When Fritz Schumacher laid out his vision for Hamburg a century ago, the sketch looked more like a fern than a town plan. Fronds of urban development radiated from the centre to tickle the countryside, bristling with dense rows of housing. The white spaces in between were to be filled with parks and playgrounds.

Schumacher was Hamburg’s chief building officer in the early 20th century, and a pioneer of green cities with widespread access to nature. “Building sites emerge even if you don’t invest in them,” he warned in 1932. “Public spaces disappear if you don’t invest in them.”

Not all of Schumacher’s ideas survived the wartime bombs that blew Hamburg apart, or the rebuilding process, but his schematic of the “natural development of the organism Hamburg” has steered the city down a greener path than its neighbours. Stitched together by a series of green axes and rings, nature reserves make up more of the state of Hamburg than any of the other federal states in Germany – nearly 10%. “We call it Hamburg’s green network,” says Barbara Engelschall of the city’s environment authority.

But even forward-thinking cities such as Hamburg have struggled to break free from the instinct to pave over plants. In 2018, conservation groups petitioned the city to preserve its green space after Olaf Scholz, the centre-left mayor who would go on to become chancellor of the country, pledged to build 10,000 flats in the pricey port each year. The demand attracted 23,000 signatures and led to a rather German solution to nature conservation: a contract.

The authorities signed an agreement with the citizen’s initiative to protect 30% of Hamburg’s land area – 10% as untouchable nature reserves and 20% with a looser conservation status – and ensure the share of public green space in the city rises over time. The city also agreed to increase the biotope value, an index it uses to measure the quality of nature.

And the plan has been successful. A progress report in July found it had risen from 2019 reference values as result of efforts to upgrade grasslands, rewet moorlands and use nature-friendly conservation measures on land owned by city companies.

The contract also contains clauses that mean construction works that hurt nature in one part of town must be compensated for elsewhere. A similar flexibility governs the 20% of the city area under light conservation rules, allowing authorities to build on green areas if they save new ones.

It really is a “big lever” of change, says Malte Siegert, who negotiated the deal on behalf of the local branch of the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (Nabu). He sympathises with calls for more affordable housing and says cities just have to think about where to build it and how to offset its impacts. “It’s a good compromise to say: yes, we will make the city more dense, but then do more to make the remaining green spaces really deliver an ecological service.”

Sophie, an actor who works at Good One Cafe in the Eimsbüttel district, says that the city does a good job of bringing greenery into every neighbourhood. Hamburg ranks highly in quality of life surveys, but she admits that residents are probably not aware of the politics behind what they’re enjoying. “You easily take things for granted when they’re right outside your door.”

The scale of Hamburg’s hurdles varies from district to district. The industrial harbour has the highest levels of cemented surface – though what it lacks in greenery it makes up for in waterways – and deprived inner-city neighbourhoods such as St Georg and St Pauli are also heavy on concrete, though they sit close to parks. The latter is home to a vast anti-aircraft bunker from the second world war that reopened in July as an entertainment centre housing 23,000 plants on its public rooftop garden.

And, speaking from a park in front of the environment authority’s office, surrounded by wild flower meadows thrumming with insects, Engelschall says there are challenges involved in putting the city’s green ideals into practice. Increasing an area’s biodiversity score means first measuring it – a mammoth task that she and her colleagues have been painstakingly working at for years – and understanding the local nuances of how to improve it. Training the city’s time-strapped gardeners and changing the practices of private contractors can also take time.

Bernd-Ulrich Netz, who heads the city’s conservation department, says there is also still a cultural hurdle to overcome which requires a shift in how people relate to nature. “The classic English image of a castle with a green lawn is deep in the minds of many people. They couldn’t imagine a castle with a meadow of flowers in front of it, even though it would be much more beautiful.”

Volunteers have set out to change that in parks across the city. Luisa Schubert, who runs a hands-on ecology project for Hamburg’s city park association, says 160 people have signed up to her newsletter volunteering programme that seeks to foster stronger connections between people and nature. About 25 of them turn up on a given day to sow seeds, rake leaves, and plant shrubs.

“Although it’s work, I think they enjoy it – otherwise they wouldn’t come,” says Schubert. One regular volunteer told her that he comes with his son to replace having a private garden, after having struggled to decide between living in a village or a city. Another recently held up a flower and told Schubert excitedly: “Wildflowers change the world.”

On another day, Schubert was with a group of raucous third-grade pupils who suddenly fell silent upon seeing a dead squirrel. One of the children started a ceremony, she says, and they buried the animal together.

“This is the kind of nature experience that will really influence kids’ lives later on,” says Schubert.

What she hears most often from volunteers is a feeling of purpose, she says. “It’s so important amid this environmental, climate and biodiversity crisis to feel a little sense of fulfilment – like ‘I have done something’, even on a small scale.”

The huge cuts in carbon emissions now needed to end the climate crisis mean it is “crunch time for real”, according to the UN’s environment chief.

An unprecedented global mobilisation of renewable energy, forest protection and other measures is needed to steer the world off the current path towards a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1C, a report from the UN environment programme (Unep) has found. Extreme heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods are already ravaging communities with less than 1.5C of global heating to date.

Current carbon-cutting promises by countries for 2030 are not being met, according to the report, and even if they were met, the temperature rise would only be limited to a still-disastrous 2.6C to 2.8C. There is no more time for “hot air”, the report said, urging nations to act at the Cop29 summit in November.

Keeping the international goal of 1.5C within reach was technically possible, said the report, but it required emissions to fall by 7.5% annually until 2035. That means halting emissions equivalent to those of the EU every year for a decade. Delaying emissions cuts only means steeper reductions would be needed in future.

Unep said countries must collectively commit to cut 42% off annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 57% by 2035 in their next UN pledges, called nationally determined contributions and due in February. Without these pledges, and rapid action to back them up, the 1.5C goal would be gone, the UN said.

However, the head of Unep, Inger Andersen, said it was misguided to fixate only on whether the 1.5C target was kept or not, because every fraction of a degree of global heating avoided would save lives, damage and costs: “Don’t over-focus on a magic number. Keeping temperature as low as possible is where we need to be.”

The finance and technology to slash emissions exists, Andersen said, but “political courage” was needed, particularly from the G20 nations (excluding the African Union) that cause 77% of global emissions.

Andersen said the world’s nations made strong climate promises at the Paris summit in 2015. “Now is the time to live up to that – it’s climate crunch time for real. We need global mobilisation on a scale and pace never seen before, starting right now, or the 1.5C goal will soon be dead and the ‘well below 2C’ target will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

Unep’s last two annual reports highlighted “the closing window” for action and the “broken record” of failed promises. “Now we’re saying, this is it,” she said.

“The irritating thing is technology is there for the grasping, as are the job and economic development opportunities,” Andersen said. “It just takes political courage and some strong leadership.”

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “We’re playing with fire; but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.” He said global heating was supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods, turning forests into tinder boxes and cities into saunas.

“Governments must wean us off our fossil fuel addiction: showing how they will phase them out – fast and fairly,” he said, adding that levies on fossil fuels could help pay for climate action.

The Unep report found that faster rollout of solar and wind energy could provide 27% of the emissions cuts needed. “That’s massive and this is a cheap, proven technology – it’s not a gamble to invest in,” Andersen said.

Stopping the destruction of forests could bring another 20% cut, the report said. Much of the rest could come from energy efficiency and the electrification of buildings, transport and industry, as well as cutting methane emissions from fossil fuel facilities, which Andersen described as “not hard”.

The estimated investment needed to cut emissions to net zero is $1-2tn a year, according to the report, about 1% of the value of the global economy and financial markets. “We’re talking a couple of percentage points that would be incremental in terms of renewal of ageing infrastructure” in developed countries, said Andersen. But developing countries would need finance from rich nations, a topic at the top of the Cop29 agenda.

The global geopolitical situation was difficult, acknowledged Andersen, with conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and tensions between western nations and Russia and China. But she said: “If there is a space where the world has been able to meet, it is really the environment space.”

She cited a recent G20 meeting of environment and climate ministers. “These are not the best friends, all of them, and yet they managed to have a [good] communique.” She said there had been significant green policy shifts in the US, China, Germany, India and Brazil, but a a much greater effort was required.

“The sooner we strike out hard for a low-carbon, sustainable and prosperous future, the sooner we will get there – which will save lives, save money and protect the planetary systems upon which we all depend,” she said.

“World leaders continue to drag their feet, protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry, while people are suffering right now. At Cop29, leaders must respond and act on their fair share of responsibility – especially wealthier nations who have fuelled this crisis for decades,” said Harjeet Singh, at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

This Tuesday, Charlie Kirk brought his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour to the campus of my public university in a Republican-controlled state. It was nothing like the last time Kirk and his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization had visited. Although the different timing matters – this was literally two weeks before election day – the differences between the 2018 and 2024 events in many ways reflect the dangerous radicalization of the US right wing.

In 2018, Kirk had a fairly similar agenda when coming to my university: “exposing leftist lies and progressive propaganda” at US universities. I wrote a column about the rather bland event, describing it as a “rightwing safe space”, in which Kirk railed against the “cultural Marxists”. Most students seemed more amused than aggrieved. How different this week’s event was.

When I came to campus early, I saw them set up their stands. I drank my coffee opposite to a lone female student with a Trump hat – a rare sight even at my university. I then went to teach my course on far-right politics, where TPUSA’s event was the talk of the class. I told my students that I totally understood if they wanted to observe the event – who am I to stand in the way of them getting “de-brainwashed”? – and approximately half of my students indeed left halfway through class to attend the event.

After class, I walked down to Tate Plaza, the open space in front of the student center, and was perplexed by the sight. I saw what looked like a sea of Maga hats on the large open space. I bumped into one of my students, who told me that TPUSA handed out the Maga hats for free, and that he was leaving because you couldn’t hear anything anyway. In the background Kirk was droning on about Kamala Harris, wokeism and his other favorite enemies. But there was something to the meeting, an energy that was lacking six years ago. This was not just a safe space, this was a boisterous and proud rally!

Sure, almost anyone wearing their own Maga hat was older and not related to the university, but a couple hundred students happily accepted and wore the hat. Moreover, most kept them on when they left the rally, and went to the food court, to class or even downtown. Turns out that a hat that is the most recognizable symbol of support for a man that has been loudly and openly authoritarian and racist in the last months is a rather cool gimmick for privileged young white men.

There are important broader lessons to be drawn from the differences between these two TPUSA events. First, the 2024 meeting shows the radicalization of conservative America. While Turning Point was already supportive of Trump in 2018, it still had a largely independent program, ostensibly focused on traditional conservative values as small government and capitalism. In the past years, Kirk has not only fully embraced the authoritarian and nativist agenda of Trump, he and his organization have pivoted to full-on Christian nationalism.

Second, Turning Point USA targets college and high school students, that is, those 21 and under. These kids and young adults have been socialized in a world in which 1 Trump is a former president; 2 the Republican party is the party of Trump; and 3 the US Capitol got stormed by Trump sympathizers. For those raised in Republican households, which means most of the students at my university, this means that Trump and the far right are completely normal. What we see as far right, they see as mainstream conservatism. They have no conception of the Republican party of George Bush Sr or Jr.

Third, radicalized organizations like TPUSA have overtaken the role of mainstream conservative organizations such as the College Republicans, not just on campus but also as training grounds for the next “conservative” elite. Kirk has literally been training the cadres for the next Trump administration, should it happen. This is a very different kind of “Republican”, if they are Republicans at all. They are more assertive and extremist but less tied to traditional conservative organizations, including the Republican party.

Fourth, and most optimistically, the sea of Maga hats also gave me a shimmer of hope for the upcoming election. Since Trump’s shock 2016 win, the media has obsessed about “shy Trump supporters”, that is, people who support Trump in the elections but do not say so in polls because of social desirability. Although empirical evidence has always been weak, the “shy Trump voter” never disappeared from the public debate. Seeing these students wear the Maga hats, not for fun or provocation, but as a “normal” expression of support for the “conservative” candidate in the presidential election, confirmed my suspicion that there are no “shy Trumpers” left in 2024.

And, if this is true, there might still be hope, in the sense that the current polls are overrepresenting the Trump vote, because they are overcompensating for a dated phenomenon, the shy Trump voter, yet another victim of the normalization of Trump.

• Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today

Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.

Either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, more than 1.9 million voters have cast early votes in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Democrat Joe Biden, while North Carolina also set a new record of more than 1.7m despite the chaos caused by Hurricane Helene last month.

At an event in Georgia, Trump celebrated the state’s record-breaking vote levels, and at a separate rally urged his supporters to “just vote – whichever way you want to do it.”

Here’s what else happened on Wednesday:

Donald Trump election news

• A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men. The Trump campaign called the allegations by Stacey Williams “unequivocally false”, calling it a fake story “contrived by the Harris campaign”.

• Trump appeared in Zebulon, Georgia, with lieutenant governor and 2020 election denier Burt Jones, at a faith-focused event his campaign dubbed a “Believers and Ballots town hall”. Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk, for providing hurricane relief where he claimed the federal government did not.

• Trump stayed in Georgia for a rally in Duluth with guests Tucker Carlson, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. He escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris, saying she was “crazy” and inviting voters to tell his opponent: “‘You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.’”

• The US justice department warned Musk’s Super Pac that the billionaire and Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports. Musk, who has thrown his support behind Trump, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.

• Writing on Truth Social, Trump assailed John Kelly as a “a bad general” gripped by “pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, on Tuesday said he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. Two retired army officers said they agreed with Kelly, while Republicans including the governor of New Hampshire dismissed the comments.

Kamala Harris election news

• Kamala Harris denounced Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to him. In a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, the Democratic nominee jumped on Kelly’s claims. Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the president also agreed with those calling Trump a fascist.

• Harris repeated the fascist claim during a televised town hall with undecided voters in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In response to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asking her: “Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?”, Harris answered: “Yes, I do.” Trump was invited to attend the same town hall but declined.

• Harris’s campaign announced she will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021.

• Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz voted early along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus. Leaving the voting booth in St Paul, Minnesota, Walz said his vote was “an opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward”.

• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, rallied Democrats in Florida, marking a break from his recent stumping in more competitive states including Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both parties expect the Sunshine state to once more swing for Trump, but the Harris campaign’s rare foray drew attention to the close Senate race between the Republican incumbent and Democratic challenger.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• The Los Angeles Times opinion editor resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the masthead from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Mariel Garza said she was standing up against the decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner. In a social media post, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House”.

• China-linked social media bots are targeting Republicans including Marco Rubio, according to new research from Microsoft, while a senior US intelligence official said groups in Russia created and helped spread viral disinformation targeting Tim Walz.

• Pennsylvania’s highest court allowed people whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to cast provisional ballots, likely affecting thousands of early voters. The decision was another defeat for the Republican National Committee’s legal campaign, after it argued some provisional ballots cast during the April primary should have been rejected.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

Biodiversity is declining more quickly within key protected areas than outside them, according to research that scientists say is a “wake-up call” to global leaders discussing how to stop nature loss at the UN’s Cop16 talks in Colombia.

Protecting 30% of land and water for nature by 2030 was one of the key targets settled on by world leaders in a landmark 2022 agreement to save nature – and this month leaders are gathering again at a summit in the Colombian city of Cali to measure progress and negotiate new agreements to stop biodiversity loss.

However, simply designating more areas as protected “will not automatically result in better outcomes for biodiversity”, researchers warn, in the latest study to challenge the effectiveness of conservation practices.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s most biodiversity-rich land is within protected areas, but the quality of these areas is declining faster than it is outside protected areas, according to the analysis by the Natural History Museum (NHM).

Researchers looked at a Biodiversity Intactness Index, which scores biodiversity health as a percentage in response to human pressures. The report found the index declined by 1.88 percentage points globally between 2000 and 2020. It then focused on the critical biodiversity areas that provide 90% of nature’s contributions to humanity, 22% of which is protected.

The study found that within those critical areas that were not protected, biodiversity had declined by an average of 1.9 percentage points between 2000 and 2020, and within the areas that were protected it had declined by 2.1 percentage points.

The authors say there are a few reasons why this might be the case. A lot of protected areas are not designed to preserve the whole ecosystem, but rather certain species that are of interest, which means total “biodiversity intactness” is not a priority.

Another reason is that these landscapes could have already been suffering degradation, which is why they were protected in the first place. Researchers say specific local analysis is key to working out why each one is failing.

Dr Gareth Thomas, head of research innovation at NHM, said: “The 30×30 target has received so much attention – as it should do – and has become a key target people talk about at UN biodiversity talks, but we wanted to understand if it was really fit for purpose.

“I think if you asked most people they would assume an area designated as ‘protected’ would at the very least do exactly that: protect nature. But this research showed that wasn’t the case.”

The amount of land protected for nature stands at 17.5% of land and 8.4% of marine areas – an increase of about half a percentage point each since Cop15 in 2022. This will need to increase substantially by 2030 to meet the target.

But for many of those areas, the “protections in place are not stringent enough”, said Thomas.

“Countries need to continue their focus on 30×30, that shouldn’t waver. They just need to bring more into it, and pay more attention to actually conserving the land which provides those ecosystem services,” he said.

Oil, gas and mining concessions threaten key areas for biodiversity, as well as Indigenous territories. For example Conkouati-Douli national park is one of the most biodiverse protected areas in the Republic of the Congo – yet more than 65% of the park is covered by oil and gas concessions, according to a new report by Earth Insight.

In the Amazon, Congo basin and south-east Asia, at least 254,000 sq km (98,000 sq miles) of protected areas are threatened by oil and gas exploration. More than 300,000 sq km of Indigenous territories in the Amazon overlap with oil and gas concessions, the report has found.

Recent research from the University of New South Wales in Sydney looked at forested land in 300,000 of the world’s protected areas and found the policy was almost “completely ineffective” in many biodiversity-rich countries, including Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, Venezuela and Madagascar.

Corruption, political instability and a lack of resources were key reasons why conservation laws were not implemented.

Protected areas are also being threatened by the effects of the climate crisis: wildfires and droughts do not respect their boundaries. Australia, for example, used to have a strong record of protecting nature in its national parks but in 2019, many were destroyed by fire.

Emma Woods, director of policy at the Natural History Museum, said: “We urgently need to move beyond the current approach of simply designating more protected areas to 30×30. Our analysis reinforces the view that this will not automatically result in better outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystems.”

Thomas said he hoped the study’s findings would be “a wake-up call” to policymakers and enforcers of the legislation that it was not enough just to designate an area as protected. “The ministers and policymakers need to know it is not about just hitting a number,” he said.

Ben Groom, professor of biodiversity economics at Exeter University, who was not involved in the research, said it was “extremely positive” that there was support for 30×30 but “there was always a chance that this would manifest in shallow policy implementation in the form of cost-minimising attainment of the 30×30 target, rather than focusing on quality.”

Donald Trump escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris at a Wednesday evening rally in Georgia as he faces growing scrutiny over reports of his praise of Hitler and alleged sexual misconduct.

“This woman is crazy,” the former president said at an event in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, hosted by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group. He said voters should stand up to the vice-president and tell her: “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”, later adding: “She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.”

The rally, less than two weeks before election day, came after the Guardian published an interview with a former model who accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in 1993 after notorious sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein introduced them, an allegation the Trump campaign denied. Stacey Williams said it felt as if the unwanted touching was part of a “twisted game” between the two men and that it appeared Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

Williams’s account put the spotlight back on the roughly two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct throughout his career. Harris, campaigning with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has sought to encourage Republican women to support the Democrat.

The Georgia rally also came after Harris’s surprise speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, when she denounced the former president as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, told the New York Times this week that he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. He also said Trump repeatedly commented: “Hitler did some good things, too.”

In a characteristically rambling speech, Trump went on meandering tangents about Google (“Google is treating us much better. Do you notice that? What happened to Google?”); McDonald’s (“McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that [Google] ever had”); Emmanuel Macron (“I stopped wars with France”); Richard Nixon (“That was not good when they found out he taped every single conversation”); and the vice-president’s name (“You can’t call her ‘Harris’ because nobody knows who the hell you’re talking about”).

He threatened to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes, repeating false claims that the station manipulated Harris’s interview after Trump backed out of his planned interview with the program. He reiterated the threat a second time about an hour later in his speech.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, former independent presidential candidate, also rallied for Trump in Georgia, calling Kelly a “known liar”. Trump did not address Kelly at the rally, but on Truth Social called his former chief of staff a “LOWLIFE” and “total degenerate”.

In a “faith-focused” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia earlier on Wednesday, Trump praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has been condemned for undermining democratic institutions and aligning with Moscow and Beijing.

Asked about his faith, Trump responded: “When you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that.” He went on to falsely suggest he has endured more investigations than notorious gangster Al Capone.

A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.

Stacey Williams, who worked as a professional model in the 1990s, said she first met Trump in 1992 at a Christmas party after being introduced to him by Epstein, who she believed was a good friend of the then New York real estate developer. Williams said Epstein was interested in her and the two casually dated for a period of a few months.

“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said.

The alleged groping occurred some months later, in the late winter or early spring of 1993, when Epstein suggested during a walk they were on that he and Williams stop by to visit Trump at Trump Tower. Epstein was later convicted on sex offenses and killed himself in prison in 2019.

Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other.

Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary for Donald Trump’s campaign, provided a statement denying the allegations, which said in part: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

Williams says that Trump sent her agent a postcard via courier later in 1993, an aerial view of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach residence and resort. She shared it with the Guardian. In his handwriting – using what appears to be his usual black Sharpie – he wrote: “Stacey – Your home away from home. Love Donald”.

Williams, who is 56 and a native of Pennsylvania, has shared parts of her allegation on social media posts in the past, but revealed details about the alleged encounter on a call on Monday organized by a group called Survivors for Kamala, which supports Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The Zoom call featured actor Ashley Judd and law professor and academic Anita Hill, among others. Survivors for Kamala also took out an ad in the New York Times this week, signed by 200 survivors of sexual and gender violence, which was meant to serve as a reminder that Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse in a court.

After the alleged incident, Williams said that she and Epstein left Trump Tower, and that she began to feel Epstein growing angry at her.

“Jeffrey and I left and he didn’t look at me or speak to me and I felt this seething rage around me, and when we got down to the sidewalk, he looked at me and just berated me, and said: Why did you do that?” she said on the Zoom call.

“He made me feel so disgusting and I remember being so utterly confused,” she said.

She described how the alleged incident seemed to her to be part of a “twisted game”.

“I felt shame and disgust and as we went our separate ways, I felt this sensation of revisiting it, while the hands were all over me. And I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated. I felt like a piece of meat,” she said in an interview with the Guardian.

She and Epstein parted ways soon after. Williams said she never had any knowledge of his pattern of sexual abuse, which would later become known. Epstein is now considered one of the worst and most prolific pedophiles in modern history.

The allegation of groping and unwanted sexual touching follows a well-documented pattern of behavior by Trump.

About two dozen women have accused the former president, who has been convicted of multiple felonies, of sexual misconduct dating back decades. The allegations have included claims of Trump kissing them without their consent, reaching under their skirts, and, in the case of some beauty pageant contestants, walking in on them in the changing room.

A former model named Amy Dorris shared allegations about Trump similar to what Williams described in an interview with the Guardian in 2020. Trump denied ever having harassed, abused or behaved improperly toward Dorris.

Last year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996 and awarded her $5m in a judgment.

Williams’ allegations raise new questions about Trump’s relationship with Epstein.

No evidence has surfaced that Trump was aware of or involved in Epstein’s misconduct.

But Trump and Epstein knew each other for decades and were photographed at the same social events in the 1990s and early 2000s, years before Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “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.”

After Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Trump told journalists in the Oval Office that he “knew him, like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” but that he had a “falling out” with Epstein in the early 2000s.

“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” Trump said. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

Asked whether she had considered coming forward in the past, as other women were making allegations against Trump, Williams said she was a person who wanted to avoid negative attention or risk the backlash many other survivors have faced.

“I left the business,” she said. “I disappeared on purpose because I love being anonymous and I love my life of being a private citizen. Then I watched what has happened to women who come out and it is so horrifying and abusive. The thought of doing that, especially as a mother with a child in my house, was just not possible,” she told the Guardian.

“I just chose in my own way – comments on social media to contradict people who said he didn’t do anything,” she said.

Like other survivors, she said, she has processed what happened to her and became more confident about facing an angry backlash, she said.

Williams spoke about the allegations to at least two friends who spoke to the Guardian. One friend, who asked not to be named, said Williams told her about the alleged incident in 2005 or 2006 during a conversation in which Williams mentioned knowing Epstein, and how he had introduced her to Trump. The friend specifically remembers Williams telling her that she had been groped by Trump. Epstein was not a household name at the time, but the friend would later recall the anecdote when the Epstein scandal erupted.

“What I recall is that it was groping … what we would call feeling someone up,” the friend said.

Ally Gutwillinger, another longtime friend, said Williams told her about the alleged incident in 2015. Gutwillinger remembers the timing because Trump had announced that he was running for president.

“I went to her house sometime in that week and I saw a postcard of Mar-a-Lago and I said: ‘What’s this?’ and she said ‘Turn it over,’” Gutwillinger said. “She said something like: ‘He’s vile, he groped me in Trump Tower.’”

Kamala Harris has denounced Donald Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to himself after allegations emerged about the former president’s repeatedly-voiced admiration for Hitler.

On Wednesday, the vice-president gave a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, doing so in the aftermath of reports that John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, recalled how Trump lamented not having generals who swore loyalty to him in the same manner as military commanders served Hitler in Nazi Germany.

“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in,” Harris said.

Harris said that the remarks relayed by Kelly showed that Trump “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States constitution”.

“He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States,” she said.

Posing the question as a stark choice for US voters going to the polls for the presidential election on 5 November, she added: “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be what do the American people want.”

Harris’s address came after she had spent more than a week highlighting Trump’s earlier branding of his political opponents as “the enemy within” and demands for the military to be deployed those who cause election “chaos”.

In on-the-record taped conversations with the New York Times, Kelly – who was White House chief of staff for 18 months during Trump’s presidency – said his former boss repeatedly praised Hitler, even when contradicted, and fitted the dictionary definition of a fascist.

“He commented more than once that: ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” said Kelly, who also said that Trump would rule as a dictator if elected again.

Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, made similar remarks in an interview with the Atlantic.

Referencing the various reporting, Harris said: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best.”

She added: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, certainly falls into the general definition of fascists, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”

It was the second time in a week that Harris had, in effect, labelled the Republican nominee a fascist. Last week, she answered affirmatively when a Detroit radio interviewer who asked if Trump’s vision amounted to fascism – although she did not utter the word directly.

Trump’s spokesperson has denied Kelly’s claims that Trump said this, calling it “absolutely false”.

Harris’s remarks on Wednesday were the clearest sign yet that she had changed tactics from a previous approach initially adopted after becoming her party’s nominee, when she and her surrogates attempted to play down and belittle Trump. In one example, by mocking his obsession with crowd sizes at his rallies.

Theories abound as to what Harris could do to turn voters away from Trump’s appeal, which has centered on vows to lower prices that rose during Joe Biden’s presidency and throw immigrants out of the country.

In an interview earlier today on CNN, the noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that the very sort of message Harris pushed this afternoon was not working.

“What’s interesting is that [when] Harris focused on why she should be elected president, that’s when the numbers grew,” Luntz said.

“And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused onto him and said, don’t vote for me, vote against him, that’s when everything froze.”

Kelly’s characterisation of Trump as a fascist echoes that of Gen Mark Milley, the retired former chair of the armed services joint chiefs of staff. Milley, who Trump has said should be executed, is quoted by the journalist Bob Woodward in a recently published book as calling Trump “a total fascist” and “fascist to the core”.

Later on Wednesday, it was reported that Harris told NBC News that she was preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump will declare victory before the election is complete, saying: “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that.”

Also, at the White House daily media briefing, the press secretary. Karine Jean-Pierre, acknowledged that Biden agreed with those who say Trump is a fascist.

“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre replied, when a reporter put the question to her in the White House briefing room. She went on to argue that Trump himself has made no secret of how he would like to govern, saying: “The former president has said he is going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that … we cannot ignore or forget what happened on January 6 2021.”

Cecilia Nowell contributed reporting