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      Trump Cacophony Hits Different This Time

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump speak at length? There’s a qualitative way to think about this question, about the substance of what he’s saying: He is still talking — perhaps more than people realize — about how the last election was stolen from him, and he treats the 2020 election as a Year Zero event that has ruined the world.But there’s a second — quantitative — way of looking at this question.In 2015 and 2016, as he was becoming the Republican nominee the first time, Mr. Trump quickly transformed into an all-encompassing, central figure, in an evolving, building story that started like a dark joke that Mr. Trump was in on, then swooned into a reality. Around this time eight years ago, terrorist mass shootings took place in Paris and California as the race for the Republican nomination became increasingly dark. It seemed to click into place then that Mr. Trump’s fluid plans, reactionary ideas, jokes and lies could coexist with and shape grave events. The combined effect of all this was to concentrate the country’s attention like a supernova; reaction to Mr. Trump became a constant feature of politics and also people’s personal lives.But the path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same. “The street still hopes for somebody else,” one Trump-critical donor recently said of Wall Street donors, a kind of dreamy summary of where things stand. Sarah Longwell, who’s overseen regular focus groups, noted on her podcast this fall that many voters seem not to have clocked that Mr. Trump and President Biden are likely to be the nominees. “People are constantly telling me, ‘But couldn’t this happen? But couldn’t this happen?’” If Mr. Trump were to win the first two contests by large enough margins, the general election could essentially begin as early as next month.Why does the volume around Mr. Trump feel different? For one thing, he has opted out of two old ways he achieved omnipresence, no longer tweeting and no longer appearing at Republican debates. Eight years in, there is also a lack of suspense about whether Mr. Trump could become the Republican nominee or the president.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?  More

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      Looking Ahead to 5 Things That Will Shape the 2024 Election

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      Trials, a Kennedy and the economy are among the variables to consider.A recent Trump caucus event in Waterloo, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressIt’s divisible by four. It’s a leap year. It’s a Summer Olympics year.It’s a presidential election year.Happy New Year?Whether the 2024 presidential election cycle brings you dread or excitement, there’s no doubt that the table is set for an extraordinary year.The potential for political turmoil has rarely seemed more obvious. Voters are deeply dissatisfied with the direction of the country and their options for president. President Biden’s approval rating is lower at this stage than for any president in the era of modern polling, dating to the 1940s. His likely opponent faces several criminal trials. Waiting in the wings, there’s an independent candidate with the last name Kennedy. The Democratic convention is even in Chicago.Here are just a few of the big topics that will shape the 2024 election.Can Nikki Haley win a state?Of all the items on this list, this is probably the least consequential. But it is first up on the calendar, with the early primary contests just a few weeks away, and a Haley win in New Hampshire or South Carolina is neither impossible nor irrelevant.Heading into the holidays, surveys showed Ms. Haley approaching or exceeding 30 percent in New Hampshire — putting her closer to an upset than it might look, given the volatile nature of early primaries.Her path to victory in New Hampshire is still fairly narrow. Her recent stumble in answering a question about the cause of the Civil War may halt her momentum. And even if she does defeat Donald J. Trump in the state, it’s hard to see her posing a serious threat to win the nomination, given the relatively narrow, factional character of her appeal.But if she regained her footing and did manage to pull off an upset in New Hampshire or South Carolina, it would still carry symbolic significance. It would be a reminder that the not-Trump wing of the Republican Party, while diminished and weakened, was still around. It would be a visible crack in Republican support for Mr. Trump, and it would happen just weeks before his scheduled trial in March.There’s a possible chain of events in which the combination of a trial and a Haley win winds up mattering more than we might guess today.The trial of Donald J. TrumpMaybe the criminal trial of Mr. Trump will not go down as “the greatest political spectacle of our lives” or something similarly grandiose, but it’s hard to think of anything like it that’s ever been scheduled on the political calendar.The trial promises to be the political center of gravity for the first half of the year, with the federal election subversion trial scheduled to begin on March 4 — the day before Super Tuesday in the G.O.P. primary — and then possibly lasting through the heart of the primary season, although delays are possible.It is hard to believe that a trial, in itself, will do grave political damage to Mr. Trump. After all, he endured the indictments unscathed. And he would probably amass enough delegates to win the Republican nomination even before the jury issued a verdict. The preponderance of Republican delegates will be awarded within a month of the start of the trial if it begins as scheduled.But there is a way a trial could matter: It might lead to a realization by Republican primary voters and elites that Mr. Trump is likely to be convicted. And whether they see it coming or not, a conviction isn’t the same as a trial or an indictment. It might be far more consequential.Recent polls — including New York Times/Siena College battleground polling in October — show Mr. Biden opening up a lead if Mr. Trump is convicted, let alone imprisoned. These polls should be taken with a grain of salt — they pose hypotheticals to voters, who mostly aren’t paying attention to Mr. Trump’s legal woes. But they’re a reminder that there are risks to his candidacy. In a close race, it might be decisive even if only a sliver of voters refuse to vote for a felon.At the same time, a conviction would offer a new path for those seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot, whether by disqualifying him in the courts or by denying him the nomination at the Republican convention.Mr. Trump also faces a trial in Florida over his handling of classified material and in Georgia in an election case, although appeals and delays may carry them beyond the election. There’s also the coming Stormy Daniels case on the possible falsification of business records in New York, which is generally not seen as rising to the same level as the other cases.And let’s not forget the likely Supreme Court case about whether he’s disqualified to be president under the 14th Amendment.All of this is extraordinary to contemplate. Calling this simply “something to watch” is gross understatement. But that’s our politics nowadays.The new swing voteIf you’ve been following elections long enough, the term “swing voter” might conjure up images of soccer moms, security moms, Reagan Democrats, the white working class and countless other archetypes of the mostly white suburban voters who analysts said decided American elections over the last half century.But as 2024 begins, the voters poised to decide the election look very, very different from the swing voters of lore. They’re disproportionately young, Black and Hispanic.Whether these voters return to Mr. Biden is one of the biggest questions of the cycle, not only because it might decide the election but also because there’s a chance it could shape the trajectory of American politics for decades.As we’ve written countless times, there will be many opportunities over the next year for Mr. Biden to lure back these traditionally Democratic but disaffected voters. In the end, he might well approach or match his support from last time. If he does, perhaps all the debate over it will seem misplaced.But whatever the outcome, the reality of so many young, Black and Hispanic persuadable voters might powerfully shape the incentives facing the candidates and perhaps even the overall course of the race. For the first time, there’s a straightforward case that Democrats and Republicans alike have an incentive to focus more on Black, Hispanic and young voters than on white working-class voters. This might not yield any drastic changes in strategy, policy or messaging. But it would be surprising if it yielded no change at all.Eight years ago, Mr. Trump was kicking Univision out of news conferences. Now, he’s giving Univision exclusive interviews. This is just one small, early anecdote well before the campaign gets underway. The examples may be much more striking by Election Day.The third party?There’s another place that disaffected young, Black and Hispanic voters might go: a third-party candidate, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Mr. Kennedy doesn’t loom over the 2024 race quite the way Mr. Trump’s trials do. We don’t even know if Mr. Kennedy will successfully gain access to the ballot. But it’s another obvious X-factor that we can see coming, even if we don’t know how it might affect the race.The early polling — which shows Mr. Kennedy in the teens — seems plausible at this early stage. Around 20 percent of voters nationwide have unfavorable views of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, and Mr. Kennedy has a brand name that past minor candidates like Gary Johnson, a libertarian in 2016, could never have dreamed of.Historically, most independent candidates fizzle. Mr. Johnson saw his support peak near 10 percent in July 2016, only to win 3.3 percent in November. Mr. Kennedy might fade for similar reasons, especially with the stakes of a Biden-Trump matchup seeming so large. On the other hand, Mr. Johnson was no Kennedy.Does another year help or hurt Biden?In many ways, the outlook for Mr. Biden in 2024 ought to be bright. The economy seems as if it’s finally about to land softly. His opponent is set to go on trial. And the voters he needs — young, Black and Hispanic — are the kinds of voters who Democrats would usually think are easiest to win back to their side.All this might ultimately propel Mr. Biden to re-election. Many incumbent presidents have gone on to win under fairly similar circumstances, with the help of a polarizing campaign and a growing economy.But there’s a catch: Some of these favorable winds have been at Mr. Biden’s back for most of the last year, and he appears weaker than ever.Despite an improving economy, Mr. Biden’s approval rating stands at just 39 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. That’s a net eight points lower than it was a year ago. It’s also worse than any previous president on the last New Year’s Day before re-election. Satisfaction with the country is about as low as it was in 1980, 1992, 2008 and 2020 — years when the president’s party was defeated.One possibility, of course, is that it’s just a matter of time. The economic news has only turned unequivocally positive over the last few weeks or months. Consumer confidence is still below average, but it appears to be improving. That might start to help Mr. Biden’s ratings. If you squint at the numbers, you could argue it has already begun to do so: His approval rating is up about 1.5 points over the last three weeks.Unlike most presidents seeking re-election, Mr. Biden has also been hobbled by persistent questions about whether he should be the party nominee. Democrats have spent more time ruminating about his age than defending his record. His party will presumably put its doubts to the side and rally behind him once he secures the nomination over the summer. Maybe that’s when he’ll finally rejuvenate his support.But the other possibility is that time is not on his side. It might even be part of the problem.The president gets older every day. To the extent his age, stumbles and stutters explain why voters lack confidence in his leadership and the direction of the country, there’s not much reason to expect it to get better. It might get worse. More

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      Will the Economy Help or Hurt Biden ’24? Krugman and Coy Dig Into Data.

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      Peter Coy: Paul, I think the economy is going to be a huge problem for President Biden in 2024. Voters are unhappy about the state of the economy, even though by most measures it’s doing great. Imagine how much unhappier they’ll be if things get worse heading into the election — which I, for one, think is quite likely to be the case.Paul Krugman: I’m not sure about the politics. We can get into that later. But first, can we acknowledge just how good the current state of the economy is?Peter: Absolutely. Unemployment is close to its lowest point since the 1960s and inflation has come way down. That’s the big story of 2023. But 2024 is a whole ’nother thing. I think there will be two big stories in 2024. One, whether the good news continues, and two, how voters will react to whatever the economy looks like around election time.Paul: Right now many analysts, including some who were very pessimistic about inflation last year, are declaring that the soft landing has arrived. Over the past six months the core personal consumption expenditures deflator — a mouthful, but that’s what the Federal Reserve targets — rose at an annual rate of 1.9 percent, slightly below the Fed’s 2 percent target. Unemployment is 3.7 percent. The eagle has landed.Peter: I question whether we’ve stuck the soft landing. I do agree that right at this moment things look really good. While everyone talks about the cost of living going up, pay is up lately, too. Lael Brainard, Biden’s national economic adviser, points out that inflation-adjusted wages for production and nonsupervisory workers are higher now than they were before the Covid pandemic.So let’s talk about why voters aren’t feeling it. Is it just because Biden is a bad salesman?Paul: Lots of us have been worrying about the disconnect between good numbers and bad vibes. I may have been one of the first people to more or less sound the alarm that something strange was happening — in January 2022! But we’re all more or less making this up as we go along.The most informative stuff I’ve seen recently is from Briefing Book, a blog run by former White House staffers. They’ve tried to put numbers to two effects that may be dragging consumer sentiment down.One effect is partisanship. People in both parties tend to be more negative when the other party controls the presidency, but the Briefing Book folks find that the effect is much stronger for Republicans. So part of the reason consumer sentiment is poor is that Republicans talk as if we’re in a depression when a Democrat is president, never mind reality.Peter: That is so true. And I think the effect is even stronger now than it used to be because we’re more polarized.Paul: The other effect affecting consumer sentiment is that while economists tend to focus on relatively recent inflation, people tend to compare prices with what they were some time in the past. The Briefing Book estimates suggest that it takes something like two years or more for lower inflation to show up in improved consumer sentiment.This is one reason the economy may be better for Democrats than many think. If inflation really has been defeated, many people haven’t noticed it yet — but they may think differently a little over 10 months from now, even if the fundamentals are no better than they are currently.I might add that the latest numbers on consumer sentiment from several surveys have shown surprising improvement. Not enough to eliminate the gap between the sentiment and what you might have expected from the macroeconomic numbers, but some movement in a positive direction.Peter: That makes sense. Ten months from now, people may finally be getting over the trauma of high inflation. On the other hand, and I admit I’m not an economist, I’m still worried we could have a recession in 2024. Manufacturing is soft. The big interest rate increases by the Fed since March 2022 are hitting the economy with a lag. The extra savings from the pandemic have been depleted. The day after Christmas, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said the share of Americans in financial distress over credit cards and auto loans is back to where it was in the depths of the recession of 2007-9.Plus, I’d say the labor market is weaker than it looked from the November jobs report. (For example, temp-agency employment shrank, which is an early warning of weak demand for labor.)Also, small business confidence remains weak.Paul: Glad you brought up small business confidence — I wrote about that the other week. “Hard” indicators like hiring plans are pretty strong. “Soft” indicators like what businesses say about future conditions are terrible. So small businesses are in effect saying, “I’m doing OK, and expanding, but the economy is terrible” — just like consumers!I’m not at all sure when the Fed will start cutting, although it’s almost certain that it eventually will, but markets are already effectively pricing in substantial cuts — and that’s what matters for the real economy. As I write this, the 10-year real interest rate is 1.69 percent, down from 2.46 percent around six weeks prior. Still high compared with prepandemic levels, but financial conditions have loosened a lot.Could there be a recession already baked in? Sure. But I’m less convinced than I was even a month ago.Peter: The big drop in interest rates can be read two ways. The positive spin is that it’ll be good for economic growth, eventually. That’s how the stock market is interpreting it. The negative spin is that the bond market is expecting a slowdown next year that will pull rates down. Also, what if the economy slows down a lot but the Fed doesn’t want to cut rates sharply because Fed officials are afraid of being accused by Donald Trump of trying to help Biden?Paul: I guess I think better of the Fed than that. And always worth remembering that the interest rates that matter for the economy tend to be driven by expectations of future Fed policy: The Fed hasn’t cut yet, but mortgage rates are already down substantially.Peter: Yes.Paul: OK, about the election. The big mystery is why people are so down on the economy despite what look like very good numbers. At least part of that is that people don’t look at short-term inflation, but at prices compared with what they used to be some time ago — but people’s memories don’t stretch back indefinitely. As I said, the guys at Briefing Book estimate that the most recent year’s inflation rate is only about half of what consumers look at, with a lot of weight on earlier inflation. But here’s the thing: Inflation has come way down, and this will gradually filter into long-term averages. Right now the average inflation rate over the past 2 years was 5 percent, still very high; but if future inflation runs at the 2.4 percent the Fed is now projecting, which I think is a bit high, by next November the two-year average will be down to 2.7 percent. So if the economy stays where it is now, consumers will probably start to feel better about inflation.Peter: Except that perceptions of inflation are filtered through politics. Food and gasoline are more expensive for Trump supporters than Biden supporters, if you believe what people tell pollsters. That’s not going to change between now and November.The Obama-Biden ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008 because voters blamed Republicans for the 2007-9 recession. Obama-Biden had a narrower win in 2012 against Romney-Ryan, and I think one factor was the so-called jobless recovery from that same recession. That’s why Biden is supersensitive about who gets credit and blame for turns in the economy.For the record, Trump might be president right now if it hadn’t been for the Covid pandemic, which sent the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent in April 2020. The economy was doing quite well before that happened. A lot of Republicans are nostalgic for Trumponomics, although I think the economy prospered more in spite of him than because of him. Thoughts?Paul: Most of the time, presidents have far less effect on the economy than people imagine. Big stimulus packages like Barack Obama’s in 2009 and Biden’s in 2021 can matter. But aside from pandemic relief, which was bipartisan, nothing Trump did had more than marginal effects. His 2017 tax cut didn’t have much visible effect on investment; his tariffs probably on net cost a few hundred thousand jobs, but in an economy as big as America’s, nobody noticed.Peter: Just speculating, but I wonder if when people say they trust Trump more than Biden on the economy, they’re feeling vibes more than parsing statistics. You know, “We need a tough guy in the White House!”Paul: People definitely aren’t parsing statistics. Only pathetic nerds like us do that. And while Trump wasn’t actually a tough economic leader, he literally did play one on TV.But we don’t really know if that matters, or whether people are still reacting to the shock of inflation and high interest rates, which they hadn’t seen in a long time. Again, the best case for Biden pulling this out is that voters get over that shock, with both inflation and interest rates rapidly declining.Oh, and falling interest rates mean higher bond prices, and often translate into higher stock prices, too — which has also been happening lately.Peter: True, Paul. But cold comfort for people who don’t own stocks and bonds. Or who do own stocks and bonds in their retirement plans but don’t think of themselves as part of the capitalist class. To win in November, Biden and his team are going to need to be perceived as doing something for the working class and the middle class. That’s why you see the White House talking about eliminating junk fees and capping insulin prices.Paul: For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people judge the economy in part by the stock market, even if they don’t have a personal stake. That’s why Trump boasted about it so much, and has lately been trying to say that Biden’s strong stock market is somehow a bad thing.Finally, there are some indications that Democrats in particular are feeling better about the Biden economy. The Michigan survey tracks sentiment by partisanship. The numbers are noisy, but over the past few months Democratic sentiment has been slightly more positive than it was in the months just before the pandemic struck.Peter: Paul, how important do you think the economy will be to voters compared to other issues, such as Trump’s fitness for office, Biden’s age, abortion access, et cetera? I mean, if it’s not important, why are we even having this conversation?Paul: The economy surely matters less than it did when Republicans and Democrats lived in more or less the same intellectual universe — everyone agreed that the economy was bad in 1980 or 2008; now, Dems are fairly positive while Republicans claim to believe that we’re in a severe downturn. But there are still voters on the margin, and weak Democratic supporters who will turn out if they have a sense that things are improving.Peter: Democratic strategists think the election might come down to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, assuming that Biden holds Michigan and New Hampshire and loses Arizona and Georgia. Any thoughts about the economic outlook for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?Paul: No strong sense about either state. But one little-noticed fact about the current economy is how uniform conditions are. In 2008, so-called sand states that had big housing bubbles were doing much worse than states that didn’t; now unemployment is low almost everywhere.Of course, all political bets are off if we have a recession. But there’s a reasonable case that the economy will be much less of a drag on Democrats by November, as the reality of a soft landing sinks in.Oh, and my subjective sense is that for whatever reason, media coverage of the economy has turned much more positive lately. I have to think this matters, otherwise, what are we even doing? And until recently, media reports tended to emphasize the downsides — “Great jobs numbers, and here’s why that’s bad for Biden” has become a sort of running joke among people I follow. These days, however, we’re starting to see reports acknowledging that we’ve had an almost miraculous combination of strong employment and falling inflation.Peter: Paul, what economic indicators will you be paying the most attention to in the next few months with regard to the election? I’ll nominate inflation and unemployment, although those are kind of obvious.Paul: Unemployment, for sure. On inflation, I’ll be watching longer-term measures: Will inflation be low enough to bring down two- or three-year averages? And especially highly visible stuff, like groceries. Thanksgiving dinner was actually cheaper in 2023 than in 2022. Will grocery prices be subdued enough to reduce the amount of complaining?Oh, and I’ll be looking at consumer sentiment, which as we’ve seen can be pretty disconnected from the economy but will matter for the election.Peter: Happy New Year!Source photographs by Caroline Purser and Anagramm/Getty ImagesThe 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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      What Are Young Voters Looking For?

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      Want to ruin a Democratic strategist’s New Year? Bring up President Biden’s popularity problem with younger voters.The strategist may start furiously tap-dancing about this outreach plan or that policy achievement. But she has seen the polling trend line. She has heard the focus groups. She knows that millennials and Gen Z-ers are not feeling the Biden love. Many are threatening to sit out next year’s election. Some are flirting with supporting Donald Trump — or a third-party rando.And even if only a few of them follow through, the president and his party could be in big trouble. Americans younger than 45 have saved the Democrats from disaster in multiple recent elections. Their creeping alienation has the blue team rattled and raging: For the love of God, what will it take to lock in these voters?!This is not a new question. The political world, especially the Democratic Party, has long been in search of the secret formula for wooing younger voters to the polls. Strategists noodle over which issues members of this cohort care about, which candidates they connect with, how best to reach them. In 1994, Bill Clinton ventured onto MTV and overshared about his underwear in an effort to impress the young ’uns. Now that is desperation.Spoiler: There is no secret formula. Or rather, there is a whole host of formulas with scores of constantly shifting variables. Millennials and Gen Z-ers don’t just expect different things from candidates than do older voters; they approach the entire concept of voting differently, generally in ways that make them harder to persuade and mobilize.The people who obsess about this issue for a living can overwhelm you with data and analysis, competing priorities and suggestions. Even the bits they think they have figured out can abruptly shift. (Just when some thought they had a solid grip on this election, along came the war in Gaza.) All that, of course, is on top of the concrete systemic challenges of getting younger people registered for, informed about and comfortable with voting in general.As a close friend who spent years neck deep in the political weeds of cultivating younger voters observed, “The big theme is that there is no theme.”And yet there are a few recurring subthemes that bubble up when you talk with the professionals and with the younger voters themselves. These insights won’t crack the turnout code. Or necessarily save Mr. Biden’s presidency. But they do shed light on some of the more amorphous reasons younger Americans are so hard to turn out — and can maybe even point a way forward.“The No. 1 rule when you’re talking about young people: They may be progressive, but they are not Democrats,” warned Joshua Ulibarri, a partner with the Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. “They don’t turn out for parties.”Younger Americans may vote more Democratic than their elders, but that does not mean they want to join the team. And while their politics are generally to the left of the party’s center of gravity, this isn’t merely a matter of ideology.“Parties are institutions, and Gen Z-ers aren’t really into institutions,” said Morley Winograd, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California. The research on Gen Z-ers indicates they have little trust in most major U.S. institutions, and it’s hard to get more establishment or institutional than a political party. Certainly among the Gen Z-ers I know (I have kids, and they have friends), maintaining their independence from and skepticism of a compromised political establishment they feel is not working for them is a point of pride.Today’s hyperpartisan system, with its Manichaean mentality, can make parties even more unappealing for younger voters, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, whose specialty is younger voters. “They are not willing to take that responsibility to have to defend one party and create an enemy of the other.”And definitely don’t expect them to be moved by appeals to help a party take control of Congress or even the White House, Mr. Ulibarri said.Younger voters also are less inclined to turn out simply because they like a candidate’s personality. Now and then, one comes along who inspires them (think Barack Obama) or, alternatively, outrages them enough to make them turn out in protest (think Donald Trump). But more often they are driven by issues that speak to their lives, their core values or, ideally, both.The most outstanding current example of this is the issue of abortion rights, which has emerged as a red-hot electoral force since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Younger voters express anxiety about the practical repercussions of this decision and fury at the government intrusion into people’s personal lives. The issue has a clarity, immediacy and tangibility that appeal to younger voters. This is especially true when it appears as a stand-alone ballot initiative.Younger voters’ focus on issues and values rather than candidates and parties raises the question of whether ballot initiatives could be a way to engage them and propel them to the polls. Supporting such measures is more straightforward than embracing candidates. Plus, they have the advantage of not being (or at least not seeming) as entangled with a particular party. They have more of a direct-democracy vibe. (Please refer to: Institutions suck.) How much more satisfying is it to vote for an issue you are passionate about than for some flawed politician with a fake smile making promises you’re pretty sure he won’t keep?Supporting a candidate, any candidate, means accepting that person’s foibles and flaws along with the good parts. It requires balancing multiple concerns and priorities. And the longer the candidate’s record in public office, the more variables there are to consider. Just take the example currently giving the Biden campaign the worst nightmares: For progressives, at what point does Mr. Biden’s handling of Gaza outweigh his embrace of, say, combating climate change or protecting abortion access or supporting labor unions? What if the only alternative is another Trump term?For younger voters who reject the team mentality of party voting, these equations get complicated and frustrating — often frustrating enough to just skip voting altogether. When researchers ask younger people why they don’t vote, one of the top responses, if not the top one, is: I didn’t feel I knew enough about the candidates.Part of younger voters’ disenchantment may be wrapped up in the nature of progressivism. Younger voters tend to be more progressive than older ones, and progressives, by definition, want government to do more, change more, make more progress. You often hear variations on: Sure, the president did ABC, but what we really need is DEFGHIJXYZ. Or: This climate initiative/health care plan/caregiving investment/pick your policy achievement doesn’t go nearly far enough.This is not to suggest that Mr. Biden hasn’t racked up some notable missteps (Afghanistan!) and failed promises (the student debt mess). But expectations are an inextricable factor. Harvard’s Theda Skocpol refers to “the presidential illusion” among those on the political left, the longstanding idea that the president is a sort of political Svengali and that federal leadership can counter conservatism in states and localities. When reality sets in, these supporters are not shy about expressing their disappointment.Of course, most voting in America calls for choosing between candidates, in all their messy imperfection. Younger voters are less likely than older ones to have resigned themselves to this, to have curbed their expectations and idealism. So where does all this leave campaigns and, trickier still, parties desperate to win over younger voters?Younger voters need to be reminded of the concrete changes their votes can effect. Because of the 2020 election, the Biden administration has pushed through a major investment in fighting climate change; billions of dollars for infrastructure are flowing into communities, including rural, economically strapped areas; the first African American woman was appointed to the Supreme Court; many judges from notably diverse professional backgrounds have been placed on the lower courts, and so on.The dark corollary to this is detailing the explicit damage that can be done if young people opt out, an especially pressing threat with Mr. Trump on the vengeance trail. Separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, stacking the Supreme Court with abortion-hostile justices, effectively declaring war on science — these were the fruits of the Trump administration. And that’s before you get to his persistent assault on democracy. Think of it all as his practice run, then imagine where another four years could take us.The key is figuring out and effectively communicating the right balance of positive and negative partisanship for the moment, said Mr. Della Volpe, stressing, “The recipe for 2020 will not be the same as 2024.”Another basic step: Candidates need to make clear that they understand and share younger voters’ values, even if they have different plans for working toward realizing their goals. Strategists point to the shrewd decision by Team Biden, after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 primary contest, to form working groups with Mr. Sanders’s team, stressing their shared values. Connecting elections to something that resonates with younger voters — that is meaningful to their lives — is vital, said Abby Kiesa, the deputy director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a research group at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life that focuses on youth civic engagement. Issue groups can play a useful role in this, she said.Most broadly, everyone from interest groups to parties to candidates needs to push the message that a democratically elected government can still achieve big things. This goes beyond any specific bill or appointee. Younger Americans aren’t convinced that government can make meaningful progress. Some days it is hard to blame them. But this cynicism has terrible implications for democracy, and all of us would do well to fight it.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Biden Lies Low in St. Croix During Holiday Week

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      The president is enjoying a working vacation, a White House official said. Residents hope to bring attention to the Virgin Islands’ economic troubles.As wars rage in Gaza and Ukraine, migrants stream illegally into the United States in record numbers and an intense 2024 campaign season looms, President Biden is lying low.Here on tropical St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Mr. Biden; the first lady, Jill Biden; and their granddaughter Natalie are spending New Year’s week in a secluded oceanfront villa overlooking the turquoise Caribbean, the president is staying mostly out of the spotlight.On Saturday, Mr. Biden made his first public appearance, venturing out to attend mass at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Christiansted, the largest town in St. Croix. He and Dr. Biden later taped an interview with Ryan Seacrest, due to air on New Year’s Eve as part of ABC’s “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest.” In the evening, the president and first lady dined at Too Chez, one of the island’s top restaurants, and he afterward revealed his New Year’s resolution.“To come back next year,” Mr. Biden said.Republicans have roundly criticized Mr. Biden’s island getaway, which began just a day after he returned to the White House from spending Christmas with family at Camp David.Several lawmakers accused the president of failing to address the migrant surge along the southern U.S. border by taking time away. And on Thursday, when the White House announced in the morning that there would be no public events for Mr. Biden that day as temperatures hovered in the 80s on St. Croix, an arm of the Republican National Committee pounced.“Illegal immigrants are pouring across the open southern border by the tens of thousands every day,” the group RNC Research wrote on the social media site X, adding that Mr. Biden, “on his second vacation in a week — called it a day before noon.”President Biden attended mass on Saturday at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Christiansted, the largest town in St. Croix.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesJulian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, said that presidential vacations are virtually always denounced by the opposing party.But even a commander in chief needs to unwind sometimes, Mr. Zelizer noted, and, in this day and age, no president is ever truly unplugged.“It’s not as if the president takes a vacation like many of us and just sits around on the beach or something,” he said. “They go with their full presidential apparatus and they’re surrounded by their advisers.”A White House official described Mr. Biden’s trip as a working vacation. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, accompanied the president to St. Croix and has briefed him multiple times since arriving, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s schedule.On Friday, Mr. Biden condemned Russia for launching what he called the largest aerial assault on Ukraine since the start of the war, and he issued a statement warning that President Vladimir V. Putin “must be stopped.” Asked Saturday if he planned to speak with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine after Russia’s latest attacks, Mr. Biden replied, “I speak to him regularly.”He also called on Congress on Friday to approve national security funding for Ukraine and Israel, which has been tied to negotiations over border and immigration policies, and White House officials said the president was closely monitoring those talks, too.Many St. Croix residents said that, even though Mr. Biden was staying largely out of the public eye this year, they appreciated that his visits have helped highlight the history of the island, which was once home to the founding father Alexander Hamilton. They described it as a quirky, warmhearted island where stray cats are well fed at five-star resorts. In Lin Manuel-Miranda’s musical “Hamilton,” St. Croix features only as the “forgotten spot in the Caribbean,” from which a young Hamilton pulled himself out of poverty.Mr. Biden’s visit is his second to St. Croix as president, but the Bidens have traveled there more than a dozen times over the years.“He loves St. Croix, and we really love having him here,” said Leonore Gillette, a retired schoolteacher who has lived on the island for 45 years.“We certainly appreciate the infusion of activity,” said Nadia Bougouneau, another longtime resident who works at the Buccaneer, a resort that was filled to capacity with Secret Service agents and members of the media traveling with Mr. Biden. The president played on the 18-hole golf course at the resort last year with his grandson Hunter.Several people, including the governor of the Virgin Islands, fondly recalled Mr. Biden’s visits before he was president — and the Secret Service was not blocking miles of roads for security. Back then, locals and tourists said they would run into him biking, jogging or picking up coffee at Ziggy’s, an island market and gas station on the east end.“We feel like he’s a Virgin Islander,” Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said.“Before he was president, I would be downtown at night and see him in a restaurant, and I’d be sitting with people and say, ‘That’s Joe Biden.’ And people would say, ‘No way,’” he recalled.These days, the governor said, Mr. Biden’s visit gave him a chance to highlight some of the issues facing the U.S. Virgin Islands, which is heavily dependent on tourism and still working to recover from the hurricanes Irma and Maria.Mr. Bryan called the islands’ most serious challenge a requirement to match 10 percent of $15 billion in federal hurricane reconstruction aid. He said the money, and the ability of the Virgin Islands to repair its water systems and other major projects, could be jeopardized because the government cannot afford the approximately $1.5 billion match. The Virgin Islands, home to about 87,000 people, has an annual budget of $1.2 billion.Still, Mr. Bryan said, he does not view Mr. Biden’s New Year’s visit as the best time to make his case to the president.President Biden’s motorcade driving through Christiansted. The U.S. Virgin Islands are still working to recover from the hurricanes Irma and Maria.Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times“To be honest, I preferred it when he wasn’t president because he spent more time with me,” he joked, adding that this year, “I really try to stay away from him so he can get a chance to rest, because he’s going to need it to go into this election.”Mr. Biden is entering 2024 with a persistently low job approval rating of 39 percent, according to December polling from Gallup, the worst of any modern-day president seeking re-election. Mr. Zelizer said that makes the policy challenges Mr. Biden faces in the Middle East and Ukraine — and with Congress — all the more difficult.“All of this is going to be waiting for him when he comes back to Washington, and he knows it,” Mr. Zelizer said. He added, “It’s going to be a tough year.” More

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      Biden’s Christian ‘Persecution’? We Assess Trump’s Recent Claims.

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of criminalizing Christians, and Catholics in particular, for their faith. Here are the facts.Former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly tried to appeal to Christian voters in recent weeks by accusing the Biden administration of criminalizing Americans for their faith.On multiple occasions this month, Mr. Trump has claimed that President Biden has “persecuted” Catholics in particular. Mr. Biden himself is Catholic.“I don’t know what it is with Catholics,” Mr. Trump said during a rally in Coralville, Iowa. “They are going violently and viciously after Catholics.”Mr. Trump repeated similar comments days later at another rally, in Waterloo, and in a video posted before Christmas he said that “Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before.”The message fits into a larger theme for Mr. Trump, who — facing criminal charges in relation to his bid to say in office after losing the 2020 election and criticism for praising strongmen — has tried to paint Mr. Biden and Democrats as being the real threat to democracy.Here’s a closer look at his claims.WHAT WAS SAID“Under Crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before. Catholics in particular are being targeted and evangelicals are surely on the watchlist as well.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthFalse. Experts say they are unaware of any data to support the idea that Catholics in the United States are being persecuted by the government for their faith — let alone at record levels.“In terms of the evidence, I find it to be pretty hard to kind of support the idea that there’s a concerted, marked increase in a particular kind of Christian targeting,” said Jason Bruner, a religious studies professor at Arizona State University and historian who studies Christian persecution.Instead, Mr. Bruner said, it’s most likely that Mr. Trump is extrapolating from cases — say, churches that faced penalties for congregating during the Covid pandemic or anti-abortion activists who have been charged with crimes — to suggest a systemic issue.“There’s a long history of discrimination against Catholics in the United States, from the framing way through the 1970s,” said Frank Ravitch, a professor of law and religion at Michigan State University. “And if anything, it’s probably better now in terms of nondiscrimination than it ever, probably, ever has been.”Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Ravitch said, show “such an incredible blindness to the history of anti-Catholicism in the U.S.”Advocates who track Christians fleeing persecution around the world note that the Biden administration has been gradually increasing the number of refugees admitted into the United States after the number dropped precipitously during the Trump era. At the end of fiscal year 2023, the country recorded about 31,000 Christian refugee arrivals — about half of all refugees and the highest number recorded since fiscal year 2016. (Not all were necessarily fleeing persecution on religious grounds.)“We’re encouraged by that trajectory,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization that has pushed the Biden administration to establish policies welcoming those facing faith-based discrimination.The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for the sources behind his claims.WHAT WAS SAID“Over the past three years, the Biden administration has sent SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthThis is misleading. The Justice Department has initiated an increasing number of criminal prosecutions under a law that makes it a violation to interfere with reproductive health care by blocking entrances, using threats or damaging property. In at least one case, a defendant’s family claimed he was arrested by a “SWAT” team, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that was not the case.The law is called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act and was enacted in 1994. Federal prosecutors have used it to initiate 24 criminal cases, involving 55 defendants, since January 2021, according to the Justice Department.While a majority of those cases have involved acts at facilities that provided abortion services, prosecutors have also used it to charge several individuals who supported abortion access and targeted Florida centers that offered pregnancy counseling and abortion alternatives.Moreover, Mr. Trump omits that such arrests are not for “pro-life” activism but for specific actions, including violence, that prosecutors argue were attempts at blocking access to or interfering with reproductive health care services.In one case, federal attorneys charged a man for allegedly using a slingshot to fire metal ball bearings at a Chicago-area Planned Parenthood clinic. In another, prosecutors said that a New York man used locks and glue to prevent the opening of a clinic’s gate. And three men were accused of firebombing a clinic in California; one recently pleaded guilty.Mr. Trump’s claims about the use of “SWAT teams” may be a reference to the 2022 arrest of a Catholic activist in Pennsylvania. The defendant, Mark Houck, was charged with shoving a volunteer at a Planned Parenthood center in Philadelphia in 2021. Mr. Houck’s defense maintained that he was responding to abusive comments made toward his 12-year-old son by the volunteer. He was acquitted earlier this year.Republican lawmakers have criticized Mr. Houck’s arrest by armed agents, but the F.B.I. has rejected the claim that it used a SWAT team and said its tactics were consistent with standard practices.“There are inaccurate claims being made regarding the arrest of Mark Houck,” the F.B.I. said in a statement. “No SWAT team or SWAT operators were involved. F.B.I. agents knocked on Mr. Houck’s front door, identified themselves as F.B.I. agents and asked him to exit the residence. He did so and was taken into custody without incident pursuant to an indictment.”Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, when asked about the circumstances of Mr. Houck’s arrest, has said such decisions are made at the local level, “by the career agents on the ground, who have the closest visibility to the circumstances.”WHAT WAS SAID“The F.B.I. has been caught profiling devout Catholics as possible domestic terrorists and planning to send undercover spies into Catholic churches, just like in the old days of the Soviet Union.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthThis needs context. Mr. Trump was likely referring to a leaked January memo prepared by the F.B.I.’s field office in Richmond, Va., that warned of the potential for extremism for adherents of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. Republicans have criticized the memo for months.But the memo was withdrawn and the nation’s top law enforcement officials have repeatedly denounced it.The memo warned of potential threats ahead of the 2024 election and suggested gathering information and developing sources within churches to help identify suspicious activity. It also distinguished between those radicalized and not radicalized, saying “radical-traditionalist Catholics” were a small minority.Some researchers believe there is some merit to those concerns, even if the memo was flawed. Mr. Ravitch, the Michigan State University professor, said he believed agents erred in focusing on Catholicism. “What they’re really talking about is an extremely radical brand of Christian nationals,” he said, emphasizing that they are a small subset and not representative of the Roman Catholic Church or evangelicals.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said during a September congressional hearing that he was “appalled” by the memo and that “Catholics are not extremists.” He called suggestions that the government was targeting Americans based on their faith “outrageous,” referencing the fact that his own family fled Europe to escape antisemitism before the Holocaust.And earlier this month during a Senate hearing, Mr. Wray said of the document: “That particular intelligence product is something that, as soon I saw it, I was aghast. I had it withdrawn.”In a statement this week, the F.B.I. reiterated, “Any characterization that the F.B.I. is targeting Catholics is false.”Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

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      The U.S. Economy, the Southern Border, Oct. 7: How 13 Biden and Trump Voters Saw 2023

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      What word would you use to describe the American economy as 2023 ends? What word would youuse to describe the American economy as 2023 ends? “Optimistic.” Chris, 59, Mich., Biden 2020 voter “Upward.” Deborah, 51, Tenn., Biden 2020 voter “Uncertain.” Joe, 37, Ark., Trump 2020 voter Something strange happened during our recent Times Opinion focus […] More

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      The Best Sentences of 2023

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      Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She also assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More