Trump vows to oust special counsel, as he, Harris race through swing states

United States presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he plans to fire the special prosecutor investigating him if he wins the election, a bullish threat as polls nudge slightly his way 12 days before the vote.

The Republican candidate and former president made the comment in an interview on Thursday with a conservative radio host, saying he would dismiss special counsel Jack Smith – who has brought two federal cases against him – “within two seconds”.

Trump’s remarks – which his opponent Kamala Harris’s campaign said was proof he sees himself as “above the law” – aired before he was to head to the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada for campaign rallies.

“Jack Smith is a scoundrel … He’ll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump told the radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Smith’s case against Trump is focused on his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. If re-elected, Trump would not have the authority to unilaterally fire the special counsel, but could direct the Justice Department to do so.

Harris, meanwhile, was scheduled to appear with former President Barack Obama and rock icon Bruce Springsteen at a rally in the swing state of Georgia.

Increasingly, Harris’s campaign has turned to influential celebrities to headline events and get out the vote.

Thursday evening, Grammy winner James Taylor will share the stage with Harris’s running mate Tim Walz in North Carolina, another pivotal election state that is recovering from the throes of a deadly hurricane.

And on Friday night, music sensation Beyonce – whose song, Freedom, has become the Harris campaign’s signature track – will appear with the vice president at a rally in Houston.

’50-50 forecast’

The campaign blitz across battleground states has intensified as Trump and Harris remained in a dead heat in the polls, with Trump showing slight gains in recent weeks.

According to the 538 polling aggregator, Trump holds a minor lead in four of the seven US swing states that are likely to determine the election – North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Harris has a small advantage in two of the states – Michigan and Wisconsin – while the candidates are squarely tied in Nevada.

In all seven states, the difference is under two percentage points, well within the polls’ margin of error, meaning the states are a toss-up.

Pollster and 538 founder, Nate Silver, said the data indicated Harris and Trump’s odds of victory are close to 50-50, even if his instinct is that Trump will edge it out.

“My gut says Donald Trump,” Silver said in a guest essay for The New York Times. “But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut – including mine.”

“Instead,” Silver said, “you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong.”

In a contrasting essay, James Carville, a longtime Democratic consultant who famously managed former President Bill Clinton’s winning campaign in 1992, reached another conclusion, saying he is “certain” Harris will come out ahead.

Writing for The New York Times, Carville pointed to a string of recent election defeats for Republicans and Harris’s massive fundraising advantage as evidence of an upcoming Harris victory.

Part of his reasoning was “100 percent emotional”, he confessed.

“I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future towards justice will make the same mistake twice,” he wrote.

Early votes pouring in

With early voting in full swing in most US states, almost 30 million Americans have already cast their votes early, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab tracker.

Preliminary data shows registered Democrats leading Republicans in the early count, though it does not indicate how they voted, and Republicans expect to close the gap on Election Day.

Trump, who previously discouraged early voting, has come around to it this year, saying, “The main thing to me is, you’ve got to vote.”