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      A Cowed Establishment Toasts Trump at a Manhattan Charity Dinner

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      There were grudge matches and sycophancy in equal measure at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. “Isn’t it just exciting, what’s going on,” Donald Trump said.Donald J. Trump and the assorted fat cats to whom he was speaking seemed to be processing many complicated emotions all at once.“You think this is easy?” the former and perhaps future president asked. “Standing up here in front of half a room that hates my guts, and the other half loves me?”There he stood, the godhead of a populist revenge movement, tucked into his satiny cummerbund, a black bow tie around his neck. It was the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan.This charity event, held Thursday evening in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, has been a stop for presidential candidates ever since 1960. That’s when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon showed up, at the dawn of the television age, to make self-deprecating jokes while courting the Roman Catholic vote. In 1970s New York, the era in which Mr. Trump came up, the dinner was one of the glitziest events on the social calendar, attended by governors and mayors and media machers and real estate titans.In 2016, he came as a presidential candidate himself. But when Mr. Trump’s remarks about his then-opponent, Hillary Clinton, veered into nasty territory, he was booed. He and his wife, Melania Trump, slunk out of the room the second it was over.Eight years later, the dinner he returned to was not the same. Like so much else in the Trump era, the Catholic charity event had become savage, warped by blunt force politics. There were all sorts of open wounds and grudges on display among the tuxedoed and the begowned. There were sycophants and there were outcasts. You could see the ones who had submitted to Mr. Trump, sitting beside members of a gorgonized establishment still unsure how to treat him, much less stop him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Suffs,’ the Tony-Winning Broadway Musical, Will Close Jan. 5

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      The musical, created by Shaina Taub, announced that it will play its final performance on Jan. 5 and start a national tour next fall.“Suffs,” a new musical about the American women’s suffrage movement, has a lot going for it: Its producers include Hillary Rodham Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, it won Tony Awards for its score and its book, and its audiences seemed energized by how the show’s themes resonated with the candidacy of Kamala Harris.But the show has struggled to sell enough tickets to defray its running costs, and on Friday night the producers announced that it would close on Jan. 5. At the time of its closing, it will have had 24 previews and 301 regular performances. The show announced plans for a national tour, which will begin in Seattle in September 2025.The musical, which takes place in the early 20th century, depicts two generations of women eager to win the right to vote, but divided over how best to do that. Shaina Taub, a singer-songwriter, wrote the book and score and stars as Alice Paul, an influential suffragist. It was directed by Leigh Silverman.The show began previews on March 26 and opened on April 18 at the Music Box Theater. A pre-Broadway production at the Public Theater received reviews that were mixed; the reviews of the Broadway production were somewhat better. Writing in The New York Times, the chief theater critic Jesse Green called it “a good show and good for the world” but said “to be great, a musical (like a great movement) must grab you by the throat. ‘Suffs’ too often settles for holding up signs.”The show’s grosses have been middling — during the week that ended Oct. 6, it grossed $679,589, which is generally not sufficient to sustain a large-cast musical.“Suffs” is the sixth musical to announce closing dates since early May, following “Lempicka,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “The Who’s Tommy,” “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants.” Broadway is always a difficult industry, and most shows fail, but the odds of success are particularly long now because production costs have risen, audience size has fallen, and a high volume of shows are competing for attention.“Suffs,” with Jill Furman and Rachel Sussman as lead producers, was capitalized for $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped. More

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      Trump Steps Up Threats to Imprison Those He Sees as Foes

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      The former president is vowing to prosecute those he sees as working to deny him a victory, while laying the groundwork to claim large-scale voter fraud if he loses.Donald J. Trump has long used strongman-style threats to prosecute people he vilifies as a campaign tactic, dating back to encouraging his 2016 rallygoers to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. And during his term as president, he repeatedly pressed the Justice Department to open investigations into his political adversaries.But as November nears, the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.After Democrats replaced President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as their 2024 nominee — and Mr. Trump’s lead in the polls eroded — Mr. Trump’s targets expanded.He has been laying the groundwork to claim that there was large-scale voter fraud if he loses, a familiar tactic from his 2016 and 2020 playbooks, but this time coupled with threats of prosecution. Those who may face criminal scrutiny for purported efforts at election fraud, Mr. Trump has declared, will include election workers, a tech giant, political operatives, lawyers and donors working for his opponent.Over the past month, he has shared a post calling for former President Barack Obama to be subject to “military tribunals” and reposted fake images of well-known Democrats clad in prison garb. He has threatened the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with a life sentence for helping state and local governments fund elections in 2020. He stoked fears of voter intimidation by urging police officers to “watch for the voter fraud” at polling places because some voters may be “afraid of that badge,” and warned that people deemed to have “cheated” in this election “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Mr. Trump wrote on his website Truth Social on Saturday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hillary Clinton Debated Trump. Here’s Her Advice for Kamala Harris.

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      The 2016 Democratic nominee fell short to Donald Trump, but she had strong debate moments against him. In an interview, she offered some thoughts for Kamala Harris.Hillary Clinton has as much experience as any Democrat in debating Donald J. Trump.The 2016 presidential campaign, when she was her party’s nominee, included three of the six general-election debates Mr. Trump has participated in. Those faceoffs went a long way toward shaping the country’s vision of his candidacy and what he would be like as president.Mr. Trump, of course, went on to win the 2016 election — an outcome that still haunts Democrats.When Mrs. Clinton called this week to discuss her old debate coach, Karen Dunn, who is helping out Vice President Kamala Harris this time around, I took the opportunity to ask about her experience on the debate stage with Mr. Trump.“The consensus was that I won all three debates and that I was well prepared,” Mrs. Clinton said.Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been lightly edited and condensed.What do you remember about your own preparations to debate Donald Trump?It was the first debate when Trump literally ridiculed me for preparing. This was not something we had thought about beforehand, because who thought we could be ridiculed for preparing for a presidential debate in front of 85 or 90 million people?So basically I said, yeah, I did prepare. And I’ll tell you something else I prepared for: I prepared to be president. Because I had the confidence. I knew the material. I felt comfortable. I also knew I had to brush Trump back and not let him be the center of attention all the time.What advice do you have for Kamala Harris as she prepares to debate Trump?She’s proven to be a good debater, both in her races in California and in her debate with Mike Pence. So I think she needs to be prepared enough that she feels really comfortable going on both offense and defense against Trump, because there’s a lot to cover with him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris’s Debate Tutor: a Lawyer Unafraid of Telling Politicians Hard Truths

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      Karen Dunn, who is preparing the vice president for next week’s clash, has trained Democrats for debates in every election since 2008. Her approach, as Hillary Clinton put it, is “tough love.”Vice President Kamala Harris has never met or spoken with former President Donald J. Trump, but the woman running her debate preparations has spent a lot of time thinking about how to respond to what Republican nominees say during an onstage clash.That outside Harris adviser, Karen L. Dunn, a high-powered Washington lawyer, has trained Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates for debates in every election since 2008.She is described by candidates she has coached and other people who have worked with her as a skilled handler of high-ego politicians. By all accounts, she possesses the rare ability to tell them what they are doing wrong and how to fix it — and how to inject humor and humanity to sell themselves to voters watching the debate.“It’s a combination of tough love,” Hillary Clinton, whom Ms. Dunn helped prepare for presidential debates in 2008 and 2016, said in an interview on Thursday. “She’s unafraid to say, ‘That’s not going to work’ or ‘That doesn’t make sense’ or ‘You can do better.’ But she also offers encouragement, like, ‘Look, I think you’re on the right track here’ and ‘You just need to do more of that.’”The emergence of Ms. Dunn as the leader of Ms. Harris’s debate team comes at a critical moment in both the presidential race and Ms. Dunn’s professional life.When she is not preparing top Democrats for debates — in addition to her four previous cycles of involvement at the presidential and vice-presidential level, she has worked with Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Cory Booker of New Jersey — Ms. Dunn is a top lawyer for some of America’s leading technology firms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 Things to Watch For at the Democratic Convention

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      The Democratic National Convention, which opens Monday in Chicago, will be a test for the party and its new standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has never been so center stage. The next few days should signal how Ms. Harris intends to define her candidacy, and will help determine whether the party can remain unified despite deep divisions over issues including the war in Gaza.Here are six things to watch for this week.Harris presents herself: Ms. Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday offers her a chance to introduce herself to what will likely be, along with her debate or debates with Mr. Trump, one of the biggest audiences she will have before Election Day. Her challenge, Democrats say, is to balance loyalty to Mr. Biden and assuming control of her party.Her speech is an opportunity to show the extent to which she intends to carve out her own political identity and demonstrate how a Harris presidency would be different from a Biden presidency. Not incidentally, it is also a test of whether the sitting vice president will present herself as the candidate of change or as the incumbent, running on the record of the past three years.Party unity: Democrats are hoping for four days of party-building, well aware of the dissension-free convention staged by Mr. Trump and the Republican Party last month in Milwaukee. That might be tough.The convention will be shadowed by demonstrations over the Biden administration’s strong support of Israel in the war in Gaza, a policy opposed by a sizable contingent of Democratic delegates. Protests on the streets could spill into the convention hall. Should that happen, Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, said Ms. Harris would need to separate herself from “the fringe of her coalition.” He added: “This is important in terms of defining her as both strong and mainstream.”A handoff from a Clinton: Hillary Clinton is set to speak on Monday night, and thoughts about what might have been will not be lost on anyone in the hall. In 2016, Mr. Trump defeated her in her bid to be the first female president, a loss that some Democrats argued was at least in part a sign of Americans’ unwillingness to elect a woman to the nation’s highest office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More