Biden, Joseph R Jr

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Condemns Trump In Re-Election Speech: ‘Your Freedom Is on the Ballot’

      by

      President Biden on Friday delivered a ferocious condemnation of Donald J. Trump, his likely 2024 opponent, warning in searing language that the former president had directed an insurrection and would aim to undo the nation’s bedrock democracy if he returned to power.On the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Biden framed the coming election as a choice between a candidate devoted to upholding America’s centuries-old ideals and a chaos agent willing to discard them for his personal benefit.“There’s no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” Mr. Biden warned in a speech at a community college not far from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War. Exhorting supporters to prepare to vote this fall, he said: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”In an intensely personal address that at one point nearly led Mr. Biden to curse Mr. Trump by name, the president compared his rival to foreign autocrats who rule by fiat and lies. He said Mr. Trump had failed the basic test of American leaders, to trust the people to choose their elected officials and abide by their decisions.“We must be clear,” Mr. Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”The harshness of Mr. Biden’s attack on his rival illustrated both what his campaign believes to be the stakes of the 2024 election and his perilous political standing. Confronted with low approval ratings, bad head-to-head polling against Mr. Trump, worries about his age and lingering unease with the economy, Mr. Biden is turning increasingly to the figure who has proved to be Democrats’ single best motivator.Mr. Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Iowa soon after Mr. Biden’s appearance, quickly lashed back, calling the president’s comments “pathetic fearmongering” and accusing him of “abusing George Washington’s legacy.”Mr. Biden’s remarks carried echoes of the 2020 campaign, when he presented himself as the caretaker of “the soul of America” against a Trump presidency that he and Democratic supporters argued was on the verge of causing permanent damage to the country.The 31-minute speech was Mr. Biden’s first public campaign event since he announced in April that he would seek re-election and was, in tone and content, arguably his most forceful public denunciation of Mr. Trump since the two men became political rivals in 2019.Mr. Biden’s appearance, meant as a kickoff to help define the 2024 campaign, was an early effort to revive the politically sprawling anti-Trump coalition that propelled Democrats to key victories in recent elections. Mr. Biden’s task now is to persuade those voters to view the 2024 contest as the same kind of national emergency that they sensed in 2018, 2020 and 2022.President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, participated in a wreath ceremony at the Valley Forge National Arch before his speech on Friday. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe began with an extensive recounting of Mr. Trump’s actions before, during and after the Jan. 6 attack. The country, Mr. Biden said, cannot afford to allow Mr. Trump and his supporters to present a whitewashed version of that day and spread falsehoods about the violent outcome of their effort to undo the 2020 election results. Upholding the nation’s democracy, Mr. Biden said, is “the central cause of my presidency.”Mr. Biden said that, by contrast, Mr. Trump “refuses to denounce political violence,” asserting, “You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.”Mr. Trump and his allies have spent the three years since the Capitol riot denying and deflecting his responsibility, downplaying the seriousness of the bloodshed and going so far as to suggest it was all a plot by Mr. Biden’s allies deep within the federal government to make Mr. Trump look bad.“Trump is trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election,” Mr. Biden said. “It was on television. We saw it with our own eyes.”Mr. Biden made no mention of the 91 felony charges the former president faces in four jurisdictions, sticking to a vow to steer clear of his rival’s legal problems and focusing squarely on Mr. Trump’s actions rather than any potential criminal consequences for them.“Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the 2020 election. The legal path took him back to the truth, that I won the election and he was a loser,” Mr. Biden said. “He had one act left, one desperate act available to him, the violence of Jan. 6.”For a president who has faced intense scrutiny over his vigor in public appearances, the speech was a deftly delivered, focused argument about this year’s stakes. It was Mr. Biden’s latest attempt to build his political identity around the ideas of restoring national unity and upholding fairness, democracy and collective patriotism.He has come back to those themes many times, during his brief push for voting rights legislation in early 2022, then as the midterm elections approached and most recently in September, during a speech in Arizona honoring former Senator John McCain.On Friday, Mr. Biden sought to frame Mr. Trump as the leader of a cult of personality, and his Republican allies as sycophants. The president mentioned the recent $148 million judgment against Rudolph W. Giuliani for his lies about Georgia election workers, as well as the $787.5 million that Fox News was ordered to pay to settle a defamation case about its role in spreading election lies.Mr. Biden lamented that Fox News hosts and Republican officials who condemned Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 behavior in the moment had since changed their tune and repeated his falsehoods.“Politics, fear and money all intervened, and now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Jan. 6 have abandoned democracy,” Mr. Biden said.But what remains unclear is how much Mr. Biden’s democracy pitch will resonate with voters who remain nervous about an improving economy, and wary of re-electing an 81-year-old who is already the oldest president in U.S. history.Even some who have expressed deep fears about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian impulses are skeptical that the subject will be a winning message in 2024.“As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah wrote in a text message to a New York Times reporter. “Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another. Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”Mr. Biden and his campaign have often sought to remind voters of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesDemocrats have found that while ideas of democracy can motivate the party’s most engaged voters, it can be more of a struggle to connect lofty ideals to voters who are more focused on economic issues like high prices and interest rates. In the 2022 midterm elections, months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, far more Democratic candidates made abortion rights central to their messaging as opposed to threats to democracy.Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who convened planning sessions in 2020 to prepare for ways the Trump administration could disrupt that year’s election, said she was worried that “we’re in the nothing-matters phase of American politics.” Mr. Trump’s supporters, she lamented, become only more loyal each time he does something that in a previous era would have been instantly disqualifying.“It’s not clear to me that anything Biden does could fundamentally change any of that,” Ms. Brooks said. “So I’m actually quite depressed.”The Democratic governor of the state Mr. Biden was visiting, Josh Shapiro, who won office in 2022 against an election denier who chartered buses to Washington on Jan. 6, said before Mr. Biden’s speech that the key for the president and fellow Democrats would be connecting the idea of democracy with bread-and-butter issues like health care and the economy. A return to power by Mr. Trump, he said, would “create chaos” across a spectrum of issues that would affect people.“He brought real chaos to this country, and we should not allow that to come back,” Mr. Shapiro said.Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was more succinct. “I see ’24 as good versus evil,” he said.Mr. Biden threaded his speech with warnings that Mr. Trump and Republicans would threaten not only democracy but also major Democratic priorities — abortion rights, voting rights and economic and environmental justice.Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit dedicated to combating authoritarianism, said he had stressed to Mr. Biden’s aides that the president needed to connect democracy to voters’ personal experiences on other issues, in the same way Mr. Trump repeats to his supporters that prosecutions of him are persecutions of them.“Democracy is not just a way of structuring elections for order in our government,” Mr. Bassin said. “It’s a set of values about the kind of communities we want to live in and the way that we want to live as neighbors.”Mr. Biden warned in his speech that Mr. Trump was not being shy about what he would do in a second term.“Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s not hiding the ball.”Mr. Biden then recounted, in exacting detail, how a Trump campaign rally last year began with a choir of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 singing the national anthem while a video of the damage played on a big screen. Mr. Trump had watched with approval.The scene, Mr. Biden suggested, would be the nation’s fate if Mr. Trump and his allies returned to power.“This is like something out of a fairy tale,” Mr. Biden said. “A bad fairy tale.”Kellen Browning More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Playing for Time, U.K. Leader Sets Up Chance of U.S. Election Overlap

      by

      Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signaled that voters will go to the polls in the fall, around the time that the United States will be in the midst of its own pivotal vote.When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this week that he was not likely to call a general election in Britain before the second half of the year, he was trying to douse fevered speculation that he might go to the voters as early as May. But in doing so, he set up another tantalizing prospect: that Britain and the United States could hold elections within days or weeks of each other this fall.The last time parliamentary and presidential elections coincided was in 1964, when Britain’s Labour Party ousted the long-governing Conservatives in October, and less than a month later, a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, swept aside a challenge from a right-wing Republican insurgent. The parallels to today are not lost on the excitable denizens of Britain’s political class.“It’s the stuff of gossip around London dinner tables already,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington who is now a member of the House of Lords. For all the Côte du Rhône-fueled analysis, Mr. Darroch conceded, “it’s hard to reach any kind of conclusion about what it means.”That doesn’t mean political soothsayers, amateur and professional, aren’t giving it a go. Some argue that a victory by the Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, over President Biden — or even the prospect of one — would be so alarming that it would scare voters in Britain into sticking with Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party, as a bid for predictability and continuity in an uncertain world.A supporter of Donald J. Trump laying out signs on Tuesday before an event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesOthers argue that the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, could win over voters by reminding them of the ideological kinship between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Britain. Mr. Trump praised Mr. Sunak last fall for saying he wanted to water down some of Britain’s ambitious climate goals. “I always knew Sunak was smart,” Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account.Still others pooh-pooh the suggestion that British voters would make decisions at the ballot box based on the political direction of another country, even one as close and influential as the United States. Britain’s election, analysts say, is likely to be decided by domestic concerns like the cost-of-living crisis, home-mortgage rates, immigration and the dilapidated state of the National Health Service.And yet, even the skeptics of any direct effect acknowledge that near-simultaneous elections could cause ripples on both sides of the pond, given how Britain and the United States often seem to operate under the same political weather system. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 is often viewed as a canary in the coal mine for Mr. Trump’s victory the following November.Already, the campaigns in both countries are beginning to echo each other, with fiery debates about immigration; the integrity — or otherwise — of political leaders; and social and cultural quarrels, from racial justice to the rights of transgender people. Those themes will be amplified as they reverberate across the ocean, with the American election forming a supersized backdrop to the British campaign.“The U.S. election will receive a huge amount of attention in the run-up to the U.K. election,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford University. “If the Tories run a culture-war campaign, and people are being fed a diet of wall-to-wall populism because of Trump, that could backfire on them.”Some argue that if the elections coincide, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, could win over voters by reminding them of the similarities between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesProfessor Ansell identified another risk in the political synchronicity: it could magnify the damage of a disinformation campaign waged by a hostile foreign power, such as the efforts by Russian agents in Britain before the Brexit vote, and in the United States before the 2016 presidential election. “It’s a two-for-one,” he said, noting that both countries remain divided and vulnerable to such manipulation.On Thursday, Mr. Starmer appealed to Britons to move past the fury and divisiveness of the Brexit debates, promising “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.” That was reminiscent of Mr. Biden’s call in his 2021 inaugural address to “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.”Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who studied at Oxford and has advised Conservative Party officials, said he warned the Tories not to turn their campaign into a culture war. “It will get you votes, but it will destroy the electorate in the process,” he said he told them, pointing out that a campaign against “woke” issues had not helped Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida dislodge Mr. Trump.Mr. Sunak has vacillated in recent months between a hard-edge and more centrist approach as his party has struggled to get traction with voters. It currently lags Labour by 20 percentage points in most polls. While general elections are frequently held in the spring, Mr. Sunak appears to be playing for time in the hope that his fortunes will improve. That has drawn criticism from Mr. Starmer, who accused him of “squatting” in 10 Downing Street.“I’ve got lots that I want to get on with,” Mr. Sunak told reporters Thursday. He could wait until next January to hold a vote, though analysts say that was unlikely, since campaigning over the Christmas holiday would likely alienate voters and discourage party activists from canvassing door to door.Counting votes in Bath, England, during the U.K.’s last general election in 2019.Ian Walton/ReutersWith summer out for the same reason, Mr. Sunak’s most likely options are October or November (Americans will vote on Nov. 5). There are arguments for choosing either month, including that party conferences are traditionally held in early October.In October 1964, the Conservative government, led by Alec Douglas-Home, narrowly lost to Labour, led by Harold Wilson. Like Mr. Douglas-Home, Mr. Sunak is presiding over a party in power for more than 13 years. The following month, President Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Republican senator from Arizona, who had declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”Sixty years ago, the Atlantic was a greater divide than it is today, and the links between trans-Atlantic elections more tenuous than they are now. Mr. Trump, armed with a social media account and a penchant for lines even more provocative than Mr. Goldwater’s, could easily roil the British campaign, analysts said.And a Trump victory, they added, would pose a devilish challenge to either future British leader. While Mr. Trump treated Mr. Sunak’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, as an ideological twin, he fell out bitterly with Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, and there was little reason, they said, to hope for less drama in a second Trump term.The biggest pre-election danger — much more likely for Mr. Sunak than for Mr. Starmer, given their politics — is that Mr. Trump will make a formal endorsement, either while he is the Republican nominee or newly elected as president, said Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London.“Given how negatively most Brits feel toward Trump,” Professor Bale said, “such an endorsement is unlikely to play well for whichever of the two is unlucky enough to find favor with him.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      After the Iowa Shooting, Demands That Politicians Act

      by

      More from our inbox:Motivating Young People to Vote for Biden‘A Glimmer of Hope’Immigration Judges Are Needed. I Volunteer!The Inmates and the CatsParents picked up their children from a reunification center in Perry, Iowa, on Thursday morning.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “One Confirmed Dead Among Several Victims in Iowa School Shooting” (news article, Jan. 5):It has happened again, this time in Perry, Iowa, and it will keep happening until voters confront the politicians. With a majority of Americans saying they favor stricter gun laws such as universal background checks, there is no better time than now, in this election year, for voters to ask the candidates to support efforts to reduce gun violence in America.Republicans, especially recently, are demanding yes or no answers to critical questions. In town halls and at rallies and caucuses, candidates need to be confronted: Will you commit to specific steps to insure the safety of our schoolchildren, yes or no?There is no better time or place to demand yes or no answers to questions about gun safety than in Iowa in the next two weeks.David SimpsonRindge, N.H.To the Editor:I’m distressed and angered about another public school shooting — and there is still no action from state and local governments regarding protecting our children from these violent acts. As a public-school teacher and a parent, I fear for my own children as well as my students.We know we need to keep guns out of the hands of violent and mentally unstable people, but we also need to keep people who are violent out of our schools. We need changes to our laws and policies if we are going to stop this epidemic of gun violence against our children.Kathryn FamelyFalmouth, Mass.To the Editor:Re “In Nashville, Parents Believed Time Had Come for Gun Limits” (front page, Dec. 29):The parents of Tennessee children who were present during the Covenant School mass shooting last March deserve all the credit in the world for standing up to be counted in the fight against the madness of the easy access to firearms in this country.In some ways, fighting for change in an extremely red state like Tennessee is at the same time more difficult and frustrating, yet also more valuable.When a Republican or a conservative person is persuaded that we need to strengthen common-sense gun laws, eliminate the gun show loophole and ban the sale of high-speed automatic rifles, the accomplishment is greater. Most Democrats already favor such restrictions.The stories of these parents’ encounters with Tennessee lawmakers, while inspiring, are also infuriating. It seems unfathomable that a legislator would sympathize in private with these parents who are trying to make the world safer for schoolchildren, yet then vote against any measure that might actually accomplish that goal.For these parents and others frustrated and enraged by these gutless lawmakers, I can suggest one other tactic. Perhaps only the thought of political defeat would be persuasive. It may seem unpalatable for a lifelong conservative Republican to vote for the Democratic candidate, yet doing so once over this life-or-death issue may be the only way to alter the behavior of obstinate politicians.Marc SpringerBrookline, Mass.Motivating Young People to Vote for Biden Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Young Voters Have an Entirely Different Concept of Politics,” by Michelle Cottle (Opinion, Jan. 3):Ms. Cottle brings up the problem of President Biden’s lack of appeal to young voters. Mr. Biden’s strongest suit is still this: He’s not Donald Trump.If young voters care about the environment, all Democrats have to do is feature Mr. Trump’s “I want to drill, drill, drill!” remark in their ads, along with his comments ignoring climate change.Even more important is Mr. Trump’s nominating for the Supreme Court conservative justices who have taken away women’s rights over their own bodies.If young voters aren’t feeling motivated to vote by these issues, they should be.Christine GrafSt. Paul, Minn.To the Editor:I absolutely agree with Michelle Cottle’s observation that Bernie Sanders was crucial to Joe Biden’s support among young people in the 2020 election. If you compare this year’s primary season with the 2020 one, this year’s so far is very lackluster for the Democrats.To give it the energy of the 2020 primary season, Mr. Biden needs to put Bernie Sanders — and Elizabeth Warren — on the road again, especially on college campuses. And they need to talk about what they hope to accomplish in a second Biden administration, not just about what has been accomplished so far.These two will provide the energy and vision that young people crave and will give them the motivation to show up at the polls on Election Day.Paul MarshLansing, Mich.‘A Glimmer of Hope’Students playing between classes this month at the Hand in Hand school in Jerusalem.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “In a Jewish-Arab School, an Oasis From Division but Not From Deep Fears” (news article, Jan. 1):I was delighted to read this story on the first day of 2024. Day after day reading about the atrocities committed in Israel and the resulting horrors happening in Gaza has been so depressing. Reading 9-year-old Ben, a “religious Jew,” say that his best friend is Arab gave me a glimmer of hope for the future.Scott BaleStamford, Conn.Immigration Judges Are Needed. I Volunteer! Fred Ramos for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Migrant Surge Stretches U.S. Border Patrol Thin” (front page, Dec. 29):I am a recently retired lawyer. Your description of the unmanageable burdens immigration is placing on our resources jolted me to ponder an untapped but significant solution to the limited number of immigration judges needed to process the backlog of asylum cases (as distinguished from the more complex deportation proceedings).There are thousands of ready, willing and able retired lawyers and judges throughout our country who could be quickly trained and qualified locally or online to process asylum cases.Many in this cohort already voluntarily serve our state and federal courts as appointed and volunteer lawyers for those who cannot afford a lawyer. Many also serve as court-appointed court mediators without compensation. I suggest that activating these resources would rapidly reduce the huge backlog of asylum cases.I hereby volunteer if anyone at the Departments of Justice or Homeland Security wants my help.Les WeinsteinLos AngelesThe writer is a member of the California State Bar and a former U.S. Department of Justice trial lawyer.The Inmates and the Cats Cristobal Olivares for The New York TimesTo the Editor:I’m glad that “Cats Filled This Chilean Prison. Then, the Inmates Fell in Love” ran on the front page of the very first paper of 2024.There’s no end to bad news, and it was uplifting to read about programs that connect prisoners with animals and specifically about Chillona, “a relaxed black cat that has become the darling of a nine-man cell crammed with bunk beds.”Bonding with pets apparently leads to an increase in empathy and a decrease in recidivism. When the inmates in Santiago care for the cats, the cats, in return, offer “love, affection and acceptance.”Talk about a win-win.Carol WestonNew York More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden to Set Stakes for 2024 Election in Pennsylvania Speech

      by

      President Biden is returning to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to try to define the 2024 presidential election as an urgent and intensifying fight for American democracy.Mr. Biden is expected to use a location near the famous Revolutionary War encampment of Valley Forge and the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to cast preserving democracy as a foundational issue to the 2024 campaign, according to a senior Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the remarks.The address, which builds on previous speeches about safeguarding American institutions and combating political violence, represents a bet that many Americans remain shaken by the Jan. 6 attack and Donald J. Trump’s role in it.Leaning on a phrase used by America’s first president, George Washington, around the time he commanded troops at Valley Forge, Mr. Biden is expected to suggest that the 2024 election is a test of whether democracy is still a “sacred cause” in the nation, the aide said.Mr. Biden is fond of using sites of historical significance to underscore speeches that he and his team see as important moments. He traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia before the midterm elections and to Gettysburg, Pa., during the 2020 presidential campaign.His campaign views the events of Jan. 6 — when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent culmination of his election denialism — as critical to understanding how the 2024 campaign will unfold. His team notes that Mr. Trump and Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of that day but argues that images of the Capitol riot remain seared in the minds of voters.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

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Politically Obtuse Plutocrats

      by

      All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?Apparently, yes.If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network.If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. And it looks even more desperate after Haley’s recent Civil War misadventures — first failing to name slavery as a reason the war happened, then clumsily trying to walk back her omission.But there is a logic behind this drama. What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.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

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      What Biden Needs to Tell Us

      by

      Sometimes social revolutions emerge from ordinary ideas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like William Petty, David Hume and Adam Smith popularized a concept called “division of labor.” It’s a simple notion. If I specialize in doing what I’m good at, and you specialize in what you’re good at, and we exchange what we’ve each made, then we’ll both be more productive and better off than if we tried to be self-sufficient.It seems banal, but division of labor was part of a constellation of ideas that liberated our civilization from the savage grip of zero-sum thinking. For millenniums before that, economic growth had been basically stagnant. Many people simply assumed that the supply of wealth was finite. If I’m going to get more of it, it will be the result of conquering you and stealing what you have. In a zero-sum mind-set, the basic logic of life is dog-eat-dog, conquer or be conquered. Property is theft. Predators win.Division of labor, on the other hand, and the other principles that underlie modern capitalism, encouraged a positive-sum mind-set. According to this way of thinking, the good of others multiplies my own good. Steve Jobs got to enjoy a fortune, but I get to enjoy the Mac I’m now typing on and tens of thousands get to enjoy the jobs he helped create.In this kind of society, life is not about conquest and domination but regulated competition and voluntary exchange. Not about antagonism but interdependence. In this kind of marketplace, Walter Lippmann wrote in the late 1930s, “the vista was opened at the end of which men could see the possibility of the Good Society on this earth.”In other words, a dry economic concept like “division of labor” helped inaugurate a moral revolution. A positive-sum society is a more pluralistic and tolerant society because all its members are encouraged to pioneer their own specialty. People are rewarded for their skills and imaginations, not their ability to intimidate. Competition for comparative advantage unleashes untold human creativity, drive, innovation and ambition.The errors and scandals of the early 21st century (Iraq, the financial crisis, etc.) produced a crisis of legitimacy for this brand of liberal democratic capitalism. People lost confidence that the elites knew what they are doing or were serving anybody but themselves. This disillusion led to a concomitant rise in global populism. In 2002 only 120 million people lived in countries governed by what The Guardian called “at least somewhat” populist leaders. By 2019, more than two billion did.Populism thrives on a zero-sum mind-set. The central story that populists tell is: They are out to destroy us. Populist leaders invariably inflame ethnic bigotry to mobilize their own supporters.America’s populist in chief, Donald Trump, exemplifies this mentality. Trump grew up in a zero-sum world. In the world of New York real estate, there’s a fixed amount of land. Trump didn’t have to invent a new concept, just screw the other side. In 2017, the Vox writer Dylan Matthews and his colleagues read all of Trump’s books on business and politics, and concluded that zero-sum thinking is the core of his mind-set. “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” Trump and his co-author wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass.” “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups — oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized.This thinking is rising across the globe. Despots are trying to grab territory to increase wealth and glory. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, state- and nonstate violence was higher in 2022 than it was a decade before.Vladimir Putin doesn’t seek to recapture Russian greatness by leading a nation that cures cancer or produces technological innovations; he seeks glory by conquering Ukraine: You lose, I win. Xi Jinping no longer talks of the U.S. and China as friendly competitors; he describes a world in which we are locked in a zero-sum war for supremacy: He wins, we lose. As my colleague Thomas Friedman has noted recently, Hamas could have turned Gaza into Dubai — a land of capitalism, growth and opportunity. But Hamas rejects the whole ethos of modern capitalism for a more primitive ethos: Jews die, we dominate.We all have complaints about the age of go-go globalization, but what’s followed is far worse — global economic competition being replaced by political and military confrontation. And the thugs are winning. Russia now has the momentum in Ukraine. China is growing increasingly aggressive in the waters around Taiwan. Trump is leading in many polls.Many of us greet 2024 with a sense of foreboding. We need Joe Biden to be as big as this year demands. We need a leader who shows that he grasps the scope of global crisis and has a vision for how to return to a positive-sum world of growth, innovation and peace.Personally, I’d ask Team Biden to take a look at Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. A lot of people thought Reagan was too old that year. But he told a bracing story about the global threat and he had a vigorous vision for America’s future. Team Biden is not going to go all Reaganite, but it could promote a liberal version of two of his themes — law and order and the spirit of enterprise.Law and order. We are in the middle of a multifront conflict that pits the forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism. In a civilized world, people create rules and norms to make competition fair, whether it’s economic, intellectual or political competition. Barbarians seek to tear down those rules so thuggery can prevail. Biden needs to position himself as the candidate for law and order — in Ukraine, against Hamas, at the ballot box, on America’s streets and, yes, on the southern border. He has to stand for the rule of law against growing chaos.The spirit of enterprise. One of the great achievements of Biden’s first term is that America is once again a nation that builds things. Manufacturing employment is up. More broadly, the American economy is surging, with fast growth, plummeting inflation, real wage increases. Far from being in decline, the U.S. economy is driving the world.Biden needs to paint a portrait of America’s future not with statistics but with a vision of a way of life. Liberal capitalism involves a set of concrete social actions: starting a business; building better schools; working together with people in companies; rising from poverty to buy a house; raising children not to be culture warriors but workers and innovators.This liberal dream is still ingrained in the nation’s bones. It’s been covered over by several years of bitterness, disillusion and pessimism. Maybe Biden can reach something deep in every American and revive the optimism that used to be our defining national trait.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Meets With Teamsters President as Union Weighs 2024 Endorsement

      by

      Sean M. O’Brien, the general president of the Teamsters union, sat down with former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday at Mr. Trump’s seaside mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.Kara Deniz, a spokeswoman for the union, said the meeting was simply one of a series of meetings the Teamsters plan to have with all the presidential candidates.But this particular meeting, which the union detailed in a lengthy post on social media that was accompanied by a picture of Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Trump, came at a remarkable moment. At a public hearing in November, Senator Markwayne Mullin, a staunchly pro-Trump Republican from Oklahoma, called Mr. O’Brien a “thug,” a “bully” and a coward, and challenged him to a fight.President Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in history, as have several leaders of organized labor, and the Teamsters endorsed his candidacy in 2020. In December, Mr. Biden issued an executive order mandating what are known as project labor agreements — which establish fixed work, wage and labor standards at construction sites — for all federal contracts exceeding $35 million. That order was a potential boon to the Teamsters union, which is likely to control transportation at many of those sites and would have to be brought into contract talks as funds from Mr. Biden’s signature domestic achievements start to flow.Just last week, the Biden administration named Cole Scandaglia, the Teamsters’ senior legislative representative, to a high-profile advisory board at the Transportation Department. And in 2022, the administration moved to shore up a pension fund that affected 350,000 Teamster retirees.Yet there was Mr. O’Brien next to a beaming Mr. Trump, whose appeal to working-class voters will be key to his re-election bid. Mr. O’Brien promised the former president a seat at another meeting later this month in Washington, this time with rank-and-file members.Serious issues need to be addressed “to improve the lives of working people across the country, and the Teamsters union is making sure our members’ voices are heard as we head into a critical election year,” Mr. O’Brien said in a statement. “We thank the former president for taking time during this private meeting to listen to the Teamsters’ top priorities.”Teamsters leaders have met with other candidates, mainly on the margins of the 2024 election and none with Mr. Trump’s profile. The first two meetings came last month, with former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, whose presidential campaign has barely registered with voters, and with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine independent who qualified this week for the presidential ballot in Utah. The union has also met with Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, Democratic candidates, as well as Cornel West, who is running as a left-wing independent.A spokesman for the Biden campaign, Ammar Moussa, said the president “looks forward to continuing to work with the Teamsters and workers across America to ensure working Americans get a fair share of the wealth they’re helping to create.”In September, Mr. Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line when he stood with members of the United Auto Workers striking in Michigan. Pressure from the administration helped resolve the strike, and has helped other unions expand their organizing.Still, while the U.A.W.’s brash new president, Shawn Fain, has praised Mr. Biden and castigated Mr. Trump, the U.A.W. has so far not endorsed the president’s re-election bid, and Mr. O’Brien may have added to the White House’s frustration. As the Teamsters line up meetings with each presidential candidate, the union’s leadership appears intent on maintaining its leverage, just as Mr. Fain has. More