Trump and Harris neck-and-neck as she prepares to announce VP pick after meeting candidates Sunday: Live

Kerstin Emhoff, ex-wife of Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, has defended him after he admitted to having an affair during their marriage.

Emhoff, who is now married to Vice President Kamala Harris, responded on Saturday to claims that he had an extra-marital affair, first reported by the Daily Mail.

“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” he said in statement to CNN.

He was married to film producer Kerstin from 1992 to 2008 and the pair have two children, Ella and Cole, who are now young adults. The Mail reported that the couple split after Kerstin discovered the affair. She did not respond to that allegation in her statement.

“Doug and I decided to end our marriage for a variety of reasons, many years ago,” she told the Washington Post. “He is a great father to our kids, continues to be a great friend to me and I am really proud of the warm and supportive blended family Doug, Kamala, and I have built together.

Lindsey Graham has warned Donald Trump against devolving into birtherism-like attacks against Kamala Harris during the 2024 race for the White House.

The South Carolina senator appeared on Fox News Sunday on August as the Trump campaign continues to search for an effective message to run against Harris after she became the formal Democratic nominee.

Graham made the remarks after Trump broached the issue of Harris’s racial background during an interview at a conference hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists this week. In front of the largely Black audience, Trump insisted that Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black — drawing groans from the crowd.

In a social media video posted on X on Sunday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, independent presidential candidate, recounted a strange tale 10 years ago, when he was going to go “falconing” in upstate New York. On the way there, a woman in the van in front of him hit and killed a “young bear,” he said. He decided to put the dead bear in his car, he continued.

“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was gonna skin the bear,” the scion said. “It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.”

After a nice time upstate, he had to drive to New York City for a dinner instead of his home in Westchester — with the bear still in his car.

The dinner went late and he had to head to the airport. “I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad,” he said. Kennedy then started discussing the recently-created bike lanes that had led to a lot of accidents in the city.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of and I said let’s go put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,” Kennedy continued. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

He said the story of the dead bear wound up on “the front page of every paper.”

The presidential candidate added: “I was worreid because my prints were all over that bike.”

“Luckily, the story died down after a while and it stayed dead for a decade. The New Yorker somehow found out about it, and they just – they’re gonna do a big article on me and that’s one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact checkers,” he said.

Can’t believe it? Watch the whole video for yourself…

Kamala Harris’ campaign launched “Republicans for Harris” with endorsements from former Donald Trump administration officials and prominent conservatives.

The initiative is “a grassroots organizing program to further outreach efforts to the millions of Republican voters who continue to reject the chaos, division, and violence of Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda,” the Harris campaign said in a statement on Sunday.

Notable endorsements include former White House Press Secretary and Melania Trump chief-of-staff Stephanie Grisham, and former homeland security and counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, Olivia Troye.

“As a national security official and lifelong Republican, I witnessed firsthand the threat Donald Trump poses to our country while working in the Trump White House,” Troye wrote. “ The stakes are too high to let partisanship jeopardize our freedoms and the Constitution.”

A first-term senator from Arizona, on paper, sounds like a perfect foil against a junior senator from Ohio, at least as running mates go.

With Kamala Harris ascending to the rank of presumptive Democratic nominee and nobody in her party apparently willing to challenge her for the nomination now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the race, all eyes have turned to Harris’s selection of a potential running mate ahead of her party’s convention, which kicks off August 19.

The two presidential candidates are neck-and-neck, with 50 per cent of registered voters said they would support Kamala Harris while 49 per cent said they would support Donald Trump, according to the CBS poll released Sunday.

Harris and Trump are tied in battleground states, the poll showed, meaning Harris gained points over Biden, who was trailing behind Trump when he dropped out.

There has also been a boost in Democratic enthusiasm since Harris entered the race, the poll revealed. On July 18, 81 per cent of Democrats said they would ‘definitely’ vote in November compared to now, when 85 per cent said they would ‘definitely’ vote.

Regardless of political leaning, the number of Black registered voters who said they would vote dramatically increased since Biden stepped aside. Only 58 per cent of Black registered voters said they would ‘definitely’ vote on July 18, compared to 74 per cent who would now.

The poll was taken between July 30 and August 2nd. During that period, Trump questioned Kamala Harris’ ethnic background, asking at the NABJ conference: “Is she Indian or is she Black?”

Philadelphia’s mayor released a video urging Pennsylvanians to support the state’s Governor Josh Shapiro “for vice president,” sparking speculation that Kamala Harris’ pick for running mate had been leaked.

On Friday, Mayor Cherelle Parker posted a video on her personal social media accounts encouraging Pennsylvanians to stand behind “Kamala Harris for president” and “Josh Shapiro for vice president”, days before the presumptive Democratic nominee is expected to make her official announcement.

“I can’t think of a better partner than our governor, Josh Shapiro,” Parker said, in the video.

The ad caused speculation to run wild across social media, with many wondering whether the mayor had accidentally revealed Harris’ running mate. The video has not been deleted as of Sunday morning.

However, The Independent has learned that Mayor Parker was simply expressing her support for a longtime ally and friend as a potential selection by Harris for the Democratic ticket.

Donald Trump has insisted that he and running mate JD Vance aren’t “the weird ones” as the Republican presidential candidate works to combat Democrat messaging to the contrary.

Trump made the remarks Thursday on the “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” a political podcast, following days of messaging from Kamala Harris’ campaign dubbing her rivals “weird.”

“Well, they’re the weird ones, and if you’ve ever seen [Kamala Harris] with the laugh and everything else, that’s a weird deal going on there,” Trump said. “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not and I’m up front, and he’s not either, I will tell you, JD is not at all, they are.”

“You notice the evening news, every one of them talk, you know, they introduced the word weird, and all of a sudden they’re talking about weird,” he continued. “Now, we’re not weird people. We’re actually just the opposite. We’re right down the middle.”

Katie Hawkinson has the latest…