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      Biden’s Approval Rating Remains Low Despite Flurry of Good News

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      The president is experiencing a flurry of good news on the economy, crime, immigration and other areas, but voters so far have not given the president much credit.Inflation at long last is down. So are gas prices and Covid deaths and violent crime and illegal immigration. Unemployment remains near record lows. The economy, meanwhile, is growing, wages are climbing, consumer confidence is rising and the stock market is surging.For President Biden, many of the numbers that define an administration are finally heading in the right direction. Except one: his approval rating.Despite the flurry of good news on economic and other domestic fronts in recent weeks and months, Mr. Biden’s poll numbers remain low. Just 39 percent approved of his performance in the latest survey by The New York Times and Siena College, far from the level that would typically give strategists confidence heading into a re-election campaign.An average of multiple recent polls by the website FiveThirtyEight puts Mr. Biden’s approval at 41.2 percent, lower than every president at this stage of their term in the last three-quarters of a century other than Jimmy Carter, who went on to lose his bid for a second term. The Times-Siena survey found Mr. Biden deadlocked at 43 percent to 43 percent with the Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted three times on criminal charges.The question for Democrats is whether Mr. Biden’s public standing is a lagging indicator that will grow in the next several months as improving conditions in the country become more evident to voters, much as Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were transformed from midterm losers to re-election winners. Or as some Democrats fear, is Mr. Biden’s anemic support more about Mr. Biden himself in a highly polarized moment that will make securing a second term next year vastly more challenging?“Even though Biden’s numbers aren’t great, their trendlines, albeit halting, are positive, and we’ll see if they have a soft landing,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was Mr. Clinton’s White House counselor and analyzes today’s political trends in regular papers. “I feel like Biden has plenty of time to get the arrows in the right direction the way that Obama did and Clinton did and Reagan did.”Biden aides express equanimity about the sluggish poll numbers, noting that Mr. Biden won in 2020 and that Democrats avoided a predicted “red wave” in 2022 despite his similarly low approval rating then.But they are taking satisfaction for the moment that so many other indicators have turned positive. Given where this presidency began, in the throes of a pandemic and resulting economic crisis, it was hardly a given that a year out from the next election Mr. Biden would preside over a healthy economy and a healthy citizenry.The president’s advisers argue that the positive trendlines of late were a direct result of Mr. Biden’s policies, including widespread Covid-19 vaccination, abundant pandemic relief spending, a mammoth new program to build or repair roads, bridges and other public works, record investments in clean energy and federal support to jump-start the semiconductor industry.Biden aides express equanimity about the sluggish poll numbers, taking satisfaction for the moment that so many other indicators have turned positive.Doug Mills/The New York Times“What you’re seeing is the president put in two hard years of work of putting these policies in place, and they’re starting to deliver the results we thought they would,” said Ron Klain, the president’s first White House chief of staff, who managed many of those efforts.“The good economic news is very important. It creates a base for him to run on,” he added. “I don’t think you’re ever going to persuade Republicans, but I think independents are coming around that the economy is doing better, and I think that’ll be a self-reinforcing cycle.”Republicans will do all they can to foster the opposite impression, though, portraying the nation as a dystopian hellscape awash in crime, uncontrolled immigration, rising debt and economic misery. “Our country is going to hell,” Mr. Trump told supporters in April.Mr. Biden has engaged in the battle of perceptions lately by branding the disparate elements of his agenda “Bidenomics” and embarking on a barnstorming tour of the country claiming credit for avoiding the recession experts had long predicted. His team has proved particularly disciplined in reinforcing that message with the kind of relentless repetition traditionally necessary to cut through the noise of public life.Change in attitudes has been noticeable but incremental. Just 23 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track in the latest Times/Siena poll, but that is up from 13 percent a year ago. Similarly, just 20 percent consider the economy excellent or good, but that is up from 10 percent a year ago, while the share of respondents who called it poor has fallen from 58 percent last summer to 49 percent today.It can take a while for the public perspective to catch up with improving conditions. A recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush officially ended in 1991, long before the 1992 election, but it did not feel that way to voters who turned instead to Mr. Clinton and his “it’s-the-economy-stupid” campaign.The Great Recession sparked by the 2008 financial crash formally ended in June 2009, but Mr. Obama’s Democrats were still swamped in midterm elections a year later. By the time he came up for re-election in 2012, public confidence in the economy had improved and he secured a second term.Moreover, the lingering effects of recent hardships are not so easily erased. Inflation has fallen from a peak of 9 percent to 3 percent, a remarkable drop, but even though prices have stabilized, they have stabilized at a level still significantly higher than when Mr. Biden took office. Unemployment is at 3.5 percent, matching a half-century low and meaning that most people who want a job can find one, but not all of these positions have high pay with benefits. Wages have begun rising faster than inflation — but only just begun.And for all that, conditions still feel in flux to many people. While illegal border crossings have dropped significantly since last year, they surged again in July. The S&P 500 stock market index has swelled by 17 percent this year, but slipped in recent days after the Fitch Ratings agency downgraded the U.S. government’s credit. Likewise, gas prices remain below their peak but have inched up lately.What may prove more vexing to Mr. Biden and his strategists is the possibility that his political prospects may be decoupled from such issues. In past generations, Americans were more reactive to events in evaluating their presidents, while in recent years they have been more locked into their partisan corner. The days when a president could garner the support of 60 percent or more of the public feel long gone.President George W. Bush’s approval rating in Gallup surveys fell below 50 percent two months after his second inauguration and never surpassed it again for his entire second term. Mr. Obama was below 50 percent for the vast bulk of his second term until his final months in office, and Mr. Trump never enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans for a single day of his presidency. Mr. Biden fell below 50 percent in his first summer in office and has yet to recover.“Presidents today are less and less able to rely on even begrudging approval from partisans on the other side of the aisle,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster. “This places a lower and lower ceiling on presidential job approval, because without the ability to garner any approval from the other side, you are stuck relying solely on your own party’s voters to boost you.”For decades, the American National Election Studies, a collaboration of Stanford University and the University of Michigan, has tracked how Americans felt about presidential candidates, asking them to rate them on a scale of zero to 100, with zero meaning very cool and 100 meaning very warmly.In 1980, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both received some measure of support from voters who were not in their party.United Press InternationalIt used to be that Americans had at least some respect or admiration for a candidate of the other party. In 1980, Democratic voters gave Mr. Reagan an average of 46.3 while Republicans gave Mr. Carter an average of 40.6. In 2000, Democratic voters gave the younger Mr. Bush an average of 44.8 while Republicans gave the Democrat Al Gore an average of 40.8.But by recent years, views had hardened, becoming far more pronounced and partisan. In 2016, Democratic voters gave Mr. Trump just 14.5 while Republicans gave Hillary Clinton a 16.6. In 2020, Democrats gave Mr. Trump a 9.6 while Republicans gave Mr. Biden a 20.2.“The reality is that presidents lately are not coming into office with even the slightest bit of good will or benefit of the doubt from the other side,” Ms. Anderson said, “and that places a very hard cap on how much approval they can ever hope to garner outside their own team.”So as Mr. Biden and his team look ahead to 2024, they hope to make the most of an improving economy to bring home disaffected Democrats and independents, but they cannot count on a newfound swell of popularity to carry him to victory. Instead, they anticipate a grinding campaign in which they compete for a relatively small share of the electorate while trying to maximize turnout among their own voters.“Republicans are just hard core,” Mr. Klain said. “They’re never going to approve of Joe Biden’s job, no matter what he’s doing. The vote is the vote. What matters is who’s going to win on Election Day.” More

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      Fact-Checking Trump Defenders’ Claims After Indictment in Election Case

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      Former President Donald Trump’s supporters have made inaccurate claims about the judge presiding over his case and misleadingly compared his conduct to that of other politicians.Allies of former President Donald J. Trump have rushed to his defense since he was charged on Tuesday in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.They inaccurately attacked the judge assigned to oversee the trial, baselessly speculated that the timing of the accusations was intended to obscure misconduct by the Bidens and misleadingly compared his conduct to that of Democratic politicians.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“Judge Chutkan was appointed to the D.C. District Court by Barack Obama, and she has a reputation for being far left, even by D.C. District Court standards. Judge Chutkan, for example, has set aside numerous federal death-penalty cases, and she is the only federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has sentenced Jan. 6 defendants to sentences longer than the government requested.”— Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, in a podcast on WednesdayThis is exaggerated. Mr. Cruz is correct that Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the trial judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s prosecution in the case, was appointed by President Barack Obama. While she has gained a reputation for handing down tough sentences to people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 riot, she is not the only federal judge who has exceeded prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.Of the more than 1,000 people who have been charged for their activities on Jan. 6, 2021, about 561 people have received a sentence, including 335 in jail and another 119 in home detention, as of July 6, according to the Justice Department. Judges have largely issued sentences shorter than what prosecutors sought and what federal sentencing guidelines recommend, data compiled by NPR and The Washington Post shows.Senator Ted Cruz described Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s appointment as “highly problematic,” but in the Federal District Court in Washington, cases are randomly assigned.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesJudge Chutkan ordered longer penalties in at least four cases, according to NPR, and appears to have done so more frequently than her peers. But other judges in Federal District Court in Washington have also imposed harsher sentences.Those include Judge Royce C. Lamberth, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, who sentenced a man to 60 days in prison while the government had asked for 14 days. He sentenced another to 51 months, rather than 46 months, and another to 60 days, rather than 30.Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, sentenced another defendant to 30 days, twice as long as the government recommendation. Judge Reggie B. Walton, nominated by President George W. Bush, sentenced a defendant to 50 days compared with the recommended 30 days. And Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, appointed by President Bill Clinton, sentenced a man to 60 days rather than 45 days.Moreover, Mr. Cruz described Judge Chutkan’s appointment as “highly problematic” given her political leanings. But it is worth noting that in the Federal District Court in Washington, cases are randomly assigned — similar to how Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, was randomly assigned to preside over the case involving Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office.What Was Said“All of these indictments have been called into question because they come right after massive evidence is released about the Biden family. On June 7, the F.B.I. released documents alleging that the Bidens took in $10 million in bribes from Burisma. The very next day, Jack Smith indicted Trump over the classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago. And then you go to July 26. That’s when Hunter Biden’s plea deal fell apart after the D.O.J. tried giving him blanket immunity from any future prosecutions. The very next day, Jack Smith added more charges to the Mar-a-Lago case. And now, just one day after Devon Archer gave explosive testimony about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s business deals, Smith indicts Trump for Jan. 6.”— Maria Bartiromo, anchor on Fox Business Network, on WednesdayThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump and many of his supporters have suggested that the timing of developments in investigations into his conduct runs suspiciously parallel to investigations into the conduct of Hunter Biden and is meant as a distraction.But there is no proof that Mr. Smith, the special counsel overseeing the cases, has deliberately synced his inquiries into Mr. Trump with investigations into the Bidens, one of which is handled by federal prosecutors and others by House Republicans.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Smith as special counsel in November to investigate Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol as well as the former president’s retention of classified documents. After Republicans won the House that same month, lawmakers in the party said they would begin to investigate the Bidens. (The Justice Department separately began an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business dealings in 2018.)Over the next few months, the inquiries barreled along, with some developments inevitably occurring almost in tandem. In some cases, Mr. Smith has little control over the developments or when they are publicly revealed.The first overlap Ms. Bartiromo cited centered on an F.B.I. document from June 2020 that contained an unsubstantiated allegation of bribery against President Biden and his son, and on charges filed against Mr. Trump over his handling of classified documents.Jack Smith was appointed in November 2022 to investigate Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House oversight committee, issued a subpoena in May for the document. The F.B.I. allowed Mr. Comer and the committee’s top Democrat access to a redacted version on June 5. That same day, Mr. Comer said he would initiate contempt-of-Congress hearings against the F.B.I. director on June 8, as the agency was still resisting giving all members access to the document.Two days later, on June 7, Mr. Comer announced that the F.B.I. had relented and that he would cancel the contempt proceedings. Members of the committee viewed the document on the morning of June 8, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, held a news conference that afternoon describing the document.That night, Mr. Trump himself, not the Justice Department, announced that he had been charged over his mishandling of classified documents, overtaking any headlines about the Bidens. The department declined to comment, and the indictment was unsealed a day later, on June 9.In the second overlap, on July 26, a federal judge put on hold a proposed plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department over tax and gun charges. Ms. Bartiromo is correct that a grand jury issued new charges against Mr. Trump in the documents case on July 27.The timing of the latest developments in Ms. Bartiromo’s third example, too, was not entirely in Mr. Smith’s hands.Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer was first subpoenaed on June 12 to testify before the committee on June 16. Mr. Comer told The Washington Examiner that Mr. Archer rescheduled his appearance three times before his lawyer confirmed on July 30 that he would appear the next day. Mr. Archer then spoke to the House oversight committee in nearly five hours of closed-door testimony on July 31. Republicans and Democrats on the committee gave conflicting accounts of what Mr. Archer said.Mr. Trump announced on July 18 that federal prosecutors had informed him he was a target of their investigation into his efforts to stay in office, suggesting that he would soon be indicted. Mr. Trump’s lawyers met with officials in the office of Mr. Smith on July 27. A magistrate judge ordered the indictment unsealed at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 1.What Was Said“All of the people who claim that the 2016 election wasn’t legitimate, all of the people who claimed in 2004, with a formal objection in the Congress, that that election wasn’t legitimate, and in fact, objected to the point where they said that the voting machines in Ohio were tampered with and that President Bush was selected, not elected — and not to mention former presidents of the United States and secretary of states, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and a whole slew of House Democrats who repeatedly led the nation to believe — lied to the nation, that they said Russia selected Donald Trump as president, that the election was completely illegitimate — all of that was allowed to pass, but yet, once again, we see a criminalization when it comes to Donald Trump.”— Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, on CNN on WednesdayThis is misleading. Mr. Trump’s supporters have long argued that Democrats, too, have objected to election results and pushed allegations of voting malfeasance. None of the objections cited, though, have been paired with concerted efforts to overturn election results, as was the case for Mr. Trump.Democratic lawmakers objected to counting a state’s electors after the elections of recent Republican presidents in 2001, 2005 and 2017. In 2001 and 2017, objecting House members were unable to find a senator to sign on to their objections, as is required, and were overruled by the vice president. In 2005, two Democrats objected to counting Ohio’s electoral votes. The two chambers then convened debate and rejected the objections.In each case, the losing candidate had already conceded, did not try to overturn election results and did not try to persuade the vice president to halt proceedings as Mr. Trump is accused of doing in 2020.Mrs. Clinton has said repeatedly that Russian interference was partly to blame for her defeat in the 2016 presidential election. But she is not accused of trying to overthrow the results of the election. Prosecutors have not detailed any involvement on her part in a multifaceted effort to stay in power, including by organizing slates of false electors or pressuring officials to overturn voting results.What Was Said“Indicting political opponent candidates during a presidential election is what happens in banana republics and Third World countries.”— Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, in a Twitter post on TuesdayThis is exaggerated. Mr. Trump is the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges, but he is not the only presidential candidate to face charges in the United States and certainly not in the world.Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was indicted in August 2014 and accused of abusing his power. Mr. Perry, who ran for president in 2012, had hinted that he would run again and set up a political action committee the same month he was indicted. He officially announced his presidential bid in 2015 but dropped out before a court dismissed the charges against him in 2016.Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader, ran for president behind bars in 1920 after he was indicted on a charge of sedition for opposing American involvement in World War I. He was sentenced in 1918 to 10 years in prison.It is also not unheard-of for political leaders in advanced economies and democracies to face charges while campaigning for office. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on charges of fraud and bribery. After losing power, he returned to his post in November 2022 while still facing charges. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi faced numerous charges and scandals over tax fraud and prostitution while he served as prime minister in the 2000s.And in Taiwan, prosecutors said in 2006 that they had enough evidence to bring corruption charges against the president at the time, Chen Shui-bian. Mr. Chen remained his party’s chairman through parliamentary elections in 2008 as the investigation loomed over him, and he was arrested and charged that November. More

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      43% vs. 43%: Why Trump and Biden Are Tied in Our New Poll

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      Rikki Novetsky, Stella Tan, Clare Toeniskoetter and Liz O. Baylen and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWith Donald Trump facing charges in three different criminal cases, the biggest questions in American politics are whether that creates an opening for his Republican rivals in the presidential race — and whether it disqualifies him in the eyes of general election voters.A new set of Times polls has answers to those questions. It shows the president and the former president still tied among registered voters, each at 43 percent.Nate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst, talks us through the first Times/Siena polling of the 2024 election cycle.On today’s episodeNate Cohn, chief political analyst for The New York Times.Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are tied, each at 43 percent, among registered voters in our first Times/Siena poll of the 2024 election cycle.Pete Marovich for The New York Times; Scott Morgan, via ReutersBackground readingCan the race really be that close?The first Times/Siena poll of the Republican primary shows Trump still commands a seemingly unshakable base of loyal supporters.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Nate Cohn More

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      Trump Expected to Appear in Court on Election Charges

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      The former president’s appearance before Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya on election subversion charges comes about six weeks after his arraignment over sensitive documents.Former President Donald J. Trump is expected to appear at 4 p.m. on Thursday in the U.S. federal courthouse at the foot of Capitol Hill, the site of a yearslong government effort to hold accountable those who tried to subvert democracy.Mr. Trump’s appearance before Moxila A. Upadhyaya, a federal magistrate judge, comes about six weeks after his arraignment in Miami on charges of mishandling government documents after he left the White House and seeking to block investigators.His second federal indictment is likely to follow a cadence similar to his first.The former president will fly down on his private jet from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He is expected to arrive between 3 and 4 p.m., at the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse, the venue for dozens of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The U.S. Marshals Service, which is responsible for security inside federal courthouses, will escort him to an area where he will be booked for a third time this year. (He was arraigned in New York in the spring in connection with a hush-money payment to a pornographic actress before the 2016 election.)The sheriff in Fulton County, Ga., where another potential indictment connected to Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election looms, has suggested that if Mr. Trump is charged, he will be processed like anybody else, mug shot and all. That will not happen on Thursday: The marshals did not photograph Mr. Trump in Miami, and they will not take his picture in Washington, according to a law enforcement official involved in the planning.But federal rules dictate that an accused person be reprocessed in each jurisdiction in which he or she faces charges, so Mr. Trump will have to be fingerprinted for a second time using an electronic scanning device. He is also expected to answer a series of intake questions that include personal details, such as his age.As of late Wednesday, there have been no credible threats of organized efforts to disrupt the proceedings, a senior federal law enforcement official said, although officials expect pro-Trump demonstrations and are on the lookout for individuals or small groups that may act violently.The level of security, both outside the building and inside, is likely to be among the most intense ever deployed at a federal courthouse, officials said.Federal law enforcement agencies are coordinating with the city’s Metropolitan Police Department to guard the building and to block off some of the surrounding streets.And the courtroom itself will be packed with security. Mr. Trump, as always, will be accompanied by his Secret Service detail. The marshals will be present to protect the judge and the special counsel Jack Smith should he attend the hearing, as he did in Miami.The hearing should be relatively straightforward.Mr. Trump will be asked to enter a plea — what many anticipate will be not guilty — in response to the four-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday.Then the government will be asked to present conditions for his release.In the Florida case, government officials requested no bail and no restrictions on his travel, acknowledging his status as a leading candidate for the 2024 presidential Republican nomination.There are no indications that they plan to change their request this time.But there might be a wrinkle or two. In Miami, the magistrate judge, Jonathan Goodman, amended the bond deal reached between the two sides because it did not include restrictions on Mr. Trump’s contact with potential witnesses and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, who continues to work for him in some capacity.It is possible that Judge Upadhyaya might have a similar issue with some element of Mr. Trump’s new bond agreement, or she might simply hand off the case to the assigned trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, a President Obama appointee.The Trump side of the courtroom could be more of a wild card.The former president and his allies have accused Mr. Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Mr. Smith, without evidence, of conspiring to destroy his chances of re-election by weaponizing federal law enforcement against him. And his team has made it clear that it does not think it can get a fair trial in Washington, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, John Lauro, suggested on Wednesday that the trial be moved to a nearby state, with a friendlier and more conservative electorate.“Well, there’s other options — West Virginia is close by,” he told CBS.The most consequential decisions, however, will be made in the coming weeks, after Judge Chutkan takes over. District court judges in Washington have been inundated by so many Jan. 6 cases (more than 1,000 people have been charged) that their calendars are often booked for months and, in some cases, more than a year in advance.Mr. Smith has called for a “speedy trial,” presumably before the election. It remains to be seen if the judge will accommodate that timetable.Mr. Lauro, speaking to another interviewer on Wednesday, suggested it would be more fair to give Mr. Trump “years” to prepare his defense.“Why don’t we make it equal?” he told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “The bottom line is that they have 60 federal agents working on this, 60 lawyers, all kinds of government personnel. And we get this indictment, and they want to go to trial in 90 days? Does that sound like justice to you?” More

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      Trump Prepares to Make Familiar Trip to Courthouse, This Time in Washington

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      The former president’s appearance before Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya on election subversion charges comes about six weeks after his arraignment over sensitive documents.Former President Donald J. Trump is expected to appear at 4 p.m. on Thursday in the U.S. federal courthouse at the foot of Capitol Hill, the site of a yearslong government effort to hold accountable those who tried to subvert democracy.Mr. Trump’s appearance before Moxila A. Upadhyaya, a federal magistrate judge, comes about six weeks after his arraignment in Miami on charges of mishandling government documents after he left the White House and seeking to block investigators.His second federal indictment is likely to follow a cadence similar to his first.The former president will fly down on his private jet from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He is expected to arrive between 3 and 4 p.m., at the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse, the venue for dozens of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The U.S. Marshals Service, which is responsible for security inside federal courthouses, will escort him to an area where he will be booked for a third time this year. (He was arraigned in New York in the spring in connection with a hush-money payment to a pornographic actress before the 2016 election.)The sheriff in Fulton County, Ga., where another potential indictment connected to Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election looms, has suggested that if Mr. Trump is charged, he will be processed like anybody else, mug shot and all. That will not happen on Thursday: The marshals did not photograph Mr. Trump in Miami, and they will not take his picture in Washington, according to a law enforcement official involved in the planning.But federal rules dictate that an accused person be reprocessed in each jurisdiction in which he or she faces charges, so Mr. Trump will have to be fingerprinted for a second time using an electronic scanning device. He is also expected to answer a series of intake questions that include personal details, such as his age.As of late Wednesday, there have been no credible threats of organized efforts to disrupt the proceedings, a senior federal law enforcement official said, although officials expect pro-Trump demonstrations and are on the lookout for individuals or small groups that may act violently.The level of security, both outside the building and inside, is likely to be among the most intense ever deployed at a federal courthouse, officials said.Federal law enforcement agencies are coordinating with the city’s Metropolitan Police Department to guard the building and to block off some of the surrounding streets.And the courtroom itself will be packed with security. Mr. Trump, as always, will be accompanied by his Secret Service detail. The marshals will be present to protect the judge and the special counsel Jack Smith should he attend the hearing, as he did in Miami.The hearing should be relatively straightforward.Mr. Trump will be asked to enter a plea — what many anticipate will be not guilty — in response to the four-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday.Then the government will be asked to present conditions for his release.In the Florida case, government officials requested no bail and no restrictions on his travel, acknowledging his status as a leading candidate for the 2024 presidential Republican nomination.There are no indications that they plan to change their request this time.But there might be a wrinkle or two. In Miami, the magistrate judge, Jonathan Goodman, amended the bond deal reached between the two sides because it did not include restrictions on Mr. Trump’s contact with potential witnesses and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, who continues to work for him in some capacity.It is possible that Judge Upadhyaya might have a similar issue with some element of Mr. Trump’s new bond agreement, or she might simply hand off the case to the assigned trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, a President Obama appointee.The Trump side of the courtroom could be more of a wild card.The former president and his allies have accused Mr. Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Mr. Smith, without evidence, of conspiring to destroy his chances of re-election by weaponizing federal law enforcement against him. And his team has made it clear that it does not think it can get a fair trial in Washington, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, John Lauro, suggested on Wednesday that the trial be moved to a nearby state, with a friendlier and more conservative electorate.“Well, there’s other options — West Virginia is close by,” he told CBS.The most consequential decisions, however, will be made in the coming weeks, after Judge Chutkan takes over. District court judges in Washington have been inundated by so many Jan. 6 cases (more than 1,000 people have been charged) that their calendars are often booked for months and, in some cases, more than a year in advance.Mr. Smith has called for a “speedy trial,” presumably before the election. It remains to be seen if the judge will accommodate that timetable.Mr. Lauro, speaking to another interviewer on Wednesday, suggested it would be more fair to give Mr. Trump “years” to prepare his defense.“Why don’t we make it equal?” he told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “The bottom line is that they have 60 federal agents working on this, 60 lawyers, all kinds of government personnel. And we get this indictment, and they want to go to trial in 90 days? Does that sound like justice to you?” More

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      On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy

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      Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesArmed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Biden and Trump Are Tied in a Possible 2024 Rematch, Poll Finds

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      A Times/Siena poll suggests a slight Biden edge among voters who don’t like either candidate.Will they stick with the same candidates in 2024?Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesAfter Democrats fared well against MAGA candidates in the midterms last year, it might have been reasonable to think that President Biden would have a clear advantage in a rematch against Donald J. Trump.Yet despite the stop-the-steal movement, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the numerous investigations facing Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are still tied, each at 43 percent, among registered voters in our first Times/Siena poll of the 2024 election cycle.The possibility that criminal indictments haven’t crippled Mr. Trump’s general election chances might come as a surprise or even a shock, but the result is worth taking seriously. It does not seem to be a fluke: Our Times/Siena polls last fall — which were notably accurate — also showed a very close race in a possible presidential rematch, including a one-point lead for Mr. Trump among registered voters in our final October survey.Mr. Trump’s resilience is not necessarily an indication of his strength. In most respects, he appears to be a badly wounded general election candidate. Just 41 percent of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, while a majority believe he committed serious federal crimes and say his conduct after the last election went so far that it threatened American democracy.But Mr. Biden shows little strength of his own. His favorability rating is only two points higher than Mr. Trump’s. And despite an improving economy, his approval rating is only 39 percent — a mere two points higher than it was in our poll in October, before the midterm election. At least for now, he seems unable to capitalize on his opponent’s profound vulnerability.Democrats can’t necessarily assume the race will snap back into a clear Biden lead once people tune into the race, either. The 14 percent of voters who didn’t back Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump consisted mostly of people who volunteered — even though it wasn’t provided as an option in the poll — that they would vote for someone else or simply wouldn’t vote if those were the candidates. They know the candidates; they just don’t want either of them.As I mentioned to my colleague David Leonhardt for The Morning newsletter, it’s reasonable to believe that Mr. Biden has the better path to winning over more of these voters. They dislike Mr. Trump more than they dislike Mr. Biden, and the political environment, including promising economic news, seems increasingly favorable to Mr. Biden. But it hasn’t happened yet.And the upside for Mr. Biden among the dissenting 14 percent of voters isn’t necessarily as great as it might look. He leads by a mere two points — 47 percent to 45 percent — if we reassign these voters to Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden based on how they say they voted in the 2020 election. And Mr. Biden still leads by two points, 49-47, if we further restrict the poll to those who actually voted in 2020 or 2022.A two-point edge is certainly better for Mr. Biden than a tie, but it’s not exactly a commanding advantage. It’s closer than his 4.5-point popular vote win in 2020, and it’s well within a range in which Mr. Trump can win in the key battleground states, where he has usually done better than he has nationwide.The survey suggests that the electorate remains deeply divided along the demographic fault lines of the 2020 presidential election, with Mr. Trump commanding a wide lead among white voters without a college degree, while Mr. Biden counters with an advantage among nonwhite voters and white college graduates.To the extent the survey suggests a slightly closer race than four years ago, it appears mostly attributable to modest Trump gains among Black, Hispanic, male and low-income voters. The sample sizes of these subgroups are relatively small, but we’ve seen signs of Trump strength among these groups before. In some cases, like Hispanic and lower-income voters, they’re groups that have already trended toward Republicans during the Trump era. It would hardly be a surprise if those trends continued. Here again, it’s a story worth taking seriously.Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s “predictive” of the final result, certainly not with 15 months to go. What it means, however, is that Mr. Trump doesn’t appear to have sustained disqualifying damage — at least when matched against a president with a 39 percent approval rating. For now, it suggests that the Biden campaign can’t necessarily count on anti-Trump sentiment alone; it may need to do some work to reassemble and mobilize a winning coalition. More