Elbahrain.net Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz accused Donald Trump of descending into “madness” on Tuesday, following a report that the former president pined for the loyalty of the “kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate seized on the report in The Atlantic as top party figures warned of dark days ahead if Trump wins the presidency in 13 days given his often-expressed autocratic instincts.

A tense atmosphere around a neck-and-neck election ratcheted up significantly following the article by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump had noted in a private conversation while president: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The report was substantiated in the article by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Trump’s alleged fixation with Hitler was also supported by material in several books, including one by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 31: Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly answers questions during a press conference related to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order concerning travel and refugees, January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC. On Monday night, President Donald Trump fired the acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she released a statement saying the Justice Department would not enforce the president’s executive order that places a temporary ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“Folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had. Think about it,” he added.

Walz noted the recent ruling by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that granted presidents substantial immunity for official acts committed in office as he tried to ignite public concern about the nature of a second term for an ex-president who has already tried to overturn the result of a democratic election.

Trump’s campaign denied the exchange about Trump and Hitler reported in The Atlantic. “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this,” campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said. And responding to Kelly’s comments to The Times, campaign communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement that the retired Marine general had “totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff.”

But even as the furor grew over the Atlantic report, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, played into Democratic warnings that they’d take the country down a dark road.

After musing about turning the military or the National Guard on “enemies from within” in recent interviews (even specifying he was referring to top Democrats) and warning that TV networks like CBS should lose their licenses to broadcast, Trump launched a searing attack on Harris during a rally in North Carolina.

“Does she drink? Is she on drugs? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I have no idea,” he said. Earlier in the day he called her “lazy” – a racist trope often used against Black Americans.

Trump also said he’d ask Congress to pass a law that says anyone who burns the American flag should spend a year in prison. “We’re going to ask Congress to – they say it’s unconstitutional, I disagree – to give a one-year prison sentence for anybody burning the American flag.”

Vance, meanwhile, said that a future Trump administration might consider deporting DACA recipients – children who were brought to the United States illegally but who have built lives here – as part of its hardline immigration policies. “When you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this country, you’ve got to deport people or you don’t have a border anymore. It’s just that simple,” the Ohio senator said in Arizona.

Democrats highlight Trump’s extremism
With the race still deadlocked and Harris potentially needing a perfect run through blue wall swing states to win, leading Democrats on Tuesday conjured what they see as the extreme possibilities of Trump’s possible return to the Oval Office. The strategy looked a lot like a bid to put a frisson of fear through the party base to drive up turnout.

Yet there is a potential flaw to playing the fear card. The history of Trump’s riotous presidency is no secret, even if memories may have begun to fade. As he exploits voter anxiety over the high cost of living and immigration, attempts to remind the electorate of what his White House years were like have not yet been decisive. And while Trump’s wildness might alienate some critical moderate voters, his strongman act has delivered him to the threshold of the White House again. That’s partly because, for many like-minded Americans, his antics come across as strength.

President Joe Biden delivered a dire warning about what may lie ahead while in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks at NHTI Concord Community College on October 22, 2024 in Concord, New Hampshire.

Harris: ‘A very, very serious decision’
The vice president, meanwhile, pressed home her closing argument that Trump represents a fundamental danger to America’s character in an interview with NBC, while vowing to combat the high grocery and housing prices on which her rival has seized to lay out his own nightmare vision of a nation in crisis.

“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country, and it includes whether we are a country that values a president who respects their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States,” she said in the interview.

Harris, who will appear in a CNN town hall event on Wednesday evening, warned: “The choice before the American people is the choice to choose to turn the page on the division and the hate and to bring our country together.”

Harris and Trump courts Hispanics
Harris earlier unveiled a new program to court crucial Latino voters – promising to improve access to good jobs, professional training and housing – as she vies for a regular Democratic constituency into which Trump has made inroads.

But at a roundtable with Latino business executives in Miami, Trump, as he often does, didn’t stick to the ostensible theme of the event, digressing into falsehoods and vitriol. His blasting of Harris as “lazy” was a characteristic case of the ex-president branding an opponent with the transgression with which he’s been accused since he didn’t go out of his way to hold the event — it was at his Doral golf club. And Trump has cancelled a string of interviews in recent days. His comparatively light schedule has raised questions about the 78-year-old’s capacity to stand up to the rigors of the frantic final days of a presidential election campaign.

The former president also indulged in his unique version of fear mongering that he typically uses to fire up his base. He warned that if Harris wins on November 5, there may never be another election again. “People don’t know who the hell Harris is, but now they are finding out that she’s a radical left lunatic,” Trump said. “We can’t take a chance on losing this election because if we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore.”

Trump’s words evoked the inflammatory language that he used ahead of the riot of his supporters on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol that was an attempt to halt the certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory. And if there’s one candidate in this race that has shown disrespect for democratic elections, it’s him.

Tuesday’s increasingly dire invocations of the future underscored the deep divides in American politics that make the 2024 election an almost existential proposition for both sides.

US elections were once seen as a regular exercise in salving the country’s political wounds — even for a limited period. There’s no way that’s happening this year.

Elbahrain.net Nearly three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw Moscow condemned by countries globally, leader Vladimir Putin is staging a summit with more than a dozen world leaders – in a pointed signal from the autocrat that far from being alone, an emerging coalition of countries stands behind him.

The three-day BRICS summit, starting Tuesday in the southwestern Russian city of Kazan, is the first meeting of the group of major emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa since it expanded earlier this year to include Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Iran.

Leaders expected to attend include China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa as well as those from outside the club, like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was expected to join but canceled his trip after suffering an injury at home.

Set to be by far the largest international gathering the Russian president has hosted since the start of the war in February 2022, the gathering of BRICS and other countries this week spotlights a growing convergence of nations who hope to see a shift in the global balance of power and – in the case of some, like Moscow, Beijing and Tehran – directly counter the United States-led West.

It’s this latter message that Putin – and close partner and most powerful BRICS country leader Xi – will project in the coming days: it’s the West that stands isolated in the world with its sanctions and alliances, while a “global majority” of countries support their bid to challenge American global leadership.

In remarks to reporters Friday, Putin hailed the growing economic and political clout of BRICS countries as an “undeniable fact” and said that if BRICS and interested countries work together, they “will be a substantial element of the new world order” – though he denied the group was an “anti-Western alliance.”

Putin’s messaging this week will be all the more poignant as the meeting comes just days ahead of the US elections, where a potential victory for former President Donald Trump could see the US shift its staunch support of Ukraine and strain Washington’s ties with its traditional allies more broadly.

“This BRICS summit is really a gift (for Putin),” said Alex Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “The message will be: how can you talk about Russia’s global isolation when (all these) leaders … are coming to Kazan.”

Russia wants to portray BRICS “as the spearhead, the new organization that leads us all as a global community to a more just order,” Gabuev said.

But despite Russia’s sweeping rhetoric, the leaders meeting in Kazan have a wide range of viewpoints and interests – a reality of BRICS that observers say limits their ability to send a unified message – especially the kind Putin may desire.

Global crises
The Russian-hosted gathering poses a sharp contrast to last year’s BRICS summit in Johannesburg, when Putin participated from the other side of a video screen – unable to attend in person due to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes over Ukraine.

This year, the Russian president is at the helm of the first summit since the organization nearly doubled in size – and the gathering is playing out before a very different global landscape.

While BRICS is primarily geared toward economic collaboration, its meeting last year took place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. Now, even as that war rages on, the expanding conflict in the Middle East, where Israel is fighting Iran’s proxies, is also likely to dominate leaders’ conversations.

Putin last week confirmed that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas would join the event. The Russian leader and his officials will likely use the conflict – and the anger across the Global South toward the US and its support for Israel – to press his argument for a new world order without the US at the helm, observers say.

China and Russia have both called for a ceasefire in the spiraling conflict and criticized Israel’s actions, while the US has endorsed Israel’s right to retaliate against militant groups Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The vessel – the Port Olya 3 – was identified by Maxar Technologies in satellite imagery taken on September 4 at Port Olya in Astrakhan, Russia.

last month’s meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Then, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the effort, saying such plans would help Moscow, while warning Beijing and Brasilia: “you will not boost your power at Ukraine’s expense.”

Zelensky’s own challenges presenting his “victory plan” to end the war and the impending US elections mean China now has “a tremendous opportunity to beat the drum of its own format (on Ukraine) without sparing too much leverage,” according to Gabuev in Berlin.

The gathering in Kazan also gives Putin ample opportunity for one-on-one facetime with his fellow BRICS leaders and other friendly dignitaries in attendance.

The recent inclusion in BRICS of Iran – which CNN has reported has provided Russia with hundreds of drones, as well as short-range ballistic missiles (a transfer Iran denies) – brings a close Russian partner even further into Moscow’s fold. China has also been accused by the US and its allies of powering Russia’s war effort through its provision of dual-used goods like machine tools and microelectronics – a role Beijing also denies as it defends its “normal trade” with Russia and “neutrality” on the war.

ELBAHRAIN.NET Even by his haywire standards, Donald Trump’s latest rhetoric and behavior is erratic, autocratic and vulgar and hints at four years of unpredictable leadership that may lie ahead if he’s elected president in 15 days.

Vice President Kamala Harris and top Democrats are seizing on the Republican nominee’s bizarre antics to inject new urgency and a sharper focus into her campaign, arguing he “demeans” the presidency and is “deranged.” As Trump cancels one-on-one interviews and piles up odd public appearances, Democrats are suggesting that he is “unstable” and showing cognitive decline, using the same critique he once used against President Joe Biden. The Harris campaign, for example, immediately highlighted the 78-year-old Trump saying on Sunday that he’s “not that close to 80” when calling for cognitive tests.

The former president this weekend described Harris as a “sh*t” vice president, opened a rally with a rambling and explicit story about late golfing legend Arnold Palmer’s anatomy, and justified his previous threat to use the military on enemies “from within” even as House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump meant nothing of the sort.

With polls deadlocked, Trump’s behavior hasn’t yet disqualified him. And he consistently leads surveys when voters are asked who they most trust to manage high prices for housing and groceries and to handle immigration.

The White House failed to neutralize both those issues politically, paving the way for their potency in the 2024 campaign. Officials repeatedly insisted that rising inflation early in the Biden term was “transitory” and that the economy was healthy even when millions of Americans were hurting. Similarly, administration spokespeople were long reluctant to consider rising numbers of border crossings as a “crisis” even though the asylum system was overwhelmed. Migrant crossings and inflation have both fallen considerably from their peaks, but the political damage may have been done. And Trump’s voters still regard him as a vessel for their frustration with a political and economic system they believe has poorly served them.

Trump’s behavior underscores stakes of deadlocked election
It will be up to voters to decide how to process Trump’s recent conduct.

The Harris campaign, which began as an attempt to spread joy, is now fully exploiting Trump’s rhetorical rampages.

The vice president told the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC on Sunday that “the president of the United States must set a standard” for this country and the world. “What you see in my opponent, a former president of the United States … demeans the office,” she said. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Saturday claimed in Nebraska that Trump lacked “stamina” to be president and was “far more unfit than he was in 2016. He’s more deranged.”

In Nevada the same day, former President Barack Obama slammed Republicans who make excuses for Trump when he “repeatedly lies or cheats or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, or just insults people, when he calls service members who died in

The most troubling of recent Trump comments are his suggestions that he could use the US military or National Guard against the “enemy from within,” a classic trope of authoritarian leaders. When asked who he meant, Trump has several times cited California Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, and Adam Schiff, who was a key figure in Trump’s first impeachment.

But Johnson insisted on “State of the Union” that Trump was referring specifically to “marauding gangs of dangerous, violent people who are destroying public property and threatening other American citizens,” even when CNN’s Jake Tapper played tape specifically referring to Schiff and Pelosi. And in an interview that aired on Fox’s “MediaBuzz” later Sunday, the ex-president yet again made clear exactly what he meant when he said that “of course” Schiff is an enemy

The ex-president has so polarized the country that he’s created a unique political environment. Liberals and media elites might, for example, view his appearance making fries at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday as a stunt. Walz slammed it as an insult by a tycoon who spent decades “stiffing workers’ pay.” But to Trump supporters, the photo-op could convey authenticity and kinship.

That hold on the GOP base explains why Republicans repeatedly accommodate his crude and anti-democratic conduct. It’s why Johnson’s defended the party nominee on “State of the Union,” which sent particular alarm bells since the speaker may be called upon to play a role in defending constitutional governance in the event of a disputed election.

The McDonald’s logo is displayed at a restaurant in Burbank, California, on July 22, 2024.

battle ‘losers’ or fellow citizens ‘vermin’ or ‘the enemy within.’”