'Fanning fuel of hate': Harris says Trump is focused on dividing US

Kamala Harris has accused Donald Trump of "fanning the fuel of division and hate" in the US after the Republican presidential candidate held a rally at New York's Madison Square Garden marked by racist comments, coarse insults and dangerous threats about immigrants.

- Adam Gabbatt and Ed Pilkington New York

Responding to Sunday night's rally on her way to a campaign stop in Michigan yesterday, Harris said the former president was "focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself, and on dividing our country, and it is not in any way something that will strengthen the American family, the American worker".

The Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, described the event, which had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the venue in 1939, as "a mini-January 6 rally".

Appearing on MSNBC yesterday, she added: "These are mini-stop-the-steal rallies. These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn't go the way that they want."

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the Sunday night rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting "the enemy from within" and again promised to launch "the largest deportation programme in The Philadelphia district attorney's office has filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Elon Musk's political action committee from awarding $1m to registered voters in swing states. The lawsuit by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, accuses the tech billionaire and his America Pac group of attempting to influence voters in the US election with hopes of a cash prize.

"America PAC and Elon Musk are running an illegal lottery in Philadelphia (as well as throughout Pennsylvania)," the suit says.

Pennsylvania is one of the key swing states where the presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be decided.

The suit specifies that at a 19 October campaign rally, Musk announced that if a registered voter turned over personal identifying information and signed a petition pledging "support for the constitution", they would be eligible to be selected randomly for a $1m prize.