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      A Disappearing President Steps Back Into the Limelight

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      At a rally today, if it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world, he kept the focus on Trump.For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, President Biden stood silently onstage in Maryland, his hands folded and his body swaying ever so softly. On one side of him was Vice President Kamala Harris, heaping praise on him; hovering on the other side was Harris’s face again, emblazoned on a shirt worn by a member of the crowd.It was the pair’s first time onstage together since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. The appearance, three and a half weeks in the making, had great potential for awkwardness: an event for the Biden White House with the vibe of a Harris campaign rally.If it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world now, he kept the focus on Trump.“Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is,” Biden said, evoking a set of conservative policy plans drawn up by allies of former President Donald Trump, once he stepped to the microphone. “Beat the hell out of ’em.”Unburdened by the weight of defending democracy in an embattled presidential campaign, Biden joked repeatedly about his age — “I served in the Senate for 270 years!” — referred to former President Trump as “Donald Dump,” and delivered a line that had bedeviled him at the debate where his candidacy unraveled.“This time,” he said, “we finally beat big pharma.”It was a flash of a Biden who has not been seen much since he dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. He is no longer his party’s standard-bearer. He has not appeared on the campaign trail. He seems in many ways to have shrunk from public view.It all got me curious about what these past weeks have meant for Biden — a man who is, of course, very much still president. My colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, has watched Biden and Harris up close, and he spoke with me this afternoon from the event in Maryland. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.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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      2026 Prices for Drugs That Are Subject to Negotiations

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      The prices were made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, which granted the health secretary the authority to negotiate on behalf of Medicare.The Biden administration on Thursday announced the results of negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies over the prices of 10 costly or common medications. The new prices, which will take effect in 2026, are the maximum Medicare Part D plans and patients will pay for a one-month supply.1. Eliquis, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, $2312. Jardiance, for diabetes and heart failure, from Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly, $1973. Xarelto, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Johnson & Johnson, $1974. Januvia, for diabetes, from Merck, $1135. Farxiga, for diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease, from AstraZeneca $1786. Entresto, for heart failure, from Novartis, $2957. Enbrel, for autoimmune conditions, from Amgen, $2,3558. Imbruvica, for blood cancers, from AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson, $9,3199. Stelara, for autoimmune conditions, from Johnson & Johnson, $4,69510. Fiasp and NovoLog insulin products, for diabetes, from Novo Nordisk, $119 More

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      Inflation Progress Cheers Biden and Democrats

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      After more than two years of being politically battered over soaring prices, Wednesday’s inflation report left many Democrats feeling victorious.Consumer prices rose 2.9 percent in the year through July, falling below 3 percent for the first time since 2021. The report keeps the Federal Reserve on track to cut interest rates next month, a move that could lift economic sentiment in the United States ahead of the November election.“We’ve won the battle against inflation,” Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, wrote on X. “It’s time for the Fed to begin cutting rates.”Congressional Democrats were also using the report to push the Fed to cut aggressively.“Inflation is down,” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said in a news release. “The price of gas or a new car have fallen over the last year. And many families can now breathe a bit easier. Now, we need to make sure that this relief is reaching all Americans.”Republicans have been hammering Democrats over inflation and are unlikely to let them off the hook. They continue to note that prices are up nearly 20 percent since President Biden took office and note that the labor market is showing signs of slowing.“Despite a small improvement in the rate of price increases, the damage from the Biden-Harris administration’s philosophy of ‘tax it, regulate it, and spend it’ is done and continues to plague the economy,” said Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the House Budget Committee. “It’s hard to fathom how hardworking American families can survive another four years of the Biden-Harris failed economic agenda.”Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to crack down on corporate price gouging and is expected to lay out additional plans for lowering costs in a speech this week.Former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, will hold a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend with a focus on inflation, according to his campaign. He has claimed that the Biden administration’s spending policies have fueled record levels of inflation.“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies.”While Mr. Biden cheered the inflation figures, he cautioned that the cost of living remained too expensive. He said large corporations had been sitting on record profits and failing to do enough to help.“We have more work to do to lower costs for hardworking Americans, but we are making real progress,” Mr. Biden said, while noting that wages have outpaced price increases for 17 months running. “Prices are still too high.” More

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      Hunter Biden Sought State Department Help for Burisma

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      After President Biden dropped his re-election bid, his administration released records showing that while he was vice president, his son solicited U.S. government assistance.Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.Embassy officials appear to have been uneasy with the request from the son of the sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company.“I want to be careful about promising too much,” wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome who was tasked with responding.“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Biden, said his client “asked various people,” including the U.S. ambassador to Italy at the time, John R. Phillips, whether they could arrange an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region of Italy, where Burisma was pursuing a geothermal project.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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      Former Pro-Trump County Clerk Is Found Guilty of Tampering With Voting Machines

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      Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Ms. Peters is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison.The conviction of Ms. Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Mr. Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Mr. Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.After 2020, pro-Trump activists in cities across the country sought to gain access to Dominion voting machines, hoping to prove that they had been used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. All of those efforts failed, and local officials have in many cases opened investigations.More recently, concerns have been raised that officials loyal to Mr. Trump could seek to tamper with the results of the 2024 election. Other allies of the former president have sought to give local election officials discretionary power over the certification of elections, raising fears that partisan officials could short-circuit the certification process.Almost from the start, the tale of Ms. Peters, 68, read like a political thriller, with allegations that she had secretly hatched plans to employ computer hackers to obtain data from voting machines, and had used disguises and false identities in an effort that allowed election deniers to infiltrate the office in Mesa County that was responsible for tallying official vote counts.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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      Biden Says He Dropped Out to Avoid Becoming a ‘Distraction’ for Democrats

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      President Biden said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he had abandoned his bid for a second term because he did not want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats, but he expressed no second thoughts about whether he could still do the job, despite concerns about his age and capacity.In his first interview since ending his re-election campaign on July 21, Mr. Biden said that he had “no serious problem” with his health, but added that the highest priority had to be defeating former President Donald J. Trump. “We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he told Robert Costa on “CBS Sunday Morning.”The president attributed his decision to step aside to pressure from his own party but did not offer new details about the dramatic days leading up to his stunning announcement. “A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” he said. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about, Why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”He said that he initially intended to be a bridge to the next generation in running for president in 2020. “When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”Even though he would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won again, Mr. Biden suggested that he had originally resolved to seek re-election because he saw Mr. Trump as a singular threat who had to be stopped. He cited the former president’s support from white supremacists and referred to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that he has said inspired him to run in 2020.“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified,” Mr. Biden said. “Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”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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      Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller.

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      Kamala Harris has a very different theory of this election than Joe Biden did.In 2020, and then again in 2024, Biden ceded the battle for attention to Donald Trump. Whether as a matter of strategy or as a result of Biden’s own limitations, Biden adopted a low-key campaigning style, letting Trump dominate news cycle after news cycle. Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump, and Joe Biden wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. On that much, they agreed.In 2020, when Trump was the unpopular incumbent, that strategy worked for Biden. In 2024, when Biden was the unpopular incumbent, it was failing him. It was failing in part because Biden no longer had the communication skills to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.Then came the debate, and Biden’s decision to step aside, and Harris’s ascent as the Democratic nominee. Harris has been able to do what Biden could or would not: fight — and win — the battle for attention. She had help, to be sure. Online meme-makers who found viral gold in an anecdote about coconuts. Charli XCX’s “kamala IS brat.”But much of it is strategy and talent. Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama. And while Harris’s campaign is largely composed of Biden’s staffers, the tenor has changed. Gone is the grave, stentorian tone of Biden’s news releases. Harris’s communications are playful, mocking, confident, even mean. Trump is “old” and “feeble”; JD Vance is “creepy.” Her campaign wants to be talked about and knows how to get people talking. It is trying to do something Democrats have treated as beneath them for years: win news cycles.Biden’s communications strategy was designed to make Trump bigger. Harris’s strategy is to make him smaller. “These guys are just weird,” Tim Walz said on “Morning Joe,” and it stuck. Walz inverted the way Democrats talked about Trump. Don’t make a strongman look stronger. Make him look weaker. Biden’s argument was that Trump might end American democracy. Walz’s argument is that Trump might ruin Thanksgiving.There are many reasons Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate, not least the chemistry between the candidates. But he was on the shortlist in the first place because he proved himself able to do what Harris wanted done: Get people talking about the thing he wanted them talking about.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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      There Is Still a Biden Scandal

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      One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for re-election.For a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years. And concerns about the capacities of Donald Trump, the aging candidate actually running for the White House, are naturally going to claim more attention now that they’re contrasted with a younger rival.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