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      If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance

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      Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.Listening to JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography — a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite — I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone’s life.All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scotch-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.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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      A Party Now Molded in Trump’s Image Prepares for a Coronation

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      Thursday night, when Donald J. Trump accepts the Republican presidential nomination for the third time, will be the culmination of an extraordinary run of good fortune.Exactly seven weeks ago, Donald J. Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in Manhattan, an unprecedented conviction of a former president that looked like a political rock bottom.Since then, the Supreme Court handed him a critical legal victory that threw those felony convictions and more cases into limbo. President Biden’s disastrous debate plunged the Democratic Party into a rolling crisis. Two days before the opening of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt that shocked the nation and quieted Democrats’ criticism and any remaining Republican grumbling.And hours before Mr. Trump formally received his party’s nomination on Monday, the judge overseeing another of the criminal cases against him — the one involving accusations that he had mishandled classified documents — threw out all of the charges.Thursday night, when Mr. Trump accepts the Republican presidential nomination for the third time, will be the culmination of an extraordinary run of good fortune and a testament to his political instincts. His address will also in many ways serve as the Republican Party’s coronation of a leader who went from rattling the conservative establishment to refashioning it entirely in his image.“Eight years ago, Donald Trump shocked the system and defied the doubters,” Kellyanne Conway, the adviser who brought his campaign to the finish line then, said on Wednesday night.This week, the doubters in his own party proved hard to find. Over the first three days, Republicans of all stripes — elected officials, regular Americans, his family — have taken turns seeking to reintroduce Donald Trump: not the chaotic president from news headlines, but a softer, kinder leader, yet unafraid to fight. With a bandage on his right ear, where the would-be assassin’s bullet went through, he has basked in a hero’s welcome every night.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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      Why MAGA Nation Embraces Donald Trump

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      More from our inbox:Exit Menendez?Joe, Keep Your DignitySpirituality in America Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal,” by David Brooks (column, July 12):I’ve always believed that the mass of Donald Trump supporters were fundamentally just working-class Americans who, as the country’s wealth increasingly skewed to the 1 percent ever since President Ronald Reagan, found themselves running faster and faster to stay in the same place, and finally (and justifiably) started to fume about it.While Mr. Brooks doesn’t flat out say it, I take away from his article that, rather than viewing their plight as old-fashioned liberals used to — as plain and simple economic class exploitation — the white working class has been conned by demagogues like Mr. Trump into seeing it as existential, zero-sum identity politics.If Mr. Brooks’s suggestion is that religious leaders guide Americans back to some form of enlightened democratic civility, they’re going to have to drop a bit more wealth redistribution into their message to the congregation.Steven DoloffNew YorkTo the Editor:Having been dismissed as “deplorables,” sniffed at as people who “cling to guns or religion,” and generally considered less worthy, it was only a matter of time before the voters who have become MAGA nation would decide to stand up for themselves and say, We matter, too, and as much as you do.For all his many shortcomings, Donald Trump does have a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, and he was happy to swoop in and exploit the concerns of this group.Democrats may prefer to fault President Biden’s frailty, but they have no one but themselves to blame or the burgeoning strength of the adversary they face.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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      Climate and the Republican Convention

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      Here’s where the party stands on global warming, energy and the environment.It’s official: Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the presidential election this November, and Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is his running mate.The long-awaited announcement of the vice-presidential candidate came as the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee on Monday and Trump made his first public appearance since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on Saturday.Climate change was not on the agenda. But the convention’s first day, which was focused on the economy, offered fresh signs of what a new Trump presidency might look like in terms of climate policy.Today, I want to share with you some of the reporting my colleague Lisa Friedman has been doing on the Republican ticket and what to expect when it comes to climate and the environment. Lisa has covered environmental policy from Washington for more than a decade.For Republican leaders, it’s all about energyJune was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record and more than a third of Americans are facing dangerous levels of heat. But climate change is unlikely to be a major theme at the Republican convention, which runs through Thursday. It was not mentioned in any of the main speeches on Monday, which instead focused on inflation and the economy.(The closest thing to a mention of global warming Monday night came from Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who derided what she called the “Green New Scam,” saying it was destroying small business.)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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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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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      in Elections

      Election Results in Europe Suggest Another Reason Biden Has to Go

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      There’s a dollop of good news for Democrats from the British and French elections, but it’s bad news for President Biden.The basic lesson is that liberals can win elections but perhaps not as incumbents. The election results abroad strike me as one more reason for Biden to perform the ultimate act of statesmanship and withdraw from the presidential race.The U.K. elections on July 4 resulted in a landslide for the Labour Party, ending the Conservative Party’s 14 years in power. Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, achieved this result in part by moving to the center and even criticizing the Conservatives for being too lax on immigration. He projected quiet competence, promising in his first speech as Britain’s leader to end “the era of noisy performance.”But mostly, British voters supported Labour simply because they’re sick of Conservatives mucking up the government. The two main reasons voters backed Labour, according to one poll, were “to get the Tories out” and “the country needs a change.” A mere 5 percent said they backed Labour candidates because they “agree with their policies.”British voters were unhappy with Conservatives for some of the same reasons many Americans are unhappy with Biden. Prices are too high. Inequality is too great. Immigration seems unchecked. Officeholders are perceived as out of touch and beholden to elites. This sourness toward incumbents is seen throughout the industrialized world, from Canada to the Netherlands and Japan.Frustration with incumbents was also a theme in the French election, where President Emmanuel Macron made a bet similar to the one that Biden is making — that voters would come to their senses and support him over his rivals. Macron basically lost that bet, although the final result wasn’t as catastrophic as it might have been.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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      Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Independent Streak Marked Supreme Court Term

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      The junior member of the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority often questioned its approach and wrote important dissents joined by liberal justices.Justice Amy Coney Barrett, 52, is the youngest member of the Supreme Court and the junior member of its conservative supermajority. Last week, she completed what was only her third full term.Yet she has already emerged as a distinctive force on the court, issuing opinions that her admirers say are characterized by intellectual seriousness, independence, caution and a welcome measure of common sense.In the term that ended last week, she delivered a series of concurring opinions questioning and honing the majority’s methods and conclusions.She wrote notable dissents, joined by liberal justices, from decisions limiting the tools prosecutors can use in cases against members of the Jan. 6 mob and blocking a Biden administration plan to combat air pollution. And she voted with the court’s three-member liberal wing in March, saying the majority had ruled too broadly in restoring former President Donald J. Trump to the Colorado ballot.The bottom line: Justice Barrett was the Republican appointee most likely to vote for a liberal result in the last term.That does not make her a liberal, said Irv Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Supreme Court Institute.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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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.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