Harris, Walz wrap up Pennsylvania bus tour as Trump plans DNC counter events: Live

During his appearance in the crucial swing state, the former president dedicated some time to mocking Harris’s Time magazine cover by insinuating the depiction made her look better.

Ariana Baio reports:

A straight, football-coaching National Guardsman wasn’t the LGBT+ ally that Seth Elliot Meyer expected.

But Meyer, who came out as queer in his freshman year of high school in 2000, admits he was wrong about Tim Walz.

“I just sort of naively believed that someone who was a big, masculine dude with a deep voice was never someone who’s going to be on my side,” Meyer says.

“As much as those younger students who were courageous enough to be out in those years, it was just as important to have those very kind of ‘normal,’ strong, straight, masculine allies backing us up.”

Before he was governor of Minnesota, before he was a member of Congress, and before he was a candidate for the next vice president of the United States, he was “Mr Walz,” a geography teacher at Mankato West High School, roughly 80 miles south of Minneapolis.

Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, shared two selfies of himself, his wife Gwen Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emoff shortly before they boarded buses to take them around Pennsylvania.

“Road trip,” Walz wrote in the caption of his post.

Kamala Harris’s campaign has slammed Donald Trump for planning a rally in a Michigan town with long ties to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.

On Saturday, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign savaged the Republican ticket’s choice of venue arguing that Trump is making an appeal to the white nationalists who marched against Jews and other minorities in Charlottesville in 2017 – a moment which led to Trump controversially praising demonstrators and counterprotesters at a press conference.

“The racists and white supremacists who marched in Trump’s name last month in Howell have all watched him praise Hitler, defend neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and tell far-right extremists to ‘stand back and stand by.’ Trump’s actions have encouraged them, and Michiganders can expect more of the same when he comes to town next week,” the Michigan communications director for the Harris campaign, Alyssa Bradley, told The Washington Post.

John Bowden reports:

Republicans will join the swathes of Democrats descending on Chicago this week as Trumpworld tries to find a way to blunt Kamala Harris‘s momentum.

As the four-day Democratic National Convention gets underway in the Windy City, Donald Trump and his allies are making plans for counter-programming to the event.

Trump’s Chicago hotel will become the epicenter of the Republican world as his allies including Florida Senator Rick Scott and his colleague in the House, Byron Donalds, are among those who will lead the GOP’s efforts to counter-program the convention.

Themes of the four-day event at the Trump hotel will include immigration, crime and the economy, and will mirror issues being spoken about at the DNC in order to drive home the Republican party’s message.

John Bowden reports:

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz put his coaching jacket on while addressing a group of high school football players about the importance of unity and positivity on Sunday, as part of the campaign’s bus tour through Pennsylvania.

At Aliquippa High School, Vice President Kamala Harris, Second Gentleman Doug Emoff and Walz spoke with a group of high school football players about the future of the country.

The group of young athletes sat and listened as Walz reminded them of the importance of unity and functioning as a team both on and off the field.

“Politics isn’t that much different than this. It’s about something bigger than themselves, it’s about setting up a future goal and trying to reach it,” Walz said.

“It’s about doing it with dignity and hard work. It’s about doing it with humility and when you lose, you walk across the field and you shake hands with the other team and know they played hard too,” Walz continued.

Walz is often referred to as “coach” – a reference to his days of coaching high school football.

For their next stop on the Pennsylvania bus tour, Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff Tim Walz and Gwen Walz are at a firehouse in Aliquippa.

After departing from the bus, the group shook hands with members of the local fire department (and the paw of the firehouse dog) and spoke with the group.

Donald Trump continued to invoke his strategy of attacking Vice President Kamala Harris by sharing an AI-generated photo of what looks like Harris presiding over an army of USSR soldiers in “Chicago.”

The former president shared the image on Truth Social on Saturday evening. It had no caption on it but elluded to a statement he made during his Pennsylvania rally on Saturday.

“In her speech yesterday, Kamala went full communist. You heard that? She went full communist,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Wilkes-Barre.

He compared her policies to that of a communist country – like the Soviet Union.