Lauren Gambino

On the first day of early voting in battleground Georgia, one of the state’s Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock, warned that Donald Trump was a “dangerous” choice for the country.

He urged Black men to consider how Trump would govern, as Harris works to shore up support from this traditionally Democratic-leaning voting bloc.

“I don’t buy this idea that there will be huge swaths of Black men voting for Donald Trump. That’s not going to happen,” said Warnock, a Baptist pastor, who preaches from the same Atlanta pulpit as Martin Luther King. “What I would urge folks to do is to show up, to understand that if you don’t vote, that is a vote – for Donald Trump, that’s the concern.”

Warnock spoke on the call organized by the Harris campaign ahead of Trump’s visit to the state today. Warnock acknowledged the work Democrats still needed to do to mobilize their “broad coalition” ahead of next month’s election, as polls show Harris drawing notably less support among Black men than past Democratic nominees.

“Do you think when the George Floyds and all of those cases emerge again that Donald Trump’s going to do something about it? No, he’s going to do just the opposite,” Warnock said. “An unhinged Donald Trump will give these officers who have behaved with brutality a free pass and immunity, and this could literally mean death in our communities. You need to vote like your life depends on it – it does.”

Lauren Gambino

Amber Thurman’s mother wants Americans to know that her daughter was not a statistic.

Thurman, a young mother and aspiring nurse, developed sepsis and died after being unable to access legal abortion and routine medical care in Georgia.

“She was loved by a family, a family that would have done anything had we known when I looked at her and reassured her that she was in the best care,” Shanette Williams said on a call organized by Kamala Harris’s campaign. “I had no clue. I had no clue that this could have been prevented, and when I found that out, everything changed.”

With the future of abortion on the line in November, Thurman’s mother has become a reluctant but powerful surrogate for Harris in the battleground state, where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy. Harris has said Donald Trump and Republicans should be held accountable for ushering in the post-Roe bans that ultimately led Thurman to wait.

The campaign call was timed in advance of Trump’s visit to Georgia today for a town hall on “women’s issues” hosted by Fox News.

Williams was with her daughter at the hospital, where she waited for more than 20 hours for a routine medical procedure known as a D&C that removes remaining tissue. She developed sepsis and died in August 2022, leaving behind her young son, now eight.

“Initially, I wasn’t a political person. I’m independent. Because of August the 19th, we’ve been thrown into an arena where we have to do something to honor Amber,” Williams said through tears. “I just need to make sense of it all. My baby is not here, and it’s left us so much pain and trauma.”

Joanna Walters

Donald Trump talked more about 6 January 2021, and said that there was a term “peaceful and patriotic” and said “a lot of strange things” happened on that day, mentioning “people being waved into the Capitol” by police.

He said only “a tiny fraction” of people who came to Washington that day went down to the US Capitol after his rally close to the White House and “not one of those people had a gun” and “no one was killed”. He then, as he has done many times before, criticized the shooting by a law enforcement official of rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber as part of the mob that had violently invaded the Capitol.

In fact, the insurrectionists smashed their way into the Capitol against outnumbered police, as they tried to stop the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the previous November’s election.

At least seven deaths, and perhaps as many as nine deaths, have been linked to the January 6 riots, including suicides among police officers some time after the event.

After fleeing for their lives, the US Congress reconvened in the early hours of 7 January 2021, to certify Biden’s win.

Joanna Walters

Donald Trump was asked about a peaceful transfer of power after this November’s election. He dodged.

The interviewer on stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, said, moments ago: “If you look at the events of January 6, 2021, it showed to many people that America’s democracy was unruly and violent. Only three weeks to go to the election, will you commit now to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power?”

Instead of answering the question about this election cycle, Trump said that the US had a peaceful transfer of power.

There was a smattering of applause in the audience. Micklethwait said: “Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared with Venezuela but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” then added: “Would you respect the decision?”

Trump digresses with some criticism of Micklethwait. Then he comes back to the topic, but again talking about 2021.

Joanna Walters

Donald Trump just claimed that, if he became president again, he would have the right to instruct the Federal Reserve about interest rates – while saying he would not actually order the US central bank what to do.

“I think I have the right to say, ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’. I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not the interest rates should go up or down,” he said at the Chicago Economic Club moments ago.

The president of the US traditionally does not weigh in on interest rates, allowing the Fed to make its own decisions. This doesn’t mean that the bank is not susceptible to political pressure in the wider sense, but the bank expects and is expected to make monetary policy and related decision autonomously.

Trump refuses to say if he has talked to Russia’s Putin since leaving office

Joanna Walters

Donald Trump has just declined to comment when asked directly in an event he’s appearing at in Chicago if he has had conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin since he left the White House in 2021 after being voted out of office.

The former president was asked if he had talked to Putin “since you stopped being president”, as has been stated in a book by veteran journalist and author Bob Woodward, reported last week. He asked by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait moments ago, who is interviewing Trump in an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago.

“I will not comment,” Trump said.

However, he then hinted maybe he had when he added: “But if I did it’s a smart thing. If I have a good relationship with people, that’s a good thing.”

Woodward said that Trump has held several private calls with Putin since his single-term presidency.

Joanna Walters

Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait is busy pushing back on Donald Trump’s insistence that imposing what the former president boasts would be “obnoxious” levels of tariffs on imports will have a positive effect on the US economy.

“Critics say tariffs would end up being like a sales tax,” Micklethwait said, saying that it will push up costs for US consumers.

The two men talked over each other a bit, and Trump insisted that high tariffs would force overseas manufacturers to build their products in the US to sell to American consumers.

“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that company will come into the US and build factories here. You make the tariffs so obnoxious that they come in straight away,” Trump said.

Donald Trump just took the stage at the Economic Club in Chicago, where he’s repeating his familiar campaign promise to enact high import tariffs to spur domestic manufacturing.

“We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes still, further, for companies that are going to make their product in the USA. We’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs, because I’m a believer in tariffs,” the former president told his interviewer, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

The ex-president added:

To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm.

Economists have been skeptical that tariffs would help American manufacturers:

Donald Trump is expected to soon take the stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, where we can expect him to outline his plans to lower prices for US consumers. But the Associated Press reports that his tariff-heavy proposals and ideas for meddling with the Federal Reserve are unlikely to undo the impact of inflation, and may instead push prices higher. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has seized on his strange behavior at a campaign event yesterday, where Trump spent more than a half-hour swaying to the music onstage. The former president said this morning that he was reacting to a pair of medical emergencies that occurred in the audience, but the Harris campaign has implied it is a sign that he is not as healthy as he appears.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• The Harris campaign rejected an allegation of plagiarism brought against the vice-president by a conservative activist, CNN reports.

• Early voting begins today in Georgia, and long lines of voters were spotted in at least one Atlanta-area county. Trump encouraged his supporters to vote by whatever method they chose.

• Nathan Wade, a former prosecutor in Trump’s election meddling case in Georgia, is testifying behind closed doors to a Republican-led House committee.

Donald Trump will speak at the Economic Club of Chicago at noon, where you can expect to hear him argue that his policies will tame inflation.

Prices rose at levels not seen in four decades under Joe Biden, and though the rate of increase has declined in recent months, polls have shown inflation remains one of the issues voters are most concerned about.

But the Associated Press reports that, based on what Trump has proposed, it’s unlikely he would be able to unilaterally bring prices down. In fact, he might make them go up:

Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted that Trump’s policies – the deportations, import taxes and efforts to erode the Fed’s independence – would drive consumer prices sharply higher two years into his second term. Peterson’s analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise register 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s economic proposals were adopted.

Many economists aren’t thrilled with Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda, either. They dismiss, for example, her proposal to combat price gouging as an ineffective tool against high grocery prices. But they don’t regard her policies as particularly inflationary.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and two colleagues have estimated that Harris’ policies would leave the inflation outlook virtually unchanged, even if she enjoyed a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. An unfettered Trump, by contrast, would leave prices higher by 1.1 percentage points in 2025 and 0.8 percentage points in 2026, they concluded.

Taxes on imports – tariffs – are Trump’s go-to economic policy. He argues that tariffs protect American factory jobs from foreign competition and deliver a host of other benefits.

While in office, Trump started a trade war with China, imposing high tariffs on most Chinese goods. He also raised import taxes on foreign steel and aluminum, washing machines and solar panels. He has still grander plans for a second term: Trump wants to impose a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and a “universal’’ tariff of 10% or 20% on everything else that enters the United States.

Trump insists that the cost of taxing imported goods is absorbed by the foreign countries that produce those goods. The truth, though, is that U.S. importers pay the tariff – and then typically pass along that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices, which is how Americans themselves end up bearing the cost of tariffs.

What’s more, as tariffs raise the cost of imports, the weakened competition from foreign products makes it easier for U.S. producers to raise their own prices.

Donald Trump raised a lot of eyebrows last night, including Kamala Harris’s, after he spent a significant part of his town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, swaying to music on stage.

On Truth Social, the former president has offered an explanation for the campaign event that could, charitably, be described as unorthodox. Here’s what he said:

I had a Town Hall in Pennsylvania last night. It was amazing! The Q and A was almost finished when people began fainting from the excitement and heat. We started playing music while we waited, and just kept it going. So different, but it ended up being a GREAT EVENING!

For more updates on the US election, tune in to the Guardian’s Today in Focus US Election Extra podcast. Join Lucy Hough, breaking down every essential development in the presidential race every weekday.