Elections

The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.But there is another angle you can take on the Republican use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.At the same time, it is hard not to miss the degree to which attempts to nullify popular referendums or redistrict opponents into irrelevance can also work to inculcate a sense of hopelessness in those who might otherwise seek political change. Yes, it is true that many people will push back when faced with a sustained challenge to their right to participate in political life or exercise other fundamental rights. But many people will resign themselves to the new status quo, persuading themselves that nothing has fundamentally changed or concluding that it is not worth the time or effort involved to pick up the fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which includes sweeping legislation covering a wide range of military priorities including Aukus passed the US House of Representatives, a day after it cleared the Senate. The acquisition of at least three such submarines from the US is an interim step before Australian-built nuclear-powered submarines start to enter into service in the 2040s More

Recent positive news may put two theories on economic disenchantment to the test.The New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Stocks have boomed in recent days.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA Federal Reserve announcement about the future of the funds rate is not the sort of news that would typically factor into analysis of public opinion and the economy. Usually, analysts look at numbers like gross domestic product and unemployment, not something as arcane as a federal funds rate.But this isn’t a normal economy, and public opinion about the economy hasn’t been normal, either.For two years, the public has said the economy is doing poorly, even though it appears healthy by many traditional measures. This has prompted a fierce debate over whether the public’s views are mostly driven by concrete economic factors like high prices or something noneconomic — like a bad “vibe” brought on by social media memes or Fox News.The Fed’s projection Wednesday that it will cut rates three times over the next year probably won’t generate TikTok memes, but it’s exactly the kind of event that may ultimately resolve this debate one way or another — with important and potentially decisive consequences for the 2024 presidential election.To cut right to the heart of the problem underlying this debate: High prices do not seem to fully explain why voters are this upset about the economy.Yes, voters are upset about high prices, and prices are indeed high. This easily and even completely explains why voters think this economy is mediocre: In the era of consumer sentiment data, inflation has never risen so high without pushing consumer sentiment below average and usually well below average. This part is not complicated.But it’s harder to argue that voters should believe the economy is outright terrible, even after accounting for inflation. Back in early 2022, I estimated that consumer confidence was running at least 10 to 15 percentage points worse than one would expect historically, after accounting for prices and real disposable income.I could run through the numbers, but just consider this instead: The low point for consumer sentiment in 2022 wasn’t just low; it was a record low for the index dating all the way to 1952. That’s right: Consumer sentiment in 2022 was worse than it was in the 1970s, when higher inflation was sustained for much longer, and worse than it was in the depths of the Great Recession.Now, other gauges of consumer confidence don’t show things quite so bad, but even the rosier measures show Americans about as down on the economy as they were 15 years ago, when mass layoffs drove a doubling of the unemployment rate to 10 percent and when household net worth fell $11.5 trillion. You don’t need fancy math to see there’s something left to be explained.The two sides of this debate disagree about why, exactly, the public is so sour on the economy.The Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, on Wednesday.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe case for vibesOne side argues that public opinion about the economy is now being driven by noneconomic factors, and in particular vibes, or a prevailing mood that colors our perception of reality. In this view, the vibe today is so biting and dour that public opinion is no longer responsive to material economic reality: The “vibe” is bad, so voters can’t see that the economy is good.Strictly speaking, there’s no reason vibes can’t be grounded in tangible economic conditions — like stimulus checks going away — but in practice this winds up being an argument for how noneconomic factors prevent voters from appreciating the economy. Those factors could include conservative media, cynical social media, the mental health crisis, a pandemic hangover, President Biden or really anything else that might dampen the economic spirit of Americans.There might well be something to the vibes argument. There might even be a lot to it. But there’s just not much evidence to support it. This side fundamentally rests its case on a diagnosis of exclusion: If we don’t buy the economic argument, then it must be noneconomic — and if it’s noneconomic, it can really be anything. The power of vibes here is naturally indeterminate, and allowing limitless explanatory power to a theory without evidence should give any serious thinker some pause.If this side of the debate is right, the consequences for Mr. Biden are pretty bleak. In this view, the economy ought to be helping him, but instead it will presumably be a major drag. An 81-year-old white male moderate may be the worst possible Democrat to turn around the vibe on TikTok.The case for the economy explaining allThe other side of the debate argues that the explanation is fundamentally economic, but that the factors dragging down consumers aren’t neatly captured by the usual economic statistics.There are two kinds of adverse economic factors that this side of the debate has in mind. One is economic dysfunction — some basic things have become harder. It’s harder to hire. It’s harder to get a loan. It’s more expensive to buy things. At times it was impossible to buy things because of supply chain shortages. It’s harder to buy a home. It’s harder to sell a home. If you wanted to engage in these kinds of economic activities, you should have done them before the fall of 2021.It’s easy to see how these challenges could affect economic perceptions, and these problems can be missed by economic statistics. The usual data measures the extent of economic activity, not its ease. That people still have the resources to spend, hire and buy doesn’t change that voters may rationally conclude the economy is bad if it makes it harder for them to undertake economic activity.The other kind of adverse economic factor is the pessimism about future growth. A statistic like unemployment says a lot about the economy today, but little about the economy tomorrow. Expectations of future growth are an important component of consumer confidence indexes, and for good reason: The desire to turn money into more money is foundational to American capitalist culture. Here again, there have been reasons to anticipate limited economic growth or even a recession. Investors have expected it, as evidenced by the yield curve. There was even a reasonable assumption that the Fed would be so focused on slowing inflation by keeping interest rates high that a recession would be all but inevitable.In contrast to the “vibes” theory, there’s a lot of evidence for these various phenomena. They also fit into the framework of consumer confidence as a function of concrete economic conditions.But whether these nontraditional economic problems add up to explain what’s going on is much harder to say. They might explain a lot and might even explain all of it, but it’s impossible to prove empirically without any precedent for today’s economy in the era of modern consumer confidence data. There has simply never been a time when unemployment has stayed so low and prices have gone up so much, let alone with all of these additional twists like supply chain shortages and expectations of recession.What can be said is that the theory of concrete economic problems will be put to the test as soon as economic reality improves, and that time might finally be at hand.Many states now have gas prices below $3 a gallon.Adam Davis/EPA, via ShutterstockThe economy appears to be improvingAfter a few months of stubborn inflation, rising gas prices and interest rates, and a falling stock market, the last month or so has brought excellent economic news. The stock market has gone up nearly 15 percent since New York Times/Siena College polls were in the field in late October. The inflation trajectory looks good. Mortgage rates are falling. Gas prices are down. Once-skeptical economists have declared that a “soft landing” seems at hand. And now the Fed is forecasting rate cuts, which augurs growth, confidence in lower inflation and eventually a return to a more normal economy.Put it together, and the big economic barriers could be poised to fade. If they do and the material economic side of the debate is correct, consumer confidence might quickly begin to recover. And Mr. Biden’s re-election chances would begin to improve, at least to the extent that the economy and not another issue, like his age, is responsible for Donald J. Trump’s lead in the polls.While it’s too early to say, there are certainly signs that consumer confidence could rise. For one, it has already been doing so. Overall, consumer confidence is up nearly 20 points since inflation peaked in the summer of 2022. That rate of improvement is in line with prior, vigorous periods of economic expansion, like during the 1990s. The monthly pattern in consumer confidence even seems to align with the news: Last month’s strong economic data corresponded with a rebound in consumer confidence that erased the declines of the past four months, when the economic news was worse than over the summer.That’s what we would expect if real economic factors were driving consumer confidence, though it’s not enough to disprove the vibe theory. To send the vibe argument away, we would need to start to see the gap closing between expected and actual consumer confidence. If fears of a recession fade and a more normal economic environment returns, there might still be enough time for that gap to close before Mr. Biden stands for re-election. More

Party leaders believe Mazi Melesa Pilip has the potential to be a breakout star. But she has little political experience and her policy views are largely unknown.Republicans battling to hold onto the New York House seat vacated by George Santos chose on Thursday another relatively unknown candidate with a remarkable biography but a thin political résumé to run in a special election next year.After extensive vetting, Republican leaders selected Mazi Melesa Pilip, a local legislator who was born in Ethiopia, served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces and first ran for office in 2021 vowing to fight antisemitism.It was a bold gamble by Long Island Republicans, a group better known for nominating older, white establishment figures. Republicans believe Ms. Pilip, a 44-year-old mother of seven, has the potential to become a breakout star before the Feb. 13 special election, particularly at a moment when Israel’s war with Hamas is reordering American politics.“She is the American success story,” said Peter King, a former New York Republican congressman involved in the nomination. “Some people have superstar capacity. She walks into the room, people notice her, they listen to her.”Ms. Pilip, however, lacks many of the credentials typically prized in a competitive congressional race. She has almost no experience raising money, lacks relationships with key party figures outside her affluent New York City suburb and has never faced the kind of scrutiny that comes with being a candidate for high office.In fact, beyond fierce advocacy for Israel and support for the police, she has taken no known public positions on major issues that have shaped recent House contests. That includes abortion rights, gun laws and the criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

In closing arguments, the lawyer for two former Georgia election workers defamed by Rudolph Giuliani said a big jury award would deter future attacks by powerful people.A lawyer for two former Georgia election workers told members of a jury in federal court on Thursday that they should send a message in considering how much Rudolph W. Giuliani should have to pay for spreading defamatory lies about them as part of his effort three years ago to keep President Donald J. Trump in office.“Send it to Mr. Giuliani,” the lawyer, Michael J. Gottlieb, said in his closing argument. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”The election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who were counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Ga., on Nov. 3, 2020, are asking for at least $24 million each from Mr. Giuliani for baselessly accusing them of cheating Mr. Trump out of votes and broadcasting that lie to millions of followers on social media.Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington has already found that Mr. Giuliani, who served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and helped lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election result, defamed the women. The jury in the civil trial is only being asked to determine what damages Mr. Giuliani should pay.The jurors adjourned on Thursday afternoon and were set to pick up their deliberations on Friday.In a last-minute decision, Mr. Giuliani decided not to testify as planned on Thursday. His lawyer and Judge Howell had expressed concerns for days that Mr. Giuliani would repeat his unfounded claims of election fraud from the stand, as he did on Monday outside the courthouse when he attacked Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss again.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, also asked the jury to send a message, by not landing on a “catastrophic” dollar figure.“I’m asking you to be reasonable and be just,” Mr. Sibley said.Mr. Sibley said that Mr. Giuliani has admitted that he was wrong, but that the torrent of abuse directed at Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss after his statements about them was not entirely his fault.Mr. Sibley argued that Mr. Giuliani did not himself say all of the horrible and racist things or encourage violence against the women, and that no amount of money could realistically repair the women’s reputations in the eyes of the people who believe the lies. Mr. Giuliani, he said, knows that defamation is wrong, because he believes he has been defamed by President Biden.Mr. Sibley asked jurors to remember Mr. Giuliani by the reputation he had 20 years ago, after serving as mayor of New York City and as a federal prosecutor who took down the mob.“Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be defined by what’s happened in recent times,” Mr. Sibley said. “This is a man who did great things.”During the trial, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, who are mother and daughter, delivered emotional testimony about how the falsehoods spread by Mr. Giuliani ruined their lives.They told the jury they had received hundreds of threatening and racist messages from people who believed Mr. Giuliani’s assertion, causing them to lose their livelihoods, move out of their homes and suffer emotional distress. More

It’s not just a piece of political memorabilia — it’s a strategy.When Donald J. Trump walked into a Georgia courthouse on Aug. 24 to be booked as part of his fourth criminal indictment, becoming the first former president (and only current presidential candidate) to have a mug shot taken, the picture seemed destined to become a symbol of this fraught, unprecedented moment in American history. As has become increasingly clear, however, Mr. Trump and his team have come to see the mug shot in a different way.Specifically, as the source material for a new strain of political pop culture mythmaking and memorabilia.Almost overnight they splashed the image, with Mr. Trump’s signature glower, across mugs, T-shirts and posters in their campaign store, using it and all it represents as a key component of their fund-raising. Then, this week, NFT INT, the official licensee of the Trump name and image for digital trading cards, began selling a special “Mugshot Edition” NFT set that includes, for a certain few willing to buy the whole thing, pieces of the blue suit and red tie Mr. Trump wore in the photo.Or, as the NFT INT website calls the garment, “The most historically significant artifact in American history.”The 47 cards on offer were created by the artist Clark Mitchell and depict Mr. Trump as, for example, Captain America, and sitting in for Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Cards can be bought individually for $99 or as a full set that runs for $4,653 and includes a physical trading card (some of which will be signed by Mr. Trump) with a swatch of suit fabric and an invitation to a special dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Those who buy 100 of the NFT cards receive a swatch of the jacket or pants, plus a swatch of the tie and the dinner at Mar-a-Lago.According to the NFT INT website, the suit is “priceless.” There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.The mug shot edition is just the latest in a series of NFT cards released on the site portraying former President Donald J. Trump.NFT INTThe mug shot edition is the third set of NFT cards released, with the first two drops selling out in “a little more than 24 hours,” according to Kevin Mercuri, a spokesman for NFT INT and the chief executive of Propheta Communications. The new offering comes complete with a video of Mr. Trump endorsing the drop — and the suit — at the top of the web page. Mr. Mercuri said the idea for selling the suit swatches came from NFT INT and was inspired by the way sports figures sell pieces of their jerseys to fans. Mr. Trump was “aware of the trend and receptive” to the proposal, he said, and “generously gave the suit to NFT INT. He felt that members of the public would want to have a piece of history.”The suit was then authenticated by MEARS, a company that specializes in validating sports memorabilia. Troy R. Kinunen, the chief executive of the company, said that “the team at CollectTrumpCards provided the suit directly from the President” and that MEARS then verified certain design elements of the garment against photos and video, including pocket placement, buttons, and the collar of the suit jacket, which Mr. Trump had sewn down in the back to keep it in place. (Though given the number of blue suits Mr. Trump appears to own, it is hard to know how anyone could tell them apart.)Selling the mug shot suit tracks, to a certain extent, with other examples of fan culture. Paige Rubin, an assistant vice president and the head of sale for handbags at Christie’s, said there was an almost insatiable public appetite for souvenirs of the famous and infamous, and often the most valuable pieces of memorabilia at auction are determined by provenance: “Does the object you are selling resonate with the fan base? Does it connect to an iconic moment in a career?”Similarly, there is a long tradition of auctioning memorabilia from public figures, including many presidents, as Summer Anne Lee, a historian of presidential dress at the Fashion Institute of Technology, noted. Scraps of Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained bedsheets regularly come up for auction, and a pair of Richard Nixon’s eyeglasses from around the time of his resignation were sold in 2005 for $1,955. In 2019, a pair of underpants believed to have belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, were gaveled at almost $5,000.However, despite the fact that Melania Trump likewise sold one of her most notable White House outfits — the white hat she wore during the French state visit in 2018 — as part of her own NFT drop, and despite Mr. Trump’s own history of monetizing his own brand in a way other political candidates might not dare, it is almost unheard-of for a living president to hawk his own memorabilia for his own profits, Ms. Lee said. Though NFT INT is not related to the Trump organization and Mr. Trump is not a part of the company, as a licenser Mr. Trump would probably receive a percentage of sales.Which makes it in his interest to divide the suit into as many pieces as possible — both financially and, even more pointedly, conceptually.After all, if a garment is considered “historic,” keeping it whole would seem the more desirable choice. That would allow it to be exhibited in a museum, or a presidential library (or, in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum).On the other hand, most tiny scraps of clothing that exist in collections are religious curios, fragments of martyrs’ gowns. Treating the mug shot suit in the same way “suggests Trump believes the suit he wore for his mug shot will be even more motivational to his fans than any other,” Ms. Lee said. “They are offering it like pieces of religious clothing, which implies Mr. Trump is a saint who has been through trials and tribulations for the country.”Indeed, said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, the sale suggests a “quasi-religious element, as if the suit Trump wore in court has special charismatic qualities.”Well, one of the cards in the set does depict Mr. Trump as a golden god. More

More from our inbox:A Party Pooper’s View of the New Climate DealThe Biden Impeachment Inquiry: ‘Republicans, Have You No Shame?’The 1968 and 2024 ElectionsThe A.I. StakesVeterans’ Suicides by Firearm Harry WrightTo the Editor:Re “Fight the Powerful Forces Stealing Our Attention,” by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 27):In 2010, frustrated that I had to admonish the students in my large sophomore lecture course to turn off their cellphones at the start of each class, only to see them return to them immediately at the end, I told them a story.When I went to college, I explained, there were no cellphones. After class, we thought about what we had just learned, often discussing it with our friends. Why not try an experiment: for one week, no cellphones for 10 minutes after every class? Only three of the 80 students accepted the challenge, and not surprisingly, they reported back that they were thrilled to find themselves learning more and enjoying it more thoroughly.So, hats off to the authors of this essay who are teaching attentiveness. I fear, though, that they are trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Would that they prove me wrong.Richard EtlinNew YorkThe writer is distinguished university professor emeritus at the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park.To the Editor:Of course, we have lost a good deal of our ability to focus and concentrate with the persistence of digital information gnawing at our attention spans. While this is not a new problem, it has been grossly intensified.The answer in the past, and the answer now, is libraries: places of quiet reading, contemplation, study, thinking, even daydreaming.To put away electronic media for a time and enjoy the silence of a library is a gift for personal balance and tranquillity.Bonnie CollierBranford, Conn.The writer is a retired associate director for administration, Yale Law Library.To the Editor:Some years ago I returned to the tiny Greek island my family left in 1910. “There’s nothing there,” everybody said. But the nothing that was there was the absolute antidote to most of the malaise of modern life, or, as my daughter calls it, “the digital hellscape.”The effect was immediate. No credit cards, no taxi apps, no alarm systems, none of it. Just the sounds of the goat bells on the hills and people drinking coffee and staring at the water and talking to each other. And it wasn’t boring at all.Jane WardenMalibu, Calif.A Party Pooper’s View of the New Climate Deal Fadel Dawod/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “In Climate First, Pact Seeks Shift on Fossil Fuels” (front page, Dec. 14):I hate to be a climate summit party pooper, but the bottom line is that the new deal being celebrated is not legally binding and can’t, on its own, force any country to act. History has shown that if a country isn’t forced to act, it usually won’t.How do I know that? We just had the hottest year on record, with global fossil-fuel emissions soaring to record highs. We had agreed not to go there. Here we are.Douglas G. WilliamsMinneapolisThe Biden Impeachment Inquiry: ‘Republicans, Have You No Shame?’Representative James Comer, left, and Representative Jim Jordan have led the Republican impeachment inquiry.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Impeachment Inquiry Approved, Despite No Proof of Biden Crime” (front page, Dec. 14):This is a sad day for our country. Republicans voted to have an impeachment inquiry into President Biden without having any basis on which to proceed. Why did they take this unprecedented step? They were responding to the wishes of Donald Trump.The constitutional power of the House of Representatives to impeach is a solemn duty reserved for instances where a president has committed “high crimes or misdemeanors.” In this case, there is not a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing, only a father’s love for his surviving son.Republicans, have you no shame? You will rue the day you voted in such an unethical manner. To use impeachment as a political tool in the 2024 election is an embarrassment for the whole world to see.I am afraid that we have reached the point where retribution is one party’s focus instead of the myriad needs of the people of this nation.Ellen Silverman PopperQueensThe 1968 and 2024 Elections Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Reading about how President Biden is losing support among young pro-Palestinian college kids takes me back to my youth. I’m a baby boomer, and this reminds me of the 1968 presidential election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.So many of my generation were so angry about the Vietnam War and how Vice President Humphrey had backed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the war that many of us refused to vote for Humphrey. Nixon was elected, and the war continued.As President Biden often says, an election is a choice. However, one can also choose not to vote. Those of us who refused to vote for Humphrey may well have tipped the election to Nixon, and with it all of the consequences that followed.It is a cliché that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but there is a lot of truth to it. I fervently hope we don’t make that mistake in 2024.Stuart MathNew YorkThe A.I. StakesTo the Editor:Re “How Money, Ego and Fear Lit A.I.’s Fuse” (“The A.I. Race” series, front page, Dec. 4):Although the history of artificial intelligence may read like a struggle between those favoring cautious development and those intent on advancing the technology rapidly with fewer restrictions, it was inevitable that the latter would come out on top.Given the resources required to scale the technology, it could be developed only with the support of parties with enormous computing power and very deep pockets (in other words, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta).And in return for their investments of billions of dollars, it is hardly surprising that those competing parties would demand rapid advancement with fewer restrictions in the hope of controlling the future of an industry that holds the promise of spectacular profit.In retrospect, the proponents of a cautious approach to the development of A.I. never stood a chance.Michael SilkLaguna Woods, Calif.Veterans’ Suicides by FirearmPhotos of people who died by suicide were displayed during an awareness event in Los Angeles last month.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Rate of Suicide by Firearm Reaches Record Level, Report Says” (news article, Dec. 2):The increasing use of firearms in suicides is particularly concerning among veterans. Suicide rates among veterans are twice as high as among civilians, and veterans are twice as likely as civilians to use a firearm in a suicide attempt. Younger veterans are at especially high risk; those under the age of 55 have the highest rates of suicide by firearm.New data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers a glimmer of hope: New York State is bucking the trend. It saw a 13 percent decrease in firearm-related suicides by veterans in 2021. That conforms with research findings that states with stricter gun control policies experience fewer firearm-related suicides.Saving lives means reducing access to lethal means.Derek CoyNew YorkThe writer, an Iraq veteran, is senior program officer for veterans’ health at the New York Health Foundation. More

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been awash in condolences. Friends tell me how deeply sorry for me they feel. They say they can only imagine my pain. They wonder how I’ve gotten through it.They’re talking about the hours I had to spend with Ron DeSantis.To be more specific, they’re talking about my coverage first of his televised face-off with Gavin Newsom and then, six days later, his debate with Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and (is there no mercy in this world?) Vivek Ramaswamy, whose singularly manic smugness makes him the political equivalent of one of those carnival rides that just spin you in circles, faster and faster. I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.But he isn’t the great puzzle of the race for the White House. That honor belongs to DeSantis, who won a second term as Florida governor in 2022 by an indisputably wowie margin of nearly 20 percentage points, had donors lining up for the pleasure of hurling big wads of cash at him, and was supposed to be MAGA magic — Donald Trump’s priorities without Donald Trump’s pathologies.He performed a nifty trick, all right. Abracadabra: His early promise disappeared.And while DeSantis’s downward trajectory recalls the sad arcs of Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential race and Scott Walker eight years later, a big part of the explanation is peculiar to him. It’s a deficit of joy.His joylessness is why it’s so unpleasant to watch him, whether he’s at a lectern or a state fair, dressed up or dressed down, demonizing schoolteachers or migrants or Mickey Mouse.Oh, sure, there’s the demonizing itself, which positions him contemptuously and censoriously far to the right. But the scornful manner completes the spiteful message. You can get away with an air of meanness if there are gusts of exuberance along with it — if you relish your rants and exult in your evil, as Trump seems or long seemed to. But not if you project the sense that campaigning is some nuisance you’ve deigned to put up with. Not if you’re put out. Not if your every smile comes across as an onerous homework assignment in a class you were forced to take for your major.“Grinding away methodically” — that’s how Dan Balz, in an article in The Washington Post last weekend, described both DeSantis’s county-by-county trudge across Iowa and his point-by-point slog through debates. Balz was sizing up Haley’s surge past DeSantis into second place in many polls, and he was kinder than the CNN senior political commentator Ana Navarro, who several days later said that the DeSantis campaign had “that certain stench of political death.”It’s not moribund yet. As Balz rightly noted, Iowa is famously unpredictable and DeSantis has garnered some important endorsements in the state. He’s also concentrating his resources there in a manner that could well lift him above Haley (though not Trump) in the end.But even before his campaign’s stench of death, he often bore the expression of someone catching a whiff of something foul. And a sour puss is not the sweetest bait. It’s not the smartest presidential audition.Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all had moments when they communicated an outsize delight at drawing near, and then reaching, the pinnacle of American politics. They had their resentments, too, and their degrees of interest in masking those, along with their success in doing so, varied widely. Trump devolved into all resentment all the time. It’s where he dwells — or, rather, rages — now.But a while back he, like the others, could flash a certain spark. Joe Biden still can — he clearly regards the presidency as a great privilege.Maybe DeSantis does, too, and perhaps his quest for it really does excite and inspire him. You wouldn’t know it from his debates or from his CNN town hall in Des Moines on Tuesday night, when his diminished chances to win his party’s nomination prompted a salvo of negative comments about Trump that he should have been firing off all along.Maybe he’s just terrible at glee or at anything glee adjacent. Maybe that won’t matter: We’ve entered a scarier, stranger chapter of American political life — of American life, period — in which a genuine smile may seem discordant and a grudging one in tune with mournful times.Whatever the case, it’s possible that DeSantis will be back on a debate stage just before the Iowa caucuses. I apparently haven’t suffered enough.For the Love of SentencesGetty ImagesIn The Washington Post, Monica Hesse marveled at the extent to which Paris Hilton has outsourced her newborn’s diaper changing to a nanny and has thus been spared “close encounters of the turd kind.” (Thanks to Trish Webster of Hudson, Ohio, and Marjorie Hollis of Port Angeles, Wash., for nominating this.) Also in The Post, Sally Jenkins deconstructed the wild finish of the N.F.L. game last Sunday between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs: “It’s the time of year when some teams flex and some teams fold. The Chiefs have been hanging on to their accustomed dominance with their fingernails, and you can almost hear the titch, titch of them slipping.” (George Gates, Greensboro, N.C.)And Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford observed that the National Guardsman Jack Teixeira’s alleged leaking of classified documents reflected “an omnivorous appetite for information about global affairs.” “It was as if he had gone to the secrets buffet and sampled one of every dish,” they wrote. (Terry Burridge, Arlington, Va.)In The Times, Lindsay Zoladz nailed a seasonal annoyance: “When a nonholiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix.” (Chris Winters, Seattle)Also in The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’” (Dave Powell, Longboat Key, Fla.)And Andrew Solomon, reviewing “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese, defended Verghese’s idealistic sensibility, asking, “Why should we assume that sophistication requires cynicism?” “People may not be as good as Verghese’s characters,” he added, “but neither are they as bad as Philip Roth’s or Saul Bellow’s. Ugliness is not truer than loveliness, nor cruelty more so than kindness.” (Florence Nash, Durham, N.C.)On Semafor, Liz Hoffman surveyed the witnesses called by a Senate committee pondering new banking rules. “We all know the image: C.E.O.s lined up behind a wood table, wearing a practiced look of contrition and their third-best watch,” she wrote. (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)On the music blog Stereogum, Tom Breihan noted the link of a No. 1 Kelly Clarkson hit, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” to a certain German philosopher: “For a proto-fascistic theorist who died in an insane asylum after a syphilis-induced nervous breakdown, Nietzsche had a real knack for a catchy phrase.” (Mark Pitcock, Merrimack, N.H.)And in an article in The New Yorker with the terrifically clever (and frightening) headline “All the Carcinogens We Cannot See,” Siddhartha Mukherjee described a conversation with a researcher named William Hill: “Hill reached into a drawer and pulled out a vial filled with a coal-black sludge. ‘That’s a solution of suspended particles of dust and soot,’ he explained. ‘It’s liquid air pollution.’ I shook the vial, watching the particles rise and settle. It was as if someone had made a hideous snow globe with the grime wiped from my windows in New York.” (Susan Hacker, Willingboro, N.J.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m WatchingJoJo Whilden/NetflixMy end-of-year movie binge continues, at least to the extent that it can amid a storm of work obligations. Students’ final papers! Proofreading the pages of my forthcoming book! This newsletter! I was so far behind last weekend that I couldn’t use the ticket I bought to a Sunday night showing of “Maestro.”But I found time days before that for “May December,” which I enjoyed less than most critics apparently did. I found its jumble of tones and its melodramatic score distancing, though I’m never sorry to spend time watching Julianne Moore, who plays a woman who went to prison for the sexual abuse of a minor; married and had children with him; and is trustingly but tentatively welcoming an actress (Natalie Portman) who is about to play her into the couple’s home.I’m also never sorry to spend time with Tilda Swinton, whose one extended scene with Michael Fassbender is the high point of “The Killer,” an otherwise uneven, underbaked affair about a professional assassin (Fassbender) who botches a job, is marked for elimination and strikes back against the people coming after him.“Leave the World Behind” — about strangers warily sizing up one another as they confront what just might be the end of the world — held my interest more effectively than either of those other movies did. While it plays heavy-handedly with the question of whether we humans are worse than we admit or better than we realize — whether we’re drowning in our own malice or buoyed by our fugitive grace — it expertly builds tension and has a few bravura sequences. It also has a quartet of excellent performances by Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la. On a Personal NoteTravis Dove for The New York TimesBoth courses that I taught this semester ended last week, and in the waning minutes, my students and I allowed ourselves conversations far afield of the topics at hand. That always seems to happen. I asked them questions about their lives that I hadn’t asked before. They asked me questions about mine. A few of them, eyeing the vast and scary expanse beyond college, were curious about my path to where I am now. Did I plan it all out?Yes.And no.“Plan” is a flexible verb, an elastic concept. The students were talking about a meticulous choreography, a step-by-step progression. That’s how many people approach the future, and for some of them, it’s the right call. But what those people see as a risk-minimizing strategy always seemed dangerous to me, because it presumes a degree of control over events that most of us don’t really have and a predictability by which the world doesn’t operate. It also creates a merciless yardstick: If things don’t happen a certain way by a certain point, you’re off course. You’re behind schedule. You’ve failed.But there’s another kind of planning. It involves knowing generally what you’re after, preparing for a range of possibilities therein, not so much writing a script as sculpting a space: You want a career in the law, but you choose your focus — or it chooses you — as you go along. You want to arm yourself with the skills and sensibility to start a business, but the nature of that enterprise will be determined by circumstances that you can’t, and shouldn’t, guess right now. You want to lavish your energy on — and earn your keep with — words, but whether they’re in screenplays, novels, magazines or newspapers is up for grabs.We talk too little about that kind of map, though it has much to recommend it, including its allowance for serendipity, for surprise, which can thrill as often as it disappoints.My students asked me: Did I plan to leave New York for North Carolina and trade the churn of Manhattan for the calm of my suburb? Was I determined to become a professor? Was I set on Duke?I wasn’t set at all. I didn’t time this to happen when it did, two and a half years ago. I felt an itch for just a bit of an adventure. I felt a pang for new scenery and a new challenge. I craved more green, less noise. And I’d arranged my life so that I could make such a pivot when the pivot made sense. Then I got an email about my current job, and I let life fill in the blanks. More