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      Border Crisis Comes to Blue Cities After Migrants Are Bused North

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      The strain of migrants in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities has taxed resources, divided Democrats and put pressure on President Biden to act.When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending migrants and asylum seekers from the southwestern frontier to New York, Washington and Chicago, he vowed to bring the border to the Democratic cities he said were naïvely dismissing its costs.A year later, the migrant waves he helped set in motion have put northern “sanctuary” cities increasingly on edge, their budgets stretched, their communities strained. And a border crisis that has animated Republican politics for years is now dividing the Democratic Party. Humanitarian impulses are crashing into desperate resource constraints and once-loyal Democratic allies have reluctantly joined Republicans to train their fire on President Biden.Eric Adams, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, declared this week that without a federal bailout and clampdown at the border, swelling migration “will destroy New York City.” The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, has promised to sue Mr. Abbott. And the liberal mayor of the third-largest city, Chicago, began pleading last month for the White House to step in.“Let me state this clearly: The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat, has declared a state of emergency, activated the National Guard and started petitioning the White House for help.The migrants on state-funded buses from Texas are a fraction of the total number arriving in northern cities. Texas brags that its “Operation Lone Star” has sent more than 13,100 migrants to New York City since August 2022, but the overall strain there stems from the total, more than 110,000. Some of those migrants have family in New York, while others are attracted to the city’s history of welcoming immigrants.Still, the rising clamor is creating a rare convergence between the two parties, which for years have fought in seemingly parallel political universes. Democrats focused on issues like abortion, the preservation of democracy and expansion of health care, while Republicans warned of a migrant “invasion” and railed against “woke” liberal ideology, socialism and expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Endless Republican news conferences at the border and threats to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, were dismissed as political bluster.Now, suddenly, some Democrats are sounding remarkably like Republicans.“Upstate New Yorkers shouldn’t be forced to bear responsibility for decades of failed immigration policy, dysfunction and stupidity out of Washington, Albany and places like New York City,” said Josh Riley, the Democratic candidate seeking to unseat Representative Marc Molinaro, a Hudson Valley Republican. Mr. Riley added that it was time for Mr. Biden to “to step up and help out.”For Republicans, the response to Mr. Abbott’s gambit has gone beyond what they could have hoped for — a spreading of the pain, as millions of migrants stream across the southern border, fleeing violence and poverty, drawn to what they see as a more welcoming administration in Washington and plentiful work.Representative Ronny Jackson, a conservative Republican from Texas, praised the bus caravans as “bold” and “thinking outside the box.” Even more moderate Republican voices have praised the move. “The reality is, Abbott was shining a light on existing issues that nobody was talking about,” said Will Hurd, a moderate Republican and former House member from a Texas border district now running for president as a fierce critic of Donald J. Trump. “Blue governors and mayors are having to deal with what Republican governors have had to deal with for three years now.”Democrats seem paralyzed by a surge of urban migration that has defied easy answers — and increasingly threatens their political aspirations, from crucial tossup congressional races in the suburbs of New York City to the race for the White House.Democrats in the cities continue to castigate their Republican opponents for using migrants as political weapons, with little regard for their health or safety. Last month, a 3-year-old child traveling to Chicago on a Texas-funded bus became ill, was put on an ambulance and later died at a hospital. The party’s candidates are quick to point out that Republicans deserve a large share of blame for blocking previous attempts to enact a bipartisan immigration overhaul in Washington.But many Democrats realize complaints only go so far as they enter an election year, when immigration, border security and appeals to nativism from Mr. Trump and his imitators will roil the electorate far from the Mexican border.“The potency of the issue has not abated, and Democrats who think that it has are fooling themselves,” said Howard Wolfson, a top Democratic strategist who steers hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“This is not just going to be a local New York City or Chicago or Boston issue,” he added. “This is going to be top of mind for voters all over the country next year, and my strong advice to the White House is they need to get off the sidelines and take action to address this.”In Chicago, migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport.Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York TimesThe numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. New York City is sheltering 59,000 migrants each night and projects that caring for them could eat up $12 billion in the next few years, threatening the viability of other city services.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants, and spent at least $250 million. Migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport, and prompted fierce recriminations from Black residents on the South Side who see disparities between investment in their communities and the money spent on migrant care.In Washington, the city has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.And in Massachusetts, the arrival of thousands of migrant families has driven the state’s shelter population up by 80 percent in the last year.“When is enough enough?” asked Representative Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat who represents a border district around Laredo, Texas. “You’ve got to be able to control your borders and be able to handle the number of people that come in. You just can’t open up the faucet and let everybody in.”Mr. Cuellar said that even before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, he warned Biden transition officials that a crisis was looming with the receding Covid-19 emergency and the end to draconian border rules imposed by the Trump administration. He recalled meeting Mayor Adams at a reception this year and listening to his complaints.“I didn’t tell him who I was,” Mr. Cuellar said. “I was just smiling and thinking to myself, ‘You guys only get a drop of what we get here at the border.’”Asylum seekers, many from Venezuela, at a Catholic Charities respite center in Laredo, Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs the appeals grow louder, the White House has slowly ramped up its response.The Federal Emergency Management Agency in June allocated huge “shelter and service” grants to cities and states unused to such attention — $105 million to New York City, $10.6 million for Chicago, $19 million to Illinois, more than $5 million to Washington. Those numbers, however, hardly meet the need: Chicago and Illinois alone have allocated about $200 million on migrant care in the city this year.After Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York traveled to Washington last month, Biden administration officials said they would ask Congress to allocate more money to reimburse cities and states and pledged to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork to obtain work permits more quickly. They also blamed Congress for refusing to take up a comprehensive immigration plan Mr. Biden first proposed in 2021.Tom Perez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has begun convening weekly phone calls with Mr. Adams and Ms. Hochul, and he spoke with Governor Healey on Thursday.White House officials said they were rushing work permits to migrants who cross the border using a new app issued by Customs and Border Protection and said the administration had spent $1 billion to ease the crisis. An additional $600 million request is awaiting congressional action.But the officials said ultimately Congress must act to broaden immigration legislation.Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesman, dismissed Mr. Abbott’s “cruel political stunts” and chided “Republicans in Congress who not only refuse to pass comprehensive immigration reform but are also not providing” the Department of Homeland Security with the resources it needs.He said the Biden administration was “using the tools it has available to secure the border and build a safe, orderly and humane immigration system while leading the largest expansion of lawful pathways for immigration in decades.”But the White House has quietly said no to more aggressive unilateral actions, such as using executive powers to accelerate work permitting. And Mr. Biden himself appears to want nothing to do with the issue publicly, forgoing the kind of high-profile leadership local officials have been clamoring for.“When some of these governors and blue cities like New York started calling out, I thought the Biden administration would get its head out of the sand, but not a lot has changed,” said Mr. Jackson, the Republican congressman from Texas. “I just think they don’t know what to do at this point. They’ve created a crisis they can’t manage.”Some Democrats fear that their standard-bearer for 2024 may be misreading the potency of a volatile issue heading into an election year.Tom Suozzi, a Democratic former congressman from Long Island mulling a comeback attempt next year, urged Mr. Biden to take a page from one of his predecessors, Bill Clinton. Mr. Suozzi said the president should propose to Republicans a moderate package of reforms that balances border security with “the very real human suffering that exists.”“If the Republicans come to the table with the president and the Democrats, America has a path forward,” Mr. Suozzi said. “If the Republicans reject the president’s moderate solution, it exposes them as simply playing politics on this issue.”Washington, D.C., has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.Valerie Plesch for The New York TimesBut Democrats are divided on how the administration should respond. Leaders in some of the affected cities want an expansion of humanitarian parole programs and temporary protected status for whole classes of migrants, such as Venezuelans. Those steps would help rush work permits to overcrowded shelters, police stations and airports now housing people who are either forced to sit idle or enter the underground economy.“This does require a national response, but it has to be a humanitarian response, not an iron hand across the border,” said Nubia Willman, who led Chicago’s Office of New Americans as the first buses began arriving.And public displays of division have liberal Democrats worried that more moderate Democratic leaders like Mr. Adams may just play into Republican hands. Former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have both quoted Mr. Adams in recent days in their own appeals to harden the southwestern border.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Chicago Democrat, said she understood the “frustration” of some Democrats. But, she said, “I just really hope that my colleagues would show why Democrats need to stick together. The blame game doesn’t get us anywhere.”She called Mr. Adams’s comments “anti-immigrant” and “despicable.”For now, even the fastest way to relieve cities’ burdens — requests for federal funds to help reimburse cities and states — has been caught up in politics. Republicans are threatening to stop any funding that would share the cost of the crisis.“The city and state made a choice,” said Mr. Molinaro, the Republican congressman from New York. “There is no willingness by the president and governor to intervene in a real way. I don’t see subsidizing the city to be a sanctuary city.” More

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      ‘I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible’

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      If President Biden loses his bid for re-election, a key factor will be the widespread perception that the economy is doing badly on his watch. Poll after poll shows Americans rating economic conditions as very bad and giving Biden very low approval for his economic management.The strange thing is that these bad ratings are persisting even as the economy, by any normal measure, has been doing extremely well. Indeed, we’ve just experienced what Goldman Sachs is calling the “soft landing summer.” Inflation is down by almost two-thirds since its peak in June 2022, and this has happened without the recession and huge job losses many economists insisted would be necessary. Real wages, especially for nonsupervisory workers, are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic.Oh, and to correct a widespread misconception: No, these figures don’t exclude food and energy prices. The government does calculate measures of “core” inflation excluding those prices, but those are only for analytical and policy purposes.So why are people so negative about an economy that by all standard measures is doing very well?When I first began writing about the disconnect between public economic perceptions and what appeared to be economic reality, I got a lot of pushback, of two distinct kinds.First, there was the argument that there were real economic problems that justified public negativity. People really hate inflation, even if their incomes are keeping up, and a year ago real wages were still somewhat depressed. But at this point inflation is way down and real wages are up.Second, there was the argument that, in effect, the customer is always right: If people feel that they’re doing badly, you should figure out why, not lecture them that they should be feeling better.But here’s the funny thing: There’s substantial evidence that people don’t feel that they personally are doing badly. Both surveys and consumer behavior suggest, on the contrary, that while most Americans feel that they’re doing OK, they believe that the economy is doing badly, where “the economy” presumably means other people.Let me run through some of this evidence.The Federal Reserve conducts an annual survey of the economic well-being of households. At the end of 2022, 73 percent of households said that they were “at least doing OK financially,” down from the previous year (presumably because of the end of many pandemic aid programs) but not significantly below the number in 2019. In 2019, however, half the population said that the national economy was good or excellent; in 2022 that number was down to just 18 percent.Are people still doing OK? Well, consumer spending has been strong, suggesting that American families aren’t too worried about their financial situation.What about inflation? According to a recent poll by The Wall Street Journal, 74 percent of Americans say that inflation has moved in the wrong direction over the past year — a result stunningly at odds with the data, which shows inflation plunging. But are people really experiencing rising inflation?As it happens, several organizations regularly survey consumers to ask how much inflation they expect, and these expectations have come way down, which is completely at odds with claims that inflation is getting worse.Even better, I’d argue, are surveys that ask businesses not about the national economy but about their own prices or costs.The National Federation of Independent Business asks small-business owners whether they have increased or reduced prices over the past three months. More businesses are raising than are lowering prices, but the difference is much smaller than it was last year. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta asks businesses how much they expect their costs to rise over the next year; their median answer is 2.5 percent, down from 3.8 percent last year.So when people are asked about their own experiences, not “the economy,” what they say about inflation is consistent with official data showing rapid improvement.The bottom line is that there is a real disconnect between what Americans say about the economy and reality — not just official data, but even their own experiences. It’s silly to deny that this disconnect exists.What explains negativity about a good economy? Partisanship is surely a factor: Republicans’ assessment of the current economy roughly matches what it was in June 1980, when unemployment was twice as high and inflation four times as high as they are now. Beyond that, the events of the past few years — not just inflation and higher interest rates but also the disruption Covid caused to everyone’s lives, and perhaps the sense that America is coming apart politically — may have engendered a sourness, an unwillingness to acknowledge good news even when it happens.Now Biden administration officials are trying hard to sell their economic accomplishments, as they should — if they don’t, who will? But will public opinion turn around? Nobody knows. We’re living in a world in which what people believe may have little to do with facts, including the facts of their own lives.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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      Biden Is Old and Trump Is on Trial. Will Anything Else Matter?

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      Thirty-six years in the Senate, eight as vice president, nearly three in the White House — President Joe Biden has a long record to be judged by, a deep familiarity with Washington that Americans can decide to see as an asset or an impediment. But what happens in November 2024 may have significantly less to do with how he has navigated the corridors of power than with how he moves from the edge of the stage to the lectern and from subject to verb.Is there a wobble in his step? A quiver in his voice? He’s 80, and that’s not just a number. In a poll published by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, 73 percent of registered voters said that Biden had too many years on him to seek four more. In a survey by The Associated Press and NORC released last week, 77 percent of adult Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said that he’s too old to be effective during a second term.But that doesn’t mean they won’t give him one, because their alternative would probably be Donald Trump, who has been charged with an array of felonies, 91 in all. That, too, is not just a number. It’s an irrefutable measure of his indecency and his rapacity, no matter what jurors decide about the criminality of his conduct.It’s also a preview of how Trump will spend much if not most of the 14 months between now and Election Day — preparing his defense, railing about prosecutors and judges, and possibly sitting and seething through testimony about his transgressions. His legal odyssey overshadows everything else about his bid to return to the White House, which could come down to what the small group of persuadable swing voters make of the evidence against him and the spectacle of it all.Biden’s age. Trump’s trials. One man’s attempt to manage the rigors of a presidential campaign without being or seeming depleted by them. Another man’s challenge to manage any kind of presidential campaign at all with the sword of imprisonment dangling over his head. I can’t shake the feeling that the 2024 presidential election hinges on those anomalies, with all the usual dynamics minimized or rendered irrelevant by the uncharted terrain that both Biden and Trump are traversing.Granted, there could be an eventual matchup other than Biden versus Trump. The seeming inevitability of that face-off prompts me to distrust it: Life in general and politics in particular are seldom as tidy and predictable as that.And even if it does turn out to be the choice before us, we’ll hear plenty about matters other than Biden’s health and Trump’s indictments — about inflation, Hunter Biden, migrants, Hunter Biden, NATO, Hunter Biden, abortion, Hunter Biden. In terms of values and policy as well as demeanor, Biden and Trump have governed and will govern as differently as two leaders can.But questions about Biden’s physical and cognitive fitness aren’t going away. In private and in whispers, many Democrats express doubts about his robustness and crispness. They entertain the possibility of — and in some cases, wish for — a turn of events by which someone else becomes the party’s nominee. They contemplate how much is at risk.As well they should. “If Trump beats Biden next year, there won’t be another free and fair election,” A.B. Stoddard wrote in The Bulwark recently, an assessment that I find as correct as it is blunt.Trump’s chances of prevailing are bound up in what happens with his indictments and how they mature in the public mind. Until now, they seem to have helped him with the Republican primary electorate by feeding his martyr act, by supporting his portrayal of himself as a proxy for Americans who don’t meekly obey elite liberals’ orders.But that could change. I suspect it will. Even a part played as well as Trump’s poor, persecuted me suffers from overexposure, and even an electorate as polarized as ours includes some voters who make their decisions along practical lines. The uncertainty of Trump’s legal fate and the mess and melodrama of every second of his existence will matter to them.If they’re wise, it will matter more — much, much more — than Biden’s diminished brio. Picking between Biden and Trump wouldn’t be about surrendering to the lesser of two evils. It would be about distinguishing imperfection from evil, about recognizing that one route preserves democracy while the other opens the door to autocracy, about realizing that there would be remedies for Biden’s limitations but no reprieve from Trump’s excesses.Old is workable. Depravity is a dead end.Words Worth Sidelining (the Iconic Edition)Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesWhen I started working at The Times, way back in the Mesozoic Era, I learned quickly that certain sloppily used words rankled the news organization’s vigilant copy editors much more than others. “Unique” was prominent among them.We overexuberant writers regularly tried to shuttle it into our articles to ramp up their drama and puff up their significance, and we were repeatedly and rightly slapped down: Was the “unique” sequence of events or the “unique” political actor really one of a kind? Without peer? Without replica?The answer, almost always, was no. “Unique” didn’t apply. So “unique” didn’t survive. We grudgingly settled for “unusual.” We made peace with “atypical.”Why hadn’t we started out there? I think there’s a reason beyond a reflexive purpling of our prose. Regardless of our professions, many of us humans — certainly, many of us Americans — tend to see the circumstances and challenges of our own moment in the grandest, most self-inflating terms. And so we tend to describe them in the grandest, most self-inflating terms.“Unique” isn’t unique. It belongs to a whole lexicon of hyperbole, an entire brood of overstatements. Two in particular rankle you. I know that because they pop up frequently in emails that you send me, urging me to call them out. You’ve had quite enough of “unprecedented.” And the ubiquity of “iconic” is driving you mad.Like “unique,” “unprecedented” is fitting only under strict conditions, and after Donald Trump stormed onto the presidential scene in 2015, news events met them more often than usual. But once writers and commentators extracted “unprecedented” from their verbal tool kits, many used it indiscriminately. It was a hammer with such a resounding, rewarding thwack. Enamored of that sound, they reduced it to white noise.To overuse a word is to undermine it, and “iconic” illustrates that as well. Recently, I did a Google search of its mention in news sources over the prior week. I found references not only to “iconic” hotels (fair enough) and “iconic” dishes (ditto) but also to “iconic” raincoats, “iconic” images of the track star Usain Bolt and “iconic” beauty serums. There was even a list of the actress Blake Lively’s seven “most iconic roles.” Seven?! One was her shark-terrorized surfer in “The Shallows.” I’ve seen “The Shallows” (don’t ask), and I can vouch that her character musters considerable courage and ingenuity. But that doesn’t make her some soggy Erin Brockovich.It’s time for restraint — with “unprecedented,” with “iconic” and with another exaggeration that has been making the rounds. How many “unicorns” can there be? They’re multiplying like deer in the suburbs. Here a unicorn, there a unicorn, everywhere a unicorn, chomping on linguistic purity like a doe on my neighbor’s hostas. Let’s end the feast.Words Worth Sidelining is a recurring newsletter feature. Thanks to Shane Sahadi of Brentwood, Calif., and Kathy Simolaris of Wilbraham, Mass., among many others, for flagging “unprecedented,” and to Adam Eisenstat of Pittsburgh and Norma Howard of Seattle, among many others, for sounding the alarm about “iconic.”For the Love of SentencesJimmy Buffett in the 1970s on his sailboat in Key West.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe musician Jimmy Buffett died last week, and journalists paid vivid tribute to a colorful character. In The Washington Post, Amy Argetsinger and Hank Stuever framed him in terms of the rock band that gave us “Hotel California,” writing that Buffett “looked like an Eagle, or at least someone an Eagle might have hired to replace the kitchen cabinets in a house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, who winds up staying the weekend, playing guitar.” (Thanks to Tom Davis of Green Bay, Wis., and Augusta Scattergood of Washington, D.C., for nominating this.)In The Times, Guy Trebay appraised Buffett’s sartorial style by what he eschewed: “not for Mr. Buffett the hippie-adjacent suedes and leathers of his musical contemporaries.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)The Times also resurfaced Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2018 profile of Buffett as a late-blooming and lavishly compensated entrepreneur: “Jimmy Buffett — the nibbling on sponge cake, watching the sun bake, getting drunk and screwing, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere Jimmy Buffett — has been replaced with a well-preserved businessman who is leveraging the Jimmy Buffett of yore in order to keep the Jimmy Buffett of now in the manner to which the old Jimmy Buffett never dreamed he could become accustomed.” (Charles Ellis Harp, Victoria, B.C., and Chip Pearsall, Greenville, N.C., among others)The past week was a good one for spirited takes on college football. On ESPN’s website, David Hale provided context for the Colorado Buffaloes’ upset victory, in the first weekend of college football, over the T.C.U. Horned Frogs, who played in the national championship game some eight months ago: “Sure, this wasn’t last year’s T.C.U. That team was like the guitar solo in ‘Free Bird’ — chaotic, rollicking, lasting far longer than it had any right to, but never truly earning the respect of the cultured class of critics. But those Frogs had a host of N.F.L.-caliber players. This year’s team — well, it’s a little like seeing Skynyrd today. There’s no one from the original band left.” (Chris Wheatley, Port Ludlow, Wash.)And in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Luke DeCock questioned the wisdom of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s admission of S.M.U., the University of California and Stanford University into its fold. “It was a late-night deal at Food Lion: Buy one irrelevant football program, get two free,” he wrote. (Eric Walker, Black Mountain, N.C.)Moving on to politics, Peter Sagal in The Atlantic explained that abducting and deprogramming MAGA cultists wasn’t a workable strategy, given the cult’s size: “It would take half the country kidnapping the other half of the country, and then who would feed the pets?” (Donna Cameron, Brier, Wash.)In The Times, Vanessa Friedman pondered the moral to the promiscuous use of Donald Trump’s mug shot in merchandise produced not only by his supporters but also by his critics: “What does it mean, exactly, that no matter our allegiances at this particular moment, or our different versions of recent history, we share a common ground right in the middle of an ocean of consumer kitsch? That while we may have lost the skill of constructive dialogue, we all still speak T-shirt?” (Barbara Buswell, Oakland, Calif.)And this is how Jack Shafer, in Politico, described Mitch McConnell’s most recent incident of sudden speechlessness: “The top Republican powered down for 30 seconds as if an unseen hand had removed the lithium ion battery from his chassis.” (Tim White, Moncure, N.C.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteLaysan albatrosses on Laysan Island, Hawaii.NetflixWhen it’s close to bedtime and I’m too tired to read or to follow the plot of a movie or series, I favor nature documentaries. I luxuriate in images of scenery inaccessible to the casual traveler. I marvel at the patience and prowess of whoever managed to capture footage of a mature lion at the moment it killed, a young albatross at the instant it took flight.But what we humans can do is arguably paltry next to the animals’ feats. That’s always one of my takeaways. Operating on ancient instinct, birds migrate across or between entire continents. Salmon make that crazy trek upstream. Polar bears swim for miles and miles, from ice floe to ice floe, in the frigid hope of sneaking up on a seal.All those phenomena appear in resplendent color and breathtaking detail in “Our Planet II,” a four-part documentary that began streaming on Netflix in June. It means to awe, and it succeeds. But it does something even more powerful and important: It humbles.I don’t know how any person can behold the diversity and majesty of the wildlife on display in “Our Planet II,” or in many similar celebrations of the natural world, and not question the presumptuousness and recklessness with which we often disturb and destroy what’s around us. I don’t know how anyone can shake off the reminder that we share the Earth with creatures too extraordinary to be taken for granted.As a warming planet melts ice floes, those polar bears swim longer and harder, at risk of starvation. As our garbage pollutes the oceans, albatrosses sometimes choke on plastics that they mistake for food. They have no say in our behavior, but they’re often at the mercy of it. Maybe that makes some people feel godlike. In light of how we’ve comported ourselves, it makes me feel ashamed. More

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      Justice Dept. Says It Will Indict Hunter Biden on Gun Charge This Month

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      The timetable, following the collapse of an earlier deal that would have allowed President Biden’s son to avoid any jail time, means he will face prosecution as his father seeks re-election.David C. Weiss, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, said on Wednesday that he planned to indict the president’s son on a gun charge before the end of the month — a move prompted by the acrimonious collapse of a plea deal in July.In a three-page update filed in federal court in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Weiss laid out plans to bring charges related to Mr. Biden’s purchase of a pistol in 2018, when prosecutors say he lied on a federal form by stating that he was not using drugs at the time. Mr. Biden had previously agreed to participate in a two-year diversion program for nonviolent gun offenders as part of the plea deal, which unraveled dramatically at the last minute this summer.Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, signaled in a statement that he would challenge any effort to proceed with a trial, arguing that the original agreement reached over the summer “remains valid and prevents any additional charges from being filed.”The government’s filing, while expected, adds an additional and volatile element to an already packed calendar of criminal cases coinciding — and colliding — with the 2024 presidential race. It piles on a possible federal trial of President Biden’s son to former President Donald J. Trump’s two federal and two state criminal cases.The status report by Mr. Weiss was filed at the request of a federal judge. It makes no mention of the status of likely separate charges stemming from the five-year investigation of Mr. Biden’s business dealings, and subsequent failure to pay taxes, conducted by Mr. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who was appointed last month as a special counsel after overseeing the investigation. Last month, prosecutors told the court they intended to file the tax charges in either California or Washington, D.C.Leo Wise, a veteran prosecutor detailed to Mr. Weiss’s team in June, said in the court filing on Wednesday that the Justice Department would seek the return of an indictment on the gun charge before Sept. 29, citing a timetable set by the Speedy Trial Act.Mr. Biden appeared to be just hours away from resolving his legal troubles this summer through a deal that would have cleared up both the tax and gun investigations. But under questioning by a judge in federal court in Wilmington, prosecutors and defense lawyers were forced to acknowledge that they had very different interpretations of the terms of the agreement, leading to its collapse.After subsequent negotiations to revive an agreement on the tax and gun charges foundered, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland elevated Mr. Weiss to the status of special counsel, giving him more flexibility in pursuing the tax charges and the freedom to continue investigating other elements of the case.Under the original deal, Mr. Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and to settle the gun investigation without being charged.Despite the collapse of the agreement, Mr. Lowell said that his client had been abiding by the terms of the original deal “for the last several weeks” and had been making regular visits to his court-assigned probation officer.Mr. Lowell suggested that he was continuing to pursue a “fair” deal with Mr. Weiss, not subject to “outside political pressure.”Mr. Weiss is the third special counsel appointed since Mr. Garland took office in March 2021, joining Jack Smith, who is overseeing the investigations of Mr. Trump, and Robert K. Hur, who is examining President Biden’s retention of sensitive documents from his tenure as vice president.The gun charge stems from Hunter Biden’s response of “no” on a federal form he filled out as part of the purchase of a handgun when asked whether he was an “unlawful user” of drugs. At the time, Mr. Biden, who had been addicted to crack cocaine, was struggling to remain sober.Such federal prosecutions are relatively rare, and seldom pursued as stand-alone charges. Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives responsible for reviewing Mr. Biden’s file were skeptical of bringing charges against him, especially considering that he had sought treatment and had no prior criminal history, according to another person with knowledge of the situation. (The widow of his brother, Beau, later found the gun and threw it in a dumpster.)Another factor that could complicate the government’s case: Last year’s Supreme Court ruling that gave people a broad right to carry guns outside the home. Mr. Biden’s lawyers have argued that recent lawsuits challenging federal regulations, including the drug use restriction, could render a prosecution of Mr. Biden moot. More

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      Dignified Silence Doesn’t Work Against Trump

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      Donald Trump is increasing his already overwhelming lead for the Republican nomination, and is tied with President Biden in a hypothetical general election face-off, according to recent polling.This is astonishing given Trump’s quagmire of legal trouble, but it is the logical result of a candidate running without forceful, widespread opposition and condemnation. His opponents, for varying reasons, have taken the strategic position of ignoring his predicament, fingers and toes crossed that he will succumb to self-injury.They’re wishing on an avalanche of “ifs.” But there’s no wishing in this kind of battle, no victory without confrontation.This reluctance to take on Trump has allowed him and his surrogates to develop a narrative of victimhood and justified vengeance while allowing the image of timidity and weakness to harden around his opponents like plaster.And with this failure to engage, this campaign of cowardice, Republican voters, already primed by Trump to disbelieve facts and believe conspiracy theories, are robbed of any debate that could help modulate their views.Those voters exist in a void of veracity, and Trump fills it with his version of truth: anti-truth.But not only are most of Trump’s Republican rivals avoiding attacking him over his various indictments, so is his Democratic one.Joe Biden refuses to comment on them. He and his campaign have chosen to keep their distance from the chaos and not feed into Trump’s false assertion that his legal woes originate from political animus.This idea of a dignified silence has a long political history, but its utility and efficacy is unclear in a modern context. It feels a bit like a “Happy Days” nostalgia in a “Walking Dead” reality.And yet the Biden campaign plows ahead with it. Just last week, the Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond reiterated the strategy: “We’re not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal problems.”But Trump’s legal problems aren’t about parking tickets or child support payments; they’re about an ongoing assault on our democracy, and it is hard to square having the candidate who is campaigning on protecting our democracy not address the great threat to that democracy.And that threat isn’t simply about what has happened, but what could yet happen.In July, The Times reported that Trump and his allies plan on “reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands” if he regains the White House. Last week, The Associated Press reported that conservative groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, are drawing up plans to “dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision,” should Trump be re-elected. Last year, Trump called for a “termination” of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election.Still, Biden adheres to a dignified silence approach, clinging almost religiously to the notion that voters will recognize and appreciate the difference between a restorer and a destroyer.That may well be the case. The continuity of the Republic as we know it may hang on it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to question the wisdom of that approach and to be apprehensive about it.On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden said he had counseled Hillary Clinton to “not get into” the topic of Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape during their second general election debate, “because it just drags it down.” As Biden put it, “Everybody knows who Donald Trump is.”On the debate stage, Clinton took the soft-pedal Biden approach. When asked about that video, Clinton gave a somewhat meandering answer, ultimately landing on the refrain that “everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point about whether or not the man in the video or the man on the stage respects women.”But Trump went on the attack. WikiLeaks had begun leaking John Podesta’s emails, and Trump made the emails a central argument.And as Rolling Stone put it in 2018, “The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape dominated headlines for roughly a week; WikiLeaks, on the other hand, was an unrelenting drumbeat of rumors and wild allegations that left conservatives in a perpetual state of fury.”Clinton, of course, would lose that election.The asymmetry in the way Trump and his opponents engage with each other gives Trump a big advantage. He unleashes his barbs nonstop, and erratically, until one of them hits. His opponents keep refusing to respond in kind, maintaining respectable restraint, while racking up political wounds.During a Labor Day speech, one that some saw as the president beginning to ratchet up his attack on Trump, Biden didn’t even mention his predecessor’s name, instead repeatedly referring to him as “the last guy.”Most of Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democratic, are placing a risky bet, one that completely depends on the discernment of the American voter. That may, in the end, prove to be a brilliant tactical assessment, but I worry that it’s just as likely to be a tragic miscalculation.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Why So Many Americans Are So Down on Biden

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      Unemployment is near historic lows, and inflation has come way down. We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk. The homicide rate fell by about 10 percent across 30 cities compared with last year. Democrats defied electoral trends by holding the Senate, scoring major legislative victories and easily confirming a Supreme Court nominee.Why, then, do only 20 percent of voters rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” versus 49 percent who call it “poor,” according to a New York Times/Siena poll? Why are Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future, according to the Pew Research Center? Why does Gallup find a significantly smaller percentage of Americans have confidence in the presidency today than they did in the last, disastrous year of Donald Trump’s tenure? And why is President Biden polling dead even with his predecessor in multiple surveys despite the former president’s 91 felony charges?In short, with everything so great, why are people so down? That’s a question that, as The Times’s Reid Epstein wrote last week, stumps the White House and its political allies, who seem to think the problem is a failure to communicate all the good news.But there’s another explanation: The news isn’t all that good. Americans are unsettled by things that are not always visible in headlines or statistics but are easy enough to see.Easy to see is the average price of a dozen eggs: up 38 percent between January 2022 and May of this year. And white bread: up 25 percent. And a whole chicken: up 18 percent. As for the retail price of gasoline, it’s up 63 percent since January 2021, the month Biden became president.Yet none of these increases make it into what economists call the core rate of inflation, which excludes food and energy. The inflation ordinary people experience in everyday life is not the one the government prefers to highlight.Easy to see is the frequent collapse of public order on American streets. In April hundreds of teenagers wreaked havoc in the Chicago Loop. Two boys were shot. A young couple was beaten by the doorway of a building on North Wabash. Yet only 16 people were arrested. Similar scenes unfolded last month in New York’s Union Square and again in Boston, where police officers were assaulted in two separate riots largely by juveniles.In New York, there were at least 66 arrests. In Boston, just 13.Easy to see is that the kids are not alright. The causes are many; social media companies have a lot to answer for. But so do teachers’ unions, handmaids of the Democratic Party, who pushed to keep school doors closed during the pandemic, helping themselves while doing lasting harm to children. The Biden administration spent much of its early months saying it wanted more than half of schools open at least one day per week by the 100th day of his presidency.“It is a goal so modest and lacking in ambition as to be almost meaningless,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter noted at the time.Easy to see is that the border crisis has become a national one. In May the administration boasted that new policies had contributed to a sharp decline in the “number of encounters” between border patrols and migrants crossing the southwestern border illegally. By August, arrests of migrants who crossed the border with family members had hit a monthly record of 91,000. In New York City alone, more than 57,000 migrants seek food and shelter from the city’s social services on an average night.Nobody can say for certain how many migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s presidency remain in the U.S., but it’s almost certainly in the millions. In 2021 the president dismissed the initial surge of migrants as merely seasonal. “Happens every year,” he said.Easy to see is that the world has gotten more dangerous under Biden’s watch. The president deserves credit for arming Ukraine, as he does for brokering a strategic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea. But he also deserves the blame for a humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal that almost surely played a part in enticing Vladimir Putin into launching his invasion of Ukraine and whetted Beijing’s appetite for Taiwan.How large a part is unquantifiable. Yet it was predictable — and predicted.Easy to see is that the president is not young for his age. The stiff gait and the occasional falls. The apparent dozing off. The times he draws a blank or struggles to complete a thought. Yet the same people yelling #ResignFeinstein or #ResignMcConnell don’t appear to be especially vocal when it comes to the president’s fitness, as if noting the obvious risks repeating a Republican talking point.But people notice, and they vote.Easy to see are tents under overpasses, from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York to the I-5 in Seattle. And the zombified addicts passed out on sidewalks in practically every city and town. And the pharmacies with everyday items under lock and key to prevent shoplifting. And women with infants strapped to their backs, hawking candy or gum at busy intersections. And news reports of brazen car thefts, which have skyrocketed this year.“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith said. Not all the ruin mentioned above is Biden’s fault, and none of it is irreversible. But there’s much more ruin than his apologists — blinkered by selective statistics and too confident about the president’s chances next year — care to admit.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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      Ad Wars in 3 Governor’s Races Leave Out Trump and Biden

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      Offering a look at both parties’ political strategies this year, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, as well as local scandals and crime.Just over a year before the 2024 elections, three races for governor in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi are offering a window into the parties’ political strategies and how they might approach statewide and congressional contests next year.Strikingly, even as former President Donald J. Trump’s indictments and President Biden’s polling struggles have consumed the national political conversation, the two men rarely show up in advertising for the three governor’s races.Since July, nearly 150 ads have been broadcast across the contests. Just one ad mentioned Mr. Trump. Three brought up Mr. Biden.Instead, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, according to an analysis of ad spending data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Attack ads about local scandals and controversies are frequent, and crime is the top advertising issue in the Kentucky governor’s race.Much as education was a dominant theme in Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor of Virginia in 2021, the issue remains one of the top advertising topics in both Kentucky and Louisiana, with nearly one in five ad dollars spent focusing on education over the past 60 days, according to AdImpact data.“Glenn Youngkin winning an off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia is the playbook,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who has researched political advertising. “You go with the last playbook.”Allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican looking to unseat Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, have seized on a message about education similar to the one that helped propel Mr. Youngkin to victory.“The radical left has declared war on parents, and Andy Beshear is with them,” proclaims one ad from Kentucky Values, a group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association.Mr. Beshear has countered by praising teachers, running an ad calling them “heroes” and pledging to increase their pay and expand universal preschool.“Our teachers are heroes, and public schools are the backbones of our communities,” Mr. Beshear says in the ad, standing in the middle of a classroom.Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican running for re-election, is running an ad boasting that he “got us back to school fast” during the coronavirus pandemic and criticizing other states for closing schools.In Louisiana, Jeff Landry, the Republican front-runner, is putting money behind an ad criticizing “woke politics” in schools and pledging to bring school agendas “back to basics.”No issue is getting more attention, in terms of total spending, than crime is in Kentucky. Twenty-five percent of ad spending in the state has focused on crime in the past month, according to AdImpact data.Ads from allies of Mr. Cameron warn of dangerous criminals flooding the streets as a result of a commutation program Mr. Beshear signed during the pandemic.Ads from allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican nominee for governor of Kentucky, warn about the early release of prison inmates. School Freedom FundOf course, these three states are all deep-red bastions in the South and are not representative of the country’s broader politics.Abortion, perhaps the biggest issue in major battleground states, is barely registering in these three governor’s races; in the past 30 days, not a single campaign ad has been broadcast on the topic in Kentucky or Louisiana. In Mississippi, the only ad regarding abortion is from Brandon Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor, who has diverged from many in his party by supporting abortion restrictions.“Sometimes the family Bible is the only place you have to turn,” Mr. Presley says, sitting at a table next to a dog-eared Bible that he says is his family’s. “It’s shaped who I am and what I believe. It’s why I’m pro-life.”Given that Mr. Trump carried all three states by double digits in 2020, his absence from the airwaves shows he may not be helpful to Republican campaigns in a general election.“These campaigns are really smart and have done in-depth analytics on who their target voter is who’s actually going to move in this election, and he’s probably not helpful to that group of people,” said Michael Beach, the chief executive of Cross Screen Media, a media analytics firm.That one mention of Mr. Trump? It was in an ad from Mr. Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, boasting that he had followed the former president’s lead in releasing prison inmates early. More

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      Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden

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      It’s a weakness that could manifest itself as low Democratic turnout even if Trump and Republicans don’t gain among those groups.President Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump.On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters. If he’s unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.Democratic share of major party vote among nonwhite voters More