Elections

I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.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

A former State Department official, he resigned in protest in 1982 over Cuba policy, then spent decades trying to rebuild relations with the island nation.Wayne S. Smith, a veteran Cuba expert at the State Department who, after resigning in protest over America’s embargo against the island nation in 1982, spent nearly four decades leading efforts to rebuild relations between Washington and Havana, died on June 28 at his home in New Orleans. He was 91.His daughter, Melinda Smith Ulloa, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.For more than 24 years after he joined the Foreign Service in 1958, Mr. Smith was America’s man in Havana, whether he was physically in the Cuban capital or dealing with it from a desk in Washington.Later, after leaving the State Department, he used his extensive experience to carry out a sustained campaign against America’s strategy of isolating Cuba, while also leading private and congressional delegations to the island in an attempt to build avenues of dialogue.“He was one of the foremost spokespeople in favor of normalizing relations,” William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba affairs at American University in Washington, said in an interview.A witty and nimble writer, Mr. Smith turned out scores of opinion pieces, journal essays and books, including a memoir-cum-history, “The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations Since 1957,” published in 1987.“Cuba seems to have the same effect on U.S. administrations,” he liked to say, “as the full moon once had on werewolves.”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

Legend says the Durandal sword had been stuck in a French hillside for nearly 1,300 years. When it went missing in June, an investigation to find France’s Excalibur began.As legend has it, a sword from God given to Roland, an 8th century military leader under Charlemagne, was so powerful that Roland’s last mission was to destroy it.When the blade, called Durandal, proved indestructible, Roland threw it as far as he could, and it sailed over 100 miles before slicing through the side of a rock face in the medieval French village of Rocamadour.That sword, as the story goes, sat wedged in the stone for nearly 1,300 years, and it became a landmark and tourist attraction in Rocamadour, a very small village in southwestern France, about 110 miles east of Bordeaux. So residents and officials there were stunned to discover late last month that the blade had vanished, according to La Dépêche du Midi, a French newspaper.An officer with France’s national police force in Cahors, a town 30 miles southwest of Rocamadour, said that the sword disappeared sometime after nightfall on June 21, and that the authorities opened an investigation after a passerby reported the next morning that it was missing.The officer, who declined to give his name, emphasized that the sword is “a copy,” but acknowledged that it had symbolic significance.He referred further questions to the office of the prosecutor of the republic in Cahors, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.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

A philandering father; a literary affair.Tim Graham/Getty ImagesDear readers,Back before the memoir boom, when the barbarous neologism “autofiction” was not yet in vogue, a more titillating vocabulary was deployed when works of fiction flirted with personal disclosure. The facts of life were “thinly veiled.” Stories were “semi-autographical,” their gossip value suggested by the French term roman à clef. You could imagine someone, possibly the author, whispering in your ear: “But you know who that’s really supposed to be…”A degree of self-exposure — not quite baring all, but not quite staying fully clothed either — used to be part of the business of the novel. Rewriting personal experience as fiction can be a way of processing trauma, exacting revenge or asserting control over emotional chaos. Some novels work hard at transforming the material, and show the work. Others, like the two below, wear the cloak of artifice lightly, creating an intimacy with the readers that carries a hint of prurience. Are we really supposed to know about this? In the age of perpetual TMI, it’s good to be reminded that decorum can be its own kind of transgression.And who doesn’t love to be let in on somebody’s family secrets — especially if the somebody in question is witty, elegant and ruthlessly honest? Other people’s parents can be wonderful monsters, and the act of depicting them that way combines Oedipal rebellion and filial loyalty. In these books, dutiful children turn the tables on their parents, giving birth to them as terrible, pitiful, unforgettable characters.—A. O.“The Seraglio,” by James MerrillFiction, 1957We 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

King Lear gave up power too early. President Biden will give it up too late.And that is Joe’s tragedy.Unlike Biden, Lear had a loyal lord who was willing to tell him the truth. When the old king disinherits his good daughter and divides the kingdom between his maleficent daughters, the Earl of Kent tries to tell Lear he’s bollixing everything up:“What wouldst thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, When power to flattery bows?” Lear, swayed by his bad daughters’ sycophancy, screams at Kent, “Out of my sight!”Kent urges the king to “see better.”Some eyes get plucked out in “Lear,” but the play is really a lesson about inner blindness, the way power can occlude the ability to see yourself, and the world. A lack of self-knowledge in a leader can lead to ruination.And that is where we are with President Biden. His raison d’être for running, at 81, is stopping Donald Trump, a mendacious scofflaw who will become even more incorrigible with the egregious decisions of his radical Supreme Court and his own age spiral.But Biden’s contention that he alone can beat Trump was never true. And now he has lost some moral high ground because he hid the evidence of cognitive deterioration.Trump is the master con man, but Biden is giving him a run for his money.He, his wife, his vice president and his longtime aides worked hard to conjure a mirage where everything is fine in Bidenworld.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

In a way, we’ve been here before. A presidential candidate seemingly unfit for office but nonetheless in position to be his party’s standard-bearer. A media drumbeat demanding that somebody, somehow, step in and push him out. A raft of party leaders and important officeholders hanging around uncertainly with their fingers in the wind.As with Joe Biden in 2024, so it was with Donald Trump at various times in 2016 — both during the primary season and then especially in the fall when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped and it seemed the G.O.P. might abandon him.For Biden and his inner circle, an arguable lesson of that experience is that they aren’t actually finished, they don’t have to listen to the drumbeat and they can just refuse to leave and spite all the naysayers by winning in the end.After all, it didn’t matter that not only the mainstream press but much of right-wing media deemed Trump unfit for high office — that Fox News anchors tried to sandbag him in the early Republican debates, that National Review commissioned a special issue to condemn him, that longstanding pillars of conservative punditry all opposed him. It didn’t matter that his rivals vowed “never” to support him, that the former Republican nominee for president condemned him, that leading Republicans retracted their endorsements just weeks before the election. Trump proved that nothing they did mattered so long as he refused to yield.But I don’t think history will repeat itself. I think Biden will bow out, his current protestations notwithstanding, because of three differences between the current circumstance and Trump’s position eight years ago.First, while both political parties are hollowed out compared with their condition 50 years ago, the Democrats still appear more capable of functioning and deciding as a party than the Republicans. Biden’s own presidency is proof of that capacity: He became the nominee in 2020 in part because of a seemingly coordinated effort to clear the field for him against Bernie Sanders, exactly the thing the G.O.P. was incapable of managing four years earlier with 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Jillian Weinberger and In this conversation, the New York Times Opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman speaks with the author Dov Seidman about the erosion of American norms, evinced by the recent trial and conviction of former President Donald Trump, and the difficulties the country faces because of that erosion.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday in the audio player above.)Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Marcia Straub/GettyThoughts? Email us at [email protected] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger and Kaari Pitkin. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Original music by Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker.. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.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, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More

On This Week’s Episode:“This American Life” heads to some of the happiest places on Earth: amusement parks. Ira Glass takes us behind the scenes at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Mo., where the young staff members — coached by a funny, fun-loving boss just a little older than they are — truly seem to love their jobs.This is a rerun of an episode that first aired in August 2011.xavdlp, via Getty ImagesNew York Times Audio is home to “This American Life.” New episodes debut in our app a day early. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More