US Election Live Blog: Donald Trump lashes Kamala Harris as ex model claims he groped her

Donald Trump has come out swinging against Kamala Harris as a former top model accused the presidential nominee of “groping her” in a twisted game with Jeffrey Epstein.

Donald Trump angrily denied damaging claims by his “total degenerate” former chief of staff – including that he praised Adolf Hitler – as Kamala Harris called her opponent a fascist who was a danger to the US.

With less than two weeks until the election, the former president took a narrow lead in a new Wall Street Journal poll and high-profile polling guru Nate Silver said his gut told him the Republican would win.

The Vice President’s town hall with undecided voters worried nervous Democrats after she repeatedly failed to offer straight answers to questions that have dogged her campaign, including why she had not delivered on her ideas for the country over the past four years.

Mr Trump’s campaign also ignited a transatlantic stoush with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing his Labour Party of “blatant foreign interference” as its members prepared to travel to the US to support Ms Harris.

With the race going down to the wire, the Vice President manoeuvred to focus her closing message on her “unhinged and unstable” opponent, seizing on his longest-serving White House chief of staff John Kelly’s allegations about his behaviour in power.

He said Mr Trump wanted generals who followed orders like those who served the Nazi leader, that he had to dissuade him from using the military against Americans, and that he “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government”.

On social media, Mr Trump denied the allegations, saying the “dumb” former Marine general “made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”.

“John Kelly is a LOWLIFE, and a bad General, whose advice in the White House I no longer sought, and told him to MOVE ON,” he said.

Ms Harris called a surprise press conference to sound the alarm, before telling undecided voters in the town hall on CNN that she believed Mr Trump was a fascist who was a “danger to the wellbeing and security of America”.

But she offered few details about her plans while attacking him, sidestepping questions about who was to blame for high grocery prices, how she would stop civilians being killed by US-funded bombs in the Middle East, and whether she would reform the Supreme Court.

Ms Harris struggled to nominate mistakes she had made or her weaknesses, other than to say she was “kind of a nerd”. And when asked why she had failed to deliver on her ideas as the Vice President, she said: “There’s a lot that was done but there’s more to do.”

Mr Trump meanwhile boasted at a rally about the “record numbers” in early voting in key swing states, saying he was determined to make the election “too big to rig”, and later said on social media that Ms Harris was “losing badly”.

• READ MORE: Imagine if Harris praised Hitler and called veterans ‘losers’

• READ MORE: ‘Generational moment’: Trump winning over Gen Z

Former model Stacey Williams stands at an event 1996. Picture: Evan Agostini

Stacey Williams says the ex-president, whose spokesperson denied the allegations, touched her in an unwanted sexual way in 1993, after Epstein introduced them. Picture: AFP

It comes as Mr Trump has been accused of groping a model in front of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein in 1993, with the woman alleging it was a “twisted game” between them as they smiled at each other.

Stacey Williams made the explosive claim to The Guardian in a call organised by Survivors for Kamala, a group supporting the former president’s election opponent Kamala Harris.

She said the incident occurred at Trump Tower after Epstein suggested they stop by to visit the celebrity real estate mogul, and that Mr Trump put his hands “all over my breasts”.

Mr Trump’s campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the allegation came from “a former activist for Barack Obama” and was “unequivocally false”.

“It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign,” she said.

Multiple women have accused Mr Trump of sexual misconduct including the writer E. Jean Carroll, with a New York jury finding last year that he sexually abused her in 1996.

Ms Williams, now 56, told The Guardian that she and Epstein – who died in 2019 – dated for a few months in the early 1990s and that it was “very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

Mr Trump had said in 2002 that he had known the “terrific guy” for 15 years.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” he said at the time.

When Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges and became known as one of America’s most prolific abusers, the then-president said they had a “falling out” in the early 2000s and that he was “not a fan of his”.

The Guardian reported Ms Williams said that she later received a postcard from Mr Trump with a picture of his Mar-a-Lago residence and a handwritten note that said: “Stacey – Your home away from home. Love Donald.”

She reportedly said she was “so utterly confused” by the incident because it seemed “somehow orchestrated” and left her feeling “like a piece of meat”.

With less than two weeks until the presidential election, Ms Williams told The Guardian she had not been prepared to come forward sooner because women who made such allegations received “horrifying and abusive” treatment.

She had previously shared parts of her allegations in social media posts. Two of her friends also told The Guardian that they remembered her mentioning the incident with Mr Trump in the past, with one saying she raised it in 2005 or 2006, and another in 2015.
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Originally published as US Election Live Blog: Donald Trump lashes Kamala Harris as ex model claims he groped her