Donald Trump went viral with a carefully staged photo op at McDonalds, an apparent meditation about a golfing legend’s genitalia and crass insults at a charity banquet. He has dominated headlines after issuing dark threats, including deploying the military against the “enemy from within”; repeatedly declined to say he would accept the results of the election; and delivered long, roundabout speeches and an impromptu 39-minute dance session.

Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally Friday in Texas, a state she does not believe she will win but one where her campaign plans for her to begin making a closing argument to voters centered on abortion rights.

Harris will travel to Texas, which her campaign calls the “ground zero of the nation’s extreme abortion bans,” to warn Americans about the threat she believes former president Donald Trump poses to women and those who support women’s reproductive rights, officials said.

Former president Donald Trump and his allies have filed hundreds of lawsuits, with more to come, seeking to tighten voting rules or disqualify voters. Security experts have gamed out how to restore order quickly if unrest at polling locations shuts down voting for hours on end. Election administrators in several states have purchased panic buttons for their poll workers to use in the event of violence.

Despite all of that, Vice President Kamala Harris’s legal team claims they are sure that this year’s presidential election will be secure, fair and free — if not entirely without problems.

Over multiple interviews with the campaign’s top legal advisers, the Harris campaign projected confidence that the 2024 presidential election will ultimately succeed in delivering a clear winner, with eligible voters able to cast ballots, the ballots being properly tabulated and Congress certifying the electoral college count on Jan. 6, 2025.

“There’s not an awful lot that does keep me up at night,” said Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, who helped oversee the vetting process for Harris’s running mate. “We found that the 2020 election was the most secure election in American history. And I think there’s a reason to expect that this will be the same.”

Four years ago, Trump responded to his loss to Joe Biden by claiming without basis that fraud had marred the results, launching a multistate effort to overturn the vote and inciting a mob to assault the Capitol. This year, he has repeatedly said he believes the only way he can lose is if Democrats cheat while maintaining that his opponents have already interfered with the election. He has declined to pledge to respect the outcome.

In interviews, several of Harris’s top attorneys — the campaign now has hundreds of lawyers — said their years-long preparations have positioned them to be ready should Trump again try to invalidate the results. To bolster their belief, they cite recent court victories, including two key wins in Georgia and another in North Carolina last week that they said prove their strategy is working. The campaign made the lawyers available to speak about their preparations in an effort to reassure voters, particularly anxious Democrats, that they are ready for any eventuality.

The real test, they said, will come after Nov. 5, when, if Harris wins, they say Trump and his allies will launch more litigation, sow mistrust and perhaps even plant the seeds for civil unrest.

“No matter what level of the election, whether presidential or Senate or House, Republicans are going to say, if they lose, that they were cheated,” said Marc Elias, a longtime Democratic election lawyer leading the recount strategy for the Harris team. “Donald Trump will never concede.”

“Against that,” he added, “I will tell you we have been preparing for every eventuality.”

Elias said the Harris legal team has prepared for lawsuits seeking to halt voting on Election Day, block the counting of provisional ballots or discard mail ballots arriving after Nov. 5, among other scenarios.

Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt did not directly answer a request for a response to the Harris team’s claims. “President Trump has been very clear,” she said in an email. “We must have free and fair elections.”

A Republican National Committee spokeswoman said the GOP’s election protection program is robust and has also racked up successes so far this year. Among other things, the party has recruited 5,000 volunteer lawyers across the country to monitor elections, according to spokeswoman Claire Zunk.

“Our unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote,” Zunk said. “We have stopped Democrat schemes to dismantle election safeguards and will continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”

As early voting gets underway across the country, Harris has increasingly emphasized the threat she says Trump poses to American democracy. Harris campaigned last week in Washington Crossing, Pa., with a handful of prominent Republicans who have endorsed her candidacy, as she hammered the former president for his effort to overturn the 2020 election.

“This is a profound difference between Donald Trump and me — he who violated the oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and, make no mistake, he who, if given the chance, will violate it again,” Harris said. “Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and he refused to accept the will of the people and the results of a free and fair election.”

Democrats and Republicans have sparred for years over whether to loosen or tighten voting access, with Democrats pushing for less restrictive policies and Republicans insisting that more stringent rules are needed to prevent fraud. Those battles have continued in the lead-up to the election, with GOP lawsuits pushing to remove voters from state rolls, invalidate mail-in votes and apply greater scrutiny to overseas ballots.

The Harris campaign argued in an internal strategy memo obtained by The Washington Post that the GOP effort to restrict access aligns with the party’s political motives because Trump thinks has a better shot at winning if Republicans can make it harder for certain people to vote, such as those who choose to cast ballots by mail.

“Democrats are running an aggressive, proactive legal strategy to protect your right to vote and have that vote count,” the memo states. “We have been planning for four years to win not only at the ballot box but also in court, and to ensure another free and fair election.”

In 2020, Trump allies convened in numerous states he lost to falsely sign certifications that he had won. Elias said he is less worried about that happening now because so many of the lawyers and operatives who participated in that scheme have been indicted or are under ethics investigations.

He’s also less worried about violence on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress will convene to certify a final count of the electoral college. Federal law was changed after the violent attack on the Capitol in 2021 to make it harder to challenge valid electoral votes.

Other possible avenues for undermining the results have also fallen away. In Georgia last week, a state judge blocked a new rule approved by the pro-Trump state election board that would have required a hand-count of the number of ballots at every precinct. Critics said the requirement threatened to upend the election by delaying the reporting of results.

The same judge also ruled that county election boards do not have the discretion to withhold certification of results, a defeat for Trump allies who had sought to empower local leaders to hold up the outcome of the vote.

Also last week, a North Carolina judge dismissed a case from state and national Republican leaders seeking to remove more than 200,000 voters from the rolls. The GOP claimed in the suit that the voters had not provided proper documentation when they registered, but offered no evidence that any of them were ineligible to vote.

The plans for a robust legal strategy has been years in the making, predating Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Harris’s ascension to the nomination.

A big moment came shortly after Biden launched his reelection campaign last April, when Dana Remus, a senior adviser and outside counsel to the campaign, convened a meeting with the legal team to plot strategy. A particular focus was how to plan for the days after Election Day.

The team also prioritized building out a network of lawyers based in battleground states, spending the summer creating “state pods” to work in coordination with the national lawyers.

“I would say the overriding theme of our strategy is prepare, prepare, prepare,” Remus said in an interview. “We’ve been doing it for four years, and that is a difference from the past. You typically spin up the voter protection and election protection aspect of a campaign as the campaign spins up in the year, 18 months before an election, and we have been building since 2020.”

The team now has more than 400 lawyers, including volunteers, who are specifically focused on post-election planning. The campaign has drafted more than 500 pleadings related to potential Election Day and post-election litigation, covering a wide range of topics, including the Trump campaign’s legal strategy, governors and state legislatures’ emergency powers and the role of electors and Congress in final certification.

“He tried it in ’20 and we were prepared,” Pat Moore, senior counsel on the Harris campaign, said of Trump. “We expect that he’s going to try it in ’24, and we’ll be even more prepared. We understand the arguments that they’re likely to make, and we have literally thousands of papers of draft pleadings ready to go for when they are made. So, is it typical? Of course not. Trump is atypical, but he is predictable.”

Plenty of outside groups are using darker language to broadcast the risks they see this election season. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, for instance, convened a gathering last week of senior retired military leaders and state and local officials to issue what they called a “stark warning” that Americans must take seriously the risk of violence or disruption.

The group conducted a variety of tabletop exercises, including one simulation where allegations of election irregularities result in protests that spiral out of control, requiring local officials to close polls to restore order. The exercise revealed, the experts said, that state and local officials are not as prepared as they must be for such a crisis.

“We think there’s a real possibility of civil unrest,” said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma who participated in the exercises. “The question is how we deal with it.”

Edwards said disinformation could fuel anger and even violence. His biggest fear, he said, is that the certification of results is delayed.

“The greatest danger here is that we will not be able to actually count and certify the results of the elections so that the administration of whoever wins the presidency can take place,” he said.

Donald Verrilli, a former U.S. solicitor general who advises the Harris campaign, conceded that the outside angst is real. But it’s not new, he said, and it doesn’t mean catastrophe is coming.

“Those kinds of tabletop exercises and anxiety were all present in 2020,” he said. “We met the moment and we’re ready to meet the moment here too.”

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

With two weeks of campaigning left before the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are running nearly evenly across the seven battleground states among a critical portion of the electorate whose votes likely will determine who becomes the next president.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll of more than 5,000 registered voters, conducted in the first half of October, finds 47 percent who say they will definitely or probably support Harris while 47 percent say they will definitely or probably support Trump. Among likely voters, 49 percent support Harris and 48 percent back Trump.

Trump’s support is little changed from the 48 percent he received in a spring survey of six key states using the same methodology, but Harris’s standing is six percentage points higher than the 41-percent support registered for President Joe Biden, who was then a candidate.

In addition to swing-state voters overall, the Post-Schar School survey focuses on a sizable group of registered voters who have not been firmly committed to any candidate and whose voting record leaves open whether they will cast ballots this fall. With another part of the electorate locked down for a candidate for many months, this group of “Deciders” could make the difference in an election where the battleground states could be won or lost by the narrowest of margins.

The new results show changes among this group of voters compared with the first survey conducted last spring. About three-quarters of battleground-state voters say they will definitely vote for Harris or Trump (74 percent). That’s up from 58 percent who were committed to Biden or Trump this spring. The percentage who are uncommitted has dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent over the past five months. Among likely voters, the latest poll finds that a smaller 21 percent say they are not fully committed to Harris or Trump.

Younger registered voters are more likely to be uncommitted: 43 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds are uncommitted, a larger share than any other age group. Non-White voters are more likely to be uncommitted than White voters, 34 percent vs. 23 percent.

Trump is strongest in Arizona, where he holds an edge of six percentage points among registered voters. That shrinks to three points among likely voters. His four-point edge in North Carolina among registered voters ticks down to three points among likely voters. That echoes a Post poll conducted last month but contrasts with a Quinnipiac poll suggesting Harris may have a slight edge. Those advantages are within the margin of error.

Among these key-state voters, Harris runs strongest in Georgia, where she has an advantage of six percentage points among registered voters and four points among likely voters, which is within the margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Harris also is slightly stronger than Trump in the three most contested northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but by percentages within the margin of error.

The seventh battleground state, Nevada, is tied among likely voters though Harris is three points stronger than Trump among registered voters.

Overall in these seven states, 37 percent of registered voters say they will definitely vote for Harris and 37 percent will definitely back Trump, or already voted for each. An additional 10 percent say they will probably vote for Harris, 10 percent probably for Trump. Harris’s 37 percent “definite” support is up sharply from Biden’s 26 percent this spring. Trump’s firm support has grown by a smaller six points, from 31 percent to 37 percent.

The poll sample also includes some voters who had been interviewed last spring and who said they were uncommitted at the time. The new survey finds that about half (46 percent) have shifted to definitely supporting one of the two candidates, with more moving to Harris than have moved to Trump.

Six percent of all key-state voters say they are unlikely to support either Harris or Trump and most of these voters say that, if Trump and Harris are the only two candidates on their ballot, they are likely not to vote in the presidential race. These voters tend to be younger, more likely to be people of color and more likely to identify themselves as independents.

Among voters who have a record of voting in just one of the past two presidential elections, 78 percent say they will definitely vote this year or have already voted. They are about evenly divided between Trump (47 percent) and Harris (46 percent). Among voters who turned out in both 2016 and 2020, 49 percent support Harris while 47 percent support Trump.

The poll underscores how dependent Trump and Harris are on halfhearted supporters. Only 13 percent of “probably Harris” voters say they would be enthusiastic if she wins, while 11 percent of “probably Trump” voters say the same about him. About 4 in 10 of each group say they would feel “upset” if the other candidate wins, compared with about 8 in 10 voters who are locked in for each candidate.

Steven Grissom, a 54-year old White stagehand in Las Vegas said, “I sure as hell don’t like my choice,” but that he was going to vote for Trump. “I could leave it blank,” he said, “I don’t want my lack of vote to give [the election] to Kamala.”

Harris’s job approval rating as vice president is net negative with these swing state voters: 44 percent approve of the job she is doing while 55 percent disapprove, with 42 percent disapproving strongly. Asked for a retrospective judgment on Trump as president, 51 percent say they approve of the way he handled the job while 49 percent disapprove, 37 percent strongly.

Two groups of voters have drawn significant attention this fall: Hispanic and Black Americans. Among Hispanics, Harris is faring slightly worse in these seven states than Biden did four years ago among Hispanic voters throughout the country. She leads Trump by 22 points across all seven states among registered voters, which compares with Biden’s national margin of between 25 and 33 points against Trump, according to 2020 exit polls, AP VoteCast and Pew’s validated voter study.

But in two battlegrounds with higher percentages of Hispanic voters she’s about even with Biden in 2020. Harris leads by 24 points among Hispanic voters in Arizona and 16 points in Nevada. Both are roughly on par with Biden’s advantages in those states four years ago, according to exit polls and other post-election estimates.

Harris leads by an 82 to 12 percent margin among Black voters in these seven swing states, a 70-point margin that is slightly smaller than Biden’s national advantage with Black voters four years ago.

Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Georgia and about one-fifth in North Carolina. The poll finds Harris with slightly more support among Black voters in Georgia (83 percent) than in North Carolina (78 percent). Meanwhile, in the northern trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, 85 percent of Black voters currently back Harris. The issue for Harris there is ensuring strong Black turnout in the cities of Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

Kobe Sifflet, a 21-year-old Black deli clerk in Atlanta, said he was still undecided and wanted to hear more about Harris’s plans. Trump “seems a bit extreme,” to him.

Malik Williams, 27, a Black voter in Stone Mountain, Ga., who manages a tattoo parlor, said he would probably vote for Harris. “I think Trump’s trying to push a more police state in terms of creating unnecessary conflict with citizens, versus actually trying to make the country better.”

The gender gap between the candidates amounts to 14 percentage points. Harris leads among female voters in swing states by seven points while Trump leads among all men by the same percentage. The divide is largest among younger voters, with women under age 30 favoring Harris by 20 points while men under 30 favor Trump by 15 points.

Education is the principal dividing line among White voters in the survey. White voters with college degrees support Harris by 50 percent to 45 percent. White voters without degrees back Trump by about 2 to 1.

Kacey Campbell, a 30-year-old school administrator from Milwaukee who is White, said she is leaning more toward Harris, but calls it “just a slight lean.” She watched both debates to try to lock in a decision but is disappointed in how both candidates have addressed the Israel-Gaza war. She said the “scale of destruction” in Gaza affects her confidence in voting for the Democratic Party. She criticized Democrats for saying “we’re not Donald Trump, we’re not Project 2025,” rather than running on their own policies.

“Being disaffected or discontented with the choices is not an irrational sentiment for people to have, said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, “especially when they see the hyperpolarization going on, the inability of parties to work well together to solve problems.”

Trump’s current margin among White voters without college degrees in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is about the same as it was in 2020. In Michigan, however, he’s running better with these voters than he did four years ago. Meanwhile, Harris is running ahead of Biden’s 2020 margins among Whites with college degrees in Wisconsin but about the same in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Emily Dembs, a 33-year-old White voter from St. Clair Shores, Mich., said they are torn about whom to vote for. “I really don’t like Trump at all. I think he’s a lying scumbag.” But the Democratic Party to them, “has felt so phony.” If they do vote, they will vote for Harris. “Voting for Harris is probably a good idea, I just wish we had more options or different people.”

Threats to democracy rank high as an issue to the voters in these states, with 61 percent overall saying it is extremely important, including 71 percent of Democrats, as well as 61 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of independents.

Slightly more registered voters in these states trust Trump over Harris to handle threats to democracy in the United States, 43 percent to 40 percent. This is also true among uncommitted voters, with 32 percent saying they trust Trump, 28 percent Harris and 26 percent trusting neither candidate.

At this point, the economy and inflation stand out as more important to the remaining uncommitted voters than other issues, a potential problem for Harris.

Potential Harris voters are much more likely to feel the economy is getting worse (56 percent) and inflation is getting worse (69 percent) than are committed Harris voters (25 percent and 36 percent). In fact, the annual rate of inflation was 2.4 percent in September, a significant improvement over the 9.1 percent in June 2022.

A majority of probable Harris voters call the economy extremely important (55 percent) and inflation extremely important (59 percent), compared to a minority of committed Harris voters (44 percent and 43 percent).

By contrast, a majority of probable Trump voters call climate change a crisis or major problem (67 percent) compared to a majority of firm Trump voters who call it a minor problem or no problem at all (61 percent). Probable Trump voters are more likely to rate climate change as extremely or very important (39 percent) than firm Trump voters (24 percent).

A similar gap exists between likely and committed Trump voters on abortion. A majority of probable Trump voters support legal abortion in all or most cases (60 percent), while a majority of committed Trump voters want it to be illegal in most or all cases (59 percent).

Nearly two-thirds of voters (65 percent) think Trump will make “fundamental changes to the country,” including 40 percent who think he’ll make fundamental changes for the better while 25 percent say he will for the worse. Fewer than half of all key-state voters think Harris will make fundamental changes to the country (47 percent), 30 percent for the better and 17 percent for the worse. Smaller shares of uncommitted voters say both candidates will make fundamental changes to the country than key-state voters overall.

The voters in these states are keenly aware of the importance of what happens in each of them in November. Three in 4 voters say this makes them feel empowered that their vote can make a difference in the outcome.

More than 6 in 10 say they do not feel pressure to make the right choice and, when asked whether they do not care which candidate wins, 85 percent say that does not describe them.

“I take it as a pretty big responsibility,” said Richard Schall, a 31-year-old White postal worker and U.S. Army veteran from Latrobe, Pa., who plans to vote on Election Day. Despite his concerns about Trump frequently being disrespectful, he “leans more toward Donald Trump on the basis that I’ve seen him as president and the uncertainty of Harris … I don’t think the way Trump handled things was so inherently bad that it was dangerous.”

There are some disadvantages to being in competitive states, among them being the saturation level of advertising aimed at the voters. About 3 in 4 voters in the Post-Schar School poll say they are “annoyed” by these advertisements, but there’s not likely to be any escaping them between now and Election Day.

This poll was conducted by The Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government Sept. 30 to Oct. 15 among a stratified random sample of 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points, state sample sizes ranged from 580 to 965 voters with error margins between 3.9 and 5.0 points. The sample was drawn from the L2 database of registered voters in each state; all selected voters were mailed an invitation to take the survey online, with additional contact efforts from live-caller interviewers, text messages and emails. Sample design, data collection and processing was conducted by SSRS of Glen Mills, Pa.

Speaking to a crowd in Erie, Pa., on the last Saturday in September, former president Donald Trump lambasted his Democratic opponent.

“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired — sad — but Lyin’ Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way,” he said, mispronouncing the Democratic presidential nominee’s name as the crowd chuckled. “There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing.”

Ten minutes later, he offered an even blunter assessment, warning that the nation’s immigration system was being mismanaged by “stupid people like Kamala.”

“She’s a stupid person,” he said, before adding again, as if for emphasis: “Stupid person.”

Since Harris emerged on the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Trump has repeatedly attacked her intelligence — deriding her as a “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow,” “stupid,” and an “extremely low IQ person,” among other similar pejoratives.

To some of the former president’s fiercest supporters, he is simply stating a truth and articulating aloud their view of her. But for many voters, as well as experts, Trump’s sneering dismissiveness of Harris’s intellect reeks of racism and sexism.

If elected, Harris — who is Black and Indian American — would make history as the first female president, as well as the first female president of color, and Trump’s repeated jabs at her intelligence go beyond mere insults.

The attacks are particularly striking given Harris’s deeply accomplished résumé: former San Francisco district attorney, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator and now vice president.

“This lands differently when you do this to women of color, because you’re saying, ‘How dare you get out of the box I put you in,’” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.

“There is a history in the United States about the perception of Black people, about the perception of Black women, that we’re not smart enough, that we’re not good enough, that you only get to where you are because of affirmative action,” she said. “So when you attack people of color, when you attack the vice president, you’re really showing that you have these biases.”

The Trump campaign rejected the notion that Trump’s questioning of Harris’s intelligence is in any way racist or sexist.

“Only dumb and low IQ individuals would be offended by that, expressing faux outrage because they need every excuse to explain away their insecure, miserable, and pathetic existence,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Being unintelligent has nothing to do with race or gender. It has everything to do with Kamala Harris being wholly unqualified to be President because of all the hurt and misery she has brought to America.”

Harris has raised her own questions about Trump’s acuity and fitness for the job, though with less stark language and name-calling. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin last Monday, Harris accused Trump’s staff of deliberately keeping him from the public, noting he had recently pulled out of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview, has refused a second debate with her and won’t release his medical records.

“Why is his staff doing that?” she asked. “And it may be because they think he’s just not ready. And unfit and unstable.”

Trump’s digs at Harris’s intelligence began to intensify almost as soon as President Joe Biden bowed out of his reelection bid on July 21 and endorsed her. The very next day, Trump described Harris as “Dumb as a Rock” in a social media post.

He has since continued to press the theme. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, Trump described her as “a low IQ person” who is “not smart.” The night before, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Manhattan, Trump’s comedy roast included a jibe at Harris’s intellect.

“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the white-tie crowd. “This is a person that has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”

During an interview Tuesday at the Chicago Economic Club, Trump said Harris “is not as smart as Biden, if you can believe it.” And last Monday, he took to social media to call on her to “pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility,” and dismissed her recent appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as “slow and lethargic.”

Trump’s attacks on her intelligence happen on an almost daily basis — and sometimes more than once a day. Trump described her as “dumber than hell” at the Detroit Economic Club on Oct. 10, and in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 9 warned, “People are realizing she’s a dumb person and we can’t have another dumb president.”

He continued: “Somebody said to me — one of my people, a nice person, a staff person — said, ‘Sir, please don’t call her dumb. The women won’t like it.’”

Trump has struggled with both Black and female voters. An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found women supported Harris by a 14-point margin, with 55 percent preferring her and 41 percent preferring Trump. The same poll found that Harris also overwhelmingly leads Trump among Black voters, with 84 percent preferring her to the 11 percent who prefer Trump — although Trump has improved his margins slightly among Black women, to the consternation of the Harris campaign and Democrats.

Trump has so far refused to heed advice to avoid bad-mouthing Harris’s intelligence — in part because, as one confidant put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share a candid insight, “he doesn’t respect her as a worthy opponent.”

The Harris campaign declined to respond to questions about Trump questioning her intelligence. Her team has largely followed the vice president’s posture: not leaning into the history-making nature of her bid as potentially the first woman of color to be president, while dismissing Trump’s broadsides as “the same old tired playbook” that has left Americans exhausted and ready for change.

Last week, Harris accused Trump’s staff of hiding him away, rhetorically asking a large crowd in Greenville, N.C.: “Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”

Trump has long viewed himself as a counterpuncher — forcefully attacking anyone who goes after him, including his White male opponents. Trump, 78, repeatedly went after Biden, 81, over his alleged cognitive abilities, arguing that the president was not physically or mentally capable of serving a second term.

But Trump also has a rich history of sexist attacks, and has reserved some of his most vituperative abuse for women of color. In 2018, Trump demeaned three Black female reporters in as many days, describing one as a “loser” and sneering at another, “You ask lots of stupid questions.” In 2019, amid a fight with House Democrats, Trump took to social media to encourage “The Squad” — a group of congresswomen of color — to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”

He has also attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is Black, as “low IQ Maxine Waters” and as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

For supporters of Harris, 60, the insults are deeply offensive and, they say, geared as firing up Trump’s base.

“There’s an air of misogyny about it, there’s an air of racism about it,” said Kim Barbaro, 49, a Democrat from Ottsville, Pa., in rural Bucks County. “There’s a lot of dog whistles going on when he speaks, so I’m hoping we’ve reached the tipping point with it, because it’s gotten so intense.”

“We need to return back to decency. He’s an unkind human and I’m not here for it,” she added.

Alexandra Moncure — a 35-year-old former Republican turned independent after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — took full-time leave from her marking job in Manhattan to volunteer at one of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign offices and said she believes Trump’s attacks on the vice president’s intelligence come “from a place of insecurity.”

“I think it’s one of his approaches in terms of how he activates his base to attack people — on gender, on race, on anything that he views as something that could detract from her,” Moncure said.

Marjorie Margolies — a former Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication — arrived in Congress during the first “Year of the Woman” in 1992, when four women won election to the Senate, and said she is astonished that a presidential candidate deliberately treats his female opponent this way.

“It boggles my mind that this is acceptable behavior,” she said. “I’m stunned, I’m appalled, and mostly I’m surprised that there are that many people out there who think that this is acceptable behavior. And I’m oh so sad.”

But, she added, she thinks Harris’s handling of this particular brand of insult has been masterful.

“She doesn’t want to give it too much air,” Margolies said. “She doesn’t want to give it a place to resonate. I think that is smart.”

Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, remain largely undaunted by this line of attack, with many agreeing with and encouraging it. Julie Apfelbaum, a Republican who attended Trump’s recent Coachella rally in Harris’s home state of California, said Trump’s criticisms of Harris are totally justified.

“She’s stupid,” said Apfelbaum, an insurance broker from the Thousand Oaks, Calif., area, before offering a mocking rendition of Harris speaking. “She gets done talking, and it’s like, ‘What did she say?’ She said a bunch of nothing. She does a word salad, like they say.”

Later in the Coachella rally, the audience punctuated Trump’s speech with shouted insults at Harris. One man stood up from his seat to yell that Harris was dumber than a rock. Someone responded that they shouldn’t insult rocks.

Hannah Knowles in Coachella, Calif.; Maeve Reston in Washington Crossing, Pa.; Marianne LeVine in Oaks, Pa.; and Jeremy Merrill and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report.

The deadly shooting at a July 13 Donald Trump rally was preventable, but multiple security failures allowed a 20-year-old gunman to climb atop an unsecured roof and fire eight shots, killing an attendee and wounding Trump and two others, the bipartisan House task force investigating the attack wrote in a preliminary report released Monday.

The task force’s 53-page report, which is based on 23 interviews with state and local law enforcement officials, thousands of pages of documents obtained by federal, state and local agencies, and briefings from Secret Service and the FBI, details the failures that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., this summer.

Inadequate planning and coordination between local and federal law enforcement, fragmented lines of communication between law enforcement agencies and the failure to establish a secure perimeter were among the mistakes that allowed Crooks to not only access the unsecured roof but also move freely around the property for hours before the rally, the task force’s members argued in their report.

The report largely echoes preliminary reports released by the Secret Service and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee last month.

“Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the lawmakers who wrote the report concluded.

Several of the report’s key findings were already publicly known, but interviews with local law enforcement officials provided more details on the Secret Service’s failure to adequately prepare for the rally and establish day-of lines of communication between local and federal law enforcement officials.

State and local law enforcement officials who spoke to the task force were critical of the lack of a unified command post and communications hub for state and local police, Secret Service and other federal partners. They also criticized a lack of “a unified briefing” between all entities ahead of the rally that “may have led to gaps in awareness among state and local law enforcement partners as to who was stationed where, spheres of responsibility, and expectations regarding communications during the day.”

The task force will continue to interview federal and local officials familiar with the events of July 13 in the next phase of its investigation, while expanding its scope to also investigate how a second gunman was allowed to come within several hundred yards of Trump on Sept. 15 at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida.

A separate independent panel that released its own findings on the July 13 incident last week called for dramatic change at the U.S. Secret Service. The panel concluded that the protective agency had become “bureaucratic, complacent and static,” calling for new leadership from outside the agency.

The bipartisan task force did not offer recommendations for the agency in its report. But it offered a scathing assessment of the security failures that led to the shooting.

“In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), chairman of the task force, said in a statement.

Former president Donald Trump participated in an interview that aired on Fox News on Sunday. If so inclined, as many Fox News viewers presumably will be, it’s easy to pick out pieces of the conversation that would assuage concerns one might have about his authoritarian inclinations — concerns that many Fox News viewers presumably don’t have.

Trump was asked, for example, whether he would use law enforcement to punish his political opponents.

After some back-and-forth, he said what he was supposed to say: No, “because that’s a bad thing for the country. I don’t want to do that. … I haven’t said that I would.”

Asked about the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and his comments at an event last week that it was a “day of love,” Trump defended himself by drawing a distinction.

He noted, as he often does, that his speech that morning had included a call for the protests to be conducted “peacefully and patriotically” and described the rioters as “a small group of people [who] went down to the Capitol.” He wasn’t talking about them, he said. He was talking about the speech and “that tremendous crowd, the largest group I have ever spoken to, in front of these beautiful monuments, I thought it was actually a beautiful thing.”

And there you go. All this brouhaha about Trump as a threat to democracy or a fascist despite his having checked the boxes he was supposed to check. It’s just like how the media criticizes Trump for saying there were “very fine people” on both sides of the violence in Charlottesville without noting that he also checked the box to say that Nazis are bad!

But then, as now, the context is important — context that includes everything else that Trump said.

In the Fox News interview, conducted by media reporter Howard Kurtz, Trump did say he wouldn’t go after his political opponents. Kurtz could have pointed out that Trump triggered investigations of a number of his political opponents when he actually was president, but didn’t. But the reality seeped into the conversation anyway.

Kurtz began with Trump’s recent frustrations about CBS News and the “60 Minutes” interview of Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has sought to suggest that the interview was unfairly edited to benefit Harris. But, Trump being Trump, he’s done so in hyperbolic terms, suggesting that the edit was so egregious that it constituted one of the largest breaches of media ethics in recent history. And because he’s so effectively cast the media as hostile to his base and to America, he has demanded — as he did to Kurtz — that CBS lose a broadcast license granted it by the federal government.

In other words, he thinks the federal government should punish an organization he presents as his political opponent. He also said, as he has often in the past, that he was going to sue the New York Times for whatever reason — which at least isn’t a pledge to leverage presidential authority against the newspaper. (Which would not itself be terribly surprising.)

Trump also made very clear that he stood by his comments about the “enemy within,” a term he applies to his political opponents and critics. As he did when he began using this descriptor earlier this month, he cast these “enemies” as more dangerous than foreign actors such as China and Russia.

“The outside people, the so-called enemies, if they’re enemies — and they might not be enemies,” Trump said of those countries and their leaders, “if you have a smart president, they can be handled.” But those paled, he suggested, in comparison to the people who had investigated him.

That framing itself is fascinating, of course. Russia is not as worrisome as Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the Democratic candidate for Senate, because Schiff elevated concerns about ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia? Trump’s presentation of the “enemy within” was offered solely in the context of the threat to him.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward recently reported that Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had described Trump as “fascist to the core” in a private conversation. Using government power to punish and centering himself as the most important element of that government certainly comports with that idea.

Kurtz asked Trump about another element of Milley’s condemnation, his referring to Trump as “the most dangerous person ever.” Trump responded that Milley was “woke” and that he’d fired him, which he didn’t. (A second later, he clarified that he was going to fire Milley but “time was pretty short, so I just left him.”)

The Capitol riot lingered over the entire conversation, for obvious reasons. That event was the culmination of a months-long effort by Trump to insist that the 2020 election would be or was stolen. He demanded that his supporters show up in Washington that day, promising them it would be “wild.” And he encouraged them to march to the Capitol from the White House, which thousands did — his sole mention of doing so “peacefully and patriotically” muffled by a fusillade of disparagements and demands for action, to fight.

Even when talking to Kurtz about the “small group” that went to the Capitol, Trump claimed that they were ushered inside by the police. (This, too, is how Trump works: He throws out as many defenses as he can muster — like the one he posted on Truth Social blaming the government for the riot — recognizing that he only needs his audience to accept one to give him a pass.) He also claimed that “nobody had guns here either.”

This isn’t true, as Kurtz pointed out, but Trump rejected that feedback. (“Well, I have not heard that at all, no,” he said. “I don’t think so. They had no guns. They had no guns.”) In fact, testimony offered at the House select committee’s probe of the riot indicated that Trump knew his supporters in Washington were armed but wanted the metal detectors at his speech shut down. After all, he reportedly said, “they’re not here to hurt me.”

It is good that Trump at least still believes that he should say, for example, that he won’t target his opponents. Even that should carry an asterisk, of course, given how fervently he’s insisted that the purported targeting of him is a moral outrage. Nor is it clear that labeling his opponents as enemies is less dangerous than threatening to have them audited by the IRS.

In a related way, it’s also better if he isn’t explicitly saying that he approves of the most violent actors at the Capitol riot. But he keeps edging closer to those lines, calling the rioters “we” and insisting that those in prison — often for committing violence against law enforcement — are “political prisoners.”

Someone viewing the interview with an eye toward feeling comfortable in supporting Trump will be able to find fig leaves covering the necessary unpleasantries. Someone viewing it through the lens offered by Milley, though, will not find those unpleasantries obscured.