Good morning.

Barack Obama returned to the scene of past triumphs yesterday to pass the mantle of political history to Kamala Harris amid chants of “Yes, she can!”. The former US president gave the closing speech on night two of the Democratic national convention (DNC) in his home city of Chicago, delivering a withering critique of Donald Trump.

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told delegates. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”

It was another night crackling with energy in the packed arena as America’s first Black president made the case for the nation to elect the first woman and first woman of colour to the Oval Office.

• What was Obama’s best line? “I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible” – a nod to his 2004 convention speech as a relatively lowly Illinois state senator that shot him to fame.

• What did Bernie Sanders focus on? In his speech, Sanders detailed an extensive progressive agenda that he said Democrats must enact if Harris is elected as president, stressing the need to expand healthcare access, reduce the cost of higher education and raise the minimum wage.

Trump attacks Kamala Harris and ‘Marxist left’ in speech to police

Donald Trump pledged to shield police officers from legal accountability if he is re-elected as president after falsely claiming that the US is in the grip of a wave of violent crime that he blamed on the Black Lives Matter movement and people crossing the Mexican border.

Speaking to police officers in Michigan yesterday, the former president sought to pin responsibility for the imagined crisis on his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, whom he characterised as among “Marxist district attorneys” with a record of being anti-police and pro-criminal during her term as the district attorney in San Francisco in the 2000s.

• What is Trump saying privately? According to Stephanie Grisham, the ex-president’s former press secretary who has since said she abhors Trump and spoke at the DNC to excoriate him, Trump has called his supporters “basement dwellers”.