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      Tim Ryan Says Kamala Harris Should Replace Biden as Democratic Nominee

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      Tim Ryan, a former Ohio congressman, called on Democrats to replace President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the party’s ticket in the November election against former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Ryan, in a Newsweek opinion column, wrote that he had lost confidence in Mr. Biden’s ability to defeat his rival after watching the president struggle in Thursday’s head-to-head debate with Mr. Trump. He noted that Mr. Biden had said he would be a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, an idea he said he liked. “Regrettably, that bridge collapsed last week,” he wrote.“Witnessing Joe Biden struggle was heartbreaking,” Mr. Ryan wrote of the debate. “And we must forge a new path forward.”In 2020, Mr. Ryan endorsed Biden after his own bid for the party’s nomination failed. During the midterm elections in 2022, he lost his bid for Senate in Ohio to J.D. Vance, a Republican who is said to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist of running mates.Since Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance last week, the noise has intensified about whether Democrats should replace him as the party’s nominee. He is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in August in Chicago.While figures such as Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, the governors of Michigan and California, have drawn attention as potential replacements, Mr. Ryan wrote that Ms. Harris gives Democrats their best shot at holding the presidency. “Those who say that a Harris candidacy is a greater risk than the Joe Biden we saw the other night and will continue to see are not living in reality,” he wrote. “It is not just utterly preposterous for the haters to say that, it is insulting.” More

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      There’s No Reason to Resign Ourselves to Biden

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      Though Joe Biden’s debate performance last week was among the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed, it at least seemed to offer clarity. Suddenly, even many people who love this president realized that his campaign has become untenable.For years, loyal Democrats have been suppressing their private anxiety about Biden’s decline. In the debate’s miserable aftermath, there was finally space to acknowledge the obvious: Biden is too old for this. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote. The Democratic Party’s predicament is an awful one, but there was a cold, flinty relief in being forced to reckon with it.Since then, however, the Biden campaign has quickly moved to squash that reckoning, framing the divide in the Democratic Party as one between naïve, hysterical outsiders and savvy, resolute insiders. Biden surrogates fanned out to discount the debate as a single “bad night.” A campaign email slammed those calling on the president to step aside as the “bed-wetting brigade,” and offered tips for responding to “your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important podcasters,” an apparent reference to the former Obama officials who host “Pod Save America.” On Monday, I listened to a recording of a Zoom meeting with Biden’s national finance committee in which his deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, accused the media of blowing the debate “out of proportion,” and his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, compared it to Barack Obama’s lackluster performance against Mitt Romney in 2012.Some allies of the president have even suggested that Democrats learn from Donald Trump’s unswerving followers. “If Republicans are standing lock step” with the 78-year-old disgraced criminal Trump, said the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, “then Democrats damn well should be standing lock step with their ethical and morally decent 81-year-old president.”I don’t blame people in the Biden camp for doing everything they can to tamp down an intraparty revolt. That’s their job, and I take some comfort that they’re doing it as well as is possible, since if Biden is the nominee, it’s imperative that he defeats Trump. But as long as there’s time to replace Biden, Democrats should not allow themselves to be bullied into fatalism and complacency.More than a setback, Biden’s showing at the debate was a revelation, confirming the worst fears of his doubters. Since then, several news reports have made it clear that the Biden we all saw onstage is familiar to those who see him behind the scenes. Axios reported that, according to presidential aides, Biden is alert and engaged from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but not necessarily outside of those hours. The Wall Street Journal reported that European officials were worried about Biden’s “focus and stamina” even before the debate, “with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” This is not a fixable problem.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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      Jill Biden Is Vogue’s Cover Star

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      During the most challenging period of President Biden’s re-election bid, the first lady appears on the cover of a high-fashion bible.The August cover of Vogue featuring Dr. Jill Biden was released online Monday — four days after the big debate — and brought with it a fresh round of scrutiny over her role as a die-hard campaigner for her husband, who is locked in a nail-biting campaign for re-election.During much of President Biden’s term, the first lady was a figure of minimal controversy. That began to shift when campaign season heated up. Laura Ingraham of Fox News claimed that Dr. Biden was covering up the president’s unfitness out of her own desire for political power and prestige. Sounding the same theme, The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, began referring to her as “Lady Mac-Biden.”Dr. Biden took center stage after Mr. Biden struggled to finish his sentences during a dismal debate performance on Thursday against former President Donald J. Trump. Afterward, The New York Times reported that Dr. Biden was the first person he had turned to: “The first lady’s message to him was clear: They’d been counted out before, she was all in, and he — they — would stay in the race.”On the Vogue cover, Dr. Biden wears a white Ralph Lauren tuxedo dress. She was photographed in the spring by Norman Jean Roy, whose recent contributions to Vogue include portraits of Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. The accompanying profile of the first lady, by Maya Singer, describes her as a “vision of calm amid utter cacophony.”Dr. Biden has been on the cover of Vogue twice before. Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, noted that an appearance on the Vogue cover is a “rite of passage” for first ladies. Still, Ms. Brown added, the implications of Dr. Biden’s appearance on the cover of a fashion magazine are “always a risk.” And at this moment, the Vogue cover “is not particularly helpful,” she added.Soon after the magazine posted the cover image to its Instagram account on Monday, the comments were overwhelmingly negative. Some were from Trump supporters who took Dr. Biden’s appearance as an opportunity to complain about the fact that Melania Trump had been passed over for a Vogue cover when she was first lady. A number of other critical remarks seemed to come from Democrats, one of whom argued that Dr. Biden was pursuing her and her husband’s own ambitions “at the expense of Americans safety and happiness.”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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      Judge Orders Biden Administration to Resume Permits for Gas Exports

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      President Biden had paused new natural gas export terminals to assess their effects on the climate, economy and national security. A federal judge disagreed.A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to resume issuing permits for new liquefied natural gas export facilities after the government had paused that process in January to analyze how those exports affect climate change, the economy and national security.The decision, from the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, comes in response to a lawsuit from 16 Republican state attorneys general, who argued that the pause amounted to a ban that harmed their states’ economies. Many of those states, including Louisiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming, produce significant amounts of natural gas.The judge, James D. Cain Jr., who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, wrote in his decision that the states had demonstrated that they had lost jobs, royalties and taxes that would have flowed had permits for gas exports continued.Texas, for example, projected that it would lose $259.8 million in tax revenues associated with natural gas production over five years as a result of the pause of permitting.Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has said that she expects that the analysis of L.N.G. exports, which is being conducted by her agency, would be completed late this year.But Judge Cain agreed with the attorneys general that the states were being harmed.“The Court finds that the lost or delayed revenues tied to natural gas production is a concrete and imminent injury that supports standing,” Judge Cain wrote.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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      Two More Democratic Lawmakers Express Concern About Biden After Debate

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      Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said he was “horrified” by the debate. Representative Debbie Dingell said “the campaign needs to listen to us.”Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he was surprised and “horrified” by President Biden’s frail appearance in his debate against former President Donald J. Trump and pleaded with Mr. Biden and his campaign to be candid about his current condition.In an interview with WPRI, a television station in Providence, Mr. Whitehouse, who in March defended Mr. Biden as “the only option that we have” to defeat Mr. Trump in the election, expressed alarm and said that he had “never seen” Mr. Biden in that kind of condition before.“Like a lot of people, I was pretty horrified,” Mr. Whitehouse said Monday, adding that he wanted “the president and his team to be candid about his condition, that this was a real anomaly and not just the way he is these days.”Mr. Whitehouse was joined in his concerns by Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat in a deep blue district that encompasses Ann Arbor. Ms. Dingell criticized the Biden campaign for reports that its leaders were “going to stick to their strategy” and were considering holding some kind of interview or news conference to allay concerns about the president.“One interview isn’t going to fix this,” Ms. Dingell said in an interview on CNN, adding: “I think the campaign’s got to listen to people. And by the way, I think the campaign needs to listen to us.”She continued: “I know how to win campaigns. My strategy is to stick my ear to the ground and know what people are saying.”The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.It was the latest in a wave of reactions among Democrats concerned about Mr. Biden and his re-election campaign. The campaign and Biden allies have sought to tamp down the panic that has gripped the party and its wealthy donors in the aftermath of the debate. Top Democratic lawmakers fanned out on Sunday to defend the president and reassure his supporters.But Ms. Dingell’s and Mr. Whitehouse’s comments on Monday demonstrated that questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness for another four years in office will continue to linger heading into the Democrats’ nominating convention in August. More

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      Biden Campaign Will Try to Reassure Big Donors

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      President Biden’s top campaign official is scheduled to hold a crucial call on Monday to convince donors that the president can beat former President Donald J. Trump.President Biden’s top campaign official is scheduled to hold a crucial conference call with donors on Monday to try to convince them that Mr. Biden can still win the race against former President Donald J. Trump.The call with the national finance committee, scheduled hastily on Sunday, is the Biden campaign’s most formal attempt yet to tamp down panic within the ranks of major donors since Thursday’s debate.Some individual donors have received direct communication from campaign officials, and Biden fund-raisers say communication picked up over the weekend, according to people close to the conversations. The call on Monday is to be hosted by Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair.Preserving the donor base will be critical to the president’s argument for staying in the race, many of Mr. Biden’s allies have acknowledged.Mr. Biden huddled out of sight at Camp David on Monday morning as his team remained defiant, promising that he will stay in the race despite last week’s debacle. He plans to return to the White House on Monday evening.Family members and friends spent the weekend urging Mr. Biden to keep fighting, even as some Democrats and others called on him to step aside. At the White House and the campaign, aides tried to press forward as usual, putting out news releases on student loans and the president’s overtime policies.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