Elections

When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called “Weakness” against Nikki Haley, a hawk.)The ad’s subtext is clearly gender, trying to exploit Kamala’s problems winning over Black and white working-class men.In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing — a lot better than Trump does — and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Shining a little more light on her mysterious life, her memoir details her support for abortion rights, her doubts about the 2020 election and her explanation for that “I really don’t care” jacket.Melania Trump’s new memoir offers a few new glimpses into a life she has carefully walled off from the public, but readers hoping to understand one of the most mysterious first ladies in modern history will not make it past the gilded front gate.First ladies write memoirs because they want to be understood. (The hefty contract doesn’t hurt, either.) Hillary Clinton wrote about her husband’s affair with an intern and the poisonous political process that followed. Michelle Obama revealed that she was angrier with her husband’s critics — one in particular — than she had ever let on while he was in office. Laura Bush used her book to voice her support for gay marriage and abortion rights.It is almost as if they must survive the role before they can write about it.But in Mrs. Trump’s telling, her time as first lady was largely smooth sailing. Her book, an early copy of which was obtained by The New York Times before its release next week, does not reveal her to harbor differing views from her husband, beyond her support for abortion rights.In fact, her grievances — with the news media, with “the opposition” and with aides she believes failed her and her husband — sound a lot like her husband’s, only dressed up in couture.Here are five takeaways.The big revelation is that she supports abortion rights.Mrs. Trump made headlines this week when a reported excerpt from her book revealed that she supported abortion rights — a notable position given that her husband appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn a constitutional right to the procedure.“A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes,” Mrs. Trump writes. “Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

One of the men, from New Jersey, referred to lawmakers as “traitors” and encouraged other rioters to drag them out of the building by their hair, prosecutors said.A man from New Jersey and another from New York were sentenced to prison on Friday after federal prosecutors said they had breached the U.S. Capitol building and attacked law enforcement officers during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The New Jersey man, Michael Oliveras, 51, was sentenced to five years in prison. He broke into the Capitol with rioters and urged them to drag members of Congress out of the building by their hair, according to a news release.Prosecutors said Mr. Oliveras, who lived in Lindenwold, N.J., traveled to Washington to try to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. According to the release, he documented his attack online, not only posting on social media that he had booked a hotel room near the building to scope it out, but also detailing when he entered the Capitol.Mr. Oliveras, carrying an American flag, marched to the West Front of the Capitol and confronted police officers, the release said. About 10 minutes later, a video he recorded showed him barging into the building and looking for lawmakers, yelling, “Where are they?” He also called them “traitors,” prosecutors said.“Drag them out by their hair,” he yelled, using an expletive.Mr. Oliveras entered and was ejected from the Capitol twice. During an unsuccessful third attempt, he stood in a doorway telling others to “push” and then brawled with officers.He continued with the riot for hours into the evening, marching to the other side of the building and encouraging others as they destroyed media equipment, the release said.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

City officials have refused to provide estimates of when the devastated water system in Asheville, N.C., will be back in operation.Since their home lost running water around 2 p.m. on Sept. 27 from Hurricane Helene, Etiska Jackson and her husband, Jayme, have been driving back and forth between their home in Asheville, N.C., and her brother’s in Madison County, about 25 miles north. There, they wash their clothes, take showers and fetch water from a well to flush their toilet.“I feel like I’m camping in my house,” Ms. Jackson, 61, who works as a receptionist at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, said from the front yard of her bungalow on Friday afternoon.For Ms. Jackson, the most troubling part of not having running water is not knowing when it may return. “They can’t even give us a time frame,” she said. About a foot of water poured out of the dark, gray sky when the remnants of Helene inundated Asheville and much of western North Carolina. More than a week later, not a drop comes out of most people’s faucets. For many of them, it could be weeks before that changes.Bottled water was the only potable water that residents of the city of 94,000 had as of Friday. A treatment plant capable of serving a part of the city that accounts for about 20 percent of its needs was back at full capacity on Friday and city workers were sampling water in pipes to see if it was safe to drink, said Ben Woody, the assistant city manager. Residents have been told to boil any water that does come to them, before drinking it.During the day, you can see Asheville’s water crisis on street corners and at parks throughout the city.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesAt Pack Square Park, just outside the Buncombe County Courthouse, the limit was two gallons per person, or five per family.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Natan Last goes toe to toe with us in this challenging puzzle.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesSATURDAY PUZZLE — My memory is not what it once was. At any given moment, I am either losing my house keys, my wallet or my train of thought. So all I can say is that, as far as I can remember, today’s crossword puzzle, constructed by Natan Last, contains some of the wittiest clues I’ve ever seen. (My personal favorite is 17-Across.)The grid’s design is also satisfying as all get out. I mean, just look at that neat diagonal stack of nine-letter entries moving through its center. There’s enough open space for Saturday-level difficulty, but a few sneaky nooks in each corner that make it easy to build outward.Though a successful solo constructor, Mr. Last also regularly submits group puzzles created in a crossword class he teaches at JASA (the Jewish Association Serving the Aging). Several of them have made the cut for publication in The New York Times, so keep your eyes out for those, too.Tricky Clues17A. Tell me you didn’t gasp when you found that [Pitches low and inside?] solved to SUBWAY ADS — the ads being the pitches, and the subway a low, inside locale for them. Brilliant, no notes.30A. You’ll need a basic knowledge of boat lingo to solve this one — which, unfortunately for the landlubbers, might be said about many Times clues (you might say we’re naval-gazing). [What shells can be filled with] are CREW TEAMS. “Shell” is the term for a row crew’s notably lightweight racing boat.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

At the end of his town hall in North Carolina on Friday, former President Donald J. Trump was asked by a former Air Force pilot whether he would create a panel to keep “woke generals” out of the Defense Department.Mr. Trump not only agreed, but also went a step further. “I’m going to put you on that task force,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.The remark was the last in a series of promises the former president made as he answered preselected questions from voters in Fayetteville, N.C., an area with a large military population. It’s a dynamic that happens often at Mr. Trump’s events, in which he makes direct commitments on small and large issues to appeal to and energize his specific audience.He promised that his proposed missile defense system, an American clone of Israel’s Iron Dome, would be made in North Carolina. He pledged to raise military pay. And before taking a question, he promised to restore the name of nearby Fort Liberty, the largest U.S. military base, back to Fort Bragg, which honored a Confederate general from a slave-owning family. The name was changed in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race.Attendees cheered as Mr. Trump arrived for the town hall at Crown Arena in Fayetteville, N.C.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesSitting onstage at the Crown Arena in front of several thousand people, many of whom said they were active-duty military service members or veterans, Mr. Trump took eight questions from audience members. Like the event’s moderator, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida and a veteran, the participants teed him up to offer lines from his stump speech. Many of the questions echoed his exaggerated and false claims about immigration, approved of his vow to conduct massive deportations of undocumented immigrants and acknowledged his fear-inspiring predictions of global war.All Mr. Trump had to do, largely, was agree. He repeated his false claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and made familiar attacks against the media.Mr. Trump earlier in the day toured parts of Georgia hit by Hurricane Helene, and he claimed that reporters were doing little to cover the storm and the Biden administration’s response.Ms. Luna, a proud and combative ally of Mr. Trump, took the ball and ran with it, and claimed that the administration’s response was intentional. “I do believe that they’ve intentionally, this is my opinion, not helped out those residents, because it’s red communities that are impacted,” she said. More

As California battled the deadliest wildfire in its history in 2018, Donald J. Trump, then the president, initially opposed unlocking federal funding for the state, according to two former Trump administration officials.But Mr. Trump shifted his position after his advisers found data showing that large numbers of his supporters were being affected by the infernos, said the officials, who have both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser, said that Mr. Trump had initially instructed Brock Long, then the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not to send “any money” to California, a state that Mr. Trump lost decisively in the 2016 election.Mark Harvey, the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, also recalled Mr. Trump delivering that message in a meeting with Mr. Long. (Mr. Long did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did John R. Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time.)Ms. Troye said the episode, which was previously reported by E&E News, was not the only time Mr. Trump resisted providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning regions. She mentioned his response to sending aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes.“We saw numerous instances — this was just one — where it was politicized,” Ms. Troye said in an interview regarding the California episode, adding, “It was red states vs. blue states.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More