The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Editorial Board Member
We have a Veepstakes winner! Or, given the misery that tends to befall folks who snuggle up to Donald Trump, maybe a loser.
Either way, the MAGA king has just announced Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his next apprentice. Which is great news for those who like their V.P. candidate to look like a Civil War re-enactor — and to hold political positions that feel very 19th century. So the MAGA faithful should be over the moon with this pick.
For everyone else, there is plenty to dislike. Vance’s economic populism makes many in the business wing of the G.O.P. twitchy. His foreign policy isolationism discomfits interventionists in both parties. His cheerleading for draconian abortion restrictions should freak out anyone who values bodily autonomy for women. And his enthusiastic peddling of election fraud lies and his flirtation with the Great Replacement theory are an absolute disgrace.
Vance’s selection also reaffirms Trump’s lack of interest in reaching beyond his base. The Republican Party has a solid farm team. Trump could easily have picked a running mate who at least made it look as though he were keen to woo, say, suburban women or Latinos or young Black men.
But why bother? Having survived an attempt on his life, Trump is feeling buoyant and clearly saw no reason to venture beyond his political comfort zone of conservative white guys with proven bootlicking skills, a taste for trolling the libs and a fat streak of political opportunism.
Vance knows how to shape-shift to suit the moment. Already we have seen him morph from a passionate “never Trump guy” in 2016 to a passionate Trump suck-up by the time of his Senate run in 2022. This flexibility apparently applies to issues as well, as evidenced by the announcement from the fiercely anti-abortion senator that he’s cool with abortion pills — a stance that neatly aligns with Trump’s new push to paint himself as more moderate on women’s reproductive rights. (Psst: Don’t fall for it, ladies.)
Vance isn’t dazzling on the trail. But he is good on TV, which is what really matters to Trump. His “Hillbilly Elegy” background and experience in the Marines will play well with “everyday Americans.”
As for potential friction with his new boss: Vance is way younger and smarter than Trump, and breathtakingly ambitious. It’s easy to imagine this causing Trump to sour on him down the road, should the two be elected — and maybe even turn the MAGA troops against Vance. But, hey, Trump’s last V.P. made it through his tour of duty in one piece. What’s the worst that could happen?
Opinion Columnist
The conservative legal movement has long prided itself on following the text of the Constitution and federal statutes. Originalism and textualism are both legal philosophies that prize the plain language of the words on the page. Any other approach has been derided as “living constitutionalism,” a philosophy that makes the law subject to the judge’s own preferences.
Yet we’re now seeing conservative judges issue rulings that seem to defy the text. Judge Aileen Cannon’s lengthy opinion dismissing the special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Donald Trump is yet another example of this disturbing trend. Her ruling contradicts the clear language of the Constitution and the relevant statutes.
The basic legal framework of the case is simple to explain — the appointments clause of the Constitution vests in the president the power to appoint “officers of the United States,” but it also provides that Congress can vest the appointment of “inferior officers” in “heads of departments.” Trump’s team claims that Congress never vested the attorney general with the power to appoint Smith.
Federal law and Supreme Court precedent make that claim questionable. For example, federal law authorizes the attorney general to retain a “special assistant to the attorney general or special attorney” and also empowers the attorney general to “appoint officials” to “detect and prosecute crimes against the United States.” In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court cited those statutory provisions and declared that Congress had given the attorney general “the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties.”
Even though Judge Cannon accepted Smith’s argument that he is an “inferior officer,” she still held that his appointment violated the appointments clause. The opinion is a long exercise in the use of structural and historical arguments to argue that the words in the Constitution, case law and the relevant statutes do not quite mean what they seem to so clearly say.
Her ruling is mistaken, but it is not frivolous. There isn’t a specific special counsel statute within the federal code. In cases such as Trump v. Anderson (which blocked Colorado’s attempt to remove Trump from the ballot) and Trump v. United States (which granted him sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts), the Supreme Court used structural concerns about the balance of power between the states and federal government, or between Congress and the president, to issue rulings at odds with the actual constitutional text.
The Supreme Court and the lower courts should consider the constitutional structure of our government when rendering their rulings, but when both the Constitution and the relevant statutes speak clearly, the judge’s role is to apply the text, not to engage in linguistic and historical gymnastics to explain it away.
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Editorial Board Member
It’s starting to seem as though there is no legal mechanism in American government — no matter the charge, the prosecutor or the venue — that can hold Donald Trump accountable for crimes he is charged with committing.
On Monday morning, the federal judge overseeing his classified-documents prosecution — widely agreed to be the most open-and-shut of the many indictments against him — dismissed all charges on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in charge, had been appointed in violation of the Constitution.
Her argument was that there is no federal law authorizing the appointment of a special counsel, even though appointments like Smith’s have been made by presidents of both parties going back decades — including the Trump Justice Department’s appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate ties between Trump and Russia — and have been upheld in court.
It was a stunning, conveniently timed ruling from a judge who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his tenure and who has almost without exception ruled in his favor at every point of this prosecution — usually accompanied by lengthy delays and reasoning so inscrutable that even conservative appeals court judges have reversed her.
In this case, however, Cannon had one particularly influential voice in her corner: Justice Clarence Thomas, who suggested that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional in the Supreme Court’s decision this month to immunize Trump and all future presidents for virtually all their “official” acts, no matter how criminal.
“If there is no law establishing the office that the special counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution,” Thomas wrote, in a brief concurrence joined by none of the other justices. (Arguably, he should have recused himself from that case, because of his wife’s advocacy.) And here you thought the immunity ruling couldn’t do any more damage than it already has.
Smith’s team will surely appeal the dismissal, and they have the much stronger case, based on precedents in the lower courts and the Supreme Court like Morrison v. Olson. That ruling upheld a law allowing for the appointment of prosecutors far more independent than Smith, who remains directly answerable to the attorney general. But the issue will eventually wind up before the Supreme Court, where Thomas’s voice could hold more sway.
If the Justice Department prevails as it should, it can do what it should have done long ago — seek to have the case reassigned to another judge, one who understands how the law works (or used to).
Of course, if Trump wins in November, he will eighty-six the entire prosecution, and Smith himself, whitewashing Trump’s federal rap sheet and making it easier for him to purloin as many classified documents as he pleases.
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Milwaukee
Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally Saturday will probably fundamentally change the messaging and direction of the presidential campaign and enhance Trump’s standing, at least in the near term.
As we prepare for the Republican National Convention, which opens here in Milwaukee on Monday, here are several possible effects of the shooting:
The image: Trump’s instinct to raise his clenched fist, with blood streaking across his face, and to repeatedly shout the word “fight” from the stage, just seconds after he was injured, was gold for his campaign. It created an indelible image and captured the essence of Trump’s MAGA movement: under attack but defiant, bloody but unbowed.
As a person who spent the first part of my career as a graphic designer and art director, I immediately saw the visual power and nearly infinite graphic possibilities of this image. The raised, clenched fist has a long history in propagandistic imagery as a symbol of resistance and revolution in Western popular culture, dating back at least to the French Revolution of 1848 as depicted in Honoré Daumier’s circa 1860 painting The Uprising.
Victimization: Trump has spent much of his time in presidential politics concocting a narrative of victimization, insisting that he and his movement were under attack and needed to fight back to save “our country.” He, and his supporters who were killed and injured, can now portray themselves as legitimate victims.
Neutralizing criticism: Becoming victims makes it easier for members of the right to neutralize discussion about the violence of Jan. 6 for the remainder of the campaign. Even the issue of gun control will probably not resonate. Rather than seeing this as evidence that we should restrict gun access, Republicans will try to justify owning more guns to defend themselves from political violence.
The legend: Years ago, Trump had already become a folk hero among his supporters for fighting the establishment. Another common feature among many folk heroes is that they evade or survive capture, punishment or death. By surviving this attempt on his life, Trump’s legend only grows among his faithful.
Outreach to Black voters: It will be interesting to see how this incident fits into the campaign’s attempts to reach out to Black voters. Trump has already suggested that his indictments created a sort of kinship with Black people who have been unfairly treated by the criminal justice system. Black people have also been subjected to unimaginable violence in this country, and many Black leaders have been assassinated.
The rapper 50 Cent, who said last month that Black men identify with Trump, rose to fame on the fact that he had been shot nine times and survived. Soon after the attempt on Trump’s life, the rapper was trending on social media.
Empathy: Many voters have never found Trump a particularly sympathetic figure, but it is natural to empathize with a person who endures such an event, even if you disagree with the person’s politics. That may allow some voters to set aside legitimate worries about the destructive potential of a second Trump term.
The past few weeks have completely changed the race. Liberals have weakened Biden by painting him as feeble and impaired, while this shooting has most likely lifted Trump by making him seem resilient and defiant.
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Opinion Columnist
In the aftermath of what appears to have been an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Republicans are accusing the news media of creating an atmosphere that made violence all but inevitable. One widely circulating proof point in this argument is the June cover of The New Republic, which depicts Trump with a Hitler mustache above the headline that declares “American fascism” in red type redolent of the Third Reich.
I’m always hesitant to engage in the game of who started it — that is a question for squabbling children. And yet we would do well to remember that the language of apocalyptic violence has been Trump’s signature throughout his career, long before he descended that golden escalator to declare that rapists from Mexico were invading our country.
From the earliest days of his presidential candidacy, the news media tried in a variety of ways to navigate his norm-busting political statements. I’ve spent some time thinking about Arianna Huffington’s decision in 2015 to consign candidate Trump to the entertainment section of her news site, The Huffington Post.
“Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” wrote Ryan Grim, who was then the site’s Washington bureau chief. “We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”
At the time, and after I took over as Huffington’s successor in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, I had a sense of smug certainty that I would never have made such a decision. But given all that has happened since, I have come to think of it differently.
Perhaps it was a prescient if imperfect choice: a failed attempt to cordon off an ugly strain of political talk, safely in the world of paranoid, conspiracy-laden entertainment. Trump was a reality television star. And this was, after all, the time of the Shonda Rhimes TV melodrama “Scandal,” about dastardly Republicans, and “House of Cards,” David Fincher’s soapy saga about diabolical Democrats. Over time I have come to understand the decision as a warning, and a cry for help.
It is worth remembering that the conspiratorial and diabolical cast of mind knows no party, even if it has surfaced more frequently and violently in history on the right. We will spend many years trying to figure out how we got here, and who is to blame. But the urgent business of this moment is finding a path out of this madness.
Opinion Columnist
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” William Butler Yeats wrote these words in his poem “The Second Coming” in a different time of violence and fear. The year was 1919, Europe was still reeling from World War I, a deadly influenza pandemic was sweeping through the world, and the Irish war of independence was underway. Yeats was writing from the heart of a storm, a storm that would grow indescribably worse in 20 short years.
I think of Yeats’s words often. By “center,” he’s referring not to some kind of moderate political middle but rather to the moral center of civilization. When the moral center gives way, nations fall.
I thought of those words again when I saw the blood on Donald Trump’s ear on Saturday. Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’s words, the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed in our land.
The cultural conditions for chaos are created by a lack of courage and character. Yeats lamented that the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And already, we’ve seen the passionate intensity of the worst on display. Members of one extreme faction have claimed the shooting was an elaborate ploy to generate sympathy for Trump. At the same time, members of the opposing extreme faction have attempted to claim that President Biden is responsible for the attack.
How does the center hold? Democrats and independents must stand in solidarity with Republicans, grieving for the dead, praying for the wounded and giving thanks that Trump survived with only a minor wound. Virtually every leading Democrat has condemned the violence with a loud voice, and Biden has both condemned the violence and spoken to Trump directly.
All of this is good and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Each of us has our own role to play, in our own circles of influence, either big or small. There has rarely been a better time to love our enemies, to pray for our nation and to remember — during one of the most fraught political campaigns in generations — that each and every one of us is a human being, created in the image of God.
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Opinion Columnist
I always watch Donald Trump rallies if I can. I was watching the one Saturday night in Butler, Pa., on Fox News, waiting for the former president to come on. But after an hour of waiting, I had to leave to meet my sister, Peggy, for dinner.
As soon as we sat down, we heard the shocking news about the assassination attempt on Trump, and we ran out of the restaurant and went back to see that horrific, bloody two minutes and 30 seconds being replayed over and over on every cable channel.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
My sister heard that sound before, on June 5, 1968, but it was louder, because she heard it inside a ballroom. She was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
She had just moved from Washington to California that May for a job at the American Hospital Supply Corp. A woman she worked with had befriended her because Peggy knew no one in Los Angeles. The woman’s husband was an electrician at the Ambassador Hotel.
He had called his wife to say, “Bobby Kennedy is going to make a speech at the hotel tonight. A lot of people are coming to see him. Why don’t you both drive down here, and we can have a drink after?”
Kennedy had challenged President Lyndon Johnson, running on a platform critical of the Vietnam War. Then in March, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. Kennedy was left competing against Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. When Kennedy went to the Ambassador that night, he was on a high. A few hours before, he won the California and South Dakota primaries.
Peggy loved John F. Kennedy — she was in the crowd at his inaugural — and was devastated when he was assassinated in 1963. She was excited as she squeezed into the back of the ballroom to hear her hero’s brother Bobby Kennedy, who wrapped up his speech at about midnight, happily saying, “So my thanks to all of you, and on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”
A few minutes later, she heard the same firecracker noise: Pop. Pop. Pop.
“After we heard the gunshots, there was total chaos, people screaming and crying,” Peggy recalled. The crowd pushed toward the kitchen hallway, where Kennedy had been shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian.
Kennedy was leaving through the kitchen; he was felled next to a tray stacker and an ice machine.
“People were screaming, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, just like his brother!’” Peggy said. “We saw them take the body away. I was thinking, ‘How could this happen to one family, the same thing?’ It was surreal.”
Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital 25 hours later.
His only security had consisted of a former F.B.I. agent, William Barry, and two unofficial bodyguards, his friends Rosey Grier, a retired football player, and Rafer Johnson, an Olympic decathlon gold medalist.
Grier and another friend of Kennedy’s, the writer George Plimpton, were the ones who tried to wrestle the gun from Sirhan as he kept shooting and wounding people. Ethel Kennedy, visibly pregnant, was leaning over her husband, asking bystanders to give him air.
This was the tragic event that caused the Secret Service to provide protection for presidential candidates. Agents of the service were there Saturday evening surrounding Trump after a sniper climbed a roof and shot a rifle at him.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
Acts of political violence are intended to shed blood, but they are often more than that. Some are explosions of rage or hatred; some, like the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, are the product of mental illness. But the precise motive is usually remembered less than the collective sense that the fabric of civilization has again been torn.
We know nothing yet of the motive or background of the shooter who fired at Donald Trump on Saturday — and who killed a member of the audience at Trump’s rally — but the gun took direct aim at the American political process. As President Biden said not long afterward, anyone should have the right to attend a political rally without fear of bullets. Trump should be able to go anywhere in this country and spread his message without worrying about being attacked. But instead of an election in which ideas and personalities can compete with one another, the shots substitute chaos, panic and profound doubt about whether politics is worth it.
Those of us who lived through the political assassinations of the 1960s and who covered domestic and international terrorism in the decades that followed can’t forget the sense of despair that followed each gunshot and explosion. Whether they intend to or not, those who perpetrate these acts send a warning that no leader is safe, that politics is useless and that the only true power lies in personal acts of bloodshed.
That’s why it’s crucial that elected leaders of all ideologies stand up for the American political system, now, while it looks fragile. It’s vital that this election campaign continue its course. It’s vital that all political candidates spend as much time as possible with voters. And — assuming that this was the act of one person — it’s vital that no Republican or Democratic politicians blame the other party, its leaders, the government or even sharp political language for this horrific event. Scores of politicians have already said there is no place for violence, but they also need to say there is no place for using someone else’s violence to foment greater division through misinformation and attributing false motives.
Normal political criticism of Trump or Biden or any other candidate for office is not the cause of assassination attempts, and one shooter’s eruption should not be allowed to reshape American politics or the national conversation about this country’s priorities.
There’s no doubt that conversation has veered to extremes this year. The anger pervading so much political debate sometimes feels like gas fumes in danger of being sparked. But it’s worth remembering that all those historical moments of despair eventually dissipated, and civilization healed. The country has always proved too strong to be shattered, and it will continue to do so as long as its leaders and its people support its foundation.
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Editorial Board Member
Last month, Russian prosecutors finally brought the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to trial on charges of espionage, after holding him for almost 15 months in Moscow. After a brief closed-door session in Yekaterinburg, the trial was postponed to Aug. 13.
The charge against Gershkovich is ludicrous: He is accused of spying on Uralvagonzavod, a massive research and industrial complex that makes tanks and has been around since Stalin’s day. The real reason he was seized is as a hostage to swap for some Russian held abroad and as a warning to all Western reporters — or visitors, for that matter — that Russia is not a safe place to be in.
That point is being driven home, to foreigners and Russians, on an extraordinary scale these days. A sampling of Vladimir Putin & Co.’s repressive activities since Gershkovich’s brief appearance in court, culled from the independent Russian media site Meduza (working, like other survivors of a once lively independent information landscape, from self-imposed exile) include:
A ban on 81 European Union media outlets, including Der Spiegel and Politico, for “systematically disseminating false information about the progress of the special military operation.” That, of course, is the only legal way to refer to the invasion that has been spreading death and devastation across Ukraine for 870 days as of Friday. The ban was purportedly in retaliation for a new E.U. ban against four Russian propaganda outlets.
An arrest warrant issued on Tuesday for Yulia Navalnaya — the widow of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in February — on a charge of participating in an “extremist organization.” That would be his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which amassed considerable and credible evidence of corruption by and around Putin.
A declaration on Wednesday by the Russian prosecutor general’s office that The Moscow Times an “undesirable organization” — the next step up after being declared a “foreign agent.” The paper is now an English-language online publication produced outside Russia, but the designation would jeopardize anyone in Russia sharing information with it.
That The Moscow Times is “undesirable” to Putin is self-evident, since it reports accurately about his regime and its war. But for me and many other foreigners who lived and worked in Russia in the 1990s, a daily, U.S.-style newspaper, whose reporters and editors included both expats and Russians, was a sign of the modicum of freedom that blossomed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and raised such great expectations.
All that has been replaced by a drumbeat of trials, bans and charges that seem to feed on themselves, much as Stalin’s purges took on a terrible life of their own as people turned on one another to survive. It begins with a need to prevent any questioning or criticism of the criminal “special military operation,” and then it metastasizes until anything that might displease Putin and his ex-K.G.B. cohort becomes an enemy to be crushed.
Opinion Editorial Assistant
New York’s heat wave continues. Much of the city is likely spending the time in the climate-controlled indoors, but one group of people that stays outside — and sweats — is delivery workers.
It’s hopefully well understood that ordering delivery in winter means that a driver, most likely an immigrant on a bike or scooter, will brave ice and windchill to bring GrubHub or UberEats. In the summer the same person overheats and dehydrates so others don’t have to walk a few blocks for pizza. Cross-country packages aside, most local delivery is that: Someone else goes outside so that others don’t have to.
This is, on one level, fine. Delivering is a respectable job, it’s essential for those with limited mobility and it’s increasingly an avenue for migrants without work authorizations to support their families. But as climate change results in more inclement weather, designating a proxy to face the increasing health risks of procuring bubble tea on a sweltering day reeks of classism. It calls to mind the old practice of paying a substitute to be drafted into the Civil War, leaving the acute dangers of the battlefield to the poor.
A solution here is difficult, both because a significant reduction in deliveries seems unlikely and because it would deprive people of work. Perhaps the city can instead create legal protections for workers. A rule proposed by the Biden administration would require employers to “evaluate heat risks” and carry out “requirements for drinking water, rest breaks and control of indoor heat,” a good start for regular workers. Pushing for that rule, including equal protections for gig workers, would be a logical and humane next step.
New York could also set up no-questions-asked cooling centers near delivery worker hubs, in addition to the cooling kits the city is already providing. And individual New Yorkers, busy as they are, could also adjust: for instance, if given windows of 3 to 5 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. for a grocery delivery, the one during cooler hours might be better.
The heat shouldn’t stop New Yorkers from taking care of their neighbors.
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Editorial Board Member
Patrol cars used by the New York Police Department will soon bear a new motto, news that made me raise an eyebrow.
Three important words — “Courtesy, professionalism, respect” — have been on the side of patrol cars since 1996, when this New York City kid was just 9 years old. The motto was introduced as part of a campaign under Mayor Rudy Giuliani to improve police-community relations in the bitter wake of the harsh policing policies that led to abuse and contributed to mass incarceration.
The new slogan, “Fighting crime, protecting the public,” isn’t necessarily problematic.
But the language, first reported by Gothamist, conveys an unmistakably more aggressive tone. And the N.Y.P.D.’s decision to drop the old motto — born in an era when the department was at least attempting to solicit the good will of a skeptical public — feels notable.
It reminded me of a weird episode at the Police Department this year when the department and several members of the top brass began using their official N.Y.P.D. social media accounts to attack a city councilwoman, a political activist and journalists. In one post, the chief of patrol, John Chell, criticized a veteran Daily News writer, Harry Siegel, for a column about crime statistics, with Chell saying he was “calling you and your ‘latte’ friends out on their garbage.” The official departmental social account referred to the columnist as “Harry ‘deceitful’ Siegel.” In another post, Chell criticized a State Supreme Court judge over a case in which she had no involvement. Mayor Eric Adams defended the boorish behavior.
Were it not for the steady erosion of police reforms unfolding under Adams, it might be easier to see the shift in language at the N.Y.P.D. as mere semantics.
Under Adams, reported police stops have nearly doubled the rate during Bill de Blasio’s administration, according to data published by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Last year the number of complaints against the department rose to 5,550, the most since 2012. The Times and ProPublica reported in June that the police commissioner, Edward Caban, has used his authority to halt disciplinary proceedings for officers found by the city’s civilian review board to have committed serious misconduct.
The evidence also suggests Adams is failing to sufficiently advance long-term reforms. The federal N.Y.P.D. monitor this year said significant racial disparities in police stops continued to be a problem at the department. Just as concerning, the monitor said the department is failing to document more than one in three stops. The monitor has been in place since 2013, when a federal judge ordered reforms after declaring that the department’s stop-and-frisk practice violated the 14th Amendment and was unconstitutional.
When New York elected Adams, a former police captain, many voters said reducing crime was a top priority.
That doesn’t mean the city wants a Police Department trapped in a time warp.
Opinion Columnist
On Tuesday, which feels like the distant past in the fast-moving saga over President Biden’s candidacy, one expert told me that if Biden survived efforts to oust him, it would be in large part because of the support of Black people.
“Fifty percent of his early comeback is rooted in the trust and support and forgiveness and a chance for a new beginning from the Black churches, from the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management.
At the time, Sonnenfeld thought Biden was bouncing back. The tide on Biden’s future continues to shift, and at the moment it feels less like a comeback and more like a last gasp, but what Sonnenfeld said has some basis in data.
A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll released Thursday found that a majority of Black Democrats (63 percent) want Biden to continue in the race, while a majority of Hispanic Democrats (59 percent) and white Democrats (64 percent) want Biden to leave it.
And this isn’t because Black Democrats don’t want Kamala Harris; 80 percent said that they would be “satisfied” if she replaced Biden on the ticket.
So what is it about?
I believe it is because Black people understand unfair persecution in their bones. They know it ancestrally and contemporaneously. And so there isn’t the same rush to condemn that others may have.
Countless politicians have sought to exploit this sense of Black empathy for perceived victims. In this cycle, Donald Trump has tried to tap into it, claiming that his indictments — which he contends are unfair persecutions — gained him support in the Black community.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” Trump said in February. “And a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.”
Trump’s statement may well be bluster, but he wraps his hyperbole around a kernel of truth: Black people have been hurt by America’s systems, and they are wary of them.
I believe that in the Biden scenario, Black people see something suspicious and unseemly in the rush to abandon him. They see a system — an establishment — turning on him, and it instinctually feels off, like being abandoned by allies. And that feels eerily, unsettlingly familiar.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
At President Biden’s news conference on Thursday evening, a reporter reminded him that in 2020, he said he would be “a bridge” — a president who planned to transition to a new generation. She asked, “What changed?”
“What changed was the gravity of the situation I inherited,” Biden said. In a news conference that might have been coherent enough to buy him some time, this answer reminded me of why he needs to go. Biden was saying that he should still be president through 2028 because things were bad in 2021. Really? That sounds to me like a man clinging to power.
This was of a piece with Biden ducking several questions that related to his abilities in the future. But the future is where presidential campaigns are always fought and won. If a nominee is not expressing a vision of the future, he will lose and the down-ticket candidates are lambs to slaughter.
Toward the end, Biden said, “I’ve got to finish this job because there is so much at stake.” Let’s unpack that for a minute. What does “finishing the job” — presumably he meant passing more great bills — have to do with the stakes? Biden’s “stakes” are the world’s many problems; the real stakes are that Donald Trump would be a dictator. His lack of appreciation of the true stakes should be motive enough to continue the effort to find another candidate.
I had hoped Biden would withdraw in front of millions of people on Sunday night, thereby blowing the Republican convention sky-high. That’s probably not going to happen now. Instead, thanks to a middling performance by Biden as the NATO summit concluded, we’re most likely in for at least another week of this excruciating and divisive purgatory on the Democratic side while Republicans hold their coronation in Milwaukee.
Having set reports of senility to rest with an impromptu hourlong tour of the foreign policy horizon, Biden is now likely to retreat again behind the low-risk teleprompter as he hits the trail.
His campaign aides plan to run out the clock before the dispiriting Democratic convention. Skeptical Democrats will try to use polls to convince Biden that he has no path to victory, but their best hope is another moment of public frailty. It’s a bad sign for a political party when so many of its members think the only way to win is for their presumptive nominee to lose.
Opinion Climate Editor
When Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday, its winds were strong enough to take out 10 long-distance transmission lines and to knock down many trees that brought down power lines. All told, nearly three million people lost electricity. Many of them are still waiting for a local utility, CenterPoint, to restore their power. If, as predicted, the heat index hits the triple digits over the next few days, having power could be the difference between life and death.
Power outages aren’t a given when a big storm hits — by cutting down trees next to power lines and installing poles that can withstand hurricane-force winds, utilities can help keep the power on. That’s power that people could use to run their air conditioning and medical devices, keep their food cold and charge their phones.
Too few cities, however, are investing in storm-resistant infrastructure. One reason is that upgrading the power infrastructure is costly, and neither electricity customers nor cities or states are eager to foot the bill. Another more frustrating reason is that people often oppose tree removal or the installation of larger, hurricane-proof power lines because they don’t like the way they look.
According to Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, residents have pushed back against upgrades to power infrastructure in both Houston and Austin. “Everybody likes their trees,” he told me. “And we plant trees really close to the lines. Nobody likes to trim the trees back because, well, the power lines are unsightly.” CenterPoint, he said, has “caught hell” in Houston for cutting down trees and installing a few weatherproofed power lines.
Tension between the strain that climate change places on infrastructure and the aesthetic preferences of a small number of community members continues to emerge across the country. A recent survey of solar and wind energy developers found that visual concerns were the most common form of local opposition to new projects — projects that will help shore up the grid against outages and blackouts. In California, residents who didn’t want two major solar projects impinging on their views (among other reasons) appealed the approval of one project several times; in Iowa, a major wind project’s approval is in doubt because local people said they were worried about the visual impact of the turbines, as well as noise.
Preparing for and adapting to climate change involves sturdy and by some standards ugly infrastructure — and it’s time that Americans start to see it as lifesaving instead. As The Economist put it on a memorable cover last year: “Hug Pylons, Not Trees.”
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Opinion Columnist
One of my go-to economic data experts emailed on Thursday morning about the latest inflation report, which showed prices actually falling in June and up only 3 percent over the past year. It was, he declared, “beautiful.”
Your aesthetic sense may vary, but we’ve now had two months of really good price data, enough to puncture the bubble of pessimism that, um, inflated early this year. And the implications of the good news are pretty big.
Early this year we had several bad reports, which led to widespread concern that inflation had stopped falling and might even be increasing; some even suggested that the Fed might want to increase interest rates rather than begin cutting.
Many economists argued, however, that the bad data was just noise, largely reflecting one-time price resets at the start of the year. They have now been vindicated. Note that the Federal Reserve focuses not on the Consumer Price Index but on an alternative measure, the personal consumption expenditure price index, which isn’t in yet for June. But estimates based on the data available so far suggest that the P.C.E. will come in at around 2.4 percent, close to the Fed’s 2 percent target. And since the Fed is supposed to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is right now, there’s now an overwhelming case for interest rate cuts.
Economists who told us not to panic over a few hot inflation reports aren’t the only people who have been vindicated. Taking a longer view, the White House economic team also has every right to a victory lap. Here’s what the team said three years ago:
No single historical episode is a perfect template for current events. But when looking for historical parallels, it is useful to concentrate on inflationary episodes that contained supply chain disruptions and a spike in consumer demand after a period of temporary suppression. The inflationary period after World War II is likely a better comparison for the current economic situation than the 1970s and suggests that inflation could quickly decline once supply chains are fully online and pent-up demand levels off.
That process took longer than expected, but in the end played out almost exactly the way they predicted. And yes, as someone who held similar views, I’m feeling some personal satisfaction.
Stepping back even further, whatever you think President Biden should do next — I’ve said my piece — the inflation news is a big vindication for Bidenomics. The administration was harshly criticized for its spending, which critics claimed would lead to ’70s-type stagflation. Well, it didn’t, and big spending has helped the U.S. economy power ahead of peer nations.
All in all, a very good morning on the economic front. Now, if we can only clean up the political mess … .
Opinion Columnist
The calls for President Biden to withdraw from the presidential race have mostly been made lovingly, in tones of deep respect. Many of us have known and admired Biden for decades, and we believe he has had an excellent term in office.
Think of it this way: It’s precisely because you love your aging parents that you want them to give up the car keys.
Yet Biden’s pushback has been sad and sometimes petty. He denounced the suggestions as coming from “elites” and “big names” — which is rich coming from a president — and his team mocked the Democratic “bed-wetting brigade.” Aides dismissed calls to step down as coming from failed presidential candidates like Senator Michael Bennet and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, or from people in the Obama orbit, like David Axelrod.
Perhaps the most pathetic White House response was directed at George Clooney, who last month co-hosted the biggest Democratic fund-raiser ever for Biden. In a Times Opinion guest essay on Wednesday, Clooney praised Biden but also said that the Biden at the fund-raiser “was the same man we all witnessed at the debate” — and so called on him to withdraw.
“Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020,” Clooney wrote, reflecting his tone throughout the essay. “We need him to do it again in 2024.”
Biden’s pushback was less magnanimous, with one person in his circle telling a Times reporter: “The president stayed for over three hours, while Clooney took a photo quickly and left.”
As it happens, I know something about the circumstances of the event, and here’s what happened, according to someone involved in it. Biden’s team proposed a fund-raiser to be held in June, but Clooney was shooting a movie and offered the only date he could do it — which required him to then rush straight to the airport from the event. The campaign agreed and offered no pushback.
Clooney arrived early and spent hours being photographed with donors before opening the show — and then left from the event to fly to Italy for his movie shoot. Biden certainly didn’t complain; on the contrary, he left a thank-you message on Clooney’s voice mail.
And really? Biden’s team seemed to be suggesting that the president somehow has more stamina than George Clooney. That’s cringeworthy.
Perhaps the most interesting response to the Clooney essay came from Donald Trump in a Truth Social rant: “So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?”
Trump seemed aghast at any pressure on Biden to withdraw from the race — perhaps because he realizes that the only Democratic presidential candidate weaker than him is the president. Finally, Trump may be right about something.
So let’s hope Biden and his team listen to those calling for him to rethink his position. It may be tempting to lash back, but it’s beneath him.
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Editorial Board Member
Can Europe get on the same page with itself? That’s perhaps the biggest question lingering in the background of the NATO summit in Washington this week marking the 75th anniversary of the world’s most successful alliance.
Despite conventional wisdom that says Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine unified European allies against a common threat — and a joint declaration that underscores that point — there continue to be huge differences of opinion within Europe about how big a danger Vladimir Putin is. Jason Davidson, a political scientist who interviewed 98 security analysts in the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Poland for his upcoming academic book about NATO, told me that Europeans have very different views about what constitutes the greatest threat.
“Italy, for instance, is far more concerned with instability from the Mediterranean than Russia,” he said, citing threats to maritime commerce and unauthorized immigration. Italy’s priority is widely shared by countries on NATO’s southern flank — Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, he said. People in Poland, on the other hand, were universally concerned about Moscow.
But perhaps the biggest divide is between the European Union — which released a defense industrial strategy in March that aims to promote an indigenous defense industry — and NATO, which is busy reminding Americans how lucrative defending Europe can be for American firms, to ensure that the United States stays in the alliance. It’s not hard to find officials affiliated with the European Union and NATO criticizing one another’s visions for the defense of Europe.
“There is a risk that the E.U.’s strategy aims to simply replace ‘buy American’ with ‘buy French’ at a time when all allies must urgently work even closer together to boost defense production,” Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson and now a distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told me before the summit began. She said the Union’s plan risked undermining NATO by setting up alternative military standards and creating “confusion.”
The good news is that NATO devoted a section of its joint declaration at the summit to ironing out its differences with the European Union, which it called a “a unique and essential partner.” If Europe hopes to deter Putin and other threats, it had better put up a united front.
Opinion Staff Editor
Last week in a letter to the medical journal The Lancet, three doctors attempted to answer a difficult question: How many Palestinian deaths could be attributed to Israel’s incursion into Gaza?
The doctors, who have backgrounds in research and public health, used a ratio derived from recent conflicts showing that three to 15 times as many people die from indirect causes as perish from direct bombardment. In their description, indirect deaths can extend months and years beyond the current conflict from “causes such as reproductive, communicable and noncommunicable diseases.” Using the latest death toll provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (close to 37,000 deaths), the doctors say even a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for each direct death would mean up to 186,000 Palestinian deaths “could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
It’s a staggering number, but it’s an extrapolation from an estimated ratio. Given the information vacuum that is Gaza today, it’s an example of what happens when experts have little data to work with, giving rise to projections, dueling propaganda and, in the end, a narrowing window of accountability.
The death toll in Gaza has been contested from the start of the war. Israel sealed Gaza’s borders after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, making it virtually impossible for outside journalists and third-party organizations to independently verify the extent of the calamity taking place there.
The gap in verifiable coverage has opened the way for a macabre debate about the scale of the dead in Gaza. Skeptics and many Israeli officials see the Gaza Health Ministry as an unreliable source. The United Nations and other major international groups have said they have no reason to disbelieve the count. The Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its death count, and in May the U.N. revised its subtotal number of dead women and children to reflect only identified women and children, excluding unidentified bodies.
Yet many, including Human Rights Watch and a Biden administration official, believe the Health Ministry count to be low, in part because the number comes from hospital staff members and health workers who are strained under a collapsing infrastructure, often without proper training or equipment. Many Palestinians are reported to be dead and unidentifiable under rubble; several have described the smell of decomposing bodies as omnipresent in destroyed areas.
The letter to The Lancet is more a call for open documentation of casualties than anything else. Without access to Gaza, the outside world is left with an incomplete picture of the scale of the destruction, as Palestinians living there enter their tenth month of enduring widespread violence. It’s difficult to predict if and when a day will come for a true accounting of the casualties of this conflict. Until then, these grim ratios and estimations are what we have to try to comprehend the scale of the unimaginable.
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Several voices in the Democratic Party are telling President Biden to either stay in the race or leave. He seems to be listening only to those telling him, against all evidence, that he can still win in November. But the real voice Biden should care most about isn’t that of a Democrat at all. The president should be required to watch all 80 minutes of the unhinged rant let loose by the Republican candidate on Tuesday in Florida.
It couldn’t really be called a speech; Donald Trump doesn’t give those. Instead, standing on his golf course in Doral, Trump just lobbed random lies and nonsense into the crowd, as if firing a T-shirt gun. There was no particular coherence or theme to it, beyond apocalyptic descriptions of the failures of the Biden administration, now featuring the new cartoon character “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.” His weird pauses and bumbled words often rivaled Biden’s speaking problems, and the content was far worse.
By pursuing legal charges against him and his cronies for trying to stay in power in 2020, Biden “and his thugs,” Trump said, “are turning America into Communist Cuba.” Biden “doesn’t know what a synagogue is,” he said. Electric cars are essentially golf carts and have to be recharged for three hours every 45 minutes, he said. Melania won’t buy him bacon anymore because it’s too expensive. He challenged Biden to a golf contest. And then, ignoring the statistics showing a sharp drop in crime in Washington, D.C., this year, he produced this twisted take on tourism at the city’s biggest attractions:
“Right now, if you leave Florida, ‘Oh, let’s go, darling, let’s look at the Jefferson Memorial, let’s look at the Washington Monument, let’s go and look at some of the beautiful scenes,’ and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped.” That would come as a shock to the crowds of tourists on the Mall in Washington this summer.
Trump’s remarks should prompt revulsion and an immediate desire to do whatever it takes to keep him from the White House. No sacrifice should be considered too great for this cause, even the self-sacrifice of Biden’s personal ambitions. By staying in the race, Biden is making it far more likely that a disordered fearmonger is going to displace him. Dave Wasserman, a prominent political analyst at Cook Political Report, says the race is no longer a tossup; Trump has a considerable advantage since the debate, and Cook just shifted six important states in Trump’s direction.
The Biden campaign put out a sharp retort to Trump’s rant, but news releases won’t do the job when the infirmities of the man at the top of the Democratic ticket continue to drive away voters, state by state.
Editorial Board Member
Two terms crop up often in the French political lexicon: “la rupture” and “la cohabitation.” The former means the same as in English and is applied to any political parting of the ways — between candidates, parties, ideologies. “Cohabitation” refers to times when the president and the majority in the National Assembly fall into different political camps.
Both terms have been in heavy use since the second and final round of the surprise election President Emmanuel Macron called on June 10, after the far right scored big in elections to the European Parliament. Macron’s timing and calculations remain a bit puzzling, but stopping Marine Le Pen and her nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally was one major goal; another was to achieve “clarity” in a muddled political landscape in which the president was growing increasingly unpopular. French elections come in two rounds, and Macron probably hoped that a strong showing by Le Pen in round one would shock the electorate into common sense in round two.
The gambit succeeded. After scoring big in the first round Le Pen was blocked in the second. But clarity was not to be. Rather than flock to Macron’s center, voters shifted to a hastily assembled bloc of left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, which included traditional Socialists, radical leftists, Communists and Greens. They are now the biggest grouping in the National Assembly, the French parliament.
That was the rupture. Now comes the challenge of cohabitation. The left-wing coalition is hardly favorable for Macron, especially given that the strongest party in the grouping, the aggressively named France Unbowed, is also the most radical, under the rabble-rousing Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He doesn’t get along with Macron, or most any of his partners, and has already demanded the prime ministry for his party.
The left, moreover, will go after many of Macron’s pet economic policies. Last year, the president unleashed fiery protests when he raised the retirement age from 62 to 64; the left wants to lower it to 60, along with other costly social spending the French economy is not in shape to handle. And Mélenchon, a supporter of the Palestinian cause, might try to recognize a Palestinian state.
There’s no indication yet of Macron’s choice for prime minister. He could try someone from his humbled party, or an acceptable leftist, or an apolitical technocrat. In any case, past bouts of cohabitation have not achieved much.
As for the far right, blocking the National Rally — again — may have brought relief, but it was hardly a victory. The party got 37 percent of the vote and increased its seats in the parliament from 89 to 142, the most of any single party. It can’t be dismissed as the radical fringe of nativists and antisemites the way it was in its early years.
So we’re likely to hear “rupture” a lot more.
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Opinion Columnist
Is a single transgression enough to torpedo a writer’s reputation — Virginia Woolf wearing blackface, for example? Or does the full-throated denouncement require a lifetime of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, Naziism or collaboration, along the lines of Jack London, Henry Miller, Thomas Mann or Jean Rhys?
All are writers who are still read.
But these are different times, and so the question arises anew with regard to recently named transgressors, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, both celebrated, even beloved figures.
Let’s go over what we know. With Alice Munro, the facts are straightforward and damning. According to an essay by Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner in The Toronto Star, Munro stayed married to the man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing her daughter.
With Neil Gaiman, the issue is knottier. The author was recently accused of sex abuse and rape, allegations he has emphatically denied. We don’t know what happened, but recent history shows that for some audiences, accusations alone are too often sufficient evidence. It doesn’t bode well.
The question of whether you can separate the art and the artist is old and vexing, with no clear answer, though the current cultural consensus holds strongly against. As Jean Luc Godard (alleged to be antisemitic) once said, “How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of ‘The Searchers’?”
Even some who argue that, say, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or Louis-Ferdinand Celine can still be appreciated despite reprehensible views or acts may also insist that artists whose work is closely tied to their personal lives, like Woody Allen or David Foster Wallace, for example, should be held to account.
In these latter-day cases, the verdict, spiked with envy and resentment, seems preordained. Will there be a double standard between Neil Gaiman, who is a prominent and commercially successful online figure, and Alice Munro, who led a humble, quiet existence in Canada and whose stature among the literati has achieved Joan Didion-level worship?
Most people in the literary world know that writers are flawed humans just like everyone else, only a little more so. Even so, most of us do not really know these people; we know them mostly through their writing.
Great writing is about human complexity, not the black-and-white moralizing of the internet mob. In the eyes of the wise reader, whatever our judgments of the authors, their writing only becomes yet more interesting, more telling, more potent.
Opinion Columnist
Donald Trump pushed the Republican Party’s platform committee to change its language on abortion, and on the surface it looks like an exercise in relative moderation.
Where the 2016 and 2020 Republican platforms called for a national abortion ban, demanded a constitutional amendment to establish due-process rights for embryos and fetuses and stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” the 2024 platform simply states the Republican Party’s belief that “the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.”
This change, said NBC News and other outlets, is a “softening” of the party’s position on abortion.
But is it really?
The lodestar for the anti-abortion movement has always been a constitutional guarantee of fetal personhood, which would outlaw abortion and threaten the legality of both IVF and hormonal birth control. (This endorsement of protection for fetal personhood also makes clear that the platform’s ostensible support for IVF is cheap political posturing.) To state, in the context of abortion, that the 14th Amendment guarantees due process and that legislatures are free to pass laws “protecting those rights” is to outright endorse the legal theory that the Constitution already outlaws abortion with or without amendment.
The new platform language may lack the specificity of the old, but it expresses the same basic commitment to vast restrictions on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Moreover, the Republican Party coalition is still grounded in the grass roots activity of anti-abortion groups and the ideological ambitions of movement jurists and politicians. The platform makes no real difference in their efforts to ban abortion and limit a woman’s right to live a free life and pursue her own vision of the good.
It should be said as well that in the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments — written and ratified to assist the formerly enslaved and enshrine a principle of anti-subordination in the Constitution — to dismantle this nation’s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.
Animating that amendment, as well as the 13th, was the reality that Black Americans could not be secure in their persons — in their bodies and reproductive capacities — as long as the badges, incidents and vestiges of chattel slavery endured in the nation’s constitutional order. If, in other words, American slavery rested on reproductive enslavement — the forced birth and breeding of men and women for profit — then anti-slavery had to mean reproductive liberation.
What the anti-abortion movement wants is a dark and cruel inversion of what the Reconstruction framers intended.
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I was an early and enthusiastic fan of Kamala Harris when she first ran for president. She had an inspiring personal story and an impressive résumé. Here was someone who had been a senator, an attorney general and a prosecutor. She had been an advocate for recidivism reduction and other measures of criminal justice reform, and had proved she could be tough in the Senate, where her questioning was described as “prosecutorial.” She seemed gutsy and capable and a fine candidate for national office.
Wow, was I wrong. Look, it’s hard to shine as vice president — as John Adams put it, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” But Harris has also proved how easy it is to sink.
Between her high staff turnover, her ineffectiveness on migration and the border, her chronically low approval ratings and her often embarrassing public experiences — remember, Harris chose to subject herself to the cringe on “The Drew Barrymore Show” — she has not exuded competence or inspired confidence.
Yet despite Joe Biden insisting he can still drive, dagnabbit, talk of anointing Harris as his replacement has started to take hold. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina said he would support Harris if Biden drops out, also proposing a mini-primary. “The Democratic Nominee in 2024 should be Kamala Harris,” the former congressman Tim Ryan wrote in Newsweek last week. “She is brilliant, compassionate, engaging, funny and totally down to earth,” he wrote, and “more importantly, she deserves a chance to go to the American people and show us her mettle.”
Choosing a presidential candidate should not be about someone proving herself or “deserving a chance.” It should be about who has the best chance. This should not be about advancing women, Black people or people of South Asian descent. It should be about beating back Donald Trump with the most electable and capable candidate possible.
That Harris leads Biden slightly in polls as a possible replacement candidate only shows how low that bar is. Those same polls suggest she would still lose against Trump.
If some racist or sexist Americans wouldn’t vote for Harris based on her ethnicity, race or sex, shame on them. But to argue against Harris is not inherently racist or sexist.
If Democrats are serious about not wanting to lose this election — and most important, preventing Trump from resuming power — they need to stop trying to make Harris happen and allow an open primary. Americans need a candidate who will win.
Opinion Writer
Buckle up for another bumpy political week. As Washington lawmakers slouch back from their holiday break, they have been greeted by a defiant letter from President Biden, effectively daring them to try derailing his re-election bid.
Thank you for sharing your concerns, he wrote. “I am not blind to them.” That said, he continued, “I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024.”
No matter how many times he repeats it, this assurance remains worthless. What high-ranking politician doesn’t believe in his own exceptionalism? I mean, Ron DeSantis was 100 percent convinced he was the best person to beat Trump this year, and we see where that got him.
But where Biden seems intent on making toxic mischief is with grand pronouncements about preserving democracy.
“We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively,” he asserted, ticking through the number of votes, the percentage of the primary vote and the number of delegates he amassed — as if a re-election primary coronation is anything like an open race.
“Do we now just say this process didn’t matter?” he wrote. “That the voters don’t have a say? I decline to do that.” Only the voters decide the nominee, he said, not the press, pundits, donors or other “selected” groups of individuals. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?”
So much to unpack. Let’s just go with this piece: While there is an abundance of Democratic pundits, donors and members of “selected” groups, I’m confident it’s not enough to account for the 59 percent of Democrats who, post-debate, fear Biden is too old for the job, according to the latest Times/Siena poll.
What about these voters? Or the 79 percent of independents who expressed similar anxiety? Do they not matter? Are we not concerned about their faith and trust as they grapple with apparently having been misled about the president’s fitness? How do they feel about Biden’s people stage-managing and shielding him to the point that it was almost impossible for voters to assess his fitness until absurdly late in the race? Are the voters who feel betrayed going to punish the entire Democratic Party come November?
Biden aggressively pitching the situation as him and the grass roots versus a bunch of snooty elites may make him feel tough. But it accomplishes little more than fueling discord and division within his own party. He needs to show people he is up to the job, and not just assert as much while pretending this is a crisis manufactured by bed-wetting establishment types.
The president and his team have proved they know how to write a strong and salty letter. If only that were all there was to the job.
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Opinion Writer and Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
This will be a very full, unpredictable week of politics. In terms of where everyone is: Donald Trump will hold rallies in Miami on Tuesday and near Pittsburgh on Saturday. President Biden will host a NATO summit in Washington beginning Tuesday, and is expected to hold a news conference on Thursday. He will also campaign in Detroit on Friday. Kamala Harris will hold a campaign event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and Jill Biden will hold a slate of campaign events in the Southeast on Monday.
How strong is Biden’s support with congressional Democrats? This week might answer that. One thing I’ve seen in the last decade that will most likely shape the politics of it, though, is really about what elected officials say publicly; the public pays attention to what politicians say on the record, so if they back him or tell him to leave, voters will take that more seriously than the private commentary.
On Sunday, a number of Pennsylvania Democrats, including both senators, welcomed Biden at the airport, and there have been shows of support from people like Bernie Sanders and Joyce Beatty. A small number of House members, like Minnesota’s Angie Craig, have said publicly that he should step aside; there’s also been reporting on private meetings where additional Democrats have said he should withdraw.
There are elected officials like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who said Sunday there were still voter concerns about Biden’s 2024 viability that the president needs to address this week. Congress is coming back to Washington on Monday, which might make things more chaotic in the short term, when a few hundred lawmakers, aides and reporters begin interacting. How congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries approach his candidacy seems likely to shape a lot.
Trump is widely expected to announce his vice-presidential pick this week — maybe J.D. Vance, Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, though it could be someone else. That pick might not change people’s perceptions of Trump personally, but it might give a real lens to the rest of the campaign.
In 2012, for instance, whether Mitt Romney intended this or not, his selection of Paul Ryan affirmed the idea of their campaign as an ideological, austerity-minded one; in retrospect, that was probably the apex of entitlement-reform politics in America. Vance is now very much a post-Trump figure, and there’s a universe in which his selection makes the rest of Trump’s campaign and potential presidency look different and more ideologically aggressive and populist, compared with, say, Burgum, who is perceived as being more from the corporate, business world.
Republicans are also meeting, privately, about the party’s platform this week. Longtime anti-abortion activists are deeply unhappy with the reported plan to drop the party’s commitment to a national abortion ban in favor of Trump’s “states should decide” position that doesn’t really satisfy anyone, especially people who want abortion to be legal.
Opinion Columnist
In his Friday back-against-the-wall interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Biden said of Donald Trump, “The man is a congenital liar.”
That rang some bells with longtime Times readers.
In 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election, William Safire wrote a blistering Times column about Hillary Clinton called “Blizzard of Lies.” Citing Whitewater, Travelgate, exponential commodity trading profits and behavior in the wake of her friend Vince Foster’s death, he wrote: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar. Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.”
Then the kerfuffle began. Bill Clinton said he wanted to punch Safire in the face. His spokesman, Mike McCurry, told reporters: “The president, if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response to that on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.”
Safire was presented with a pair of red boxing gloves on “Meet the Press.”
The famous Times wordsmith, who had a column called “On Language” in addition to his conservative political column, was accused by some of choosing the wrong word. Congenital is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Existing or dating from one’s birth,” as in a “congenital disease or defect.” It was harsh.
As the author and journalist Garry Wills wrote in The Washington Post, “It seems a gratuitous, if not cruel, description of a woman who is not accused, or suspected, of such innate deceptiveness during the first 45 years of her life.”
My pal Safire took all the criticism with his usual equanimity. But one day during this donnybrook, I wandered into his office down the hall from mine in the Washington bureau. I wanted to see what he thought. He wasn’t there but in plain view, he had left a list of synonyms for “congenital,” starting with “chronic.” So he may have had his doubts about the word he chose, as well.
But in the latest instance, President Biden probably chose the right word. Donald Trump not only gives the impression that he has been lying since the cradle, but seems proud of it. So “congenital” works pretty well.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
On Friday President Biden named the one scenario by which he’d decide to abandon his re-election campaign:
If “the Lord Almighty came down” and told him to.
Not if Democratic leaders in Congress insisted it was best for the party and country. Not if other prominent Democrats begged. Not if polls showed him losing to Donald Trump in November. (They already do.) Biden essentially said that those leaders would never lose faith and those polls can’t be trusted. Everything will be fine. Everything is fine.
Either Biden genuinely believes that or has decided that a pantomime of unsullied confidence is the best damage control. Neither possibility reassures me, and I suspect that neither will end Democratic worries about his fitness and about voters’ impressions of it.
Biden made his remarks in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that was all of 22 minutes long and was broadcast, unedited, in prime time. The interview continued his effort to explain, improve on and erase his shockingly unsteady performance in a debate against Trump over a week ago.
And Biden indeed improved on it. He ably extolled his first-term record, even if some sentences were rickety, with some details incorrect. He wisely emphasized crucial differences between him and Trump and rightly recognized the stakes of defeating Trump.
But Stephanopoulos wasn’t asking Biden about Trump. He was asking Biden about his own health, and Biden deflected many of those questions or answered them tersely. He conceded no physical decline since 2020. He cast this current passage as 2020 all over again — needless panic and predictable underestimations of his strength. He pretty much rolled his eyes at a reference to his supposedly low approval rating. And he scoffed at the suggestion that he have a thorough neurological work-up.
Stephanopoulos kept asking about the future. Biden kept talking about the past.
But this isn’t 2020. The polls, the country, Biden — they’re all different. Does he fully get that?
“I’m the guy,” he said, over and over, and while that phrase typically teed up mention of one of his many legitimate accomplishments, it was also an assertion of his status, in his view, as the best and only Democrat to take on Trump, no matter the evidence to the contrary.
I hope with every fiber of my being that he’s right, because I doubt the Lord is descending anytime soon. And if he’s wrong? Heaven help us.
Opinion Columnist
Out of many major political figures in the United States, J.D. Vance may have had the single worst reaction to Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump: He put the blame on President Biden without presenting a shred of evidence. So, naturally, he is Trump’s vice-presidential pick.
But there’s a lot more to say about Vance, none of it good. I’m sure my colleagues will pick up on other themes, but here’s one topic on which Vance has been possibly the worst major political figure in America: the economics of immigration.
There are many things you could say about immigration, most of them good: An influx of working-age adults paying payroll and income taxes is exactly what we need to maintain Social Security and Medicare.
If you squint hard, you might be able to find some downsides to the growing number of foreign-born workers. One thing you can’t honestly say, however, is that immigrants have been taking jobs away from native-born Americans. It’s true that employment of foreign-born workers has grown much faster than employment among the native-born. But native-born Americans are leaving the work force because we’ve had low fertility for a long time and lots of baby boomers are retiring — which is why we need immigrants to keep paying the bills!
And even as we’ve absorbed large numbers of immigrant workers, unemployment among native-born Americans has remained near historic lows:
Yet Vance has been out there claiming that immigrants are taking away our jobs. He’s not stupid; I’m pretty sure that he knows better. But his willingness to say things he knows are false is probably why Trump picked him.
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