Trump and Harris face off in contentious debate

Our coverage of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has moved here.

Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris debate at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 10.

Kamala Harris on Tuesday night baited Donald Trump for nearly all of the 1 hour and 45 minutes of their first and potentially only debate — and the former president took every bit of it.

The vice president had prepared extensively for their debate, and peppered nearly every answer with a comment designed to enrage the former president. She told Trump that world leaders were laughing at him, and military leaders called him a “disgrace.” She called Trump “weak” and “wrong.” She said Trump was fired by 81 million voters – the number that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump was often out of control. He loudly and repeatedly insisted that a whole host of falsehoods were true. The former president repeated lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He parroted a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets, and lied about Democrats supporting abortions after babies are born – which is murder, and illegal everywhere.

Here are some takeaways from the debate:

A turning point when Harris jabs Trump over the size of his rally crowds: Harris came onstage with a clear plan: Throw Trump off his game. It was, by any measure, a dramatic success. When the vice president mentioned Trump’s criminal conviction and outstanding legal issues, he bit. When she called him out for sinking a bipartisan immigration bill, he bit harder. And when Harris suggested Trump’s rallies were boring, he nearly choked on the bait.

Rather than engage on the issues raised by the moderators, including a few that Trump considers some of his political strengths, the former president went on at length about the entertainment value of his rallies, claims the Biden administration was legally targeting him and, in a long, bizarre spell, insisted – against all available evidence, that migrants were eating Americans’ pets.

Trump indulges in conspiracy theories: Despite signals from even his running mate, Trump did not refrain from repeating the conspiracy theory du jour during the debate. The former president brought up the unfounded conspiracy theory that migrants from Haiti living in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s cats and dogs. He said at one point that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of people who live there.”

When ABC moderator David Muir pointed out that city officials have denied any evidence that migrants in Springfield were eating pets, Trump doubled down, saying that “the people on television” were saying it. When pressed, Trump just said, “We’ll find out.” When the debate moved to crime, Trump claimed that crime was up in the United States contrary to the rest of the world. There too Muir pointed out that, according to FBI data, crime had declined in the past few years.

Fierce argument over abortion, a key issue for both candidates: The vice president, who has long been one the administration’s strongest surrogates on reproductive rights, was able to respond to the former president’s defense of his abortion policy in a way Joe Biden was not.

The former president, who appointed three of the Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn federal abortion protections, has sought to moderate his stance on the issue by criticizing six-week abortion bans and reiterating his support for exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. But he has also defended the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Read more takeaways from Harris and Trump’s first debate.

Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was “devastating” for former president Donald Trump, argues Mike Madrid, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group.

Trump rarely delivers on policy, Madrid said; instead, he usually scores points with his style of rhetoric.

Not tonight.

“This was an old, tired performance from a feeble old man who’s suffering from mental decline,” Madrid said, adding that Harris overwhelmingly won the debate.

Harris, on the other hand, had a tall task to master, and she did it, he said.

Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly pushed former President Donald Trump off his talking points during the ABC News Presidential debate.

“This was a very different debate than what we saw just a couple months ago with Joe Biden,” CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju told viewers.

And she succeeded in doing so, Raju argued.

From Harris’s comments about abortion, to Trump’s crowd sizes, to his economic record, it was clear Trump was “irritated,” he said.

Harris looks in Trump's direction during their debate in Philadelphia on September 10.

Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in a virtual coin toss before their presidential debate – but that’s about all he won.

From the opening moments Tuesday night, when the vice president strode over to Trump’s podium and all but forced him to shake her hand, she dictated the terms of their critical clash exactly eight weeks before Election Day.

From Harris’ point of view, the night could hardly have gone better.

She came across as fresh and energetic and brimmed with a positive future vision. Trump glowered and ranted and blasted America as a failing nation and seemed off his game.

The vice president, who has sometimes struggled in spontaneous situations, delivered the most imposing performance of her political career. Trump, who had gone into the debate predicting he’d prove boxing champ Mike Tyson’s maxim that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” was himself stunned by multiple jabs and landed few in return.

At a time when nearly a third of voters suggested in one recent poll that they wanted to know more about Harris, the vice president’s performance seemed more likely to expand her coalition. Trump, meanwhile, didn’t make much effort to change perceptions about his dystopian intentions among the key swing state voters who will decide the election.

While it’s too early to say whether Harris’ performance will translate into new momentum, her campaign will be optimistic that she’s improved her chances among, perhaps, 200,000 movable voters who will decide the next election in a handful of states.

Read the full analysis.

Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance in the spin room following the presidential debate between Trump and Harris on September 10.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said he thinks former president Trump finds the question about vetoing a national abortion ban “ridiculous” because it’s “legislation that’s never going to actually happen.”

Vance said he had not spoken to the former president about whether or not he would veto a national abortion ban, despite Vance saying on NBC’s Meet the Press last month that Trump would veto such a ban.

But during the debate, Trump danced around the question of whether or not he would veto a national abortion ban.

An ABC moderator brought up Vance’s previous comments, to which Trump responded:

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced each other in a presidential debate Tuesday in Philadelphia.

It was the first debate between the two nominees, and it came less than two months before Election Day. 

David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News moderated the debate. The rules mirrored those used in the Biden-Trump debate: there was no live audience, and, with a few exceptions, the candidates’ microphones were muted while their rival spoke.

Trump and Harris stand on stage at the start of the debate.

People attend a debate watch party at the Dew Drop Inn in Washington, DC.

Trump reacts during the debate.

People watch the debate on a cross-country flight.

Harris reenacts the thumbs-down gesture that former Sen. John McCain used to vote against a repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

Trump walks off stage at the end of the debate. Harris and Trump didn't interact after the debate ended. 

See more photos from the debate.

Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday:

Facts First: This claim is misleading. While US service members are not engaged in major wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, US service members have come under fire in the Middle East repeatedly over the last year and increasingly been in harm’s way since Hamas’ attacks on Israel last October.  

There are currently roughly 2,500 US troops in Iraq, who have come under repeated fire since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Also since October, more US troops have deployed to the Middle East, including on Navy ships to the Gulf of Oman and Red Sea.

CNN cited two US officials in reporting Tuesday that the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was last operating near the Gulf of Oman, and the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is expected to leave the region this week after last operating in the same area.

In the last several months, US service members have taken fire in the Middle East and been wounded or killed. Last month, eight US service members were treated for traumatic brain injuries and smoke inhalation after a drone struck Rumalyn Landing Zone in Syria. In January, three US soldiers were killed, and dozens more were injured, in an attack on a small outpost in Jordan called Tower 22. The same month, two US Navy SEALs died after going missing one night at sea while trying to seize lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen. 

Former US Representative from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard works the spin room on behalf of Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump after the ABC Presidential Debate at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10

Donald Trump allies and advisers are publicly attacking ABC News and its moderators over their fact checks of the former president and lines of questioning at Tuesday’s debate, while some privately acknowledge that he fell for some of Vice President Kamala Harris’ attempts to bait him into attacking her.

One person close to Trump acknowledged that Harris “at times, successfully baited Trump.” But they also argued that ABC’s live fact checks appeared to anger Trump and throw him off, while also claiming Harris was not receiving the same scrutiny.

A Trump adviser told CNN they believe Harris isn’t getting enough questions on inflation and the economy, though they acknowledged Trump could have done a better job of steering the conversation back to the issue they believe is the most important ahead of November. 

Trump adviser Tim Murtaugh told CNN that Harris’ response to her changing policy positions, her answers on how she would fix inflation, and her handling of the southern border were some of the brighter moments of the night. 

A voter enters a booth fill out a ballot in a primary election to pick candidates for governor, the US House, and the state Legislature, in Nashua, New Hampshire on September 10.

While most eyes were on the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the final round of primary elections before November took place Tuesday.

In New Hampshire, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte is projected to win the Republican primary to succeed retiring GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, according to The Associated Press. Ayotte, who narrowly lost her bid for reelection in 2016, will next face Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, who won a hard-fought Democratic primary. The race is expected to be competitive.

In New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District, Maggie Goodlander, who is married to President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, will win the Democratic nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Annie Kuster, according to the AP. Goodlander, a former congressional and White House aide, will be favored in November against Republican Lily Tang Williams in the Democratic-leaning seat.

Meanwhile, Sarah McBride has won the Democratic nod for the at-large House seat in deep-blue Delaware, according to the AP, as the state senator bids to become the first openly transgender member of Congress.

McBride is looking to succeed Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester, who is running for Senate and also hopes to make history this November. Blunt Rochester, who was unopposed Tuesday for the Democratic nomination, would be the state’s first Black senator if elected.

Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s debate are closely divided over which candidate better understands the problems facing people like them, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, with 44% saying Harris does and 40% picking Trump. 

That marks a shift in Harris’ favor from prior to the debate, when 43% said Trump had a better understanding of their problems while 39% said Harris did. 

But voters who tuned in give Trump a 20-point advantage over Harris after the debate on handling the economy, 55% to 35% – a margin that’s slightly wider than before they took the stage in Philadelphia.

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 6 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 4 percentage points more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

An 82% majority of registered voters who watched Tuesday’s debate say it didn’t affect their choice for president. Another 14% said it made them reconsider but didn’t change their minds, with 4% saying it changed their minds about whom to vote for. Debate watchers who supported Trump prior to Tuesday night were modestly more likely than those who supported Harris to say the debate had left them reconsidering.

Methodology: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 605 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Tuesday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

Former President Donald Trump claimed in Tuesday night’s debate that he saved Obamacare, his predecessor’s landmark health reform law that Trump repeatedly vowed to repeal and replace.  

“I had a choice to make: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be, or do I let it rot? And I saved it,” Trump said. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is misleading. The only reason Obamacare wasn’t repealed was because congressional Republicans could not amass enough votes to kill the law in 2017. During Trump’s administration, he and his officials took many steps to weaken the Affordable Care Act, though they did continue to operate the Obamacare exchanges.  

Within hours of taking the oath of office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at rolling back Obamacare – stating that the administration’s official policy was “to seek the prompt repeal” of the Affordable Care Act.  

Although Congress failed to repeal it, Trump did manage to undermine the law, which led to a decline in enrollment. He cut the open enrollment period in half, to only six weeks. He also slashed funding for advertising and for navigators, who are critical to helping people sign up. At the same time, he increased the visibility of insurance agents who can also sell non-Obamacare plans. 

Trump signed an executive order in October 2017 making it easier for Americans to access alternative policies that have lower premiums than Affordable Care Act plans – but in exchange for fewer protections and benefits. And he ended subsidy payments to health insurers to reduce eligible enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs.  

Plus, his administration refused to defend several central provisions of the Affordable Care Act in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, arguing that key parts of Obamacare should be invalidated. The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the challenge and left the law in place. 

Enrollment declined until the final year of his term, which was in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Former President Donald Trump said he thought the ABC News moderators were “very unfair” and that it was “three on one” during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump said he would “think about” another potential debate.

Asked by a reporter why he came to the spin room and let the performance speak for itself, the former president said: “Well, I think it did.”

Discussion of tonight’s debate was trending high on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump took the stage, with a related topic getting more than 25 million views.

Social media users in the Chinese Communist Party-ruled country seized on Trump’s unfounded accusation that Harris is a “Marxist,” with one user asking: “Is this a competition of who’s more loyal to the (Communist) Party?”

Other discussion focused on the clash between candidates, with one post describing it as a “match full of gunpowder.”

Some social media users complimented Harris’ performance.

Users appeared to be largely following along by watching clips on social media because the debate was not broadcast by state television. There was little discussion, as of Wednesday morning local time, about the back-and-forth between the candidates that centered on China trade policy.

In that exchange, Trump praised his move to implement a range of tariffs on Chinese goods, while Harris accused him of not protecting US interests against China. Harris said the former president “invited trade wars” and “ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.”

Some context: The Trump administration restricted exports to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s top chipmaker, and added dozens of Chinese companies to an entity list, while slapping massive trade tariffs on a range of Chinese goods.

The Biden administration has largely kept those tariffs in place, while touting its policy of explicitly targeting China’s tech sector with sweeping controls designed to curtail China’s access to technology critical to the manufacturing and operations of its military power.

CNN's Phil Mattingly speaks to 13 undecided voters at a CNN focus group in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The majority of voters participating in a CNN focus group at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, say they thought Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential debate on Tuesday.

The group was made up of 13 voters who had not yet made a decision on who to vote for before the debate. When CNN’s Phil Mattingly asked the group who won the debate, eight of the voters said Harris won the showdown. Mattingly noted that Erie is “the swingiest county” in the battleground state.

One voter said she thought Harris was “more optimistic” and “more respectful” and was able to describe her plans more effectively.

Another voter, however, who said she felt like Donald Trump won the debate, said she felt like the former president is the candidate that could improve things like inflation and the economy.

“I think it’s important to remember that we are voting for the leader of our country and not who we like the most or who we want in our wedding party, but who is actually going to make our country better,” she said.

One critical moment of the debate the voters reacted to was when Trump and Harris debated about abortion rights. One voter responded positively to Harris’ answer because the vice president’s “impassioned response” resonated with her. She said she still had a favorable reaction to the moment even though she said she doesn’t agree with all of the vice president’s positions on the issue.

“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said.

Another voter said that although she also doesn’t agree with Harris’ stance on abortion, she thought it was “nice to see the passion and believability that she stands behind and then have something to gauge more of what she says on since she hasn’t spoken a lot, solidly about a lot of issues.”

On Trump’s strongest moment, one voter, who is a veteran, said he felt like the former president’s remarks about the Afghanistan withdrawal were strong.

Former President Donald Trump.

Former President Donald Trump defended his debate performance to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins as he exited the spin room on Wednesday.

“This was my best debate,” Trump said when pressed by Collins on whether he took the bait from Vice President Kamala Harris.

Asked about his answer to whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Trump said:

Former President Donald Trump said he had “no idea” when asked by CNN what his reaction was to Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Swift said in a post on Instagram that she watched the debate and would cast her vote for Harris, ending speculation about whether the megastar would share her political views ahead of November’s election.

Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s debate ended the night with split opinions of Kamala Harris: 45% say they view her favorably, and 44% unfavorably , according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS.

That’s an improvement from before the debate, when 39% of the same voters said they viewed her favorably. Debate watchers’ views of Trump, meanwhile, shifted little – 39% rated him favorably and 51% unfavorably following the debate, similar to his pre-debate numbers among the same voters.

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 6 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 4 percentage points more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

Identical shares of debate-watchers, 54%, said that they had at least some confidence in Harris’ and Trump’s respective abilities to lead the country, with 36% saying they had a lot of confidence in Trump and 32% that they had a lot of confidence in Harris. In June, just 14% who tuned in for the presidential debate between Trump and Joe Biden expressed a lot of confidence in Biden’s ability to lead. 

Asked specifically about Tuesday’s debate, viewers said, 42% to 33%, that Harris offered a better plan for solving the country’s problems than Trump did, with 22% saying that neither candidate offered up a better plan.

Methodology: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 605 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Tuesday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

Workers at the Linamar Corp. of Canada EV battery case manufacturing facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in October 2023.

Vice President Kamala Harris claimed Tuesday that the economy added 800,000 new manufacturing jobs during the Biden-Harris administration.  

Facts First: Harris was rounding up and was referring to labor market data available through July 2024, which showed the US economy added 765,000 manufacturing jobs from the first full month of the Biden-Harris administration, February 2021. But it’s worth noting that the growth almost entirely occurred in 2021 and 2022 (with 746,000 manufacturing jobs added starting in February 2021) before a relatively flat 2023 and through the first seven months of 2024.  

In August, the US economy lost an estimated 24,000 manufacturing jobs, bringing that tally down to 739,000, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary employment data released Friday.

The gain during the Biden-Harris era is, however, over 800,000 using non-seasonally-adjusted figures that are also published by the federal government – in fact, the non-seasonally adjusted gain is 874,000 through August – so there is at least a defensible basis for Harris’ claim. However, seasonally adjusted data smooths out volatility and is traditionally used to observe trends. 

An estimated 172,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during former President Donald Trump’s administration, however, most of those losses occurred following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. From February 2017, the first full month that Trump was in office, through February 2020, the US economy added 414,000 manufacturing jobs, BLS data shows. 

Presidential terms don’t start and end in a vacuum, and economic cycles can carry over regardless of party. Additionally, the ups and downs of the labor market and the broader economy are influenced by factors beyond a single president, although specific economic policies can influence economic and job growth. 

President Joe Biden said he feels Vice President Kamala Harris won tonight’s debate, writing in a post on X that it “wasn’t even close.”

The president watched the debate from a hotel in New York City with family and staff, per a person familiar.

People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Shaw’s Tavern on September 10 in Washington, DC. 

Donald Trump immediately looked to turn the debate against Kamala Harris on Tuesday night into a win and questioned whether he would participate in a second one.

He said Harris “wants to do another one because she got beaten tonight, but I don’t know if we’re going to be doing another one.”

Trump was again noncommittal when asked on Fox News whether he would agree to another debate with Harris, saying, “I have to think about it, but if you won the debate, I sort of think maybe I shouldn’t do it.”

Harris’ team immediately called for the candidates to do a second debate. Trump’s campaign had said he agreed to do a NBC debate on September 25.

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Donald Trump.

Vice President Kamala Harris, right, and former President Donald Trump shake hands during the second presidential debate at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 10.

Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump say, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS.

Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would.

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in, and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 6 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 4 percentage points more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

But the results mark a shift from June, when voters who tuned in for the debate between Trump and Joe Biden said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed his Democratic rival. In 2020 and 2016, Biden and Hillary Clinton were seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump across the presidential debates.

Methodology: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 605 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Tuesday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

In Tuesday night’s debate, former President Donald Trump once again said that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to get rid of private health insurance.  

Facts First: Trump’s claim is outdated. While Harris did say in her first presidential campaign in 2019 that she wanted to eliminate private health insurance, the plan she rolled out later that year included a role for private insurers, and as vice president, she has supported bolstering the Affordable Care Act. Coverage on the Obamacare exchanges are offered by private insurers. 

At a CNN town hall in January 2019, Harris, who was then a California senator vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that she would eliminate private health insurance as a necessary part of implementing Medicare for All, a government-run health insurance proposal promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Harris was a co-sponsor of Sanders’ bill, which called for essentially getting rid of the private insurance market. 

A furor erupted, and her national press secretary and an adviser quickly walked back her comment, saying she was open to multiple paths to Medicare for All. And private insurers were included in the plan she rolled out in July 2019. 

Since she was named President Joe Biden’s vice president, she has supported his efforts to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, which has led to a record number of people signing up for 2024 coverage from private insurers on the individual market. 

Harris’ campaign has confirmed that the vice president no longer supports a single-payer health care system. 

Sen. JD Vance speaks to reporters in the spin room following the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris at The National Constitution Center on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance argued that former President Donald Trump “hammered” Vice President Kamala Harris on her inconsistencies during Tuesday’s debate.

Pressed by Collins on why Trump didn’t focus on Harris’ reversal on policy until his closing statement, Vance said:

Vance also defended Trump’s amplification of the false claim that immigrants in a community in Ohio are abducting people’s pets and eating them. Vance said that they’ve heard accounts from people there, saying: “This stuff is happening.”

“The people on the ground dealing with this think that it is happening,” he said.

Vance said that he has a responsibility as a senator to take people seriously when they say their lives have been “ruined” by this migrant crisis.

Vance later told a gaggle of reporters in the post-debate spin room that he thought the American people could “see right through” Harris’ debate performance.

This post has been updated with additional comments from JD Vance.

Former President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that the US was “paying almost all of NATO” for years, until he “got them to pay up” by threatening not to follow through on the alliance’s collective defense clause. 

“For years, we were paying almost all of NATO,” he said. “We were being ripped off by European nations, both on trade and on NATO. I got them to pay up by saying one of the statements you made before, ‘if you don’t pay, we’re not going to protect you.’ Otherwise we would have never gotten it.” 

 The US share of total NATO military spending fell to about 65% in 2023. And the US is now responsible for about 16% of direct contributions to NATO, the same as Germany. Erwan Lagadec, an expert on NATO as a research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and director of its Transatlantic Program, said the US share was reduced from 22% “to placate Trump” and is a “sweetheart deal” given that the US makes up more than half of the alliance’s total GDP. 

Former President Donald Trump claimed that some states allow people to execute babies, in addition to allowing abortion in the ninth month, and he singled out the governors including Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz for his stance on the issue.

On Walz, Trump said, “He also says execution after birth – it’s execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK. And that’s not OK with me.” 

“They have abortion in the ninth month. They even have – and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia not the current governor he’s doing an excellent job. But the governor before, he said, ‘The baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby,’ in other words, ‘We’ll execute the baby,’” Trump said.

“Every state explicitly criminalizes infanticide,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said in June.

“There is no basis for this claim,” Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School, also said at the time.  

There are some cases in which parents choose palliative care, a kind of care that can provide relief for the symptoms and stress of a deadly illness or condition that gives the baby just minutes, hours or days to live. That is not the same as executing a baby. 

Trump also misspoke. It was not the governor of West Virginia, it was the former Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam who made a controversial remark in 2019 that many Republicans said sounded like he supported infanticide. Northam, who is a pediatric neurologist, said his words were being misinterpreted. In any case, infanticide was not legal when Northam was governor of Virginia nor was it ever legal in West Virginia either. 

As for abortions in the ninth month, Minnesota is one of a handful of states that allow abortion at any stage of a pregnancy, but it doesn’t mean that doctors perform them. Nationally, just 0.9% of abortions in 2021 — the latest year the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has data — happened at 21 weeks or later. Many abortions at this point in the pregnancy are necessary due to serious health risks or lethal fetal anomalies. More than 93% of abortions were conducted before the 14th week of pregnancy, according to the CDC. In Minnesota, according to state data for 2022, of the 12,175 abortions in the state, only two happened between the 25 and 30th week of pregnancy. None happened after the 30th week of pregnancy that year. 

Kamala Harris during the second presidential debate at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

When ABC’s David Muir asked Donald Trump why he opined on Kamala Harris’ race, he said it didn’t matter to him and repeated a false claim to suggest the vice president had a history of denying parts of her racial identity. 

When Harris was asked to weigh in, she engaged with the issue in a more fulsome way than she has done in the past few weeks of her campaign by listing what she aimed to characterize as a legacy of Trump’s racism, even going so far as to call it a “tragedy.”

When asked about this issue in a recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris dismissed it as “the same old tired playbook.”

Tonight, Harris chose to use Trump’s past statements on race to argue a broader point.

When asked about this pivot, a campaign aide texted to CNN: “Not showing our cards. We got another debate.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, right, and former President Donald Trump during the second presidential debate at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 10.

Under the rules of Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak.

The pool reporter in the debate hall in Philadelphia was able to hear some of what was said when their mics were muted.

When Trump claimed that Democrats want abortion access in the ninth month, Harris said, “That’s not true.”

When Trump said he was a leader on in vitro fertilization, Harris said, “You have not.”

When Trump made the debunked claim about migrants in Ohio eating pets, Harris responded: “What? That is unbelievable.”

When Harris said Trump “doesn’t have a plan for you,” the former president responded: “That’s just a soundbite. They gave her that to say.”

Sen. JD Vance speaks to reporters in the spin room following the presidential debate between Trump and Harris at The National Constitution Center on September 10, in Philadelphia.

CNN’s Dana Bash described the debunked rumor involving Haitian migrants and pets as “racist” following Tuesday’s debate.

Her comment came after Sen. JD Vance defended the meme, which was also promoted by former President Donald Trump, in a post-debate interview.

Kamala Harris campaign officials didn’t receive a heads-up on Taylor Swift’s surprise Tuesday night endorsement, according to Ian Sams, a senior campaign spokesperson, who also welcomed the news in an interview with CNN.

“People didn’t know she was going to do that,” he said.

But he said the campaign would be happy to have Swift lend her support in whatever capacity she’s inclined to ahead of the election.

Former President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday that he “ended” the Nord Stream pipeline.

“I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on day one,” Trump said. “But he ended the XL pipeline – the XL pipeline in our country, he ended that. But he let the Russians build a pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany; the biggest pipeline in the world.” 

Facts first: Trump’s claim is false. He did not “end” Nord Stream.  

While he did sign a bill that included sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.  

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The pipeline was damaged later that year in what has been described as a likely act of sabotage.  

Emhoff attend a watch party after a presidential debate with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia on September 10.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff praised Vice President Kamala Harris’ debate performance at a watch party in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the Central Park Five pleaded guilty to crimes, and that the five teenagers “badly hurt a person, killed a person” in the 1989 attack.  

Facts First: These claims are false. The Central Park Five did not plead guilty, they were convicted by a jury at trial (that conviction has since been vacated). Also, the five teenagers were accused of raping a jogger – not of murder.  

Five teenagers who were accused of raping a jogger in 1989 were pressured into giving false confessions. They were exonerated in 2002 when DNA evidence linked another person to the crime. The teenagers sued the city, and the case was settled in 2014. 

A sixth teenager charged in the attack did plead guilty to robbery charges. His conviction was also overturned because there was no physical evidence connecting him to either the rape or the robbery, and because people who blamed the sixth teen later recanted.  

Former President Donald Trump claimed during the debate on Tuesday that “crime in this country is through the roof.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim that crime rates are up is false. And while it is true that the FBI’s most recent data did not include some large cities, crime counts still show a downward trend as both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024.  

There are limitations to the FBI-published data from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data and the submitted data usually has some errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime.  

The preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% decline in murder and a roughly 6% decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in Trump’s last calendar year in office in 2020. The preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.  

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said in an email to CNN last week: There is ample evidence that crime is falling in 2024 and murder specifically fell at the fastest – or one of the fastest – paces ever recorded in 2023 and again in 2024.” 

Asher continued: “The evidence comes from a variety of sources including the FBI’s quarterly data, the CDC, the Gun Violence Archive, and our newly launched Real-Time Crime Index. We show a 5 percent decline in violent crime – including a 16 percent decline in murder – and a 9 percent decline in property crime through June 2024 in over 300 cities with available data so far this year. Data from these various sources suggest the US murder rate was down significantly in 2023 relative to 2020/2021 highs but still slightly above 2019’s level.”    

After Trump claimed in June that “crime is so much up,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces. She said: “It would be more accurate to say that crime is so much down.”   

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reacted to Taylor Swift endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president and him for vice president, saying he’s “incredibly grateful” for her support and calling her social media statement an example of “the type of courage we need in America.”

During an interview with MSNBC, Walz placed his hand over his heart and smiled widely as an anchor read Swift’s statement endorsing their campaign in its entirety.

“I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift. I say that also as a cat owner, a fellow cat owner,” Walz said in response, alluding to the image Swift shared holding a cat accompanying her statement.

Walz encouraged Swift’s supporters to engage with the campaign through its official website.

“This would be the opportunity, Swifties. Kamalaharris.com, get on over there, give us a hand, get things going,” he said.

Former President Donald Trump complained that the US had given $250 billion to $275 billion in aid to Ukraine while European countries had given just $100 billion to $150 billion even though they are located closer to Ukraine. 

The Kiel Institute, which closely tracks aid to Ukraine, found that, from late January 2022 (just before Russia’s invasion in February 2022) through June 2024, the European Union and individual European countries had committed a total of about $207 billion to Ukraine, in military, financial and humanitarian assistance, compared to about $109 billion (€98.4 billion) committed by the US. Europe also exceeded the US in aid that had actually been “allocated” to Ukraine – defined by the institute as aid either delivered or specified for delivery – at about $122 billion (€110.21 billion) for Europe compared to about $83 billion (€75.1 billion) for the US. 

In addition, Europe had committed more total military aid to Ukraine, at about $88 billion (79.57 billion euro) to about $72 billion (64.87 billion euro) for the US. The US narrowly led on military aid that had actually been allocated, at about $56.91 billion for the US (51.58B euro) to about $56.84 billion for Europe (51.52B euro), but that was nowhere near the lopsided margin Trump suggested. 

It’s important to note that it’s possible to come up with different totals using different methodology. And the Kiel Institute found that Ukraine itself was getting only about half of the money in a 2024 US bill that had widely been described as a $61 billion aid bill for Ukraine; the institute said the rest of the funds were mostly going to the Defense Department. 

Former President Donald Trump repeated Tuesday past claims that he “rebuilt our entire military.”  

“We’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other. Because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry. I rebuilt our entire military. She gave a lot of it away to the Taliban. She gave it to Afghanistan,” he said.  

Harrison said in a November email: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F-15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.” 

Following the debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris talked to a crowd of supporters at a watch party in Philadelphia.

She emphasized the importance of winning the battleground state of Pennsylvania and thanked campaign volunteers.

The theme of unity — instead of division — was also a common motif for the vice president in her attacks against Trump on the debate stage.

Former President Barack Obama delivers a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Former President Barack Obama said Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris showed she will be “a president for all Americans” after her performance in the ABC presidential debate against former President Donald Trump. 

Kamala Harris’ team is pleased with how tonight’s debate between the vice president and Donald Trump went. 

Harris campaign advisers told CNN throughout and after Tuesday night’s debate that they felt the vice president displayed a strong command of the issues; delivered messages she had hoped to on pivotal issues such as reproductive rights, the economy and foreign policy; and notably, successfully got under Trump’s skin — more than once. 

One senior adviser said if there was one thing that consistently surprised the Harris team tonight, it was how often Trump took the vice president’s bait, including on issues such as the crowd sizes at his rallies.

As senior Harris advisers watched the debate on-site at the Constitution Center, applause broke out in the room during the first commercial break, according to a person in the room. Now that the debate is over, the mood inside the Harris campaign is one of celebration.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro joins the Pennsylvania delegation as they cast their votes during the Ceremonial Roll Call of States on the second day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 20 in Chicago.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he was worried that the country had “brain fog” about Donald Trump’s record as president.

But after tonight’s debate, Shapiro said “I think Kamala Harris wiped out that brain fog” by reminding the American people of the former president’s record.  

The governor said his state is “no stranger to close elections,” but he thinks Harris “understands that to pick up that last yard or two here in Pennsylvania is tough, but you gotta show up.” 

Former President Donald Trump said of the Biden-Harris administration, “the only jobs they got were bounce-back jobs” that “bounced back and it went to their benefit,” but “I was the one that created them.” 

More than 21 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. Following substantial relief and recovery measures, the US started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic (February 2020) employment totals in June 2022. 

The job gains didn’t stop there. Since June 2022 and through August 2024, the US has added nearly 6.4 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record. In total under the Biden-Harris administration, around 16 million jobs have been added.

But it’s not entirely fair nor accurate to say the jobs gained were all “bounce-back” or were people simply returning to their former positions. 

The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities. 

Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own businesses.

Vice President Kamala Harris implied Tuesday that all prospective start-up business owners will be able to take advantage of the $50,000 tax deduction she’s proposing for new small businesses, saying that it will help them “pursue their ambitions.” 

“I have a plan to give startup businesses $50,000 tax deduction to pursue their ambitions, their innovation, their ideas, their hard work,” Harris said. 

“Businesses that fail before they begin to turn a profit won’t be able to utilize the deduction, because to take a deduction you have to have taxable income to deduct against,” Erica York, a senior economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN.  

In other words, the tax deduction may not ultimately help businesses owners get off the ground and running initially. However, it may help lower their tax burden over time, but only if they turn a profit. 

Former President Donald Trump gestures during the debate Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 10.

Former President Donald Trump repeated a claim he has made on numerous occasions during his campaign – that the Biden administration orchestrated a criminal election subversion case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, a criminal fraud case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Manhattan, and a civil fraud case that was brought against him by the attorney general of New York state. 

Facts First: This is false. There is no evidence that Joe Biden or his administration were behind any of these cases. None of these officials reports to the president or even to the federal government.  

Attorney General Merrick Garland testified to Congress in early June about the Manhattan case in which Trump was found guilty: “The Manhattan district attorney has jurisdiction over cases involving New York state law, completely independent of the Justice Department, which has jurisdiction over cases involving federal law. We do not control the Manhattan district attorney. The Manhattan district attorney does not report to us. The Manhattan district attorney makes its own decisions about cases that he wants to bring under his state law.” 

As he did in his conversation with Elon Musk, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making such claims; Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg were colleagues in the New York attorney general’s office before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021. 

CNN anchor Chris Wallace said he didn’t think he’d ever “witness a debate as devastating” as the June showdown between former President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Wallace said that he believed Harris “pitched a shutout on almost every subject I can think of” and that she “shut Trump down.”

He agreed with an observation made by CNN’s Dana Bash, saying that Harris’ message Tuesday night could be summed up by her statement that Trump is not campaigning against Biden — but her instead.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that President Joe Biden has taken money from China and Ukraine, including $3.5 million from the wife of the mayor of Moscow. 

Roughly a year after launching their impeachment inquiry into Biden and more than three years into Biden’s presidency, the closest House Republicans have gotten to connecting the president to money earned by his family members is in finding that the president received personal checks from his brother while he was a private citizen after his vice presidency. Republicans have questioned the legitimacy of these transactions and used them to suggest that Joe Biden did benefit from his brother’s relationships with foreign entities. But banking records provide substantial evidence that Joe Biden had made loans to his brother and then was paid back without interest, as House Democrats have said. 

Biden said at a presidential debate against Trump in 2020: “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.”  

The Washington Post dove into the allegations in 2022 that Hunter Biden received money from the wife of the Moscow mayor. But there’s no evidence that Joe Biden had any involvement regardless.  

Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade is rolling from the debate site as of 11:05 p.m. ET, according to pool reporters.

President Joe Biden watched Vice President Kamala Harris debate former President Donald Trump from a hotel in New York City with family and staff, per a person familiar.

Biden had declined to share what debate advice he offered his vice president as he left the White House this afternoon, though he did tell reporters Harris seemed “cool, calm and collected” heading into the evening.

The president is in New York ahead of Wednesday’s September 11 anniversary and celebrated his granddaughter Finnegan’s birthday earlier tonight in the city.

Former President Donald Trump weighed in Tuesday on the state of manufacturing in America, saying the industry lost 10,000 jobs “in the last month.” Manufacturing’s total job losses in August, according to the government’s latest tally, were actually quite a bit higher, at 24,000.

Trump, unsurprisingly, blamed the Biden administration and Chinese automakers for the weakness the manufacturing industry is currently seeing.

“They’re building these massive plants and they think they’re going to sell their cars into the United States because of these people,” Trump said. “What they have given to China is unbelievable.”

There’s quite a bit to untangle there. Chinese manufacturers have been operating out of Mexico for decades, but it’s true that some automakers from China have ramped up investments in the country recently to tap in to the sizable US market.

As it relates to the health of US manufacturers, high interest rates and sluggish domestic demand are the main issues top of mind for the industry, according to recent business surveys from the Institute for Supply Management. The industry “contracted in August for the fifth consecutive month and the 21st time in the last 22 months,” ISM said.

Taylor Swift performs onstage on August 15 in London.

Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president at the conclusion of Tuesday’s debate — a crucial endorsement that ends months of speculation about whether the superstar would weigh in on this year’s race.

Swift added: “I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered!”

Swift has spent most of her nearly two-decade career staying mum on politics, until the 2018 midterms, when she endorsed two Democratic candidates out of Tennessee. She has since been vocally supportive of Democratic policies and candidates, often encouraging her supporters to vote and advocating for women’s rights, reproductive health and LGBTQ+ rights.

She signed off her post, which included a picture with one of her three cats, Benjamin Button, with “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

This post has been updated with additional reporting on Swift’s endorsement.

Former President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that 818,000 of the jobs created under the Biden-Harris administration from April 2023 to March 2024 were a “fraud.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false and needs additional context. 

Trump was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recently released preliminary estimate for its annual benchmark revision that suggested there were 818,000 fewer jobs for the year ended in March 2024 than were initially reported. 

Economic data is often revised, especially as more comprehensive information becomes available, to provide a clearer, more accurate picture of the dynamics at play. 

Every year – including the four years when Trump was president – the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a thorough review of the survey-based employment estimates from the monthly jobs report and reconciles those estimates with fuller employment counts measured by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program. 

This annual process, called a benchmarking, provides a near-complete employment count because the BLS can correct for sampling and modeling errors from the surveys and re-anchor those estimates to unemployment insurance tax records. The revision process is two-fold: A preliminary estimate is released in mid-August, and the final revision is issued in February, alongside the January jobs report. 

While the recently announced preliminary revision (which amounts to 0.5% of total employment) was the largest downward revision since 2009 (which was -902,000, or -0.7%), there have been other large revisions made in recent years – notably a downward revision of 514,000 jobs (-0.3%) for the year ended in March 2019, during the Trump administration. 

The preliminary revision was larger than typical, but economists and even a Trump-appointed BLS commissioner have publicly stated that there is nothing nefarious at play. Revisions of this size typically happen at turning points in the economy, when the BLS’ methodology is less reliable, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. 

Additionally, the pandemic had a seismic effect on the economy as well as the gold standard methods used to measure it, so this large revision is likely a reflection of that. Specifically, the BLS’ model for capturing business “births and deaths” is likely overstating new firm formation while underestimating deaths, Oxford Economics’ Chief US Economist Ryan Sweet told CNN. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump didn’t interact at the conclusion of Tuesday’s debate, according to a pool reporter in the room.

When the contentious debate ended, they both thanked the moderators and turned toward their exits without looking at each other. Trump walked straight off stage.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff emerged and gave his wife a smile and a hug.

After closing statements, former President Donald Trump spoke for about 42 minutes and 52 seconds, while Vice President Kamala Harris spoke for about 37 minutes and 36 seconds.

While the debate was designed to offer both candidates an equal chance to respond to questions, they could choose not to use the maximum allotted time. The moderators also allowed more time for responses after some exchanges.

Here’s how long each candidate used:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday claimed that former President Donald Trump left office “with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.”  

Facts First: Harris’ claim is false.  

In January 2021, when Trump left office, the official unemployment rate was 6.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.8% in April 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down global economies, including that of the US. That was the highest rate since 1939, according to BLS historical records.  

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. But by the time Trump left office, the unemployment rate had gone down.   

Harris gestures as she speaks during a presidential debate.

Moments after the debate is over, the Harris campaign is calling for another round.

Trump has said he would do a NBC debate on September 25.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris traded attacks tonight as they worked to get their policy positions across to voters during the ABC presidential debate.

It was the first time the two candidates had met face-to-face.

Here are some of the key lines from their onstage encounter:

LIBAN CONTROL KABUL AIRPORTMilitary vehicles sit abandoned on the tarmac in the wake of the American forces completing their withdrawal from the country and Taliban fighters seizing and securing the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2021. (

In Tuesday night’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated a familiar claim, which he has made in speech after speech, that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when President Joe Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021. 

“We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind,” Trump said. 

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure — it’s closer to $83 billion — for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A fraction of this funding was for equipment. 

Trump delivers his closing statement on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Donald Trump’s campaign tried to claim victory before the end of the presidential debate Tuesday, with top Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles arguing that his performance was “masterful” and that he laid out a “bold vision of America.”

The statement called Vice President Kamala Harris’ vision for America “a dark reminder of the oppressive, big government policies of Joe Biden that she wants to continue.”

Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Donald Trump’s big question for Kamala Harris during his closing remarks during the presidential debate Tuesday, was: “Why didn’t she do it?” as he tried to tie the vice president to the Biden administration.

He looked to make his case against Harris by connecting her to “wars going on in the Middle East. We have wars going on with Russia and Ukraine,” the Biden administration’s chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and immigration. He also said Harris would ban fracking, a position she has since reversed her position on after saying in 2019 that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”  

He ended his remarks by calling President Joe Biden and Harris “the worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country.”

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Trump.

Harris speaks during a presidential debate with former President Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Speaking during her closing remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a familiar line for anybody who’s listened to her truncated campaign: “We are not going back.”

She said America on Tuesday night has heard “two very different visions for our country: One that is focused on the future, and one that is focused on the past — an attempt to take us backward.”

“But we’re not going back,” she added.

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Kamala Harris.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris met with Russian President Vladimir Putin days before Russia invaded Ukraine and failed to deter him from the invasion. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Harris was not sent to negotiate peace, and she has never met with Putin. In reality, she met with US allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the Munich Security Conference in the days before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin was not at the conference. 

The Biden administration was still trying to deter an invasion of Ukraine at the time of Harris’ 2022 trip to the conference in Germany, but top administration officials, including President Joe Biden, made clear that they believed Putin was already moving toward invading. As Harris was on her way to Germany, Biden told reporters that he thought a Russian attack “will happen in the next several days.” 

CNN reported on the day the Munich conference began that a senior administration official said Harris had three key objectives:

The Munich conference was held from February 18 to February 20, 2022; Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.  

Roughly 90 minutes into the debate broadcast, former President Donald Trump had spoken for about 40 minutes and 50 seconds, while Vice President Kamala Harris used roughly 35 minutes and 31 seconds.

While the debate is designed to offer both candidates an equal chance to respond to questions, they can choose not to use the maximum allotted time. The moderators have also allowed more time for responses after some exchanges.

Follow our live graphic to see who’s using the most and least airtime as the debate concludes. Data will be updated every 5 seconds.

Former President Donald Trump claimed during the debate on Tuesday that Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, was responsible for inadequate security at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

Facts First: This claim is false. The speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security. Capitol security is overseen by the Capitol Police Board, a body that includes the sergeants at arms of the House and the Senate. Pelosi’s office has explicitly said she was not presented with an offer of 10,000 National Guardsmen as Trump has claimed, telling CNN last year that claims to the contrary are “lies.”

And even if Pelosi had been told of an offer of National Guard troops, she would not have had the power to turn it down. The speaker of the House has no authority to prevent the deployment of the District of Columbia National Guard, which reports to the president (whose authority was delegated, under a decades-old executive order, to the Secretary of the Army). 

You can read a complete fact check on it here.

During the debate, former President Donald Trump pinned the blame for the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago on the Biden-Harris administration during which 13 American servicemembers were killed by an ISIS suicide bomber along with some 170 Afghans on August 26, 2021.

There is some merit to Trump’s argument, after all, the Biden Harris administration was in charge when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened and during the debate Vice President Kamala Harris said that she endorsed the withdrawal.

Yet, as Harris also pointed out, it was the Trump administration that had negotiated the US withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in 2020, an insurgent group, rather than with the elected Afghan government.

The Taliban did not observe the terms of the withdrawal agreement; neither negotiating in good faith for power-sharing with the Afghan government nor did they separate from terrorist organizations.

For his part, Trump had no problem pulling out of the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, even though this agreement was negotiated together with American allies, not with an insurgent group. So, the idea that Biden-Harris administration was bound by Trump’s agreement with the Taliban as the administration has claimed makes no sense.

We can, however, expect to hear more on this issue as the presidential campaign continues, after all, some 800,000 American men and women have served in Afghanistan; many of whom will surely be voting in this close election.

Former President Donald Trump repeated a version of one of his frequent claims Tuesday night that legal scholars wanted Roe v. Wade overturned so individual states could instead decide how to regulate abortion. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Many legal scholars wanted the right to have an abortion preserved in federal law, as several told CNN when Trump made a similar claim in April. 

Some legal scholars who support abortion rights had wanted Roe written in a different way, including even the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but that isn’t the same as saying that “every legal scholar” believed Roe should be overturned and sent to the states.  

“Donald Trump’s claim is flatly incorrect,” another legal scholar who did not want Roe overturned, Maya Manian, an American University law professor and faculty director of the university’s Health Law and Policy Program, said in April. 

Trump’s claim is “obviously not” true, said Mary Ziegler, alaw professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on the history of the US abortion debate. Ziegler, who also did not want Roe overturned, said in an April interview: “Most legal scholars probably track most Americans, who didn’t want to overturn Roe … It wasn’t as if legal scholars were somehow outliers.” 

Read more here. 

Pressed about whether he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, former President Donald Trump’s answer was vague.

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump said during the presidential debate Tuesday night.

“But I’m not president right now,” he added.

Some background: Trump in November promised to replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, in a series of posts on Truth Social. A Trump-backed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare failed in 2017 after three Republican senators joined with Democrats to vote against the bill.

Donald Trump again looked to tie Kamala Harris to some of the Biden administration unpopular policies during the presidential debate Thursday, claiming the vice president “is Biden.”

“Remember this she is Biden. You know, she’s trying to get away from Biden. ‘I don’t know the gentleman,’ she says. She is Biden,” Trump said. He called Joe Biden’s presidency “the most divisive presidency in the history of our country.”

Harris, while laughing and gesturing to herself, said, “clearly, I am not Joe Biden and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”

Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that both she and her running mate Tim Walz own guns.

Harris currently owns a handgun, an aide told CNN.

Some context: In 2019, when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris spoke of owning a firearm.

“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do – for personal safety,” she told reporters in Iowa. “I was a career prosecutor.”

Back in California, Harris served as an Alameda County criminal prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general.

A Harris campaign aide said at the time that the weapon was a handgun, which she keeps locked up as a responsible gun owner. According to the aide, the handgun was purchased years earlier.

But in terms of gun reform, Harris has made impassioned calls for banning assault weapons and universal background checks.

CNN’s Kyung Lah and MJ Lee contributed reporting.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, September 10, in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump claimed at Tuesday’s debate that Vice President Kamala Harris has been the Biden administration’s “border czar.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim about Harris’ border role is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States. 

Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong.

Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries. 

Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries. (Biden also mentioned Mexico that day). Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.” 

Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far. 

During a back-and-forth over the war in Ukraine, former President Donald Trump said Vice President Kamala Harris failed to secure peace after being sent to negotiate with the leaders of Ukraine and Russia.

When moderator David Muir asked Harris directly whether she had met Russian President Vladimir Putin, Harris responded: “I said at the beginning of this debate, you’re gonna hear a bunch of lies coming from this fella. And that is another one.”

Harris said she’s met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky several times.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ health care platform builds on the Biden administration’s efforts to reduce prescription drug costs.

She is calling to expand the current $35 monthly cap on out-of-pocket costs for insulin and the upcoming $2,000 annual limit on out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs generally to all Americans, not just Medicare enrollees. These caps were put in place for those on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act. The $2,000 limit on Medicare Part D drug costs takes effect in January.

Harris’ plan would also accelerate the speed of Medicare’s drug price negotiations so that the costs of more medications come down faster. The Biden administration announced the results of the first-ever round of negotiations, which is expected to result in $6 billion in savings for Medicare and a $1.5 billion reduction in out-of-pocket costs for seniors when the lower prices take effect in 2026.

Meanwhile, Trump in November promised to replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, in a series of posts on Truth Social. A Trump-backed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare failed in 2017 after three Republican senators joined with Democrats to vote against the bill.

Trump also vowed in a June 2023 campaign video to reinstate his previous executive order so that the US government would pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other developed countries. Some of the former president’s pharmaceutical policies were overturned by Biden.

In August, Trump announced plans to make either the government or insurance companies pay for in vitro fertilization treatments. He did not specify how the treatments would be paid for. The former president also praised medical marijuana ahead of some states voting on the issue this fall.

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s campaign promises on key issues.

Some of former President Donald Trump’s allies tell CNN they are frustrated that he has lost his composure multiple times during tonight’s debate.

These allies said that they don’t believe Vice President Kamala Harris is answering questions directly, but that her answers are overshadowed by Trump’s inability to stay on message.

Trump’s allies had been warning the former president against responding to goading remarks from Harris. While those close to him indicated he understood the importance of this, Trump multiple times has taken bait from Harris, including fighting with her over whether people leave his rallies early.

Trump’s team and aligned Republicans have begun blaming the moderators, criticizing them for fact-checking Trump and not Harris and claiming they are giving Harris softer questions — a sign his allies do not see the former president as “winning” this debate.

Harris listens during a presidential debate hosted by ABC as Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

The Harris campaign’s strategy leading up to Tuesday’s debate — and during — was to get former President Donald Trump off message. And the vice president’s aides and allies applauded the moments when her goading appeared to work; the preparation, they said, was going to plan. 

Within the first hour of the debate, multiple aides and allies gushed over her performance.

One Democratic lawmaker offered a more tempered reaction. 

“She is doing okay. Solid but still a little uneven and missing some opportunities. But Trump is a complete disaster, and she is playing him very well. He is in full on crazy town,” the lawmaker told CNN.  

When asked about previous false comments he’s made on Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” for political purposes, former President Donald Trump said he “couldn’t care less” about her race.  

Harris called Trump’s comments about her race a “tragedy.” 

Harris went on to attack the former president’s record on race relations in America, referring to a housing discrimination lawsuit his development company faced in the 1970s for denying housing to Black Americans, and the birther conspiracy Trump started around former President Barack Obama’s nationality.  

Some background: Trump falsely claimed Harris “happened to turn Black” for political purposes at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in July. When an interviewer asked him whether he agreed with Republicans on Capitol Hill who have characterized Harris as a “DEI hire,” Trump responded by questioning Harris’ heritage. 

The same day Trump made those comments, speaking in Houston at a gathering of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, Harris described the former president’s comments as “the same old show, the divisiveness and the disrespect.”

Harris’ mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican; both immigrated to the United States. Harris was born in Oakland, California, and attended a historically Black university, Howard University, in Washington. She is the first female, first Black and first Asian American vice president. 

Vice President Kamala Harris said she agreed with President Joe Biden’s controversial decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.

Harris then went on to criticize Trump’s handling of international relations, saying that he “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine” on the matter during his time as president. 

“He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban,” she said. 

The vice president then accused Trump of inviting the Taliban to Camp David — the historic presidential residence in Maryland.

“This former president, as president invited them to Camp David because he does not, again, appreciate the role and responsibility of the president of the United States, to be commander in chief with a level of respect,” Harris said.

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Kamala Harris.

A presidential debate between former President Donald Trump, on screen at left, and Vice President Kamala Harris, right, is seen from the spin room on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

New York City Councilmember Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Central Park Five, will also be in the spin room for Vice President Kamala Harris following the debate, according to the campaign.

Salaam was wrongly accused in 1989 and then convicted along with four other Black and Latino teenagers of raping a jogger in Manhattan’s Central Park and spent nearly seven years in prison before DNA evidence emerged linking someone else to the crime. Former President Donald Trump, who at the time of the case was a New York real estate mogul, took out full-page newspaper ads following the case that read: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”

Harris referenced Trump’s call for the Central Park Five to face the death penalty during Tuesday’s presidential debate.

The Harris campaign had been teasing an undisclosed guest to appear in the spin room following the debate to serve as a surrogate Harris.

This post has been updated with additional reporting on surrogates attending the spin room.

CNN’s Kayla Tausche contributed reporting to this post.

In the first hour of Tuesday’s presidential debate, 71% of grassroots donors to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign were women, a campaign official told CNN.

The first hour of the debate featured heated exchanges between Harris and former President Donald Trump around abortion access and reproductive health care.

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Tuesday that 818,000 of the jobs the Biden-Harris administration created from April 2023 to March 2024 were a “fraud.”

Trump was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recently released preliminary estimate for its annual benchmark revision that suggested there were 818,000 fewer jobs for the year ended in March 2024 than were initially reported.

Economic data is often revised, especially as more comprehensive information becomes available, to provide a clearer, more accurate, picture of the dynamics at play.

Every year – including the four years when Trump was president – the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a thorough review of the survey-based employment estimates from the monthly jobs report and reconciles those estimates with fuller employment counts measured by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program.

This annual process, called a benchmarking, provides a near-complete employment count, because the BLS can correct for sampling and modeling errors from the surveys and re-anchor those estimates to unemployment insurance tax records. The revision process is two-fold: A preliminary estimate is released in mid-August, and the final revision is issued in February, alongside the January jobs report.

While the recently announced preliminary revision (which amounts to 0.5% of total employment) was the largest downward revision since 2009 (which was -902,000, or -0.7%), there have been other large revisions made in recent years – notably a downward revision of 514,000 jobs (-0.3%) for the year ended in March 2019, during the Trump administration. 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the debate on Tuesday, September 10, in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump said the US experienced “the highest inflation” ever under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim that inflation was at its highest under the Biden-Harris administration is false. Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, hit 9.1% in June 2022. That wasn’t the highest ever recorded. Rather, it was the highest inflation rate in nearly forty years. For instance, in 1980, inflation hit nearly 15%, according to CPI data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

Some of the earliest inflation data the BLS maintains indicates that inflation was even higher in 1917, when it was trending at nearly 18%.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the debate on Tuesday, September 10.

During Tuesday night’s debate, Vice President Kamala Harris said:

Facts First: This is misleading. Harris did not make her position on fracking clear during her only debate in 2020, the general election’s vice presidential debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence; Harris never explicitly stated a personal position on fracking during that debate. 

Rather, she said that Joe Biden, the head of the Democratic ticket at the time, would not ban fracking if he was elected president. Harris said in the 2020 vice presidential debate: “Joe Biden will not end fracking”; “I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking.” 

It made sense that Harris was addressing Biden’s plans at the time, given that the president sets administration policy. But contrary to her claim on Thursday, neither of these 2020 debate comments made clear that she personally held a different view on the subject than she had the year prior. 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the debate on Tuesday, September 10, in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday the United States took in billions of dollars from China as a result of his tariffs.  

Facts First: Trump’s claim about how tariffs work is false. A US tariff is paid by importing businesses in the United States – not other countries – when a foreign-made good arrives at the American border.  

Here’s how tariffs work:When the United States puts a tariff on an imported good, the cost of the tariff usually comes directly out of the bank account of an American importer. 

Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, have found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. 

It’s true that the US Treasury has collected more than $242 billion from the tariffs Trump imposed on imported solar panels, steel and aluminum, and Chinese-made goods – but those duties were paid by US importers, not the country of China.  

Former President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 10.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that when Vice President Kamala Harris previously ran for the presidency, during the 2020 election cycle, she was the very first candidate to drop out of a crowded Democratic primary. 

“When she ran, she was the first one to leave because she failed,” Trump claimed, referring to Harris’ 2020 bid, while arguing that Harris didn’t receive any votes this primary cycle because President Joe Biden was still at top of the ticket during the primaries. 

Facts First: This is false. Harris was far from the first candidate to drop out of that Democratic primary when she exited the race in early December 2019. She was preceded by the sitting or former governors of Washington, Montana and Colorado; the sitting mayor of New York City; andsitting or former members of the House of Representatives and Senate, plus some others 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the debate on Tuesday, September 10, in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump repeated a false claim at Tuesday’s debate that has been promoted by numerous prominent Republicans in the past week, including Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance.

Trump claimed that Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, are stealing people’s pet dogs and cats and eating them. 

Facts First: This is false. The City of Springfield and the local police have said they have seen no evidence for the claim – which appeared to originate from a Facebook post in which someone purporting to be a local resident passed along what they said was a story about their neighbor’s daughter’s friend. 

The Springfield News-Sun reported that “the Springfield Police Division said Monday morning they have received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten.” 

Vance acknowledged on social media on Tuesday that it is “possible” that the “rumors” he has heard from local residents “will turn out to be false,” though he also encouraged people to “keep the cat memes flowing.” 

Kamala Harris looked to separate herself from Joe Biden on the debate stage Tuesday when Donald Trump tried to link her to the president’s policies.

“Biden had no idea how to talk to [Russian leader Vladimir Putin]. He had no idea how to stop it, and now you have millions of people dead, and it’s only getting worse,” Trump said of the ongoing conflict.

“Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s our president. They threw him out of the campaign like a dog,” Trump added.

Biden ended his campaign for reelection in July and endorsed Harris.

A little over half an hour into Tuesday night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Harris campaign officials and Democrats are delighted by what they see as the vice president successfully baiting the former president.

So far, no other exchange has pleased Harris aides more than when the vice president commented on Trump supporters “leaving his rallies early” – which prompted the former president, who is famously sensitive about his crowd sizes – to insist on pushing back on the allegation.

“He is taking the bait at every turn,” a Harris campaign aide said.

“So triggered,” said another.

A Democratic congressman watching told CNN: “Man, she got right under his skin. Took bait.”

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 10.

Vice President Kamala Harris said during Tuesday night’s debate that the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Donald Trump would “essentially be immune from any misconduct” undertaken by him while in the White House. 

Facts First: This needs context. In their decision in July in the historic case, the six conservative justices granted Trump some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, but not blanket immunity, as the former president had sought in his federal election subversion case. The court said Trump could not be criminally pursued over “official acts,” but that he could face prosecution over alleged criminal actions involving “unofficial acts” taken while in office.  

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are facing off in their first debate Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The debate comes less than two months before Election Day.

Former President Donald Trump shakes hands with Vice President Kamala Harris at the start of the ABC presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Patrons at the Dew Drop Inn in Washington, DC, watch the debate Tuesday night.

Vice President Kamala Harris listens to former President Donald Trump during the debate.

People attend a debate watch party hosted by the New York Young Republican Club in New York City.

Former President Donald Trump responds to a question during the debate.

ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis moderated the debate.

See more photos from the debate

Former President Donald Trump argued that he could get Russia’s war in Ukraine “settled” within 24 hours if he’s elected back into office.

Asked by moderator David Muir how he would end the war and if he wants Ukraine to win war, Trump responded:

“I want the war to stop… people being killed by the millions,” adding that he believes the Biden administration has not asked NATO to invest more in the war.

Trump went on to say that he has a good relationship with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I will get it settled even before I become president,” he said.

When asked to clarify his stance on whether it’s in the US’ best interest for Ukraine to win the war, Trump said:

Kamala Harris on Tuesday attempted to tie the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to Donald Trump’s past rhetoric after the former president appeared to downplay his role in the riot.

“Let’s remember Charlottesville,” she said, referring to the White nationalists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing groups who descended on the Virginia city in 2017 to protest its decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, with some chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” One of the attendees rammed his car into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old paralegal and injuring several others. Trump was widely condemned at the time for declaring that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the demonstrations.

“Let’s remember that when it came to the Proud Boys, a militia, the former president said, ‘Stand back and stand by,’” Harris added, referring to a remark Trump made at a 2020 presidential debate. Asked ​to condemn White supremacists, Trump instead used ​his allotted time to blame ​what he called “antifa and the left​” for violence and to tell the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” ​

“Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back. Let’s chart a course for the future and not go backwards to the past,” Harris said.

When contrasting her stance on abortion with that of former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that Trump would sign a national abortion ban if he’s elected and that under Project 2025, which she alleged was authored by Trump, abortions and miscarriages would be monitored.  

Facts First: Harris is making a prediction that we cannot definitively fact check, but Trump himself has not, during this campaign, endorsed these policies she said he would implement as president. 

Trump has repeatedly ducked direct questions about his support for a federal ban, and polls show that a majority of Americans are not in favor of a federal abortion ban. 

Additionally, there is no evidence that Trump was personally involved in writing the Project 2025 policy document.

Noah Weinrich, a spokesperson for Project 2025, said in a message to CNN when a similar claim was made during the Democratic National Convention last month: “Project 2025 is not affiliated with any candidate, and no candidate was involved with the drafting of the Mandate for Leadership, which was published by Heritage in April 2023.” 

At the first break, former President Donald Trump clocked in at approximately 28 minutes, 22 seconds, while Vice President Kamala Harris’ time came in at approximately 21 minutes, 25 seconds. 

Follow our live graphic to see who’s getting the most and least airtime as the debate continues.

While both candidates have an equal chance to respond to questions, they can choose not to use the maximum allotted time.

Data will be updated every 5 seconds.

Trump debates Harris on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Despite his running mate JD Vance saying that Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban, the former president said tonight he did not discuss it with him. 

On the debate stage, Trump said he is “not a fan” of an abortion ban, but would not explicitly say if he would veto one — rather that it would never get through Congress. 

Last month, Vance told “Meet the Press” that Trump would veto a national abortion ban if it hit his desk as president.

“I think it’d be very clear he would not support it,” Vance said. “I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the President of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it.” 

Pressed again, Vance said, “I think he would, he said that explicitly that he would.”

In April, Trump said he would not sign a federal abortion ban if it passed Congress, but he didn’t explicitly say he would veto one.

Trump and Harris debate at The National Constitution Center on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump backtracked on statements in which he seemingly agreed that he lost the 2020 election by “a whisker” and claimed he was being “sarcastic.”

“I said that?” Trump said as moderator David Muir read back Trump’s own statements on the 2020 election. “That was said sarcastically.”

“Look, there’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it, they should’ve sent it back to the legislatures for approval,” Trump said.

Vice President Kamala Harris later pushed back against the former president’s claims on the 2020 election, saying, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that, and clearly he’s having a very difficult time processing that.”

This post has been updated with Kamala Harris’ remarks.

Harris speaks during a presidential debate with Trump in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris said that “world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump” during the presidential debate on Tuesday.

Harris argued Trump does not have the “temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact,” pointing to his denial over his 2020 election loss and his claims about the court cases against him being a weaponization of the Justice Department.

Responding to Harris’ answer, Trump praised the prime minister of Hungary, calling Viktor Orbán “one of the most respected men” and a “tough person.”

Trump claimed Orbán said, “You Trump back as president, they were afraid of him.” Trump said that referred to countries such as China and Russia.

“Look, Viktor Orbán said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” he added, claiming there were “no problems” when he was president.

The Hungarian prime minister first won power through a democratic election, then proceeded to weaken the institutions of that democracy by eroding the legal system, firing civil servants, politicizing business, attacking the press and intimidating opposition parties and demagoguing migration.

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Donald Trump.

A young Palestinian woman checks the damage inside a classroom at the al-Zahra school used as a refuge by displaced Palestinians, after it was hit by an Israeli strike in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City on August 8.

Take a look at the positions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the most fraught foreign policy issue facing the country that has spurred a multitude of protests around the US since it began last October.

Harris: After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris gave a forceful and notable speech about the situation in Gaza. She echoed Joe Biden’s repeated comments about the “ironclad support” and “unwavering commitment” to Israel, as well as the need to get the Israeli hostages back from Hamas captivity. The country has a right to defend itself, she said, while noting, “how it does so, matters.”

However, the empathy she expressed regarding the Palestinian plight and suffering was far more forceful than what Biden has said on the matter in recent months. She went on to describe “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” and said, “I will not be silent.”

The vice president continued calling out the plight of the people in Gaza, as well as the need to free the Israeli hostages and secure a ceasefire deal, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. Harris said that as president, she would maintain the US alliance with Israel and “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” 

Trump: The former president also met with Netanyahu in July, the first such meeting between the two men since Trump left the White House more than three years ago. Trump, who often claims he was the most pro-Israel president in modern history, once touted his close, personal relationship with Netanyahu. However, their relationship has soured in recent years, and the former president has been reluctant to speak with him throughout the ongoing conflict.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel, Trump criticized Netanyahu for his handling of the war, claiming to Fox News at the time the prime minister and the country overall were “unprepared.”

Many Israelis presume that Trump would give Netanyahu a longer leash to use greater force in Gaza. Trump has said that Israel must “finish what they started,” “get it over with fast,” and that the US must “let Israel finish the job.”

Read more about the candidates and where they stand on key issues.

Former President Donald Trump claimed during Tuesday night’s debate that “21 million people” are crossing the border monthly into the United States under President Joe Biden. 

Facts First: This number is false. The total number of “encounters” at the northern and southern borders from February 2021 through July 2024, at both legal ports of entry and in between those ports, was roughly 10 million, far less than Trump’s “21 million” figure.  

An “encounter” does not mean a person was let into the country; some people encountered are promptly sent away. Even if you added the estimated number of “gotaways” (people who evaded the Border Patrol to enter illegally), which House Republicans have said is more than 1.7 million during the Biden-Harris administration, “the totals would still be vastly smaller than 15, 16 or 18 million,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute think tank, said in an email in June, when Trump made similar claims. 

In this January 6, 2021 photo, then-President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 presidential election results in Washington, DC.

Former President Donald Trump blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser for the lack of security during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

But the speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security. That’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board, which oversees the US Capitol Police and approves requests for National Guard assistance.

Trump also repeated Tuesday night that he requested 10,000 National Guard members ahead of January 6, but that “Nancy Pelosi rejected me.” However, Trump’s former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has told lawmakers that he was never given a formal order by Trump to have 10,000 troops ready to be sent to the Capitol on January 6.

When asked by ABC News’ David Muir whether there was anything he regretted about what he did that day as president, Trump said he told rioters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” during a speech he made on January 6. 

He then deflected the question, asking “what about all the people that are pouring into our country and killing people that [Vice President Kamala Harris] allowed to pour in?” 

The former president called Harris “the border czar” — a frequent name he calls the vice president to attack her stance on immigration. 

CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed reporting.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that he “probably took a bullet to the head” because of the rhetoric Vice President Kamala Harris and others have said about him — referring to the July assassination attempt on him.

Trump was pushing back against Harris’ claim that the former president would weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies if reelected.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate for the first time at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on September 10.

Vice President Kamala Harris reiterated that her “values have not changed” when asked about her previous stance that she would ban fracking and took a jab at former President Donald Trump’s character.

“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And in fact, I was the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she said.

Harris said she wants to invest in “diverse sources of energy.”

During her 2020 campaign, she enthusiastically supported a ban on fracking — but a Harris campaign official said in late July that she no longer supports such a ban. Previously, Harris acknowledged that it would take legislation to restrict fracking beyond federal lands, and pointed to the residual health impacts of fracking on local communities. She said during a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, she said she would start “with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands.”

Harris later took a jab at former President Trump’s character by talking about her upbringing and being raised by a single mother and her career fighting for people who need help as a prosecutor.

“The true measure of the leader is the leader who actually understands that strength is not in beating people down it’s in lifting people up,” Harris said.

When Trump responded, he started talking about more of Harris’ previous stances — eliciting a reaction from Harris at the other podium.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are seen on screens in the media center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris previewed a new line of attack against former President Donald Trump in the first minutes of Tuesday night’s debate, with the frame “What Donald Trump left us.”

It was an intentional move by the campaign to introduce that message at the debate.

“What Trump Left Us was a big moment,” a Harris campaign official told CNN. “She just nailed his record in less than a minute. He was defensive. Good.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is watching tonight’s presidential debate backstage at a campaign watch party in Phoenix, Arizona, a campaign official told pool reporters traveling with Walz.

Walz addressed the watch party in Phoenix prior to the debate, where he said former President Donald Trump will have to “answer for the absolute trainwreck that was his presidency” during tonight’s presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

ABC News’ moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir, have been fact-checking former President Donald Trump live as they host Tuesday’s debate.

After Trump said Kamala Harris supports “execution after birth,” Davis responded by saying: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

When Trump said crime rates have skyrocketed under President Joe Biden and Harris, Muir countered by saying: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris shake hands ahead of their presidential debate Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Harris walked over to Trump and extended her hand. He accepted the handshake. 

A big question heading into tonight’s debate was whether Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would shake hands. 

The vice president’s team had declined to entertain questions before the debate about whether Harris intended to try to shake Trump’s hand. A senior adviser now confirms the vice president went into tonight with the plan to do so, which is why she ended up walking to Trump’s podium to extend her hand out first. He accepted the handshake.

Harris introduced herself by name and said, “Let’s have a good debate.” Trump responded: “Nice to see you. Have fun.”

Trump and President Joe Biden did not shake hands at the beginning of the CNN debate in June.  

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the debate in Philadelphia on September 10.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated a claim that migrants are arriving to the US after fleeing prisons and mental institutions.  

“We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump claimed.  

Trump makes this claim often, and he’s often alleged that jails and mental institutions are being emptied out deliberately to somehow dump people upon the US.  

Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim.  

Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told CNN last year they had not heard of anything that would corroborate Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing. 

Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom. 

In response to CNN’s 2023 inquiry, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung cited one source for Trump’s claim about prisons being emptied for migration purposes – a 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart News about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents that Venezuela had done this. But that vague and unverified claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated. 

And a second article that Cheung cited at the time, about Mexico’s president having freed 2,685 prisoners, was not about migration at all; that article simply explained that the president had freed them “as part of an effort to free those who have not committed serious crimes or were being held unjustly.” 

Kamala Harris hit Donald Trump over his lack of support from people who once worked for him, listing off former officials who have decried their former boss as the former president rebutted that the Biden administration should be firing more of their officials.

She listed off several former Trump administration officials who have come out against Trump, including his second chief of staff, John Kelly, who said the former president has “contempt” for the Constitution.

Trump hit back by saying: “I’m a different kind of a person. I fired most of those people, not so graciously. They did bad things or a bad job. I fired them.” He added the Biden administration “never fired one person.”

He said the Democratic administration should have fired those “having to do with Afghanistan,” referring to the deadly August 2021 US withdrawal from the country. Trump added, “look at the economy. Look at the inflation. They didn’t fire any of their economists.”

Vice President Kamala Harris invited people to attend one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies because “it’s a really interesting thing to watch.”

She said that she believes the American people deserve a president who puts them first and Harris pledged to be that president.

Trump responded by saying: “People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go.”

He said people don’t leave his rallies, which he described as “the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies, in the history of politics.”

This post has been updated with more remarks from the candidates.

Former President Donald Trump claimed in Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that there was virtually no inflation during his administration. 

“I had no inflation, virtually no inflation,” Trump said. 

Inflation was low at the end of Trump’s term, having plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic. The year-over-year inflation rate was about 1.4% in January 2021, the month Trump left office.  

Former Vice President Kamala Harris said during Tuesday night’s debate that former President Donald Trump’s policies would result in a “Trump sales tax” that would raise prices for middle class families by about $4,000 a year.   

Facts First: The claim is reasonable enough, but it’s worth explaining that Harris is referring to Trump’s proposal to implement new tariffs if he returns to the White House. 

Trump has called for adding a tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports from all countries, as well as another tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports.  

Together, a 20% across-the-board tariff with a 60% tariff on Chinese-made goods would amount to about a $3,900 annual tax increase for a middle-income family, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund a liberal think tank. 

If the 20% tariff was just 10%, as Trump sometimes suggests, the total impact for middle-class families could be $2,500 a year, according to CAP. 

Separate studies estimate that the impact of Trump’s proposed tariffs would also raise prices for families, but by a lower amount. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated the new duties would cost the average middle-class household about $1,700 annually. And the Tax Policy Center said the impact could be $1,350 a year for middle-income households. 

ABC’s rules for tonight’s presidential debate stipulated that the other candidate’s microphone would be muted while their opponent is speaking — but crosstalk between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was clearly audible during one of their exchanges.

Trump was giving an answer on his stance on in vitro fertilization. He told the moderators to ask whether Harris would support abortion in the eighth or ninth month. Harris was clearly heard responding, “Oh, c’mon.”

A drone view shows asylum seeking migrants from China and Turkey as they climb a hill while looking to surrender to immigration officials after crossing the border into the United States from Mexico in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, on May 20.

Donald Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has quickly started to try to counter Trump’s attacks on her immigration record during her campaign and outlined her policies.

Trump’s attacks stem from President Joe Biden having tasked Harris with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America in March 2021. While Harris focused on long-term fixes, the Department of Homeland Security remained responsible for overseeing border security.

Here’s a look at what both candidates have proposed on the issue:

Trump

Harris

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s stances on key issues.

Vice President Kamala Harris said former President Donald Trump’s proposal to institute sweeping tariffs on all imports of up to 20% is “a tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.”

What Harris failed to mention though is that under her watch, President Joe Biden has instituted hefty tariffs, predominantly on Chinese imports.

In May, the administration implemented new tariff rates on Chinese imports – ranging from 100% on electric vehicles to 50% for solar components to 25% for other sectors – that will roll out over the next two years.

Harris sought to defend such tariffs by saying Trump “invited trade wars.”

Former President Donald Trump said that he would not sign a national abortion ban.

Trump, pushing back against Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that the former president would push through a national abortion ban, said, “Well there she goes again, it’s a lie. I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted” — referring to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Harris speaks on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris criticized what she called “Trump abortion bans” in an impassioned argument for reproductive rights during Tuesday night’s debate.

She said Trump’s policies on abortion have no exception for rape or incest, which she called “immoral.”

Harris also pointed out Trump’s selection of US Supreme Court Justices during his time as president, which she linked to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

“Let’s understand how we got here,” she said. 

Harris then went on to say she would “proudly” sign a bill into law reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade if elected president.

What Trump has said about abortion: Trump’s position on abortion is that “states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” according to an April video posted to his Truth Social platform. That stance was echoed in the new Republican National Committee platform. The platform does not mention a national abortion ban, a policy some social conservatives wanted to see included, but which the former president has publicly said he opposes. 

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade remains unpopular with a wide majority of Americans, according to a poll from Marquette Law School released last month, with two-thirds opposing the decision. 

Harris listens as former President Donald Trump speaks.

Vice President Kamala Harris appeared incredulous during former President Donald Trump’s answers on China during Tuesday’s presidential debate — raising her eyebrows, lowering her chin and mouthing “that’s not true” to his answer.

After Trump said China “bought their chips from Taiwan,” Harris held her mouth agape and shook her head. She continued shaking her head as Trump said she’s adopted some of his policies. When Trump called her a “Marxist,” Harris raised her eyebrows and tilted her head back.

When Trump referred to Harris’ father as a Marxist, Harris brought her hand to her chin to pantomime contemplative thought.

Harris’ campaign pushed to have the mics unmuted during the debate but was unsuccessful.

Harris speaks during a presidential debate with former President Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris said mainstream economists believe her economic plan would grow the economy and Donald Trump’s would shrink it.

Goldman Sachs, in an analyst note last week, said exactly that: Trump’s economic policies — particularly on trade — would cause America’s economy to shrink by a bit in 2025. By contrast, Harris’ economic policy proposals would grow the economy by a marginal amount next year, Goldman Sachs predicted.

Trump has proposed 10% to 20% tariffs on most items imported to the United States except Chinese goods — which would get a 60% tariff. That would cost Americans $2,600 a year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

And Trump’s proposal to deport 10 million to 20 million immigrants would be an “inflation shock.” Even a tenth of that proposal would lift inflation by 1.3 percentage points after three years, according to research presented at the Peterson Institute for International Economics by Australian economist Warwick McKibbin. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the US economy, would be 2.1 percentage points lower with that many deportations — a dramatic decrease.

Harris’ proposals, by contrast, are more standard fare and would keep the economy on pace, most mainstream economists say.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump defended his decision to support the six-week abortion ban that will be on the ballot in his home state of Florida, after appearing to waffle on the issue last month.

He said “Democrats are radical” in their abortion policies, though he has said he believes abortion should be a state issue.

Trump also went on to tout that he was able to overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing justices to the Supreme Court and said that he still believes in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

This November, voters in at least 10 states will take to the polls to determine the future of abortion access in their state, after a nationwide effort by organizers to secure a wave of ballot measures aimed at restoring or protecting the right to an abortion — and some aimed at restricting it.

Trump also attacked Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, for his stance on abortion, claiming that Walz supports “execution after birth.”

ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis pushed back on that claim, saying: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

What Trump has said about abortion: Trump’s position on abortion is that “states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” according to an April video posted to his Truth Social platform. That stance was echoed in the new Republican National Committee platform. The platform does not mention a national abortion ban, a policy some social conservatives wanted to see included, but which the former president has publicly said he opposes. 

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade remains unpopular with a wide majority of Americans, according to a poll from Marquette Law School released last month, with two-thirds opposing the decision.

This post has been updated with additional comments from Donald Trump.

An abortion rights advocate participates in a protest outside of the US Supreme Court Building on June 24 in Washington, DC.

The candidates are being asked about abortion and reproductive rights, a key issue in the 2024 campaign. Here’s a look at where each candidate stands on the issue.

Kamala Harris’ stance: Harris took on the lead role of championing abortion rights for the Biden administration after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. This past January, she started a “reproductive freedoms tour” to multiple states, including a stop in Minnesota thought to be the first by a sitting US president or vice president at an abortion clinic.

On abortion access, Harris embraced more progressive policies than Biden in the 2020 campaign, as a candidate criticizing his previous support for the Hyde Amendment, a measure that blocks federal funds from being used for most abortions. Policy experts suggested that although Harris’ current policies on abortion and reproductive rights may not differ significantly from Biden’s, as a result of her national tour and her own focus on maternal health, she may be a stronger messenger.

The issue was a key part of the programming at the Democratic National Convention this summer and Harris’ campaign announced the launch of a 50-stop bus tour last month — starting in Trump’s backyard of Palm Beach, Florida — focused on reproductive health care.

Donald Trump’s stance: Trump last month said he will not support a ballot referendum to expand abortion access in his home state of Florida just 24 hours after suggesting he might. The rush to clarify his stance followed intense blowback from anti-abortion advocates online, leading to concerns among Republicans that Trump’s continued waffling on abortion might lose him some deeply religious voters in a tightening race.

Trump, whose ever-evolving views on reproductive health have traversed every side of the debate, has long expressed concerns about the political fallout from the 2022 Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion. Though he has sought credit for installing the three conservative justices that tipped the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump earlier this year said future questions about access should be left to the states.

Trump said in April that he would not sign a federal abortion ban and has taken the position that abortion laws should be decided by states. He’s also said that he supports exceptions in cases of rape and incest and when the life of the mother is under threat.

Trump said in May that he did not support banning birth control. He previously said that he was “looking at” contraceptives when asked if he supported restrictions. In August, Trump announced plans to make either the government or insurance companies pay for in vitro fertilization treatments. He did not specify how the treatments would be paid for.

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s campaign promises on key issues.

Harris listens as former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during the debate.

Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “Marxist” on Tuesday as he looked to tie the vice president to her father, a retired Stanford University economist.

“If she ever got elected, she’d change it. And it will be the end of our country. She’s a Marxist; everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well,” Trump said during the presidential debate.

Some background: The former president has previously levied similar personal attacks against Harris and focused on her father, Donald Harris, who rose from a rural boyhood to earn a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and became the first Black economics professor granted tenure at Stanford.

Among the economists who know him, Harris’ father is considered a free thinker, willing to challenge his field’s orthodoxy, CNN previously reported. He has largely stayed out of the public eye during his daughter’s political rise, though he did emerge publicly during Harris’ 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination to publicly chastise her for joking that of course she had smoked marijuana, given her Jamaican background.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the presidential debate.

Former President Donald Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 after Vice President Kamala Harris accused him of being linked to the “dangerous plan.”

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” he said. “That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

Trump went on to say that the people who wrote the Project 2025 plan came up with ideas, “I guess some good, some bad,” but that it makes no difference because he has nothing to do it with it.

Some background: Harris has been attacking parts of the conservative Project 2025 that sets up a blueprint for a potential second Donald Trump presidency. The 920-page document was organized by the Heritage Foundation think tank and developed in significant part by people who served in Trump’s administration. Trump has publicly distanced himself from the initiative, calling unspecified Project 2025 ideas “seriously extreme.”  

Project 2025’s proposals for right-wing policies and a radical reshaping of the executive branch have become frequent targets of Democratic criticism. A Harris campaign official previously said the campaign has “made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump’s policies” as “Project 2025,” since they believe “it has stuck with voters.” 

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Donald Trump.

Democrats have been attacking parts of the conservative Project 2025 that sets up a blueprint for a potential second Donald Trump presidency.

The 920-page document was organized by The Heritage Foundation think tank and developed in significant part by people who served in Trump’s administration.

Trump has publicly distanced himself from the initiative, calling unspecified Project 2025 ideas “seriously extreme.”  

But, Russell Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, was heard on video talking candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nation-ism.”

Vought thought the men he was talking to were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. They actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.

Project 2025’s proposals for right-wing policies and a radical reshaping of the executive branch have become frequent targets of Democratic criticism. A Harris campaign official previously said the campaign has “made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump’s policies” as “Project 2025,” since they believe “it has stuck with voters.”

Trump and Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10 in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris said the Biden administration had to “clean up Donald Trump’s mess” after his four years in the White House.

She accused Trump of leaving the US with “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” and “the worst public health epidemic in a century.”

“What we have done, and what I intend to do, is build on what we know are the aspirations and the hopes of the American people,” she said. 

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the debate on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris emphasized that she has a plan to help American families who say they are worried about the economy and cost of living.

“I believe in the ambition, the aspiration, the dreams of the American people,” she said.

She touted her plans to build an “opportunity economy,” including her proposals to make housing more affordable and expand the child tax credit.

Harris also attacked former President Donald Trump’s proposals, such as providing tax cuts to corporations and argued that they would hurt American middle class families.

Trump has promised to extend the cuts from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, notably the TCJA’s individual income tax breaks, and reduce the corporate tax rate.

Trump responded by repeating his claim that he would put tariffs on other countries, such as China. He also pointed out that President Joe Biden kept those tariffs in place.

The former president also emphasized the high inflation rates under the Biden-Harris administration, saying they have been a “disaster for people, for the middle class, but for every class.”

Read more about Harris’ plans here and Trump’s plans here 

This post has been updated with additional remarks from Donald Trump.

High prices are a top concern for many Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of living after a spell of steep inflation. In new CNN polling of six swing states, economic issues remain the topic most often chosen by voters when asked what matters in their choice for president.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both unveiled more of their economic plans last week. Below is a snapshot of what the candidates have proposed so far.

Highlights of Harris’ economic promises

Highlights of Trump’s economic promises:

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s campaign promises on key issues.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris greet as they debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10 in Philadelphia. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump shook hands when they met for the debate Tuesday night.

Harris walked over to Trump and extended her hand. He accepted the handshake.

Harris introduced herself by name and said, “Let’s have a good debate.” Trump responded: “Nice to see you. Have fun.”

It’s the first time Harris and Trump have ever met in person.

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ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis speak at the start of the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

ABC News officially announced the rules last week of tonight’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, noting that both candidates had agreed to the format.

The moderators are going over the rules now as the debate kicks off.

Here are some of the key rules of the face off:

We’re tracking how much speaking time each candidate uses during the first presidential debate meeting between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Follow our live graphic to see who uses the most and least airtime.

Data will be updated every 5 seconds.

The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is underway in Philadelphia.

The debate, hosted by ABC News and moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, comes as the latest polls show the race for the White House remains tight.

How to watch:

More on the debate: ABC’s rules, first shared with the campaigns last month, largely mirror the format of CNN’s presidential debate in June between Trump and President Joe Biden, during which the candidates’ microphones were muted as their opponent spoke. It was a rule that the Biden campaign had insisted on but something the Harris campaign had sought to change after she became a presidential candidate.

The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.

Former President Donald Trump’s team has enlisted some of the most vocal and popular right wing social media activists to assist with rapid response during the debate.

Rogan O’Handley, Jack Posobiec, Alex Bruesewitz and Chaya Raichik among others have set up what they are calling a “social media war room” to respond in real-time to the debate. Trump facetimed into the so-called war room tonight, according to sources in the room.

Their collective social media accounts are expected to reach millions, though most of them are conservative followers.

Trump’s campaign has made an effort to reach out to these influencers for months to court them as they try to reach conservative voters who may not engage with politics in a traditional way ahead of November.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to the press ahead of the presidential debate on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom says Vice President Kamala Harris should work to defend President Joe Biden’s record during the debate Tuesday night – but still find ways to set herself apart from the president.

Asked why the race was so close, Newsom said “We’re a divided country and we have work to do.” Inflation is also a contributor, he said.

One of the first Democratic lawmakers to call for President Joe Biden to drop out of the race after the June presidential debate said he feels more confident going into tonight’s debate.

Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington, was among the first to voice opposition to Biden remaining the Democratic presidential candidate after his poor debate performance in June — a debate that ultimately changed the trajectory of the race when Biden dropped out weeks later.

Smith feels differently Tuesday.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade is rolling into the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for tonight’s debate.

It arrived at the debate site at 8:17 p.m. ET.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff wished his wife good luck at the presidential debate tonight.

He said he can’t wait to see Vice President Kamala Harris “in action” on the stage against former President Donald Trump.

“You’ve got this, and I’ve got you,” Emhoff said in a post on X.

Kamala Harris’ debate team has been preparing the vice president for some of Donald Trump’s most popular lines of attack: going after her immigration record and the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to two sources familiar. 

The Trump campaign previewed as much on Monday, pointing to border security — which remains a political vulnerability for the vice president — and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as issues that the Trump camp believes Harris “owns” and that Trump will pursue on the debate stage. 

Presented with that, Harris aides and allies expect Harris to paint Trump as “unserious” and have prepared the vice president to describe, what they say, are the former president’s “unpopular policies,” instead of taking the bait. 

That’s especially true when it comes to Trump falsely claiming that Harris is the “border czar” who is solely responsible for the management of the US-Mexico border. It’s a title that Harris team has been trying to shake off since the moment President Joe Biden assigned her to tackle root causes of migration in 2021. 

But this time,Harris campaign officials think she has a case on immigration: using the failed bipartisan border measure to cast Trump as unserious at the border and citing her time as California attorney general tackling transnational criminal gangs. 

Similarly, her team has prepared Harris to use Trump’s own actions and record against him, in an attempt to flip the script on the former president on issues, like the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Some undecided voters in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania say they are going to be closely watching the debate tonight between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

One voter who is participating in a CNN focus group at Mercyhurst University in Erie said she wants to hear more about where both candidates stand on the economy. She said as a grandmother, the economy will be a key issue for her this election, specifically housing affordability, the cost of living and jobs.

“There’s just so many things I worry about for my children and my grandchildren,” the voter said.

When asked to raise their hand if they thought the debate will determine how they vote in November, nearly all of the people in the group put their hands up.

Nearly all of the voters also put their hands up when asked if they felt like they needed to learn more about Harris after she became the Democratic nominee just a few months ago.

The voters will also share their reactions after the debate.

Will either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump deliver a compelling message in tonight’s debate to swing voters while bolstering the confidence of their respective bases?

Here’s what to watch out for as the candidates take the stage:

Will Harris deliver a policy message? Harris has been vice president for nearly four years. Still, 28% of likely voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they needed to know more about her.

The debate will provide a platform for Harris to address that. She has drilled down on two issues: cost of living and reproductive rights. The latter is an obvious place of strength. Her position is vastly more popular than Trump’s and her ability to speak about it is significantly stronger than Biden’s. It also fits neatly into a broader message about personal freedoms.

The economy is a stickier wicket. Her campaign has sought to stay close to what the Biden administration has been preaching while injecting it with a populist freshness.

And while there’s little reason to expect Harris to deviate from her strategy, which has been to speak broadly while rationing specifics, she will be pushed to provide a clearer picture of how she ranks her priorities. Harris is also likely to be pressed on some recent policy switcharoos.

Trump to face cross-examination on abortion Trump has at times boasted of appointing three of the six Supreme Court Justices who voted in 2022 to gut Roe v. Wade, ending federal protections for abortion. “I’m proud to have done it,” he once proclaimed.

The former president himself has offered a variety of positions and takes on the issue, the most consistent being that abortion policy should be determined by the states. Asked what state policies he supports, Trump has failed to deliver a clear answer.

How does Harris address the war in Gaza? Because of the diverse, fragile Democratic coalition that she needs to keep onside, Harris has not been fully clear on her Middle East plan. Both in her convention speech and on the newly minted “issues” page on her campaign website, Harris has made the case for Israel’s defense, along with the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state, and security for both. Critics say she is cutting the proverbial baby in half.

Here’s what else to watch out for ahead of tonight’s debate.

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves as she arrives at Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia on September 9.

Vice President Kamala Harris spent the day reviewing issues and themes as well as possible debate scenarios with her team, according to a source a familiar.

Her aides and allies tell CNN she’s ready and feeling prepared.

Earlier today, President Joe Biden told reporters he spoke with Harris who he described as appearing “calm, cool, and collected.”

Read about Harris’ and Trump’s stances on key issues.

Thursday night’s debate is taking place in Philadelphia, putting a spotlight on the top media market in the top battleground state this election.

Since President Joe Biden dropped out, both sides have poured ad money into the critical battleground, totaling more than $161.7 million between July 22 and September 10. And the campaigns and their allies have run close on Pennsylvania airwaves during that stretch – Democrats have spent about $84.5 million and Republicans about $76.2 million.

Philadelphia has drawn the most ad spending, nearly $63 million of the total, and Democrats have spent about $33.8 million there while Republicans have spent about $28.6 million.

With millions flooding the Philadelphia market, the candidates and their allies are fighting to get their message out and leveling sharp attacks. Over the last week, the top ad on Philly airwaves has been a stark attack ad from the pro-Donald Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., with nearly $1 million behind it, highlighting violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Another top ad over the last week comes from the Trump campaign, backed by more than $700,000, slamming the Biden-Harris administration for inflation.

On the other side, a network of pro-Kamala Harris outside groups has spent more than $500,000 airing an ad touting Harris’ economic vision, while Harris’ campaign is also up with an ad promoting her pitch for an “opportunity economy,” backed by nearly $350,000 in the last week.

Behind Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh media market ranks second in Pennsylvania for ad spending, drawing about $36.5 million in ad spending since Biden dropped out, and Democrats lead there by about $20 million to $16.2 million. And the Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York media market ranks third, with about $22.3 million in total ad spending, Democrats and Republicans running about even, $10.97 million to $11.2 million. For the most part, these markets are seeing the same ads that voters are seeing in Philadelphia and across the commonwealth. 

Donald Trump posted two AI memes of cats as the former president’s campaign and other prominent Republicans promote false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Ohio killing and eating pets. 

Trump posted on Truth Social a fake photo of what appears to be him on his plane surrounded by cats and ducks, as well as an AI photo of a cat wearing a MAGA hat and holding a gun. 

Earlier Tuesday, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged that it’s possible the false claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting the pets of Springfield, Ohio, residents might not be true, but he encouraged his followers to continue posting “cat memes.”

The unsubstantiated claims appear to have begun as a rumor in a local Facebook group before being embraced and promoted by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk. 

In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for the city of Springfield said, “There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Former President Donald Trump’s walkthrough is underway on the debate stage, a source familiar told CNN.

Trump, according to ABC News, won a virtual coin flip to determine podium placement and order of closing statements during the debate.

Trump chose to offer the last closing statement and Vice President Kamala Harris chose the right podium position on screen.

The debate will begin at 9 p.m. ET.

Donald Trump has been ensconced in his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for the last several days, undergoing debate prep with a team of advisers and outside allies. 

As they’ve batted questions back and forth and prepared him to pivot on the debate stage tonight, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN his aides have also underscored one thing: don’t underestimate Vice President Kamala Harris on the debate stage.

Trump has privately praised Hillary Clinton as a “brilliant” debater and speculated that Harris will be less of a challenge. But many of those around him have urged him not to expect a less formidable adversary in Harris tonight.

They’ve combed over her other debate performances and her tough questioning at Senate hearings to remind him that she’s done well in the public eye in these moments before. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are facing off tonight in the ABC’s presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

It’s the first debate between the two nominees, and it comes with less than two months to go before Election Day. But it’s actually the second presidential debate of this election cycle.

Take a look at scenes ahead of the debate.

Images of Harris and Trump are seen on a screen in the "spin room" ahead of the debate. The “spin room” is where supporters of each candidate put their “spin” on the debate in conversations with media.

Former Trump officials, Anthony Scaramucci and Olivia Troye, who both support Harris, talk to reporters in the spin room before the debate.

A woman holds Lilly the dog near the National Constitution Center on Tuesday.

Law enforcement officers gather across the street from the National Constitution Center on Tuesday.

An ABC News banner is assembled as preparations are made in the spin room before the debate.

Air Force Two, carrying Harris, arrives in Philadelphia on Monday.

Teleprompters are seen in the spin room on Monday.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to do his walk through of the debate stage at any moment and in the lead up to tonight’s showdown, those around him are expressing confidence.

Some of the advice that Trump has been given from those around him in recent days has centered around temperament, with allies urging Trump to maintain focus on talking about specific issues — especially immigration and inflation. Multiple sources close to Trump told CNN they believe if he can do that, he can come out of this debate on top. 

Trump’s team has advised the former president that they believe Vice President Kamala Harris will try and get under his skin, something that has proven not to be that difficult to do, and warned him not to engage. 

Trump did not sit for any mock debates ahead of his showdown with Harris Tuesday night. Most conversations about the debate happened informally in routine discussions with allies, or during what his team refers to as “policy time,” when senior advisors went through various potential questions and how to pivot away from political issues they believe are hurtful to the former president, like abortion. 

Ahead of Tuesday night’s debate, Kamala Harris’ aides discussed how much time — if at all — the vice president should spend fact-checking former President Donald Trump, keenly aware of the times President Joe Biden attempted to do that in the last presidential debate that didn’t land, according to two sources familiar.  

Harris aides and allies have frequently described Trump as a wild card and fully anticipate that he’ll spew falsehoods during the presidential debate. 

Part of the debate preparations for Harris included how the vice president navigates those moments and avoids getting roped into a fact check back and forth, taking into account that the microphones will be turned off when the other candidate is speaking.

“She’s not going to let him walk away from other important issues that Americans care the most about,” one source told CNN, adding that the advice to the vice president has been to “focus your limited time on speaking directly to American people.”

Harris allies have also advised against being swept up by counting Trump’s falsehoods. 

Instead, her team has directed her to return to the campaign’s foundational message that Harris, not Trump, is focused on solutions.  

“She’s going up against someone who presents as a wild card and chaos agent. She’s very ready and very prepared,” one of the sources said.

Former President Donald Trump has arrived in Philadelphia ahead of tonight’s presidential debate, which begins at 9 p.m. ET.

Trump’s plane was taxiing shortly after 6:40 p.m. ET.

Far-right conspiracist Laura Loomer, who maintains a relationship with Trump and regularly posts misinformation on social media, was seen getting off of the former president’s plane in Philadelphia with Trump staffers.

Loomer’s presence around Trump has irked some of his top advisers, who believe she causes problems by feeding him conspiratorial information he later repeats. In addition to Loomer, Stephen Miller, Vince Haley, Natalie Harp, Lara Trump, Alina Habba and Chris LaCivita were also seen exiting plane.

Debate preparations: CNN reported earlier today that members of Trump’s advance team have been on the ground in Philadelphia for a week, making sure every detail is accounted for when the former president takes the stage later tonight.

Members of his team have measured the podium, the walk to the podium, and identified where every camera is located to brief him ahead of his walkthrough. Trump is known for his obsession with optics, and that trickles down to even junior staffers, who have been taking detailed notes on the setup to brief senior advisers and the former president when he arrives.

Harris arrived in Philadelphia last night.

This post has been updated with more details on individuals traveling with Trump.

Kamala Harris’ campaign released a list of campaign surrogates expected in the debate spin room following Tuesday’s debate.

The “spin room” is where supporters of each candidate put their “spin” on the debate in conversations with media.

The list provided by the Harris campaign includes:

On the debate stage tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris wants to win over undecided voters. But to do that, she needs to present herself as middle-of-the-road politically because a majority of them are moderates, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said Tuesday.

According to polling this month from the New York Times/Siena College, 60% of undecided voters say they are moderates and 54% say they are independents.

Of that group of undecided voters, 48% say they want to learn more about Harris, compared with 18% who say they want to hear more from Trump.

“The bottom line is undecideds have made up their mind about Donald Trump. They don’t like him,” Enten said in his analysis, adding that Tuesday’s debate is an opportunity for Harris to give these voters exactly what they want.

In terms of what these voters want to hear from the candidates, 30% say the economy and inflation are most important to them — but 28% say they don’t have a top issue in this election. That means this debate isn’t necessarily just about policy, “it’s about personalities of the candidates as well,” Enten said.

“So I wouldn’t be trying to get in the minutia of policy details. You want to just show that you’re a strong leader; that you can, in fact, lead this country into the future,” he said.

President Joe Biden stops to speak to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on September 10 in Washington, DC.

It was less than three months ago that President Joe Biden shocked Democrats with a debate performance against Donald Trump so disastrous that within weeks, he would be forced to end his reelection campaign.

Tonight, it will be his vice president, Kamala Harris, who will face off against Trump. The president will be in New York City this evening ahead of the September 11 anniversary on Wednesday, and he plans to watch from his hotel.

As he tunes in, the gravity of tonight is not lost on him. Biden understands through his own experience better than anybody what tonight is about, a source close to him said. That includes both the immense pressure and the excitement that comes with a presidential debate, as well as the focus that will be required of Harris, the source said.

Biden and Harris have discussed the upcoming debate in recent weeks. But those close to the president have largely remained tight-lipped about what advice the president may or may not have offered his vice president, as Biden remains sensitive to giving Harris space to do what she needs.

As for the mood inside the White House, some officials here describe nerves and anxiety as they point to the fact that Trump is a three-time Republican nominee who has done this numerous times. There is also a real sense of relief — a quiet acknowledgement that there is no chance tonight could go worse for Democrats than the last presidential debate.

CNN chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny looks back at moments from Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump’s past debates to see what to expect in their encounter on Tuesday.

Watch below:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday in Arizona.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said America will see a contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in tonight’s presidential debate, arguing that Harris will “lay out a plan for this country” while Trump will “talk about revenge.”

Tonight’s showdown in Philadelphia is — for now — the only debate scheduled between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. 

Depending on how the night goes, it may not be the last.

Harris’s team has not ruled out an additional debate before November’s election, suggesting their willingness to agree to a second matchup would hinge on Trump actually showing up in Philadelphia.

“I’m happy to have that conversation about an additional debate after September 10,” Harris said in August. “For sure.”

Trump, for his part, has claimed to be ready for another debate against Harris at the end of September. 

The fact that a second debate isn’t on the calendar is an indication both teams are watching to see how tonight goes before agreeing to anything. A bad night for either candidate would make another debate more uncertain.

The rules for another debate would also likely be contested by both campaigns since the original parameters for the face-offs that were negotiated for then-candidate President Joe Biden wouldn’t apply.

High prices are a top concern for many Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of living after a spell of steep inflation. In new CNN polling of six swing states, economic issues remain the topic most often chosen by voters when asked what matters in their choice for president.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both unveiled more of their economic plans last week. Below is a snapshot of what the candidates have proposed on the topic so far.

Highlights of Harris’ economic promises

Highlights of Trump’s economic promises:

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s campaign promises on key issues.

President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 5 in Pittsburgh on September 2.

President Joe Biden described Vice President Kamala Harris as “cool, calm and collected” ahead of her first debate with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Biden stayed tightlipped about their conversation, adding he was “not going to tell you what advice I gave her.”

The president said he was heading to attend his granddaughter’s birthday in New York and would watch the debate after.

Donald Trump’s team wants to mimic the results of his first debate against President Joe Biden, down to the optics, as the former president prepares to face off with Vice President Kamala Harris. Members of Trump’s advance team have been on the ground in Philadelphia for a week, making sure every detail is accounted for when he takes the stage later tonight.

Members of Trump’s team have measured the podium, the walk to the podium, and identified where every camera is located to brief him ahead of his walk-through. The former president is known for his obsession with optics, and that trickles down to even junior staffers, who have been taking detailed notes on the setup to brief senior advisers and Trump when he arrives.

As allies have warned Trump not to let Harris get under his skin, they have also told him to respond with facial expressions over verbal outcries and reminded him that the camera will be constantly on him, even if he is not speaking.

Many of his advisers believe that part of his success in the last of debate stemmed from how he presented himself onstage, particularly in comparison with Biden.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday in Arizona.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday rallied young Arizona voters ahead of Tuesday’s debate, telling them, “do not underestimate the power you have” and declaring that the antidote to the current state of politics is for them to reengage.

During the campaign stop, his first solo trip to Arizona, Walz told the audience, “Do not underestimate the power you have, not just on your peers, but on others.”

DirecTV has rejected Disney’s offer to air ABC‘s presidential debate tonight amid a bitter carriage dispute that has forced a blackout of Disney-owned networks for the satellite carrier’s 11 million customers. 

In a statement Tuesday, DirecTV said Disney’s offer to carry Disney-owned ABC stations solely for the debate “will cause customer confusion among those who would briefly see the debate only to lose the channel again shortly after.”

DirecTV said it instead made a counteroffer to Disney, agreeing to return ABC “in time for tonight’s Presidential Debate if Disney is also willing to return all its channels across platforms through the end of Monday NightFootball at 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday, Sept. 17.”

That would allow viewers to also watch the Emmy Awards ceremony on Sunday, Sept. 16 that will air on ABC. 

But Disney rejected the offer, DirecTV said. 

Since ABC has agreed to simulcast tonight’s presidential debate on other networks, DirecTV said its customers will still be able to watch the face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on other channels. 

ABC News shared an image of the stage ahead of the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia.

ABC News officially announced the rules last week of tonight’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, noting that both candidates had agreed to the format.

ABC’s rules, first shared with the campaigns last month, largely mirror the format of CNN’s presidential debate in June between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Here are the rules of the face off:

Harris’ camp had lobbied for the mics to remain on for the duration of the debate.

“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones,” the letter from the Harris campaign to the network, shared in part with CNN, said.

The network, according to the source familiar, offered assurances to the Harris campaign that if there is significant cross talk between Harris and Trump, it may choose to turn on the mics so that the public can understand what is happening, the moderator would discourage either candidate from interrupting constantly and the moderator would also work to explain to viewers what is being said.

You will be able to watch the ABC debate live on CNN tonight at 9 p.m. ET.

CNN’s Hadas Gold and Kate Sullivan contributed reporting to this post.

Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she arrives to speak on the fourth and last day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, on August 22.

Part of Kamala Harris’ campaign strategy going into today is to use the presidential debate as an opportunity to introduce the vice president to undecided voters, alongside trying to expose former President Donald Trump and “his true colors,” as one source described it to CNN.

While the campaign has boasted of the recent momentum behind the vice president, Harris aides and allies see Tuesday night’s debate as an opening to try to broaden the base. 

Sources close to the campaign describe the vice president as keenly aware of the strategies Trump is likely to employ, but her team is also preparing her to remain focused on the policy issues and her vision to reach those persuadable voters. 

It’s not wholly unlike the strategy Harris had previously been planning for—reminding voters of the unpredictability of Trump and, as she’s repeatedly mentioned on the trail, what her campaign has cast as attacks to personal freedoms.

Before Harris became the lead of the party’s ticket, her team had been preparing her to take that message against Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance. That has spilled into her preparations heading into Tuesday. 

“She’s been prepping for this for a long time,” one source told CNN. “Vance was a stand-in for Trump. We were always taking it to Trump.”

Former President Donald Trump is in good spirits ahead of tonight’s debate, Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a call with reporters.

Trump is at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and will be departing shortly for Philadelphia, the spokesperson said.

The Trump campaign also said that the “bar is very high” for Vice President Kamala Harris and that it “may be the one and only debate.”

Alvarez added that the American people know “who Trump is,” but “what we don’t know is Kamala Harris.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will face off against former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia in their first presidential debate tonight.

The debate, hosted by ABC News and moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, comes as the latest polls show the race for the White House remains tight.

More on the debate: ABC’s rules, first shared with the campaigns last month, largely mirror the format of CNN’s presidential debate in June between Trump and President Joe Biden, during which the candidates’ microphones were muted as their opponent spoke. It was a rule that the Biden campaign had insisted on but something the Harris campaign had sought to change after she became a presidential candidate.

The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.

In this October 2020 photo, then-Sen. Kamala Harris and then-Vice President Mike Pence participate in the vice presidential debate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The world knows what kind of a debater former President Donald Trump is: loose with the facts, quick with an insult and confident to the extreme.

But what about Vice President Kamala Harris?

While her 2020 presidential campaign barely registered – she ended her campaign in December 2019, before the first primary votes were cast – Harris did leave a mark in one important way.

On the primary debate stage in June 2019, before she was his running mate or he was anywhere near the White House, Harris eviscerated Joe Biden.

“That little girl was me”: The issues of policing and race were key to the 2020 Democratic primary.

“I do not believe that you are a racist,” Harris told Biden, staring him down across the debate stage as he looked straight ahead or down at his podium.

But it was hurtful, she said, that Biden would praise men like the late Sens. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, “who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”

Pivoting, she noted that during his long Senate career, Biden worked with these men on legislation opposed to federally mandated busing in local school districts.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

It was a powerful moment, evidence of what Harris can do on the debate stage – clearly rehearsed, deployed effectively, unsparing and said to the face of her opponent, who would later elevate her as his running mate.

Keep reading here about Harris’ debate skills.

Following the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, the Harris campaign is planning a series of high-dollar fundraisers headlined by the vice president herself, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as it continues ramping up spending across battleground states. 

On Saturday, Vice President Harris will headline a fundraiser in Washington, DC, hosted by the Harris Victory Fund, according to an invite obtained by CNN. 

Given the condensed timeframe that Harris has to ramp up her ground game and re-introduce herself to voters, most of Harris’ fundraising events to date have been helmed by surrogates, including her vice presidential pick, Gov. Tim Walz, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as well as a handful of Democratic governors and lawmakers. 

Fundraising, for Harris and Walz, has been a bright spot. Harris’ campaign fundraising has dwarfed that of former President Donald Trump — in August, the Harris campaign reported it’d brought in $361 million, compared to the Trump campaign’s $130 million.

According to the campaign, August also marked the best month for grassroots fundraising in presidential history, with 1.3 million donors making their first donation of the 2024 election cycle.

Border Patrol agents talk with migrants seeking asylum as they prepare them for transportation to be processed on June 5 near Dulzura, California.

Donald Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has quickly started to try to counter Trump’s attacks on her immigration record and outlined her policies.

Here’s a look at what both candidates have proposed on the issue:

Trump

Harris

Read more about Harris’ and Trump’s stances on key issues.

Former President Donald Trump will be joined by two family members and a series of his top campaign advisers at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday, a source familiar with the campaign’s plans told CNN. 

The former president’s eldest son, Eric Trump, as well as Eric Trump’s his wife and RNC co-chair Lara Trump are expected to join the former president at the venue and accompany him to a holding room onsite, the source said. Trump’s co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, as well as senior advisers Corey Lewandowski, Jason Miller, Steven Cheung and Taylor Budowich are also planning to join him at the venue — helping the former president prepare right up until the moment he appears for his showdown with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, will be in Philadelphia and is planning to post live on X from the former president’s account throughout the course of the debate, two sources familiar with the plans said.

Kamala Harris steps off Air Force Two upon arrival at Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 9.

An important part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ preparations to debate Donald Trump Tuesday night has entailed getting ready for possible insults, derogatory comments and name-calling from the former president, two sources familiar said.  

The team helping to prepare Harris have had to look no further than Trump’s recent public comments, including at his political rallies, to get a sense of the kinds of things the GOP nominee may say on the debate stage. 

It is anybody’s guess just how much Trump will be inclined to try to personally insult his rival tomorrow night — and how much of it will even be heard by the public, given that candidates’ mics will be off when it is not their turn to speak. If the mics were on the entire time, the Harris adviser said, “it would show he does not have the temperament to be president.” 

As she has been reading up on Trump’s policy positions, past comments and even insults he has directed at her, two people Harris has extensively spoken with are President Joe Biden and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — both have experienced insults thrown their way by the former GOP president on the debate stage. 

Coming just weeks after the Democratic National Convention, where Harris formally accepted her party’s nomination for the presidency, the vice president’s advisers see Tuesday’s ABC News debate as a critical opportunity to speak to voters, including those who are starting to tune in for the first time and are interested in giving her a second look. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listens during a campaign rally for former President Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23 in Glendale, Arizona.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be in Philadelphia tonight for the presidential debate as a surrogate for former President Donald Trump, a spokesperson for Kennedy told CNN on Sunday.

Kennedy will appear in the spin room — where supporters of each candidate put their “spin” on the debate in conversations with media — on behalf of Trump, the spokesperson said.

Kennedy endorsed Trump and suspended his independent White House bid last month, urging his supporters to back the former president. Trump has said Kennedy would play a role in his administration if he is elected.

Kennedy’s alliance with Trump came after a long history of attacking the former president.

Trump’s running mate: Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance will also hit the spin room Tuesday, after attending a Philadelphia debate watch party hosted by the Trump campaign, according to a source familiar with the plans.

Earlier on Tuesday, Vance has a fundraiser in Greenville, North Carolina. 

CNN’s Kit Maher contributed reporting to this post.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Enmarket Arena August 29, in Savannah, Georgia.

The most important moment in the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump comes tonight, as the vice president prepares for what could be her only opportunity to directly confront a former president whose political dominance she is pledging to end.

Their Tuesday night debate is particularly important for Harris, who is battling to define herself in voters’ eyes and keep up the positive momentum she’s enjoyed since becoming the Democratic Party’s new nominee this summer.

The debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will be the first face-to-face encounter between Harris and Trump, who are locked in a tight race.

For Harris, it’s a marquee moment to show Americans that she is ready to assume the presidency, a question very much on the minds of voters as the fall campaign intensifies.

Trump, meanwhile, is eager to negatively shape voters’ perceptions of his Democratic rival and halt the gains she has made since ascending to the top of the Democratic ticket in July. Harris has eliminated what for much of the year had been Trump’s lead over Biden in presidential polling.

Both Harris and Trump are offering themselves as change agents of sorts. Harris has pitched herself as a clean break from a bitterly divisive era of politics dominated by Trump. The former president, though, points to Harris’ time in the Biden administration and says she bears the blame for inflation, higher mortgage rates and more.

Trump’s campaign and his allies have accused Harris of avoiding policy particulars. But Trump’s incoherent answer last week to a question about how he would make child care more affordable was a vivid reminder that the former president has long brushed aside policy details and questions about the practicality of his proposals.

Keep reading here about tonight’s showdown.

The race to Election Day in November is on.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will have their first face-to-face encounter tonight as they take the debate stage in Philadelphia.

Early voting will also get underway in September. North Carolina was supposed to be the first state to send mail-in ballots, on September 6, but a dispute over whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can remove his name from the ballot has caused a delay. Kennedy suspended his independent presidential bid in August and endorsed Trump.

Other states begin sending mail-in ballots later in the month. Voters in most of the country have the option of requesting a mail-in ballot, and voters in eight of those states and Washington, DC, will get a mail-in ballot automatically. The other states require an excuse for mail-in ballots.