptocurrency project that has yet to formally launch. The former president, who has called himself the first ‘crypto president’ and whose campaign is receiving substantial contributions from the industry, teased its announcement in a video released last week.

An official account for World Liberty Financial confirmed the hack in a separate post on X. “ALERT: Lara’s and Tiffany Trump's X accounts have been hacked. Do NOT click on any links or purchase any tokens shared from their profiles,” the company said. “We're actively working to fix this, but please stay vigilant and avoid scams!”

World Liberty has itself been the target of scammers ahead of its launch. The Independent, a British newspaper, reported Monday that cyber criminals have drawn tens of thousands of users to a counterfeit version of the site.

The breach comes nearly a month after the Trump campaign confirmed some of its internal communications were compromised. U.S. intelligence officials said that Iran was responsible for the hacks that targeted officials on the Trump campaign and also to hack the Harris campaign as well.

X had no immediate comment.

Labor Day is a critical mile-marker on the road to the general election, and Kamala Harris has reached it with a slim advantage over Donald Trump. But the former president would still be well within striking distance if the election were held today.

Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.

The polls are extraordinarily tight in all of them, and that isn’t expected to change much over the next nine weeks. In modern presidential elections, where the race stands on Labor Day is usually pretty close to where it ends up once the votes are counted.

Of the seven states that both campaigns have identified as the core Electoral College battlegrounds, Harris leads Trump in three of them — the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — according to multiple polling averages. But those leads are small: In only one state, Wisconsin, does an average show a greater than 3-point margin for the vice president.

In three others — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — the polls are so close that different polling averages have different leaders as of Sunday night.

Only in the remaining swing state — North Carolina, which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 — does the former president lead in all three polling averages: FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, the new data-journalism site from FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. But that lead is only around 1 point.

The three states where Harris has a modest lead would be sufficient to win the presidency if she also wins the traditionally blue states and earns the electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where a Split Ticket/SurveyUSA poll released on Saturday gave her a 5-point lead over Trump.

In short: Harris is narrowly ahead in the Rust Belt — which would be enough to win — but Trump is breathing down her neck. And those are also the states where the polling has been least accurate and specifically underestimated Trump in the past two elections. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Trump in all three states in 2016, only to lose them. And now-President Joe Biden’s prospects looked like a slam dunk going into the 2020 election, but he barely escaped with victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, the candidates are essentially tied in the Sun Belt, where Trump is narrowly leading in the only state he won in the past that’s now up for grabs. That’s a big change from earlier in the summer, when Trump held consistent leads in the Sun Belt states over Biden when he was the presumptive nominee.

The current swing-state dynamic in large part reflects the existing partisanship of the battlefield. The three states in which Harris leads consistently are also where, before Trump’s 2016 victory, Republicans hadn’t won since either 1988 (Michigan and Pennsylvania) or 1984 (Wisconsin). All three also have Democratic governors who won their 2022 races by at least 2.5 percentage points.

Of the four other states, only Nevada — where Republicans haven’t won a presidential election since 2004 or a Senate race since 2012 — is generally considered blue-leaning. The other three have only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate once this century: Arizona (2020), Georgia (2020) and North Carolina (2008).

There are still nine weeks left until Election Day. But battleground state by battleground state, the race is careening toward another close finish.

Here’s the latest polling in the seven most competitive states:

Arizona (11 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +0.2
RealClearPolitics average: Trump +0.5
Silver Bulletin average: Trump +0.5
2020 result: Biden +0.3

Though Trump leads narrowly in two of the three polling averages, the lone high-quality poll conducted after last month’s Democratic convention, from Fox News, showed Harris 1 point ahead of Trump, 50 percent to 49 percent.

Georgia (16 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +0.4
RealClearPolitics average: Trump +0.2
Silver Bulletin average: Harris +1.1
2020 result: Biden +0.2

Another state where Harris led a post-convention Fox News poll last week, by 2 points, but the averages mostly tip ever so slightly toward Trump.

Michigan (15 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +2.4
RealClearPolitics average: Harris +1.1
Silver Bulletin average: Harris +1.9
2020 result: Biden +2.8

Harris leads in the averages, but a survey from in-state pollster EPIC-MRA showed Trump ahead by 1 point.

Nevada (6 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +0.8
RealClearPolitics average: Tie
Silver Bulletin average: Harris +0.8
2020 result: Biden +2.4

Democrats’ fortunes have improved in Nevada, where the post-convention polling generally shows Harris slightly ahead – including a recent Fox News poll giving her a 2-point edge.

North Carolina (16 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Trump +0.4
RealClearPolitics average: Trump +0.6
Silver Bulletin average: Trump +0.3
2020 result: Trump +1.3

The only battleground state where Trump leads in all three averages, but it’s still only by about 1 point — which was also his margin in last week’s Fox News poll.

Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +1.2
RealClearPolitics average: Harris +0.5
Silver Bulletin average: Harris +1.2
2020 result: Biden +1.2

There’s been a dearth of polling in Pennsylvania, where there hasn’t been a high-quality independent survey since the first half of August. Harris leads the averages narrowly, but the race is still exceedingly tight in the most important swing state.

Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)

FiveThirtyEight average: Harris +3.2
RealClearPolitics average: Harris +1.4
Silver Bulletin average: Harris +3.3
2020 result: Biden +0.6

It’s a similar drought in Wisconsin, where Harris led in higher-quality polls conducted earlier in August. Republican-leaning pollsters have the most recent data, which is why outlets that adjust the numbers to account for partisan lean show Harris with a larger lead than those that don’t.

NORTH HAMPTON, New Hampshire — Donald Trump hasn’t set foot in New Hampshire since he won the state’s GOP primary in January. His campaign hasn’t sent a high-profile surrogate here since the spring.

And now, even as they insist he can win here, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters in this blue-leaning swing state are openly saying that his campaign should focus its efforts elsewhere.

“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states” and not in New Hampshire, said Lou Gargiulo, who co-chairs Trump’s campaign in this state. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.”

It’s a marked shift from when New Hampshire was among the bluish battlefields where Trump’s campaign boasted it could expand its electoral map as President Joe Biden faltered. Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said days after the June debate that the party had started to “engage” in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia. A post-debate survey showed Trump had erased Biden’s polling lead in the Granite State, leaving Republicans gleeful and Democrats spooked.

Today, New Hampshire stands as the latest sign of how Trump’s map is constricting in his run against Kamala Harris. A trio of surveys have shown the vice president opening an outside-the-margin-of-error lead over Trump — one that she aimed to cement on Wednesday with a campaign event at a brewery on New Hampshire’s Seacoast where she touted her new plan for small business tax breaks. Race raters have shifted the state to the left. And Republicans here are privately bemoaning the Trump campaign’s lack of investment in this state where Democrats outnumber Republicans in field offices by 17 to 1.

“The Trump campaign does not appear to be matching or contesting” New Hampshire, said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist from the state and former Trump administration appointee.

“Organizationally speaking there have been no visits, no surrogates. They have their institutional support and they’re going to go with it,” said Bartlett. “Whereas Democrats, even with a lead, continue to flood the zone week after week with high-profile people.”

Trump’s campaign insists it is contesting New Hampshire, a state where he has thrice won GOP primaries but lost two consecutive general elections, including by 7 percentage points to Biden in 2020. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign who hails from New Hampshire, said the campaign is “maintaining an offensive posture” here and in the other blue-leaning swing states of Minnesota and Virginia.

“They’re not in our target seven battleground states,” Leavitt said. But New Hampshire is “certainly a state we believe the president can flip red.”

But Harris sought to put Trump on defense on Wednesday, when she touted her latest economic plan to a crowd of more than 3,000 people who waited hours under the blazing sun to see the Democratic nominee — and slammed Trump’s stances on everything from taxes to abortion access.

“We will move forward because ours is a fight for the future and it is a fight for freedom,” Harris said. “And I don’t have to tell the folks in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state — you know the importance of individual freedoms.”

Trump and his allies seized on Harris’ visit as a sign that Democrats were concerned about their standing in a state that hasn’t voted red in a presidential election since 2000 and that prognosticators view as “likely” to vote blue in November.

“Comrade Kamala 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,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will! To my friends in New Hampshire, get out and vote TRUMP.”

And he pledged to return to New Hampshire before the election while calling into a local radio show Wednesday morning.

“It’s a very important place in terms of winning this election. It could come down to New Hampshire. I'll be there,” Trump said.

But Trump put no date on the calendar. Meanwhile, in his absence, Trump’s campaign has not sent a high-profile surrogate to rally the troops here since appearances by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum in April and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds in May — despite requests from the state GOP, according to a person familiar with the conversations granted anonymity to discuss the internal matter.

And his team has done little to expand its official footprint in New Hampshire since the primary. Trump’s campaign maintains its headquarters in Manchester and has “several” paid staff on the ground, Leavitt said — though she declined to specify a number.

“I’m not seeing any organized effort on Trump’s behalf, whatsoever,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chair. “I’m not getting any phone calls automated or otherwise. I’m not seeing a county headquarters.”

Republicans affiliated with Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire argued they are fielding a strong grassroots effort for their party’s nominee in the state. The campaign runs training sessions for volunteers out of its Manchester office and online. Supporters have marched in local parades and staged a boat parade last month on Lake Winnipesaukee.

And there is some benefit to Trump staying away from New Hampshire — at least for another week. Should he visit before Tuesday, the former president would face pressure to put his thumb on the scale in the hotly contested gubernatorial primary. In that race, polls show former state Senate President Chuck Morse, who shares an adviser with one of the super PACs supporting Trump and who is running on his loyalty to the former president, trailing far behind former Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

But after Tuesday, “it would be good of him and [Ohio Sen.] JD Vance to show up,” said Sean Van Anglen, a Republican consultant in the state.

“I have hopes they can win in New Hampshire — but you have to be here. You have to go person to person, you have to have surrogates here, the candidate’s got to be here a few times,” Van Anglen said of the state that prides itself on putting even the highest-profile candidates through the retail-politics ringer. “I know it’s only four electoral votes, but it has played a crucial role in so many presidential elections.”

The paucity of the Trump campaign’s operations in New Hampshire is particularly glaring when contrasted with that of his rivals. Democrats have flooded the state with field offices and dispatched some of the party’s biggest stars — among them: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and, over Labor Day weekend, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna — to launch canvasses and headline fundraisers. Biden visited the state twice after the primary — partly as a mea culpa after a bitter battle between state and national Democrats over the order of this year’s nominating calendar led the president to leave his name off the January ballot (he won the contest on the write-in campaign his allies waged on his behalf).

And on Wednesday, it was Harris’ turn to make the appeal. Standing behind thick panes of glass on a stage erected in the middle of a field ringed by bleachers full of eager supporters, she professed adoration for the state — “it’s so good to be back in New Hampshire” — and urged her backers to treat her campaign as the “underdog” against Trump.

“This race is going to be tight until the very end,” Harris said. But “we are up to the task. And with your help, we will win in November.”

Vice President Kamala Harris is just barely pulling ahead of former President Donald Trump in the battleground states, according to CNN/SSRS polls released Wednesday.

Harris polls above Trump in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, the poll found — though her slight lead is either within or just barely outside the margin of error. The candidates are tied at 47 percent in Pennsylvania, and Trump leads Harris by 5 points in Arizona.

Across the battleground states, Trump polled above Harris when voters were asked which candidate they trusted more to handle the economy and immigration. Both are major liabilities for Harris’ campaign, and Trump and his surrogates have continuously bashed her vice presidency as one that saw major inflation and a worsening crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Harris polled above Trump when it came to protecting democracy and on abortion and reproductive rights, two issues upon which Harris has built her campaign as she seeks to define herself as a foil to Trump, who set in motion the overturn of the federal right to abortion and denied losing the election in 2020.

In Arizona, 62 percent of likely voters said they would support a state constitutional amendment creating the fundamental right to abortion, according to the poll.

Fifty percent or more of the likely voters across the battleground states said Trump’s views and policies were too extreme. Just under half said the same about Harris, whose momentum the Trump campaign is trying to slow with television ads calling her “dangerously liberal.”

Democratic Senate candidates are running slightly ahead of Harris in the battleground states. In Nevada, the poll shows Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen leading GOP nominee Sam Brown outside the margin of error, 50 percent to 40 percent. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, respectively, have slight leads over their Republican opponents. The races in Arizona and Pennsylvania are inside the margin of error; in Pennsylvania, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and GOP candidate Dave McCormick are dead even, just like the presidential race there.

The poll was conducted for CNN by the independent firm SSRS Research between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29. A total of 4,398 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found from a registration-based sample were surveyed online and by phone. The margin of error varied by state from plus or minus 4.5 percentage points to plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

A version of this first appeared in The Recast, POLITICO’s race and politics newsletter.

Charlamagne tha God is changing his tune.

The radio personality, a perpetual critic of Democrats and their tactics in taking on Donald Trump, told POLITICO in January that the presidential contest was shaping up to be a competition between “the cowards, the crooks and the couch.” Those were gutting words from an influential man whose show, “The Breakfast Club,” reaches 8 million people, many of whom are Black and brown — and exactly the voters Democrats need to shore up before November.

But ever since President Joe Biden was cast aside in favor of Kamala Harris, Charlamagne has watched the party shed what he alludes to as their spinelessness. And he’s all in on the vice president, though he contends he’s not telling his listeners how to vote this year.

Despite growing close with Harris during her time as a junior senator from California — and even stumping for her on the trail back in 2019 — they hit a rough patch. Earlier this year, he called Biden a lousy messenger and said he felt burned by Harris after she was tapped as running mate: “Once they got in the White House, she … kind of disappeared.”

But they’ve now appeared to have reconciled, and Charlamagne — who’s had at least one in-person conversation with the new Democratic nominee since her ascension — praised her for showing her full, true self to American voters.

There are, of course, some qualms left on how exactly she’ll mobilize enough Black voters this year and how she’ll answer for her record. We talk to Charlamagne about all that — and why he anticipates Harris will “dog walk” Trump in next week’s televised presidential debate.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When our story originally ran in January, you were adamant about not endorsing during this presidential campaign. Clearly a lot has changed with Harris now atop the ticket and you’ve since thrown your support behind her.

How do you reconcile this? And is this change in your stance, as the kids say, an example of you not standing on business? 

No. I feel like all my issues I had with the Biden-Harris administration were because of Joe Biden.

I personally didn't believe Joe Biden could have won. And clearly others, including himself, came to that conclusion, long after I did.

Now, when we talk about the vice president, I was frustrated because I expected more, because of my belief in her.

I know the role of the vice president is a complementary role, and she's there to help the president with his agenda. But these are unprecedented times. So I felt like we needed her to step up because Biden simply couldn't do it.

You previously told me you felt burned by Harris during her time as vice president. You don't feel like this is you going back on your word? To you, this is simply a remaking of the Democratic Party, which you’ve been calling for?

Absolutely. You can go back and watch me and the vice president's conversation when she was on my late night talk show, “Tha God's Honest Truth.” Everybody always talks about her going in on me when I asked her who was the real president, Joe Manchin or Joe Biden. But also underlying that conversation is me saying to her, “You can be that superhero that can save this democracy.” She needed to pivot now with her language and start being that person that I first saw back in 2017, when I was watching her in the Senate hearings.

But the one thing I will tell you, Brakkton, is I'm not going to tell nobody who to vote for. That's what I'm not going to do.

That's something I did back in 2020. And that's what made me feel burned.

There were a lot of my listeners who were like: “You told us to vote for this administration because this was going to happen and that was going to happen. And some of those things didn't happen.”

[Biden-Harris did pass] the American Rescue Plan funding [for] Durham, North Carolina’s Black Wall Street ... [the] $35 cap on insulin and $588 million to improve maternal health. But they fell short in promising things they knew they didn’t have the votes to deliver: the George Floyd Policing Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — and the administration fell short by not treating Donald Trump like he was an actual threat to democracy.

You also said that Harris was “handcuffed” in the Biden administration. Can you explain what you meant by that? Do you see the handcuffs being removed now that she's the standard-bearer for the Democrats? 

So when I say handcuffs, it's really just the position the vice presidency puts you in — sort of that complementary role.

Yet we were in such unprecedented times and Democrats, including Harris, were serving as this crew of Avengers to protect old Captain America.

Democrats have always been the party of cowards, especially in recent times when it comes to Donald Trump. But it took a lot of balls and a lot of courage from a lot of different people to say, “Yo, President Biden, you got to go.” We don't see that from Democrats too often.

Let's turn to the upcoming presidential debate. Clearly, we saw how much one debate can alter the trajectory of a political campaign. How critical of a moment is this for the vice president?

I wouldn't even ask how critical is it for the vice president. I’d ask, how critical is it for Donald Trump? 

I'm a person that believes Donald Trump doesn't even want to run anymore. I just think he's trying to survive because of all of the criminal convictions he's facing. ... Now, mind you, I'm a person that doesn't believe he'll ever see prison because I just don't believe America has any systems in place to punish that level of white privilege.

Now, to go back to your question. I think Vice President Kamala Harris will dog walk Donald Trump in a debate. There really is no way he can win.

Let's just say it's a fair debate, they both respect each other, give each other the room to talk and respectfully disagree. If it goes like that, Kamala wins hands down because all Trump is going to do is lie, and Kamala is going to hit him with facts, and she's going to hit him with policy.

So the only thing Trump will be able to attempt to do is overpower her, talk over her, interrupt her, insult her. And if he does that, she still wins because he's going to look like a mad man.

So you're not worried about former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard being in the debate prep with Donald Trump? She made a couple of attacks on Harris in the 2019 presidential debates for prosecuting hundreds of Californians for weed charges as state attorney general while also admitting, on your program, that she previously smoked cannabis.

One thing that the vice president seems like she doesn't like to do is explain herself. When you go back and watch that Tulsi Gabbard thing, it was almost like Harris was just like: “You're telling such a blatant lie, why would I even dignify that with a response?”

But in those moments, you have to, because the American people are watching.

She needs to look at it as: “I'm not explaining this to you, Trump.” More like, “I'm setting the record straight.”

You have been frustrated with the Biden administration for not doing more on marijuana legalization and pardoning. So far, we've really not heard much from Harris or Tim Walz on this issue. And certainly, you're hearing Trump’s attacks about Harris locking up Black men.

Which is inaccurate, by the way.

Well, I was going to ask you about that because I've seen you pushing back on those critiques with your social media posts. Do you need to hear more on this issue from the Harris-Walz campaign?

When the vice president and I talked about the legalization of marijuana, she said we need to legalize it and she said she was for studying the effects of marijuana on people.

I highly doubt her position has changed in 2024, especially when she comes from a state where marijuana is legal, recreational and medicinal. And Tim Walz comes from Minnesota, where it's, you know, also legal.

The reason I thought President Biden should [pardon marijuana offenses] is because he is a person who was responsible for so many bills, especially drug legislation that threw a lot of Black and brown people under the bus, whether it was the1986 mandatory minimum sentencing or that 1994 crime bill.

He could have done that with a stroke of a pen — pardoned everybody who was in prison on a federal level with nonviolent marijuana charges. Or he could have taken it a step further and did nonviolent drug offenses.

In the past, you shared with me that you back channeled with the vice president, but that there had been a bit of a falling out in your relationship. Have you spoken to her since she's been at the top of the ticket?

Yes.

Can you share details about the conversation?

There's always been lines of communication open. That's one thing I can honestly say about her is she checks on folks, and she is a person that has always kept lines of communication open with me. Even earlier this year, we've seen each other, we've shared space.

Has she expressed interest in having you out on the campaign trail with her again, like you did in 2019?

Not at all, actually. It's literally just catch-ups.

One of my biggest frustrations with politics, period [is]: You get to know a person personally, and then the cameras turn on and you’re like, “Who the hell is this individual?” Like, “This isn't the person I speak to.” But what has been a pleasant thing to me since she’s been at the top of the ticket: The person she's showing up as in the media is her true, authentic self.

When we saw her in, I think it was Michigan, when she stopped the protesters and she was like, “You want Donald Trump to be president? Keep doing what you do.” Like that is really her.

So yeah, I think it's going be a good thing if she wins in November because I think the Democratic Party as a whole, they really do have to continue to answer to America, but they really have to answer to Black voters.

There are a lot [of] Black people who feel like we've over-delivered for Democrats and Democrats, historically, they've under-delivered for us.

How does the Harris campaign go about mobilizing Black voters?

She definitely needs to answer questions from Black people, you know? We saw her sit down with [CNN’s] Dana Bash last [week] and it was cool. I think it was a little bit overhyped, but it's because she hasn't sat down and done a lot of interviews.

One thing that Donald Trump is able to do that I give him a lot of credit for: He talks to so many people that there's so much Donald Trump messaging just out there. So what the vice president needs to do is she needs to go out there. Talk to a lot of people and really utilize Black media. So when people have these questions about her record and about what it is that she's done, they can go right there and look it up.

Accepting his party’s nomination in 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale vowed to cut the deficit with a memorable line about the tough medicine either he or Ronald Reagan would have to administer to the country.

“Let's tell the truth,” Mondale said, “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.”

Now, as Labor Day marks the final stretch of another presidential campaign, it’s time for another round of truth-telling.

The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly. GOP leaders won’t tell you that on the record. I just did.

Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.

Harris is less a doctrinaire progressive than she is up for grabs on policy, but any liberal course she takes would be constrained by a GOP-held Senate. No, that’s not a sure thing, but it’s the safest electoral bet in this turbulent election. What is virtually certain come January is that conservatives will have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, which will also serve as a check on the law and rulemaking coming out of a Democratic White House.

Harris is effectively an emergency nominee, has few policy proposals, scant governing history in Washington and a history of churning through staff. Oh, and she would be the first Democrat to enter the presidency since 1884 without majorities in both chambers, should Republicans flip the Senate.

That adds up to a recipe for gridlock — and perhaps some deal-making to fund the government and avoid across-the-board tax hikes — but not a Scandinavian social welfare state.

2026 would represent the sixth year of one party holding the presidency, always a promising midterm for the opposition. Those conditions, along with a diminished, twice-defeated Trump, would make it easier for Republicans to recruit Senate candidates.

Consider just the governors: Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu would all be prime targets for Senate Republicans. As one GOP senator put it to me in hoping for Trump’s defeat: Who do you think would have a tougher 2026 reelection, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) under Harris or Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) under Trump?

A Democratic House majority would also be far easier for Republicans to reverse under Harris than Trump. And the GOP would almost certainly find more success in the 36 governors’ races taking place that year if they were running against the so-called six-year-itch.

For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole.

One high-level Republican, conceding it may only be “wishful thinking,” even floated the idea of a Harris victory followed by Biden pardons of both his son, Hunter, and Trump. That would take the issue of both cases off Harris’ plate and, more to the point, drain the energy behind Trump’s persecution complex so that Republicans can get on with the business of winning elections.

The broader question among Republicans: Would it be best to endure a Harris presidency to keep Trump out of power, likely for good? Or is the better way to hasten his departure from the scene for him to win so that he could only serve one more term and be done for certain in 2028?

The argument for the second of these cases being that, should he lose this year, he would once again insist he was cheated and hold out the possibility of a fourth consecutive bid, prolonging the party’s capture.

Now, this is the point to acknowledge that none of these scenarios will prove tidy, or perhaps even feasible.

As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.

And if their voters aren’t looking for a reformation, well, the would-be Martin Luthers of the GOP will fare about as well as John Boehner, who liked to say: "A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk." (This must be the first time a founder of Protestantism and the well-tanned former speaker have been used in the same sentence.)

“You’re assuming Republicans have a top of the ticket problem and not a voter base problem,” said Terry Sullivan, a former GOP strategist. “It’s not like our leaders have been leading the voters to the wilderness against the voters’ judgment.”

Would the vast majority of Republican activists suddenly embrace their own version of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed Democrats toward the center after their repeated losses in the 1980s? Probably not.

Many would stew in fetid waters, believing their nominee was somehow cheated when the Democrats swapped in Harris for President Joe Biden. Those conspiracies would be nourished by, well, Trump himself and surely flourish in the closed-off information channels in which so many on the right confine themselves.

So, yes, moving past Trump in the aftermath of another defeat will hardly be easy.

But it’s essential if Republicans want to become a viable national party once more.

Just consider the history. The party has won the national popular vote only once since 1992 — and that was in 2004, when George W. Bush was running as a commander-in-chief during two wars. Bush tallied 50.7 percent of the vote, besting John Kerry by 2.4 points.

Twenty years later, Republicans have captured the presidency just once, when Trump won narrowly thanks to two third-party candidates siphoning votes. But he only netted 46 percent of the vote in 2016 and just under 47 percent in 2020.

It's not just Trump, though, it’s also the down-ballot candidates he’s foisted upon the party. Republicans vastly underperformed a promising midterm in 2022 in part because of below-replacement-level figures he elevated. And they may lose winnable races again this year — think the Senate race in Arizona and governor’s race in North Carolina — because Republicans have become overly captive to candidates in his image.

This is not all to say things are hunky-dory for Democrats. But that’s the point. Their precarious coalition is entirely dependent on sharing a common enemy, Trump, and has been for nearly a decade. Why do Republicans want to keep propping up their opposition?

The day after Trump leaves the scene, Democrats will lose their best force for unity, fundraising and enthusiasm. But they’ll have the same challenges they do today with the Electoral College, the Senate and the House and the distribution of voters therein.

Of course, it won’t be easy to kick the habit. Millions of Republican voters don’t want to go to rehab. And GOP leaders, as former Representative Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.) put it, “live in fear that their base is going to desert them.”

But the Republican who forges a hybrid coalition — a modern-day conservative fusionism — between the pre-Trump party and his enthusiasts will be rewarded. No, it can’t be anti-Trump. But it must be post-Trump.

The best case for Trump’s defeat may, predictably, be Trump himself. He’s incoherent on abortion rights, unable even to appear at a cemetery without creating a political mess and is so bothered by those who’ve suffered the wounds of war that he slights Medal of Honor recipients. And, running against a female opponent, he's pushing blowjob jokes about her and his last female opponent.

And that’s just the last two weeks.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s routine self-sabotage, mocking his advisers’ attempt to keep him on message, refusing to learn the basics of issues over nine years after he entered politics and making little effort to appeal to those in his own party who are uneasy with him.

To repurpose another resonant political line from yesteryear, Republicans should ask themselves: Had Enough?

Some of the House GOP’s most vulnerable members told Speaker Mike Johnson in a private GOP call on Wednesday that they’re worried his spending strategy heightens the risk of an electorally damaging government shutdown.

During a private, 30-minute call with GOP lawmakers Wednesday, Johnson laid out his plan to quickly pass a spending bill that would punt the current Oct. 1 shutdown deadline into March. He’s also going to attach legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. It’s the exact strategy pushed by House conservatives, and will almost certainly be rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Right now, it’s not even clear it has enough GOP support to pass the House.

New York Rep. Nick LaLota, a vulnerable first-term Republican, asked Johnson on the call what the speaker would do if the Senate rejected that package and instead sent back a straightforward funding bill without the voting policy proposal, known as the SAVE Act. LaLota argued that allowing a shutdown would mean 10 vulnerable GOP incumbents lose their races in November — enough that Republicans would lose control of the House — according to two people on the call.

The speaker declined to answer how he would respond in that situation, saying he didn’t want his plans to leak to the press. He also argued: You don’t go into a fight planning to fail.

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), whom Democrats are also targeting in November, also pressed leadership during the call and sought clarity about the strategy behind the funding plan, a person familiar with her comments confirmed. She asked: "How long do we take this? Is the intent to message ‘Dems oppose SAVE,’ but are we going to take this to a shutdown?"

It’s a familiar House Republican fight, but the political stakes are significantly higher this time. Vulnerable members don’t want to flirt with a shutdown so close to the election, especially when the ultimate outcome — a clean spending bill with no policy bills attached — feels inevitable. Plus, with centrists nervous about prompting a shutdown and some conservatives planning to oppose the spending bill regardless of policy riders, the strategy could mean Johnson and House Republicans tee up a bill that can’t even pass their own chamber.

Johnson outlined his thinking for taking that risk on the call, arguing that Congress would need another six months to reconcile the $100-billion difference between Republican House and Democratic Senate leaders on topline spending numbers. If they kicked the deadline into December as Democrats want, Johnson argued, they’d likely just need another short-term patch and have to deal with a spending fight at Christmas. And attaching the SAVE Act was important to show Republican voters that the party cares about elections, he said.

Plus, the speaker noted a new March deadline could give former President Donald Trump the chance to influence spending, if he wins the presidency.

Republican leaders want to put the conservative-favored stopgap government funding bill on the floor for a vote next week. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) told lawmakers on the call that he’ll start whipping the funding plan on Monday night, when his team will meet in person for the first time since late July.

Most Republicans on the appropriations committee, as well as some members of leadership, also prefer a stopgap bill that goes into early December. Still, many are unlikely to buck Johnson on the floor.

Those governing-minded Republicans aren’t planning to oppose a short-term funding patch, known as a continuing resolution or a CR, that includes the SAVE Act, at least not yet. But they view it as an opening move Johnson is making to placate spending-weary conservatives, not as an actual solution. Ultimately, they have no interest in shutting down the government or getting into a preelection standoff with Democrats.

“You realize the federal law already says that … you have to be a citizen to vote. So, from my perspective, I hope it doesn't hold up the funding,” said Rep. Larry Buschon (R-Ind.).

“I think that ultimately we will … pass a clean CR into early December.”

Further complicating matters, Johnson could also face pushback from his right flank on his funding plan. Some conservatives vowed last year to oppose any short-term funding patch — a dynamic that could easily tank the GOP’s vote count, especially if centrists aren’t on board.

The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus last month called on leadership to tee up a continuing resolution into early 2025 with the voting bill attached, taking an official position that requires the support of 80 percent of its members. But some members who oppose any stop-gap funding bill are privately complaining about that position, according to a person familiar, granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), a Freedom Caucus member who is retiring from Congress, appeared to hint at that frustration on Wednesday, predicting that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would just reject any spending bill House Republicans pass that includes their proposal on non-citizen voting.

“He will reject it when tied to a CR,” he said in a post on X. “We should be focusing on passing ALL 12 appropriations bills!”

A spokesperson for Rosendale said that the Montana Republican “has always been and continues to be against any form of a CR.”

Still, conservatives who support the spending strategy are hoping that Trump will bring some skeptics over to their side. They also argue some of the anti-CR sentiments last year were driven by animosity toward then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

OTTAWA — New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh has “ripped up” a deal that has propped up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Parliament since 2022, throwing the timing of Canada’s next election into question.

The move loosens Trudeau’s grip, but not enough to immediately send Canadians to the polls.

“The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people,” Singh said in a video posted on his social media accounts. “They cannot be the change. They cannot restore the hope. They cannot stop the Conservatives, but we can.”

Tearing up the deal does not mean an election is imminent or that Trudeau’s minority government is about to fall. The Liberals will be forced to seek vote-by-vote support from the NDP or Bloc Québécois. Even then, they could be forced to resign if they lose what’s known as a vote of confidence in Parliament.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Wednesday if Singh is serious, he should immediately commit to voting at the earliest opportunity to trigger an election over the Trudeau government’s landmark environmental policy, a controversial carbon-pricing system.

Singh’s party, which has struggled to gain traction in the polls while it propped up the unpopular government, is jettisoning the pact in a bid to position itself competitively ahead of the next election.

Many observers had expected the race to kick off in the fall 2025. Now, Singh’s announcement has Ottawa’s political class in speculation overdrive about the chances a campaign could start much sooner.

The NDP is currently competing in two hotly contested off-cycle electoral races. It is vying to snatch one seat from the Liberals in Montreal, Quebec, and to defend another from the Conservatives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Voters will head to the polls in the two federal by-elections on Sept. 16, just as Parliament returns for the fall.

Singh’s announcement comes just days before Trudeau huddles with his caucus ahead of the fall legislative sitting.

Trudeau said Wednesday that he’s “not focused on politics” and hopes an election won’t come until next fall.

But he also used a press conference to fire off a few shots.

“I certainly hope that the NDP will stay true to its fundamental values, which is making sure Canadians get the support they need and keeping away the austerity, the cuts and the damage that will be done by Conservatives if they get the chance,” the prime minister said.

The NDP has supported the Liberals since March 2022 when the two parties inked a cooperative pact, called a supply and confidence agreement.

Under the deal, the two parties have championed legislation for new social programming, such as dental care and pharmacare, and banned the use of replacement workers in federally regulated workspaces.

The arrangement, which was set to expire in June 2025, had promised Trudeau a smooth ride in Parliament. Entering the fall session, the deal had mostly run its course and the NDP had extracted about as much as it could on policy.

In a break with President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris called Wednesday for a smaller capital gains tax increase on the rich than he’s proposed.

Harris would hike the top total rate on people making more than $1 million to 33 percent, including a special 5 percent surcharge, well below the nearly 45 percent levy Biden has pitched.

“We will tax capital gains at a rate that rewards investments in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses,” she said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

“When the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.”

Harris had previously endorsed Biden’s slate of tax increases, including his plan to nearly double the top long-term capital gains rate on the highest earners to 44.6 percent from 23.8 percent.

It’s one of nearly $2 trillion in tax increases Biden has proposed on the wealthy.

Her shift toward what her campaign considers a more “moderate” capital gains increase comes ahead of her first debate with former President Donald Trump, and as Republicans try to paint her as a creature of the extreme left.

It's also part of an effort to woo business owners, with Harris separately calling for start-up firms to be allowed to deduct more of their costs. She also proposed creating a type of standard deduction for businesses.

And it prefaces a major debate next year in Washington over the future of the tax code, when big chunks of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts will expire, and taxing the rich will be a key issue.

Harris’ rethink of Biden’s plan may disappoint some progressives who have been anxious to more steeply hike taxes on capital gains, a key source of income for people at the very top of the income ladder. Capital gains frequently comprise more than half the income of those reporting making more than $10 million.

At the same time, though, Biden’s capital gains proposal likely goes well beyond what many congressional Democrats would be willing to support.

It's also possible that Harris’ plan may still be too much for some Democrats. In 2021, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, they considered increasing the capital gains tax rate to 28.3 percent before dropping the idea.

Biden has proposed requiring people making more than $1 million to pay taxes on capital gains — which include things like appreciation in the value of stocks — at ordinary income tax rates, instead of a special preferential rate. He has also proposed raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent and increasing an investment surcharge on high earners to 5 percent from 3.8 percent.

Harris would hike the top base rate on capital gains to 28 percent, while keeping Biden’s increased investment add-on tax.

She backs Biden’s other proposals to increase levies on high earners and large companies.

“Billionaires and big corporations must pay their fair share,” Harris said Wednesday.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called the shooting at a Georgia high school an “outrageous” and “senseless tragedy,” telling a crowd in New Hampshire that gun violence is one of the issues at stake this November.

“This is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies, and it’s just outrageous that everyday in our country, in the United States of America, that parents have to send their children to school, worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It’s senseless,” Harris said.

“We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Yet Harris, who has regularly called for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, did not mention any specific policy changes in her remarks.

Harris addressed the shooting during a campaign event in New Hampshire, hours after a shooter opened fire Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta. At least four people are dead and an additional nine have been taken to hospitals with injuries, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The suspect is alive and in custody.

The tragedy came just weeks into the high school’s new school year, making it the 385th mass shooting of this year, in which four or more people were injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The vice president, who was briefed on the incident before leaving Washington, has been heavily involved in the White House’s response to gun violence. President Joe Biden tapped her to lead the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which helps coordinate policy across the federal government, aid communities in the aftermath of a tragedy and identify new executive actions while gun safety legislation remains stalled in Congress.

Harris on Wednesday said that during her monthlong tour of college campuses last year she heard from young voters who told her about their experiences with active shooter drills — now routine practice in American schools.

“Our kids are sitting in a classroom where they should be fulfilling their God-given potential, and some part of their big beautiful brain is concerned about a shooter busting through the door of the classroom. It does not have to be this way,” Harris said.

Ahead of Harris’ event, Biden called the shooting a “horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart.” He noted that’s why he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, established the White House guns office and announced dozens of executive actions since taking office.

“Republicans in Congress must finally say ‘enough is enough’ and work with Democrats to pass common-sense gun safety legislation. We must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines once again, require safe storage of firearms, enact universal background checks, and end immunity for gun manufacturers,” he said in a statement. “These measures will not bring those who were tragically killed today back, but it will help prevent more tragic gun violence from ripping more families apart.”

The Justice Department has seized more than 30 web domains that it said were part of a broader, ongoing, surreptitious effort by the Russian government to influence the 2024 U.S. election and American public opinion, federal authorities announced Wednesday.

The seized sites were linked to a Russian campaign known as “Doppelganger,” one of the most prolific and public campaigns spreading disinformation linked to Moscow in recent years. Experts recently saw evidence of the campaign spreading Russian disinformation related to the failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, and the Biden administration has worked to counter the campaign's efforts in recent months.

The legal actions, which also included the indictment of two Russian employees of the Kremlin-backed media outlet RT, underscored previous warnings this year by the Biden administration that foreign adversaries are looking to interfere in the upcoming vote. The new details about the Russian efforts are likely to increase concerns about continuing interference by foreign governments as the U.S. presidential campaign enters its final stretch.

“The Justice Department's message is clear: We have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic system of government,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference announcing the crackdown.

Russia has targeted American elections with disinformation for years, most notably during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russia was linked to disinformation campaigns designed to sway the vote toward Trump. In response to a reporter’s question, Garland said the Kremlin’s aim has not changed.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said he hopes the countermeasures against the Russian propaganda drive will deter other U.S. adversaries, such as China and Iran, from meddling in the election.

“Knock it off,” Wray said.

Garland added: “We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia and Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.”

The 32 seized websites used domain names similar to those for prominent U.S. news sources like The Washington Post and Fox News, but directed unwitting readers to Russian-produced content that typically fueled Russian-government narratives or sought to foment division in the U.S., Garland said. Some were explicitly focused on the upcoming U.S. election, officials said.

“They were fake sites,” Garland said. “They were filled with Russian government propaganda that had been created by the Kremlin to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests and influence voters in the United States and in other countries.”

In addition, the State Department on Wednesday announced it is cracking down on operations of RT’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya and its subsidiary companies, and would be instituting a new visa restriction policy aimed at these groups. It also announced a $10 million reward for information on individuals involved in RT-linked Russian hacking group RaHDit.

The Treasury Department took further steps against the RaHDit group, sanctioning almost a dozen individuals linked to the group, including Aleksey Alekseyevich Garashchenko, a former Russian intelligence official who leads the group. In addition, top figures at RT were sanctioned, including RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan.

The Russians dubbed a campaign to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 as “The Good Old U.S.A. Project,” according to a planning document the FBI said it obtained and included in a court filing supporting the seizure. The project’s organizers developed messaging for voters in six swing states, and aimed to use targeted social media advertising to track its impact. A key message of the project, according to the affidavit: “that the US should target their effort towards addressing its domestic issues instead of wasting money in Ukraine and other ‘problem’ regions.”

In addition to the “Doppelganger” domains, the project established look-alike pages on Facebook for major western news outlets, using names like “CNN California” and “California BBC,” U.S. officials said.

The Justice Department alleged that Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko was behind the effort. Kiriyenko is the former prime minister of Russia, and currently is a top official in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration, playing a leading role in administering seized Ukrainian territory.

Garland called Kiriyenko a member of Putin’s “inner circle.”

This is not the first foreign interference effort aimed at U.S. elections this year. The announcement came weeks after the Iranian government was linked to a hack and leak operation against the Trump presidential campaign, and after similar targeting of the campaigns of President Joe Biden and of Vice President Kamala Harris was disclosed. On Tuesday night, the accounts of members of Trump’s family on social media platform X were also compromised. 

“Russia is not the only foreign power trying to interfere in our elections,” Garland said. “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity in this election cycle.”

The Justice Department also announced criminal charges against two Russians, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, accused them of continuing to covertly distribute media sponsored by RT in the U.S. even after that outlet formally shut down its U.S. operations following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That campaign involved placing videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube, prosecutors said.

An indictment unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan charges the two Russians with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering.

“While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia' s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment says.

A parliamentary majority and martial law mean the Ukrainian president has the right to assemble his government as he sees fit, but the opposition is crying foul.

© Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

Florida now allows chaplains in public schools. Oklahoma and Texas are looking to infuse Bible lessons into curricula. And Louisiana wants to set up Ten Commandments displays in classrooms.

But these efforts to push Christianity into public schools are hitting a wall of hostility in conservative-led states, including lawsuits, protests and resistance from local officials.

The clash of religion, politics and local control represents an unusual challenge for a spreading education policy model led by influential conservative leaders. And it’s sparking a legal fight over the separation of church and state that could end up before the conservative-controlled Supreme Court.

Republican officials including Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Oklahoma state school Superintendent Ryan Walters are welcoming legal challenges, defending their policies and demanding local schools fall in line. Even former President Donald Trump has offered support for posting the Ten Commandments in public schools.

But a diverse range of opponents — including local school officials, civil rights organizations and the Satanic Temple — hope to stymie these initiatives.

“What we're trying to do, honestly, is protect the religious freedoms of all of our students … from being improperly indoctrinated by teachers or by schools,” said Rob Miller, superintendent of the Bixby Public Schools district near Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is defying orders from Walters to incorporate the Bible and Ten Commandments into school curriculum. “There's enough court precedent and historical evidence to show that the separation of church and state has worked well for quite a long time.”

State lawmakers from both major parties introduced more than 650 bills tied to religion in education this year, according to a report by Quorum, a software company that tracks legislation. But the movement for religious instruction in public schools is overwhelmingly driven by conservative Republicans. They argue kids can’t understand Western civilization without learning about Christianity and benefit from the lessons of biblical teachings.

“If we start from a moral perspective, then maybe we’d have a little bit more peace in our society and in this country,” Landry told reporters in August while defending his state’s embattled Ten Commandments law. “Many religions share and recognize the Ten Commandments as a whole. So, really and truly, I don’t see what the whole big fuss is about.”

Wary of Florida’s chaplain program

DeSantis has championed a new Florida law that allows religious chaplains in schools, saying that a bit of “soulcraft” could “make all the difference in the world” to some students.

But, so far, school boards are not creating chaplain programs, citing fears of possible religious freedom lawsuits if they restrict access to organizations like the Satanic Temple. Recognized by the IRS as a religious group, the Satanic Temple has been loudly declaring its intent to flood Florida with chaplains against the wishes of DeSantis, who has vowed to keep them out.

Osceola County, a left-leaning enclave in central Florida, has been on the cusp of becoming the state’s first school district to allow chaplains. But two attempts to get a program off the ground have been narrowly defeated by local school board members.

Last week, a proposal to launch a chaplain program fell by a 3-2 vote at a meeting where some supportive clergy faced off against Satanists and a civil rights group opposed to the plan.

Board members raised concerns about possible First Amendment violations and lawsuits the district could face in deciding to push pause.

"I need more time to make a decision," board Chair Heather Kahoun said when the chaplain program was first considered in August. "I haven't had an opportunity to think about these things, to think about the implications regarding the First Amendment, regarding federal litigation that we could receive if we were to approve this as it is today."

Supporters of the chaplain program, led by Osceola board member Jon Arguello, bashed its rejection as politically motivated, noting that the law was signed by DeSantis at a local high school.

“If there was a student who came up here asking for ‘Hey, I want to be chemically castrated’ because I’m a transgender ideologist, the school board members on this dais would pay for the Uber to send that student to go to the clinic,” Arguello said during the Aug. 27 meeting. “But here, in this situation, a student comes, and they ask for spiritual guidance because they need something that is different than what we’re offering, and they want to cut it down.”

Florida education officials introduced a proposal last month to prevent organizations like the Satanic Temple from volunteering through a policy aimed at ensuring only “credible” chaplains are permitted on campuses. It suggests requiring participants to belong to a religious organization that meets in-person at least monthly within the boundary of the school district. It also calls on principals to beef up the qualifications for chaplains by requiring previous experience and a degree in counseling or theology.

“Florida welcomes legitimate and officially authorized chaplains to become volunteers at their local schools and to provide students with morally sound guidance,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said in a statement announcing the model policy.

Still, the Satanic Temple — which didn't respond to a request for comment from POLITICO — is showing no signs of backing down and has started selling merchandise heralding how “Florida welcomes” its chaplains in schools.

“The reality is you’ll have to accommodate religious identities you may not agree with,” Satanic Temple founder Lucien Greaves told Osceola’s school board on Aug. 27. “You will end up with Satanist chaplains.”

Legal fight in Louisiana

A few states over, Louisiana's new law requiring public schools to post a version of the Ten Commandments is facing a significant legal test this month.

The ACLU and other religious freedom groups sued to have Louisiana’s law, which passed with some bipartisan support, overturned on First Amendment grounds. Representing a group of religious and non-religious plaintiffs, the civil rights organization contends that displaying a “specific” version of the Ten Commandments “runs afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government taking sides on questions of theological debate.”

Top state officials like Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill expect schools to prepare to follow the policy despite the pending federal lawsuit.

The state has already produced several examples of posters schools could use to comply with the law, featuring Charlton Heston as Moses and Lin-Manuel Miranda from Hamilton to help signal the historical and cultural significance of the Ten Commandments to students.

The biblical signage, according to Louisiana Republicans like Landry and Murrill, is meant to help curb a “lack of discipline” in local schools and the “inability of the whole system to impose some rules of order.”

“If those posters are in the school, and they find them so vulgar, tell the child not to look at it,” Landry told reporters in August when asked about parents who object to the law. A court hearing at the end of the month may determine whether the law will be allowed to take effect in January.

In a similar fight, a proposed new K-5 reading and language arts curriculum next door in Texas is facing criticism — and possibly a future lawsuit — over its “heavy coverage of religion” and prominent focus on the Bible. State officials, though, are standing by the proposed curriculum, claiming that the lessons draw from a “wide range” of faiths and are not meant to “proselytize or present one religion as superior to another.”

Bibles in classrooms

In Oklahoma, Walters, the state superintendent, declared in June that the Bible was a required “instructional support” for student curriculum in fifth through 12th grades. “Immediate and strict compliance is expected,” Walters said in a memo to superintendents and lawmakers.

Yet critics immediately dismissed the order as a paper tiger, saying Walters lacked legal authority to unilaterally require curriculum standards without approval from state policymakers. Oklahoma law also grants local school districts significant discretion to determine the instruction materials they use to meet state-approved academic standards.

“Superintendent Walters has no authority whatsoever to dictate curriculum to school districts and individual teachers under state law,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, a co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nonprofit that is pushing to obtain records about the Bible mandate with a group of other organizations. “His memo is reckless grandstanding that school boards should ignore.”

The state superintendent dug in. Walters’ office issued a more detailed July memorandum that extolled the Bible’s influence on Western art and culture and said physical copies of the holy book and Ten Commandments must be provided in classrooms — but also noted the Bible was “not to be used for religious purposes such as preaching, proselytizing or indoctrination.”

Several major Oklahoma school districts have said they will not alter their curriculum, prompting a defiant response from Walters.

"Some Oklahoma educators have indicated they won't follow the law and Oklahoma standards, so let me be clear: they will comply, and I will use every means to make sure of it," Walters said in a July 24 statement.

The superintendent’s office did not respond to questions regarding how many districts are following or refusing the biblical instruction demands, or what the state will do to enforce compliance.

“Biblical instruction in its historical and literary context was the norm in American classrooms prior to the 1960s, and its removal foreshadowed a decades-long decline in American education,” Walters said in a statement to POLITICO.

Miller, who is suing Walters for defamation as part of a separate and ongoing dispute over school funding that has entangled the state superintendent, suspects Walters could attack the state accreditation of school districts that refuse to comply, a move that would likely spark lawsuits.

"This is a state where religion is a very important part of most families' lives. So this idea that schools are the ones trying to keep God out, or keep the Bible out — it's a red herring, it's not true, and it’s designed to inflame people," Miller said.

“I wish it was that easy that we could read some Bible verses and kids would behave themselves. But society has changed an awful lot in the last hundred years since that was the norm.”

ALBANY, New York — The Chinese consul general in New York has been removed, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Wednesday — a day after her former gubernatorial staffer Linda Sun was arrested on charges involving alleged aid to the Chinese government.

“I was just on the phone at the request of Secretary of State Blinken, speaking with a high-ranking State Department official, and I conveyed my desire to have the consul general from the People’s Republic of China in the New York mission expelled,” Hochul said at an event in Manhattan. “And I have been informed that the consul general is no longer in the New York mission.”

Hochul didn’t offer any additional details, saying she was “momentarily out of this room” when a return call came.

But after her event, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a briefing that “the consul general was not expelled” by the United States government.

"Our understanding is the consul general reached the end of a regularly scheduled rotation in August, so rotated out of the position,” Miller said. “When it comes to the status of particular employees of a foreign mission, I’d refer you to the foreign county to speak to it. But there was no expulsion action.”

An attempt to reach the office of Consul General Huang Ping was unsuccessful.

Sun was arrested on Tuesday. She faces 10 criminal charges centering on allegations that she used her position in the governor’s office under Hochul and her predecessor, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to boost the Chinese government.

Sun is accused of collecting payments to help shape the state’s messaging around Taiwan and encourage meetings between New York’s leaders and Chinese officials. At one point, she allegedly forged Hochul’s signature on a letter inviting a Chinese trade delegation.

The governor declined to weigh in Taiwan's autonomy Wednesday, saying she’d leave such matters to President Joe Biden's administration. But she said she “requested the State Department to take appropriate action in response to the dangerous and outrageous actions taken by the People’s Republic of China, and they are involved.”

Sun was brought into the executive branch by Cuomo. She was promoted to deputy chief of staff by Hochul soon after she took office in 2021.

Hochul on Wednesday repeatedly highlighted the fact that Sun was hired by Cuomo and brushed her off as a “mid-level employee” in her administration.

“Her access to information was fairly limited,” Hochul said. “We’re talking about correspondence and invitations and information like that.”

A review of the governor’s schedules indicates that Sun was in the room with Hochul for publicly disclosed meetings on 22 occasions from the time she took office in August 2021 through May 2022.

That included a 2021 meeting where the only attendees were Hochul, Sun and Huang, the consul general.

Sun also participated in a meeting that year between Hochul and Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

Hochul brushed off requests from Republicans to launch a state investigation into the Sun matter.

“There was a very thorough investigation done by the Eastern District of New York,” she said. “The length of their indictment is quite voluminous and impressive.”

She added that it would be “quite expensive” to conduct another investigation and said she doesn’t see a need to overhaul the way the state screen employees.

“I feel confident in our vetting practice right now,” the governor said. “We have very high levels of background checks. They take an enormous amount of time — they will go back basically to people’s kindergarten activities.”

Maya Kaufman contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law promised to help Virginia expand broadband internet to hard-to-reach corners of the commonwealth — investing nearly $1.5 billion to improve a key service across a swing state crucial to Democrats’ hopes in the November election.

But so far, Virginia, like many states, hasn’t seen a cent of that money put to use. The state got news only in July that it was approved for funding — more than 10 months after completing its application to Washington, and nearly three years after the law was signed.

Virginia’s story is just one thread of the messy, delayed rollout of a $42 billion national program championed by Democrats in particular, but with big potential payoffs in Republican districts as well.

In his speech last month at the Democratic National Convention, Biden trumpeted his broadband program in historic terms, calling it a national build-out “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.” Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris helped create and promote the program as vice president, and on the campaign trail it could offer a way to show how the White House has delivered for rural Americans.

But as Harris makes her case, the delays have turned what could have been a victory lap for the Biden-Harris administration into a focal point for industry frustration, local partisan finger-pointing and anti-Washington complaints from all corners.

The success or failure of the program could have political implications in Virginia, a swing state that voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections but is a current target for the Republican National Committee. Polling has shown a narrow lead shifting between Republicans and Democrats, all within the margin of error.

One liberal activist lamented a missed campaigning opportunity from the broadband money.

“People need to see it,” said Lynlee Thorne, a political director for Democratic campaign group Rural Groundgame, which helps lead campaigns for Virginia state seats. “It's got to be a lot more concrete. We're past the point of being able to earn people's votes based on the status quo or just hope.”

The program, known officially as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (or BEAD) and embedded in Biden’s mammoth infrastructure law, was meant to bring a vital service to communities across America.

But thanks to a federal affordability requirement that telecommunications companies say is too tight, many states have sparred with Washington over their funding applications, delaying the rollout. There’s little chance that communities across the country will see concrete results until 2025 at the soonest — well past Biden’s time in office — and no chance at all before November’s election.

Politically, the frustration has already boiled into attacks: Some Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation blamed the Biden administration during oversight hearings this spring and summer.

General Assembly Del. Terry Kilgore, a veteran Republican legislator, says it counts as an embarrassment for politicians trying to defend the program. He said his constituents in the state’s rural southwest are eager to improve their spotty internet access, and they’ve been hoping for money since the law was signed.

“It's hard to address in a town hall or a tele-town hall when those questions come up,” Kilgore told POLITICO. “You say, ‘Well, we're still waiting on the federal government.’ And they go, ‘Oh, gosh, it’s been three, four years.’ It sort of puts egg on everybody's face.”

The administration says Biden’s broader goals are on schedule, despite delays in states like Virginia.

The government is executing BEAD “on the 10-year timeline Congress intended,” a spokesperson for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency tasked with overseeing the program, told POLITICO.

The federal grant program has now green-lighted applications from 34 states, which will let them start accessing the first share of federal aid. But given the lengthy negotiations over the terms of their plans, the administration doesn’t expect broadband projects funded by the marquee program to launch in earnest until 2025.

As the months go by, there is also another clock ticking loudly on the program’s broader policy goals. If voters return former President Donald Trump to office in November, Republicans will have wide latitude to rewrite its rules — possibly wiping out Democratic requirements for accessibility, union participation and climate impact, and almost certainly dialing back the affordability rules that have caused so much friction in Virginia.

Even among the numerous delayed state broadband programs, Virginia stands out as a special case. The state has marketed itself as a hub of digital infrastructure; it hosts Amazon’s second headquarters and a huge portion of the world’s data centers.

When lawmakers passed BEAD in 2021, Virginia already had a standing broadband office — a rarity at the time. That gave Virginia an advantage, as did its broadband-savvy U.S. senator, Democrat Mark Warner, a former telecom executive who successfully fought to maximize his state’s payout from the program.

When the time came, it was the first in the nation to complete its application for the federal broadband money last September — a milestone proudly touted by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Months passed. Louisiana was the first state to get approved for the money, in December 2023. Then came Kansas, Nevada and West Virginia in April. Then more than a dozen others in the spring and summer.

Youngkin’s office told POLITICO this summer that he was concerned about the delay, saying he worried that other states might hire Virginia’s workers if they got the money first.

Interviews and written documents show the issue holding Virginia back appeared to be the law’s affordability requirement. According to funding rules published in May 2022 by the Commerce Department, any provider taking the federal money needs to offer a low-cost service option. The administration and Virginia were locked in a multi-month standoff over exactly how to fulfill that requirement — an impasse that hit many other states as well.

The affordability rule was part of a suite of federal conditions, some written into the original infrastructure law and some added by the administration in its 2022 guidelines. The rules require states accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally. One vague but broad provision requires low-cost options and fast connections for “middle class families” at “reasonable prices.”

Some top Republicans — including Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) — complained early last year that these requirements were unnecessary progressive goals that went beyond the infrastructure law.

Democrats defended them as reasonable considerations: If the federal government was going to pay companies to build out internet service, the law should do everything possible to make sure that it was rolled out responsibly, in a way that consumers can actually afford.

In Virginia, the issue was how explicitly the state would spell out what a provider’s low-cost option would be. Nudged by telecom companies, the commonwealth initially sought to let providers themselves determine these rates. The Biden administration pushed for a more precise price or formula, set by the state rather than the companies. Ultimately, NTIA and Virginia compromised and allowed the commonwealth to set a range of rates — $30 to $75 per month, or lower if they want — that providers had to offer within eligible areas.

That argument hung up Virginia’s $1.5 billion application, and by early 2024 its delay was reverberating across Capitol Hill, where many Republican lawmakers invoked the dispute in Virginia to complain about the progress with BEAD nationwide.

Whose fault was the delay? That depends who you ask. Republicans have generally blamed overweening Washington bureaucrats, but industry critics say the Virginia government was too sympathetic with the telecom industry from the start.

The initial Virginia plan on affordability was “mimicking the talking points” from the telecom industry, argued Christopher Ali, a Penn State professor who has researched broadband extensively, including in Virginia, in a recent interview. Like many states, Virginia faced pressure from the telecom industry over too-close control of rates, and wanted to be sure companies were actually willing to participate.

The compromise version was still fairly telecom-friendly. “It’s pretty close to what we were advocating for,” Ray LaMura, president of a state cable broadband association called VCTA, told POLITICO.

LaMura said that forcing ultra-low rates would have made the build-out untenable for many companies. Many unserved households are far off the roads, he pointed out, making them the hardest to reach with broadband infrastructure.

Virginia’s standoff has parallels across the country that have taken their own time to resolve. Initially, the Commerce Department anticipated approving all states’ plans by the spring of 2024; it has since updated that to by the fall. In a budget hearing in late June, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told a House panel that states were to blame for waging unnecessary arguments over the federal rules.

“We are not slowing this down,” Raimondo said. “A lot of these governors are dragging their feet.”

Regardless of where the blame lies, the program’s inertia draws a contrast to some of Biden's other spending programs, which have long since broken ground on highway repairs and other infrastructure projects.

In Virginia, that leaves thousands of mostly rural residents stuck in a long-outdated version of the internet.

According to the official state count, there are more than 100,000 homes and offices across Virginia with connection speeds slow enough to qualify for the $1.48 billion in funding.

Without an upgrade, residents there have dial-up level connection speeds, or are forced to shell out more than $100 a month for satellite service.

Katrina Smith, a former president of the Virginia Realtors Association, has seen the impact both on her family and professionally. She said her daughter could not stay with her in Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley during the pandemic because her job in a credit union needed a wired connection. Ultimately, Smith said she and her neighbors petitioned Comcast to extend its network to her home — which the company agreed to do, for a price. “We paid a lot of money,” she said.

For people who can’t afford to do that, there are costs beyond just access, she said: Home prices go up in areas where there’s good connectivity, Virginia realtors determined in their research done in recent years. An association analysis in 2020 showed that better internet access in connectivity-strapped southwestern Virginia could increase typical home value by up to 13 percent.

The Biden administration maintains there’s a big payoff around the corner.

“Virginia can now move from planning to action,” Alan Davidson, who heads the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, told reporters on July 26 following the approval of the commonwealth’s plans, which he lauded as sophisticated.

Now able to obtain an initial chunk of the grant money, Virginia can soon start picking the providers to do the network building — although it faces yet another bureaucratic hurdle before that can happen: It’s still trying to get federal certification for exactly what areas are eligible for this aid. Other states, meanwhile, are already doing this. Louisiana announced last month that it’s moving to pick broadband providers this fall, hoping to launch projects in the first quarter of 2025.

With BEAD money on hold nationwide, Republicans have been sharpening their knives for a different future for the program — one where telecom companies get the money without the Biden administration’s safeguards.

If Trump is elected in November, then his agency leaders would have wide latitude to revisit the rules that Republicans don’t like or make other changes to the program, although they could face hurdles in re-litigating approved state plans and would still have to comply with the infrastructure law’s directives. Both in Congress and at agencies, influential Republicans have signaled they don’t expect to see the same affordability demands.

They might have a friend in Elon Musk, too, who has offered his own swipes at the “outrageous waste” of BEAD. Musk’s Starlink service offers satellite internet to rural Americans, and his SpaceX officials have expressed interest in receiving some of these broadband subsidies in certain states.

House Republicans have already launched an investigation into whether the Biden administration’s affordability requirements were violating the infrastructure law itself, which includes a prohibition on rate regulation.

In a May hearing, Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) called it “incredibly troubling” that the NTIA would withhold grant approval based on affordability requirements. Brendan Carr, an influential Republican commissioner at the FCC — and potential agency chair under Trump — said during a July hearing that BEAD needs “a course correction,” complaining that it has failed to connect any households to broadband after years because of requirements that led to it “going off the rails.”

In an interview this May, Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), who chairs a key House Energy and Commerce telecom subcommittee, predicted a Trump reelection would mean a change in broadband priorities: “We might not have to even ask those questions about rate regulation,” he said, “because it wouldn’t be going on.”

Industry leaders are clamoring for this added flexibility. In July, more than 30 telecom executives signed a letter to Raimondo saying that aggressive implementation of the affordability requirements could undermine the program. “We and our members sincerely want this program to work, but we believe that your agency’s administration of the low-cost service option requirement in particular risks putting the overall success of BEAD in jeopardy,” the letter said.

Some of these broadband officials see the Virginia compromise, which was approved after their letter, as more palatable, and one that could be adopted more widely. ACA Connects said it was “encouraged” to see Virginia’s final low-cost proposal, which “gives providers flexibility and reflects marketplace realities,” a spokesperson for that cable group told POLITICO in August.

One state broadband leader who successfully won approval from the Biden administration last month — with a more flexible low-cost plan not to exceed $70 per month, recalculated annually — says she would welcome ditching more prescriptive affordability requirements in the event of new White House leadership.

“Is it my job to be telling companies what they charge? I would say it’s not,” Misty Ann Giles, a Republican who heads Montana’s broadband efforts and directs its Department of Administration, said in an interview. She told POLITICO that NTIA is unduly “pushing a social policy.”

While Republicans paint the program as a regulatory mess, Democrats looking for political capital have tried to showcase smaller efforts to boost connectivity. That includes internet projects in Virginia and elsewhere, already underway, funded from other pots of money in the infrastructure law and pandemic relief packages.

These pots of money have meant more than $700 million flowing to Virginia across 30 different broadband projects, still in process but already making progress, according to the administration. That’s on top of other efforts in recent years funded by the commonwealth itself. Across the nation, beyond BEAD, “we have billions of dollars already in flight — and we’re already connecting people,” an NTIA spokesperson told POLITICO.

Local Virginia politicians speak with pride of how far they’ve already come, even as they say BEAD will be vital for finishing the job and acknowledge impatience among their communities.

“When I'm talking to voters, I talk about how with the local and private funds, we've leveraged over $2 billion to invest in broadband infrastructure and hitting almost the entire commonwealth,” state Sen. Jennifer Boysko, a Democrat who chairs the commonwealth’s Broadband Advisory Council, told POLITICO.

However, she acknowledges delays can cause tension. “I've done some meetings with local county leaders who are frustrated because they know that they've invested the money, they know it's there, but the projects aren't happening as fast as they want them to,” she said.

In May, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited Stafford County, Virginia, to trumpet hundreds of millions of dollars in broadband investments from her department’s pandemic relief money. She said more than 600 new addresses have broadband thanks to these efforts.

Despite the claims of change, the effects still aren’t always felt in rural corners of Virginia. The 600 households mentioned by Yellen represent less than 1 percent of the total homes without fast connections. Thorne, the Democratic political campaigner, fumed as she recalled unserved residents who know internet infrastructure is within reach. “We put up these ridiculous barriers to just actually getting it to people,” she said.

“There's not the shovels in the ground,” she added. “That's what people need to see.”