The Trump campaign and the Biden administration do not often agree, but they do appear to have at least one new area of overlap: Both say they are at work on proposals for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, an investment fund owned and operated by the government.

It would not be an obvious policy choice. Around the world, such funds are often associated with autocracy and corruption — and with countries that have surplus to invest rather than mammoth debt. But Norway’s fund, the world’s largest and seen as an economic miracle, shows why the idea has drawn attention and envy from both sides of the aisle.

Norway’s oil fund — worth $1.79 trillion, and holding an average of 1.5 percent of shares in the world’s listed companies — gives the small Scandinavian country of some 5.5 million people oversized financial power, a flow of limited budget infusions, and a source of wealth likely to outlast even the richest petroleum deposits, with few apparent downsides.

“Why don’t we have a wealth fund? Other countries have wealth funds. We have nothing,” former president Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, said last month in New York City. The United States would have “the greatest sovereign wealth fund of them all,” he later promised — even larger than Norway’s, one of his economics advisers said.

Officials in the Biden White House, led by national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy Daleep Singh, were already working on a plan of their own, the administration soon told reporters without claiming such grand ambitions. (Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign did not response to a request for comment on the proposals.)

But many Norwegians are skeptical. The U.S. proposals are “not related to what we have done in Norway,” said Knut Kjaer, first manager of Norway’s oil fund, who ran it from 1997 to 2008.

The view from Norway

Around the world, sovereign wealth funds do not represent a universal success story. Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund was at the core of a sprawling global embezzlement scandal, which the Justice Department dubbed the “largest kleptocracy case to date.”

And they require spare cash to invest. The United States has a largely private energy sector and yawning debt. It effectively has no spare cash, meaning it would need to borrow to put money in a fund or raise it some other way.

But in a moment of resurgent interest across the political spectrum in industrial policy and the use of government to bolster key sectors, the idea of a state-controlled investment fund has found renewed appeal.

The discovery of oil in the North Sea in the late 1960s turned Norway’s shoreline, once home to a declining fishing industry, into a booming energy hub.

The oil and gas under the North Sea were on land owned by the Norwegian state, which also owned large portions of the companies that extracted and exported it. Soon, Norway faced a new question: What to do with all the profits?

“Norway ran a substantial current account surplus for many years,” said Ole Bjorn Roste, a politics professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. After considerable debate, Norwegian lawmakers signed a law in 1990 to establish a fund with the excess profits.

The fund’s value was roughly 18,521,686,235 kroner in 1996 — close to $2 billion at the time. Through continued input of oil profits and investment proceeds, it passed $1 trillion in 2019. “The main problem is that it has grown too big,” said Tore Eriksen, a Norwegian economist who helped set guidelines for the fund.

It did not just grow, but evolved. Initially focused on bonds, it expanded into stocks. The Norges Bank Investment Management was established under Norway’s central bank to manage the fund. The aim was to build wealth for future generations and buttress the economy against oil price fluctuations.

The fund follows several key rules: All investment are made outside of Norway, and the government can only spend a small fraction of it at a time, to avoid warping the domestic economy.

Trond Grande, the current deputy chief executive overseeing the fund, said that its governance structure and transparency helped it become a success. It has a clear, simple aim, he said: “To have the highest possible long-term return.”

Generally, this has worked. The fund saw a real return of 4 percent between 1998 and 2024.

Its degree of ownership over companies means it wields shareholder influence. Earlier this summer it made headlines by voting against a pay package for Elon Musk at Tesla valued at over $50 billion. While the fund didn’t win on that issue, it represented a kind of power within corporations that the U.S. government doesn’t have.

“We don’t want to be a passive investor, nor do we want to be an activist investor, but we want to be an active investor,” said Grande, adding that the fund had a set of expectation documents that guide it to push for climate action and labor rights.

Leading progressive supporters of a U.S. fund often point toward the success of Norway’s model, which pours state owned resource wealth into the collective ownership of shares in companies, to help fund generous spending on social welfare.

“I think that Norway fund is the best version of this, in the world, that exists,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank.

Could the United States follow suit?

From what little the Trump and Biden teams have sketched, their ideas might look similar to Norway’s on the surface.

Hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, who said he’s advising Trump on a fund, told Bloomberg Television that a U.S. wealth fund would follow a model similar to Norway’s.

It would be “over time, larger than other existing funds,” he said.

But some Norwegian economists barely find the sketches of U.S. versions recognizable.

Both sides in the United States have indicated they would used a fund, which would require congressional approval, to make strategic investments at home, whereas Norway simply makes global investments that meet its ethics guidelines, in interest of maximizing return.

In statements shared with reporters, White House staffers, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorize to share specifics, have pointed to “supply chain resilience, technological preeminence and energy security” as examples of target areas for a U.S. fund, while Trump said its aim would be “to invest in great national endeavors” including transportation infrastructure, defense technology and medical research.

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Beyond the differences in investment philosophy, Norwegian economists are skeptical of the idea that a country in large debt should follow Norway’s path. Norwegian law forbids the use debt for its fund.

You don’t have to have a budget surplus to run a wealth fund: Heavily indebted Britain recently announced plans for National Wealth Fund, though its funding is relatively modest at $9.4 billion. However, borrowing money comes with costs that could undermine the benefits of a profit-seeking fund.

In the United States, where relatively few energy resources are federally owned, a Norway-style oil fund is hard to imagine. Some government-run funds operate at the state level: Alaska’s Permanent Fund uses the state’s oil revenue to provide an annual payment to residents, for example.

Trump has suggested that a U.S. fund could be started with revenue from the tariffs he plans to impose, along with “other intelligent things.” That idea has met a mixed, at best, reception from economists, who point out that consumers would face higher prices from tariffs.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has not offered details of how it would hope to fund its own proposal.

Eriksen warned that while targeted investments may sound like a good idea, they could be politically risky. “If you lose money, it may be politically very difficult to tell people that,” he said.

While Democrats and Republicans have both expressed support for a fund, they would likely disagree about how it should invest.

Even in Norway, it is a misconception that the oil fund is above politics, said Camilla Bakken Ovald, a researcher at Kristiania University College. Lawmakers have considerable power over how much of the fund should be spent, even if they don’t use it.

“In reality, the fund is inherently political,” she said.

Jeffrey Stein contributed to this report.

A Georgia judge ruled this week that state law does not give county officials discretion to withhold certification of election results, a defeat for allies of former president Donald Trump who sought to empower local leaders to hold up the outcome of the vote.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled Monday that certification of election results is a mandatory duty irrespective of any concerns that a county election board may have about the accuracy of the count. Such concerns are the domain of prosecutors and state election officials, he ruled, and local boards are expected to relay any evidence of irregularity to their local district attorney.

The ruling sends a signal to county election officials across the state who have hesitated to certify results. It also has the potential to affect several rules approved this year by a pro-Trump majority on the State Election Board, including one that permits county boards to investigate irregularities and that critics fear could allow them to delay results.

The decision adds to a body of judicial precedent that Democrats hope will close off any attempt by Republicans to inject chaos into the post-election environment by keeping the election results from being finalized. Experts have identified that possibility as something that Trump allies could attempt in multiple states, in addition to Georgia.

Nothing in state law allows county election leaders “to declare fraud (or, more importantly, determine the consequences for it, if it in fact occurs),” McBurney wrote. “The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Secretary of State, the many District Attorneys, and the Attorney General are all better equipped and clearly authorized to undertake the work of verifying election fraud and seeking consequences for it.”

McBurney’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed this year by Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections who had refused to join her colleagues as they certified two primaries. Adams claimed in the suit that she was denied her right to examine a long list of election records for signs of fraud or other issues. She also argued that there would be no point to certification if local officials were not permitted to flag irregularities.

But nothing in state statutes gives boards leeway in their obligation to certify and “do so by a time certain,” McBurney wrote. “There are no exceptions.”

Adams, however, claimed a victory with the ruling, which affirmed her right to ask for documents that allow her to examine the security of elections.

“Having access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and have confidence in the true and accurate results before the time for certification,” Adams said in a written statement.

Voting rights advocates and Democrats — including Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign — also claimed a victory.

“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans don’t get to decide who wins elections — voters do,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “The experts were clear that the 2020 election was free, fair, and secure, and Democrats are making sure that 2024 is the same.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) made headlines last week by echoing a common refrain from members of his party, particularly over the past decade.

“I think all of us know the electoral college needs to go,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate said at an event in California. Instead, he added, “we need a national popular vote.”

In short order, Walz moderated his position back in line with the campaign. Saying that the electoral college is archaic and harmful is a tacit rejection of the importance presidential candidates slather on states like Pennsylvania and Arizona. Probably more importantly, it’s also a line that (as Walz acknowledged) is common among hard Democratic partisans, a group that Harris isn’t eager to suggest is at the center of her candidacy.

Supporters of Donald Trump didn’t let him off the hook that easily. One pro-Trump social media account, for example, shared a political cartoon suggesting that Walz’s disparagement of the electoral college was a function of Trump seizing a lead in swing states.

“Abolish the electoral college,” Walz is pictured saying, “so New York and California can decide our elections!”

This is a common line of argument. Get rid of the electoral college and presidential campaigns will have no incentive but to appeal to voters in more populous states — more populous states that, you will notice, vote heavily Democratic.

There are lots of decent arguments for retaining the electoral college. This is not one of them.

The United States is home to 337 million people. More than 80 percent of them live somewhere other than California or New York. If we picked an American at random, we’d have good odds of picking a Californian or a New Yorker — and much better odds of picking someone from somewhere else.

See for yourself. Click the button below to pick a random American. How often do you get someone from one of those states?

In part, this argument is a proxy for “voters in Los Angeles and New York” since running one television ad in those cities hits a lot of potential voters. (Of course, thanks to their proximity to current swing states, those cities get a lot of presidential ads already.) But it ignores that there are a lot of people in populous red states, too, including people who live in large cities in those states.

Two of the states where the most votes were cast in 2020 were states that backed Trump by at least 3 percentage points. Four of the top 10 states voted for Trump. Three of the ones Biden won, he won by 3 percentage points or less.

In other words, the idea that switching to a national popular vote would necessarily mean a focus on populous blue states ignores that there are a lot of populous red states, too.

More importantly, though, there are a lot of Republican voters in those blue states! (And vice versa, of course.) Yes, California backed Joe Biden by a wide margin in 2020, but there were more than 6 million people in the state who voted for Trump. That’s more votes than he got in any other state. It’s more votes than he got in the 17 states where he received the least total votes.

Add in the more than 3 million votes he got in New York, and you have 9.3 million Trump voters who were never targeted by presidential campaigns because their states’ electoral votes were predetermined.

Trump actually received more votes in states he lost in 2020 than in states he won. There were 36 million voters whose ballots went to electors who cast ballots for Trump. Another 38 million, including those 9-million-plus in New York and California, cast ballots that were essentially uncounted as their states’ electors went to Joe Biden.

A lot of those votes did come in swing states, mind you. About a fifth of both candidates’ votes came in states that were decided by less than 3 percentage points.

This doesn’t necessarily suggest that those states would see the same level of politicking should the electoral college suddenly vanish, certainly. One response to such a change would likely be that turnout increased in states where votes suddenly mattered. In the 10 states with the narrowest margins in 2020 — mostly swing states — turnout was about 5 percentage points higher than in the 10 states with the widest margins.

Again, there are other arguments for the existence of the electoral college. Some are straightforwardly partisan, recognitions that its existence has given Republicans two presidents in the past 30 years who lost the popular vote (including Trump). Others appeal to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in establishing the system as it exists. Yet others argue that it imposes a sort of moderation on candidates who would otherwise simply appeal to tightly packed urban voters.

In practice, though, that last point has in recent years also been a partisan argument. It is safe to say that Trump has not significantly moderated his positions to appeal to swing-state voters. Thanks in part to the electoral college, he is running a national campaign appealing to the homogenous interests of his heavily rural party.

It’s an approach that allowed him to take the unusual step of holding a campaign rally in California earlier this month. For those few hours, Republicans in that state got to feel something otherwise unfamiliar: that a Republican presidential candidate cared about their votes.

Donald Trump’s town-hall-style campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday understandably attracted more attention for its conclusion than for its contents. But the actual question-and-answer period did provide useful insights that should not be overlooked.

One of the questions posed to Trump — apparently prescreened by the campaign — came from a Black woman standing behind him on the stage. Reading from a card, the woman said she had been raised in a Democratic, union household in Philadelphia before (as other question-askers said as well) seeing the light about America’s problems — and, in particular, how they affect the Black community.

“Like my fellow Americans,” the woman said, “my grocery bill has not gone down. Everything is still so very expensive. What steps will your administration take to help American families suffering from this inflation?”

What follows is Trump’s response in its entirety. Some audience feedback is indicated, and we’ve added some footnotes for clarification and correction. Paragraph breaks are placed approximately where Trump appeared to shift his train of thought.

Trump’s answer

“So, you know, it’s such a great question in the sense that people don’t think of grocery. You know, it sounds like not such an important word when you talk about homes and everything else, right? But more people tell me about grocery bills, where the price of bacon, the price of lettuce, the price of tomatoes, they tell me. [1] And we’re going to do a lot of things.

“You know, our farmers aren’t being treated properly. And we had a deal with China, and it was a great deal — I never mentioned it because once covid came in, I said, that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi [Jinping]. And he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that. But we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal, $50 billion he was going to buy. [2] We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe, for the farmer. But the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.

“But you asked another question about safety and also about Black population jobs and Hispanic population in particular those two. [3] So when millions of people pour into our country, they’re having a devastating effect on Black families and Hispanic families more than any others. [4] I think it’s going to spread to a lot of other places.

“I think it’s going to spread to unions. I think unions are going to have a big problem because, you know, employers are just not going to pay the price. They’re going to — and it’s going to be — it’s a very bad thing that’s happening.

“So they’re coming in. Many are coming in from jails and prisons and mental institutions, insane asylums. [5] That’s like, you know, step above, right? Insane asylum. And whenever I go, Hannibal Lecter, you know what I’m talking about. They always go — the fake news. That’s a lot of fake news back there, too.”

[Boos from the audience.]

“They always mention — you know, it’s a way of demeaning, they say, ‘Hannibal Lecter, why would he mention?’ [6] Well, you know why, because he was a sick puppy, and we have sick puppies coming into our country. I figured that’s a lot — that’s better than wasting a lot of words. You just say, ‘Hannibal Lecter. We don’t want him.’ But. But they always sort of say, ‘Why would he say that?’ I do it for a lot of reasons.

“But I do it because we are allowing some very bad people into our country. And they’re coming as terrorists. You know, you saw the other day, last month they had the record number of terrorists. [7] I had a month — and I love Border Patrol.

“Did you see they gave me a full endorsement two days ago? Border Patrol.” [8]

[Cheers from the audience.]

“The Border Patrol. And they’re great. And, you know, they want to do their job. They don’t want to let these people come in. They look at them. They can tell. They can look at somebody, say good, bad. They say what’s coming into our country now, it’s having a huge negative impact on Black families and on Hispanic families and ultimately on everybody.

“And we’re going to close that border so tight. It’s going to be closed. And I said the two things I’m going to do, first, we’re going to close that border — [9] and people are going to come in. You want people to come in. We need people to come in. People are going to come into our country legally.

“You know, it’s so unfair. You have people that are waiting on a system, in a line and they’ve been waiting in this line. You know how long? For years, 10 years, 12 years and they study and they take tests. And then people come. I actually say, ‘Why don’t you just go and just come on across?’ I tell people that it’s terrible, right? I said, ‘Go out. You’re incredible.’ They say, ‘What can I do to speed up the process?’ I say, ‘You know what, go to the southern border. I’ll see you on the other side.’ It’s so unfair. [10]

“But we’re going to have them come in legally. You have to see what they have to do. They take tests on, you know, who was the first one here? What date was this? What does 1776 mean? All this stuff.

“And these other people are coming in and they’re affecting the school systems and they’re affecting the hospital system. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in Springfield, Ohio, a town of 50,000 people, they’ve just added 32,000 people. Illegal immigrants. [11] And we’re not going to put up with it.

“And we’re going to take care of your costs are going to come down, and you’re not going to have a problem with — because the biggest problem, and I’m hearing it from Black people and to a lesser extent right now, but it’ll be the same, Hispanic people.

“And I’ll tell you what, our poll numbers have gone through the roof. With Black and Hispanic, have gone through the roof. [12] And I like that. I like that. I like that. So we’re going to take care of it. You will be — I’ll tell you, if everything works out, if everybody gets out and votes on January 5th. [13] Or before.

“You know, it used to be, you’d have a date. Today, you can vote two months before, probably three months after. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. But we’re going to straighten it all out. We’re going to straighten that out. We’re going to straighten our election process out, too. That’s going to be important, also. So thank you very much, darling. We’re going to get it straight. Thank you.”

And that is how Trump will address inflation.

Footnotes

[1] The Wall Street Journal recently conducted a survey of economists. Overwhelmingly, they indicated that Trump’s stated economic policies — heavy on tariffs that would raise the cost of goods for Americans — would be inflationary.

[2] Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that Trump had pushed the Chinese president to buy goods from American farmers specifically to boost his reelection bid. In part thanks to the pandemic, the purchases stipulated in the deal were not made.

[3] She did not ask this question.

[4] Black and Hispanic unemployment hit record lows during the Biden administration.

[5] These comments about prisons and insane asylums are years-old rhetoric from Trump that is not substantiated.

[6] Here’s the answer to the very good question of why Trump keeps talking about 1990s movie character Hannibal Lecter.

[7] Like many on the right, Trump opportunistically conflates being on the Terrorist Screening Dataset with being a terrorist. While apprehensions of people on that watch list between border checkpoints are up, more people on the watch list were stopped at the southwest border in 2019, under Trump, than at any point in Joe Biden’s presidency.

[8] The union of Border Patrol agents endorsed Trump, not the government agency.

[9] Trump was probably going to refer to his “dictator on day one” pledge of addressing the border and drilling for oil, if he hadn’t gotten sidetracked.

[10] This comment about going to the southern border is not good advice, unless the people Trump knows have viable reasons to seek asylum in the United States.

[11] The number of immigrants from Haiti presented by Trump is exaggerated. More important, they are in the country legally.

[12] Trump’s poll numbers with Black and Hispanic voters are better than the support he saw in 2020, but he is still losing with both groups.

[13] Election Day is Nov. 5.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign Tuesday rejected claims that she and a co-author had plagiarized a handful of passages in a 2009 book on fighting crime, arguing that the allegations amounted to a partisan attempt to weaponize a 15-year-old work.

The claims arose this week when Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, listed five instances in the book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” saying Harris and co-author Joan O’C. Hamilton used language that was nearly identical to outside sources without proper citation. Rufo cited the work of Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber.

“Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions — reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing — but others seem to reflect more serious infractions,” Rufo wrote.

The claims involved about 500 words out of a 66,500-word book. The sources and statistics that Harris used are attributed in footnotes, but in some instances she and Hamilton did not use quotation marks even though they took language almost verbatim.

Harris was involved in the book — coming up with the concept, sharing her experiences as a prosecutor and district attorney in San Francisco during long interview sessions, and reviewing drafts, according to a person involved in the book, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

But Harris was not involved in the formatting of outside excerpts and citations, which have been the focus of the latest criticisms, the person said, adding that those details would have been handled by her co-author and editors.

A Harris campaign spokesman said Rufo’s allegations amounted to a partisan attack on a small sliver of work from 15 years ago.

“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies,” campaign spokesman James Singer said in a statement. “This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”

But Republican nominee Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), mocked Harris over the allegations, posting on X, “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.” The Washington Post recently examined many aspects of Vance’s book, which triggered mixed reactions in his hometown and included several accounts that could not be independently verified.

Accusations of plagiarism can become politically damaging — they helped derail President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 1987 — and potentially invite questions about a candidate’s honesty. But in this instance, according to several experts, the passages appear the result of sloppy work rather than a malicious attempt to steal someone’s ideas.

“It’s nuanced,” said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who has examined the claims about Harris’s work. “It’s not nearly as serious as accusers want it to be — and it’s not the nothingburger that the Harris campaign wants it to be, either.”

Bailey, the publisher of Plagiarism Today, a website focusing on plagiarism online, said that in most instances, Harris and her co-author provided a citation but did not put the text in quotation marks. “Some of these passages were most likely where one of the authors pasted text in, didn’t clearly mark it, and co-mingled material with their own,” he said.

Bailey said such errors are not uncommon in material written from the late-1990s to around 2010, a period when electronic research became more common but plagiarism detection had not yet emerged.

“It’s sloppy. It’s bad. But I don’t think it’s evidence of deliberate and malicious plagiarism,” Bailey said. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of egregiousness, he added, “I’m thinking in the 3-to-4 range. Not nothing, but if it were anybody else on the planet, I don’t think we’d have any alarm bells at all right now.”

“Smart on Crime” was published in 2009 at a time when Harris’s career was taking off as she rose from district attorney of San Francisco to attorney general of California. The book features Harris on the cover, but it also lists Hamilton, a California-based writing collaborator and content consultant, as a co-author. Hamilton declined to comment and referred questions to the Harris campaign.

In one passage outlining crime-fighting efforts in High Point, N.C., the authors use six sentences that are identical to those in a news release by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The book cites the release as a source in the footnotes a few paragraphs later but does not include quotations around the section that was lifted from it.

Rufo, a prominent right-leaning activist, played a central role in the push by conservatives to highlight Critical Race Theory as emblematic of what he sees as the problems with progressives’ approach to education and race. CRT argues that racism in the United States is systemic and not just rooted in individual bigotry — an idea that some find self-evident and others deeply objectionable.

In part because of such arguments, Rufo has become an in-demand activist who has advised numerous Republican and conservative candidates, from school boards to state legislatures to Congress.

He also played a role in pressing Harvard University to oust its former president, Claudine Gay, with accusations that, as a doctoral candidate in the 1990s, she had plagiarized sections of her dissertation. “While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning,” Rufo wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed after Gay stepped down.

Some analysts dismissed the claims about Harris’s work in part because they are being promoted by Rufo, whom they consider highly biased.

“I’m dismayed that he’s at it again,” said Susan Blum, a professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and author of “My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture.” “Without also looking at books Trump published or JD Vance published and taking this kind of approach to everyone in public life — then I think we can talk about it.”

Bailey added that the brevity of the passages makes it unlikely that any lack of attribution reflected an intentional effort to improperly take credit.

“Ultimately we’re talking about not very many words in a very long book, which to me means it’s more likely poor writing,” Bailey said. “You’d expect these to be more apparent throughout the book if this was malicious intent to plagiarize.”

Donald Trump went online after midnight Tuesday to brag about acing cognitive exams he never released and his cholesterol, then misleadingly called Vice President Kamala Harris’s allergies a “dangerous situation.” By midday he was meandering through an interview in which he would not directly say whether he would allow a peaceful transfer of power after the election and later complained about Fox News having a Harris aide on air. He had spent the previous evening hosting an unusual town hall (“It was amazing!”) that started with long-winded answers to friendly questions and ended with him swaying and bopping to music for 39 minutes.

With three weeks left until Election Day, Trump is running an unorthodox, freewheeling campaign, directing threats and insults at a wide mix of people and institutions, pushing his travels deeper into Democratic states where nonpartisan analysts do not regard him as competitive, and wielding darkening rhetoric about undocumented immigrants and personal attacks against Harris at campaign events where he often veers off-script and has mixed up words.

In recent days, the Republican presidential nominee held a rally in safely Democratic California, where he suggested that a heckler would later “get the hell knocked out of her”; he spoke at an event in Colorado, promoting falsehoods about Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings; he labeled some Americans “the enemy from within” during a televised interview, suggesting the military be deployed against them; and he repeatedly insulted Harris’s intelligence.

Trump’s outbursts and hostilities are evidence that he should not be returned to the White House, Democrats and other critics say. Some Republicans say Trump should spend more time focusing on policy areas where polling shows he has an advantage and less time on his grievances, obsessions and antics.

“I think he can make an appeal that gets away from personality and appeals to people who may not like him but do like his policies,” said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence. “Staying focused on the issues does that; if you’re commenting on other things, it I think can remind reluctant voters why they have concerns.”

At the same time, Trump has built a sizable and loyal base of supporters who have cheered his norm-breaking behavior, and while the cumulative electoral effect of his actions will not be known until next month, Trump is running neck-and-neck against Harris.

“I just think the elite need to take a stick out of their a–, they have zero sense of humor,” said David Carney, a longtime GOP strategist who helms a pro-Trump group.

The race is close, according to a review of public polls and interviews with strategists in both parties. Harris’s early momentum after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee over the summer elated many in her party, though now some are more jittery with surveys showing tight races in key battleground states.

Harris’s team is spending the closing weeks of the campaign ramping up efforts to portray Trump as a perilous figure who would put Americans at risk as he threatens to jail opponents and use the military to target some of his critics.

Biden’s attempts to paint Trump as a threat to democracy earlier in the contest did little to erode the former president’s standing in the race. Harris is now trying to make a sharper argument that a second Trump term would be “dangerous” and “a huge risk for America” as Trump vows to use the powers of government to serve his own interests.

Harris campaign advisers, including David Plouffe, have noted that many Americans no longer see Trump unfiltered since the news networks stopped carrying his rallies live. So they are taking it upon themselves to bring those scenes directly to the public, including on giant video screens at a Monday rally in Erie, Pa.

Harris painted Trump at the event as “increasingly unstable and unhinged,” and she argued that the stakes are much higher in this election than when Trump was running in 2016 or 2020, because the Supreme Court has affirmed that presidents have broad immunity when they carry out “official acts.” Other prominent Democrats have amplified her pitch.

“There are people that like for their candidate to look strong and to look like they are in command,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). Speaking of Trump, he added: “This guy looks like he’s the last guy to leave the karaoke bar.”

“He’s gone from tough guy to elderly man saying random things,” Schatz said.

Trump campaign spokesperson Brian Hughes defended the candidate’s decisions and comments and pointed to Trump’s rallies, interviews and roundtables as evidence of his “health, wisdom and strength.” (Trump, 78, has not released his medical reports since entering the race; Harris, 59, recently released hers.)

“What you call ‘unorthodox’ is a man running for office who speaks unambiguously to the hopes and dreams of Americans,” Hughes said in a statement. “He also speaks bluntly and accurately about the terrible failures of Kamala Harris and her dangerously liberal policies that imperil the nation.”

Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, Trump did not directly say whether he would allow a peaceful transfer of power after the election and falsely claimed that there was a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021. Pressed on the question about a peaceful transfer of power in 2025, Trump pivoted to suggest that his interviewer, Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait, may be biased against him, saying that he “has not been a big Trump fan” and that Trump had considered whether to do the interview.

He also falsely claimed that no one died as a result of the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, except Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, and that no one who went to the Capitol that day had a gun. Babbitt was one of five people who authorities said died as a consequence of the siege. Several people were charged with carrying guns and other weapons.

Trump has directed threats and insults at a range of targets over the past week, calling for the revocation of CBS’s broadcasting rights over a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, and attacking Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin of ABC’s “The View.” Last week, Trump appeared to suggest that he has been to Gaza, though there is no public evidence of such a visit. When asked about his comment, a campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss his thinking, said the former president has visited Israel. (Gaza is not in Israel.)

Trump has long keyed his actions to a loyal if limited base of enthusiastic supporters and media outlets aligned with him. His Gaza comments, for example, gained far less traction in media circles that have traditionally provided more favorable coverage of him.

Trump will travel to Michigan in coming days and return to Pennsylvania for a second time this week. When he campaigned in Detroit last week, he insulted the city. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s the president,” he said, referring to Harris. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” Trump’s campaign said his policies would bring more economic success to the city.

His campaign has also scheduled an Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, traveling again to a state that does not appear to be in play.

While nonpartisan analysts say Trump has virtually no chance of winning New York, GOP strategists see his blue-state visits as a way to reach mass-media markets and help Republicans in New York and California congressional districts. Anna Kelly, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, described the trips as a way for Trump to show that “he will be a president for all Americans, including those in traditionally blue states that Kamala Harris and the Democrats have left behind.”

As both parties try to shape people’s opinions of Trump in the closing stretch, the vast majority of voters already have cemented views of him. Former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican who has not voted for Trump and plans to write in a candidate, said voters see Trump as an “unpredictable individual” who “says things that are sometimes disingenuous and often inaccurate.”

“It’s an accepted fact of his personality,” said Gregg. “And people that like him, for other reasons, are going to vote for him, and people who dislike him because of that aren’t going to vote for him.”

Laura Wagner contributed to this report.

Looking to shore up her support with the critical demographic of Black men, Kamala Harris charged during a town hall Tuesday night that Donald Trump had no plans to help them and exhorted those voters not to be fooled by Trump or anyone who would “take you out of the game by not voting.”

“The solutions that we all want are not going to happen in totality because of one election,” Harris said during a conversation with radio host Charlamagne tha God that was broadcast live across 140 radio stations. She acknowledged the sentiment of some Black men that Democrats have not always delivered on their promises, but urged them to fight through their disillusionment and vote in November rather than letting Trump and his allies dissuade them from voting.

“We cannot allow circumstances to take us out [of] the game, because then basically what we’re saying is all those people who are obstructionist — who are standing in the way of change — they’re winning, because they’re convincing people that it can’t be done, so ‘take yourself out. Don’t participate,’” Harris said. “Look at that vicious circle … let’s not fall for it.”

Harris’s wide-ranging interview with Charlamagne, a co-host of “The Breakfast Club” program that is enormously popular with younger Black voters, came at a moment when she is trying to shore up softer-than-expected support within that demographic.

Trump has been actively courting Black male voters, and while Harris is still winning a wide majority of them, some polls have shown her level of support falling behind Joe Biden’s in 2020. The erosion has concerned Democratic lawmakers and strategists who worry that it could become a significant factor in such a close race.

Among Black registered voters, 72 percent of men support Harris, compared with 85 percent of women, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last week, which is lower than the support Biden drew four years ago. Still, the polls have varied — a new CBS News-YouGov poll showed that 87 percent of Black voters were backing Harris, the same number who supported Biden in the 2020 exit poll.

Over the course of the hour-long interview on Tuesday night, Harris said several times that she is “clear-eyed” about the problems facing Black men in the United States and the historical factors that make it harder for them to prosper. Harris said she is determined to do more to help them build wealth and expand their access to capital.

Asked about her position on reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, Harris gave her usual answer that “it has to be studied.” She said she was running to be president for all Americans, adding “that being said, I do have clear eyes about the disparities that exist and the context in which they exist, meaning history.”

Harris on Monday released an “opportunity agenda for Black men,” including such proposals as forgivable loans for small businesses and renewed attention to health problems that disproportionately affect this group. On Tuesday, Harris was quick to contrast those plans with what she said was Trump’s lack of a platform to help Black men.

“We have brought down Black unemployment … to one of the lowest levels in history, but I’m very clear the community is not going to stand up and applaud just because everybody has a job,” Harris said. “That should be a baseline. My agenda is about tapping into the ambitions and the aspirations, knowing that folks want to have an opportunity.”

Trump has put notable effort into making inroads with Black voters, especially men, who typically vote for Democrats in large numbers. Trump has argued that despite their promises, Democrats have done little to improve the well-being of Black communities and that his policies would help them by turbocharging the economy overall.

Harris told Charlamagne that one of her biggest challenges is dealing with the misinformation about her record as a prosecutor, which has made some Black men hesitant to support her, and other disinformation about her record.

“Part of the challenge that I face is that they are trying to scare people away because they know they otherwise have nothing to run on,” Harris said.

Attempting to take on Trump’s perceived appeal to some male voters as a strong figure, Harris painted the former president as an autocrat. She contended that it is a sign of weakness rather than strength that Trump has, for example, threatened to enlist the military to target his political opponents or suggested he would seek to jail election workers and other officials.

Those threats show “the man is really quite weak,” the vice president said. “It’s a sign of weakness that you want to please dictators and seek their flattery and favor.”

Throughout the course of the interview, Harris touted her plans to help Black men build wealth and expand their access to lending, while boosting training and education opportunities through apprenticeship and increased support for historically Black colleges and universities.

In addition to the policies that she said would help Black-owned businesses succeed, Harris noted Tuesday night that many Black men are serving as caregivers for their older relatives while also caring for their own children as part of the “sandwich generation.” She touted her proposal to ensure Medicare covers the cost of home health care for seniors — without getting into detail about how difficult it could be to push that change through a divided Congress.

This week, she touted those proposals in private meetings with Black men, including at a Black-owned record store in Erie, Pa. And in Detroit before the radio interview, Harris met with a group of Black men for a talk about entrepreneurship at a Black-owned art gallery. She was joined by actors Don Cheadle and Delroy Lindo, as well as actor Cornelius Smith Jr., a Detroit native.

Trump has insisted that Black men should support his campaign rather than Harris’s because he will bring them more economic opportunities.

Earlier this summer, the former president questioned Harris’s racial identity during an appearance at a convention of Black journalists in July — falsely suggesting that she “happened to turn Black” relatively recently because it was politically convenient.

Harris, who belongs to a historically Black sorority and has spoken and written at length about her mixed-race heritage, dismissed the comments as “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect.”

This week both Harris and her campaign have emphasized the work she has done throughout her career on behalf of Black voters. They have noted for example, the multistate tour that she did in April as vice president where she met privately with Black entrepreneurs, business owners and faith leaders.

At that time, Democrats were worried that Biden, who was then the likely nominee, was losing support among Black men.

Billionaire Elon Musk gave nearly $75 million to the political action committee he created to campaign for Donald Trump, marking his latest contribution in support of the former president in the final stretch of the campaign.

America PAC has emerged as a significant player in Trump’s reelection bid, with the committee launching this spring with early support from wealthy donors, including former Tesla director Antonio Gracias, Palantir co-founder and Austin-based tech investor Joe Lonsdale, and Sequoia Capital investor Shaun Maguire.

The super PAC is focused on get-out-the-vote operations in swing states, including Pennsylvania, where it is planning a canvasser hiring surge before Election Day, The Washington Post previously reported.

Musk’s contribution is part of a larger wave of fundraising hauls reported on Tuesday by several PACs, congressional campaigns and some presidential committees.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s primary fundraising vehicle for big-dollar donations, the Harris Victory Fund, brought in a staggering $633 million. That’s nearly five times as much as Trump 47’s $145 million, according to reports filed Tuesday night. It reflects a continued disparity in the financial resources directly available to both campaigns. However, a full picture of the financial strength of the Trump and Harris efforts will not be available until Sunday, when the campaigns and parties file detailed reports with the Federal Election Commission.

Musk, one of the world’s richest people, has invested significant time and resources in supporting Trump’s campaign, and has been heavily involved in the PAC’s operations. The entrepreneur endorsed Trump in July after a gunman opened fire at one of Trump’s rallies, injuring the former president and killing a spectator. Musk has also increasingly used his social media platform, X, to promote Trump’s candidacy to his 200 million followers.

Trump has repeatedly praised Musk at rallies in the months following his endorsement. The former president has also pledged to launch a government efficiency committee if elected, which Trump said Musk will lead.

Musk also spoke at Trump’s rally this month in Butler, Pa., saying the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”

While super PACs have historically used their cash advantage to invest in television advertising, a March ruling by the FEC paved the way for campaigns to share information and data on voter turnout efforts with outside groups. In an effort to remain financially competitive this election cycle, the Trump campaign has outsourced some advertising and voter-turnout efforts to outside groups, including America PAC.

As of Tuesday night, America PAC has reported more than $100 million in spending supporting Trump in the presidential race. But it has earmarked no spending for television ads, instead spending tens of millions on canvassing and direct mail. It has also spent to support Republican candidates in some House and Senate races, including Reps. Michael Lawler (N.Y.) and Ken Calvert (Calif.) in their toss-up districts.

Reports from some pro-Trump committees show wealthy backers are spending a lot in support of his reelection bid.

Miriam Adelson, a doctor and the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, donated $95 million to Preserve America PAC between July and September. The PAC, which is primarily funded by Adelson, has been one of the largest pro-Trump advertising super PACs this election cycle.

Business executive Richard Uihlein sent $49 million to Restoration PAC, which also supports Trump. And other top donors supported the Right for America super PAC: Businessman Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter and his wife gave $4.9 million, while venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz gave $2.5 million each.

Trump 47, the fundraising committee bringing big-dollar donations to Trump’s campaign, saw contributions from Andreessen, former Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder and cryptocurrency investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

Trisha Thadani and Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris will sit for an interview with Fox News on Wednesday — her first formal appearance on the network — as she continues her media blitz with Election Day fast approaching.

The network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, will conduct the interview in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Harris is currently leading Donald Trump by two points, according to The Washington Post’s latest analysis.

Following a cautious rollout after moving to the top of Democratic ticket, Harris has in recent days embraced a spate of unscripted interviews in a bid to engage a broader audience. She has appeared on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast, SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” and on Tuesday participated in a live interview with Charlamagne tha God, a well-known radio personality.

Harris’s decision to interview with Fox News appears to be the latest effort by Democrats to reach voters across the aisle. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the vice-presidential Democratic nominee, has appeared on the network, as has Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quipped at the party convention this summer that “you might recognize me from Fox News.”

The Murdoch-run network, which says it reaches nearly 200 million people each month, is the go-to election news source for Republicans.

When is Harris’s interview with Fox News?

The interview will be pretaped and will air at 6 p.m. Eastern on “Special Report With Bret Baier,” a program that draws an average of 2.3 million viewers, according to Fox News.

Responding to a question on social media, Baier said the interview would be taped “as-live” before the show and aired without any cuts.

In a separate video, Baier said he will ask Harris “about things that matter” to voters, including the economy and immigration. He asked viewers to send him questions for Harris.

Ian Sams, a spokesman for Harris, took aim at Trump on social media, saying he refused a second debate with the Democratic candidate while “Harris is willing to even go on Fox.”

Who is Bret Baier?

Baier is the host and executive editor of “Special Report with Bret Baier” and the host of Fox News Radio’s “The Bret Baier Podcast.” This election cycle, Baier created “Common Ground,” a segment that Fox pitches as featuring discussions between “political leaders from across the aisle” with “the goal of finding middle ground.”

Baier started at the network in 1998 as a reporter based in Atlanta and is the author of seven books, including a biography of George Washington. He has interviewed top political leaders of both parties as well as global leaders, the network said. Last year, he co-hosted the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 presidential cycle, which Trump did not participate in.

In September, Baier said he believed it was Trump and not Harris holding up the prospect of a second presidential debate proposed by Fox. During an appearance on a conservative radio show, Baier said he did not know Trump’s reasoning, adding that he thought the former president “couldn’t get away from the light of 70 million viewers,” and would eventually have to do it “if it was on Fox and something he could agree to.”

What has Trump said about the interview?

Trump attacked Fox and Baier in a post on Truth Social after the interview was announced. He said Harris “has wisely chosen” Baier because he is “considered to be ‘Fair & Balanced’” while accusing the anchor of being “very soft” on people on the left.

“I would have preferred seeing a more hard hitting journalist, but Fox has grown so weak and soft on the Democrats,” he wrote.

On Tuesday, Trump taped an hour-long Fox News town hall that will air Wednesday, during which he repeated many false or misleading claims that went largely unchecked by the moderator.

María Luisa Paúl contributed reporting.