The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Columnist
It wasn’t the biggest whopper of the night, but during the debate, Donald Trump — who refused to say that Ukraine should win its war — said some false things about the role our allies are playing. Again, let me give you the full statement, with no sanewashing:
“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers. Look, we’re in for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe, which is a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are. They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe like I did with NATO. They paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we’re not going to protect you anymore. So that may be one of the reasons they don’t like me as much as they like weak people. But you take a look at what’s happening. We’re in for $250 to $275 billion. They’re into $100 to $150. They should be forced to equalize.”
I’m not sure why he thinks it necessary to claim that the casualty numbers are fake. But I do know that he loves to claim that our allies aren’t paying their share. Except that’s completely wrong. I wrote about this a few months ago: Europe is spending considerably more on Ukraine than we are:
It’s true that America, with its much bigger defense industry, is supplying most of the weapons. But we are not bearing most of the monetary burden.
For Trump, of course, the claim that Europe isn’t helping serves the purpose of portraying the Biden-Harris administration as weak. But it just isn’t true.
Opinion Editor
Even before Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, it was clearly the vice president’s night. In more than 90 minutes of contentious debate, Harris continued to prosecute the case against a second Donald Trump presidency more effectively than perhaps any of his other rivals has since 2015. But was it enough to satisfy those voters who say they still need to know more about her in order to cast a ballot in her favor this November?
Over the weekend, a survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60 percent of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction, and many reported that they didn’t know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues. Any poll is just a snapshot in time, and it is admittedly hard to interpret exactly what those respondents are looking for from her. Do they want a better understanding of how she plans to govern from the Oval Office in terms of policy? Or are they more interested in her character and what type of leader she would be?
For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed. According to the Times tracker, the vice president spent nearly half of her speaking time attacking Trump. She rightfully called out his lies and his dangerous embrace of dictators. She was also strong in defending reproductive rights, as well as President Biden’s record on foreign and domestic policy. And she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House.
Yet we learned very few new details about those plans. On the economy, which voters often rank as the issue of most importance to them, she only scratched the surface in discussing how she’d enact tax cuts, build more affordable housing and help parents of young children. On foreign policy, she committed herself to a two-state solution in the Middle East and to supporting Ukraine in victory over Russia, but she didn’t expand on how she’d seek to achieve either goal. She pledged not to ban fracking but said little on how she would plan to invest in climate solutions. She also continued to dodge questions about why she recently distanced herself from positions that she took in her quest to be the Democratic nominee in 2020.
Most important, she did very little to distinguish her plans from Biden’s in an election in which the electorate seems hungry for change.
To be clear, Trump utterly failed to present or defend his policy goals. In many ways, the former president confirmed what has been obvious for years: His main aim, should he win another term, would be to do whatever is best for Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve.
But on a night when Harris set traps every which way for Trump (and he took the bait essentially every time), the one moment those tables were turned was when the former president asked her what she would do differently from the past three and a half years. Some voters may still be left looking for that answer.
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Contributing Opinion Editor
She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about having less time to speak.
But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine him, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time.
I came into the debate prepared to watch for the subtleties of Trump’s sexism. He wouldn’t look at her. He refused to speak her name. He kept referring to “her boss”(President Biden), diminishing her power. But by the end of the debate, I was tallying the ways that Harris had done the reverse: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.
She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong-un.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man and a provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.
And she managed to do it without being shrill or angry or coming off as petty. Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced or controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in and made those of us watching laugh along with her.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response.
Eight years ago, the same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked as though the restrained version of Donald Trump might have shown up in Philadelphia, the one who learned his lesson from his failure to curb his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration had made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.
But it didn’t last, and no one who has watched Trump over the past decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a description of immigrants — one he returned to over and over again during the evening — that could only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.
“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”
This was the level of delusion that Harris and her campaign had clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it just got worse from there. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a particularly heinous calumny that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the kind, Trump said he heard about it on television.
Throughout the evening, in moments just like that, Harris was able to do something that Biden had failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: push Trump in ways that exposed his spattering of lies and wild fantasies.
This was even true about the frightening attempt on Trump’s life. There has been no evidence that it was politically motivated, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming it was. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said, referring to his false claim that the indictments against him were evidence of “weaponizing” the justice system.
And asked about his role in undermining the democratic process, he said it was actually Harris who had done so, by usurping Biden’s role atop the ticket. “You talk about a threat to democracy — he got 14 million votes, and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her. But he got 14 million votes. They threw him out. She got zero votes.”
The debate was an unqualified success for Harris not just because she was able to define herself and her plans but also because she was able to push a few buttons and let Trump show off his truest self.
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Editorial Board Member
When running for office after taking away the reproductive freedoms of roughly half the American public, the best thing to do may simply be to lie about what you have done.
That was the political calculus made by Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s debate. His bald and outrageous lies about abortion and his role in overturning Roe v. Wade were fantastical, even for him. There’s lying, and then there’s the world of fairy tales, and he chose the latter.
Trump said Roe v. Wade had “torn our country apart” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative” wanted the issue to be sent back to the states.
This is a lie. A majority of Americans supported the protections for abortion under Roe and still do.
He accused Democrats of supporting killing babies. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. This is another lie, and one of the ABC News moderators, Linsey Davis, called him on it. He accused Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, of saying “execution after birth” is “absolutely fine.” This, too, is a lie.
Trump misled those who were watching the debate, saying he believes in “exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” Yet it is thanks to Trump that states have been able to enact abortion bans that include no such exceptions.
Vice President Kamala Harris, rightly, pointed out that a majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and pointed out the pain that has been caused so many women in Republican-led states since the Supreme Court’s decision.
Abortion bans are a losing issue for Republicans, and Trump did nothing to change that.
Deputy Opinion Editor
Within the first half-hour of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I heard from four veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to Harris: a strong and confident performance that often put Trump on the defensive, with the potential to win the face-off as he sputtered over abortion rights and students loans.
Harris went on offense from the start, as she strode across the stage to Trump’s podium and reached out, shook his hand and introduced herself. Her performance was — in pretty much every way — a total contrast to President Biden’s in the June debate, and if Trump had a playbook to win the debate, it wasn’t clear as he scrambled to fight back against her attacks over the economy, tariffs, in vitro fertilization and China.
Trump’s go-to line — “another lie” — probably pleased many in his MAGA base, but I’m skeptical it was persuasive for many undecided and swing voters. That’s because a lot of those voters have told The Times that they are tired of Trump’s complaining when they want to hear specifics about what he would do in office.
Time and again, Harris laid the bait, and Trump took it. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said at one point. When the ABC moderators tried to ask Trump about immigration, he said, “First let me respond to the rallies.” But Harris also found ways to send Trump off on tangents, like when he pushed the lie that migrants in Ohio are killing pets for food. The moderators fact-checked him, but he wouldn’t let it go. And then Harris lowered the boom.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing.
The Democratic strategists were struck by how much Harris owned Trump, who raised his voice more and more as the debate unfolded. They saw her as strong but likable and substantive on the issues. As for Republicans, one Trump ally argued that the former president spoke with confidence and strength and that many voters would still be unforgiving of Harris over the Biden-era economy.
The first 20 to 25 minutes of a debate are often the most important part: America is a country with a short attention span where first impressions count, where politicians try to set the tone and tempo of a debate from the start, and you can often tell quickly if someone will have an off night. Trump is often at his most disciplined (relatively speaking) at the start of a debate; as time goes on, he tends to meander in his answers and get snappish.
In this case, though, whatever discipline Trump had fell away pretty quickly in the face of a Harris onslaught. If she came under pressure, it was from the ABC moderators who pressed her on her changes in policy positions like on fracking. But I’m skeptical that the pressure from a moderator’s question will break through to voters like the pressure that Harris subjected Trump to on abortion and his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.
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Opinion Writer
Donald Trump took time out from his pre-debate “policy time” on Tuesday to stick his out-of-joint nose into Congress’s fight over funding the government:
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” he raved on Truth Social. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”
Such feistiness! Love to see it. Especially since the former president must know, or at least suspect, that he is spitting into the wind — shrieking at his minions to go hard on a poison-pill measure that has less chance of becoming law this season than JD Vance has of winding up the new V.P. of the Cat Fanciers’ Association. (The poison pill is a measure to require proof of citizenship to vote, even though the law already forbids noncitizens from voting, and Republicans have never shown any evidence that this is a problem.)
Then again, it’s not totally unreasonable for Trump to expect Republican lawmakers to blindly do his bidding. I mean, earlier this year, they tanked a serious bipartisan bill on what is ostensibly one of the party’s top priorities — border security — because Trump told them that doing so was in his electoral interests. Why not then force a government shutdown in pursuit of a measure that would cast further doubt on the integrity of our election system?
I’ll tell you why not. Because a government shutdown in the final stretch of a tick-tight, high-stakes election cycle would be political madness — especially if it looked as though the shutdown occurred not because of substantive disagreements over spending but because Trump was bullying his congressional team into indulging his delusions about election fraud. Again.
MAGA die-hards might be jazzed. The rest of the electorate, not so much.
Republican lawmakers may be loath to upset their nominee, but they value nothing above their own political fortunes. Most of them aren’t stupid enough to sign up for this kind of self-immolation.
Alicia Wittmeyer, Opinion Special Projects Editor: You’ve written about domestic violence for years. For your latest essay, how did you end up focusing on the legal consequences for women who kill their abusers?
Rachel Louise Snyder, Contributing Opinion Writer: When I was writing my book “No Visible Bruises” I heard over and over how we didn’t know the number of women who were in prison for killing someone who was abusing them. I found this startling; this seemed like such a basic statistic. After I spoke about this at Stanford Law School in 2020, the executive directors of the Criminal Justice Center — Debbie Mukamal and David Sklansky — pushed for a large-scale survey of women in prison for homicide, which became the basis for the piece.
Wittmeyer: What was it like being in a prison as a proctor instead of a journalist?
Snyder: It was so humbling. Debbie made me go through training about not harming people while you’re talking with them and, honestly, I think it’s forever changed the way I interact with people. For example, when I do these incredibly intense interviews now, I never get off the phone with someone without asking what their plan is to take care of themselves. Will they call a friend? Go to church?
Doing this in person mattered. Formerly incarcerated women who were our consultants said that inmates get surveyed ad nauseam, especially through the mail: all these faceless, nameless people asking for the worst moment of their lives. Stanford ensured that clergy and/or a social worker was available on survey days so that the women would have some emotional support.
Wittmeyer: I know the researchers hope to eventually expand their survey to every state in the country. Ambitious, important — daunting! Any sense of the states that might be next on their list?
Snyder: To some extent, it depends on where we get permission — getting permission to do in-person research is a whole complicated process that, in our case, took nearly two years (in part, because of Covid).
California, Florida and Texas contain a huge percentage of the women who are incarcerated for homicide nationwide. But Texas is complicated because its facilities are smaller, and a survey would require visiting more of them, so just logistically it’s difficult. There are states with certain laws that make them potentially interesting to us, like Oklahoma and Illinois, for example. But it costs money to do this kind of research, and no one wants to fund it, honestly.
As a society, we don’t like messy victims. The anti-domestic violence advocacy world prioritized resources for victims who don’t get convicted of committing crimes. Incarcerated women simply don’t have a ton of people on the outside really advocating for them among potential donors. So, in part, the next state will depend on who is willing to fund this research.
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Opinion Columnist
Attracted by job opportunities around Springfield, Ohio, thousands of Haitian immigrants have migrated to the area in search of a better life. And while there have been real tensions — especially after a recent arrival caused a school bus crash that killed one child and injured 23 others — it is also true that the new Haitian community has revitalized a town that was on the path to terminal decline.
For every problem — the migrants have overwhelmed key city services — there are also opportunities for both newcomers and longtime residents. As my newsroom colleague Miriam Jordan detailed in a recent article, Springfield is a microcosm for all that is good, and difficult, about immigration.
Part of this story is a furious backlash. Some of it is ordinary and even understandable resentment, and some of it emanates from the ugliest corners of American life. Last month, for example, an armed neo-Nazi group marched through Springfield denouncing Haitian immigrants in a display reminiscent of the deadly “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
A responsible leader would use the situation in Springfield — the anger and acrimony from some, as well as the decency and generosity from others — as an opportunity to try to bring people together and come, as much as possible, to a mutual understanding. A leader would see it as a chance to do democracy, to bring people together as equals so that they can figure out how to live together.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio is not that responsible leader.
Faced with troubles and tensions that could, under the wrong circumstances, escalate into outright violence, Vance fanned the flames.
In July, during a Senate committee hearing, Vance referred to Springfield as an example of how “high illegal immigration levels under the Biden administration” have raised housing costs, a highly contested assertion that rests on the false claim that the new Haitian residents of Springfield are undocumented. (The vast majority have legal residency under the Temporary Protected Status program.)
On Monday, Vance shared the outrageously false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating their neighbor’s pets. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” wrote Vance on X. “Where is our border czar?”
Vance was amplifying a lie that has its origins in a viral, and entirely fabricated, social media post spread by a Malaysia-based right-wing influencer. Springfield authorities say there are “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” The Trump campaign has not provided evidence to support the claim.
On Tuesday, Vance conceded that the smears may “turn out to be false” but urged his followers to continue spreading the lie.
Vance entered the political scene as a literary wunderkind of sorts. In highlighting this claim and spreading it to his followers on social media, he has shown that these days, he’s little more than a petty demagogue — the junior partner to another, even pettier demagogue.
The charge that a foreign people steal and eat pets is a classic attack meant to dehumanize its targets and legitimize persecution and removal. This is important to note because it comes just days after Donald Trump warned that the mass expulsion of immigrants from the United States — the centerpiece of his second-term agenda — will be a “bloody story.”
JD Vance, it seems, is playing his part.
Deputy Opinion Editor
In 20 years of covering presidential politics, I never saw a run of buoyant campaign rallies, boffo fund-raising, ecstatic social media and rank-and-file rapture for a candidate like Kamala Harris had in July and August, capped off by her Democratic convention speech. The next day, I sounded a note of caution about how joy is not a strategy, an argument that some readers disagreed with and some colleagues saw differently.
But a week after her speech, on Aug. 29, Harris faced her first real test — and, I’ve come to conclude, she fumbled it badly.
Her appearance that night on CNN — her first and only major interview since President Biden dropped out — was a missed opportunity: Harris gave canned or vague answers about why she had changed big positions from her 2020 campaign, she didn’t explain persuasively how she would lower the cost of living, and she responded blandly about what she would do on Day 1 as president. But most of all, I think, she didn’t leave strong positive impressions on undecided voters and lukewarm independents and Democrats.
The CNN interview looms large for me in part because Harris is running against a man who is unfit for office, who did enormous damage to the nation as president, who frequently veers into incoherence and lies in his news conferences and interviews — and yet who, for all that, is tied with Harris in leading polls.
Something seems to have happened in the past couple of weeks. As my newsroom colleague Nate Cohn wrote on Sunday: “Is Kamala Harris’s surge beginning to ebb?” CNN was one interview, not a trend, but I think it was revealing that a joy-driven campaign takes you only so far.
I checked in recently with our Times Opinion panel of young, undecided voters, which we are tracking through Election Day. Most in this group of 14 voters praised Harris’s convention speech; five said it made them more likely to vote for her. By contrast, seven said her answers on CNN made them less likely to vote for her.
“Harris did a poor job of explaining how she would ease inflation,” said Laura, a 20-year-old legal intern in Maryland, who was one of those less likely to support Harris after the interview. Lillian, a 27-year-old Virginian who gave Harris strong marks for her convention speech, could not come up with one positive takeaway from the interview.
For most in our group, Tuesday’s debate is critical in choosing a candidate. They want a better handle on who she is; they want stronger answers that build trust in her.
Big tent-pole events have an outsize impact in a tight race. The debate is one of Harris’s best chances to win over the doubters and undecideds and energize her momentum against Trump. No debate has ever felt more important.
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Opinion Writer
Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent who started a global anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit group that became the subject of a hit movie and made him an international superhero, is facing extremely credible charges of sexual predation and assault. His entire apparatus — Operation Underground Railroad, which claimed to conduct undercover rescue operations across the world — appears to be a grim ruse designed only to help Ballard (and possibly others) get access to and abuse women and children.
The charges, laid out in a searing New York Times investigation by Mike Baker on Monday, are as horrific as they are heartbreaking: Not only did the operation not rescue anyone, but by using loads of money to entice possible traffickers, Ballard’s scam actually helped create a market for more trafficking than might otherwise have occurred.
The revelations make Operation Underground Railroad just one more in a long roster of false heroes and false narratives to populate the national sex trafficking discourse. The sheer volume of such stories — from Somaly Mam to Pizzagate — make it tempting to assume that the entire issue is a mere boogeyman, that sex trafficking really happens only in the heads of QAnon’s most fervent loyalists.
But that would be a mistake.
Here’s a true story: By the time he was caught by a cross-border task force this past April, a Florida pharmacist, Stefan Andres Correa, had traveled to Medellín, Colombia, 45 times in two years — to rape girls as young as 9. He paid a sex trafficker $75 to procure the children and according to court records offered $75 extra plus an iPhone to at least one of the girls “if she behaved.” The case captured headlines in the United States and Colombia for its egregiousness, but officials in both countries say that it was not an anomaly.
As The Wall Street Journal has reported, the rise of work-anywhere digital nomads triggered by the pandemic and the growing perception of Medellín as a city that is finally safe for tourists have conspired to touch off a boom in child sex trafficking. The operation that led to Correa’s arrest turned up perpetrators from Florida to Ohio as well as some 250 underage victims, fewer than 100 of whom have been found and brought to safety so far.
The investigators working to track down the rest are up against dozens of crime syndicates — including an offshoot of the original Medellín cartel — and a slew of modern tools (Airbnb, digital encryption, cryptocurrency) that have made traffickers exceedingly difficult to apprehend.
They are also up against a profound blind spot. Encouraged by exploitative politicians like Donald Trump, Americans routinely work themselves up into a frenzy over the moral character of people entering their country. (Murderers! Sex traffickers! Bad hombres!) They pay considerably less attention to the havoc their countrymen bring to other nations when they leave here.
This is never more true than during election season. In the coming weeks, as anti-immigration rhetoric reaches its familiar fever pitch, voters and politicians alike will wring their hands anew over the type and number of people seeking to penetrate the United States’ southern border. They should bear in mind that an untold number of American men are flocking in the opposite direction, to commit exactly the kind of heinous acts they are most terrified of.
Editorial Board Member, reporting from Raleigh, N.C.
On the campaign trail here in Raleigh, N.C., Gwen Walz and Doug Emhoff turned on the charm on Monday afternoon.
Walz, in a peppy Midwestern lilt, encouraged Democrats to bake cookies for the volunteers at the phone bank for her husband, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris. “We need treats!” she said. “And the next night, go in and make the calls yourself.”
Emhoff, the second gentleman, joked that he and Harris had resorted to going for a walk on the tarmac recently to try to spend some quality time together. “Aw,” several women cooed at the event, in Raleigh’s City Market.
The crowd of some 200 Democrats — largely women — received Gwen Walz and Emhoff warmly. But many of them were also in a fighting kind of mood.
“Meow!” one woman cried out at the mention of JD Vance, a reference to his whining that “childless cat ladies” were running America. The Democrats inside the City Market roared, and their strong feelings were no surprise.
A day earlier, a secret audio tape was made public in which Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, vowed to ban abortions. They are already banned after 12 weeks in the state, thanks to the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly.
If only Americans considering staying home on Election Day could talk to North Carolina voters, whose lives have already been significantly affected by Trumpism.
Many Democrats here said they come from communities — and sometimes even families — in which they are far outnumbered by Republicans. “My ex-husband is voting for Trump,” Michelle Miles, 49, told me. “He’s always been controlling.”
Andrea Woodin, the secretary of the Franklin County Democrats, said she and her son, who is transgender, faced social ostracism for expressing their political views publicly.
“People yell at me from across the street,” Woodin said, adding that she home-schools her son for his safety.
In Southern battleground states like North Carolina, being a Democrat — or even just a woman — can take fortitude.
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Opinion Columnist
“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”
For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump — and the election.
Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “my values have not changed” — and she will struggle.
Madam V.P., if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.
It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast as possible.”
It’s OK to say: “President Biden and I inherited a cruel Trump border policy that included separating parents from their children. Maybe, out of an excess of compassion, we rolled it back too far. But we learned from it — we learned that only comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform can give us the solution we need, controlling illegal immigration — while continuing to be a beacon for legal immigration. So our administration sat down with one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and hammered out a bipartisan immigration bill that would have done just that. And what did Trump do? He ordered Republicans to kill it, so he could keep exploiting immigration as a wedge issue. And you’re asking me if I’ve flip-flopped?”
Politicians always underestimate how much voters (and the news media) respect a leader who can say, “We didn’t get this quite right the first time, and I’m going to fix it” — something Trump can never, ever do. As James Carville recently put it in a Times Opinion guest essay, “A leader who can openly admit a change in her understanding would feel like a breath of spring air for a lot of voters.”
Opinion Writer and Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we start the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
It’s debate week. Presidential debates are sometimes explosive and shape the terrain of elections (like the one in June, or that first Biden-Trump debate in 2020). And sometimes they are intense, but except for a single moment that becomes a shorthand for a candidate’s appeal or limitations, they fade quickly from memory. Tuesday night’s debate may be the only one between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who will meet for the first time. Will it change or harden how people view one or both of them, or will we be back where we began again this time next week?
As much as Harris’s newness and questions about her have shaped the last month, in the last week, Trump has called a news conference to revisit years-old sexual misconduct allegations against him and attack the women who lodged them, and posted at length about arresting various people if 2024 is like 2020, when he lost. That’s how Trump is, but is that how he’s going to be on the debate stage? More subdued, as he was in June, or more aggressive, as he was in 2020?
Last week, Trump’s meandering answer to a question about child-care costs wasn’t the first time he’s been asked about that in a public setting — he was basically asked the same question at the June debate and replied about something unrelated. The first debate ended up being consumed by President Biden’s awful performance and questions about his presidency, and voters’ expectations of Trump can seem fairly baked in, but not always. How he is on Tuesday could also shape the next few weeks in big ways.
On Sunday, the latest Times/Siena poll hit and, with Harris down a couple of points, there’s been some nervousness about choices her campaign has made in substance and strategy, though it’s hard to know anything certain in a race this close. On Tuesday, one of the more complex things she has to deal with is Biden’s presidency, which has often not been popular, but from which she hasn’t distanced herself too much, and can’t significantly do so anyway, since she’s a part of it.
Theoretically, the debate will force the issue a little bit, since debates tend to deal with the economic and foreign policy issues of the moment. But it’s often hard to know whether voters are looking for specific policies or a sense of command. Sounding decisive and clear about why she’s making decisions a certain way might be just as important on a debate stage as how she approaches some policy issues or broader questions.
After the debate, Harris will attend the 9/11 memorial in New York on Wednesday, and Trump may as well; Harris will spend the rest of the week in the battleground states. But even though Trump’s public persona can overwhelm everything, by the end of Tuesday night, there really might be a clear contrast between them on subjects like the courts, gun control, artificial intelligence and NATO.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
While sitting in the courtroom last spring for all 23 days of Donald Trump’s New York felony trial on charges of business fraud, I was skeptical that he would ever be imprisoned for his crimes. But I now believe that if he loses in November, he’s very likely to do time in a New York State prison, alone in a special wing secured by the Secret Service. Ironically, the justice that was delayed on Friday could be justice enhanced in the future.
If Justice Juan Merchan — an exceptionally wise jurist — had stuck to his Sept. 18 schedule, it’s hard to see how he could have sentenced a possible future president to anything more than probation. If he sentenced Trump to prison, it would have seemed highly political, even if it wasn’t, and would have probably helped Trump. And Merchan knows that if Trump wins, any decision to incarcerate the president-elect would almost certainly be viewed as impractical by a higher court.
But if Kamala Harris wins, the judge — who is clearly fed up with Trump’s shenanigans — will be free of political pressure and can impose an appropriately stiff sentence. In a letter and order Friday in which he delayed sentencing until after the election, Merchan said of the jury: “Their verdict must be respected and addressed in a manner that is not diluted by the enormity of the upcoming presidential election.” When he sentences Trump on Nov. 26, he will respect that jury. Undiluted.
I understand why supporters of the rule of law are disappointed by those political calculations. Ideally, politics should not enter into legal wrangling. In practice, though, the Justice Department has longstanding guidelines preventing prosecutions within 90 days of a federal election. Merchan has two good reasons for applying that standard to sentencing at the state level.
The first is that the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, decided in August to take no position on the sentencing delays. Bragg was trying to shield himself from political fallout, and Merchan was doing the same. His decision will be better received — even by Republicans — after the election.
The other complicating factor is that Merchan, like U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in the federal election interference case, is still moving forward with his ruling on the impact of this summer’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. On Nov. 12, Merchan will probably rule that the jury that convicted Trump on 34 counts heard plenty of convincing evidence unrelated to Trump’s official duties as president and won’t throw out the verdict.
This will clear the way for sentencing, but if he had done it on the original date, Sept. 16, it would have been only two days before sentencing — not enough time for Trump’s defense lawyers to appeal. Depriving them of that time might have been grounds for reversal.
Instead, if Trump loses, we now have a clear path to prison time. Legal experts tell me Merchan has been scrupulous and thus Trump’s appeals are unlikely to prevail.
Democrats had hoped that a prison sentence would have kept Trump’s criminal conviction front and center going into the election. But Harris, a former prosecutor, can do that without the judge. The delay avoids a MAGA backlash that would have helped Trump narrow the gap in money and momentum.
Voters were always going to be the ultimate jurors. If they do their job properly, Trump may well end up in a prison jumpsuit.
Jonathan Alter is the author of a forthcoming book on the trial: “American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial — and My Own.”
Opinion Writer
On Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump was asked a question about whether he would commit to making child care more affordable. In a two-minute response, he offered a pile of nonsense. Here’s a brief snippet that honestly I didn’t even know how to punctuate properly:
We had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because the child care is child care, couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them doing business with us.
Apparently, what he’s saying here is that he would make child care more affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not explain how that would work.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, also answered a question about child care expenses this week, from the conservative media founder Charlie Kirk. While Vance originally suggested that extended family should help care for children — an answer that left much to be desired — he elaborated on X, outlining a more substantive, realistic set of policies.
Credit where it’s due: I think a $5,000 child tax credit, which Vance has endorsed, is a good idea. It’s worth noting, however, that Vance skipped a recent vote for a bill that would have expanded the child tax credit, so, his commitment to the policy is questionable.
His other argument, about there being a “broken educational pathway” that makes it difficult for young people to become child care providers, is more complicated. Licensing requirements vary by state, and some states have negligible formal requirements for child care workers. At the least, there should certainly be some kind of formal training in early childhood development and basic safety, including CPR.
It is a positive sign, overall, that child care is an issue that’s front and center — new polling from the First Five Years Fund shows that 89 percent of voters “want candidates to have a plan or policies ready to help working parents afford high-quality child care.” Vance is at least engaging with real-world policy — a bare minimum for a serious candidate — while Trump is off in La La Land with Marco and Ivanka. It’s an understatement to say this isn’t a priority for him, and it probably wouldn’t be in a second Trump term.
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For nearly a year, Mayor Eric Adams of New York has mostly swatted away questions about the flurry of federal investigations surrounding him.
On Thursday, however, the news that federal agents had seized the phones of several top Adams officials changed everything. The action suggests that there are now three investigations into officials of Adams’s campaign or administration by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
One appears to focus on the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban. Federal officials have seized his phone.
Of interest to federal investigators in a separate investigation is the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks; First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright; and her partner David Banks, the city’s schools chancellor and a brother of Philip Banks. Federal investigators have also searched the home of a third Banks brother, Terence Banks, who is a consultant.
In a previously known case, the U.S. attorney’s office is investigating whether Adams or his campaign aides accepted illegal foreign donations from Turkish officials in exchange for special favors at City Hall.
None of these officials has been charged with a crime, and seizure of a phone is far from a criminal accusation. But this is not business as usual in New York’s government. Federal investigators had examined former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fund-raising activities but cleared him of criminal wrongdoing. They never seized his phone, something federal investigators did in Adams’s case. The last time the city faced the possibility of a looming scandal this great was arguably in 1986, when several officials in the administration of Mayor Ed Koch were convicted or forced to resign amid a bribery scheme involving parking violations.
New York deserves an explanation from Adams, something more than the simplistic “stay focused” he has offered as a response. He has yet to describe how his administration can properly serve the city while its core leadership is under severe federal scrutiny.
Two of the officials involved — the schools chancellor and the police commissioner — oversee the most essential parts of New York City government, including the education of nearly a million children. The public needs assurances that city government will continue to function despite the investigations, and in its best interest.
The gathering clouds over Adams’s City Hall are now too ominous to ignore.
Opinion Columnist
Pull up, pull up!
Friday morning’s employment report was highly anticipated; many people thought it would make the difference between a quarter-point and a half-point interest rate cut at the Federal Reserve’s next meeting.
In the event, the report was meh — a soft but not disastrous reading on employment but no further rise in unemployment. In themselves, these numbers pretty much let economic analysts believe whatever they want to believe.
But the August report was only one of five major releases since last Friday, and the combined message of these reports was: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
Last Friday we got the latest numbers on the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. It’s running slightly above 2 percent, the target rate, but we know that this small overshoot largely reflects measured housing costs, which are a lagging indicator.
On Wednesday we got two reports. One, on job openings, showed a labor market that is continuing to weaken and is now a bit looser than it was before the pandemic. The other was the Beige Book, an informal survey by regional Federal Reserve banks, which showed a weakening economy with low inflation.
And on Thursday we got data on productivity and unit labor costs. Labor costs tend to be the stickiest, hardest-to-cure piece of inflation, but they’re up only 0.4 percent over the past year, thanks to muted wage growth and high productivity growth.
Put these five reports together, and they tell us two things.
First, we’ve won the war on inflation — and we did it without a recession or a large rise in unemployment. The pessimists and prophets of stagflation were completely wrong.
Second, the Biden boom — and yes, it was a boom, with remarkable growth in both G.D.P. and employment — is losing steam. Things had to level off eventually, but the deceleration is striking. The Fed has been trying to steer between two risks: the risk of cutting too fast and reigniting inflation and the risk of cutting too slowly and allowing the economy to slide into recession. Well, the balance of risks has clearly shifted: There’s now much more danger of doing too little than of doing too much.
So the Fed should do the full half-point cut. We’ve achieved our soft landing; don’t ruin it by moving too slowly to pull the plane’s nose up.
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Opinion Staff Editor
Over this last terrible weekend, as the Goldberg-Polin family buried their son and brother, Hersh, in Jerusalem, 330 days after his abduction by Hamas into Gaza, I thought of the efforts of his mother, Rachel Goldberg, to make Hersh a presence for audiences the world over, bringing us into her home. We knew his soccer team, his love of music and atlases and world travel. We learned of his dry, sarcastic humor, how he was witty without being mean. How he was kind. We knew the family and saw ourselves in their story.
The intensity of public mourning for Hersh is a testament to both mother and child, both connected and disconnected from the reality of being the grieving parent. The exceptional work that Ms. Goldberg did to make Hersh personify a family’s suffering is a window into the depth of responsibility we all feel to our children, outside of politics, of nationality, of identity. The sense that we are in control, that we can fix things for our kids, that we must. It is connected, in this case, to a sense of Jewish community. But it is also connected to personality — Ms. Goldberg’s; that of her husband, Jon Polin; and Hersh’s. It’s connected to our sense of self.
Watching Ms. Goldberg pursue her son’s freedom, and that of all the hostages, day after day after day, I long felt that there was something akin to the cancer parent in pursuit of an elusive cure. The idea that the sheer force of will as a mother can change the story line. Ms. Goldberg put that struggle before the world, cut herself open for all of us, insisted that the world invest as much as she did in her son’s return.
During our very first conversation, on Oct. 11, Ms. Goldberg told me the story she would go on to tell leaders the world over — about her son and his capture, the joy he brought her, the joy she wanted to regain. At the end, she stopped me suddenly; she wanted to say she had read my articles about Orli, the daughter I lost to cancer six months earlier. “I feel for you and the experiences that you’ve walked through,” she said that day, five days into her son’s captivity, as Hersh’s life and hers hung in the balance. “And I just wanted to mention, you know, one day, we could be friends waiting to happen.”
Not everyone can summon that kind of empathy and that kind of will. Certainly not in that kind of moment. As Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman, said in remarks Monday night at a vigil in Washington for the hostages: “I don’t know that I would be as strong as Rachel and Jon if I were in their shoes. But right now, we all need to find that strength.”
Opinion Writer
Donald Trump’s latest economic idea, unveiled Thursday, is that he wants the United States to have a sovereign wealth fund “to invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people.” But there are some big problems with this vision.
One is that a sovereign wealth fund — a government-controlled investment vehicle — is more than a little socialist. That’s not on message for Trump, who also said Thursday that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “embraces Marxism, communism and fascism.”
Another problem for Trump is that it’s not at all clear where the federal government would get enough money to build a big fund. (He, of course, wants the world’s biggest.)
The world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds are controlled by countries that built their funds with money from massive trade surpluses: Norway, China, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Trump said the money for the fund would come from the high tariffs he wants to impose on America’s trading partners and “other intelligent things,” which he didn’t specify.
“Other countries have wealth funds,” Trump said. “We have nothing.”
He said he envisioned the fund investing in highways, airports, manufacturing hubs, defense capabilities and medical research. That sounds like a step or two beyond anything the Biden administration has done on industrial policy.
More important, Americans might not be thrilled that tariffs — essentially sales taxes on imported goods — are going into what might seem like a slush fund. Trump didn’t talk about who would control the fund; the Constitution says no funds can be spent out of the Treasury except by congressional appropriation.
Trump told the Economic Club of New York audience that he would talk over his ideas with John Paulson, a billionaire investor who sat on the dais with him. When I asked Paulson about that afterward, he said he didn’t hear Trump mention him but did support the creation of a sovereign wealth fund.
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Editorial Board Member
“Chutzpah” is an indispensable Yiddish word. It translates roughly as “gall” or “nerve,” but it is illustrated most accurately by the parable of the man who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
That was all I could think of as I followed Donald Trump’s lawyers on Thursday morning, throwing their client on the mercy of the Federal District Court in Washington, where he is being prosecuted for multiple crimes related to the Capitol insurrection he incited on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thursday’s hearing, before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, was being held to determine next steps in the case after the Supreme Court’s shocking ruling in July granting broad presidential immunity for almost all official acts. Having refiled the four-count indictment against Trump to comply with that ruling, prosecutors were eager to move ahead and file briefs on the question of which of Trump’s acts on and around Jan. 6 count as official. But John Lauro, on the defense team, insisted that any forward motion in the case would be “enormously prejudicial” to the former president, given the “sensitive” pre-election period the nation is in. “There’s something unseemly about a rush to judgment,” he said.
Forgive me for spitting out my glass of milk, but are you kidding me? Babies have been conceived and born in the time since the Jan. 6 case last achieved any forward motion. That was back in December 2023, when Trump stopped the case in its tracks by appealing on the ground of presidential immunity. It was and is an absurd claim, devoid of any historical or constitutional support, and yet with the help of the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority, half of which he put on the bench, Trump managed to drag out litigation over the matter until July, when he won a more sweeping victory than anyone, including his own lawyers, expected.
Now that the delay has put this stage of the case just a few weeks before the election, he is arguing, in effect, that he should be immune even from due process, lest voters learn more about his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election before they cast their ballots in 2024.
Chutkan was having none of it and made it clear there would be no special privileges for a presidential candidate. When Lauro said, “We’re talking about the presidency of the United States,” the judge responded, “I’m not talking about the presidency; I’m talking about a four-count indictment.”
Good for her. If anyone is politicizing this prosecution, it’s Trump, who considers gaming the legal system as his birthright.
This trial should have started and finished months ago, giving the American people a verdict in one of the most consequential prosecutions in the nation’s history. Instead, Chutkan is left to clean up the mess the Supreme Court, at Trump’s request, left her.
Opinion Columnist
Anthony Fauci recently disclosed that he was hospitalized after catching the dreaded mosquito-borne West Nile virus, telling Stat News, “I really felt like I’d been hit by a truck.”
Well, mosquitoes suck. And mosquito-borne illnesses — malaria, yellow fever — have long sucked for humanity. Cases of eastern equine encephalitis, another mosquito-borne illness, have recently popped up in Massachusetts. Some outdoor events in high-risk areas, such as Oktoberfest celebrations in Vermont, are being canceled.
Mosquito-borne diseases like these are widening their range partly because of climate change, but they’re still relatively rare in the United States.
This wasn’t always the case. Yellow fever, for example, caused multiple major epidemics in the United States, changing the course of history. But advances in science led to better understanding of its transmission and the development of a vaccine, as well as a public health response to eradicate mosquitoes in urban areas. The United States hasn’t had a major yellow fever outbreak since the one in New Orleans in 1905. And that history also points to what Americans need to do now, when faced with other mosquito-borne illnesses: We need a widespread public health response to eradicate mosquitoes in more densely populated areas and to place a renewed focus on developing new vaccines.
In addition, the best individual defenses are to use nets and screens to keep mosquitoes from entering indoors, to properly cover up as much as possible when outside — stuff those hiking pants into socks! — and to use a proper insect repellent. In many studies, DEET, Picaridin and PMD top lists of effectiveness.
I personally stick with DEET — it’s been around the longest, and thus is most studied. Yes, DEET has an unpleasant odor at first, but I’d rather smell that than contract a mosquito- or tick-borne illness, like Lyme. (Picaridin seems like a good alternative, too, and lacks the odor.)
With time, I do truly hope that we will develop new vaccines. It’s easy to forget what it took for past successes against terrible illnesses, but the price of public health is constant vigilance.
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When the stock market has a bad day, as it did on Tuesday, experts come out of the woodwork to explain why “stocks fell.” A big move in the major stock indexes seems to require a big macroeconomic explanation, such as worries about economic growth.
In fact, by my calculation, more than a quarter of the decline in the S&P 500 stock index on Tuesday was caused by concerns about a single company, Nvidia, which supplies chips for artificial intelligence and other uses.
Nvidia lost $279 billion in market value on Tuesday, which was the biggest dollar loss for one company in one day in market history. Its sharp drop wasn’t mainly because of economic jitters. Traders seemed to be reacting to a report by Bloomberg that the Justice Department sent the company a subpoena as part of an investigation into whether it violated antitrust laws.
Looking slightly more broadly at Tuesday’s bad day, more than half of the S&P 500’s decline was accounted for by eight tech stocks. Aside from Nvidia, they were Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms (the parent of Facebook), Broadcom, and two classes of shares in Alphabet (the parent of Google).
The “stocks fell” story about Tuesday is complicated by the performance of Berkshire Hathaway, among the 10 most valuable companies in the S&P 500. Its shares bucked the trend and rose fractionally (0.2 percent). Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, does own a lot of Apple stock, but otherwise, it’s light on tech. Its holdings include Geico and Burlington Northern.
There are legitimate reasons to worry that economic weakness will hurt corporate profits and cause stock prices to fall from their elevated valuations. But that doesn’t seem to be primarily what happened on Tuesday.
Editorial Board Member
Historical memory is bound to shape the first reaction to the powerful showing of a far-right party in two German state elections on Sunday. Nonetheless, there is nothing specifically German in the appeal of populism and extremism, especially among populations confused and threatened by a complex, unstable and vaguely threatening world. It’s endemic in the former Soviet satellites, but familiar, too, in the most venerable democracies.
It was populism and extremism that won in Sunday’s elections in the neighboring states of Thuringia and Saxony, both in what was formerly East Germany. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-European Union party that has been formally branded extremist in both states, came in first in Thuringia and second in Saxony, while a strange left-conservative populist hybrid, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, known by its German initials, B.S.W., and named after the former Communist who formed it a few months ago, came in third in both.
That raises some problems, and many questions.
The immediate problem will be how to form governments in the two states. B.S.W., like every other party, has declared that it will not join in any coalition with AfD, so the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the only mainstream party to make a respectable showing in either state, will probably have to try to form coalition governments with B.S.W. and other left-wing parties. It won’t be easy.
One immediate question is what the results might mean for Germany’s critical support for Ukraine. Though at opposite ends of the political spectrum, AfD and B.S.W. have almost indistinguishable positions on the resentments they feed on, including immigration and Ukraine. Both are friendly to Russia and against supporting Ukraine. German foreign policy is shaped by the federal government, which is not likely to reduce Germany’s military or political support for Ukraine anytime soon. But a signal has been sent.
The rapid rise of the AfD in eastern Germany also raises inevitable anxieties born of history: Is Nazism coming back? The leader of the AfD, Björn Höcke, has not helped with his repeated use of Nazi rhetoric in his speeches, and many Germans have demanded that AfD be banned.
Another question, though, is whether extremism and populism are unique to Germany. Many former East European populations — those of Poland and Hungary come to mind — still nurture a resentment over the perception that they are somehow second-class members of Western society, that their way of life is threatened by alien social norms imposed by a distant European Union and by alien immigrants. And populism is hardly unfamiliar in Western democracies like France, Britain, and thanks to the MAGA movement, the United States.
In eastern Germany, that sense is intensified by the fact that the West is the same country. Thuringia was one of the states most devastated by the collapse of industries that followed the reunification of Germany, and though its economy has rebounded somewhat, it still suffers from a westward exodus, especially of young women. The AfD party successfully targeted young men with messages like: “Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That’s the way to find a girlfriend!”
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A new TV ad from Donald Trump’s campaign shows how desperate he is to tie Kamala Harris to President Biden’s economic policies, and how far he is willing to stretch the truth to make that point to voters who just aren’t buying it.
The ad, titled “The Debate We’ve All Been Waiting For: Harris vs. Harris,” shows Harris talking on a TV screen about high prices.
“Everyday prices are too high,” she says. “Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes.”
Then, on another TV screen beside the first one, she says, “That’s called Bidenomics.”
This goes on a few times, with Harris talking about the price of ground beef and housing, skillfully edited with a clip of her saying, “Bidenomics is working,” as if part of the same sentence.
FLASH: Multiple presidential campaign ads have run nationally on ABC during Clemson-Georgia so far including this Trump campaign spot -- pic.twitter.com/ppChtCkjwq
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) August 31, 2024
But of course these remarks were not made at the same event, or even in the same year. She was talking about the high prices caused by the pandemic at an event last month in Raleigh, N.C., where she acknowledged the financial pressure of inflation on middle-class families and unveiled an economic plan to address it.
The clips about Bidenomics were from a speech in Washington in August of 2023, where she was promoting the good news from the monthly jobs report that had come out that day. The full context of her remarks:
And as today’s jobs numbers make clear: Bidenomics is working. Last month, we created 187,000 new jobs. That means today — yeah, go ahead and clap. I don’t want to step on the applause. That means, today, 187,000 more Americans are able to go to work, to provide for their family and invest in their future. Today’s numbers reflect the point that President Biden has made many times: America’s economy is strong and experiencing stable and steady growth. In fact, since we took office, we have created more than 13 million new jobs. In two and a half years, we have created more jobs — more new jobs than any other administration has created in four.
Harris, now running her own campaign, won’t be using the word Bidenomics anymore; it will be uttered only by Republicans, trying to blame her for the post-pandemic rise in prices. That hasn’t been very successful so far. As a recent Washington Post poll shows, only about a third of Americans believe she had significant influence on Biden’s economic policies.
But Republicans won’t be mentioning the 15 million jobs created during the Biden administration, the robust stock market or the dwindling remains of inflation. Instead, following the standard Trump method, they will just issue a series of misleading, distorted ads.
Opinion Writer and Editor
Every week on The Point, we kick things off with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
Donald Trump will speak to the Fraternal Order of Police board of trustees on Friday in North Carolina, then hold a rally near Wausau, Wis., on Saturday. Tim Walz will be in Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Thursday. After a fairly busy Labor Day weekend, Kamala Harris’s plans are so far light for the week — but presumably both she and Trump will be prepping for next week’s debate.
On Thursday, Judge Tanya Chutkan will hold a status hearing in the federal Jan. 6 case, in which Trump is still charged with four felony counts, after a variety of filings from both Trump’s team and prosecutors last week. We might find out more about what, if anything, will happen with the case before the election.
Just to give you a sense of how soon the election is in a world of absentee and early voting: In North Carolina, officials will begin mailing absentee ballots on Friday. That’s basically the earliest that happens, but over the next few weeks, more and more states will mail out absentee ballots or open early-voting locations.
One thing, tonally, that came up during the Democratic convention was the shift toward more jokes about Trump versus the very solemn and dark approach often taken by President Biden. That sometimes created jarring swings in tones, particularly during the nightly segments on Project 2025, which often were delivered pretty ironically. A specific policy agenda like Project 2025 can be either a serious problem or an object of joking derision for critics, but it’s harder for it to be both at the same time from the same person. On television, however, the Harris campaign is running a dark, non-joking ad about Project 2025 with a vintage voice-over that feels like something from the 1990s or 2000s.
As we get closer to the election, it can be hard to keep up with what to read. Here’s some informative reporting from the past week worth checking out: Jazmine Ulloa of The Times drove around Pennsylvania looking for Nikki Haley voters and interviewed them about their diverging plans for the fall. David Weigel of Semafor took a look at the Trump campaign’s strategy in embracing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. There was a great article by Richard Rubin of The Wall Street Journal on what Harris’s tax plans would actually mean.
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Opinion Columnist
Our presidential folklore is awash with animal stories. Remember Franklin Roosevelt’s dog Fala? No? Well, it was a while ago. President Biden is a big dog lover, but his pets were exiled to Delaware after multiple biting episodes. Jill Biden brought in a cat to fill the void.
Kamala Harris has been photographed cuddling puppies, but if there’s going to be any Republican animal stories during the campaign this fall, chances are they’re going to be sort of unpleasant. Donald Trump doesn’t like animals — naturally, since they draw attention from him. And now he’s got a new supporter who’s famous for his run-ins with their corpses.
Yeah, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once allegedly chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach, bungee-corded it to the roof of his car and drove it five hours to the family home. Some years ago, Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy called the episode “the rankest thing on the planet.”
People, does that remind you of anything? Back when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, his son once told the story about a family vacation in which Romney put Seamus, their pet Irish setter, in a roof crate for a 12-hour drive to Canada. Apparently, Seamus weathered the trip fine, but the presidential campaign in 2012 was very boring. As a diversion, I decided to try to see how many times I could mention the story before Election Day. Diligent readers counted around 80 mentions.
How would you compare the whale incident with that? Does it make you miss Romney? Yes, he was boring, but we’ve certainly learned how much worse a candidate can be. Don’t forget: Kennedy also dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. His explanation was that he’d found it on the side of a road and decided to take it home to refrigerate its meat. Then, upon realizing that he was late to a steakhouse dinner, he changed his mind and left the carcass in the park, creating a stir he called “amusing.”
Kennedy, you may remember, says he once suffered from memory issues because of a dead worm in his brain. He’s now supporting Trump for president, and Trump might even consider giving an administration job to his new pal.
No further comments seem necessary. Just remember that whale.
Contributing Opinion Writer
When Vice President Kamala Harris started talking policy with a heavily promoted speech about voters’ top concern — the economy — where do you suppose she did it?
My home state, North Carolina. And my governor, Roy Cooper, was the Democrat chosen to introduce her on the climactic final night of the party’s convention.
But then Donald Trump stages a rally in North Carolina seemingly every other week — often enough that I’m terrified he’ll build and start hanging out at some Tar Heel analogue of Mar-a-Lago. He’s fixated on this place.
For good reason. North Carolina has 16 Electoral College votes — the same as Georgia, one more than Michigan and only one fewer than Ohio. And they appear to be in play. On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report moved North Carolina into the tossup category.
The state hasn’t voted Democratic in a presidential election since 2008, when Barack Obama won, but Joe Biden lost here in 2020 by only about 75,000 votes, or under 1.4 percentage points.
And 2024 is different. Political analysts here tell me that they’re struck by the burst of energy for the Harris campaign and its significant investment in the state, where, according to the Pew Research Center, about 23 percent of eligible voters are Black, in contrast to 14 percent nationally. They haven’t seen anything like it since 2008.
Additionally, Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., noted that in the Republican presidential primary here, Nikki Haley received hefty percentages of the votes in urban counties even though her campaign by then was a lost cause. That suggests a potent anti-Trump sentiment among moderate Republicans and independents.
There’s yet another distinctive dynamic this time around. The slate of Republican candidates for statewide office is MAGA fury through and through. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is a firebrand with a history of misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and altogether deranged remarks. Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction, has suggested that Cooper, Biden, Obama, Hillary Clinton and Anthony Fauci should be executed for treason — and that Obama’s killing should be televised.
Asher Hildebrand, a fellow professor at Duke University’s School of Public Policy, said that while that extremism probably won’t “push too many voters to the polls for Harris, it very well might keep some Trump voters home.”
And in an election potentially decided by one measly percentage point, such disaffection absolutely could turn North Carolina blue.
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