“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28

This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden, has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.

Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.

The Facts

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as a in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.

Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.

The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, were fatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.

That was 11 months before Trump’s presidency ended. The suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed the 13 troops took place on Aug. 26, 2021 — seven months into Biden’s presidency. The last 11 months of Trump’s presidency and the first seven of Biden’s add up to 18 months.

In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”

Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.

Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.

At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”

In about a half-dozen campaign rallies and media events last month, Trump mentioned his conversation with the Taliban leader and tied it to the 18-month period without deaths in hostile action. But often Trump left the impression — as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families — that this only happened on his watch. Here are some examples:

• “Abdul was not playing games with me. You know, they were executing a lot of our soldiers. And I spoke to him, I said, ‘Abdul, don’t do it anymore. There’ll be no more.’ Anyway, I said it pretty tough. And you know what? For 18 months, we didn’t have one American soldier killed in Afghanistan. And then I left, and then I left, and there’s a bunch of incompetent people took over, and it all started up again.” (Rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Aug. 17.)
• “We had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew — don’t play around with our soldiers.” (Rally in Asheboro, N.C., Aug. 21.)
• “I dealt with Abdul, and he’s still the leader, strong man, smart man, but he understood that if he did anything because we were losing a lot of people to the snipers. … And he understood. And he said, ‘Yes, Your Excellency, I understand.’ He called me Your Excellency. I wonder if he calls that to Biden. I doubt it, right? But he understood that and he respected us. And for 18 months, not one American soldier was killed, not one.” (Remarks at a news conference in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15.)

But on occasion, Trump gets it close to correct, such as in these remarks during a news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8: “You know, if you go back and check your records, for 18 months, I had a talk with Abdul. Abdul was the leader of the Taliban, still is. But I had a strong talk with him. For 18 months, not one American soldier was shot at or killed, not even shot at, 18 months.”

The Defense Department determined that the suicide bomber, Abdul Rahman al-Logari, was not a member of the Taliban but part of the Islamic State-Khorasan, a regional branch of the Islamic State terrorist group. He was one of several thousand ISIS-K members released by the Taliban in mid-August 2021 and one of several possible suicide bombers the group had available for the attack, according to a review of the investigation completed in April.

The Pinocchio Test

Trump has a basis for citing 18 months without a death from hostile action in Afghanistan. The period of relative quiet began with his deal with the Taliban. A case could be made that the seeds of the collapse of the Afghan government — and the chaotic withdrawal of Americans that accompanied it — stemmed from the same deal.

But Trump errs in suggesting — as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families gathered in Arlington — that those 18 months took place entirely during his presidency. He earns Two Pinocchios.

Two Pinocchios

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No one expected the 922-page policy document to go viral.

The conservative Heritage Foundation quietly began working on Project 2025 in 2022, pulling together a wish list of far-right policy proposals the group hoped former president Donald Trump would enact if he won back the White House. The report was published with little notice in 2023.

Then, in March, the Biden-Harris campaign began attacking the conservative initiative through a coordinated push on social media timed to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, warning the public that Project 2025 was a blueprint for the extreme and dangerous agenda a second Trump term would usher in.

In June, comedian John Oliver devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO show to the policy initiative, and actress Taraji P. Henson used her high-profile role as host of the BET Awards to raise alarms about it.

“Pay attention! It’s not a secret: Look it up!” Henson told the audience, in a clip that was viewed more than 8 million times in 48 hours. “… The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”

By the time Trump took to Truth Social on July 5 to personally disavow the initiative — “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote, adding that some of the proposals were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” — the topic had already exploded on social media, and Democrats had alighted on a potent message that could damage Trump politically.

How an obscure Heritage Foundation policy tome emerged as a defining Democratic attack of the 2024 election is a story of fortuitous mentions, organic online momentum, an ominous-sounding name and a document that captures the myriad fears many Democratic voters have about what another Trump presidency could mean.

The sweeping policy document lays out how the next president could concentrate power in the executive branch and remove civil service protections for legions of federal workers to replace them with loyalists. It provides detailed plans for executing some of Trump’s most controversial ideas, such as eliminating the Department of Education; moving the Justice Department under presidential control; shuttering the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, and rolling back other environmental protections; and launching mass deportations, including of immigrants who came to the United States as children, often known as “dreamers.”

The document also includes other policies that Trump has not embraced, including a call for the elimination of the popular Head Start program, rescinding Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone — a key abortion medication — and using an 1873 law to prevent shipments of abortion medication through the mail, which he recently told CBS News he would not enforce.

A line-by-line review of the Project 2025 document by CBS News identified 700 policy proposals and found that at least 270 of them matched Trump’s past or current campaign proposals. The review also found that at least 28 of the project’s 38 primary authors — nearly 75 percent — worked in the Trump administration.

Jef Pollock, whose firm, Global Strategy Group, is one of the pollsters for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said the forward-looking nature of Project 2025 — articulating in granular detail what a hypothetical second Trump term could look like — helped crystallize voter fears in a tangible way.

“Voters understand that this is an actual, written plan for extremist and dangerous ideas that are going to be implemented,” Pollock said. “We know that voters have some Trump amnesia. They don’t remember all the bad things he did as president. Now it’s like, ‘Well, even if you’ve forgotten about what he did before, what he wants to do now is even worse.’”

‘An unwelcomed distraction’

Despite the best efforts of the Heritage Foundation, there was little fanfare when the conservative think tank first published the Project 2025 document, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” in April 2023.

But as soon as Project 2025 began getting a sliver of mainstream media attention months later, Trump and his campaign tried to distance him from the document, even though many of his former top aides — including former Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and former personnel chief John McEntee — advised or contributed to the effort.

In November, Trump advisers released a statement saying that while such outside efforts were “certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” they were merely “recommendations.”

Another statement came in December, when the same advisers wrote that the outside suggestions were not officially sanctioned and were “an unwelcomed distraction.”

Trump’s campaign has also redirected voters to the former president’s own Agenda 47 — a 20-point missive outlining his priorities — as well as the Republican Party platform, which his campaign carefully streamlined before adopting it in July.

“It’s literally the definition of the ‘big lie’ theory — that if you say the same thing over and over and over again enough times, you can persuade people it’s true and they’ve attempted that,” Trump spokesman Brian Hughes said.

“The only person deciding what President Trump will say or what President Trump will do as president is Donald Trump,” Hughes continued. “What’s most ironic is that while they are spending all this time trying to lie about what policies President Trump has or will advocate for as president, we still have a Harris website that has a half-dozen or more donate buttons but no policy tab.”

Heritage Foundation officials have also tried to counter what they view as misinformation, launching a new website “to counter the left’s worst lies about Project 2025,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts told members in an email Friday morning.

Privately, some Heritage members blame the Trump campaign for elevating Project 2025 by responding to Democratic attacks.

By pushing the Project 2025 agenda as Trump’s blueprint for a second term, Democrats have often inaccurately portrayed some of the document’s policy positions as Trump’s own. They also benefited from the former president’s muddled stances on issues such as abortion and from Trump’s comments that fueled the narrative — like his claim that he would be a dictator on “day one” or his frequent calls for retribution and vengeance on his enemies.

“The power here, again, is it confirms things that voters already suspected and had maybe hoped, ‘Well, maybe he’ll just focus on the stock market and business,’ and now it’s like, ‘He’s the same person he always was and surrounded by extreme people,’” said Patrick Toomey, a partner at BSG, a Democratic research and strategy firm.

Buoyed by social influencers and celebrities taking up the cause, the Biden campaign seized on the theme and hammered away.

In February and March, Democrats began more frequently blending their descriptions of Trump’s second-term agenda and the plans outlined in Project 2025 in their daily messaging, arguing at one point that the proposals outlined by both Trump and Project 2025 would create a modern-day “Handmaid’s Tale” in “Trump’s America” by rolling back LGBTQ rights and abortion access.

The Harris-Walz campaign has also held more than 60 volunteer trainings focused on Project 2025 in battleground states, a campaign official said.

As pieces of the document started circulating on social media, it caught the attention of voters like 27-year-old Tayla Cochran of Sterling Heights, Mich., a disappointed former Biden supporter who was at first “super undecided.” What she saw on her social media feeds about the threats Project 2025 could pose to birth control and abortion access reengaged her interest.

“The whole Project 2025 thing — I don’t know how true that is,” Cochran said in an interview this summer. “But it just sounds crazy. … They’re really relentless with trying to strip us of every bit of freedom we have.”

Democrats picked up on those themes and made them a through-line of programming at the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago. Many of the prime-time speakers mentioned it — Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) joked that it was “Project 1825” and “Project 1925,” an allusion to its perceived regressiveness. Comedian Kenan Thompson and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, lugged oversize copies of a Project 2025 book onstage, with Thompson joking that it was the rare document that could “kill a small animal and democracy at the same time.”

Speaking in broader terms in her keynote speech on the final night of the convention, Harris said Americans “know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers.”

And last week, Harris’s campaign released a 60-second ad in battleground states focused on Project 2025, featuring dark and grainy footage of Trump as a narrator ominously intones that the document argues for “overhauling the Department of Justice — giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance; eliminating the Department of Education and defunding K-12 schools; requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies,” among other things.

‘It really took off’

Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster, said he and fellow Democrats were “stunned” this summer when voters in focus groups began mentioning Project 2025 unprompted.

“Every single focus group I’ve done since June, respondents have brought up Project 2025,” he said. “You have a significant majority of swing voters in these focus groups knowing what it is and having extremely unfavorable opinions of it. It is a very credible manifestation of what voters fear about the new face of the Republican Party and what Trump might do in a second term.”

In a poll by the Economist/YouGov in early August, 28 percent of adults said they had heard a lot about Project 2025, while 43 percent said they had heard “a little” about it. Nearly half — 46 percent — said they had an unfavorable view of the effort, while only 15 percent had a favorable view.

Nonetheless, it took the Biden-Harris campaign and outside Democratic groups several months of pushing this message before it finally took off.

John Oliver’s point-by-point, 29-minute HBO presentation in mid-June of many of the policies outlined in Project 2025 helped amplify the conversation. In his monologue, which has been viewed online at least 9.4 million times, Oliver described Trump during his first term as “a hamster in an attack helicopter” who wanted to “bathe the world in blood and terror” but didn’t “know what buttons to press.” The Project 2025 document, he said, would change that.

Two weeks later, on the last day of June, Taraji P. Henson drove another spike in Project 2025 search traffic with her BET Awards speech. Harris’s team had worked closely with her before the awards show to produce a scripted video call, paid for by the Biden-Harris campaign, featuring the vice president and Henson from her dressing room.

Searches for Project 2025 peaked between July 7 and July 13, according to Google Trends data, the same week Biden criticized Project 2025 during a rally in Detroit — accusing Trump of lying by trying to distance himself from it and highlighting the fact that the project’s authors would seek to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication.

Attention to the document only continued to climb. Project 2025-related posts averaged 2.5 million views total per day in June, 27.7 million views per day in July — a 10-fold increase — and 11.3 million per day in August through Monday, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy organization that has helped push warnings about Project 2025.

By then, Canter said Democrats had achieved the near-impossible: They made an attack against Trump stick.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually been successful in holding him accountable for his policy positions,” Canter said.

Project 2025 means different things to different voters, which is part of its power, according to Democratic strategists and campaign aides.

“One of the reasons it’s been so successful is because you can talk about every issue — abortion, housing, climate change, immigration,” said Navin Nayak, president of the Center of American Progress Action Fund. “Every group that has a threat they were worried about has been able to use Project 2025 to animate that threat.”

Last week, for instance, Latino groups launched a bilingual campaign against Project 2025, with more than a half-dozen Latino leaders and advocates convening a Zoom call to warn of the threat the plan poses to their communities.

“The cruel agenda of Project 2025 seeks to separate families, deport dreamers, and it undermines the economic security and opportunities for working-class people,” said Katharine Pichardo-Erskine, executive director of Latino Victory Project.

Democratic strategists and Harris campaign advisers testing these lines of attack said some messages have stood out as especially effective: the curtailing of reproductive rights and access to abortions; the idea that Trump would weaponize the Justice Department; tougher immigration policies that could include raids at playgrounds and churches; and allowing employers to cut overtime pay for hourly workers, among others.

More broadly, the voters who know about Project 2025 generally have negative views of it, perceiving the effort to be scary and shadowy.

“We’ve been telling people what MAGA would do if they got into power, and Project 2025 became the plot and it felt like something nefarious to the American people — that there is this somewhat secret D.C. document that is the game plan for how to take over the federal government for their own use,” Navin said.

The Heritage Foundation says on its new website that the document is “not partisan, nor is it secret” and that it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

A key aspect of Project 2025 that has allowed Democrats to wield it as a cudgel is that it is a document that voters can read themselves. Toomey, who holds a lot of focus groups with undecided voters, described them as “the most skeptical people on earth,” whose first response to any potential political attack is, “Well, if that’s true, I don’t like it, but I’ll have to Google it for myself, I’ll have to do my own research.”

“And now we just get to say, ‘Google it. Do the research. Don’t take our word for it,’” Toomey said.

Parker Butler, director of digital rapid response for the Harris campaign, said the ability of voters to personally delve into the document helped launch it on social media.

“We saw this as a sticky thing really early on, especially on TikTok, and it was happening from independent creators who were just putting out content,” Butler said. “It really took off among the crowd that was very skeptical of the traditional news media, people who were very much the do-your-own-research type of people.”

One of those voters was Renee Richardson, a 28-year-old activity director for seniors from Sterling Heights, Mich., who discovered the document through social media this spring and read with alarm about proposals such as eliminating the Education Department — one of the suggestions Trump does agree with.

“They’re not talking about it, but if he was to take office, that stuff goes into effect. So people really need to read it over and see what they’re going to have to fall in line with,” she said during an interview earlier this summer. “Not many people know about it, and I’ve been trying to spread the word.”

Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to New Hampshire on Wednesday to lay out another plank of her economic agenda, pitching small-business relief in a Democratic-leaning state ahead of her critical debate next week against Donald Trump.

Harris plans to visit a local brewery in North Hampton that benefited from President Joe Biden’s pandemic-era relief bill and other policies, an effort to highlight the Biden administration’s record of small-business growth while also laying out plans to bolster the economy by supporting entrepreneurs in the future.

While New Hampshire, which Democrats have carried in the last five presidential elections, has not been considered among the battleground states up for grabs in November, aides say Harris is visiting the Granite State in part to show that she is not taking any voters for granted and in part to woo the kind of moderate and Republican voters who dislike Trump.

“Our campaign is reaching voters of all political stripes — including Nikki Haley voters who are turned off by Trump’s extremism,” Harris’s campaign said in a statement, which noted that Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, garnered 43 percent of the state’s vote in her bid against Trump.

Trump’s campaign has suggested that Harris is traveling to New Hampshire because she is struggling there. Many Democratic leaders in the state were upset when Biden opted to bypass its first-in-the-nation primary to elevate South Carolina earlier this year.

Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up,” Trump wrote Tuesday on his social media platform Truth Social. “Additionally, the cost of living in New Hampshire is through the roof, their energy bills are some of highest in the country, and their housing market is the most unaffordable in history.”

The economy is expected to be a major focus during Tuesday’s debate against the two candidates, and Harris has focused much of her policy rollout on what she has branded the “Opportunity Economy.”

During her visit to Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, Harris is expected to announce plans for a $50,000 tax benefit for small businesses, expanding the current $5,000 deduction for start-up firms by tenfold, according to a campaign official. Campaign aides say the proposal — part of a suite of new initiatives to boost entrepreneurship – would help draw a contrast with Trump, who has proposed tax cuts for corporations.

Trump and his campaign have sought to draw a contrast of their own, leaning into his polling advantage on economic matters. The former president has tried to brand Harris as excessively liberal, arguing that her policies have created inflation and stunted economic growth.

Harris’s latest proposal is part of an ongoing effort to combat Trump on that issue and woo some of the voters who dislike the former president but are concerned that Harris would be unfriendly to business.

In addition to the $50,000 tax deduction, Harris is proposing to create a new standard deduction for small firms to expedite their tax filings, lower barriers for occupational licenses and approve incentives for state and local governments to make it easier to form start-ups, among other changes, the campaign official said. The plans are part of a bid to spur some 25 million new business applications over four years, up from the record 19 million since Biden took office.

Harris, who has supported Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on large corporations and the wealthy to pay for other Democratic priorities like child care, has not said how much her latest efforts would cost or how the government would pay for them.

Jeff Stein contributed to this report.

Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming broke with the Republican Party on Wednesday to say she plans to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this,” Cheney said at an event hosted by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in North Carolina. “And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

Cheney, who was once the No. 3 Republican in the House, voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, saying at the time that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Republicans subsequently ousted her from her role as chair of the House Republican Conference in May 2021 because she continued to challenge Trump over his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, was appointed in 2021 to the House Select Committee investing the Jan. 6 attack, where she served as vice chair. In August 2022, she was ousted in a primary by a Trump-endorsed Republican challenger, losing the seat by a wide margin.

Trump has been critical of Cheney for years. In July, he shared another user’s post on his social media platform, Truth Social, claiming that Cheney was guilty of treason. “RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS,” the post read.

In her remarks at Duke on Wednesday, Cheney emphasized that she does not believe voters have the “luxury” of supporting write-in candidates to stop Trump.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I’ve just said about the danger that Trump poses, something that should prevent people from voting for him,” she said. But I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’s names, particularly in swing states.”

This is developing story that will update.

For much of the 2024 election, concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and job performance helped paper over the real and long-standing concerns Americans have had about Donald Trump’s character, chaotic style and authoritarian tendencies. A slew of polls actually showed Biden had little to no advantage on the subject of which candidate was more trusted to protect democracy — despite months of Democrats focusing on democracy and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which dealt a blow to the bedrock democratic principle of a peaceful transfer of power.

But as with many other facets of the race, Biden’s exit and Vice President Kamala Harris’s entry have significantly shifted the threat matrix, to the point where the fear factor again looms as a real problem for Trump.

To the extent this election is about Americans worrying about the candidates harming the country, it seems Harris has a real advantage. New polling from CNN gets at this in a better way than anything else in recent weeks.

The swing-state polling asked, as CNN has before, about whether voters viewed the candidates as “too extreme.” But then it took things a step further and asked people who agreed with the statement that a candidate was “too extreme” whether that candidate was also “so extreme that they pose a threat to the country.”

Across six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — an average of 54 percent of registered voters said Trump was “too extreme,” with 48 percent also saying that he threatens the country. In each state, at least half of voters said Trump was “too extreme,” and at least 46 percent said he was a threat to the country.

Harris’s numbers were significantly lower: An average of 44 percent said she was “too extreme,” and just 39 percent regarded her perceived extremeness as a threat to the country. In no state did a majority regard her as too extreme; most voters instead regarded her as “generally mainstream.”

The gaps are similar among independent voters, with nearly half (an average of 47 percent) saying Trump was a threat to the country, compared to just 38 percent for Harris.

And Republicans were significantly more likely to regard their own party’s candidate as both too extreme and a threat to the country. Fully 14 percent of Trump’s own party said he was too extreme, and 7 percent said he was a threat (compared to 6 percent and 2 percent, respectively, for Harris).

An average of 3 percent of Trump supporters across these states actually said Trump was so extreme that he was a threat to the country but that they were still voting for him (perhaps either because they didn’t see the threat as significant enough, and/or because they felt he was still preferable).

While this is the most substantial recent polling on how voters view the relative threats posed by the candidates, it’s not the first to show Trump is viewed as a bigger threat — or even that about half that country views him as some kind of threat.

A Syracuse University/Ipsos poll last month showed a majority of Americans said Trump was either a major threat (43 percent) or minor threat (11 percent) “to the American democratic system and rule of law.” Four in 10 regarded Harris as a major (32 percent) or minor (8 percent) threat.

These findings mark a significant shift in the relative perceived threats of the two major-party candidates from when Biden led the Democratic ticket.

I mentioned at the top that being a “threat to democracy” was more of a wash than Democrats had hoped. A Public Religion Research poll late last year showed something similar: 57 percent regarded a Trump 2024 victory as a “threat to American democracy and way of life,” but 53 percent said the same of Biden.

There’s a real question about how much this matters. The percentages in the CNN poll who labeled Trump a threat was shy of a majority, meaning this could largely be voters who are predisposed against him.

But it’s still majorities who say he’s at least “too extreme,” and all his numbers are significantly higher than they are for Harris. That suggests Harris has a powerful motivating tool — fear — to get voters to turn out, in a way Trump no longer does.