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      Trump Floats I.V.F. Coverage Mandate While Campaigning in Michigan

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      The week after Democrats spent much of their national convention attacking him over his position on abortion rights and reproductive health, former President Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would require insurance companies or the federal government to pay for all costs associated with in vitro fertilization treatments if he is elected in November.Mr. Trump’s announcement — made in an NBC interview, a speech in Michigan and a town hall in Wisconsin — came with little detail about his proposal or how he might address its cost. For one cycle, the treatments can cost up to $20,000 or more. But he has been trying to rebrand himself to voters on reproductive access and abortion rights, issues that have cost Republicans at the ballot box.Mr. Trump, who often on the campaign trail has bragged about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, last week on social media declared that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase used by abortion-rights advocates.The post appeared to be an effort by Mr. Trump to cast himself as more of a political moderate on abortion, an issue that could hurt him in November.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused Mr. Trump of trying to run from his record on abortion access.“Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “Because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, I.V.F. is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country.”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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      Harris Defends Ideological Shift to Center in CNN Interview

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      In her first television interview as the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her ideological shift to the political center, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet but promising “my values have not changed.”She also curtly rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claim that she recently “became” Black, according to partial excerpts released by CNN. The full interview will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time on CNN.Ms. Harris, taking questions Thursday afternoon from the CNN anchor Dana Bash in Savannah, Ga., sought to stake out political ground that would appeal to swing voters even as she assured progressive supporters she was still with them.“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: My values have not changed,” Ms. Harris said, adding that her past support for the so-called Green New Deal was reflected in the passage of a sweeping climate bill that Mr. Biden signed in 2022.Ms. Harris told Ms. Bash that it was “important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” according to CNN.Appointing a nominally bipartisan cabinet would be a return to tradition after eight years of more partisan White Houses. No Republicans are serving in President Biden’s cabinet. But President Barack Obama had a Republican secretary of transportation and two Republican secretaries of defense. President George W. Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary, and before that, President Bill Clinton had a Republican defense secretary.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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      Where Does Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan Stand? Here’s What to Know.

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      The Supreme Court refused to allow a key part of President Biden’s student debt plan to move forward. Here’s what’s left of it, and who could still benefit.President Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.Other elements of Mr. Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders.But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:Who was eligible for SAVE?Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than eight million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.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 Kamala Harris Interview Worth Revisiting Now

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      ‘She didn’t break eye contact. It was intense. You feel on trial.’Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will sit down with Dana Bash of CNN tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern for the first major television interview of their presidential campaign.It’s a high-stakes moment for their nascent candidacy, a chance to define their campaign, defend their ideas and test their political dexterity in the run-up to Harris’s debate against former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10.It’s also an opportunity, following a month of rallies and campaign speeches, for the pair to tell a deeper story about themselves and their vision.But getting them to do that might not be easy.My colleague Astead Herndon, friend of the newsletter and host of the podcast “The Run-Up,” interviewed Harris as part of his reporting for a profile he wrote of Harris last year.The interview was contentious, but revealing, too, and I think it’s worth revisiting now. I called Astead to ask him what it taught him, and what he’s looking for from Harris’s interview tomorrow. Our conversation was edited and condensed.JB: Astead, thank you for joining me! You’ve held sit-down interviews with Harris twice, once in 2019 and once in 2023. How were those two interviews different?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 Look to End the Electability Question

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      The party is battling a squishy, often self-reinforcing concept about the perceived ability to win.This year, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, Md., and a Democrat, sought support for her U.S. Senate bid from an elected official she had known for years.“She said to me, ‘I’m so sorry. I want to be really blunt with you, Angela,’” Alsobrooks, who is Black, said, recalling that the official, a fellow Democrat whom she did not name, said she thought Alsobrooks could not win. “We are not ready to elect a Black woman in the state of Maryland,” Alsobrooks recounted the official as saying.It turned out that Maryland Democrats were ready to do just that.Alsobrooks beat a white man in her Senate primary by more than 10 percentage points. Public polling has shown her leading another, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, whom she will face in November.But the exchange, which Alsobrooks described in an interview last week during the Democratic National Convention, underscores the way a party that is trying to elect the first Black female president is still battling anxieties about the idea of electability — and preparing to confront them.Electability — a squishy and often self-reinforcing concept about who is perceived as being able to win elections — was a through line of the Democratic primary in 2020, when voters stung by the 2016 election wrung their hands over whether preferred presidential candidates who were female, nonwhite or both could garner enough support in key battleground states. The party ultimately coalesced around Joe Biden.Democrats did not have a chance to air those concerns in a drawn-out primary in 2024, and many suggested last week that identity-based questions about electability should remain firmly in the past. They view the issue of electability as providing cover for racist and sexist notions about white voters being apprehensive about backing Black candidates and male voters being reluctant to vote for female candidates.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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      Harris and Trump Squabble Over Debate Rules as ABC Matchup Looms

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      At the weigh-in before a big bout, prizefighters often taunt their opponents in an effort to try to psych them out.So it goes with the presidential pugilists set to meet next month in the city of Rocky Balboa.The Harris and Trump campaigns squabbled on Monday over the ground rules of their coming ABC News debate in Philadelphia, with each side trying to score political points off the other.The tussle began on Sunday when former President Donald J. Trump blasted ABC in a social media post, suggesting that the network’s anchors and executives were biased against him and threatening, not for the first time, to pull out of the event. “I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Mr. Trump wrote.Then, on Monday, Ms. Harris’s campaign went public with an effort to change one of the agreed-upon conditions for the debate: that each candidate’s microphone be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, told Politico.He added a dig for good measure: “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”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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      Harris Campaign Says It Raised $82 Million During Convention Week

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      Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said on Sunday that it raised $82 million during the Democratic National Convention last week, the latest spurt of donor enthusiasm around a presidential bid that, according to the campaign, has now raised $540 million in the last month.National party conventions are typically big-money moments for presidential candidates, offering nominees four days of lightly mediated exposure to a broad, if partisan audience. Ms. Harris has been on a historic fund-raising tear ever since President Biden announced on July 21 that he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination. The party convention, which took place from Monday to Thursday in Chicago, was full of messaging encouraging big and small donors alike to give to Ms. Harris’s campaign.After the vice president’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, the Harris campaign saw its “best fund-raising hour since launch day,” the campaign’s chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo on Sunday, although she did not provide a specific amount. The $82 million total includes contributions to allied fund-raising committees with the state and national parties.The memo did not give day-by-day totals, but ActBlue, which processes online donations for many progressive causes, including Ms. Harris’s bid, reported that its platform raised $13 million on Monday, $16.5 million on Tuesday, $23 million on Wednesday and almost $37 million on Thursday.Ms. Harris’s Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, did not release similar fund-raising numbers after his party’s convention in Milwaukee last month. While he was competitive with Mr. Biden in political fund-raising through 2024, Ms. Harris opened a $50 million cash-on-hand advantage at the beginning of August, after she had ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket.The $82 million raised during the four days of the Democratic convention is roughly on par with the $81 million the Harris campaign said it raised in the first 24 hours after Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out. More

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      Kamala Harris and a New Economic Vision

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      Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines.In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting. The question is, what comes next?One influential school of thought, advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, argues for increasing the supply of essentials such as housing, health care and clean energy, in part by using government to break the choke points that make these goods too scarce and costly in the first place. This has truth — the much-criticized million-dollar-toilet problem gets at something real.But it doesn’t fully reflect the realities of how powerful interests hold captive parts of our economy, and then our political system. A second intellectual camp focuses on these forces, and its avatars include Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and the modern antitrust movement, and the U.A.W. leader Shawn Fain and re-energized labor unions. Yet it, too, is incomplete as a governing wisdom, as it lacks affirmative answers for our largest challenges, like how to decarbonize quickly and at scale, and how to contend with a rising geopolitical competitor in China.Ms. Harris’s early proposals suggest she is drawing from both strands in telling a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve. Put differently, her slogan “We’re not going back” might well extend beyond political and social rights to include a different brand of economics.This new story has two themes — call them “build” and “balance.” The first focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims; the second corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes are fairer and need less after-the-fact redistribution.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