Elections

Americans might not need to read a newspaper article to tell them how to vote in this presidential election. In fact, more than four million people have already cast their ballots. The grim reality of American life at this moment — the hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths, the financial struggles, the disinformation, the factionalism, the warming planet — makes the case for Joe Biden far more powerfully than any endorsement ever could. For many, the choice is as plain as the mask on Mr. Biden’s face.Still, we hope today’s New York Times editorial board endorsement of Joe Biden will be clarifying and insightful to readers.In January — several lifetimes ago, it seems — the editorial board wrote that choosing a Democratic nominee “calls for a hefty dose of humility about anyone’s ability to foretell what voters want.” In a departure from endorsements that have run on this page starting with Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the board picked two candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.Enter that hefty dose of humility. Democratic primary voters had other ideas about what they wanted. They delivered the nomination decisively to Mr. Biden, based both on his ability to win the White House and his diagnosis of — and solutions for — the grave problems that face the United States in 2020.In our endorsement today, the board wrote that above all else it is Mr. Biden’s promise to be a president to all Americans that argues most persuasively for his election. After four years of the most divisive president in modern times, this is both welcome and urgently needed. And what a therapeutic it would be.Readers might notice that the board’s endorsement of Mr. Biden makes no mention of Donald Trump. The case for the former vice president needs no foil to make it stronger.Also, the editorial board — which has been weighing in on Mr. Trump’s presidency for the past three and a half years — will issue its verdict on his term in office later this month.To many readers, particularly younger ones, newspaper endorsements might feel like a vestigial organ, something from another time. We tried to bring some transparency — even some levity — to the process with our Democratic primary endorsement process.Today, we’ve returned to the traditional form: the best choice, clearly stated.“Mr. Biden knows that there are no easy answers,” the board wrote. “He has the experience, temperament and character to guide the nation through this valley into a brighter, more hopeful future. He has our endorsement.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Opinion Elect Joe Biden, America Elect Joe Biden, America The former vice president is the leader our nation needs now. The former vice president is the leader our nation needs now. Damon Winter/The New York Times Supported by Continue reading the main story Elect Joe Biden, America The former vice president is the leader our […] More

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New York governor Andrew Cuomo has denounced Donald Trump over remarks he made telling Americans ‘to get out there’ and not fear Covid-19. Cuomo attacked Trump’s comments as ‘just more denial’ after the president returned from the White House following a three-night stay at the Walter Reed national military medical center. ‘Don’t be afraid of Covid? No. Be afraid of Covid. It can kill you. Don’t be cavalier.’
Trump tells negotiators to halt talks on Covid economic relief measures

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President Trump, fresh from the hospital and still battling Covid-19, tweeted Tuesday morning that he is “looking forward” to his next debate with Joe Biden on Oct. 15. “FEELING GREAT!” he tweeted separately.Here’s hoping the president is indeed feeling better and will continue to get better still. Regardless, that event should not take place in person. Nor should the other remaining debates, including the matchup on Wednesday between the vice-presidential contenders, Kamala Harris and Mike Pence.With the coronavirus continuing to spread through the White House and among others close to Mr. Trump, the risk of infecting debate participants and staff is unacceptably high. The involved media outlets and the Commission on Presidential Debates need to immediately shift the events to a virtual format.The candidates can participate remotely from separate studios, or even from their home studios. But under the current circumstances, it would be irresponsible for the show to go on as planned.Even before the president fell ill, it was arguably folly to hold face-to-face debates. These events typically take place indoors, lasting upward of 90 minutes. The participants, including the moderators, spend the entire time talking at one another, loudly. Moving the podiums farther apart and reducing the number of attendees, as have already been done, or even moving the debates outdoors, as some are suggesting, isn’t enough to address the risk.Nor were the safety protocols put in place before the first debate, in Cleveland. Most of the attendees were required to undergo pre-debate coronavirus testing by the Cleveland Clinic. The candidates and their entourages, however, were allowed to operate on the honor system.Then there was the matter of enforcement. Despite both campaigns agreeing to a requirement that everyone inside the hall wear masks, the president’s family and several of his guests removed their face coverings upon taking their seats and refused to re-mask, despite gentle prodding. The president and his aides also declined to wear masks during an afternoon walk-through of the venue.Adding to the safety concerns, there are questions about whether, in the weeks leading up to the debate, Mr. Trump was getting tested as frequently as his team said he was. Since the president’s diagnosis, which was announced days after the debate, the White House has refused to say when he last tested negative.What’s more, testing is no guarantee of safety. This has become increasingly clear with each new illness among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, whose members are said to have been getting tested regularly. It can take up to a couple of weeks for the coronavirus to reach levels detectable by a diagnostic test.So just because Mr. Pence has tested negative, according to his people, does not mean that he should be at the debate. Per guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he should be in quarantine after possible exposure to numerous people who were infected. On Tuesday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, issued a letter saying that, based on a description of the vice president’s movements provided by the White House physician Jesse Schonau, Mr. Pence “is not a close contact of any known person with Covid-19, including the president.”This would be more comforting if the White House were doing comprehensive contact tracing — and if new cases among staffers weren’t still being announced with alarming frequency.More troubling still: The debate commission said Monday that the Trump campaign had not objected to the Biden campaign’s request that plexiglass dividers be installed for the vice-presidential debate. Mr. Pence’s advisers later said they saw no need for the extra precautions and that negotiations would continue.This decision reeks of an obsession with wanting things to look “normal” although it is anything but. Even as the White House is melting down, the president and his people continue to prioritize image over safety.It’s not like this would be the first remote presidential debate. In 1960, the third debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was held with the competitors on separate coasts. Nixon was in a studio in Los Angeles, while Kennedy was in a studio in New York. The moderator and a panel of questioners were in a third location, also in Los Angeles.If split screen technology could be managed back then, surely something can be worked out today. A virtual face-off may not be ideal for sizing up the contenders — but it’s far more important to protect the health of all involved.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The most important question today is not what President Trump has learned from his bout with Covid-19. Trump is one of those leaders who never learns and never forgets, as the saying goes. The most important question is what have we as citizens learned — and, in particular, what have Trump’s supporters learned?Because the debate over Trump himself is over. The verdict is in: He cast himself as Superman, but he turns out to have been Superspreader — not only of a virus but of a whole way of looking at the world in a pandemic that was dangerously wrong for himself and our nation. To re-elect him would be an act of collective madness.But while I see it that way, and maybe you see it that way, will enough Trump voters see it that way? That will depend on Joe Biden’s ability to help them see all the big and small things where Trump has been so fundamentally mistaken.The list of “small” things is long: Caution in a pandemic is not a sign of weakness, but of wisdom. Face masks in a pandemic are not cultural markers, just common-sense protection that says nothing other than “I’m a responsible person who wants to protect myself and my grandparent, myself and my customer, myself and my co-worker, myself and my neighbor from an invisible pathogen.”Machismo in a pandemic is not strength. Resisting mask-wearing in a pandemic is not safeguarding freedom. Lockdowns in a pandemic are not an abridgment of our rights of assembly or speech. Blue states aren’t more attractive to the coronavirus than red states. Scientists are not politicians. Politicians are not scientists. Everything is not politics. Lysol is a disinfectant for cleansing counters, not your lungs. Our choices were never masks OR jobs but masks FOR jobs — the more your employees and customers wear them, the more your business can stay open and flourish.The big things Trump got wrong were twofold. The first was how to lead in a pandemic. The quality of our leadership in general is always a serious business, but in a pandemic, it becomes a matter of life or death. Leaders at every level — teachers, scientists, principals, presidents, school superintendents, hospital directors, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors, media, parents — are all being looked to for direction today more than ever because so many people feel disoriented and unmoored.Donald Trump proved to be the worst kind of leader in a pandemic — a morally reckless leader.“When it comes to living in the face of uncertainty, people tend to fall along a spectrum, reflecting their attitudes toward individual freedom versus responsibility and their disposition toward risk-taking,” explained Dov Seidman, the founder and chairman of the ethics and compliance company LRN and the How Institute for Society, which promotes values-based leadership.You can see this spectrum starkly in how people contracted the virus and dealt with Covid-19, said Seidman. “First, there were those along the spectrum who were just unlucky and unfortunate — wrong place, wrong time when a tiny invisible pathogen was present.”Second, he added, “there were frontline workers, heroes, who bravely ran toward the virus to help save others and were infected by it in the process. Third, there were individuals who were reckless and did not wear masks or stay six feet apart, harming themselves, their family, friends and co-workers, too.”And finally, said Seidman, there were the leaders: “There were those in positions of power and authority — whom people were trusting for lifesaving guidance. Some shouldered their responsibility, knowing that in this time of crisis more people than ever would heed their advice and emulate their example, if they behaved accordingly. Other leaders, though, did not lead that way; they actually encouraged people to ignore the science and let down their guard. That is moral recklessness.”That was Trump.As a result, concluded Seidman, “today, we have a real crisis of leadership and authority — people don’t know who to trust and what to believe. But what is clear is that leaders who can put more truth into the world than they muddy and put more trust into the world than they erode matter now more than ever — those are the leaders we admire and whom history will remember well.”Trump and Fox News and Facebook will not be among them. They will be remembered for how much truth they muddied and how much trust they eroded, which together have helped to compromise our country’s cognitive immunity — our ability to sort out facts from fiction — and our social immunity — our ability to face this crisis together.The second big thing Trump got completely wrong is: You don’t mess with Mother Nature.This pandemic was a natural systems event. But Trump looks at the world through markets, not Mother Nature. He and his advisers consistently downplayed the virus so as not to panic the market, whose rise they saw as Trump’s ticket to re-election.At a White House briefing back in March, Kellyanne Conway literally sneered at a reporter who implied in her question that the virus was not being contained.“Do you not think it’s being contained in this country?” Conway barked at the journalist. “You said, ‘It’s not being contained,’ so are you a doctor or a lawyer when you’re saying it’s not being contained? That’s false. You just said something that’s not true.”Of course, it was true. While Trump and his advisers were playing down the virus to protect the market, Mother Nature was silently, inexorably, exponentially and mercilessly spreading the coronavirus around our nation, irrespective of state boundaries or political affiliations. Conway herself now has Covid-19.In a pandemic, Mother Nature asks you and your leader three basic questions. (1.) “Are you humble? Do you respect my virus? Because if you don’t, it could hurt you or someone you love.” (2.) “Are you coordinated in your response to my virus, which I evolved to find any crack in your individual or communal immune system?” And (3.) “Is your adaptation response to my virus grounded in chemistry, biology and physics? Because that is all I am. If it is grounded instead in politics, ideology, markets and an election calendar, you will fail and your community will pay.”When it came to Mother Nature, Trump was not humble, he did not seek national coordination in response to the virus and he did not ground what strategy he had in chemistry, biology and physics, but rather in ideology, politics, markets and an election calendar. Our nation has paid a huge price for that.Trump wanted us to believe that we had only two choices: open the economy and ignore the virus, as he claims to prefer, or close the economy and fear the virus, as he claims Democrats prefer.It’s a fraud. Our real choices were to open the economy smartly or to open it recklessly.That is, open the economy by doing the easy things, like wearing masks and social distancing, so people could shop, go to school and go to work with a reasonable prospect of not getting sick, as Joe Biden proposes, or open the economy recklessly, without masks, and force people to risk getting sick every time they go to work or school, as Trump demands.Trump did not respect Mother Nature or us. All I can do now is pray that enough Trump supporters have learned that — and vote against him between now and Nov. 3. The lives and livelihoods of many Americans depend on it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced significant changes on Tuesday to the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers, substantially raising the wages that U.S. companies must pay foreign hires and narrowing eligibility criteria for applicants.Top administration officials framed the changes as a way to protect American jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, even though the Trump administration first committed to overhauling the program in 2017 as part of its efforts to reduce the number of foreign citizens employed in the United States.“With millions of Americans looking for work, and as the economy continues its recovery, immediate action is needed to guard against the risk lower-cost foreign labor can pose to the well-being of U.S. workers,” Patrick Pizzella, the deputy secretary of labor, told reporters on Tuesday.The rules will directly affect foreign workers and employers, especially tech companies that have long supported the H-1B program and pushed hard for its expansion.Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, said he expected the changes to cut by one-third the number of petitions filed annually for the coveted visas.The changes will be published this week as interim final rules, meaning that the agency believes it has “good cause” to claim exemption from the normal requirement to obtain feedback from the public before completing them.Immigration lawyers and experts predicted that the changes would be swiftly challenged in court because they bypassed the normal regulatory process. More

The rightful president of Belarus, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, appeared via video last month before the United Nations Human Rights Council. Her country’s August election, she declared, had been “stolen.”Despite objections from a representative of the Belarusian government, who said she had no right to address the body, Ms. Tikhanovskaya implored the United Nations to act. “Standing up for democratic principles and human rights is not interfering in internal affairs,” she insisted, “it is a universal question of human dignity.”No one knows how Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis will affect his presidential campaign, but before falling ill, he repeatedly suggested that he won’t accept the results of the election, should he lose. In that case, Joe Biden should follow Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s example and appeal to the world for help.For many Americans — raised to see the United States as the natural leader of the “free world” — it may be hard to imagine requesting foreign intervention against tyranny in our own land. But as historians like Gerald Horne and Carol Anderson have detailed, there’s a long history of Black Americans doing exactly that.From 1845 to 1847, Frederick Douglass delivered more than 180 speeches imploring British audiences to intervene against American slavery. After World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the Fourteen Points that he hoped would structure the postwar world, the National Equal Rights League, led by William Trotter and Ida Wells-Barnett, asked the Paris Peace Conference to adopt a 15th: The “elimination of civil, political and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations.”After World War II, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois edited a 94-page pamphlet that the N.A.A.C.P. presented to every ambassador to the new United Nations. “Peoples of the world,” it declared, “we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy.”In 1951, the entertainer-activist Paul Robeson handed U.N. officials a 200-page document alleging that America’s treatment of its Black citizens violated the organization’s convention against genocide. In 1964, Malcolm X beseeched Africa’s newly independent governments to “recommend an immediate investigation” into American racism by the U.N. Human Rights Council.This June, relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and Michael Brown endorsed a letter calling on the council “to urgently convene a special session on the situation of human rights in the United States.”Joe Biden is not W.E.B. Du Bois, let alone Malcolm X. But the party he leads now faces chronic racist disenfranchisement. The more the Democratic Party becomes a vehicle for Black political empowerment, the less its votes count.Democrats must now win the popular vote by three, four or even five percentage points to be assured of winning the Electoral College. They must achieve that margin in the face of a strenuous Republican effort to ensure that many Democratic ballots are not counted. And even if they overcome both of those obstacles, Mr. Trump may still not concede.That’s why Du Bois’s appeal to the world remains so relevant. By impeding Black voters, the United States still violates the democratic principles it has helped enshrine into international law. After observing America’s 2018 midterm elections, a team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe cataloged a long list of undemocratic practices, from the disenfranchisement of former prisoners to the District of Columbia’s lack of congressional representation to discriminatory voter identification laws, and concluded that, in critical ways, American elections “contravene O.S.C.E. commitments and international standards with regard to universal and equal suffrage.”What Mr. Trump is doing this year, the election-monitoring expert Judith Kelley, the dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, recently told The Boston Globe, is the kind of activity that international election observers “would go to countries and write up huge reports about and say, ‘Red flag! Red flag!’”Democrats should spend the coming weeks working to ensure that this year’s O.S.C.E. observer mission — despite being banned from many states, especially in the Deep South — can do exactly that. Then, if Mr. Trump and his allies halt the counting of ballots, or disregard them altogether, Democrats should use the O.S.C.E’s report as evidence in an appeal to the same body where Ms. Tikhanovskaya made hers: the U.N. Human Rights Council.They should also lodge a complaint with the Organization of American States, a regional organization that has pledged “to respond rapidly and collectively in defense of democracy,” and which in 2009 used that mandate to suspend Honduras after its government carried out a coup.To professed political realists, this may sound laughably naïve. In practice, international do-gooders at the United Nations and Organization of American States are virtually powerless against the most powerful government on earth.But that’s not the point. While appealing to international bodies may not change the election’s result, it could change the Democratic Party itself. Today, many prominent Democrats remain enthralled by the very myths about American exceptionalism that Black activists have long challenged.They routinely exempt American behavior from the international standards to which they demand other countries comply. If, for example, China regularly sent drones into other countries to conduct extrajudicial killings not just of suspected terrorists but also of government officials, Democrats would denounce it as a grave violation of the “rules-based international order” they extol.But when the Trump administration assassinated Qassim Suleimani, one of Iran’s most powerful officials, in January, Mr. Biden said he “deserved to be brought to justice” and worried merely about the killing’s practical effects. The 2020 Democratic platform mentions international law just once.Americans are not so inherently virtuous that they can safely disregard the moral discipline that international oversight provides. Wells-Barnett, Du Bois and Robeson understood that from brutal, firsthand experience. Now that Mr. Biden and other white Democrats are tasting disenfranchisement themselves, they need to learn that lesson, too.Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart), a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Art

A new auction of works, from artists including Shepard Fairey and Jeff Koons, is part of an initiative to help elect a Democrat president More