Los Angeles, United States:

Donald Trump may have become involved with a porn star, but if elected president he could try shutting down the entire industry, adult film stars are warning in a push to get young men to vote against the Republican next month.

The #HandsOffMyPorn campaign has spent $200,000 so far on ads to run on adult websites, warning viewers that prominent allies of Trump want to ban pornography and lock up the stars who bring it to vivid, graphic life.

And they want Americans to fight back at the ballot box.

“If you care about adult entertainment, if you consume or create adult entertainment, you gotta vote November 5,” porn actress Siouxsie Q told AFP. “There’s no two ways about it.”

The initiative comes in response to Project 2025, a blueprint for reshaping the federal government should Trump, the Republican nominee, win the election. 

Page five of the 900-page tome’s foreword states: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025. But dozens of his allies and former administration members co-wrote the document, and Democrats have argued that many of its policies match his own positions. 

The #HandsOffMyPorn campaign is aimed primarily at men, who are four times more likely to report watching porn than women, according to the Institute for Family Studies.

Just weeks before the extremely close US election between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, pollsters report a giant gender division among voters.

Trump enjoys a strong lead among male voters, regularly taking his machismo-drenched pitch to young men on right-wing podcasts.

Now, #HandsOffMyPorn’s “public service announcements” are being played to users in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, often just before they watch adult videos. 

Stars like Siouxsie Q appear and say: “Hey, I know you’re busy. I know you’re doing something. Hold on. If you want to keep doing this, you really need to vote on November 5… Enjoy!”

Harris is not in any way affiliated with the #HandsOffMyPorn campaign, which is paid for by the independent Artists United for Change committee, noted Siouxsie Q.

“Hopefully, secretly, she likes what we’re doing,” she added.

‘Lightning rod’

Crackdowns on pornography are nothing new for the United States.

But Holly Randall, a 26-year veteran of the adult industry, said she has never seen such a potentially devastating threat to the sector.

That even includes when her parents, who worked in porn during Ronald Reagan’s crackdown in the 1980s, had to film hardcore scenes in secret.

“I’ve seen these attacks come and go…. Project 2025, is the most explicit iteration of wanting to completely outlaw porn,” she said.

“Absolutely, I am worried about imprisonment,” added Siouxsie Q, who made her name performing in feminist, queer and bondage films, before moving on to producing.

Porn stars also warn that the consequences could extend far beyond even their wildly popular industry.

According to Siouxsie Q, pornography is the “canary in the coal mine” for the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. She pointed also to Republican-led banning of sex education books from school libraries.

And Randall said adult entertainment is a “lightning rod” for wider issues such as trans rights, same-sex marriage and even reproductive rights.

“It’s always the easiest thing to attack, because it represents people’s uncertainty and fear about the changing morals of sexuality and of gender fluidity,” she said.

‘Outlawed’

Trump has repeatedly claimed he has nothing to do with Project 2025.

However, a New York Times investigation this week found “well over half” of the document’s authors had been in Trump’s previous administration or on his campaign or transition teams.

Randall noted the irony of Trump — convicted for fraud over “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels — becoming embroiled in the movement, even if she suspects he personally “doesn’t actually care whether or not it’s outlawed.”

“But it’s the people around him, like (Trump running mate) J.D. Vance, these ultra-right-wing conservatives, who want to ban porn,” she said.

Vance wrote the foreword to an upcoming book by Kevin D. Roberts — the author of the Project 2025 section that calls for a ban on porn.

“I think Trump will easily step aside and allow that to happen,” said Randall.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Donald Trump has never lacked for self-confidence, but his presidential campaign has been sent into a tailspin by the extraordinary events of the past month, and suddenly he appears older, more awkward and grasping for direction.

An assassination attempt, the shock withdrawal of Joe Biden from the White House race and replacement by his younger, high-energy vice president, Kamala Harris, all seem to have taken a toll on a candidate who — until recently — had seemed well on course for victory in November.

President Biden’s exit has been particularly impactful, removing a rival whose 81 years, faltering speech and physical frailties had largely shielded Trump from the scrutiny of his own age and weaknesses.

Now it is Trump, 78, who is the oldest presidential nominee in history, and the point of comparison is a 59-year-old former prosecutor who has come out fast and swinging.

Trump is “very upset” as he huddles with aides searching for a new campaign narrative, said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017 before the two had a falling out.

“He’s now frightened, he’s now cornered, and he’s very angry,” Scaramucci told MSNBC.

‘Quit whining’

Trump’s campaign managers are reportedly desperate to have their candidate focus on issues that play with his base like immigration and inflation.

And while Trump does address those subjects at length during his long and often rambling public appearances, he repeatedly pivots to personal insults, questioning Harris’s intelligence, attacking her racial identity and branding her a “communist.”

Republicans including Nikki Haley, who Trump vanquished in the primaries but who has since endorsed him, say such attacks play badly with the undecided voters Trump needs to win.

“Quit whining about her,” Haley said on Fox News, while also urging Trump to stop obsessing over who draws the most people to their campaign rallies.

“The campaign is not gonna win talking about crowd sizes,” she said.

But Trump’s long list of grievances has only grown — “they’re not being nice to me,” he complained recently — as the momentum has shifted to Harris, erasing the poll leads Trump had in the swing states likely to decide the November election.

Sensing an opportunity, the Harris campaign has sought to amplify the image of Trump as withdrawn, angry and embittered.

“Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently,” it said in a mock promotion for a Trump campaign event on Thursday that promised “another self-obsessed rant full of his own personal grievances.”

The Thursday event had been billed as a press conference focused on Trump’s economic agenda.

Standing in front of tables loaded with supermarket goods aimed at illustrating the household cost of inflation, Trump stayed on message at first — head down, reading out examples of product price rises that were listed in a binder.

But then he repeatedly veered off topic, talking about wind turbines that killed birds, going over crowd sizes again and peppering it all with derogatory personal remarks about Harris.

While politics of resentment can play well with his base, “it is less clear how Trump’s personal attacks against Harris will play with undecided swing voters,” political science professor Elizabeth Bennion of Indiana University told AFP.

“Some observers wondered whether Trump might exercise restraint when facing a multi-racial female candidate,” Bennion added. “The answer is clearly no.”

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Mass expulsions? Political revenge? World peace? A new golden age? As Donald Trump vies for another term in the White House, America is abuzz with speculation over how life might look with the ex-president back at the helm.

In a series of interviews and campaign rallies, the Republican has offered some clues.

Here are Trump’s plans for the United States and the world, as set out by the candidate himself.

Mass deportations

President Joe Biden’s rival in November’s election has pledged to launch the biggest deportation operation of illegal migrants in US history on his first day in office.

“We’re going to get them out as fast as we can,” he has said, accusing undocumented migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The 78-year-old, known for his unfinished border wall project, has said he would be happy to “use the military” as part of the effort and would open detention camps to process targets for expulsion.

“On day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship,” he said in a campaign video.

He has confirmed he also plans to reinstate his ban on entries from several Muslim-majority countries, as a means of “keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.”

Ukraine, NATO

Trump has been saying for months he could end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours,” without explaining how.

Critics suggest his plan would involve pressuring Kyiv to cede territory illegally occupied by Russia in both 2014 and 2022.

“I will have that settled prior to taking the White House,” he told a rally in the midwestern city of Detroit recently. “As president-elect, I will have that settled.”

The ex-president is highly critical of Washington’s shipments of weapons worth billions of dollars to Kyiv, and of the funding requests from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“It never stops”, he told the Michigan crowd.

Asked in a town hall with Fox News whether he would remain committed to NATO during a second term, he replied: “Depends if they treat us properly.”

Tariffs v. tax cuts

Trump envisages tariffs of “more than 10 percent” on all imports.

US companies — and eventually their customers — pay for import tariffs, not the companies exporting the goods.

Trump insists that the revenue collected will finance a “middle class, upper class, lower class, business class big tax cut.”

Having waged a fierce trade war with China during his first term, he also plans to revoke the Asian giant’s “most favored nation” status, granted to promote trade.

Trump claims he will “stop inflation by stopping the invasion,” arguing that his immigration crackdown will reduce housing costs and other expenses.

Abortion ambiguity

Trump never misses an opportunity to point out that it is partly thanks to him — and his three conservative Supreme Court appointments — that abortion rights have been considerably weakened in the United States.

But he is more ambiguous about the future of access to reproductive health care.

Insisting it should be an issue for the individual states, the Republican has balked at pushing a nationwide abortion ban, a commitment that would win him support from the religious right.

“You must follow your heart on this issue but remember, you must also win elections,” he said in April.

‘Drill, baby, drill!’

Trump slammed the door on the 2015 Paris climate accords during his first term.

If reelected, he said at a rally earlier this month, he “will stop Biden’s wasteful spending and rapidly terminate the green new scam” — a reference to the funding committed by his successor to mitigating climate change.

“I will repeal crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate and we will ‘drill, baby, drill,'” Trump told supporters in Wisconsin, using an old Republican slogan.

“Energy costs will come down very quickly,” he vowed. “In many cases we’ll be cutting your energy costs in half.”

Going after Biden

Trump, who was convicted in May of felony business fraud and faces three further indictments, has baselessly and repeatedly claimed his various prosecutions are a political witch hunt by Democrats.

The Republican has pledged to “appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden.”

No investigation has produced evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden.

He also said he was “absolutely” ready to pardon all the Trump supporters convicted of storming the US Capitol in Washington to prevent Congress from certifying the Republican’s 2020 presidential election defeat to Biden.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)