ATLANTA (AP) — From her earliest campaigns in California to her serving as President Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris has honed an aggressive but calibrated approach to debates.

She tries to blend punch lines with details that build toward a broader narrative. She might shake her head to signal her disapproval while her opponent is speaking, counting on viewers to see her reaction on a split screen. And she has a go-to tactic to pivot debates back in her favor: saying she’s glad to answer a question as she gathers her thoughts to explain an evolving position or defend a past one.

Tuesday’s presidential debate will put the Democratic vice president’s skills to a test unlike any she’s faced. Harris faces former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, who will participate in his seventh general election debate since 2016 for an event that will be seen by tens of millions of viewers just as early voting in November’s election starts around the country.

People who have competed against Harris and prepared her rivals say she brings a series of advantages to the matchup, including her prosecutorial background juxtaposed with Trump being the first U.S. president convicted of felony crimes. Still, Harris allies warn that Trump can be a challenging and unpredictable opponent who veers between policy critiques, personal attacks, and falsehoods or conspiracy theories.

“She can meet the moment,” said Marc Short, who led Republican Vice President Mike Pence’s debate preparation against Harris in the fall of 2020. “She has shown that in different environments. I would not underestimate that in any way.”

Julian Castro, a Democrat who ran for president against Harris in the 2020 primary, said Harris blended “knowledge, poise and the ability to explain things well” to stand out during crowded primary debates.

“Some candidates get too caught up with trying to be catchy, trying to go viral,” Castro said. “She’s found a very good balance.”

Balancing narrative and detail

A former Harris aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about her approach, said the vice president views the events like a jury trial she would have led when she was district attorney in San Francisco or querying a judicial nominee on Capitol Hill as a U.S. senator. The idea, the former aide said, has always been to win the debate on merit while leaving more casual or piecemeal viewers with key takeaways.

“She understands that debates are about the individual interactions themselves but also about a larger strategy of offering a vision for what your leadership and style looks like,” said Tim Hogan, who led Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 primary debate preparation.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Harris makes deductive arguments but folds them into a broader narrative — the same way she would talk to jurors.

“She states a thesis and then follows with fact, fact, fact,” Jamieson said.

Jamieson pointed to the 2020 vice presidential debate in which Harris hammered Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy, and to her most memorable 2019 primary debate when she skewered Biden for how he had talked about race and institutional racism. She weaved her critique of Biden’s record with her own biography as a young, biracial student in the early era of school integration.

“That little girl was me,” Harris said in a widely circulated quip that punctuated her story about court-ordered busing that helped non-white students attend integrated schools.

“Most people who are good at the deductive argument aren’t good at wrapping that with an effective narrative,” Jamieson said. “She’s good at both.”

Landing memorable punches

Castro said Harris has a good feel for when to strike, a quality he traced to her trial experience. In 2019, as multiple Democratic candidates talked over one another, Harris sat back before getting moderators to recognize her.

“Hey, guys, you know what? America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table,” she said, taking control of the conversation and drawing applause.

When Harris faced Pence in 2020, it was a mostly civil, substantive debate. But she got in digs that framed Pence as a serial interrupter, as Trump had been in his first debate with Biden.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said at one point, with a stern look. At another: “If you don’t mind letting me finish, we can have a conversation.”

Finding traps in policy

Debates have sometimes put Harris on the defensive.

In the 2020 primary matches, Tulsi Gabbard, who this year has endorsed Trump, blitzed Harris over how aggressively she prosecuted nonviolent drug offenders as a district attorney.

That fall, Pence made Harris sometimes struggle to defend Biden’s positions. Now, her task will be to defend not just Biden’s record, but her own role in that record and what policies she would pursue as president.

Short, one of Pence’s top aides, noted that Republicans and the media have raised questions about more liberal positions Harris took in her 2020 primary campaign, especially on fracking, universal healthcare, reparations for slavery and how to treat migrants who cross the U.S. border illegally.

“We were surprised that she missed some opportunities (against Pence) when the conversation was centered around policy,” Short said.

Timing, silence and nonverbal communication

One of Harris’ earliest debate triumphs came in 2010 as she ran for California attorney general. Her opponent was asked about his plans to accept his public pension while still being paid a salary for a current public post.

“I earned it,” Republican Steve Cooley said of the so-called “double-dipping” practice.

Harris looked on silently, with a slightly amused look as Cooley explained himself. When moderators recognized her, she said just seven words – “Go for it, Steve. You earned it!” — in a serious tone but with a look that communicated her sarcasm. The exchange landed in her television ads within days.

“Kamala Harris is quite effective at nonverbal communication and knowing when not to speak,” Jamieson said.

The professor said Harris often will shake her head and, with other looks, telegraph her disapproval while her opponent is speaking. Then she smiles before retorting, or attacking, in a conversational tone.

“She defuses some of the argument that Trump makes that she is ‘a nasty woman,’ that she’s engaging in egregiously unfair behavior, because her nonverbal presentation is actually undercutting that line of attack,” Jamieson said.

Meeting a new challenge with Trump

For all of Harris’ debate experience, Tuesday is still a new and massive stage. Democrats who ordinarily tear into Trump instead appeared on Sunday’s news shows to make clear that Harris faced a big task ahead.

“It will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, yet another of Harris’ 2020 opponents, on CNN. “It’s no ordinary proposition, not because Donald Trump is a master of explaining policy ideas and how they’re going to make people better off. It’s because he’s a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him.”

Castro noted that Trump is “a nasty and crafty stage presence” who makes preparation difficult. And with ABC keeping the candidates’ microphones off when they are not speaking, Harris may not find it as easy to produce another viral moment that hinges on viewers having seen or heard Trump at his most outlandish.

“The best thing she can do,” Castro said, “is not get distracted by his antics.”

Eric Joss, the Libertarian nominee in the 8th Congressional District, announced the armistice with Republican state Rep. Gabe Evans during a press conference Tuesday night. Evans, a freshman legislator from Fort Lupton, signed a “pledge of liberty” to secure Joss’ support.

The pledge includes promises to oppose “military adventurism” while supporting a peaceful end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and “fundamental reform” of the U.S. Department of Education, among other issues.

Evans said he signed the pledge after some changes were made, including removing language calling for the abolishment of U.S. intelligence services.

“Eric and I are united in our determination to rein in the size, scope, cost and corruption of government,” Evans said in a statement. “Beating big government starts with defeating” U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the Democrat who currently holds the seat.

Last summer, the state Libertarian Party agreed not to run candidates against Republicans in contested races if the state Republican Party backed “liberty-leaning candidates.” That deal came after the previous race for the 8th Congressional District turned on a tight margin: Caraveo won the seat in 2022, beating Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by 1,632 votes in the first election to represent the newly created district.

In that race, the Libertarian candidate, Richard Ward, garnered more than 9,200 votes.

On Tuesday night, Joss criticized Caraveo as a “rubber-stamp” on President Joe Biden’s agenda. During her nearly two years in Congress, Caraveo has pursued a moderate path and is one of the most moderate House members, according to the accountability and transparency website GovTrack.

In a statement Wednesday afternoon, Caraveo campaign manager Mary Alice Blackstock accused Evans and Joss of making a “backroom deal.” Blackstock said Caraveo’s record “speaks for itself. Come November, voters will decide between a Congresswoman who has delivered real results and a political opportunist siding with the extremes.”

Colorado Secretary of State spokesman Jack Todd said Joss had not formally pulled his name from the ballot as of Wednesday morning. The deadline to do so is Friday.

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It is inevitable that the political frenzy surrounding the resignation of President Joe Biden as a candidate for re-election and the tribulations of former President Donald J. Trump, including his two impeachments by the House of Representatives, his subsequent acquittals by the Senate, and his criminal proceedings, is compared to that which existed in 1973 and 1974 with respect to Watergate.

The overall atmosphere of divisiveness is common to both eras, although few know or remember that President Nixon was never charged with a crime, was never impeached by the House of Representatives, and never was convicted by the Senate of an impeachable offense. He, as did President Biden, succumbed to enormous political pressure from both sides of the aisle “for the good of the country.”

What is the most important legacy of the Watergate experience on today’s events that are often declared by both political parties and the mass media to be the most dangerous and important in the history of the United States?  Was it the Supreme Court’s historic limitation of the application of executive privilege, the pressure by members of Congress that forced a president’s resignation, the confirmation that there are indeed terrible consequences for bad acts or that transparency in government is our ally not our enemy?

No, in my opinion, the most significant lesson of Watergate is the recognition that our form of government continues to have the strength and resilience to overcome the transgression of our leaders, political crisses, predictions, and warnings of national doom and government collapse.

Watergate has come to mean much more than a botched burglary by James McCord and four others on the night of June 17, 1972, at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. The core issue of Watergate was whether President Nixon committed obstruction of justice by participating in a cover-up (plugging the leak) of wrongful actions committed by individuals (the Plumbers) who were associated with the White House.

I had the privilege of serving as one of the president’s lawyers on the Watergate legal defense team, reporting to Special Watergate Counsel James St. Clair, a tough Boston trial lawyer. The 20-lawyer White House defense team consisted of our group, the White House Office of General Counsel, including Our Watergate defense team included, among others, Loren Smith, later to become the chief counsel of the two Reagan presidential campaigns and the chief judge of the United States Court of Federal Claim. We faced about 200 lawyers employed by the Senate Select Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. Our team’s primary White House political contact was General Alexander Haig, the White House chief of staff, later the Allied supreme commander in Europe.

My service at the White House started in early 1974, soon after St. Clair took the reins as the principal Watergate defense counsel. I had responded to a notice that invited DOJ lawyers to apply to the new Watergate defense team; following, I was almost immediately interviewed at the Old Executive Office Building by Geoff Shepard, who has since authored fascinating in-depth books about Watergate. Upon receiving the job offer, I accepted it without calling my wife and resigned from my position as a trial lawyer in the general litigation section in the Civil Division at the Department of Justice.

I was then 30 years old and not that far away from my graduation from the William Mitchell College of Law in Minneapolis coincidentally the alma matter of then Chief Justice Warren Burger — a Nixon appointee.

Our team was close-knit, although as in real life, some were more equal than others — despite the fact that we were all lawyers. Make no mistake about it – Watergate was a political animal or a zoo of political animals. We worked day and night together to do what we thought was legally right, attending meetings of the judiciary committees, writing sections of court briefs, appearing at Grand Jury and court proceedings, and interviewing witnesses. We argued on behalf of the Office of the President for a strong presidential executive privilege. We were under an immense amount of pressure — pressure that remains difficult to describe in words.

I accompanied Jim St. Clair when he argued before the Supreme Court that Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor, was not entitled to enforce subpoenas that had been issued, in the context of a criminal trial against seven Watergate figures, for 64 specific taped recordings of presidential conversations. We lost resoundingly in the Supreme Court on July 24 on a 9-0 vote, the opinion of which was authored by Chief Justice Burger.

His opinion established that a claim of executive privilege is reviewable by a court and the claim of executive privilege by a president is not absolute. Nonetheless, in retrospect, we had helped to set the table for similar arguments and somewhat similar results a half-century later, in the now controversial Trump v. United States decision of July 1 of this year.

I have often thought about the impact of those times on my family and the country and occasionally relive those exciting, tumultuous times. The daily tension was palpable even without the presence of cell phones, computers, and social media. The daily developments were captured in detail in the pages of The Washington Post and hometown papers across the United States and shared in buses, bowling alleys, and cafes across the United States. There also were lighter days, such as our children Justin and Heather’s (ages 5 and 1) participation in the White House Easter Egg Roll, our excursion on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, and very late-night dinners and conversations with Loren Smith about chasing UFOs.

Our future as a nation depends on our common sense and the vigorous exercise of the rights and obligations of each of the three branches of government, which were demonstrated during Watergate. It does not depend on personalities.

I am proud to have been an integral part of a historic legal team. We worked as your lawyers to help our country handle a major constitutional crisis. One is never the same after having such an experience.

Since then, most of the major figures of the Watergate era. including Richard M Nixon, Senator Sam Ervin , and Chief Justice Warren Burger, have passed. However, the United States has survived. I am a much better person for having stepped forward to help in 1974 and hope that my involvement helped. I would do it all over again, and without doubt there will be need again in the history of this great country.

Jim Prochnow is a principal shareholder in the Denver Office of Greenberg Traurig, LLP, a global law firm. He is primarily a food, drug, and trial lawyer. He and his wife, Virginia, live in Denver. They moved to Colorado after Watergate to ski and for the Colorado sunshine. They have three children.

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The song has been used in more than 8,500 TikTok videos since two independent music producers created it in July. Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris have seized on it, wagging their fingers and swinging their arms to it, some hoping to create its official dance. It was also reposted by @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s official TikTok account. Videos with the sound have racked up more than 40 million views overall, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company focused on TikTok.

It’s a marquee example of a new genre of political memes finding an audience on the short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

Politically minded Americans are increasingly embracing TikTok to make videos and trends out of snippets of songs and speeches in this election cycle. The app — a pandemic-fueled curiosity during the last presidential election — has since exploded its user base to 170 million Americans. About half of users younger than 30 say they use TikTok to help them keep up with politics and political issues, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.

“People are still doing dances to random songs, but now people are doing dances to remixes of rap with Kamala Harris speeches over it,” said Emma Mont, a digital creator and administrator of @OrganizerMemes, a liberal meme account.

While TikTok prohibits political advertising, unpaid political content is thriving on the platform — Vance, Trump, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, each had verified accounts there as of last week. Users have also flocked to a remix of Harris quoting her mother in a speech last year, saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and laughing, and to a clip that starts with Harris speaking and ends with a hip-hop song repeating, “Trump 2024.”

Seth Schuster, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said the team was tapping into viral trends both to “bring the conversation about the stakes of this election to the places a lot of our voters are getting their news from” and to expand its supporter network.

In response to the TikTok video, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said: “Cringe.”

Song snippets and catchphrases from pop culture are a core part of using TikTok. Users can select from a library of popular sounds when they make TikToks and search for songs and sounds related to topics that they’re interested in. Searching “Trump” or “Kamala” in the app’s sounds yields dozens of results, which have been used in tens of thousands of videos.

If users like a particular sound, TikTok is likely to serve them additional videos that include it — which is how it can seem that the entire internet is suddenly using a phrase like “very demure, very mindful.” (That meme sprang from a TikTok creator’s playful descriptions of how to behave in a variety of places, from work to drag shows.)

The “never Trump guy” song was created by Carl Dixon and Steve Terrell, two 34-year-old music producers with a company called House of Evo. They regularly make sounds on TikTok, including a popular remix of an evangelical sermon about margaritas last year, but they hadn’t dabbled much in politics until now.

Dixon, also known as Casa Di, and Terrell saw the footage of Vance’s comments in a post on the Harris campaign’s TikTok account that compared them with newer footage of him expressing support for Trump.

The two found Vance’s manner of speech “sort of melodic in a sense,” Terrell said. Dixon said, “We were like, what if we put this to a catchy beat or something?” The process took the pair under three hours, they said.

Their video started with footage of a member of the Harris campaign staff saying, “So this is really who Donald Trump chose as his running mate?” A different voice then says, “Drop the beat,” after which a sample of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-a-Leek” plays, remixed with Vance saying, “I’m a never Trump guy” and “I never liked him.”

“When Kamala decided to start running, me and Steve were figuring out ways to encourage people to vote or be aware of what’s going on,” Dixon said. “This is our first time doing something as politically charged,” he added.

Sounds like this one allow people to profess their political opinions, or share what they view as the stakes of the election, without having to formally expound on their beliefs, Terrell said.

TikTok is one of the few social media sites showing a sharp increase “in the percent of adults getting news there and an increase in just the newsiness of the platform,” said Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew. “A lot of that is opinion- and humor-based,” she added.

Sasha Khatami, a 24-year-old digital marketing coordinator from Alexandria, Virginia, said she had come across the song while browsing popular sounds on TikTok in July, soon after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

“Sounds are the number-one way to express your opinions,” Khatami said. “I don’t think people are sharing their feelings anymore. I think they’re making TikTok sounds and TikTok dances.”

Khatami, who said her earlier videos on TikTok typically received between 300 and 1,000 views, made up a dance to the “never Trump guy” song — and was startled and thrilled to see her post rack up hundreds of thousands of views as TikTok’s algorithm served it to other users.

Since then, she has performed the dance in front of iconic locations in the nation’s capital, including the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and has been tickled to see other TikTok users perform their own version of her shimmy.

While Khatami has been enjoying her newfound success on TikTok, she has been surprised by the volume of angry comments from supporters of Trump and Vance on many of her videos. She said she had sought to “turn that backlash into motivation,” like when a commenter declared, “Can we find this ladies dad so he can teach her about what the consequences are for what she’s doing?”

She put text from that comment onto a separate TikTok featuring her father and boyfriend, who had also learned the dance, posting it with the caption: “My dad is a never Trump guy.”

Khatami, who recently made her first political donation to Harris, said she planned to canvas soon, too.

“I feel so inspired by her campaign and what her being president could mean that I feel like I have to get more involved,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended shifting away from some of her more liberal positions in her first major television interview of her presidential campaign, but insisted her “values have not changed” even as she is “seeking consensus.”

Sitting with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris was asked specifically about her reversals on banning fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings, positions she took during her last run for president. She confirmed she does not want to ban fracking, an energy extraction process key to the economy of swing-state Pennsylvania, and said there “should be consequence” for people who cross the border without permission.

“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said.

She went on to say: “I believe it is important to build consensus. It is important to find a common place of understanding where we can actually solve the problem.”

The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash came as voters are still trying to learn more about the Democratic ticket in an unusually compressed time frame. President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid just five weeks ago. The interview focused largely on policy, as Harris sought to show that she had adopted more moderate positions on issues that Republicans argue are extreme, while Walz defended past misstatements about his biography.

Harris hadn’t done an in-depth interview since she became her party’s standard-bearer five weeks ago, though she did sit for several while she was still Biden’s running mate.

She said serving with Biden was “one of the greatest honors of my career,” and she recounted the moment he called to tell her he was stepping down and would support her.

“He told me what he had decided to do and … I asked him, ‘Are you sure?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and that’s how I learned about it.”

She said she didn’t ask Biden to endorse her because “he was very clear that he was going to endorse me.”

Harris defended the administration’s record on the southern border and immigration, noting that she was tasked with trying to address the “root causes” in other countries that were driving the border crossings.

“We have laws that have to be followed and enforced, that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be consequences,” Harris said.

Asked about Israel’s war in Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Harris said, “I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself.” But the vice president also reiterated what she’s said for months, that civilian deaths are too high amid the Israeli offensive.

She also brushed off Republican Donald Trump’s questioning of her racial identity after he suggested falsely that she changed how she presents herself for political reasons and “happened to turn Black.” Harris, who is of Black and South Asian heritage, said Trump’s suggestion was the “same old, tired playbook.”

“Next question, please,” she said.

Trump and Harris are set to debate on Sept. 10. In a post Thursday evening, it appeared Trump was paying close attention to the interview. After the debate was mentioned, he posted, “I look so forward to Debating Comrade Kamala Harris and exposing her for the fraud she is.”

Trump went on to say that his Democratic opponent “has changed every one of her long held positions, on everything. America will never allow an Election WEAPONIZING MARXIST TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.”

The debate will be the first-ever meeting for Harris and Trump. The opponents had only been in the same space when Harris, as a senator, attended Trump’s joint addresses to Congress.

During the early parts of the interview, Walz watched quietly and nodded when Harris made her main points. He was later asked about misstatements, starting with how he has described his 24 years of service in the National Guard.

In a 2018 video clip that the Harris-Walz campaign once circulated, Walz spoke out against gun violence and said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

Critics said the comment “that I carried in war” suggested that Walz portrayed himself as someone who spent time in a combat zone. He said Thursday night that he misspoke after a school shooting, adding, “My grammar’s not always correct.”

Asked about statements that appeared to indicate that he and his wife conceived their children with in-vitro fertilization, when they in fact used a different fertility treatment, he said he believes most Americans understood what he meant and pivoted to Republican opposition to abortion rights.

Democrats’ enthusiasm about their vote in November has surged over the past few months, according to polling from Gallup. About 8 in 10 Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, compared with 55% in March.

This gives them an enthusiasm edge they did not have earlier this year. Republicans’ enthusiasm has increased by much less over the same period, and about two-thirds of Republicans now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting.

At a packed arena for a rally Thursday in Savannah, Harris cast her nascent campaign as the underdog and encouraged the crowd to work hard to elect her in November.

“We’re here to speak truth and one of the things that we know is that this is going to be a tight race to the end,” she said.

Harris went through a list of Democratic concerns: that Trump will further restrict women’s rights after he appointed three judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe, that he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act, and that given new immunity powers granted presidents by the U.S. Supreme Court, “imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”

The rally was the end of a two-day bus tour in southeastern Georgia. Harris has another campaign blitz on Labor Day with Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh with the election rapidly approaching. The first mail ballots get sent to voters in just two weeks.

___

Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Sagar Meghani and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.

POTTERVILLE, Mich. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump says that, if he wins a second term, he wants to make IVF treatment free for women, but did not detail how he would fund his plan or how it would work.

“I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” he said at an event in Michigan. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”

IVF treatments are notoriously expensive, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single round. Many women require multiple rounds and there is no guarantee of success.

The announcement comes as Trump has been under intense criticism from Democrats for his role in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to an abortion in the country.

The decision is expected to be a major motivator for Democrats and women this November, and was a major theme of the party’s national convention last week as well as Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech as she accepted her party’s nomination.

In response, Trump has been trying to present himself as more moderate on the issue, going as far as to declare himself “very strong on women’s reproductive rights.”

In an interview with NBC ahead of the event, Trump also suggested that he will vote to repeal Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which limits the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant.

Trump, in the interview, did not explicitly say how he plans to vote on the ballot measure when he casts his vote this fall. But he repeated his past criticism that the measure, signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, is too restrictive.

“I think the six weeks is too short. It has to be more time,” he said. ”I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Trump had previously called DeSantis’ decision to sign the bill a “terrible mistake.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the rally Thursday that Trump “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida” known as Amendment 4 and that he “simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short.”

His comments nonetheless drew immediate reaction from those who oppose abortion rights, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who said she had spoken with Trump after his speech.

“He has not committed to how he will vote on Amendment 4. President Trump has consistently opposed abortions after five months of pregnancy. Amendment 4 would allow abortion past this point. Voting for Amendment 4 completely undermines his position,” she said, adding that, “anyone who believes in drawing a different line” still “must vote against Amendment 4, unless they don’t want a line at all.”

In his speech, Trump also said that, if he wins, families will be able to deduct expenses for caring for newborns from their taxes.

“We’re pro-family,” he said.

Trump has held multiple conflicting positions on abortion over the years. After briefly considering backing a potential 15-week ban on the procedure nationwide, he announced in April that regulating abortion should be left to the states.

In the months since, he has repeatedly taken credit for his role in overturning Roe and called it “a beautiful thing to watch” as states set their own restrictions.

Trump, however, has also said he does not support a national abortion ban, and over the weekend, his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said he would veto such legislation if it landed on his desk.

“Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue,” Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Trump first came out in favor of IVF in February after the Alabama state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, briefly pausing treatment and sparking national backlash.

Trump has since claimed the Republican party is a “leader” on the issue, even as at least 23 bills aiming to establish fetal personhood have been introduced in 13 states so far this legislative session, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. That kind of legislation, which asserts that life begins at conception, could imperil fertility treatments that involve the storage, transportation and destruction of embryos.

In a statement, Harris’ campaign said Trump shouldn’t be believed.

“Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid,” said Harris-Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika. “Because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, IVF is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country. There is only one candidate in this race who trusts women and will protect our freedom to make our own health care decisions: Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILYs List, which works to elect women who support abortion rights, called Trump’s proposal “disingenuous and unserious.”

“Congratulations to Donald Trump for realizing that his position and his record on abortion are wildly unpopular, particularly with women who will decide this election,” she wrote. “But rather than give him credit for a disingenuous and unserious proposal that contradicts his own GOP platform, we’ll credit him for something he actually did: overturning Roe v. Wade, ending abortion access for millions of women across the country, and jeopardizing reproductive freedom for all of us.”

Trump made the IVF announcement during a campaign swing to Michigan and Wisconsin as he ramps up his battleground state travel heading into the traditional Labor Day turn toward the fall election.

Trump is intensely focused on recapturing states he won in 2016 but lost narrowly in 2020 as he continues to adjust to the reality of his new race against Harris.

Trump’s first stop was Alro Steel in Potterville, Michigan, near the state capital of Lansing, where he railed against the Biden administration over inflation.

“Kamala has made middle class life unaffordable and unlivable and I’m going to make America affordable again,” he charged. It was his third visit to the state in the past nine days and second this week after a speech to the National Guard Association in Detroit on Monday.

Later, he will visit La Crosse, Wisconsin, for a town hall moderated by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed him in Detroit. It will be Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin since the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which ended three days before Biden dropped out of the race and made way for Harris.

Along with Pennsylvania, which Trump will visit on Friday, these three Midwestern states make up a northern industrial bloc Democrats carried for two decades before Trump won them in 2016. Biden recaptured them on his way to the White House in 2020.

Trump and Vance have blitzed the battleground states in recent weeks, with Vance in both states this week as well.

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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writer Christine Fernando contributed to this report from Chicago.

His campaign said Kennedy did not plan to withdraw from Colorado’s ballot and “has encouraged all of his supporters to vote for him” in the state, according to communication shared by Colorado Secretary of State’s Office spokesman Jack Todd.

Kennedy’s campaign, which submitted enough signatures to appear on the ballot as an unaffiliated presidential candidate, did not return a request for comment from The Denver Post last week asking if he planned to pull his name from the ballot.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine scion of a dynastic political family that has largely criticized his longshot pursuit of the White House, had tried to discuss administration roles with both Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, according to recent news reports. The former Democrat endorsed Trump last week but also said he wasn’t completely ending his bid — indicating he would leave his name on the ballot in states that were not likely to affect the outcome in the Electoral College.

The deadline to withdraw has passed even in some swing states, but Colorado’s ballot isn’t set until Sept. 6.

Kennedy has led a quixotic campaign in Colorado, sparking public and legal spats this summer among Libertarians as the state party attempted unsuccessfully to place him on the ballot using its line.

His continued presence on the ballot is unlikely to affect the presidential results here: Colorado is considered a safe Democratic state, one that President Joe Biden won by more than 13 percentage points over then-President Trump in 2020.

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DETROIT (AP) — Former President Donald Trump on Monday tied Vice President Kamala Harris to the chaotic Afghanistan War withdrawal on the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members, calling the attack a “humiliation.”

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery in honor of Sgt. Nicole Gee, Staff Sgt. Darin Hoover and Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, who were killed in the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport. He then traveled to Michigan for an address to the National Guard Association of the United States conference.

“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump told an audience of about 4,000, including National Guard members and their families in Detroit.

President Joe Biden’s administration was following a withdrawal commitment and timeline that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in 2020. A 2022 review by a government-appointed special investigator concluded decisions made by both Trump and Biden were the key factors leading to the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s military and the Taliban takeover.

In his speech to the National Guard in Detroit, Trump said that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do but that the execution was poor. “We were going to do it with dignity and strength,” he said. He called the attack “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”

Since Biden ended his reelection bid, Trump has been zeroing in on Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, and her roles in foreign policy decisions. He has specifically highlighted the vice president’s statements that she was the last person in the room before Biden made the decision on Afghanistan.

“The voters are going to fire Kamala and Joe on Nov. 5, we hope, and when I take office we will ask for the resignations of every single official,” Trump said in Detroit. “We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity, to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day. You know, you have to fire people. You have to fire people when they do a bad job.”

In her own statement marking the anniversary of the Kabul airport attack, Harris said she mourns the 13 U.S. service members who were killed. “My prayers are with their families and loved ones. My heart breaks for their pain and their loss,” she said.

Harris said she honors and remembers all Americans who served in Afghanistan.

“As I have said, President Biden made the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war. Over the past three years, our Administration has demonstrated we can still eliminate terrorists, including the leaders of al-Qaeda and ISIS, without troops deployed into combat zones,” she said. “I will never hesitate to take whatever action necessary to counter terrorist threats and protect the American people.”

Biden said in a statement Monday that the 13 Americans who died were “patriots in the highest sense” who “embodied the very best of who we are as a nation: brave, committed, selfless.”

“Ever since I became Vice President, I carried a card with me every day that listed the exact number of American service members who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—including Taylor, Johanny, Nicole, Hunter, Daegan, Humberto, David, Jared, Rylee, Dylan, Kareem, Maxton, and Ryan,” Biden said.

The relatives of some of the American service members who were killed appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention last month and spoke on Monday in a media call along with Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. They said they are still trying to get answers on how their loved ones died.

“For them to think that is OK and treat it as another page in a book that they’re just flipping over for the next chapter it saddens me and frightens me all at the same time,” said Alicia Lopez, the mother of Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, who added she has another son serving in the military. “I pray that I don’t get another knock on my door because of the lack of responsibilities this administration has for our military.”

Asked Monday why Biden and Harris weren’t marking the anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack as Trump did at Arlington National Cemetery, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that Trump had been personally invited by the family members and he called it one way to honor the fallen.

“Another way is to continue to work,” Kirby said. “Maybe not with a lot of fanfare, maybe not with a lot of public attention, maybe not with TV cameras, but to work with might and main every single day to make sure that the families of the fallen and of those who were injured and wounded, not just at Abbey Gate, but over the course of the 20-some odd years that we were in Afghanistan, have the support that they need.”

Also Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced that Congress will posthumously honor the 13 service members by presenting their families with the Congressional Gold Medal next month. It’s the highest civilian award that Congress can bestow.

Under Trump, the United States signed a peace agreement with the Taliban that was aimed at ending America’s longest war and bringing U.S. troops home. Biden later pointed to that agreement as he sought to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan, saying it bound him to withdraw troops and set the stage for the chaos that engulfed the country.

A Biden administration review of the withdrawal acknowledged that the evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan should have started sooner, but attributed the delays to the Afghan government and military, and to U.S. military and intelligence community assessments.

The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation said the administration inadequately planned for the withdrawal. The nation’s top-ranking military officer at the time, then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, told lawmakers earlier this year he had urged Biden to keep a residual force of 2,500 forces to give backup. Instead, Biden decided to keep a much smaller force of 650 that would be limited to securing the U.S. embassy.

___

Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report from Washington.

Oh, and Polis cracked a Taylor Swift reference, continuing his emerging tradition of shoehorning in Swifty humor whenever possible.

The three Colorado Democrats each delivered roughly two-minute speeches at the Democrats’ Chicago convention — Polis spoke Wednesday, Neguse and Crow on Thursday — as the party formally nominated Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as its presidential ticket for November.

The trio formed the de facto face of a Colorado delegation that featured both U.S. senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, as well as Attorney General Phil Weiser, Treasurer Dave Young, and several state lawmakers, among others.

In their speeches, Polis and Crow both wielded giant book-sized versions of Project 2025, the nearly 1,000-page plan drawn up by Republican groups for a second Trump term. Among other things, the plan includes recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its years-old approval of mifepristone, which is used in medication abortion.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025.

Polis’ comments largely focused on the plan’s references to abortion access, while Crow — a former Army Ranger — criticized its provisions related to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and NATO.

“Democrats welcome weird, but we’re not weirdos telling families who can and can’t have kids, who to marry or how to live our lives,” Polis said Wednesday, leaning on a Walz jab of Republican policies as “weird.” “These Project 2025 people like Trump and (running mate Sen. JD) Vance are not just weird; they’re dangerous. They want to take us backwards, but we aren’t going back — like ever, ever, ever.”

(That’s the Swift reference.)

Polis has been a public supporter of Harris — and, now, Walz — since President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection last month. Asked before his speech if he would serve in a Harris cabinet, Polis told The Denver Post that he planned to finish his term as governor, which ends in 2026.

Neguse, the fourth-ranking member of the U.S. House’s minority leadership, used his brief speech Thursday to praise Harris and her past work on education. He pointed to her support for historically black colleges and universities and to her time as California attorney general, when she secured a $1.1 billion judgment against a for-profit secondary education company over its predatory practices.

The convention ends Thursday night.

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Walz, who was tapped to serve as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate earlier this month, will speak after former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times. The full lineup — including Polis’ expected timeslot — will be released by the DNC on Wednesday afternoon.

Polis, who served in Congress with Walz, introduced his Minnesota counterpart at a Denver fundraiser last week, during Walz’s first solo trip since joining the Democratic ticket. Polis has been an enthusiastic and public supporter of Harris since President Joe Biden announced in July that he would end his reelection bid.

The Colorado governor has been at the Chicago convention all week, alongside other Colorado Democrats including U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, U.S. Reps. Jason Crow and Diana DeGette, Attorney General Phil Weiser, Treasurer Dave Young, and state Reps. Leslie Herod, Javier Mabrey and Bob Marshall.

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