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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump as “unstable”, “obsessed with revenge” and “out for unchecked power” on Tuesday night, as she called on Americans to “turn the page” on her Republican rival and vote for her instead.

In the biggest speech of her political career, the Democratic vice-president drew few punches as she criticised her opponent in this year’s White House race.

“America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind: more chaos, more division and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” she said. “I offer a different path, and I ask for your vote.”

With one week to go until election day, Harris was unsparing in her attacks on Trump, but also made a clear pitch to be the candidate of national unity, as she pledged to be a “president for all Americans” and “to always put country above party and self”.

“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” Harris said, in front of a crowd her campaign said numbered about 75,000 people. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

Harris delivered her address in Washington DC, with the White House illuminated behind her. She stood on the Ellipse, the site of Trump’s January 6 2021 speech in which he called on his supporters to “fight like hell” hours before they stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt Joe Biden from being declared president.

The vice-president’s campaign said the location had been chosen to draw a sharp contrast between her and her Republican opponent.

“We are not at this location by accident. We believe the Ellipse is significant,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign chair, told reporters ahead of the speech. “It is a stark visualisation of probably the most infamous example of Donald Trump and how he has used his power for bad.”

The campaign had described Harris’s speech as her “closing argument” with just a week to run in an increasingly tight race. The Financial Times poll tracker shows her and Trump in a virtual tie in the seven swing states that are likely to determine who wins the presidency.

“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We are very focused on making sure that we are doing everything in our power to reach the voters that are still making up their mind.”

The crowd in Washington, however, was filled with supporters, many of whom said they were cautiously optimistic she would defeat Trump.

Savannah Jones, a 27-year-old attorney originally from Utah, said Harris was the “only reasonable choice”, adding: “I’m nervous but I think she can win.”

Zachary Mohling, a 26-year-old software engineer from the Washington DC suburbs agreed, and discounted the polls showing the two candidates in a virtual tie.

“The polls were wrong in 2016, they were wrong in 2020. Every election cycle they try to account for the silent Trump voter and now they’ve gone to far,” he said.

As election day nears, Harris has stepped up her argument that Trump poses a grave threat to American democracy.

Last week, she attacked the former president for being “increasingly unhinged and unstable” after John Kelly, Trump’s one-time chief of staff, told The New York Times that Trump was an “authoritarian” who admired Adolf Hitler and fell into the “general definition of fascist”.

She has also criss-crossed the country with Liz Cheney, the conservative former Republican congresswoman who broke with Trump and her party over the 2021 Capitol attack and in September said she would be voting for Harris given the “danger that Donald Trump poses”.

The sober warnings stand in stark contrast to the image of a “joyful warrior” that the Harris campaign cultivated over the summer, after she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But aides insisted her closing message would resonate with millions of voters who are frustrated by the coarseness and division that has plagued US politics in recent years.

Trump’s own attempt at a closing argument at New York’s Madison Square Garden at the weekend was overshadowed by racist and misogynist comments, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and another comparing Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers”.

The Trump campaign on Monday hurried to limit the damage from the rally. But Trump showed little remorse on Tuesday, telling reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort that the New York event was an “absolute lovefest”.

I’d noted this info on Monday but now the pundits are picking it up.

POLITICO is a US politics website. In brief:

• Across battlegrounds … Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states.
• The implications for next week’s election results are unclear
• It’s impossible to know who these women are voting for
• “In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart.
• female turnout comes as Harris zeroes in on moderate suburban women — and particularly non-college educated, white women — in the final days of the campaign, aiming to drive them to the polls with the enthusiasm they showed in the midterm elections, right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Before you go ballistic with abusive comments:

• It’s also not clear that the increased turnout among women is uniformly beneficial for Democrats, given the significant numbers of Republican women who are showing up to early vote as well.

Read the full piece for more.

Then, if you want to abuse me for posting factual information, go right ahead. LOL.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A Belgian court has sentenced more than a hundred people for drug-related crimes in the country’s largest-ever criminal case, based on decrypted messages among gang members.

Sky ECC, an encrypted messaging service founded by a Canadian developer and used by criminal organisations worldwide, was cracked by Belgian, Dutch and French law enforcement in 2021, leading to large-scale raids and arrests in several European countries.

Based on that evidence, a court in Brussels on Tuesday sentenced 119 people to prison terms ranging between 14 months and 17 years. Prosecutors had asked for up to 20 years in prison for some of the accused. Nine people were acquitted of the charges.

The case has highlighted Belgium’s growing problem with drugs-related criminal activity, as its port of Antwerp has emerged as the main European gateway for Latin American cocaine. Belgian customs last year seized 116 tonnes of cocaine in the port, setting a record for the second year in a row.

Among those condemned was a former police officer, sentenced to five years in prison for giving criminals sensitive information from police databases.

“The court wanted to highlight that this type of criminal organisation destabilises society and the rule of law,” said Denis Goeman, a spokesperson for the Brussels court.

He said people were punished according to the severity of their crimes which included drug trafficking, money laundering, arms trafficking, extortion and kidnapping.

Among the main defendants was Eridan Munoz Guerrero, an Albanian national who admitted having run a cocaine trafficking operation in Brussels and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. “I played and I lost,” Munoz Guerrero said during court proceedings, in which his legal team succeeded in lowering his sentence from 19 years.

“I am satisfied of the judgment,” said his lawyer, Nathalie Gallant. “The court, although he played a leading role, and was among those with the highest amounts of [drugs] confiscation, has reduced his sentence.”

Europol has described decrypting Sky ECC messages as having provided “invaluable insights” into criminal organisations.

Defence lawyers had argued that the decryption was unlawful and constituted a violation of privacy, but the court dismissed those arguments.

Kris Luyckx, defence lawyer for two of the accused, said he would appeal against the rulings against his clients, who were sentenced to 12 and 11 years respectively for drug trafficking and money laundering.

The Belgian case is one among several in Europe based on decrypted messages, with countries including the Netherlands and France also pursuing crime lords and their associates based on similar evidence.