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      Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal

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      Darren Woods was one of only a few Western oil executives attending a global climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, cautioned President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday against withdrawing from the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, saying Mr. Trump risked leaving a void at the negotiating table.Mr. Woods, speaking at an annual U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, described climate negotiations as opportunities for Mr. Trump to pursue common-sense policymaking.“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” Mr. Woods said in an interview with The New York Times in Baku. “Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government. I think he could take the same approach in this space.”Mr. Woods also urged government officials to create incentives for companies to transition to cleaner forms of energy in a profitable way.“The government role is extremely important and one that they haven’t been successfully fulfilling, quite frankly,” he said.Mr. Woods’s presence in a stadium teeming with diplomats is all the more noteworthy because of who is not here in Azerbaijan, a petrostate on the Caspian Sea that was once part of the Soviet Union. Many heads of state, including President Biden, have taken a pass, as have the leaders of several big oil companies like Shell and Chevron.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Blinken Heads to NATO as Alliance Prepares for Trump’s Return

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      Officials meeting in Brussels will discuss Ukraine’s war against Russia amid concerns that the new administration will slash U.S. support for Kyiv.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is set to depart on Tuesday for Brussels, where he will attend meetings with NATO and European officials to discuss Ukraine’s war against Russia, the State Department announced.Mr. Blinken’s trip, a late addition to his schedule before a trip to Latin America, comes amid grave concern among Ukraine’s supporters that the new Trump administration will slash U.S. support for Kyiv.The Biden administration and NATO officials also fear that President-elect Donald J. Trump may try to undermine the military alliance and even seek to withdraw the United States from it.The State Department said Mr. Blinken would meet NATO and E.U. counterparts “to discuss support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggression.”Mr. Blinken plans to travel on to Peru and Brazil, where he will join President Biden for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and the Group of 20 Leaders’ Summit. More

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      Democrats Search for Answers

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      Nina FeldmanCarlos PrietoSydney Harper and Marc Georges and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioDemocrats, devastated by their sweeping losses in the election, are starting to sift through the wreckage of their defeat.Political leaders from all corners of the Democratic coalition are pointing fingers, arguing over the party’s direction and wrestling with what it stands for.Reid J. Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, discusses the reckoning inside the Democratic Party, and where it goes from here.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a reporter covering politics for The New York Times.Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Biden did four years ago across the country, in cities, suburbs and rural towns.Kevin Lamarque/ReutersBackground readingIn interviews, lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat, pointing to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand and the party’s approach to transgender issues.Nancy Pelosi, the influential former House speaker, lamented Biden’s late exit and the lack of an “open primary.”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.The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg, and Chris Haxel.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman. More

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      There Were Two Huge Problems Harris Could Not Escape

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      Sarah Isgur, a longtime Republican campaign operative — and my friend and a senior editor at The Dispatch — has a brilliant sports analogy for the process of campaigning. She compares it to … curling.For those unfamiliar with the sport (which enjoys 15 minutes of fame every Winter Olympics), it involves sliding a very large, heavy “rock” toward a target on the ice. One person “throws” a 44-pound disc-shaped stone by sliding it along the ice, sweepers come in and frantically try to marginally change the speed and direction of the rock by brushing the ice with “brooms” that can melt just enough of the ice to make the rock travel farther or perhaps a little bit straighter.The sweepers are important, no doubt, but they cannot control the rock enough to save a bad throw. It’s a matter of physics. The rock simply has too much momentum.What does this have to do with politics? As Isgur writes, “The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound ‘stone.’ ” The candidates and the campaign team are the sweepers. They work frantically — and they can influence the stone — but they don’t control it.One of the frustrating elements of political commentary is that we spend far too much time talking about the sweeping and far too little time talking about the stone. Political hobbyists in particular (and that includes journalists!) are very interested in ad campaigns, ground games and messaging.Those things do matter, but when facing an election defeat this comprehensive, you know it was the stone that made the difference.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Democratic Blind Spot That Wrecked 2024

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      The 2022 election went better than Democrats could have hoped. The party picked up governor’s mansions and state legislatures and expanded their Senate majority. It held down losses in the House. The promised “red wave” never crashed ashore. Perhaps it would have been better if it had.Looking back, the seeds of Democrats’ 2024 wipeout were planted in the quasi-victory of 2022. Three things happened in the aftermath. The pressure on President Biden not to run for re-election, and the possibility of a serious primary challenge if he did run, evaporated. Democrats persuaded themselves of a theory of the electorate that proved mistaken. And as a result, the Biden-Harris administration avoided the kind of hard, post-defeat pivot that both the Clinton and Obama administrations were forced to make after the midterm defeats of 1994 and 2010.In 2020, Democrats had worried over Biden’s age, but were comforted, in part, by the soft signals he sent that he would serve only one term. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he said in 2020. By mid-2022, as Biden signaled his intention to run again, the party was growing alarmed. In June of that year, The Times interviewed nearly 50 Democratic officials and found that among “nearly all the Democrats interviewed, the president’s age — 79 now, 82 by the time the winner of the 2024 election is inaugurated — is a deep concern about his political viability.”Nor was the public thrilled about the results the Biden administration was delivering. In October of 2022, amid widespread anger over inflation, the Times-Siena poll found Biden with a 38 percent job approval rating and trailing Trump in a hypothetical rematch.If Democrats had been wiped out in the midterms, the pressure on Biden to be the transitional figure he’d promised to be would have been immense. If he’d run again despite that pressure, he might have faced serious challengers. But Democrats fared far better than they had expected. The president’s saggy approval rating and the widespread anger at inflation were nowhere to be found in the election results. In their first referendum under Biden, Democrats did much better than they had under Clinton or Obama. Any pressure on Biden to step aside — and any possibility of a real primary challenge — ended.In its place, a new theory of the electorate emerged, based on the way Democrats over-performed in contested states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and underperformed in safe states, like New York and California. There were two coalitions: the MAGA coalition and the anti-MAGA coalition. The anti-MAGA coalition was bigger, but it needed to be activated by the threat of Donald Trump or the Dobbs abortion ruling. A slew of special election victories in 2023 seemed to confirm the theory. Democrats were winning elections they had no business winning, given Biden’s low approval rating and public anger over inflation. But the anti-MAGA coalition’s hatred of Trump had changed the electoral math.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      50,000 Russian and North Korean Troops Mass Ahead of Attack, U.S. Says

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      Ukrainian officials expect a counteroffensive in western Russia to begin in the coming days as North Korea’s troops train with Russian forces.The Russian military has assembled a force of 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean troops, as it prepares to begin an assault aimed at reclaiming territory seized by Ukraine in the Kursk region of Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.A new U.S. assessment concludes that Russia has massed the force without having to pull soldiers out of Ukraine’s east — its main battlefield priority — allowing Moscow to press on multiple fronts simultaneously.Russian troops have been clawing back some of the territory that Ukraine captured in Kursk this year. They have been attacking Ukrainian positions with missile strikes and artillery fire, but they have not yet begun a major assault there, U.S. officials said.Ukrainian officials say they expect such an attack involving the North Korean troops in the coming days.For now, the North Koreans are training with Russian forces in the far western part of Kursk.The Russian-North Korean offensive looms as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to re-enter office with a stated goal of ending the war quickly. Mr. Trump has said little about how he would settle the conflict, but Vice President-elect JD Vance has outlined a plan that would allow Russia to keep the territory it has seized in Ukraine.Some U.S. military and intelligence officials have grown more pessimistic about Ukraine’s overall prospects, noting that Russia has steadily gained ground, both in Kursk and in eastern Ukraine. Officials say the setbacks are partly a result of Ukraine’s failure to solve critical shortfalls in troop strength.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      Kamala Harris lost the election this week, but I mostly don’t blame her. At least, I don’t blame her because of anything she did recently. Since she became the unofficial nominee in July, she played a difficult hand about as well as she could have, running a disciplined campaign that sought to reassure Americans about the economic issues that trouble them most, in a political environment that was very rough for Democrats and for incumbent parties around the world.But where did that bad hand come from? It was dealt to her by two people: President Biden, who produced a governing record she could not effectively defend or run away from; and herself, with all the toxic position-taking she did in 2019, generating endless attack ad fodder for Donald Trump. And Mr. Biden even bears blame for Ms. Harris’s pre-2020 baggage, since he put her on the ticket in full awareness that she was carrying it.In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.His electoral instincts weren’t always so misguided. During the 2020 primary campaign, Mr. Biden seemed to understand that the left-wing fever dreams that drove that Democratic cycle were electorally hazardous. So, unlike Ms. Harris, he never pledged to ban fracking or abolish private health insurance. He never even filled out the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that prompted Ms. Harris to support federally funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants.After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Need Working-Class Voters. Maybe Now They’ll Act Like It.

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      The other day I was supposed to visit a friend who had been released from prison. He had to cancel to rescue his sister, who is using drugs again.Another old friend needed a ride: It turned out that his car had broken down again, and until his next paycheck came, he couldn’t afford a $2 bolt to fix it.I think of friends like these here in rural Oregon, in an area that mostly supports Donald Trump, when people ask me why America’s working class rejected the Democrats on Tuesday. My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.I see the disenchantment with Democrats in my hometown, Yamhill, which traditionally was dependent on timber, agriculture and light manufacturing. But then good union jobs left, meth arrived and everything changed. Today more than a third of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are dead from drugs, alcohol, suicide and reckless accidents.Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More