Harris accuses Trump of using "race to divide the American people" Days after Harris launched her campaign, Trump alleged something that was shocking, even by his standards: that the vice-president, who is of South Asian and Black Jamaican heritage, was not actually African American. “Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?” moderator David Muir asked. “I don’t, and I don’t care. I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. You make a big deal out of something, I couldn’t care less, whatever she wants to be is OK with me,” Trump replied. Muir then asked Harris for her thoughts. She replied: Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people. You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us, and we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race. She made a point to bring up Trump’s involvement in pushing for the prosecution of the Central Park Five. Here’s more on that: Harris tells supporters: "We have a lot of work to do" Speaking to supporters after the debate, Kamala Harris appeared to be in her stride. “But we have a lot of work to do,” she said. “And tonight I think highlighted for the American people what’s at stake.” California governor Gavin Newsom called Harris’s performance a “masterclass”. “It’s daylight and darkness, competency versus chaos, right versus wrong, illiberal versus liberal,” he said. Republicans meanwhile offered qualified praise, and bashed the moderators for fact-checking him. Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential hopeful turned Trump surrogate and harsh Harris critic, conceded that the vice-president had a good night, perhaps even a better night. But he insisted that Trump won on the policy. “We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris, but actions speak louder than words,” he said, before mustering a very qualified assessment of Trump’s performance. “The sad truth is, we only had a portion of this debate that was focused on policy, but for the portion of the debate that was focused on policy, which is the most important part of a presidential debate, I think in that area of it, I’m not going to make an overall claim with respect to the policy aspect of this debate, Donald Trump won hands down,” he said. Tim Walz welcomes "eloquent" Swift endorsement "as a fellow cat owner" Tim Walz reacted to Taylor Swift’s endorsement in the middle of an interview with MSNBC: The Minnesota governor said her post on Instagram was “eloquent” and called on Swifties, as her fans are known, to get on board with Harris’s campaign. Trump cheers debate performance, but says, "I don"t know if we"re going to do another one" Donald Trump has made a surprise appearance in the spin room at the debate venue in Philadelphia, where he told reporters he felt good about his performance against Kamala Harris, but might not debate her again. “It was my best debate ever, I think,” the former president said. “It showed how weak they are, how pathetic they are, and what they’re doing to destroy our country, on the border, with foreign trade, with everything.” But it wasn’t good enough to do again, he said: “Now, she wants to do another one, because she got beaten tonight, but I don’t know if we’re going to do another one.” Asked about Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris, even Matt Gaetz, the far-right Florida congressman, knew better than to attack the pop star. “I love her songs, but I want to live in a world where liberals make my art and conservatives make my laws and policies,” he replied. Harris "ready for a second debate", campaign team says Kamala Harris is “ready for a second debate” in October, her campaign said. “Under the bright lights, the American people got to see the choice they will face this fall at the ballot box: between moving forward with Kamala Harris, or going backwards with Trump,” Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “That’s what they saw tonight and what they should see at a second debate in October. Vice-president Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?” This second debate would come in addition to an October face-off between vice-presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance. In her post announcing her support for Kamala Harris, Taylor Swift said that she had been spurred to act after the Trump campaign implied that she supported him, and also was not pleased with a certain remark made by his running mate, JD Vance. “Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” Swift wrote. She signed her post, in which she posed with a long-haired cat, “Childless Cat Lady”. That’s something Vance once said, and which is not going away: Fact check: 2020 election lawsuits Donald Trump repeated misinformation about the result of lawsuits contesting the 2020 election results. The former president said that “no judge looked at” lawsuits he and allies filed about irregularities in the election. “They said we didn’t have standing. A technicality. Can you imagine a system where a person in an election doesn’t have standing? The president of the United States doesn’t have standing. That’s how we lost,” Trump said. That’s misleading – some lawsuits were dismissed due to a lack of standing, meaning that those who brought the lawsuits didn’t have a stake in the results. Others were decided on merit. Judges found in some cases that evidence provided was speculative, or failed to show fraud. Taylor Swift says she will vote for Harris Taylor Swift, the world-famous pop superstar, just announced on Instagram that she will vote for Kamala Harris, giving the vice-president perhaps her biggest celebrity endorsement yet. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,” she wrote. Vance clears up Trump"s abortion position and says Harris focused on "echoing platitude after platitude" ABC News then heard from JD Vance, the Ohio senator who is Donald Trump’s running mate, and asked him for clarity on whether the former president supported national restrictions on abortion. The debate’s moderators tried to get an answer out of Trump, but he instead talked about how he was proud that states were deciding the issue, while falsely claiming that Democrats supported infanticide. “I think the president’s been very clear that he doesn’t want a national abortion ban. I think in some ways he finds the question a little bit ridiculous, because why are we asking him about legislation that’s never going to actually happen, and why he would veto it or not veto it, when he says very explicitly that he doesn’t support a national abortion ban and he wants these policies to be made by the states,” Vance said. He then criticized Harris for debate rhetoric he described as empty, saying: You had Kamala Harris effectively echoing platitude after platitude after platitude. The American people can’t pay their grocery bills on platitudes. They can’t put their kids in a house on platitudes. And Kamala Harris had a lot to say but very little actual substance behind it for how she’s going to lower grocery prices, secure the border and make housing more affordable in this country. She’s been the vice-president for three-and-a-half years. She can’t run on a record, and she apparently can’t run on much of her plans either, because it’s just a lot of slogans and not a whole lot of substance. Walz says Trump"s performance reminds him of "an old man yelling at the clouds" In an interview with ABC News after the debate, Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice-president, said Donald Trump came off as unhinged. “I have to tell you, if it weren’t so dangerous, it reminds you of an old man yelling at the clouds. That was his thing: ‘Get off my yard,’” said Walz, the governor of Minnesota. “So, I think country can see what happened tonight. We’ll keep pushing forward. That’s the way that the country wants to see our politics be – she laid it out clearly. Donald Trump brought nothing tonight but anger, resentment.” Women were chipping in for Harris during the debate. Harris’s campaign said that during the first hour of the debate, 71% of their grassroots donors were women. The campaign has not yet provided an overall tally for her fundraising figures. In a conversation about Harris’s racial identity, the vice-president said Trump had a long history of stoking racial division. She recalled that he had placed a full-page ad in the New York Times that called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly accused of raping a white woman. It appears the reference was intentional. The Harris campaign announced that Yusef Salaam, one of the five exonerated men who is now a New York councilmember, will be in the spin room as a surrogate for the Harris campaign. Trump hits back at Harris"s promises, asking: "Why hasn"t she done it?" While Harris held off on attacking Donald Trump in her closing statement, the former president did not do the same, instead seizing on Harris’s years in the vice-presidency to argue she would be an ineffective leader. “So, she just started by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that. She’s going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn’t she done it?” Trump asked. He went on: She’s been there for three-and-a-half years. They’ve had three-and-a-half years to fix the border. They’ve had three-and-a-half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it? She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, go to the Capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do, but you haven’t done it and you won’t do it because you believe in things that the American people don’t believe in. Trump restated his downbeat view of the state of the country, which is a major part of his pitch to voters: We’re a failing nation. We’re a nation that’s in serious decline. We’re being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laughed. I know the leaders very well, they’re coming to see me. They call me. We’re laughed at all over the world. They don’t understand what happened to us as a nation. He concluded by calling Harris “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. And with that, the debate concluded. In her closing statement, Harris vows to "protect our fundamental rights and freedoms" We’re now at the closing statements of the debate, with Kamala Harris up first. Casting herself as a unifier, she argues her background as a prosecutor made her the right person to lead the country: I will be a president that will protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do. I’ll tell you, I started my career as a prosecutor. I was the DA, I was an attorney general, United States senator and now vice-president. I only have one client: the people. And I’ll tell you, as a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, are you a Republican or a Democrat? The only thing I ever asked them, are you OK? And that’s the kind of president we need right now, someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first. I intend to be a president for all Americans and focus on what we can do over the next 10 and 20 years to build back up our country by investing right now in you, the American people. Fact check: the Central Park Five Donald Trump doubled down on his claims that the Central Park Five, a group of Black teenagers who were arrested in connection with the rape and assault of a white female jogger in 1989 and convicted based on police-coerced confessions. Back then, Trump called for the execution of these five children. When Kamala Harris brought up Trump’s stance, he dug in: “They pled guilty … They badly hurt a person, they killed a person, ultimately.” All of them were exonerated after a convicted murderer confessed to the crime in 2002. In 2014, they were awarded a $41m settlement. In 1989, before any of the boys had faced trial, Trump paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for their execution. The headline read: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” and above his signature, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.” As my colleague Oliver Laughland reported back in 2016, Trump’s charge against the Central Park Five was a precursor to his divisive populism: Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could have been a mess of layered talking, unchallenged claims and wild veers off-topic. Instead, ABC’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, kept the candidates on point. Muir and Davis took on the first matchup between the two virtually tied presidential candidates, seeking to “enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion”, according to debate rules from ABC that took weeks to negotiate, and it was no easy task. The two effectively rerouted discussions back to the questions they had asked, on key topics including the economy, immigration, abortion rights and the peaceful transfer of power, and made important clarifying fact-check statements when they were warranted. When Trump made the outlandish claim that Democrats supported “the execution” of babies after they were born and accused Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential pick, of supporting abortions in the ninth month, Davis laid out the facts. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born,” Davis told viewers. Muir also pushed Trump on his connection to the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, and his belief that he won the election, despite all evidence to the contrary.