Less than two weeks after an assassin’s bullet hit Donald Trump in the ear this summer, he was held backstage at a Nashville event for more than an hour because of a potential security threat.

A man had evaded security and disappeared into the crowd without being checked. There was a lengthy Secret Service search to review video, interview those he was seen with and learn why he had broken procedures. Advisers discussed whether Trump should go onstage, as a crowd of 20,000 people waited in the large auditorium. Should they cancel the event? But if they canceled the first large event after the shooting, what signal would that send?

Eventually the all-clear was given, and the event went off without a hitch.

“Former President Trump’s remarks were delayed at the 2024 Bitcoin conference in Nashville Tennessee while two credentialed and screened individuals were removed from the premises for not following proper entry protocols,” Secret Service spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie said in a statement Tuesday about the incident, which has not previously been reported. “It was determined that there was no protective interest with these individuals and there was never a threat to the former president.”

But the delay was emblematic of a growing burden that the alarming threats to Trump’s life have become for him and his campaign — a burden that has caused a grim mood on the campaign, especially after a second assassination attempt Sunday at his West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course.

Once a freewheeling former president who largely moved as he pleased, Trump has over the course of this year been increasingly constrained by the growing security precautions that surround him. He has survived what law enforcement has described as two assassination attempts, had his campaign emails hacked by alleged agents of the Iranian government and been the subject of a stream of threats from Iranian officials who are seeking revenge for his decision to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

As a result, almost every aspect of his campaign has faced new restrictions — and drastically more security. Events have taken far longer to plan because of limited resources. Bulletproof glass now boxes him in at outdoor events. Campaign officials have been warned by the government about the possibility of poisoning threats that could target the former president. His team has gotten nervous about drones targeting him at golf courses and at outdoor venues after hearing briefings from the Secret Service. He has been warned of the perils of playing golf, with some of his courses now off limits.

New screening sites have taken over a parking lot near Mar-a-Lago, his Florida social club, as the nearby roads have been repeatedly closed to through traffic, causing concern among local officials about gridlock, emergency response times and potentially restricting the ability of members to make use of his club.

Additional sharpshooters at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey have also frustrated Trump, because he fears their presence will scare off paying members.

“It has interfered with the way we’d like to campaign but it hasn’t caused us not to campaign,” one top adviser said.

This account of the expanding security network surrounding Trump is based on interviews with aides, advisers, law enforcement officials and others familiar with the matter, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details.

Multiple campaign staffers have been told in recent weeks they have been a target of hackers. Staffers now use email sparingly, two advisers said. The campaign has provided mental health services since the Butler, Pa., shooting that wounded Trump in July, campaign advisers said.

Other top advisers to Trump have received death threats themselves, according to people familiar with the matter. Briefings by the FBI and Secret Service have become more frequent, they say, and campaign staff have been juggling their workload with requests for interviews from the multiple federal investigations of the Secret Service’s performance in Butler.

“We live in a military combat zone,” one Trump adviser said, describing the security apparatus now around Trump.

“There is constant chatter about Iran,” another campaign official said.

A spokeswoman for the campaign declined to comment and pointed to a post by Trump on his Truth Social website decrying Democrats for their rhetoric against him.

“Following the events of July 13 and at the direction of President Biden, the U.S. Secret Service has elevated the protective posture for all our protectees and bolstered our protective details as appropriate in order to ensure the highest levels of safety and security for those we protect,” McKenzie said.

Earlier this year, after beeping noises were found in the office, staffers grew concerned and called 911. The building was evacuated, as they thought they might be listening devices. Instead, they were part of a prank — chirping devices bought on Amazon, according to the West Palm Beach Police Department. But they caused hours of alarm, showing how concerned people are.

Trump, who has lived with federal personal protection since 2015, has said he has been surprised by the peril he now faces.

“Look, being president’s a dangerous job. It’s much more dangerous than a racecar driver, than anything. It’s probably the most dangerous profession if you think about it. Just go up and down the list,” he said during an Aug. 27 podcast interview with Phil McGraw. “ … I never realized how dangerous.”

David Urban, a longtime informal adviser, said the tension is natural after two apparent assassination attempts — and is exacerbated with a politician like Trump.

“There is an innate tension between campaigning and being 100 percent secure. Secret Service wants to wrap him in bubble wrap and put him on the shelf,” Durban said. “That’s what they want to do, that is their job. Their job is to keep him safe. He loves people. People love him. He’s a gregarious guy and he likes being out amongst people. He likes pressing the flesh.”

Trump has sought to go forward with his schedule, but campaign officials say it has been more difficult to plan events because of security limitations since the shooting in July. “There are certain places we just don’t want to go yet,” one of those people said. Trump himself wants to return to Butler for a cinematic rally near the end of the election.

The latest alleged attempt on Trump’s life, while he golfed Sunday at one of his golf clubs in West Palm Beach, has led to additional restrictions, as Congress debates an emergency funding request to provide additional federal protection for candidates through the November election.

Interim Secret Service Director Ron Rowe told Trump after the Sunday potential assassination that he should not play golf at some of his courses, which are not safe. Trump later joked with his team that he would take up bowling, according to people familiar with the situation.

Trump also asked for more resources and was told that he is already given a presidential-level detail, the people said. Trump argued that President Joe Biden faced less of a threat than he did, a person familiar with the conversation said.

A spokeswoman for the Secret Service declined to comment on the conversation.

After Secret Service agents found a man on Sunday in a tree line with a rifle, Trump was held for more than an hour because the agency needed to sweep his homes and make sure no one was there.

In late August, Trump cut short a news media interview because he had been warned by law enforcement against standing near the border outside his motorcade. Local authorities arrested a southern Arizona man that day on charges of making a death threat against Trump on social media.

“Can I tell you something? We’re in danger standing here talking, so let’s not talk any longer,” he told a reporter for News Nation after answering a couple of questions. “They don’t want me standing here. They don’t want you standing here.”

For much of the first three years after his presidency, Trump was seemingly less concerned about his safety, and security matters were handled largely in the background. He had built his political brand by entertaining massive crowds, appearing at outdoor rallies, UFC fights and college football games, often wading through throngs of adoring fans.

Bags and pockets were sometimes checked by security teams, and traffic passed without incident by Mar-a-Lago when he was there. In his off hours, he would mill about with guests, praising the shrimp and lobsters as he wandered the ballroom. The carefree attitude prompted one friend to encourage Trump to have Secret Service agents closer to his table, this person said, but Trump did not want that.

“I went to his club dozens of times and I was never wanded,” one person who knows Trump well said, referring to checks for weapons.

But those days are gone. The Town of Palm Beach now has a portion of its site dedicated to updating residents on road closures around Mar-a-Lago when Trump is in town. Residents and service providers are allowed to pass within the closure area with identification. The opening schedule for a nearby drawbridge is also adjusted depending on U.S. Coast Guard instructions. His clubs are now screening people.

“All procedures are continuously evaluated and changes may occur when necessary,” the town warns residents.

Trump has made macabre jokes about his new reality. He told a friend earlier this year that he would beat Biden, his opponent at the time, as long as he could stay alive.

Weeks after the Butler attack, at an August briefing for reporters in West Palm Beach, a campaign official reflected on the grim environment in response to a question about how Trump was handling the attack on his life.

“Truly a black swan election, a black swan election,” the official said. “My guess is we haven’t seen the end of it.”

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been on the defensive for more than a week after repeating baseless claims that immigrants living in a small Ohio city were stealing and eating local animals. His efforts to pivot the story into one that’s politically advantageous are clumsy, in part because the reality is so stark: Vance, someone attuned to the right’s online conversations, was quick to amplify the anti-immigrant rumors circulating among supporters of Donald Trump. Threats against people and facilities in the city of Springfield followed.

One way in which the Republican vice-presidential nominee has consistently attempted to rationalize his claims is by leveraging his position as the state’s junior senator.

“Why have I talked about some of the things that I have been talking about?” Vance said in response to a question posed on CNN on Sunday. “Let me just say this: My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me. Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable, and a couple of them I talk about because my constituents are telling me firsthand that they’re seeing these things.”

It should not escape notice that there is a difference between “verifiable” and “verified,” between “confirmable” and “confirmed.”

The implication is that he is privy to nonpublic information that informs his views. You can see how this is useful: He can claim that he knows more than his interlocutor. But there’s no reason to think he does, in large part because the evidence he presents so often takes the form of unsubstantiated — and later debunked — rumors circulating on the internet.

Consider his initial social media post about the rumors centered on Springfield. It came the morning of Sept. 9, as the right-wing conversation was giddily promoting unsourced or misconstrued snippets aimed at suggesting that immigrants from Haiti were stealing pet cats and hunting local geese.

Vance noted that he’d raised the issue of housing in Springfield a few months earlier. Then, he wrote: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

There were no such “reports” beyond the claims circulating on the internet. One was a fourth-hand report on Facebook of a stolen cat that was no more than a rumor. Another focused on a photo of a random Black man in a different city. A third looped in a story about an American woman eating a cat in a different part of the state. But notice what Vance doesn’t offer: evidence that he’d heard reports from actual constituents.

Never mind that those constituent reports would themselves be worth some skepticism. Rumors about immigrants stealing pets — a long-standing racist and anti-immigrant trope — were already circulating, leading to things like that Facebook post or comments presented at public meetings (clips of which also made the rounds). At the outset, though, Vance didn’t point to constituent concerns at all. Just internet stuff.

As it turns out, his office soon knew better. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that a Vance staffer called Springfield’s city manager to see if the rumors had any basis in fact. The manager said they didn’t, as did the police that same day. Vance did not retract his claim.

On CNN, he pointed to other purported evidence in lieu of the “verifiable” information he’d gotten from constituents.

“I was told … by the American media that it was baseless that migrants were capturing the geese from the local park pond and eating them,” he said. “And yet there are 911 calls from well before this ever became a viral sensation of people complaining about that exact thing happening.”

The county had denied days prior that there was evidence of this happening, as had the state Department of Natural Resources. The report Vance cited was elevated by a right-wing, pro-Trump site that was part of an effort to backfill Vance’s (and later Trump’s) claims of eaten animals with whatever evidence was available.

In another Sunday interview on NBC, Vance again insisted that his source was his constituents.

“I’m not repeating them because I invented them out of thin air,” he said. “I’m repeating them because my constituents are saying these things are happening, which is —”

NBC’s Kristen Welker interjected to note that there was no evidence to support his claims.

“Yesterday,” Vance continued, “a video came out of a migrant 30 miles away eating a cat. Clearly, these rumors are out there because constituents are seeing it with their own eyes and some of them are talking about it.”

Well, no. That rumor was out there because right-wing activist Christopher Rufo offered a bounty for evidence that Vance’s and Trump’s claims were true, yielding a shaky video of something being cooked on a grill in the city of Dayton. City officials once again denied the suggestions being made by Rufo and Vance.

The Wall Street Journal’s report on the rumors in Springfield also included consideration of another bit of evidence presented by Vance.

“A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors,” the report from Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein and Tawnell D. Hobbs read. “But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement.”

Kilgore told the reporters that she’d apologized to her neighbors for the allegation.

Early Tuesday afternoon, just such a police report had been promoted by a social media account run by the Heritage Foundation, the group that put together the compendium of policy recommendations titled “Project 2025.” Dated in late August — after rumors about pet-eating had begun to swirl in the community — the details comport with Kilgore’s complaint. The Heritage post, at least, noted that the allegations in the police report were unverified.

The pattern is consistent: Vance insists that his public concerns are driven by what he hears from constituents, but the evidence that the concerns are valid relies on misinformation or unverified reports circulating within the right-wing conversational bubble.

It is not the case, as Donald Trump suggested on social media on Tuesday, that ‘[f]inally everyone is agreeing that I won the Debate with Kamala” — that is, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Or maybe it isn’t; perhaps he held a separate private debate with someone else named Kamala. But no objective observer thinks he won his debate against the vice president. Polling since last week’s encounter has reinforced that — excluding the opt-in social media surveys that Trump eagerly shared in the aftermath of his defeat.

Data released by the polling firm YouGov on Tuesday drills down into the ways in which Trump came up on the short end of the stick. It wasn’t just that viewers believed that Harris had handled the encounter more adeptly. It’s that, on a range of measures, Trump is viewed worse now than he was before the debate.

Going into the debate, for example, an equal number of Americans told YouGov that they thought Trump was a better debater as told the pollster that they thought Harris was. After the debate? Harris was given a 15-point advantage.

That was a dramatic example, but not the only one. Harris was also seen as less likely to dodge a question or stumble over her words. Most Americans now say she is better at staying calm under pressure; only about a quarter of Americans say that Trump is.

Many of these questions, of course, don’t tell us much about how either candidate would fare as president (with the possible exception of the under-pressure one). Presidential debates are ostensibly occasions on which Americans can evaluate and contrast the positions of the candidates but, particularly in the Trump era of politics, they end up being mostly about how the candidates are perceived.

YouGov also presented new data looking at those perceptions. Views of the candidates after the debate were compared with perceptions Americans had at the beginning of August. Harris now has an advantage on every metric except “strong leader.” Trump had a wide advantage on charisma a few weeks ago; that is now gone.

This is linked to Harris’s improvement in measures of candidate favorability, certainly. Voters saw Harris as vice president to an unpopular president. Now they are considering her as a candidate running against Trump and it is beneficial to her campaign.

Since the debate, YouGov has conducted several polls measuring support in the presidential contest. Their polls showed Trump with small leads over President Joe Biden in the weeks before he dropped out of the race. After Harris became the nominee, the small advantages were hers. After the debate, YouGov shows those leads widening — modestly.

This is probably in part because the debate didn’t significantly improve how Americans view her as a steward of various issues. Winning a debate is one thing. Winning over voters who are voting primarily on, say, immigration is another entirely.

Compared to the August poll, perceptions of the candidates on key issues haven’t changed much at all.

Harris bested Trump in presentation during the debate, knocking the former president back on his heels and conveying a better handle of the moment. This isn’t really surprising; Trump’s past general-election debates were almost uniformly mediocre and Harris’s background is as a prosecutor. But while Americans have grown increasingly positive in their estimations of Harris, the debate does not appear to have been a knockout punch politically.

Unless you’re Trump and you’re interested in presenting it as a knockout punch you delivered. In which case, feel free. It’s not true, but whatever makes you feel better.

Government watchdogs with jurisdiction over the State Department and Pentagon are preparing to publish the results of multiple investigations scrutinizing the Biden administration’s provision of U.S. weapons to Israel for its military campaign in Gaza, and “several” related inquiries are either underway or planned, their offices told The Washington Post.

The forthcoming inspector general reports, which are not yet public, follow complaints from within the U.S. government that the export of billions of dollars in arms to Israel has violated laws prohibiting the transfer of American military assistance to governments that have committed gross human rights violations or blocked the movement of humanitarian assistance.

The Biden administration has acknowledged the likelihood that Israel has used U.S. weapons in Gaza in violation of international law, but says continued arms transfers are justified for the defense of the country. Israel maintains that Palestinian casualties are the fault of Hamas, which operates near civilian areas in the densely populated enclave, and denies restricting aid access.

The inspector general inquiries represent one of the last internal checks on an administration intent on surging weaponry to Israel despite criticisms of the country’s military tactics and the enormous civilian death toll in Gaza. The investigations come as some of Washington’s closest allies, including Britain, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, have restricted military equipment transfers to Israel becuase of legal and political concerns that the weapons could be used to commit war crimes.

Neither the White House nor the Israeli Embassy in Washington provided comment.

After Hamas’s cross-border attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, Israel responded with a military campaign that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The vast majority of Israel’s arsenal comes from the United States.

The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General “will soon be publishing the results of an inspection of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which provides policy and program oversight of security assistance and military sales to Israel,” said Mark Huffman, a spokesman for office.

Meanwhile, “several other projects related to U.S. security assistance for Israel are pending public announcement” by the Defense Department’s inspector general, said the office’s spokeswoman, Mollie F. Halpern. The Pentagon watchdog also is planning to publish the results of a probe of President Joe Biden’s floating pier, a defunct method of delivering aid to Gaza that cost hundreds of millions of dollars before being rendered inoperable by rough seas. The inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently published its own report on the pier, saying experts had warned in advance that choppy waters could pose challenges and that the project itself would detract from diplomatic efforts to secure more reliable land routes for aid.

The inspectors general offices disclosed to The Post their plans to publish these reports while also acknowledging receipt of a letter from dozens of federal employees spanning more than 30 agencies who accused the watchdogs of failing to conduct proper oversight of Washington’s arms policy.

The employee coalition, Feds United for Peace, said it was aware that the inspectors general had received information from government whistleblowers indicating U.S. officials “are knowingly violating domestic and international law, as well as Administration policies and procedures, in order to continue providing U.S. weapons to Israel for its war on Gaza,” according to a copy of the undated letter obtained by The Post.

“Yet we have seen no action to date from the Inspectors General,” the letter states. “This stands in stark contrast to the robust efforts to review and assess U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Spokespersons for the inspectors general overseeing the Pentagon, State Department and USAID all defended their offices’ oversight efforts.

The State Department’s watchdog said it was reviewing vetting practices related to the Leahy Laws, legislation that prohibits the U.S. government from providing military assistance to individuals or security force units that commit gross violations of human rights with impunity. It also said there are plans to audit the department’s sanctions policies in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; its “strategic response” to threats posed by Iranian-backed groups; and humanitarian assistance to the West Bank and Gaza, including the safeguards in place to prevent U.S. assistance from “benefiting terrorist groups.”

The Pentagon inspector general’s office also said it has “several ongoing and planned projects related to Israel and Gaza.” Parts of the investigations could be redacted depending on classification levels, and some of the those reports are expected to come out later than the State Department’s.

Internal critics of the government’s watchdogs are skeptical that the upcoming reports will hold the Biden administration to account on the most sensitive issues related to U.S. policy toward Israel. One official who co-authored the Feds United For Peace letter expressed disappointment that none of the inspectors general committed to examining “whether leadership circumvented laws and intentionally ignored evidence, or worse, manipulated evidence, in order to facilitate what amounts to illegal arms transfers.” This official spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media.

Harrison Mann, a member of Feds United for Peace and a former U.S. Army officer who resigned in May in opposition to U.S. policy in Gaza, said credible oversight was more important than ever.

“Principals at the State Department, DOD, and Intel Community appear to have deliberately turned a blind eye to a clear pattern of violations of international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, and avoided investigating countless credible allegations,” he said.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller rejected any notion that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has misled the public about Israel’s actions.

“We welcome differing perspectives from our workforce on the policies the United States pursues, but this claim about the actions of senior officials couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said. “We regularly brief Congress with accurate, timely information, and we work tirelessly to ensure the actions we take both comply with the law and advance the national security interests of the United States.”

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin believes Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas but he has been “very clear” to his Israeli counterpart “on the importance of civilian safety and security, as well as the need to allow civilians in Gaza unfettered access to humanitarian aid and medical services.”

The United States has delivered more than 50,000 tons of missiles, bombs, artillery and other military equipment to Israel since Oct. 7, Israel’s Defense Ministry said last month. In late June, U.S. officials told The Post that Washington has transferred at least 14,000 of the highly devastating MK-84 2,000-pound bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs. A month earlier, Biden decided to pause one shipment of 2,000- and 500-pound bombs, less than 1 percent of the weapons sent to Israel since the war began. The administration has since resumed shipment of 500-pound bombs.

In their letter, the coalition of federal workers called on the government watchdogs to evaluate whether U.S. arms transfers to Israel violate existing laws and regulations, such as the Foreign Assistance Act.

That law says “no assistance shall be furnished” to any country that directly or indirectly restricts U.S. humanitarian assistance, an action the United Nations and numerous independent aid groups have accused Israel of carrying out repeatedly over the course of the 11-month war in Gaza.

“The White House has made every excuse in the book for the behavior of the Israeli government when it comes to the obstruction of aid, and there is a degree of frustration that those decisions are being driven more by politics than by law,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official and now president of Refugees International.

An inspector general has a formal role in the government and is better equipped than humanitarian groups or journalists to demand answers from U.S. officials, he said.

“The IG is asking from inside the tent and so they’re going to have an easier time getting the straight, factual answers than anyone asking from outside,” Konyndyk said.

For the first time in nearly three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters won’t endorse a candidate in the presidential race — a blow to the Democratic Party, which has reliably received the union’s approval for years.

The Teamsters confirmed the decision not to endorse Wednesday, as the union’s executive board met in Washington to consider an endorsement.

The non-endorsement comes two days after union leaders and members met privately with Vice President Kamala Harris and she laid out her case for an endorsement, underscoring the current administration’s many achievements for unions.

“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” said Teamsters president Sean O’Brien in a statement. The union had “sought commitments from both Trump and Harris” specifically about their union campaigns, core industries and right to strike, but “were unable to secure those pledges,” he added.

Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said in a statement that the “Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor.”

Hitt also referenced a recent comment Trump made about firing striking workers in a conversation with Elon Musk, adding that Harris “will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what — because they always have been and always will be the people she fights for.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision arrives as the powerful transportation workers union, with its 1.3 million members, has forged inroads with the GOP. O’Brien addressed the Republican National Convention in July, becoming the first labor leader to do so and sending shock waves through Democratic circles.

The Teamsters have a strong presence in battleground states and could play an outsize role in the election.

The non-endorsement underscores a major division within the Teamsters, as well as other American unions with diverse membership. The results of two surveys of Teamsters membership released Wednesday by the Teamsters showed rank-and-file members strongly favoring a Trump endorsement over Harris — while several powerful Teamsters local chapters have broken with his leadership to urge members to vote for Harris.

“This election is likely to come down to a handful of votes in the ‘blue wall’ states,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Democratic political strategist in the labor movement for decades. “The Teamsters have a significant number of members in each of those states. … Their endorsement coupled with a program aimed at mobilizing their members could be a deciding factor.”

No endorsement “likely means the difference between their members voting 50 percent for Harris versus close to 60 percent,” he said, adding that “in a close race, that could be significant.”

Yet, the absence of an endorsement is unlikely to have a noticeable impact on Harris’s campaign financing given the substantial amount of donations her campaign has received, Democratic strategists say. The Harris campaign is flush with cash, raising $615 million in the first six weeks after she joined the race. The Teamsters have donated more than $800,000 so far this election cycle, with more than 92 percent going to Democratic PACs, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance.

This election cycle, many unions endorsed President Joe Biden much earlier than is typical, reflecting his administration’s efforts to champion labor. When Biden dropped out of the race in July, those unions swiftly rallied behind Harris, citing her role in the administration’s accomplishments for labor.

The Teamsters union typically waits to endorse until after both political conventions have taken place, and this year, O’Brien said the union would not stray from that tradition.

That decision has sparked an internal rift within the union.

“We’ve made a huge mistake,” John Palmer, a Teamsters executive board member and vice president at large who has been openly critical of the union’s burgeoning relationship with Republican nominee Donald Trump, said this week. “We’ve lost out on an opportunity to try to get our members to understand why they shouldn’t be voting for [Trump].”

After Monday’s meeting with Harris, O’Brien praised “her willingness to meet with rank-and-file Teamsters face-to-face,” and said the union was weighing its endorsement.

The Teamsters have endorsed the Democratic ticket in every presidential election since 1996, when they did not endorse a candidate. The union had closer ties to the GOP decades ago, endorsing Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Teamsters leadership had taken a different approach to this presidential election, meeting with several candidates, including Biden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and academic and activist Cornel West. O’Brien met privately with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in January and held a roundtable with the former president at the union’s headquarters. The union also donated $45,000 to both the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention, the latter marking the first major contribution to the GOP in years.

The budding relationship between the Teamsters and the GOP drew an uproar from progressive Teamsters, highlighting political divisions within the union’s membership, as well as Democrats in Washington. But O’Brien had explained the union’s strategy as an effort to carefully assess its options, saying that his members’ votes “will not be taken for granted.”

The indignation culminated with O’Brien’s prime-time address at the RNC, where he both praised Trump days after an assassination attempt — calling him “one tough SOB” — and railed against corporate greed, pledging to work with anyone who would support union priorities. Critics of O’Brien said his RNC address gave conservative members tacit approval to vote for Trump. Supporters say O’Brien’s efforts could move the GOP, which has been flirting with right-wing populist ideas, to the left on labor issues.

O’Brien had also requested to speak at the DNC but did not receive an invitation, according to the union. Democrats invited rank-and-file Teamsters whose pensions were saved by the Biden-Harris administration to speak on the convention stage.

Since then, the Teamsters National Black Caucus, as well as six union locals, went ahead and endorsed Harris anyway, urging their members to vote for her.

Local Teamsters union leaders have sent scathing letters to O’Brien, demanding a Harris endorsement: “I am completely disappointed and appalled at your decision to court one of the most anti-union, anti-worker politicians in history, Donald Trump,” Josh Zivalich, president of Teamsters Local 769 in Miami, wrote to O’Brien on Aug. 14.

Some labor experts say O’Brien has adopted a more bipartisan approach under pressure to consider the membership’s diverse political leanings. He won the union’s top office in 2021 after running as a reform candidate who promised more member involvement in union decision-making. O’Brien is also aware that many rank-and-file Teamsters are Trump supporters, experts say.

The Biden-Harris administration is widely viewed by historians as one of the most pro-union in modern U.S. history. The administration appointed a pro-labor leader to the National Labor Relations Board and has enacted three major spending bills with pro-union provisions. Plus, in a major victory for the Teamsters, the White House secured a pension bailout that restored retirement accounts for about 600,000 union members.

Trump has called himself “pro-worker.” And his selection of Sen. JD Vance as running mate reflects mounting pressure within the Republican Party to embrace populist right-wing politics intended to capture working-class votes. Still, as president, Trump supported a labor agenda that severely restricted union power, including installing NLRB appointees whose policies and rulings made it harder for workers to join unions.

The Teamsters released the results of an electronic poll of Teamsters members, which showed 59.6 percent supporting a Trump endorsement compared to 34 percent supporting a Harris endorsement.

The Teamsters also conducted a separate poll of Teamsters members, by phone, which they reported also gave Trump a similar lead.

Both polls were conducted by a third-party union polling service, according to the Teamsters, which did not provide information on the polling size or methodology.

At the beginning of August, two of the most important indexes of American stocks — the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 — took a sharp downward turn. On Aug. 5, the Dow closed down more than 2.6 percent; the S&P was down nearly 3 percent.

Donald Trump and his allies jumped on the news. Stock prices have always been one of Trump’s favorite proxies for political performance; when the indexes rose during his presidency, he or his staff often hyped the increases as a reflection of his excellent administration. With similar alacrity, he used the decline as an opportunity to disparage President Joe Biden’s administration — or, really, to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. This was the “Kamala krash,” his supporters crowed, pinning the drop to Trump’s then-newly minted opponent in the upcoming presidential election.

The “krash” was more of a “hikcup,” as it turned out. Three weeks later, the Dow hit a record high. It has added four more since, including one this week. The Kamala klimb, if you will.

In part because Trump isn’t actively talking about the stock markets all the time (as he did until the indexes started to drop in the second year of his presidency), the markets aren’t used as measures of Biden’s administration in the way that they were under Trump. If we do, Trump’s frequent insistence that he’s an exceptional steward of the economy becomes a bit less potent.

On all but 13 days of Biden’s presidency, the Dow and S&P have been higher than the highest point seen under Trump. This is how the indexes generally work: Over time, they usually go up. At this point in Trump’s administration, the Dow had climbed almost 8,100 points and the S&P was up nearly 1,100. Since Biden took office, the Dow is up more than 10,400 points; the S&P is up just under 1,800.

But because the value of each index has climbed, the Biden increases are a smaller percentage of the total market values than were the increases under Trump. The Dow had risen 41 percent by this point of Trump’s presidency, and the S&P was up about 48 percent. Under Biden, the Dow has risen 33 percent; the S&P, 46 percent.

One thing that stands out quite obviously on the charts above is the damage the markets took at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a wild card that Trump invokes often. Would prices have been higher had the pandemic never occurred? Did the markets simply rebound to where they would have been anyway? It’s impossible to know. Consider the pandemic a standing asterisk on any comparison between the presidents on this metric.

Oh, and add an asterisk that represents the fact that presidents have little influence over stock prices in the first place, if any. That should cover all the important bases here.

Anyway, another one of the metrics that Trump liked to celebrate was the number of record highs the indexes had achieved. Both presidents saw a number of record highs during their first years in office. There were more during Trump’s third year in office than in Biden’s; there were more during Biden’s fourth year than Trump’s (apply the pandemic asterisk here).

Cumulatively, there were more record highs in both indexes while Trump was president.

But, of course, this is a weird metric. Would investors rather have 30 straight days of the indexes rising one point to set new records or one day in which the market jumped 100 points? It’s safe to assume they’d rather have the latter.

To this point in each presidency, there have been more single-day gains of at least 1 percent during Biden’s administration than there were under Trump. Here, the onset of the pandemic helped Trump; as the economy rebounded, increases in the indexes were consistently bigger.

There’s one more point of comparison worth making: sudden, steep drops in index prices. Here, we can use the “Kamala krash” as our point of reference. How often did the indexes drop to the same extent as they did in early August under each president?

It happened more under Trump.

Lots of Trump tumbles and Donald downturns. He doesn’t mention them much.

NEW YORK — Sean “Diddy” Combs will remain behind bars after a federal judge ordered the music mogul to remain in federal custody as he awaits trial after his arrest this week.

Combs was arrested Monday by federal agents on multiple charges, including racketeering and sex trafficking. The indictment, unsealed Tuesday, accuses Combs of using his lifestyle, media and music companies to help orchestrate a widespread criminal enterprise. He was first denied bail Tuesday and kept in federal custody, where he will await trial. Combs had denied any wrongdoing.

The arrest comes almost one year after the first of 10 sexual assault lawsuits was filed against Combs, with the accusations spanning his 30-year career. On Wednesday, a judge reportedly tossed out a $100 million default judgment awarded to an inmate who had accused Combs of sexual assault.

“The fight continues. We’re not giving up by a long shot,” Marc Agnifilo, Combs’ attorney, told reporters after the decision to hold Combs in jail.

Attorneys for Combs in the federal case argued in court Wednesday that the music producer should be allowed to return to his home where he could be monitored by a third-party security company. But U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. said that the proposal was insufficient and that Combs should remain in custody as he awaits trial.

If convicted, Combs faces a maximum sentence of life in prison on the charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. The sex trafficking charge has a mandatory minimum 15-year prison sentence. The third charge, transportation for purposes of prostitution, carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.

On Wednesday, Combs’s attorneys proposed in court and in a letter to Judge Carter that Combs would submit to weekly drug testing and limit any women (except for family members) from visiting him if he were released. In their proposal, Combs would not have any contact with anyone deemed as witnesses in the case and would restrict his travel between Florida and New York. His attorney, Agnifilo, told the judge they would hire a private security company to monitor his communications. Combs would also surrender use of a cellphone and internet.

The bail package submitted by Combs and his attorneys included a $50 million bond secured by equity from Combs’s and his mother’s Miami homes.

But Judge Carter said the proposal “does not give the Court reasonable assurance that he would return to court,” and that he was also worried about Combs’s opportunity to witness tamper if he’s free on a bond. He said that the around-the-clock security would not be sufficient because employees would still come and go from the house, and he’d still be capable potentially of sending coded messages.

The decision on Wednesday came about 24 hours after the first bail hearing on Tuesday. At that hearing, Combs’s attorneys said the music mogul was “eminently trustworthy” and had looked to show his innocence and cooperation by flying to New York voluntarily and offering to turn himself in. Prosecutors contested that Combs was a flight risk and should stay detained.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky ultimately ruled Tuesday to keep Combs in detention because he was untrustworthy, and Combs’s accusers would be vulnerable to him and his influence.

Agnifilo told reporters on Wednesday he would push for a fast trial and would consider options to appeal the bail decision again. Legal experts said a trial isn’t expected to start until late 2025.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called on Latino leaders from across the country to help her mobilize Hispanic voters as her campaign ramps up its efforts to court this key demographic, which plays a pivotal role in several swing states.

“I truly believe that America is ready to turn the page on the politics of division and hate. And to do it, our nation is counting on the leaders here. Your power. Your activism,” Harris said, speaking before several hundred Latino leaders at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference. “Each of us has a job to do.”

Latinos were part of the coalition that helped elect President Joe Biden in 2020, but the president had been facing an erosion in support among these voters before he ended his reelection bid in late July. Latino leaders say that Harris’s candidacy has provided a burst of energy in the Hispanic community, but that she still has work to do to offset the slipping support.

A recent New York Times/Siena poll found Harris leading Trump among Latinos by 14 points, as she garnered 55 percent of Hispanic likely voters to Trump’s 41 percent. In 2020, exit polls showed Biden winning this group by 33 points, with 65 percent of Latinos backing him compared to 32 percent who voted for Trump.

Any erosion of support for Harris among Latinos — who make up a sizable group in battleground states including Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania — could make a difference in a close race against Donald Trump.

Harris’s campaign has intensified its efforts to attract Latino voters in the final weeks before the Nov. 5 election, launching a Spanish-language ad blitz and planning several events with surrogates across the country. The campaign plans to devote $3 million to Spanish-language radio ads during Hispanic Heritage Month, which began Sunday and runs to Oct. 15.

On Saturday, Gov. Tim Walz will visit Allentown, Pa., a majority-Latino city, for a campaign rally. The campaign’s “reproductive rights tour” also made a stop in Allentown on Tuesday with an appearance by Republican strategist Ana Navarro, who is supporting Harris.

Biden is hosting a reception at the White House on Wednesday to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. He will also speak at the awards gala for CHCI — the nonprofit arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus focused on developing Latino leadership — on Thursday night.

When Biden was still at the top of the ticket, Harris was in the forefront of his efforts to court young and minority voters, traveling multiple times to Latino-heavy areas in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Harris has often leaned into her background as a Californian and a daughter of immigrants when courting Latino voters. Harris’s mother was an Indian immigrant, and her father came from Jamaica.

Some of the loudest cheers for Harris during her remarks at CHCI came when she spoke about immigration, an issue where she and Biden have been closely scrutinized by both liberals and conservatives. She argued that the United States can both secure the border and act humanely toward immigrants already here.

“We must also reform our broken immigration system and protect our dreamers. And understand, we can do both — create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure,” the vice president said. “We can do both, and we must do both.” Dreamers refers to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Harris slammed former president Donald Trump and his allies for their plans to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.

“While we fight to move our nation forward to a brighter future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward,” she said. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How’s that going to happen? Massive raids, massive detention camps. What are they talking about?”

But immigration has proved a difficult political issue for Democrats, as Trump and other Republican candidates have accused Biden and Harris of allowing the border to become chaotic and porous. Most recently, they have falsely asserted that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats, even after the account was forcefully denied by local officials.

Biden, and now Harris, have responded to the criticism by noting that they embraced a bipartisan border bill earlier this year, only to have the bill go down to defeat after Trump urged Republicans to oppose it. The measure, which included sweeping changes to the nation’s asylum system and a mechanism to effectively shut down the border if crossings got too high, had been slammed by immigrant rights groups and endorsed by the Border Patrol union.

After Wednesday’s event, Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, said Harris’s two-pronged approach — a secure border and a pathway to citizenship — would be applauded by Latino voters. “It resonated really, really well,” Cardona said.

Harris, in her campaign events, has largely focused on border security in an effort to rebut Republican claims that she favors an open border and bears responsibility for the uptick in border crossings in recent years. In citing the need to protect dreamers, she was in a sense balancing her message, Cardona said.

“She is now going for the jugular in not just talking about border security, but going further and talking about what most Americans want and see as the real solution — Latinos as well as swing voters — which is the common-sense approach that does both,” Cardona said.

Harris also spoke at length about reproductive rights Wednesday, drawing applause when she vowed to sign into law a bill restoring the protections offered by Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights case overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. She noted that about 40 percent of Latinas live in a state with an abortion ban.

Harris, who served in the Senate for four years before becoming vice president, also leaned into her familiarity with many in the crowd, saying she was in a “room of long-standing friends.” She gave a shout-out to Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), chair of CHCI.

“To everyone, happy Hispanic Heritage Month,” she said, “which in my book is every month.”

A Senate Republican badgered an Arab American activist Tuesday during a congressional hearing about hate crimes with questions about whether she supported terrorist organizations, finally telling her that she should “hide your head in a bag.”

Sen. John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana questioned Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, asking her whether she supported Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran as she repeatedly told him no. Berry tried to explain how assuming that an Arab American would support a foreign terrorist organization or state was an example of the kind of thinking that leads to hate crimes but was repeatedly cut off by Kennedy.

“I didn’t expect a direct racist attack,” Berry told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Kennedy’s office did not immediately respond Wednesday to requests for comment from The Post.

Kennedy questioned Berry as part of a hearing titled “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America.” The other witnesses who testified were Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.

The hearing came nearly a year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which killed about 1,200 people and sparked an ongoing Israeli military campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Hate crimes against Arabs and Jews have spiked in the United States. Berry, who co-chairs the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights hate crimes task force, told lawmakers that while hate crimes ticked up 7 percent between 2022 and last year, those against Arabs and Jews spiked by 73 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Perhaps anticipating questions like Kennedy’s, Berry encouraged senators, despite their concerns about the Oct. 7 attacks, to focus on “the increase in hate crimes our country has experienced for nearly the last decade and the need for a whole-of-society approach that can effectively stem the tide of all hate targeting all communities.”

“By focusing on hate crime statistics, the federal government’s role in hate crime enforcement, and recommendations for policy remedies, I hope my testimony can help inform our collective response to combat all forms of hate,” she said.

Kennedy did not take her up on her suggestion. Instead, one of his first questions to her was “You support Hamas, do you not?” causing murmurs in the audience.

“Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question, because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today in a very effective way,” Berry replied.

​​”Let’s start with a yes or no,” Kennedy said.

“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support, but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country,” she said to applause from the audience.

Kennedy then asked if she supported Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon that the United States has classified as a terrorist organization. Berry told him that she found his questions “extraordinarily disappointing.”

“I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas or any other entity that invokes it, so, no sir,” Berry said.

“You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?” Kennedy replied with a smile. “You just can’t bring yourself to do it.”

Kennedy then asked her if she supported Iran and “their hatred of Jews?” Berry said no.

Kennedy asked Berry about her criticizing the United States for cutting off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The United States did so because Israel in January alleged that a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. In April, an independent review found that Israel had not provided evidence that a significant number of UNRWA’s workers were tied to militant groups, while the leader of the review group called the agency “indispensable and irreplaceable.”

Kennedy wrapped up his questioning by returning to where he started.

“Let me ask you one more time, you support Hamas, don’t you? You support UNRWA and Hamas, don’t you?”

“I think it’s exceptionally disappointing that you’re looking at an Arab American witness before you and saying you support Hamas,” Berry said. “I do not support Hamas.”

“You know what’s disappointing to me? You can’t bring yourself to say don’t support UNRWA, you don’t support Hamas, you don’t support Hezbollah and you don’t support Iran,” Kennedy said, incorrectly. “You should hide your head in a bag.”

The crowd gasped.

Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) gave Berry an opportunity to respond to Kennedy’s comments. Asked if she wanted to say anything, Berry said that it was “regrettable that I, as I sit here, have experienced the very issue that we’re attempting to deal with today.”

“The introduction of foreign policy is not how we keep Arab Americans or Jewish Americans or Muslim Americans or Black people or Asian Americans — anybody safe,” she added. “This has been regrettably a real disappointment but very much an indication of the danger to our democratic institutions that we’re in now.”

On Wednesday, Berry told The Post that the hearing was about the increase in hate crimes in recent years, not just against Arabs and Jews and not just since the Oct. 7 attacks. She said she tried to stay focused on that because it’s important for lawmakers who have oversight power over the Justice Department to know what’s going on, all the more so because of debunked rumors of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets and threats of violence that followed.

“We’re in the middle of seeing that right now unfold with Haitian American communities,” Berry said.

Instead, the hearing became mired in discussing foreign policy, she said, adding that Kennedy and other lawmakers hijacked the conversation from talking about hate crimes but also used the same kind of racist rhetoric that leads to hate crimes.

“I am genuinely worried about our democratic institutions,” she said.