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Tom McCarthy

Hillary Clinton: 'There is no new Donald Trump' – as it happened

Clinton in Cleveland
Hillary Clinton at John Marshall high school in Cleveland before her speech today. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Summary

We’re going to wrap up our live blog politics coverage for the day.

Click here for today’s Campaign Minute summary – and see you back here tomorrow!

Clinton meets with Sir Paul

According to a pool report, Hillary Clinton has just met with Paul McCartney, at the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, where McCartney is playing a show tonight, and which readers may remember as the site of the Republican national convention.

Sir Paul live.

Incoming:

What do you make of this theory?

Can’t tell us he’s not trying to win. Yet.

Manafort: 'on to victory'

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has sent a memo to staff hailing “an exciting day for Team Trump”:

Donald Trump doesn’t trust the media. He thinks the media is dishonest.

We know this because he constantly sends emails to supporters regarding the “dishonest media”.

In the past nine days he’s sent out two alone: on August 9 and on August 15. The latter went further. The Trump campaign now has “two opponents”, he said: Hillary Clinton and the “very dishonest” media. (He has also repeatedly criticised photojournalists and television cameras for allegedly not showing the crowds at his rallies and attacked individual reporters.)

Dishonest!
Dishonest! Photograph: Guardian

Strange then, that Trump also regularly sends out links to favourable media articles. This week he sent those emails on Monday, Tuesday and today, with URLs taking readers to right-wing websites but also news organisations like the Washington Post – which he barred from attending his rallies in June – and NBC News.

If Trump says the media is not to be trusted, then by definition any positive media article written about him is not to be trusted. Including this one, I guess.

Updated

Conservative megadonor revealed as Breitbart underwriter

Ben Shapiro, the Los Angeles-based conservative firebrand and former Breitbart.com editor at large who resigned in the wake of the Michelle Fields upheaval, confirmed on Wednesday that one of the investors in Breitbart.com is reclusive conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer. (Rumors swirled in 2015 about Mercer’s investment in the site, but then-executive chairman Steve Bannon, who today became the newest hire by Donald Trump’s campaign, refused to confirm Mercer’s involvement.)

Mercer is a computer programmer by trade who applied his skills to a successful hedge fund, Renaissance Management, and has publicly spent more than $15m on conservative causes since 2015. He also funds a $36.7m non-profit, the Mercer Family Foundation, run by his daughter, Rebekah Mercer: it, in turn, funnels money into conservative non-profits like the Media Research Center (the conservative organization dedicated to exposing liberal bias in media), Citizens United (the non-profit behind the US supreme court case that upended American campaign finance laws) and the climate-denying Heartland Institute and Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, among others.

Robert Mercer in April 2014.
Robert Mercer in April 2014. Photograph: ddp USA/REX Shutterstock

Mercer’s donations have gone to less mainstream causes as well, according to a report from Bloomberg, from conferences advocating a return to the gold standard and an activist convinced that climate change is a UN plot to “depopulate rural America”.

And Mercer’s cut checks for a veritable who’s-who of conservative darlings, from the Koch brothers’ Super Pac to current Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, from foreign policy hawk and perennial also-ran John Bolton to Ohio Senator Rob Portman, and from the fiscally conservative Club for Growth to the anti-abortion Women Speak Out Pac, an offshoot of the anti-abortion Susan B Anthony List. And he and his daughter were big, early backers of Senator Ted Cruz’s political ambitions, supporting his campaign and an affiliated Super Pac.

A Mercer man.
A Mercer man. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

Interestingly, as Politico reported last year, Mercer is reportedly an investor in Cambridge Analytics, which uses microtargeting and psychographic analysis to help campaigns – like Cruz’s – reach voters that its algorithms deem persuadable. Politico reported that “nearly 93 percent of the $2.6 million Cambridge Analytica has received in traceable federal payments has come from committees to which the Mercers donated generously”.

Microtargeting involves collecting or buying a whole host of personally identifiable data – compiled from everything from tracking cookies monitoring people’s web habits to purchase data (sometime compiled using store discount cards) and responses to online surveys and petitions – and matching it with voter data to build detailed dossiers on voters to use in online and even mobile advertising. Cruz’s campaign claimed in an NPR interview to have 4,000 points of data on every single American voter because of Cambridge Analytics; the company told NPR that “hundreds of thousands” of Americans had taken their 120-point personality test.

Updated

Genius behind taco bowl tweet was Trump family member

OK, which family member had the brilliant idea for the Trump taco bowl tweet? Ivanka? Eric? Don Jr? Melania? Barron? Tiffany? Are we missing anyone?

The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman captures the scene in a report on the fall of Manafort:

Manafort had reason to know this from the start ― and reason to know that his advice would be ignored.

The taco bowl incident, trivial though it was, is one example. On Cinco de Mayo, Trump happened to be eating a taco bowl for lunch at his desk in Trump Tower. Manafort was in the office with other aides when a member of the family suggested they tweet a picture of Trump enjoying his “Mexican” lunch.

Manafort politely suggested that this might be seen as condescending and cautioned against it. The tweet went out. Trump himself was delighted by the resulting controversy. “The people who were offended were people we wanted to offend,” he later said.

Read the full piece here.

UPDATE: Breitbart has denied that political editor Matthew Boyle is joining the Trump campaign.

Here’s our original post on the topic:

Reports are cropping up that Breitbart political editor Matthew Boyle is going to work for Trump alongside his boss Steve Bannon. Click through for details or simply admire this Ron Paul gif:

Post-update:

Updated

Breitbart CEO calls Bannon 'a huge piece of manpower'

Clinton: 'there is no new Donald Trump'

Clinton alludes to the deckchair rearrangement on luxury liner Trump and says it does not matter:

He can hire and fire whoever he wants from his campaign. They can make him read new words from a teleprompter. But he is still the same man who insults gold star families, mocks people with disabilities and thinks he knows more about Isis than our generals. There is no new Donald Trump – this is it.

Updated

This new swing-state poll of likely voters bears the same old good news for Clinton in Virginia and Colorado (note: Quinnipiac ran its survey from August 9-16, meaning before the bombshell news overnight that Trump had hired the Breitbart bigshot to run his campaign; unskew accordingly).

Polling averages have Clinton up by seven in Colorado, two in Iowa and seven in Virginia. A Washington Post poll of Virginia released yesterday had Clinton up eight among likely voters.

Updated

Newly minted campaign manager argues there are secret Trump voters not reflected in polls

The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino with the pool of reporters tracking Donald Trump today in Manhattan. She spoke with Kellyanne Conway, the pollster promoted to campaign manager in the overnight Trump campaign shake-up.

“Now we see a number of voters who are not coming clean about their support for Donald Trump,” Conway tells Lauren. And don’t call it a shake-up:

“This is an expansion at an incredibly busy time, the last 12-week homestretch for the campaign. We look at personnel as more as more. With Paul continuing as our chairman and Rick Gates as his deputy, Stephen Bannon and I have been added to what I would call the “core four” of that senior team and we’re going to divide responsibilities according to our best an highest uses.”

Q: How will she and Bannon work together?

“Steve Bannon and I have tremendous respect for each other as colleagues and as friends and we also have the trust of Donald Trump the candidate. You first of all have the trust of the candidate and the latitude … We have different styles but we have one vision.”

She said she expects to hit the campaign field and TV circuit while Bannon mans the HQ at Trump Tower.

Q: Is the race over or just getting started?

“Two or three things we’ve all learned about Donald Trump is No 1: Don’t underestimate him. No 2: You know he exceeds expectations and No 3: he also exceeds the metrics that are usually at play, meaning he over performed many of his polling averages in the primaries and the caucuses. But now we see a number of voters who are not coming clean about their support for Donald Trump. I can’t find a single hidden Hilary Clinton voter in the country. I’ve been looking for him or her. They all seem to be out, proudly saying that their voting for Hillary Clinton.

“In the case of Mr. Trump, the race isn’t over because August is not October let alone November.”

Q: How does Manafort fit in on the new team?:

“We would hope and expect Paul continues to do many of things he’s been doing. He’s just been doing the job of three or four people. We’re there to help him in that regard and he’s there to help us.”

Clinton has just taken the stage in Cleveland. Scroll back a couple blocks for the live video!

Trump: 'the Democratic party has failed the African American community'

Just before appointing the head of a web site that traffics in racist conspiracy theories to run his campaign, Trump made a pitch, in a speech in Wisconsin last night, to African American voters.

“It’s time to give the Democrats some competition for these votes,” Trump said:

Trump to black voters: Democratic party has failed you – video

Here’s our news coverage of Trump’s speech:

Here’s that live video stream from Cleveland, where Hillary Clinton is scheduled to appear before long (actually she’s scheduled to appear right this minute but let’s be honest):

Who will stand to gainsay him?

Good news for Donald Trump in Indiana, which succumbed in 2008 to the charms of Barack Obama: a new Monmouth poll has the Republican candidate 11 points ahead of rival Hillary Clinton. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, is the current Indiana governor.

The poll contains perhaps better news, though, for Democrats, for whom picking up the US senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Dan Coats is a crucial part of a plan to regain the senate majority.

Democrat Evan Bayh, a former Hoosier governor and senator, is seven points up on congressman Todd Young in the poll. There haven’t been enough polls to establish a meaningful average in the senate race.

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak shortly at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio. We’ll have a live video stream for you when the time comes. Here’s a prelude:

Mook: 'we absolutely expect' deluge of 'wild' attacks after Bannon hire

Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, in a conference call with reporters, has criticized Donald Trump’s hiring of Breitbart chief Steve Bannon to run his campaign.

“After several failed attempts to pivot into a more serious and presidential mode, Donald Trump has decided to double down on his most small, nasty and divisive instincts by turning his campaign over to someone who is best known for running a so-called news site [that traffics in] racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories...” Mook said.

“Not matter how much the establishment wants to clean Donald Trump up, get him on a teleprompter, he has officially won the fight to let Trump be Trump. He keeps telling us who he is, it’s time to believe him.”

Mook went on to say that the Breitbart organization had been known to defend white supremacists, had compared the work of Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust and had used anti-LGBT slurs.

Clinton’s campaign chief said that Trump’s alignment with the site was “unfortunately not a surprise” and that its “divisive, erratic and dangerous rhetoric simply represents who he is.”

“We should expect in the coming weeks to see more of what at the end of the day voters fear about Donald Trump: the hateful, erratic judgment and wild conspiracy theories,” Mook said. “We absolutely expect with this change for Donald Trump to double down on more hateful and divisive rhetoric, more conspiracy theories, more wild accusations.”

Mook said a prospective new onslaught of hardball, Breitbart-style attacks by the Trump campaign on Clinton would not rattle the Democratic nominee.

“People like Bannon and Breitbart have been going after Hillary Clinton every single day and she’s still standing strong… the voters have always rejected it.”

Updated

The whole electoral college handicapping game has all been a bit anticlimactic so far this year, with Clinton’s paths to victory shaping up as wide and well-paved.

But what if Trump won every tossup state? Whoops – as the race currently stands, not even a swing-state sweep would deliver Trump victory, according to analysis by the nonpartisan Cook political report:

Send Sabrina your questions

Here’s a callout for questions for the Republicans’ Hispanic outreach director, who will join Sabrina Siddiqui for our next Politics for Humans podcast.

Here are some questions people are suggesting!

Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine is about to speak in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

What’s Breitbart? On the off chance there are any Guardian readers out there who don’t also faithfully read Breitbart, whose leader just took over the Trump campaign, let’s have a look at the site.

Here’s the current landing page:

A middle finger.
A middle finger. Photograph: Breitbart

Apart from the splashy coverage of the Bannon news, the top story there is “‘Never Trump’ Leader Kristol: Rename Breitbart ‘Right-Wing Intolerant Mean-Spirited News’. The story quotes Bill Kristol recalling that three months ago, Breitbart branded him a “renegade Jew”:

And a lot of people – I’m not a big, you know, ‘Oh, it’s terrible anti-Semitism’ kind of guy, but that’s a little creepy. And the charges – why was I a ‘renegade Jew?’ Because I didn’t support Donald Trump.

The second story is the transcript of a CNN brawl from last night. The third story on the site accuses the Anti-defamation league of anti-semitism, for its criticism of Donald Trump. Here’s the top of that story:

The total transformation of the once hallowed Anti-Defamation League may now be complete. Established more than 100 years ago to fight Jew hatred at home and abroad, has the ADL now done a 180? Has its core mission changed from fighting anti-semitism to defending it? That’s the question clearly raised by the ADL’s instant condemnation of Donald Trump’s call Monday to ban anti-semites from entering the United States.

And here’s a sample of top trending headlines on the site:

Women Vote Trump Leader Amy Kremer: Clinton’s Medical Records Should Be Released

Georgia to Implement Work Requirements for Food Stamp Recipients

Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC: Clinton Told Congress a ‘Flat-out, Bald-faced Lie’

Gunman Murders Mother in Front of Her Family Just Miles from Texas Border

NB, Trump today is scheduled to receive his first classified national security briefing, his right as the Republican nominee. Accompanied by New Jersey governor Chris Christie and retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, Trump is to meet with officials at a Manhattan FBI office.

Cognoscenti advise that the briefing is likely to stick to basics and caution against alarm over what Trump might find out about, say, a clandestine US posture in former Soviet states, for example.

Republican party spox calls Trump shakeup 'healthy'

While to many eyes the recruitment by Donald Trump of Breitbart capitano Steve Bannon to run his presidential campaign looks surely like a sharp internal convolution towards the nastiest version of Trumpism’s small cold core, the chief strategist of the Republican national committee has hailed the hiring as an expansion of the campaign and “a healthy thing’:

Will the Republican rank-and-file, along with the party apparatus, remain with Trump if his campaign, as it appears it will, fully embraces the toxic mix of conspiracy, bigotry and anarchy with which the Breitbart site brims?

Here’s our interactive tracker of current and former elected Republican officials and where they stand on Trump:

Updated

Trump's 'deeply un-American' stance on immigration prompts legal concerns

A quarter century after the end of the cold war, Donald Trump has proposed restoring ideological tests for immigrants, a move that legal experts say raises a tangle of practical and even constitutional concerns, writes the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino:

In a speech on Monday devoid of policy details or specifics, the Republican nominee called for the “extreme vetting” of immigrants, including a screening process to root out applicants who do not uphold “American values”.

Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Trump’s proposal was “a nonstarter”.

“The proposal ... is very deeply un-American, is probably unconstitutional, would almost certainly fail in Congress and is another example of Trump having no idea what he’s talking about,” he said.

Honduran immigrant Brian Alexander, 7, arrives with his father to the Catholic Sacred Heart Church Immigrant Respite Center before their onward bus trip to Reno, Nevada on August 15, 2016 from McAllen, Texas. After crossing from Mexico into Texas, Central American families are processed at a U.S. Border Patrol center, given temporary legal documents and sent to their destination city, while their asylum petitions move through U.S. immigration courts.
Honduran immigrant Brian Alexander, 7, arrives with his father to the Catholic Sacred Heart Church Immigrant Respite Center before their onward bus trip to Reno, Nevada on August 15, 2016 from McAllen, Texas. After crossing from Mexico into Texas, Central American families are processed at a U.S. Border Patrol center, given temporary legal documents and sent to their destination city, while their asylum petitions move through U.S. immigration courts. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Restricting immigrants on the basis of ideology is anathema to American values, Tribe argues. Freedom of speech and religion are enshrined under the first amendment of the constitution and the enduring symbol of freedom is the Statue of Liberty welcoming weary immigrants to its shores.

Read the full piece here:

Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House.

Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort may have violated a federal law requiring lobbyists to tell the justice department if they represent foreign entities, an AP investigation has revealed this morning.

Sources told AP that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2m to two prominent Washington lobbying firms,” and “the project was structured in ways that obscured the foreign party’s efforts to influence US policy.”

A violation of the law is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Happily for Trump, in a move with truly auspicious timing, the Trump campaign overnight announced a management overhaul that appears to sideline Manafort by installing at the top of the campaign Steve Bannon, the guy who runs Breitbart. Pollster Kellyanne Conway was promoted in the shuffle.

Who’s Steve Bannon? A former investment banker who messed around in Hollywood for a while before making a documentary about Sarah Palin and taking over Breitbart, the hard-right media site dubbed a year ago as “Trump’s Pravda” by Republican soothsayer Rick Wilson. Here’s a good Bloomberg profile of Bannon and here is our news coverage of the campaign shakeup.

In this full consummation of the Trump and Breitbart brands, could Trump finally have hit on the strategy that will help him win the middle? Let’s check what the critics are saying:

On the campaign trail today, Hillary Clinton will appear at an event at John Marshall high school in Cleveland, Ohio, to talk about tax policy.

In other news, a Bloomberg Politics/Morning Consult poll out this morning found support for Trump undergoing significant shrinkage with investors. People with money in the market favor Trump over Clinton 42-40, the poll found. In June the spread was 50-33 for Trump.

Thanks for reading and please join us in the comments.

Updated

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