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      Maybe Joe Biden Knows Joe Manchin Better Than We Thought

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      Gail Collins: Never really thought I’d be leading off with a toast to Joe Manchin, Bret, but troubled times require low expectations.Bret Stephens: You came around!Gail: Joe came around! Or caved, which sounds a little more satisfying. Of course we’ve still got his Senate colleague Kyrsten Sinema and her tax obsessions to worry about. But if it all comes together this week, we’ll get the big Biden program to battle climate change. Will that make you as happy as it would make me, hmm?Bret: Your happiness sounds like it’s an 8 or a 9 on a 10-point scale, and mine is probably around a 5. The Senate just passed a $280 billion bill to support the semiconductor industry under the guise of standing up to China, which is really just a huge giveaway to Intel and other U.S. chip makers. Now we’re dropping another $369 billion, and a lot of that will be in the form of corporate subsidies for companies like Tesla and General Motors. I know Manchin and Larry Summers are saying this will help bring down inflation. But pumping a lot of money into an economy usually has the opposite effect.On the other hand, it’s a whole lot less than the trillions the administration wanted to spend last year, so I’ll take that as a victory. It might keep the nuclear industry alive, which is also vital if we are serious about tackling climate change, and it might also reduce some of the permitting bottlenecks that get in the way of energy infrastructure. And the two bills are solid legislative wins for President Biden, who really, really needed them.Gail: As did all of us who are still Friends of Biden — although I guess we’d prefer not to be called F.O.B.s.Bret: Shame the news arrives the same week we get the second straight quarter of negative economic growth, which is … not a recession?Gail: I prefer to think of it as an, um, a very relaxed financial time.Bret: Not sure how much it would help Biden if he were to say, “Folks, the economy isn’t stalling. It’s relaxing.” Sorry, go on.Gail: And while of course politics is utterly beside the point — who in the world would worry about the entire makeup of Congress? — this legislation has got to help the Democrats come election time. Lots of good reasons we’re in an economic … slump. But you’ve got to be able to deliver a plan for making things better.One of my favorite parts of the bill is the way it clamps down on pharmaceutical companies. Like giving the government power to negotiate on the prices of some drugs covered by Medicare.Bret: Terrible! Price controls inevitably lead to less innovation, fewer incentives to manufacture generics and biosimilars and crazy distortions as pharmaceutical companies jack up the price of some drugs to make up for lost revenue in others. It’s just as bad an idea as rent control and rent stabilization, which is great for some but distorts the overall market and makes the city more expensive.Gail: Hey, we the taxpayers are funding those drugs and we should get assurance that all our money isn’t going to Big Pharma’s profits.Sorry, go on.Bret: I still don’t see the legislation swinging a lot of votes to the Democrats in the midterms. Biden also got his big infrastructure bill passed last year and it didn’t help him one bit politically. The only thing that can save the Democrats now is Donald Trump and his dumb political endorsements.Gail: Anybody you’re thinking of in particular? For instance, that dweeb Blake Masters in Arizona who we talked about recently? The one who now graciously admits he “went too far” when he wrote a youthful essay implicitly criticizing American involvement in World War II. I believe you said if you were voting in Arizona and Masters won the primary, you’d support the — hehehehe — incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly.Bret: Yes, reluctantly. As David Sedaris might put it, the choice between Democrats and most Republicans these days is like a choice between a day-old baloney sandwich with a sad little pickle on a stale roll versus a plate of rancid chicken served with a sprinkling of anthrax on a bed of broken glass.I’ll take the sandwich.Gail: Got some other big primaries coming up on Tuesday besides Arizona. I’m sure a lot of Missouri Republicans would be happy to see the end of Eric Greitens, a former governor, who now seems to be fading in his run for the Senate. Can’t imagine why, given that he was forced to resign from office in an ethics crisis that included a mind-boggling sex scandal.Bret: The fact that he was the front-runner, at least until recently, really tells you that the G.O.P. has reached its psychotic stage. To recap, Greitens, a former Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, resigned in disgrace as governor four years ago after barely a year in office. Later, his ex-wife alleged in a sworn affidavit, which Greitens disputes, that he knocked her down and confiscated her cellphone, wallet and keys to keep her and their children prisoner in their home. Also, that he was physically violent toward their 3-year-old son.Gail: Which really should have sealed the deal.Bret: More recently, he filmed an ad that was a live-action fantasy of shooting RINOs — “Republicans in Name Only” — that struck many of us as a pretty open invitation to violence. Even Josh Hawley thinks he’s vile, which is like Nikita Khrushchev taking a strong moral exception to Mao Zedong.Gail: Seems like his fading in the polls shouldn’t require a celebration, but we’ll take what we can get.Bret: As for Masters, his candidacy seems to rest on his promotion of so-called replacement theory.Gail: Yes, the idea that Democrats are encouraging immigration so they can create a minority-majority of voters.Bret: It’s almost amusing, since the most significant replacement to happen in Arizona was the one in which white settlers stole sovereign Mexican territory in an unprovoked invasion and dispossessed Native American tribes.Gail: Bless you.Bret: It’s also a master class in political malpractice, since it only alienates Hispanic voters, who are often fairly conservative and increasingly open to voting for Republicans. Are you feeling optimistic?Gail: Have to admit I’m kinda worried that a lot of liberal voters — particularly the younger ones — are just so appalled by the way things have been going with abortion and guns, and so depressed by the state of the economy, that they’ll just sit this one out.Bret: Yeah, but don’t discount the rancid chicken factor. As in, for instance, the Senate race in Georgia, or the governors’ races in Maryland and Pennsylvania.Gail: Well, just to stick with Georgia for a second, it does seem a guy like Herschel Walker, with a really dreadful performance record as a father, should have tried not to build his campaign around being a family-values candidate.Bret: With luck, maybe after a few losses Republican voters will finally get the message that a Trump endorsement in the primary is the political kiss of death in the general election.Then again, it would also help Democrats if someone cured Biden of his habit of saying things that quickly prove totally wrong. The other day he said there wasn’t going to be a recession. Before that, inflation was “temporary.” Last summer, it was that the Taliban wasn’t going to overrun Kabul. You can almost know what’s coming by expecting the opposite of whatever he predicts. That’s why I’m confident he won’t run for a second term. He keeps insisting that he will.Gail: I still don’t see any point in Biden’s announcing he won’t run this early in the calendar. He should wait until the end of the midterm elections. Then we can all turn our attention to the hordes of would-be successors waving their hands.That’ll still give Democrats a year to check out the options. Don’t you think that’s enough?Bret: If you’re the billionaire governor of Illinois, Jay Pritzker, it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since fund-raising isn’t an issue. Pete Buttigieg can’t be feeling as lucky. But either way I think it would be better for Biden to announce before the midterms. Maybe he will even find it liberating to be a president who can really govern for the rest of his term without the burden of a presumptive campaign and all the nagging questions about it. And it will send the message that he has the grace and wisdom to know it’s time to step aside, which is more than can be said for the Chuck Grassleys and Dianne Feinsteins of politics.Gail: Biden’s political clout, wobbly as it is right now, will vanish completely if he embraces lame-duck-hood. Announcing he’s not running by the end of the year seems a good timetable. But of course actually trying to stay in for another race would be a disaster.Bret: Gail, before we go we should probably mention that we’ll be taking the next two weeks off for travel and family. Any parting suggestions or recommendations for our readers till we reconvene?Gail: Stay cool, read something good — I’ve really been enjoying “A Gentleman in Moscow,” by Amor Towles, a novel about a count who’s trapped in his hotel after the Russian Revolution. That’s one for now, but when we get back, Bret, we’ve got to have that favorite-books conversation we’re always threatening to have.And what’s your tip?Bret: Same. Devote a few weekend mornings to some of the terrific longer pieces in The Times. Start with Alex Vadukul’s devastating, breathtaking portrait of Daniel Auster, Paul Auster’s son. It’s a modern-day “American Tragedy,” worthy of Dreiser. Then get out in the sun and count your life’s blessings. I hope there are many.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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      We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.

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      It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style relief. The summer’s protests altered the public’s perception of race’s role in the criminal justice system. And analyses were pointing to Republican losses large enough to clear the way for the biggest burst of progressive legislation since the 1960s.Two years on, the truth is easier to see. We aren’t living in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, or Lyndon Johnson’s, or Donald Trump’s, or even Joe Biden’s. We’re living in Richard Nixon’s.Not the America of Nixon’s last years, though there are dim echoes of it in the Jan. 6 hearings, but the nation he built before Watergate brought him down, where progressive possibilities would be choked off by law and order’s toxic politics and a Supreme Court he’d helped to shape.He already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness,” he said, “when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.”There it is — the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency.Over the course of that year, he gave his pitch a populist twist by saying that he was running to defend all those hard-working, law-abiding Americans who occupied “the silent center.”A month later, after a major Supreme Court ruling on school integration, he quietly told key supporters that if he were elected, he would nominate only justices who would oppose the court’s progressivism. And on the August night he accepted the Republican nomination, he gave it all a colorblind sheen. “To those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply,” he said. “Our goal is justice for every American.”In practice it didn’t work that way. Within two years of his election, Nixon had passed two major crime bills laced with provisions targeting poor Black communities. One laid the groundwork for a racialized war on drugs. The other turned the criminal code of Washington, D.C., into a model for states to follow by authorizing the district’s judges to issue no-knock warrants, allowing them to detain suspects they deemed dangerous and requiring them to impose mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted of violent crimes.And the nation’s police would have all the help they needed to restore law and order. Lyndon Johnson had sent about $20 million in aid to police departments and prison systems in his last two years in office. Nixon sent $3 billion. Up went departments’ purchases of military-grade weapons, their use of heavily armed tactical patrols, the number of officers they put on the streets. And up went the nation’s prison population, by 16 percent, while the Black share of the newly incarcerated reached its highest level in 50 years.Nixon’s new order reached into the Supreme Court, too, just as he said it would. His predecessors had made their first nominations to the court by the fluid standards presidents tended to apply to the process: Dwight Eisenhower wanted a moderate Republican who seemed like a statesman, John Kennedy someone with the vigor of a New Frontiersman, Johnson an old Washington hand who understood where his loyalties lay. For his first appointment, in May 1969, Nixon chose a little-known federal judge, Warren Burger, with an extensive record supporting prosecutorial and police power over the rights of the accused.When a second seat opened a few months later, he followed the same pattern, twice nominating judges who had at one point either expressed opposition to the integration of the races or whose rulings were regarded as favoring segregation. Only when the Senate rejected both of them did Nixon fall back on Harry Blackmun, the sort of centrist Ike would have loved.Two more justices stepped down in September 1971. Again Nixon picked nominees who he knew would be tough on crime and soft on civil rights — and by then, he had a more expansive agenda in mind. It included an aversion to government regulation of the private sector — and so one pick was the courtly corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who had written an influential memo that year to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a robust corporate defense of the free enterprise system. Another item on Nixon’s agenda was to devolve federal power down to the states. William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general committed to that view, was his other pick. The two foundational principles of an increasingly energized conservatism were set into the court by Nixon’s determination to select his nominees through a precisely defined litmus test previous presidents hadn’t imagined applying.Our view of the Burger court may be skewed in part because Nixon’s test didn’t include abortion. By 1971, abortion politics had become furiously contested, but the divisions followed demography as well as political affiliation: In polling then (which wasn’t as representative as it is today), among whites, men were slightly more likely than women to support the right to choose, the non-Catholic college-educated more likely than those without college degrees, non-Catholics far more likely than Catholics, who anchored the opposition. So it wasn’t surprising that after oral arguments, three of the four white Protestant men Nixon had put on the court voted for Roe, and that one of them wrote the majority opinion.Justice Blackmun was still drafting the court’s decision in May 1972 when Nixon sent a letter to New York’s Catholic cardinal, offering his “admiration, sympathy and support” for the church stepping in as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.” The Republican assemblywoman who had led New York’s decriminalization of abortion denounced his intervention as “a patent pitch for the Catholic vote.” That it was. In November, Nixon carried the Catholic vote, thanks to a move that gave the abortion wars a partisan alignment they hadn’t had before.Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H. W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration. The ideological vetting of justices has increased in intensity and in precision.Mr. Trump’s term entrenched a party beholden to the configurations of politics and power that Nixon had shaped half a century ago. The possibility of progressive change that seemed to open in 2020 has now been shut down. The court’s supermajority handed down the first of what could be at least a decade of rulings eviscerating liberal precedents.Crime and gun violence now outstrip race as one of the electorates’ major concerns.Mr. Trump, in a speech on Tuesday, made it clear that he would continue to hammer the theme as he considers a 2024 run: “If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom,” he said, adding that “America First must mean safety first” and “we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it. And be tough. And be nasty and be mean if we have to.”An order so firmly entrenched won’t easily be undone. It’s tempting to talk about expanding the court or imposing age limits. But court reform has no plausible path through the Senate. Even if it did, the results might not be progressive: Republicans are as likely as Democrats to pack a court once they control Congress, and age limits wouldn’t affect some of the most conservative justices for at least another 13 years. The truth is the court will be remade as it always has been, a justice at a time.The court will undoubtedly limit progressive policies, too, as it has already done on corporate regulation and gun control. But it’s also opened up the possibility of undoing some of the partisan alignments that Nixon put into place, on abortion most of all. Now that Roe is gone, the Democrats have the chance to reclaim that portion of anti-abortion voters who support the government interventions — like prenatal and early child care — that a post-Roe nation desperately needs and the Republican Party almost certainly won’t provide.Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear. To do that, liberals must take up violent crime as a defining issue, something they have been reluctant to do, and then to relentlessly rework it, to try to break the power of its racial dynamic by telling the public an all-too-obvious truth: The United States is harassed by violent crime because it’s awash in guns, because it has no effective approach to treating mental illness and the epidemic of drug addiction, because it accepts an appalling degree of inequality and allows entire sections of the country to tumble into despair.Making that case is a long-term undertaking, too, as is to be expected of a project trying to topple half a century of political thinking. But until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of, most recently, “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”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 Savors Much-Needed Victories. But Will the Highs Overshadow the Lows?

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      With the midterm elections around the corner, the challenge for President Biden is to make sure his latest successes resonate with Americans who remain deeply skeptical about the future.WASHINGTON — President Biden and his top advisers have tried for months to press forward amid a seemingly endless drumbeat of dispiriting news: rising inflation, high gas prices, a crumbling agenda, a dangerously slowing economy and a plummeting approval rating, even among Democrats.But Mr. Biden has finally caught a series of breaks. Gas prices, which peaked above $5 a gallon, have fallen every day for more than six weeks and are now closer to $4. After a yearlong debate, Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed legislation this past week to invest $280 billion in areas like semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research to bolster competition with China.And in a surprise turnabout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat who had single-handedly held up Mr. Biden’s boldest proposals, agreed to a deal that puts the president in a position to make good on promises to lower drug prices, confront climate change and make corporations pay higher taxes.“The work of the government can be slow and frustrating and sometimes even infuriating,” Mr. Biden said at the White House on Thursday, reflecting the impatience and anger among his allies and the weariness of his own staff. “Then the hard work of hours and days and months from people who refuse to give up pays off. History is made. Lives are changed.”Even for a president who has become used to the highs and lows of governing, it was a moment to feel whipsawed. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Biden has celebrated successes like passage of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and slogged through crises like the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gas prices soared; now they are coming down. Unemployment is at record lows even as there are signs of a looming recession.The president’s brand of politics is rooted in a slower era, before Twitter, and sometimes it can pay off to have the patience to wait for a deal to finally emerge. But now, with congressional elections coming up in a few months, the challenge for Mr. Biden is to make sure his latest successes resonate with Americans who remain deeply skeptical about the future.The magnitude of the Senate deal was received like a splash of icy water across Washington, which had all but written off the possibility that Mr. Biden’s far-reaching ambitions could be revived this year. Republicans moved quickly to attack the proposal, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, deriding what he described as “giant tax hikes that will hammer workers.”The Senate deal puts the president in a position to make good on his promise to confront climate change.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesInside the West Wing, aides were forced to scramble to come up with talking points for a deal almost no one saw coming. If Congress manages to pass the compromise reached with Mr. Manchin, they argue, it will move the country to the forefront on addressing the globe’s changing climate and lower drug prices even as it raises money from corporations to lower the federal budget deficit.The deal would give Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for millions of Americans, extend health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act for three years and require corporations to pay a minimum tax — something many progressive Democrats have been demanding for years.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      2016 Campaign Looms Large as Justice Dept. Pursues Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      Top officials at the department and the F.B.I. appear intent on avoiding any errors that could taint the current investigation or provide ammunition for a backlash.As the Justice Department investigation into the attack on the Capitol grinds ever closer to former President Donald J. Trump, it has prompted persistent — and cautionary — reminders of the backlash caused by inquiries into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is intent on avoiding even the slightest errors, which could taint the current investigation, provide Mr. Trump’s defenders with reasons to claim the inquiry was driven by animus, or undo his effort to rehabilitate the department’s reputation after the political warfare of the Trump years.Mr. Garland never seriously considered focusing on Mr. Trump from the outset, as investigators had done earlier with Mr. Trump and with Mrs. Clinton during her email investigation, people close to him say.As a result, his investigators have taken a more methodical approach, carefully climbing up the chain of personnel behind the 2020 plan to name fake slates of Trump electors in battleground states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.That has now led them to Mr. Trump and his innermost circle: Justice Department lawyers are questioning witnesses directly about the actions of Mr. Trump and top advisers like his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, appears to be proceeding with caution in hopes of armoring the bureau against future attacks by making sure his agents operate by the book. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAs prosecutors delve deeper into Mr. Trump’s orbit, the former president and his allies in Congress will almost certainly accuse the Justice Department and F.B.I. of a politically motivated witch hunt.The template for those attacks, as Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, well know, was “Crossfire Hurricane,” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which Mr. Trump continues to dismiss as a partisan hoax.The mistakes and decisions from that period, in part, led to increased layers of oversight, including a major policy change at the Justice Department. If a decision were made to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election, as he suggests he might do, the department’s leaders would have to sign off on any inquiry under an internal rule established by Attorney General William P. Barr and endorsed by Mr. Garland.“Attorney General Garland and those investigating the high-level efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are acutely aware of how any misstep, whether by the F.B.I. or prosecutors, will be amplified and used for political purposes,” said Mary B. McCord, a top Justice Department official during the Obama administration. “I expect there are added layers of review and scrutiny of every investigative step.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      There’s Hot and Then There’s Hot as … Politics

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Damn, it’s hot.Gail Collins: Ah Bret, we agree once again. How inspiring it is to realize that even in these troubled times, Americans of all political stripes can gather to complain about the weather.Bret: Just give this conversation another five seconds ….Gail: And, of course, vent about Senator Joe Manchin, who keeps putting his coal-loving foot on any serious attempt to deal with climate change.Am I moving out of our area of agreement?Bret: Maybe a tad. I’m grateful to Manchin for fighting for American energy. We’ll all be complaining about climate change a whole lot more when diminished power generation and supply shocks leave us with rolling blackouts and long stretches without air-conditioning.On the other hand, I mentioned in a previous conversation that I’m going to Greenland later this summer. Wasn’t kidding! An oceanographer I know pretty much wants to shove my face into a melting glacier in hopes of some kind of Damascene conversion.Gail: Great! Then we can join hands and lobby for tax incentives that will encourage Americans to buy electric cars and encourage power companies to trade coal for wind and solar energy, right?Bret: Wind and solar power alone will never meet demand. We should build a lot more nuclear power, which is what France is doing, again, and also extract more gas and oil in the U.S. and Canada. However, if Joe Biden also wants to help me pay for that Tesla I don’t actually need, I probably won’t say no.Speaking of the president, I’m wishing him a speedy recovery. Is Covid something we can at last stop being freaked out about?Gail: Clearly Biden’s in a particular risk group because of his age, but 79-year-olds who are surrounded by high-quality medical staff may not be the most endangered part of the population.Bret: Just hope the vice president’s office didn’t recommend the doctor.Gail: One of the biggest problems is still the folks who refused to get vaccinated. And who are still being encouraged by a number of Republican candidates for high office.Bret: OK, confession: I’m having a harder and harder time keeping faith with vaccines that seem to be less and less effective against the new variants. How many boosters are we all supposed to get each year?Gail: Oh Bret, Bret …Bret: Never mind my Kamala joke, now I’m in real trouble. What were you saying about Republicans?Gail: I was thinking about anti-vaxxers — or at least semi-anti-vaxxers — like Dan Cox, who is now the Republican nominee for Maryland governor, thanks to the endorsement of Donald Trump and about $1.16 million in TV ads paid for by the Democratic Governors Association, who think he’ll be easy to beat.Bret: Such a shame that a state Republican Party that had one of the few remaining Republican heroes in the person of the incumbent governor, Larry Hogan, should nominate a stinker like Cox, who called Mike Pence a “traitor” for not trying to overturn the election on Jan. 6. His Democratic opponent, Wes Moore, is one of the most outstanding people I’ve ever met and could be presidential material a few years down the road.I hope Cox loses by the widest margin in history. Of course I also said that of Trump in 2016.Gail: Ditto. But I just hate the Democrats’ developing strategy of giving a big boost to terrible Republican candidates in order to raise their own side’s chances. It is just the kind of thing that can come back to haunt you in an era when voters have shown they’re not always freaked out by contenders who have the minor disadvantage of being crazy.Bret: Totally agree. We should be working to revive the center. Two suggestions I have for deep-pocketed political donors: Don’t give a dime to an incumbent who has never worked on at least one meaningful bipartisan bill. And ask any political newcomer to identify one issue on which he or she breaks with party orthodoxy. If they don’t have a good answer, don’t write a check.For instance: bail reform. My jaw hit the floor when the guy who tried to stab Representative Lee Zeldin at a campaign event in New York last week walked free after a few hours, even if he was then rearrested under a federal statute.Gail: We semi-disagree about bail reform. I don’t think you decide who should be able to walk on the basis of the amount of money their families can put up. Anybody who’s charged with a dangerous crime should stay locked up, and the rest should go home and be ready for their day in court. More

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      Why Trump Is Weakening

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      In Donald Trump’s quest to sustain his dominance over the Republican Party, his claim to have been robbed of victory in 2020 has been a crucial talisman, lending him powers denied to previous defeated presidential candidates. By insisting that he was cheated out of victory, Trump fashioned himself into a king-in-exile rather than a loser — an Arthur betrayed by the Mordreds of his own party, waiting in the Avalon of Mar-a-Lago to make his prophesied return.As with many forms of dark Trumpian brilliance, though, the former president is not exactly in conscious control of this strategy. He intuited rather than calculated his way to its effectiveness, and he seems too invested in its central conceit — the absolute righteousness of his “Stop the Steal” campaign — to modulate when it begins to reap diminishing returns.That’s a big part of why 2022 hasn’t been a particularly good year for Trump’s 2024 ambitions. Across 2021, he bent important parts of the G.O.P. back to his will, but in recent months his powers have been ebbing — and for the same reason, his narrative of dispossession, that they were initially so strong.While Ron DeSantis, his strongest potential rival, has been throwing himself in front of almost every issue that Republican primary voters care about, Trump has marinated in grievance, narrowed his inner circle, and continued to badger Republican officials about undoing the last election. While DeSantis has been selling himself as the scourge of liberalism, the former president has been selling himself mostly as the scourge of Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.Judging by early primary polling, the DeSantis strategy is working at the Trump strategy’s expense. The governor is effectively tied with the former president in recent polls of New Hampshire and Michigan, and leading him easily in Florida — which is DeSantis’s home state, yes, but now Trump’s as well.These early numbers don’t prove that Trump can be beaten. But they strongly suggest that if his case for 2024 is only that he was robbed in 2020, it won’t be enough to achieve a restoration.This is not because the majority of Republicans have had their minds changed by the Jan. 6 committee, or suddenly decided that actually Joe Biden won fair and square. But the committee has probably played some role in bleeding Trump’s strength, by keeping him pinned to the 2020 election and its aftermath, giving him an extra reason to obsess about enemies and traitors and giving his more lukewarm Republican supporters a constant reminder of where the Trump experience ended up.By lukewarm supporters, I mean those Republicans who would be inclined to answer no if a pollster asked them if the 2020 election was fairly won, but who would also reject the conceit — as a majority of Republicans did in a Quinnipiac poll earlier this year — that Mike Pence could have legitimately done as Trump wished on Jan. 6.That’s a crucial distinction, because in my experience as well as in public polling, there are lots of conservatives who retain a general sense that Biden’s victory wasn’t fair without being committed to John Eastman’s cockamamie plans to force a constitutional crisis. In the same way, there are lots of conservatives who sympathize in a general way with the Jan. 6 protests while believing that they were essentially peaceful and that any rioting was the work of F.B.I. plants or outside agitators — which is deluded, but still quite different from actively wishing for a mob-led coup d’état.So to the extent that Trump is stuck litigating his own disgraceful conduct before and during the riot, a rival like DeSantis doesn’t need the lukewarm Trump supporter to believe everything the Jan. 6 committee reports. He just needs that supporter to regard Jan. 6 as an embarrassment and Trump’s behavior as feckless — while presenting himself as the candidate who can own the libs but also turn the page.A counterargument, raised on Friday by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, is that so long as those lukewarm supporters still believe the 2020 election was unfair, Trump will have a trump card over any rival — because if you believe a steal happened, “you are perfectly rational to select a candidate who will acknowledge the crime and do everything to prevent it from reoccurring.”But it seems just as possible for the lukewarm supporter to decide that if Trump’s response to being robbed was to first just let it happen and then ask his vice president to wave a magic wand on his behalf, then maybe he’s not the right guy to take on the Democratic machine next time.There is more than one way, in other words, for Republican voters to decide that the former president is a loser. The stolen-election narrative has protected him from the simplest consequence of his defeat. But it doesn’t prevent the stench of failure from rising from his well-worn grievances, his whine of disappointment and complaint.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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      President Biden’s Human Rights Dilemma

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      The complications of keeping campaign promises.It was a fraught fist bump.As you heard on Monday’s episode, President Biden’s chosen greeting for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia became a diplomatic drama.After years of bombastic foreign policy tweets, analyzing the subtleties of Mr. Biden’s behavior feels like a throwback to the tan-suit era — a time when diplomacy was in the details.But this wasn’t the only fist bump Mr. Biden gave on his tour of the Middle East. He also extended one to Prime Minister Yair Lapid while disembarking from Air Force One in Israel.Below, Rachelle Bonja, the lead producer of the episode, looks more closely at Mr. Biden’s Middle East tour and explains the significance of a few diplomatic decisions we didn’t get the chance to discuss on the show.The big idea: Biden’s human rights dilemmaThe Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper on our episode with Ben Hubbard, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief, about President Biden’s foreign policy.At the beginning of his campaign, President Biden set out a clear goal: to make human rights the center of American foreign policy. He promised to return to a previous era of international relations, before Donald J. Trump introduced an “America first” doctrine and withdrew from international agreements. However, Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia quickly became a test of one of his boldest campaign promises.In both countries, Mr. Biden was under pressure to keep his commitment to speak out against human rights abuses, specifically by condemning the recent killings of journalists.As a candidate, Mr. Biden was explicit about how he felt the United States should deal with Saudi Arabia after the 2018 killing of​​ Jamal Khashoggi, a former Washington Post columnist. (American intelligence officials have determined that the crown prince approved the operation to assassinate Mr. Khashoggi.)Mr. Biden said that his plan was to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”But when the war in Ukraine drove American gas prices over $5 a gallon, Mr. Biden’s approach to the crown prince, who manages the country’s oil reserves, shifted focus.Although Mr. Biden said Friday night that he had confronted the crown prince over the murder during their closed-door meeting, the Saudi government disputed the nature of the interaction. Now the president is being criticized for his apparent compromise on human rights.But this wasn’t the only human rights dilemma Mr. Biden faced on his trip.Before he arrived in the Middle East, the president had not publicly addressed the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. Ms. Abu Akleh was a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was fatally shot in May while wearing a press vest and covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank for the network. Several investigations, including one by The New York Times, found that the bullets had come from the location of an Israeli Army unit.The United Nations’ human rights office concluded that “the shots that killed Abu Akleh and injured her colleague Ali Sammoudi came from Israeli security forces and not from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.Despite pressure from Ms. Abu Akleh’s family and others to address the killing, Mr. Biden did not mention Ms. Abu Akleh’s death while he was in Israel.Instead, in Jerusalem, the president reaffirmed his commitment to Israel as an ally and as an “independent Jewish state.” He called for a “lasting negotiated peace between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people.”Mr. Biden later visited Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, where he spoke about Ms. Abu Akleh and called for accountability in her killing: “The United States will continue to insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death and will continue to stand up for media freedom everywhere in the world,” he said.Ms. Abu Akleh’s family has called for a joint investigation of her killing. While Israel had previously offered to examine the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh in the presence of Palestinian and American representatives, the Palestinian Authority has refused a joint investigation, citing distrust of the Israelis. Mr. Biden’s decision to call for an investigation only while speaking in the Palestinian territories has stoked accusations that the president is trying to shield Israel from scrutiny.The two visits highlight how Mr. Biden has compromised on his previously stated commitments — a contradiction pointed out in a tweet by Hatice Cengiz, Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée.If he were alive, she wrote, Mr. Khashoggi might have tweeted at Mr. Biden, asking: “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.”From the Daily team: Your weekend playlistIn October 2020, a group outside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul commemorated the second anniversary of the death of Jamal Khashoggi.Murad Sezer/ReutersHere is some further listening on the Middle East and its leaders to add to your weekend playlist.Nine Days in Gaza: Last summer, a two-week outbreak of violence occurred between Israelis and Palestinians. We spoke to a resident of Gaza City, Rahf Hallaq, about her life and what the conflict was like for her.Biden’s Saudi Dilemma: More than a year before last week’s meeting with Prince Mohammed, Mr. Biden took the bold step of releasing an intelligence report that implicated the crown prince in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi.The Disappearance of a Saudi Journalist: Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has promoted himself to the West as a reformer determined to create a more free and open society. The killing of Mr. Khashoggi changed that. (From 2018.)On The Daily this weekMonday: What did the meeting between President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tell us about relations between the countries they lead?Tuesday: Has the era of global cooperation over planet-warming emissions ended?Wednesday: How abortion bans are restricting miscarriage care.Thursday: A prosecutor who worked on the Mueller inquiry discusses the possibility of criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump.Friday: As the Great Salt Lake dries up, Utah is facing an “environmental nuclear bomb.”That’s it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.Have thoughts about the show? Tell us what you think at thedaily@nytimes.com.Were you forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox.Love podcasts? Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook. More

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      Why Republicans Are Having Gas Pains

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      Until just the other day, Republicans and conservative media loved, just loved talking about the price of gasoline. Indeed, “Remember how cheap gas used to be under Trump?” became a sort of all-purpose answer to everything. Is there now overwhelming evidence that the former president conspired in a violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 election? “Real America doesn’t care about the January 6th Committee. Gas is over $5 a gallon!” declared Representative Jim Jordan.But now gas prices are falling. They’re down more than 50 cents a gallon at the pump; wholesale prices, whose changes normally show up later in retail prices, are down even more, suggesting that prices will keep falling for at least the next few weeks. And there’s a palpable sense of panic on Fox News, which has been reduced to whining about how the White House is taking a “victory lap.”Actually, from what I can see, Biden administration officials are being remarkably restrained in pointing out the good news (which is probably a result of a slowing global economy). The larger point, however, is that Republican politicians’ focus on gas prices is profoundly stupid. And if it’s coming back to bite them, that’s just poetic justice.Why is focusing on gas prices stupid? Let me count the ways.First, while presidential policy can have big effects on many things, the cost of filling your gas tank isn’t one of them. For the most part, gasoline prices reflect the price of crude oil — and crude prices are set on world markets, which is one reason inflation has soared around the world, not just in the United States. Government spending in the Biden administration’s early months may have contributed to overall U.S. inflation — we can argue about how much — but has hardly anything to do with gas prices.Second, while gas was indeed cheap in 2020, it was cheap for a very bad reason: Global demand for oil was depressed because the world economy was reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.Third, even before the pandemic struck, gas prices were unsustainably low.Little-known fact: Prices at the pump plunged during President Barack Obama’s second term, falling from about $3.70 a gallon in mid-2014 — around $4.50 in 2022 dollars — to $2.23 on the eve of the 2016 election. News reports at the time marveled at Obama’s diffidence about claiming credit.What happened? Mostly a boom in fracking, which increased U.S. oil production so much that it drove prices down around the world. As it turned out, however, that production boom didn’t make financial sense. Energy companies borrowed huge sums to invest in new drilling but never generated enough revenue to justify the cost. The fracking industry lost hundreds of billions even before the pandemic struck.So high gas prices weren’t President Biden’s fault, and given the disappearance of the forces that used to keep gas cheap, it’s hard to think of any policy — short of creating a global depression — that would bring prices down to $2 a gallon, or even $3 a gallon. Not that Republicans are offering any real policy proposals anyway.But the G.O.P. nonetheless went for the cheap shot of trying to make the midterm elections largely about prices at the pump. And this focus on gas is now giving the party a bellyache, as gas prices come down.It is, after all, hard to spend month after month insisting that Biden deserves all the blame for rising gas prices, then deny him any credit when they come down. The usual suspects are, of course, trying, but it’s not likely to go well.Some right-wing commentators are trying to pivot to a longer view, pointing out that gas prices are still much higher than they were in 2020. This happens to be true. But so much of their messaging has depended on voter amnesia — on their supporters not remembering what was really going on in 2020 — that I have my doubts about how effective this line will be.More broadly, many Wall Street analysts expect to see a sharp drop in inflation over the next few months, reflecting multiple factors, from falling used car prices to declining shipping costs, not just gas prices. Market expectations of near-term inflation have come way down.If the analysts and the markets are right, we’re probably headed for a period in which inflation headlines are better than the true state of affairs; it’s not clear whether underlying inflation has come down much, if at all. But that’s not an argument Republicans, who have done all they can to dumb down the inflation debate, are well placed to make.This has obvious implications for the midterm elections. Republicans have been counting on inflation to give them a huge victory, despite having offered no explanation of what they’d do about it. But if you look at the generic ballot — which probably doesn’t yet reflect falling gas prices — rather than Biden’s approval rating, the midterms look surprisingly competitive.Maybe real Americans do care about violent attacks on democracy, overturning Roe v. Wade and so on after all.If we continue to get good news on inflation, November may look very different from what everyone has been expecting.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