One way you know that CBS News’s new poll of the presidential race is bad news for former president Donald Trump is that Trump’s campaign is trying to spin it as unreliable.

In a “confidential memorandum” sent to reporters on Sunday, a data consultant for the campaign argued that the poll, conducted by YouGov, had been “manipulated” to show an advantage for Vice President Harris — a shift since the last CBS-YouGov poll released last month. It was a return to the days of poll “unskewing,” a central component of Republican optimism about Mitt Romney’s chances in the 2012 presidential election … which he then lost.

The objections from the Trump campaign can be dismissed most easily by considering the motivations of the two parties involved. YouGov is in the business of providing a wide range of businesses and media outlets with reliable evaluations of public opinion, the sort of effort that rewards accuracy over the long term. (YouGov is the fourth-best pollster in 538′s ratings.) Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, is in the business of presenting him as a political juggernaut with an unmatched level of support.

In other words, why the pollster would tweak a midyear presidential poll to benefit the Democrat is not clear. Why the Trump campaign would like to suggest that the poll was tweaked is obvious.

Even given its motivations, the response from Trump’s campaign to this one poll was odd. The poll, as the memo notes, shows a subtle shift in the race, one that puts Harris in front of Trump but still well within the margin of error. There are other indicators that the race is shifting in Harris’s direction (polling analyst Nate Silver’s average has Harris leading nationally and gaining in swing states), but modestly. This isn’t surprising, given that changes in political support are generally gradual. It’s possible that as the campaign progresses, Harris will open up a wider lead — or Trump will regain one. For now, though, the shift is small.

That said, the CBS poll does suggest that a wider Harris lead is quite possible. CBS has published three polls evaluating the presidential contest over the past month. The first asked respondents to choose between Trump and President Biden, his opponent at the time. The second asked for a choice between both Biden and Harris. The third, released this weekend, had only Harris. This lets us see both how the Trump-Harris race compares with the Trump-Biden one — and how Harris’s position has changed since she became the presumptive nominee.

The biggest changes are among independents and Black respondents. In the CBS poll released in the middle of last month, Trump led Harris among independents by 11 points; they’re now tied. Among Black respondents, Harris led by 55 points. Now she leads by 63 — much closer to the Biden-Trump split shown in 2020 exit polls, though still less heavily Democratic.

The bigger shift is seen when respondents were asked to select from a wider field of candidates. Here we see bigger shifts over the past month, in large part because respondents considering third-party candidates shifted their support to Harris. Notice, below, that the change in support for Trump is relatively subtle month-to-month. The change in support for his Democratic opponent, though, is often significant.

That’s in part because younger voters and non-White voters — two central components of the Democratic base — are more likely to back Harris in a larger field than they were to back Biden. In CBS’s new poll, both groups also indicated that the shift of the nomination to Harris made them more motivated to vote in November. Such questions should be taken with a grain of salt, but this comports with polling over the course of the year showing broad apathy about Biden’s reelection bid.

We can see how this works when looking at the trend in other questions included in CBS’s poll. Last month, half of Biden supporters said their vote was a function of wanting to stop Trump, not of support for the president. Now, about 4 in 10 indicate that their vote is against Trump — meaning that more respondents plan to cast an affirmative vote for Harris.

These numbers are consistent with YouGov’s broader finding that Harris has had a jump in favorability among poll respondents, itself a not-uncommon shift for a new candidate. Trump and his allies are trying to portray the enthusiasm for Harris’s campaign as inauthentic, but they might recall that before Trump’s campaign launch in 2015, his favorability among Republicans was well below water.

YouGov’s poll has also consistently asked respondents who have a preference between the two major-party candidates whether they would ever consider voting for the other party’s candidate. Overall, fewer Trump supporters say they would never support Harris than said they would never support Biden last month. That’s particularly pronounced among younger respondents, women and Hispanic respondents. (There were not enough Black Trump supporters to include in the chart below.)

Some of this is a function of the newness of Harris’s campaign. As her campaign is rolled out, it’s likely that opposition from many of those who support Trump will firm up. It’s possible, too, that she’ll peel away some of that support or, at least, soften the support in a way that dampens turnout in November.

It’s early. That “confidential” Trump campaign memo is correct in noting that the shift in the CBS poll is subtle, though its disparagement of the pollster is not. What this and other polling shows, though, is a shifted presidential contest, one that has moved from mirroring 2016 to one that is potentially, instead, mirroring 2020.

And in political polling, the direction of movement can be more important than scale.

The first night of last month’s Republican convention was centered on the sort of politics the party loudly eschews. The speakers included an array of supporters of former president Donald Trump who weren’t White or male or business leaders — representatives of other groups who were there, very clearly, to indicate that it is acceptable for Black people or Hispanics or union members to pull the lever for Trump.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was one of those speakers. He is probably Trump’s most visible Black supporter, having effectively increased his profile among Trump’s base in recent years. He’s a cable-news fixture who, on Sunday, made the transition to broadcast for an appearance on ABC News’s “This Week.”

It didn’t go very well.

Among the news that occurred last week was Trump’s suggestion that Vice President Harris is some sort of race opportunist. During an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump claimed that Harris had been “Indian all the way” before “all of a sudden she made a turn” to identify as Black.

The California-born vice president is the daughter of a Black father from Jamaica and a South Asian mother from India. She graduated from the historically Black Howard University in 1986.

“This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked Donalds why Trump was “questioning” Harris’s identity. Trump has gone to great lengths to attempt to appeal to Black voters, which might be aided by presenting Harris as inauthentically Black. In a sense, that was the answer that Donalds offered.

“If we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was [the Associated Press] that said she was the first Indian American United States senator,” he said in his response. “It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally. Obviously, the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity.”

The contrast between what Donalds says the Harris campaign is talking about “much more” and an old AP article is not just apples-to-oranges; it’s imaginary apples being compared with another store’s oranges.

Donalds’s answer mostly focused on criticisms of the Biden administration, but Stephanopoulos pressed him on the question of Trump’s attack on Harris. The legislator tried again.

“This is something that’s actually a conversation throughout social media right now,” Donalds said — not mentioning that this was mostly a function of Trump. “There were a lot of people who were trying to figure this out. But again, that’s a side issue, not the main issue.”

The two went back and forth for a while, with Stephanopoulos noting that Donalds repeatedly reiterated Trump’s assertion that there was something suspect about Harris’s presentation of identity. Ultimately it was Donalds, not the host, who suggested that they move on.

What Trump and Donalds were doing with their responses was leveraging Harris’s background to present her as inauthentic. Perhaps the inauthenticity was supposed to be about how Harris campaigned; perhaps it was supposed to be about who Harris actually was. But it is centrally dependent on the fact that we view race as strictly delineated in a way that is both overly reductive and that doesn’t carry over into other personal identifiers.

Consider Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). He is a guy who prides himself on being a child of Appalachia, a veteran and someone with a background in venture capital. Depending on his audience, he highlights different elements of that experience — as he probably has for much of his life.

The term code-switching is generally used to describe people who adopt different mannerisms for different contexts, such as a member of a racial minority speaking to members of that community as opposed to a group of White Americans. But it also applies to the sort of shifts Vance might have adopted when interacting with his rural grandmother as opposed to his Yale University classmates.

There’s not necessarily anything contradictory in this; those are elements of who Vance is. There’s undoubtedly some opportunism, but this is politics, where pandering is the name of the game. But Harris offering herself as Black and South Asian — which, mind you, she generally hasn’t done — is presented as unacceptably insincere.

Americans have a very naive understanding of racial boundaries. This is in part because so much rides on racial identity in the United States, with racial categories helping determine social status and power. This disincentives nuance. The naiveté is in part, too, because racial boundaries have shifted throughout American history and particularly in recent decades. “Non-White” used to suggest “Black.” That is no longer the case.

It’s also because our systems for measuring race have been rudimentary. Most people don’t think about their racial identity until they’re prompted, often by some form presented to them. The Census Bureau does this, for example, giving people different boxes to check to identify what their background is. You can see the challenge here: If you’re Harris, what do you check? If she’s forced to choose, it doesn’t change who she is, just how she is recorded by the government.

Something interesting happened with the 2020 Census. There’s a field on the form in which Americans can offer additional details about their heritage — checking “White,” for example, but then adding that they have a Hispanic grandparent. In 2010, only the first 30 characters of those responses were catalogued by the Census Bureau. In 2020, the first 200 were — meaning that much more nuance about identity was recorded.

This contributed to a huge shift: From 2010 to 2020, the number of Americans who identified as “White and Some Other Race” soared from about 2 million to more than 19 million. In 2010, about 3 percent of Americans were categorized as multiracial. In 2020, more than 1 in 10 were. Some of this was an actual increase in diversity. (Younger Americans are much more likely to be non-White and multiracial than older Americans.) Some of it, though, was just a change in our capturing racial identity.

About a million Americans identified as “Black and Some Other Race,” as Harris might. Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data determined that there are probably about 8 million multiracial Black or Black Hispanic Americans. Were any of them running for president, it seems fair to assume that some might point out their familiarity with Black family traditions in some contexts and other traditions in other contexts. As with Vance’s presentations of economic class, this isn’t contradictory. It’s complementary.

Donalds could have offered Stephanopoulos a nuanced response about race when asked. But he was there as an ally of Donald Trump, so no such nuance was presented.

Perhaps you, like me, were curious over the weekend about how many people were seeking instructions on the classical art of harp-playing.

The answer to this is hard to ascertain specifically because there aren’t that many harpists (extant or aspiring) out there. In 2022, YouGov asked Americans what instruments they learned to play at any point in their lives; only 1 percent nodded when asked about playing the harp.

Among Republicans, that number dropped to zero percent. This is an important point because Republican politics are the prompt for the question in the first place.

On Saturday, The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey detailed how Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hopes to leverage outside groups for voter contact before Election Day. They sat in on a presentation from one of those groups, Turning Point Action.

Those contacting voters, staff organizers were told, should not lead with their support for Trump. Instead, the organizers were told that they should “research their marks and start reaching out through Facebook groups, community events, or neighborly gestures,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey documented, “such as recommending plumbers or harp teachers.”

This advice was admittedly at odds with the instructions on another slide: “BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL.” Harp-playing is demonstrably not a normal avocation.

You can see why this component of the story attracted so much attention, particularly given the synchronicity between “BE NORMAL” and the left’s recent use of “weird” to describe Trump. But this was not the most important element of the story.

The most important element, instead, was this:

“For the large armies of paid and volunteer door-knockers and canvassers who typically drive turnout in presidential elections, the campaign is largely relying on outside groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.”

The Republican Party “had been planning an extensive field program, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey report. Those plans, though, have been “discarded” after Trump and his campaign absorbed the party this year.

That takeover was by no means surprising. The year began with Ronna McDaniel leading the Republican National Committee (RNC), something she’d done since shortly before Trump took office as president. She was robustly loyal to Trump, even reportedly agreeing to drop her maiden name of “Romney” in deference to his hostility to her uncle. But she was also seeking to balance the needs of the party with the needs of its most influential figure, to deploy the power of the institution in ways that weren’t always centered around Trump.

And now she’s gone. The party’s new co-chairs include Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. Her first instinct when presented with a Republican Senate candidate who lightly criticized her father-in-law was to say that the candidate “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party.”

Since it became obvious that Trump would be the party’s presidential nominee once again this year — since the first half of 2023, in other words — he’s finalized his control over Republican institutions either directly or indirectly. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that he would step down from caucus leadership ahead of the next congress. The party’s 2024 platform was a pastiche of Trump-authored Trumpisms. Like the Trump Organization before it, the GOP is mostly just a collection of brands under the control of Trump himself.

This brings us back to voter outreach efforts. Such efforts, generally categorized as “get out the vote” or GOTV, has not traditionally been one of the Republican Party’s strengths. The Democratic Party, bolstered by labor unions, had a history of strong GOTV efforts in part because its voting base was less likely to turn out of its own accord. Only in more recent elections did the national GOP match that push, investing in GOTV and in building a database of voters that could be used over multiple cycles and by multiple candidates.

For the party, this offered two benefits. It made their candidates more likely to win, given the increased ability to target specific low-propensity voters and push them to vote. More importantly, it built the party. It allowed them to collect new data on voters and on volunteers. It gave them something to offer to candidates — data and resources — that could help them shape candidate campaigns and policies. This increased the institutional power of the Republican Party.

But since he first became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential contest, Trump has made obvious that he intends to suck every drop of institutional power out of the GOP for his use. It’s not that he’s hostile to the party necessarily, though he obviously is often at odds with its traditional power structure. It’s just that the party has something he wants — power and resources — and he’s going to use them as he sees fit … without worrying about replenishing them.

Who benefits from outsourcing GOTV efforts to Turning Point Action (TPA)? The youth-focused group can send its data on harp enthusiasts back to the GOP, but it’s safe to assume that won’t be a priority. TPA is interested in building its own institutional power, and is using its strong relationship with Trump to do so. It’s building its database of volunteers and using the lure of volunteering to help Trump to do so. And, importantly, its effort will be an institutional success even if Trump loses. The central incentive is on raising and spending the $100 million Turning Point Action is budgeting for this year.

The Republican Party is doing some organizing on Trump’s behalf. It plans, according to Lara Trump, to dispatch a small army of poll-watchers to polling places on Election Day to ensure that no rampant fraud occurs — as it didn’t in 2020 when the party similarly tried to encourage volunteers to keep an eye on voters. I encountered some in Pennsylvania the weekend before Election Day that year; the party’s original GOTV plan for the state this year noted (according to Arsndorf and Dawsey) that the failure to instead turn out voters was a central challenge to Trump’s reelection bid.

That’s the GOTV plan that has now been scuttled. But no worries. By November, Turning Point Action will know just which Pennsylvanians need plumbers and harp instructors. And they’ll all get fundraising emails from Turning Point for the next few years, whoever’s in the White House.

Some of the ugliest moments in the 2016 Republican nominating contest came when Donald Trump attacked Sen. Ted Cruz’s family. Trump baselessly suggested Cruz’s father might have participated in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and he both attacked the appearance of Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans” on her.

Cruz’s response? To call Trump a “sniveling coward” and telling him to “leave Heidi the hell alone.”

“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” the Texas Republican added later at the Republican National Convention.

Cruz, of course, was soon supporting that same “sniveling coward” — and has done so for the past eight years. When it emerged recently that a Trump adviser was actually involved in planting the story about Cruz’s father in the National Enquirer, Cruz declined to re-litigate the issue.

Republican officeholders have spent the better part of a decade shrugging off Trump’s personal attacks and sidelining their pride in the name of being a team player. But on few counts has that been as pronounced as when he’s gone after family members.

Repeatedly this election cycle, Trump has invoked the spouses and family of Republicans who have criticized him. And repeatedly, those Republicans have stood by Trump because he’s the party’s standard-bearer.

The most recent example came this weekend in Georgia, when Trump made a point to attack not just Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) but also his wife, Marty.

Trump cited Marty Kemp having said recently that she isn’t planning to vote for Trump, even as her husband has come around to the party’s nominee.

“Now she says she won’t Endorse me, and is going to ‘write in Brian Kemp’s name,’” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Well, I don’t want her Endorsement, and I don’t want his.”

Trump added at a rally in Atlanta: “I haven’t earned her endorsement? I have nothing to do with her.”

The governor responded by echoing Cruz’s 2016 admonition, urging Trump in an X post to “leave my family out of it.”

But Kemp otherwise suggested he would still help Trump, saying, “My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

The pattern was also evident at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where two former primary foes whose spouses Trump had criticized spoke on his behalf.

Trump during the primary campaign had suggestively pointed to the absence of Nikki Haley’s husband, Michael, who was in fact deployed to Africa as a member of the South Carolina National Guard at the time.

“Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away,” Trump said, adding: “What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.”

Trump also said Michael Haley should “come back home to help save her [Haley’s] dying campaign.”

Haley responded at the time by saying, “Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief.” But by last month, she used her convention speech to play up Trump’s foreign policy.

Trump also falsely accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) wife, Casey, of trying to “commit organized voter fraud” for comments she made about supporters from outside Iowa helping with her husband’s campaign there. His campaign cited the DeSantises’ “openly stated plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also endorsed Trump despite Trump’s racist attacks on his wife, Taiwan-born former Trump administration transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Trump has also made repeated insinuations about the couple’s ties to China.

McConnell endorsed Trump in March. At the time, he was asked about Trump’s attacks on his wife and about the senator’s assertion that Trump was culpable for Jan. 6. McConnell simply repeated his past promise to support Trump if Trump won the nomination.

Former Texas land commissioner George P. Bush has supported Trump even after Trump’s attacks on his father (former Florida governor Jeb Bush) and his uncle (former president George W. Bush), as well as social media posts suggesting his mother’s Mexican heritage influenced Jeb Bush’s immigration policies.

Trump has made little secret of his propensity for attacking family members. He’s done it repeatedly with judges, prosecutors and others who run afoul of him. Less than a year before the assassination attempt against him, he made light of an attack that left former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul, with serious head injuries.

There are certainly gradations to Trump’s invocations of spouses; the attacks on Chao and Heidi Cruz are in a different ballpark than what Trump said about Michael Haley and Marty Kemp.

But few things demonstrate Trump’s domination of the Republican Party like the fact that he can go there and still maintain the support of these Republicans. And he appears increasingly intent upon driving that home.

PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) reached a cooperation agreement Monday with Jenna Ellis, who was a legal adviser to Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and was one of 18 defendants indicted in April on felony charges related to alleged efforts to try to subvert President Biden’s victory in the state four years ago, according to prosecutors.

The attorney general has agreed to drop nine felony charges against Ellis in exchange for her full cooperation with the investigation into the GOP plan to try to deliver Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Trump instead of the rightful winner, Biden.

The deal allows Ellis to avoid potential jail time in exchange for providing prosecutors with evidence that could implicate other defendants. She could provide information about former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s knowledge and participation in the elector strategy. According to the agreement, Ellis has also agreed to “completely and truthfully” testify in any future trials. She will also provide documents and any other material tied to the elector strategy that could help state prosecutors secure verdicts favorable to them in the high-profile case.

“This agreement represents a significant step forward in our case,” Mayes said in a statement. “I am grateful to Ms. Ellis for her cooperation with our investigation and prosecution. Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court.”

An attorney for Ellis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Arizona was one of seven states won by Biden where Republican electors gathered on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign certificates purporting to affirm Trump as the actual winner of each of the states. Trump supporters were preparing to cite the paperwork signed by the GOP electors as a way to challenge Biden’s win when Congress convened on Jan. 6, 2021, according to prosecutors.

Authorities in several of those states, including Arizona, have pursued criminal charges against the electors. All of the defendants in the Arizona case pleaded not guilty, including the 11 Republicans who allegedly falsely purported Trump won the state, Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn, a key adviser to Trump’s 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns. They are each charged with nine felony counts, including conspiracy, forgery and fraudulent schemes and artifices.

The Arizona case was the second round of charges for Ellis and several others in the case, who were also indicted alongside Trump in Georgia last year. Ellis pleaded guilty in October to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia and has been cooperating with prosecutors.

In Arizona, Ellis sat down with prosecutors on June 17 for a proffer session, according to the agreement — an interview in which a prosecutor and a defense lawyer meet with a person to decide whether they have valuable information to offer an investigation, the kind that could lead to a plea deal. Such meetings are often called “queen for a day” sessions because the person being questioned will not have their answers used against them, unless they lie.

In the critical time frame after Trump’s loss, Ellis was in touch with figures central to the elector strategy outside of Arizona and within, according to the April indictment and other publicly released records.

Ellis joined Giuliani, then a personal attorney to Trump, in presenting baseless claims of widespread malfeasance in states Trump lost. She accompanied Giuliani to Phoenix for a meeting, where unfounded claims of election fraud were circulated as Trump dialed in to speak to the crowd. Ellis was also by Giuliani’s side during a meeting with then-Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R), who testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack that Giuliani repeatedly sought to persuade him to help overturn Trump’s 10,457-vote defeat in the state.

“We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,” Bowers recalled Giuliani telling him and others present.

Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lavish travel provided by Republican donor Harlan Crow included two more flights aboard the billionaire’s private jet that were not publicly disclosed, according to a letter Monday from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to Crow’s attorney.

Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote that he is seeking additional information about travel that Crow provided to the justice and additional records because he is concerned that Crow might have improperly used the gifts to lower his tax bills, a claim Crow denies.

The two flights add to a long list of travel and other perks Thomas has received from Crow, including private school tuition for a relative and the purchase of the home where Thomas’s mother lived in Georgia.

The largesse and other ethics controversies swirling around the court prompted President Biden to propose a biding ethics code and 18-year term limits for the justices last week, a package of overhauls that has little chance of passing Congress at the moment.

“The questions I’ve been asking of Mr. Crow and Justice Thomas about these luxury trips and lavish gifts are not really all that complicated,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “How many of these trips happened, and when it comes to Mr. Crow’s taxes, is everything on the level or did he claim a whole lot of personal travel as write-offs?”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents show Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, took a roundtrip flight from Hawaii to New Zealand aboard Crow’s private jet in November 2010, according to the letter. Crow was onboard the flights.

It was unclear how the Thomases traveled to Hawaii or how they got home.

Wyden wrote that Thomas has not listed the flights in financial disclosure forms that Supreme Court justices are required to file, even though he has previously amended the forms to include other travel aboard Crow’s jet.

Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said disclosure rules at the time of the travel did not require him to report the flights because they fell under a “personal hospitality” exemption. Justices are now required to report such travel.

Michael Zona, a spokesman for Crow, said in a statement that Wyden’s inquiries are “intended to harass a private citizen” and that Congress has no role in tax enforcement.

“Mr. Crow and his businesses are in good standing with the IRS,” Zona said. “He has always followed applicable tax law as advised by national accounting firms who serve as his tax advisors. It’s concerning that Senator Wyden is abusing his committee’s powers as part of a politically motivated campaign against the Supreme Court.’

Donald Trump on Monday called rapper Ye a “really nice guy” who is “complicated” but has “a good heart,” praising the celebrity whose antisemitic remarks in recent years has drawn widespread condemnations and led many companies to cut ties.

Trump was widely criticized in 2022 for having dinner with Ye and the far-right activist Nick Fuentes despite their antisemitic comments. On Monday, Trump seemed to allude to the controversy surrounding Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — during a lengthy interview with online streamer Adin Ross.

“He’s very complicated,” Trump said as Ross prompted him for reactions to public figures pictured on a screen. Trump said the rapper “can get himself into trouble” along with “some other people.”

“But, you know, he’s got a good heart,” Trump said. “He does, he does, but he’s complicated, Kanye.”

Ye’s antisemitic statements cost him much of his business empire in 2022. At one point, the rapper said on social media that he planned to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Later, speaking to the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he said he liked Adolf Hitler and praised Nazis.

Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung noted Trump’s support for Israel and policy achievements including the Abraham Accords and said the former president has fought antisemitism “in America and abroad.”

“As President Trump said, this individual is a complicated person who gets himself into trouble,” Cheung said, referring to Ye. “Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth to appease Hamas sympathizers while Democrats have emboldened antisemitic protests on college campuses.”

The interview also raised the possibility of campaign finance violations when Ross gave Trump two lavish gifts: a Rolex watch and a custom Cybertruck wrapped in an image from the moments after the assassination attempt on Trump last month. Elon Musk — the chief executive of Tesla, which produces the Cybertruck — has endorsed Trump.

Individual contributions to candidates for federal office are capped at $3,300. Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said they would “submit an advisory opinion to the FEC to seek guidance on how to handle the gifts.” The Federal Election Commission declined to comment on the gifts to Trump. Representatives for Ross did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Daniel Weiner, director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute at New York University School of Law, said Ross probably landed himself in hot water with his gifts.

“Since Trump is a candidate, he’s subject to federal contribution limits, which are in the neighborhood of $3,000 per individual per election,” Weiner said. “A contribution isn’t limited to cash. It can be an in-kind contribution, which is a thing of value. A Cybertruck is a thing of value, as is a Rolex. It’s pretty simple.”

“If it’s not Mr. Ross himself that’s giving these gifts but his company or something, then it gets more complicated,” Weiner added. “Although corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money independently on electoral advocacy, corporations are still barred from giving directly to campaigns. And so, I would argue that if it’s a corporation presenting these expensive gifts to a candidate, that’s probably illegal.”

Two years ago, Trump’s meal with Ye and Fuentes drew pushback from across the political spectrum. Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, criticized the “virulent antisemitism” of Trump’s dinner guests and said, “We … call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.” A representative for RJC did not immediately respond to an inquiry Monday evening.

Ross, the streamer who interviewed Trump, is also deeply controversial. He previously hosted Fuentes, who has denounced “perfidious Jews” and said those “suppressing Christianity … must be absolutely annihilated.” The streamer once responded to a discussion of gender pronouns by saying his pronouns are “kill / them.”

Trump praised the 23-year-old Ross effusively on Monday, saying he heard about the streamer from his youngest son, Barron. “Dad, he’s really big,” Trump recalled Barron remarking. After Ross urged his viewers to “go out there and vote, and vote for the right person,” Trump marveled that Ross had gone further than many other interviewers in showing support. Behind them, about two dozen supporters listened and cheered periodically, as if they were at a rally.

“Outstanding, to do what you’ve done at a young age,” Trump told Ross.

Trump and Ross spent the final part of their hour-and-a-half-long hangout sitting in the Cybertruck listening to music.

Trump’s conversation with Ross was wide-ranging. He criticized Vice President Harris by unfavorably comparing her with potential running mates: “All of the people she’s looking at are considered much better than her,” Trump said, adding that he thinks “virtually every one of them is considered better, smarter, would be a better president than her.”

Harris is expected to name her running mate Tuesday ahead of a scheduled multistate tour with the vice-presidential pick.

Harris’s campaign ridiculed Trump’s appearance with Ross in a statement, branding it “low energy” and saying Trump “spent the hour lying about his record and attacking the media instead of speaking to the issues young voters care about.”

Trump repeatedly attacked ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, who pressed Trump on past offensive comments last week at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. He called her “nasty,” “rude” and “horrible” and said that if he owned the network, he would fire her.

Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.

Vice President Harris holed up at her residence at the Naval Observatory on Monday to finalize the selection of her running mate, perhaps the biggest decision of her nascent campaign, as plans coalesced for the joint campaign swing that Democrats hope will generate excitement for the ticket this week.

Harris met Sunday in Washington with at least three finalists: Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. After the running-mate announcement, which is expected to include several online components, including a video, Harris and her newly minted election partner plan to launch a multistate tour with a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.

As strategists in both parties awaited the selection — on which an enormous amount of strategy, messaging and advertising will depend — a Harris campaign spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said just before 4:30 p.m. Monday that Harris had not yet made her decision.

The campaign was nonetheless moving forward with plans for the national campaign swing. The trip is set to start in Philadelphia before heading to Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada through Saturday.

Harris’s campaign schedule has been unusually compressed, since President Biden ended his reelection bid on July 21, and Democrats are hoping the five-day tour will help sustain the enthusiasm that has so far accompanied her campaign, enabling her to ride Democrats’ excitement into the party convention beginning Aug. 19.

The campaign announced that the indie folk group Bon Iver would perform at the second stop in the campaign tour, Wednesday in Eau Claire, Wis. Last week, the rapper Megan Thee Stallion performed at Harris’s rally in Atlanta.

A stop later in the week in Savannah, Ga., was postponed because of Hurricane Debby, which made landfall in Florida on Monday morning and is expected to move up the East Coast.

In the meantime, the Harris campaign has been using the highly anticipated announcement to raise money, telling supporters they could be among the first to know the identity of the running mate if they donate at least $20. Such donors would be able to “join an exclusive live stream with the Vice President and her running mate,” according to recent emails to supporters, which did not give any timing for the live stream.

Other Democratic leaders were awaiting the news, anxious to see which of their colleagues would be catapulted onto the national stage.

“She has a wealth of talent from which to choose,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said Monday on MSNBC. He said that he personally knows all the governors Harris is considering and that each would be “tremendous.” He also praised Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“I’ve not been for outside pressure from anyone because this is a very personal choice for her,” Cooper added. “This has to be a governing and campaigning partner for her. She needs to make that decision. She knows what being a vice president is all about, so I think she’s got the best perspective of all.”

Cooper took himself out of consideration as Harris’s running mate early in the process. He explained Monday that he was concerned that if he’d been compelled to leave the state for long stretches to campaign, it would allow North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, who is known for highly inflammatory statements and is running to succeed Cooper, to seize the stage.

The final hours of Harris’s selection process were defined by intense jockeying on the part of various Democratic factions. Some progressives were pushing for Walz over Shapiro, citing the Pennsylvanian’s sometimes hard-hitting comments about pro-Palestinian protesters. Shapiro, who is Jewish, has compared some of the college protesters to the Ku Klux Klan and encouraged the University of Pennsylvania to break up encampments of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Some of Walz’s backers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), were set to take part in a “Progressives for Harris” call Monday night to rally support for her.

The home stretch of Harris’s search has also seen close attention paid to the schedules of possible running-mate contenders, as strategists on all sides hunt for clues on whom she might choose. Buttigieg, for example, is scheduled to begin a trip to Maine on Tuesday in his official capacity, suggesting that, at least for now, he is not making plans to be part of the running-mate reveal.

The selection will finalize the Democratic ticket at a remarkably late date, capping a period of almost unheard-of turmoil in the presidential campaign. Just three weeks ago, Biden was widely assumed to be the Democratic nominee, having announced a reelection bid and swept through the party’s primaries, and the vice president was set to reprise her role as his running mate.

All that changed when Biden, facing enormous pressure from inside his own party following a stumbling performance in a debate against former president Donald Trump on June 27, stepped aside, shaking up the race and making way for Harris as his likely replacement.

Republicans are gearing up for another jolt to the race with Harris’s selection. Trump’s campaign announced Monday that his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), would make stops effectively following Harris and her running mate as they take their tour through swing states around the country, starting with a Tuesday afternoon visit to Philadelphia before the new Democratic ticket makes its debut there.

A major task for Harris’s running mate will be taking on Vance, including in a possible vice-presidential debate.

Trump, in a media appearance Monday, criticized Harris as “ultra left, ultra radical,” comparing her unfavorably to the Democrats she has been mulling as potential vice-presidential candidates.

“In fact, all of the people she’s looking at are considered much better than her,” Trump told online streamer Adin Ross, adding that fellow Democrats “didn’t want to go through this roadblock” of challenging the sitting vice president. “… I think virtually, every one of them is considered better, smarter, would be a better president, than her.”

Harris had no public events on her calendar Monday. She participated in a private meeting with Biden and his national security team in the Situation Room to discuss tensions in the Middle East.