CHARLOTTE: Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump launched campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different approaches to attracting swing-state voters who will decide the presidential contest.
In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Harris used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her. She also promised to protect access to health care and abortion, while delighting her partisan crowds with celebrations of her debate performance Tuesday, taking digs at Trump and cheerleading for her campaign and the country.
“We’re having a good time, aren’t we?” Harris declared, smiling as her boisterous crowd chanted: “USA! USA! USA!”
In the border state of Arizona, the Republican Trump pitched a tax exemption on all overtime wages, adding it to his previous proposals to not tax tip s or Social Security income. But the former president squeezed those proposals, along with a nonspecific pledge to lower housing costs, into a stemwinding speech marked by his most incendiary rhetoric on immigration and immigrants themselves, name-calling of Harris and others, and a dark, exaggerated portrait of a nation Trump insisted is in a freefall only he can reverse.
“I was angry at the debate,” Trump said, mocking commentators’ description of his performance Tuesday. “And, yes, I am angry,” he said, because “everything is terrible” since Harris and President Joe Biden are “destroying our country.” Upon his repeated use of the word “angry,” Trump’s crowd in Tucson answered with its own “USA! USA! USA!” chants.
The competing visions and narratives underscored the starkly different choices faced by voters in the battleground states that will decide the outcome. Harris is casting a wide net, depending on Democrats’ diverse coalition and hoping to add moderate and even conservative Republicans repelled by the former president. Trump, while seeking a broad working-class coalition with his tax ideas, is digging in on arguments about the country — and his political opponents — that are aimed most squarely at his most strident supporters.
That could become a consistent frame for the closing stretch of the campaign after Trump shut the door on another debate. That potentially could have been another seminal moment during a year that already has boomeranged around milestones like Trump’s criminal conviction by a New York jury, Trump surviving an assassination attempt, Biden ending his reelection bid amid questions about his age, and Harris consolidating Democratic support to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party ticket.
“There will be no third debate,” Trump said Thursday, counting his June matchup against Biden in the total, and insisting he had won his lone encounter with Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia.
The post-debate blitz reflected the narrow path to 270 Electoral College votes for both candidates, with the campaign already having become concentrated on seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris’ itinerary Thursday put her in a state Trump won twice, but his margin of 1.3 percentage points in 2020 was his closest statewide victory. Arizona, meanwhile, was one of Trump’s narrowest losses four years ago. He won the state in 2016.
In North Carolina, Harris took her own post-debate victory lap, and her campaign already has cut key moments of the debate into ads. But Harris warned against overconfidence, calling herself an underdog and making plain the stakes.
“This is not 2016 or 2020,” she said in Charlotte. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
She touted endorsements from Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, both of whom have deemed Trump a fundamental threat to American values and democracy.
“Democrats, Republicans and independents are supporting our campaign,” Harris said in Charlotte, praising the Cheneys and like-minded Republicans as citizens who recognize a need to “put country above party and defend our Constitution.”
Yet she also made a full-throated defense of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law commonly called “Obamacare” and passed over near-unanimous Republican opposition. She mocked Trump, who has spent years promising to scrap the law but said at their debate that he still has no specific replacement plan.
“He said, ‘concepts of a plan,’” Harris said. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan. Concepts. ... Forty-five million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act. And he’s going to end it based on a concept.”
She saddled Trump again with the Supreme Court’s decision to end a woman’s federal right to abortion, paving the way for Republican-led states to severely restrict and in some cases effectively ban the procedure.
“Women are being refused care during miscarriages. Some are only being treated when they develop sepsis,” Harris said of states with the harshest restrictions.
The vice president added her usual broadsides against Project 2025, a 900-page policy agenda written by conservatives for a second Trump administration. Trump has distanced himself from the document, though there is a notable overlap between it and his policies — and, for that matter, some of the policy aims of Republicans like the Cheneys.
Harris’ approach in Charlotte and Greensboro tracked perhaps her widest path to victory: exciting and organizing the diverse Democratic base, especially younger generations, nonwhite voters and women, while convincing moderate Republicans who dislike Trump that they should be comfortable with her in the Oval Office, some policy disagreements notwithstanding. That’s the same formula Biden used in defeating Trump four years ago, flipping traditionally GOP-leaning states like Arizona and Georgia and narrowing the gap in North Carolina.
Trump, meanwhile, appears to bet that his path back to the White House depends mostly on his core supporters, plus enough new support from working- and middle-class voters drawn to his promises of tax breaks.
A raucous crowd cheered his new pitch to end taxes on overtime wages. In a state where rising housing prices has been an acute issue since the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s audience exulted in his pledge to reduce housing construction costs by “30 to 50 percent” — a staggering drop that he did not detail beyond pledging to cut regulations and ban mortgages “for illegal aliens.”
“We are going to bring back the American dream bigger, better and stronger than ever before,” Trump said, beaming.
But he reserved most of 75 minutes at the podium for, in his words, being “angry.” Mostly about an influx of migrants across the US Southern border, but also about the ABC debate moderators he said were unfair in the debate he insisted he won. He singled out Linsey Davis, calling her “nasty” — the same word he would use to describe his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump ticked through many of his usual immigration bromides, arguing that migrants in the US illegally have “taken over” US cities and suburbs. He again alluded to the debunked claims — fueled by right-wing actors on social media — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated pets and fowl in public parks. Trump invoked the approval of Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and he elicited roars when he promised “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
And the former president repeatedly mispronounced Harris’ first name, while insisting she is both a Marxist and a fascist — political ideologies that rest on opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum.

BOGOTA: Colombia’s government said Thursday it had asked Russia for information about the welfare of three of its nationals held by Moscow on suspicion of acting as mercenaries in Ukraine.

Two of the soldiers who had allegedly been fighting on the side of Ukraine reportedly disappeared in July while on their way home through Venezuela, a close ally of Moscow.

In late August, a court in Moscow said the two men — Alexander Ante and Jose Aron Medina — had been remanded in custody on charges of acting as mercenaries, a crime punishable by 15 years in prison in Russia.

The foreign ministry in Bogota said Thursday it had written to Moscow “seeking information on the legal status, current whereabouts and health status of the Colombian citizens.”

It said a third Colombian named Miguel Angel Cardenas was also being held.

The disappearance of Aron and Ante first became public in late July, when Aron’s family told Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper the two had disappeared just before they were due to board a plane at Caracas airport for Bogota on July 19.

The next time they saw the pair was in a video released by Russia’s FSB security services on July 30, which showed them in Ukrainian uniforms, and then being interrogated in prison.

It was not clear how they had arrived in Russia, which is one of the few countries to have recognized Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s claim to have won a second presidential term in disputed July elections.

Venezuela’s opposition claims their candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was the rightful winner, a claim backed by several Latin American countries, the United States and the European Union.

A friend of Ante’s family told El Tiempo the men were in Ukrainian uniform when they went missing in Venezuela, which borders Colombia.

Colombia, where the security forces have been combatting guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug cartels for over six decades, has one of Latin America’s largest armies.

Some retired soldiers have gone on to fight as mercenaries in foreign battlefields, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2022, an unknown number has also enlisted with the Ukrainian army, trying to fight off a Russian invasion.

The relatives of several ex-Colombian soldiers have reported their loved ones killed, wounded or going missing in Ukraine recently.

Last month, leftist President Gustavo Petro’s administration tabled a bill in parliament to ban the training, financing and recruitment of mercenaries in the country.