General
Monday Briefing
Israel escalates its attacks in Lebanon.
Donald Trump’s campaign turned his Georgia mug shot into a piece of promotional material, putting it on posters, T-shirts and buttons.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Donald Trump’s lifetime of scandals
Donald Trump has survived more scandals than any major presidential candidate, much less president, often turning them on their head and casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator. Any one of those scandals, by itself, would typically have been enough to derail another politician.
Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, recalls the decades of allegations against Trump: “Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all,” he writes.
Related: With polls tightening, Vice President Kamala Harris has stepped up attempts to paint Trump as dangerous and unfit to lead.
Your questions: We asked Lisa Lerer, a national political correspondent, this question from a reader. (Send us your questions here.)
Lisa: Voters living in nonswing states are still casting ballots for a list of other statewide and local offices, so their votes do matter in those races. There’s also a sense of sending a political message. While New York or Texas is unlikely to change the outcome of the presidential race, shifts in party support in those states can impact the political mandate a new president has to lead.
Scrapping the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which would face an extraordinarily — if not nearly impossible — bar to passage. With no clear way to change the system, most Americans focus on more pressing concerns, like the economy, immigration, abortion rights or even foreign policy.
More on the U.S. election
Americans head to the polls in less than three weeks.
At a rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump spewed vulgar remarks, including a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris and a reference to a famous golfer’s penis size. Harris, in response, said Americans “deserve so much better.”
Trump made a cameo at a McDonald’s in Philadelphia, a move meant to attack his opponent and give the billionaire candidate more credibility with working-class voters. Catch up on the candidates’ most recent appearances.
In a Fox News interview, Trump defended some recent falsehoods about migration and the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol by claiming that he did not know or had “not heard” the truth.
Elon Musk said he would give $1 million “randomly” once a day to a registered Pennsylvania voter who has signed his super PAC’s conservative petition, raising legal questions.
Do you have questions about the election? Send them to us, and we’ll find the answers.
