PITTSBURGH — Vice President Kamala Harris joined her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and their spouses here to kick off a bus tour across a crucial part of this state, in a political show of force before Democrats kick off their national convention in Chicago.

The four shook hands and took selfies at an airport hangar but did not deliver remarks. At one point, the crowd of a few hundred people broke into chants of “We’re not going back!”

The multi-city tour is the first such swing for Harris, whose entrance into the presidential race four weeks ago has upended the 2024 contest against Republican nominee Donald Trump. Harris and Walz have often appeared together at rallies, but the bus tour also includes second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz.

“The stops will focus on meeting voters where they are in community settings and will range from a canvass kickoff and phone bank, to local retail stops and more,” Harris’s campaign said in a statement announcing the visit.

Two buses formed the backdrop as Air Force Two landed at Pittsburgh International Airport. One bus was emblazoned with the words “A New Way Forward.”

The campaign buses are expected to stop in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh and a large cache of Democratic voters, and Beaver County, a more Republican-leaning area that Trump carried in 2020.

Pennsylvania has become the most hotly contested battleground in this election, with both candidates seeing its 19 electoral votes as crucial in most paths to victory.

Polls have shown a competitive race, with Harris improving on Biden’s numbers but not fully pulling away from Trump. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday shows Harris with a narrow lead over Trump. But as The Post noted, given the margin of error for the poll, which measured only national support, Harris’s lead among registered voters is not considered statistically significant.

In a sign of the central role Pennsylvania is playing in the race, Trump traveled to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday for a rally. On Monday, Trump plans to visit York, Pa., for a speech on the economy, while his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, plans to visit Philadelphia.

During Trump’s speech Saturday, he launched into an attack on Harris’s appearance. “I am much better looking than her,” he said. “I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”

He also mocked an illustration of Harris on the cover of Time Magazine, suggesting without evidence that the artist made the vice president look more attractive after photographers failed to get a satisfactory photo of her. He said the drawing looked like actresses Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor.

Harris’s campaign did not respond directly to the personal attacks, calling Trump’s performance the “same old show” — echoing the comments Harris made after Trump falsely attacked her racial identity in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists last month.

Harris plans to attend the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, when President Joe Biden is set to speak. She has another rally scheduled for Tuesday in Milwaukee, and plans to give her convention speech in Chicago on Thursday.

Candidates typically receive a bump in polling after their conventions, but Republicans have sought to make the case that Harris’s momentum has already begun to wane.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Vance said the vice president’s support has “leveled off” since she launched her campaign last month.

“There are a lot of polls that actually show her stagnating,” he said, referring to “internal data” without providing evidence.

The bus tour is Harris’s first campaign event since she began laying out her economic agenda, including proposals to eliminate medical debt, provide a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers and create a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child in the first year of a baby’s life.

Trump’s campaign has zeroed in on Harris’s proposal to ban price gouging on food and groceries, likening the proposal to a “communist” plan.

“Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls,” Trump said Saturday. “Never worked before.”

Dan Diamond contributed to this report from Washington.

As Vice President Kamala Harris’s new economic proposals dominated Sunday morning’s political shows, allies touted her ideas to address food and housing costs as beneficial to middle-class Americans, while critics — including Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee — slammed her plan as unworkable and unrealistic.

Harris’s economic plan, which she laid out in a speech Friday, includes a ban on price gouging for groceries and food, the cancellation of medical debt, a cap on prescription drug costs, a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life. The proposals have been cheered by supporters like billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, but some have also drawn criticism, including from economists, for potential hikes in federal spending.

Democrats on Sunday defended Harris’s economic proposals as targeting many Americans’ key needs, and they noted that her speech — delivered roughly three weeks into her sudden presidential campaign — represented the start of her policy pitch, with more detail to come.

“I think people are reading too much into what has been put out there,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a co-chair of the Harris campaign, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” dismissing attacks on Harris’s proposal. “The biggest part of our personal budgets go toward housing, go toward health care, go toward the fundamentals, and she’s got a plan on all those fronts to help more Americans be able to get a path to prosperity.”

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not explicitly endorse Harris’s new policies but said his caucus was ready to work with her to “drive costs down.”

Jeffries also defended Harris’s focus on price gouging, which even some left-leaning experts have criticized as a distraction from the major causes of inflation.

“Part of the challenge that many everyday Americans have felt is that price gouging is occurring by some bad actors,” Jeffries said. “And it’s reasonable for us to look into how we can stop it from occurring. Vice President Kamala Harris is simply saying we have to make sure that markets are properly functioning.”

While GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has attempted to frame Harris’s plan to combat price-gouging as Soviet-style price controls — an argument that some of his allies repeated Sunday — Democrats rejected the comparison and offered their own explanations. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said that her proposals aligned with existing state laws.

“You’ve heard corporations talk about how they raised prices even above what the inflationary amount would be. And you saw that their profits went up significantly during that time period,” Pritzker said. “So I think it’s not unreasonable for her to say that the federal government should do what many states have already done, which is focus on that price gouging.”

He also credited Harris’s proposal to offer a $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers as showing she’s attuned to the needs of middle- and working-class Americans. “It is impossible in this country right now, with interest rates as high as they are, for people to buy a house,” Pritzker said.

Republicans, meanwhile, focused on Harris’s past stances and sought to link her to President Joe Biden’s economic policies. Voters have persistently said that they have low confidence in Biden’s handling of the economy, and polls still give the edge to Trump over Harris on economic issues.

“The most absurd thing that Kamala says at her rallies is, ‘On day one, I’m going to tackle the food and housing affordability crisis in this country,’” Vance said on “Fox News Sunday,” criticizing his rival’s record. “Day one for Kamala Harris was 3½ years ago, and everything that she’s done has made the affordability problem worse.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), speaking on “Meet the Press,” called Harris “the most liberal person” ever nominated to be president, pointing to her previous support for a ban on fracking, the elimination of private health insurance and other liberal positions she adopted ahead of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Harris has sought to distance herself from those past stances.

“A nightmare for Harris is to defend her policy choices. Every day we’re not talking about her policy choices as vice president and what she would do as president … is a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Graham said, delivering a warning to Trump to avoid personal attacks on Harris, an ongoing frustration for Trump’s campaign advisers. “If you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.”

For their part, Democrats sought to shift discussion of Harris’s proposals to topics such as health care, where they hold a notable advantage in polls.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), another co-chair of the Harris campaign, touted last week’s White House announcement of prescription-drug savings, calling it “one of the most important pieces” of Harris’s economic policy rollout and crediting her with casting the deciding vote on the legislation that empowered Medicare to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs. The White House has said that Medicare beneficiaries can expect to save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs when the new prices take effect in 2026.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” what Democrats could do to stop losing support in rural areas, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) touted Harris’s economic plan as addressing Americans’ daily concerns.

“It goes right to the heart of how you support your family,” Beshear said, citing her tax-relief proposals. “It goes to affording health care and capping overall pharmaceutical costs.”

Trump, meanwhile, last week signaled support for expanding tariffs, another topic of Sunday’s shows. Many economic experts note that such moves create more inflation and add costs for American consumers.

“A tariff is paid by consumers. It’s the equivalent of a new Trump tax,” Coons argued.

Graham countered on “Meet the Press”: “I support his idea that whatever a country does to us on tariffs, we’re going to do to you.” He offered a hypothetical: “If you make a car in Europe, and we put a 10 percent tariff on it, and we make a car in America and sell it to Europe, and they put a 30 percent tariff on our cars, we’re going to 30 percent.”

“Did you know the Kamala price hikes have cost the average American family $28,000?”

— Donald Trump, in a TikTok video, Aug. 15

“As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.”

— Trump, media event in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15

Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges.

In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency.

The Trump campaign did not respond to queries about how this was calculated. We think we may have figured it out. It makes little sense.

The Facts

In April 2023, we fact-checked a claim by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income.” That statement came via a dubious statistic generated by E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Other economists were skeptical of Antoni’s math — a combination of two calculations involving purchasing and borrowing costs — and pointed to more reliable metrics, such as real disposable personal income per capita. Many such statistics are affected by the pandemic, adding to the complexity. But real disposable income per capital now is up about $3,000 since March 2020, just before temporary covid relief payments start showing up in the data and skew it for more than a year.

Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from.

One economist suggested that Trump might have been taking total personal consumer expenditures and dividing by total households. But that doesn’t exactly match $28,000, and personal consumer expenditures includes items (stuff the government buys for people like health care, for example) that would exaggerate the impact.

In any case, the experts said Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.

Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, for instance, provided a spreadsheet of data on real personal income less transfer payments from the government per capita. “It has increased 4.2 percent between January 2021 and June 2024,” he said in an email. “A little more than one percent per annum. A solid performance.”

Eventually, we found one possible source for Trump’s figure. In a July blog post, Antoni offered an updated estimate of his statistic — that a typical family lost “about $8,000” in income over the last 3½ years.

That’s still significantly lower than Trump’s $28,000. But the $28,000 number does appear in Antoni’s post.

Antoni focused on a July survey from Bankrate.com that found the average American said they needed an annual income of $186,000 to live comfortably.

“That’s a shocking figure — more than twice what the average full-time worker earns,” Antoni wrote. “Even in a household with two parents pulling in the average full-time salary, they’d still be about $28,000 short annually.”

Could that be the source of the $28,000 figure? It seems absurd, but after nine years of fact-checking Trump we’ve uncovered many slapdash figures. We sent Antoni’s blog post to a Trump campaign spokesman, asking if this was the source of Trump’s number, and did not get a response. Antoni also did not respond to a request for comment.

Oddly, when Bankrate.com conducted this same survey in 2023, Americans said they needed $233,000 a year to be financially secure. So in one year, the surveys indicated a $47,000 improvement — perhaps a sign that as inflation eased, Americans felt less stressed about their finances. A representative for Bankrate.com did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year the Treasury Department released a report that looked at what had happened to the purchasing power of American households since 2019, just before the pandemic. “As of the end of 2023, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, with an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year,” the report said.

That’s because, overall, wages have increased more than price inflation.

The Pinocchio Test

It’s never a good sign when a presidential campaign refuses to explain the math behind a new talking point. But it would be par for the course for Trump to misunderstand a random statistic in a blog post and try to twist it for political purposes. In any case, he’s ignoring the gains in income that have exceeded price inflation.

Four Pinocchios

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Just before Donald Trump held a rally in Doral, Fla., on July 9, Secret Service officials delivered his campaign a message: The former president and his advisers would notice additional security because the U.S. government had credible intelligence of threats against him.

“The bad guys are at it again,” an adviser said, describing the Secret Service’s message.

Days later, a Pakistani national was arrested during an FBI sting after allegedly taking part in a murder-for-hire plot on behalf of Iran targeting a politician or government official on U.S. soil. Officials familiar with the investigation said this month that the alleged plot raised concerns about Trump’s safety and prompted a number of meetings among top Justice Department officials.

On July 13, Trump was grazed by a bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania when a gunman fired shots from an unsecured roof about 150 yards away. It left Trump’s team shocked that the gunman — who had no known connection to Iran or any other foreign power — had such a clear shot at him from such a close distance, given they had been informed just days earlier that the Secret Service was on high alert.

The series of events in early July illustrates the extraordinary challenges facing the Secret Service as it attempts to protect Trump — a former president running for office again and one of the world’s most recognizable people. He not only holds large-scale campaign rallies — as he plans to do this week — but also routinely hangs out with scores of people at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., and his other resorts.

The difficulties have prompted numerous arguments over the past 3½ years between agency officials, Trump and his advisers. His aides grew increasingly angry as many of their requests for additional security were rebuffed by the Secret Service, according to eight people familiar with the events, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. They were also enraged that his Secret Service detail and team were not told for 30 minutes as police officials searched for a reported suspicious person at the July 13 rally who turned out to be the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Trump aides say they had sometimes been forced to cancel or reschedule events when aides felt the venues were not going to be sufficiently secure. They described repeatedly being denied pleas for more snipers, bomb-sniffing dogs, magnetometers and specialty teams to protect Trump, often because agency higher-ups said extra resources were not available. Trump and his campaign have a close relationship with his security detail.

Secret Service leaders have described the July 13 shooting as a failure, with former director Kimberly Cheatle resigning under pressure after she appeared to blame local police for not better securing the site and falsely claiming the agency never denied Trump detail requests for added security before the shooting. The assassination attempt has raised renewed questions about the Service’s competence that flared a decade ago. On July 13, the Service failed to tackle an obvious risk it has made a top priority since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963: keeping a gunman on high ground from having a clear shot at the top officials they protect.

The agency also dramatically stepped up its protection efforts after the shooting. In recent weeks, Trump advisers say the security level seems as heavy as when he was president. Counter-snipers and other specialty teams are with Trump at events, and the security footprint at Mar-a-Lago has grown exponentially, Trump advisers say, with snipers on roofs, equipment to block drones, cars being searched and roads, particularly Ocean Boulevard, frequently blocked.

“We live in a military encampment again,” this person said.

Trump has complained about the additional security measures at Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks, even as he tells others they are necessary, people who have spoken to him say. While the club is closed for the season, it will reopen in the fall.

Those who regularly attend rallies also say the service is being more aggressive at those events.

Trump’s team had stopped scheduling outdoor rallies in the wake of the shooting at the Secret Service’s recommendation until the agency could craft a new security plan for such events. The agency this week approved plans to use bulletproof glass to shield Trump at future outdoor events, a layer of security normally only provided to presidents and vice presidents when it is deemed necessary.

Trump had indicated he didn’t want to appear at outdoor rallies until he had the ballistic glass to protect him, advisers say. He also wants to return to Butler, where he was shot, before the election — and hold an outdoor rally. The measures are a notable change from the time before the shooting, when the Secret Service repeatedly raised concerns with Trump’s advisers about his clubs, where people who had not been properly screened often came too close to him. His daily golf outings have also caused concerns, because he lets the courses stay open to the public and is in an exposed environment for hours at a time.

For example, at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump would often sit down in the dining room near all sorts of paying customers who had not been screened. Another person who had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2023 said he walked in and wasn’t screened by any security personnel as Trump wandered about.

“We were totally shocked we could just walk in the bar and sit down right next to him,” a person who played there in 2023 said. “We didn’t go through mags, we didn’t do anything. We just finished our round and walked right over and sat next to him in the clubhouse and had lunch. You could just walk over to his table. It was pretty surprising to all of us.”

Current and former officials also said the agency has never been asked to provide such a heavy layer of protection to a former president and that the levels provided even before the shooting went beyond Secret Service guidelines. Some agency officials have grown frustrated with requests from Trump’s team to schedule events that seem especially challenging to protect, two of the people said.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, declined to comment on the warnings before the Doral event, the interactions that troubled agents at his social clubs or the tensions between Trump, his team and the Secret Service detail. A spokeswoman for Trump declined to comment.

‘Intrusion Detection Plan’

One early fight came in 2021 after Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, when his Secret Service detail grew concerned about several threats, according to people familiar with the matter.

They wanted to harden the famously porous club, where members could bring in strangers, classified documents could be found and Trump often roamed around on the patio, talking with whoever was in earshot about whatever was on his mind.

Trump’s Secret Service detail put together an “Intrusion Detection Plan” they believed would make the club a safer place for Trump. But when they asked for the funds — several million dollars, according to people with knowledge of the request — they were mostly denied by the Secret Service. They received about 10 percent of what they requested, according to people familiar with the dispute.

“Over the years, the U.S. Secret Service has continuously invested in security enhancements at former president Trump’s residences, including those in Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and Bedminster, New Jersey,” the agency said in a statement. “For operational security reasons, the Secret Service does not discuss the specific costs used to conduct our protective responsibilities.”

Earlier this month, acting director Ronald Rowe said the agency had spent about $4 million on protecting Mar-a-Lago in the years since Trump left office.

Agents have repeatedly talked with staff about the need to do more to limit Trump’s encounters at Mar-a-Lago with strangers. The club and residence have always posed particular risks for Trump and his advisers — including many risks created by Trump himself. He likes to sit in the middle of the club and greet guests, and has resisted efforts from staff to curb access to him, Stephanie Grisham, his former press secretary, said.

“They didn’t see it as their job to protect his club, but to protect him,” said a former official involved in Trump’s protection. “But it could be hard to separate the two.”

During the Trump presidency, former chief of staff John F. Kelly eventually required a senior staffer to be around Trump at all times because he was so concerned about who might encounter the president. Former aides frequently worried about foreign nationals at the club, four former administration officials said, and eyed particular guests who they believed brought them.

“There was a general concern that living in basically a hotel is not something the Secret Service ever had to deal with before,” said John Bolton, his former national security adviser. “It’s unnatural to what they have dealt with for presidents over the years.”

Bolton said that when Trump would go to his golf clubs, the courses would be open to members and their guests — just like if Trump wasn’t there. “When we were in Doonbeg and Turnberry, the clubs were totally open for business,” he said, describing a presidential trip to Trump courses in Ireland and Scotland, respectively.

Trump’s detail was concerned about the ability of a sniper to kill Trump when he golfed during his presidency, especially in his fairly consistent weekend trips to his club in Virginia in the late spring and summer. They raised concerns that if news photographers were able to take long-range photos of Trump on the course, a gunman would have the same ability to put Trump in their sights.

Secret Service officials were privately frustrated because they spent millions of dollars preparing to protect Trump Tower in New York after he became president, but then he rarely went there.

“It was a nightmare,” one senior Trump administration official said, because of all the surrounding buildings, the density of that part of Manhattan and traffic concerns. The Secret Service still has space in the building.

“You cannot imagine how much time and energy was spent to try and protect that place,” one person familiar with the agency’s work said.

‘A long reach and deep pockets’

Two Secret Service officials familiar with Trump’s security detail said the manual that guides what protection should be provided generally recommends far fewer assets for Trump than he actually receives. His motorcade, for example, includes many more vehicles than former president Barack Obama’s did after he left office.

But the officials acknowledge that the Secret Service manual is dated in terms of its assessment of what former presidents deserve, and doesn’t take into account Trump’s unusually high profile and pace of public events. Trump is also the first former president to run for reelection since Herbert Hoover in 1940.

Bill Gage, a former Secret Service agent who worked on presidential protection during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, said some presidents and former presidents are unusually difficult to protect because of their insistence on being in the public eye on a frequent basis, as Trump does.

Over the course of recent history, the Secret Service faced some similar protection challenges with former president Bill Clinton, who regularly made last-minute changes to his schedule, insisted on jogging on the National Mall and held a large number of public appearances shortly after he left office. When Bush left the presidency, Gage said, leaders of his detail pressed the agency to give him additional protection beyond what the Secret Service normally provided a former president because of Islamist threats related to his administration’s launching of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For Trump, the Iranian threats have been a regular concern, officials said, driven in part by a regime determined to kill him, as shown by the sting announced earlier this month.

“Trump killed Soleimani, so the Iranian threat is something totally different to deal with,” Gage said. “You have a state-sponsored active threat. I don’t think the Service has really dealt with that at that scale before. And not only a state-sponsored active threat, you have state sponsored splinter groups like Hezbollah. They have a long reach and deep pockets.”

While most former presidents spend time giving private speeches, writing books, vacationing and largely staying away from the general public, Trump has extensive events that include thousands, if not tens of thousands, of members of the general public — often at far-flung locales. He often likes to make “off-the-record” stops at venues such as restaurants, gas stations or ice cream shops where he encounters surprised members of the public.

In early 2024, Trump’s team alerted the Secret Service that they would have a busy year of large rallies, and they needed more resources, according to people familiar with the call.

Trump’s team usually proposes a site for a rally — often an outdoor airport or fairgrounds area. Teams go in advance and scout the site to determine where the security perimeter should be, how many agents would be needed to protect the area, where entrances should be set up, where snipers will be and what potential challenges the site poses, according to people familiar with the process.

A site plan is organized by the local field office and any requests for security staff and other resources are approved by the top officials at agency headquarters. Agents from the Secret Service’s office in Pittsburgh were involved in formulating the Butler rally plan, and Trump’s security detail was briefed on it beforehand. Often, there are days, if not weeks, of discussions about security plans.

Gage said Trump’s politically amped-up rhetoric and the hyperbolic political environment increase the need for additional protection for Trump.

“This is an environment where people not figuratively but literally hate political leaders from the other parties,” Gage said. “Trump has alienated half the country. Not being political here but that’s the reality.”