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      In New Hampshire, Chris Christie Still Sees a Path to Beat Trump

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      As he stakes his candidacy on the state, Chris Christie is promising to find new ways to confront Donald Trump. “I’m not going to let him get away with being a coward,” he said in an interview.An upset victory over Donald Trump in New Hampshire could be a knockout blow, according to Chris Christie. He is staking his presidential campaign on winning the state.Emily Rhyne/The New York TimesIn his against-all-odds pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has campaigned almost exclusively in New Hampshire: More than 90 percent of his events since February have been in the Granite State, according to a New York Times analysis.To hear Mr. Christie tell it, New Hampshire is his do-or-die state. If he doesn’t perform well here, that will probably be it.“I can’t see myself leaving the race under any circumstances before New Hampshire,” he said in an interview. “If I don’t do well in New Hampshire, then I’ll leave.”Much as he did during his White House bid in 2016, Mr. Christie is betting on the independent streak of New Hampshire voters to validate his candidacy and catapult him into contention. (Mr. Christie ultimately finished sixth in New Hampshire that year and dropped out a day later.)But while he blended into the crowd in the 2016 Republican primary contest, Mr. Christie occupies a nearly solitary position in this race: as the candidate offering the harshest criticisms of the runaway front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Christie’s central pitch to Republicans in New Hampshire is that they must vote with a sense of responsibility and urgency, because defeating Mr. Trump in the first-in-the-nation primary may be the only way to halt his march to the nomination.“The future of this country is going to be determined here,” Mr. Christie told a crowd this week at a local brewery, clutching an I.P.A. “If Donald Trump wins here, he will be our nominee. Everything that happens after that is going to be on our party and on our country. It’s up to you.”Though Mr. Christie has improved in recent polls, he still trails Mr. Trump in New Hampshire by double digits, and by much more in national polls and surveys of Iowa, the first nominating state.Mr. Christie signed autographs for supporters at an event on Monday in Rye, N.H.Sophie Park for The New York TimesYet in the interview, Mr. Christie said he still saw a path in New Hampshire. He pointed to numerous past candidates who “broke late” in the state, including Senator John McCain of Arizona during his 2000 campaign. Mr. Christie noted that Mr. McCain, who ended up winning New Hampshire, had driven around the state “basically riding around in a Suburban with two aides.”Mr. Christie is apparently trying to emulate that style. This week, he cruised around New Hampshire with only a driver and two staff members. His campaign does not have staff members on the ground in New Hampshire, and in all, he has only 11 staff members on the payroll, according to his campaign.In the trip to New Hampshire, his first since the opening Republican primary debate last month, Mr. Christie ratcheted up his criticisms of the former president.He now goes so far as to liken Mr. Trump to an autocratic leader, arguing that his conduct is beneath the office of the presidency. Mr. Christie tiptoes toward predicting how the former president’s criminal indictments will unfold, declaring that the country cannot have a “convicted felon” as its leader. And he needles Mr. Trump with subtle jabs at his idiosyncratic tendencies, taunting the former president for his love of cable television and apparent preference for well-done hamburgers.But despite his willingness to take on Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie has been denied his best shot at confronting the former president directly on the debate stage. Mr. Trump skipped the first debate and seems unlikely to attend the second one, which will be held in California at the end of the month.Mr. Christie, who has qualified for the second debate, said he had been drawing up contingency plans.“I’m not going to let him get away with being a coward and running away,” Mr. Christie said in the interview. “It could be meeting him out in front of his event as he’s making his way in. It could be confronting him on his way out. It could be actually going to the event. It could be a whole bunch of options that we’re going to try. I’m not going to tell them exactly which one I’m going to do, because then he would have his staff prepared for it and try to stop me.”Tell It Like It Is PAC, the super PAC supporting Mr. Christie’s bid, latched onto the New Hampshire-or-bust approach early on. Ninety-six percent of the roughly $1 million the group has spent on radio and television advertising has been in New Hampshire markets, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.Mr. Christie’s events grew more crowded as his swing through New Hampshire progressed, culminating with more than 150 people packed in a gym without air-conditioning in Bedford. Audiences at his events tended to applaud his anti-Trump broadsides.Mr. Christie was greeted with applause at an event in a crowded gymnasium in Bedford, N.H.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHis voters are holding out hope, but they acknowledge his path is tough.“You have to believe he’s got a chance,” said Irene Bonner, 75, of Meredith, N.H., who said she was normally apolitical but had been inspired to come to an event by Mr. Christie’s tough talk against Mr. Trump.“The party is so completely blinded by Trump, it just boggles my mind,” said John Bonner, her husband. “After everything’s gone down and the things he’s said and done. But at least Christie is speaking up.” He added, “The rest of them really aren’t.”If Mr. Trump does emerge as the nominee, Mr. Christie said, he will not back off in his criticism.“I can’t imagine that I’ll ever keep quiet,” he said in the interview. “I don’t think it’s in my personality, so I’ll continue to say what I believe is the truth.”He added: “But I’ll also be critical of Joe Biden, I’m certain, because I have been since he became president, and I suspect he is not going to do some sort of miraculous turnaround that’s going to win my support. So I think I probably have difficult things to say about both of them if I was not the nominee.”Asked if he would make an endorsement in a Trump-Biden rematch, the rarely pithy Mr. Christie was succinct: “No.” More

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      Biden Plans Democracy-Focused Speech After Next Republican Primary Debate

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      One location under consideration for the remarks is the democracy-focused McCain Institute in Arizona.President Biden is planning to deliver a major speech on the ongoing threats to democracy in Arizona later this month, with the address scheduled the day after the next Republican presidential primary debate. One location for the speech that has been under discussion is the McCain Institute, according to a person familiar with the planning. The institute, which is devoted to “fighting for democracy,” is named for Senator John McCain, a Republican who served for more than 20 years in the Senate with Mr. Biden and who sparred repeatedly with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party’s front-runner in 2024.Mr. Biden has made the perils facing American democracy a central theme of his 2020 campaign and also his 2024 re-election bid. He also made the case ahead of the 2022 midterms that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a threat to the “soul of the nation.”Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, told Democratic donors about the upcoming speech on Wednesday in Chicago, the site of the party’s 2024 convention, according to people familiar with her remarks.The White House and Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee invited major contributors to a preview of the party’s convention this week in Chicago. The Biden Victory Fund, which includes the Biden campaign, the national party and all state parties, can collect contributions as large as $929,600 from big donors.Mr. Biden was close to Mr. McCain, who died in 2018, and during his recent trip to Hanoi in Vietnam he visited a memorial there for the late senator, who was held captive as a prisoner of war. “I miss him, I miss him,” Mr. Biden said.The speech would underscore previous efforts by Mr. Biden to focus attention on the cause of democracy. He delivered speech in Philadelphia last September that attempted to frame the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation,” an echo of his 2020 campaign slogan and another speech in Washington days before the midterm elections.Mr. Biden also briefly pushed for a package of federal voting rights laws last January before dropping the issue after it became clear there was not support among Senate Democrats to change the chamber’s rules to advance the legislation. More

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      Second G.O.P Debate: Who Has Qualified So Far?

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      At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not […] More

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      Dignified Silence Doesn’t Work Against Trump

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      Donald Trump is increasing his already overwhelming lead for the Republican nomination, and is tied with President Biden in a hypothetical general election face-off, according to recent polling.This is astonishing given Trump’s quagmire of legal trouble, but it is the logical result of a candidate running without forceful, widespread opposition and condemnation. His opponents, for varying reasons, have taken the strategic position of ignoring his predicament, fingers and toes crossed that he will succumb to self-injury.They’re wishing on an avalanche of “ifs.” But there’s no wishing in this kind of battle, no victory without confrontation.This reluctance to take on Trump has allowed him and his surrogates to develop a narrative of victimhood and justified vengeance while allowing the image of timidity and weakness to harden around his opponents like plaster.And with this failure to engage, this campaign of cowardice, Republican voters, already primed by Trump to disbelieve facts and believe conspiracy theories, are robbed of any debate that could help modulate their views.Those voters exist in a void of veracity, and Trump fills it with his version of truth: anti-truth.But not only are most of Trump’s Republican rivals avoiding attacking him over his various indictments, so is his Democratic one.Joe Biden refuses to comment on them. He and his campaign have chosen to keep their distance from the chaos and not feed into Trump’s false assertion that his legal woes originate from political animus.This idea of a dignified silence has a long political history, but its utility and efficacy is unclear in a modern context. It feels a bit like a “Happy Days” nostalgia in a “Walking Dead” reality.And yet the Biden campaign plows ahead with it. Just last week, the Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond reiterated the strategy: “We’re not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal problems.”But Trump’s legal problems aren’t about parking tickets or child support payments; they’re about an ongoing assault on our democracy, and it is hard to square having the candidate who is campaigning on protecting our democracy not address the great threat to that democracy.And that threat isn’t simply about what has happened, but what could yet happen.In July, The Times reported that Trump and his allies plan on “reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands” if he regains the White House. Last week, The Associated Press reported that conservative groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, are drawing up plans to “dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision,” should Trump be re-elected. Last year, Trump called for a “termination” of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election.Still, Biden adheres to a dignified silence approach, clinging almost religiously to the notion that voters will recognize and appreciate the difference between a restorer and a destroyer.That may well be the case. The continuity of the Republic as we know it may hang on it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to question the wisdom of that approach and to be apprehensive about it.On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden said he had counseled Hillary Clinton to “not get into” the topic of Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape during their second general election debate, “because it just drags it down.” As Biden put it, “Everybody knows who Donald Trump is.”On the debate stage, Clinton took the soft-pedal Biden approach. When asked about that video, Clinton gave a somewhat meandering answer, ultimately landing on the refrain that “everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point about whether or not the man in the video or the man on the stage respects women.”But Trump went on the attack. WikiLeaks had begun leaking John Podesta’s emails, and Trump made the emails a central argument.And as Rolling Stone put it in 2018, “The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape dominated headlines for roughly a week; WikiLeaks, on the other hand, was an unrelenting drumbeat of rumors and wild allegations that left conservatives in a perpetual state of fury.”Clinton, of course, would lose that election.The asymmetry in the way Trump and his opponents engage with each other gives Trump a big advantage. He unleashes his barbs nonstop, and erratically, until one of them hits. His opponents keep refusing to respond in kind, maintaining respectable restraint, while racking up political wounds.During a Labor Day speech, one that some saw as the president beginning to ratchet up his attack on Trump, Biden didn’t even mention his predecessor’s name, instead repeatedly referring to him as “the last guy.”Most of Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democratic, are placing a risky bet, one that completely depends on the discernment of the American voter. That may, in the end, prove to be a brilliant tactical assessment, but I worry that it’s just as likely to be a tragic miscalculation.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      DeSantis Super PAC’s Urgent Plea to Donors: ‘We Need 50 Million Bucks’

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      In an audio recording made just before the first G.O.P. debate, the super PAC’s chief strategist disparaged rivals and described an expensive attempt to thwart Donald Trump in Iowa.Hours before the Republican Party’s first presidential debate, the chief strategist for the super PAC that has effectively taken over Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign met with donors in Milwaukee.“Now let me tell you a secret — don’t leak this,” the strategist, Jeff Roe, told the donors last Wednesday, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. “We need to do this now. We’re making a move now.”Then Mr. Roe made a bold sales pitch: “The day after Labor Day we’re launching and we need your help to stay up and go hard the rest of the way. We need 50 million bucks.”With urgency in his voice, Mr. Roe told the donors he required much of the $50 million in the next month before the second G.O.P. debate on Sept. 27. He said he needed $5 million a month just to sustain his Iowa operations. And he said Mr. DeSantis needed to beat Donald J. Trump in “the next 60 days” and separate from all of his other rivals “now.”The audio revealed that the people running the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, are placing big bets now in the hope that donors will cover them later. And it underscored just how steep a task the group confronts as it heads into the fall with its candidate far behind Mr. Trump in the polls, a campaign that is low on cash and a growing recognition that a Trump victory in Iowa could accelerate the end of the Republican race.In his meeting with the donors — a portion of which was reported on earlier Thursday by CNN — Mr. Roe made a cutting assessment of much of the Republican field competing against Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, Mr. Roe said, was deemed nice by voters but not seen as presidential. Nikki Haley, he added, was “not actually a lovely person” and also viewed as unpresidential. He mocked former Vice President Mike Pence, recalling the fly that landed on his head during his only debate with his ultimate successor, Kamala Harris, in 2020. And Mr. Roe said that Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the nomination by a wide margin, was certain to lose the general election and drag down other Republicans on the ballot.While Mr. Roe predicted multiple paths to victory ahead of Super Tuesday in early March, it was his plaintive warnings about when the race would be “moving” that made clear he sees Mr. DeSantis’s chances as resting on winning Iowa.In addition to being the top strategist for Never Back Down, Mr. Roe runs Axiom Strategies, the highest-grossing consulting firm in Republican politics. He is comfortable with asking candidates and their donors to part with large sums of cash, and made light of doing so at the meeting.“Now the good news is that we have all the money we need in this room,” Mr. Roe told the donors. “The bad news is it’s still in your wallet.”Even so, his request for a quick $50 million was an audacious ask given that Never Back Down has already taken $82.5 million out of Mr. DeSantis’s state political committee, raised an additional nearly $50 million and spent nearly $34 million through the end of June, according to federal filings.There are clear signs the super PAC is shifting its spending: It is ending its highly promoted door-knocking program to sway voters in Nevada, one of the early states, as well as in some Super Tuesday states, a development first reported by NBC News on Thursday.Mr. Roe leaned heavily on the donors to give more money and quickly — telling them he would meet them in the T.S.A. line at the airport to collect their checks.“This doesn’t run on, you know, fumes,” Mr. Roe told the donors. “And so we’re going to go spend this money right now, betting that our donors won’t let us down. And I’ve been let down by donors a lot. And I’ve already lost once to Trump and we can’t do it again.”That loss happened in 2016, when Mr. Roe ran the presidential primary campaign of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who came closer than any other candidate to toppling Mr. Trump.For his 2024 rematch against Mr. Trump, Mr. Roe and his colleagues at Never Back Down are trying something that has never been done before at this scale in American politics: They are running almost every aspect of the DeSantis presidential effort out of a group that is barred by campaign finance laws from coordinating strategy with either Mr. DeSantis or his campaign team.Super PACs are allowed to raise unlimited sums but because of the prohibition against coordination they are usually used as a piggy bank to buy advertising. Everything else that’s part of a modern presidential campaign — from events, to bus tours, to the labor intensive business of calling voters and knocking on their doors — is usually handled by the campaign. But because the DeSantis campaign has relatively little cash and the super PAC has had plenty, Never Back Down has taken over all of those functions.The unusual arrangement has necessitated an awkward tap dance around campaign finance laws. Mr. DeSantis insists he is technically separate from this super PAC even as he travels around on a bus funded by the super PAC and even as he attends his own events as a “special guest” of the super PAC.In July, Mr. DeSantis laid off more than a third of his campaign staff. Donors had slowed giving as he slid in the polls and as his first campaign manager, Generra Peck, spent early and aggressively. The campaign’s cash crunch has meant that the health of Never Back Down is more important to Mr. DeSantis’s fortunes than the structure of his own campaign.Officials with Never Back Down and the DeSantis campaign declined to comment.In the presentation to donors last Wednesday, Mr. Roe described several data points about how the super PAC has helped collect commitments from caucusgoers in Iowa to support Mr. DeSantis on Jan. 15.While Mr. Roe trashed most public polling, he suggested that the Des Moines Register poll this month showing Mr. Trump at 42 percent and Mr. DeSantis at 19 percent was “right along the path where our numbers show.”Then, he said, there was a drop-off to a lower tier of candidates.“Tim Scott is a wonderful human being, a nice man. He’s a moderate, a squish, but he’s a nice guy. He doesn’t have a name I.D. problem. He has a not-being-viewed-presidential problem,” Mr. Roe said.A spokesman for the Scott campaign, Matt Gorman, declined to comment.“Nikki Haley is not actually a lovely person,” Mr. Roe continued in the recording, adding that she has higher name identification. Still, he said, she has a “not-being-viewed-presidential problem.”A spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, Chaney Denton, responded by email, writing, “Lol, if anyone ever thought that, her debate performance put it to rest.”As the donors prepared to watch the first debate, Mr. Roe forecast who might attack Mr. DeSantis or anyone else. To watch “Mike Pence attack somebody, that’d be kind of weird,” he said, adding, “He might get his fly out to kind of help him.”A spokesman for Mr. Pence did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Roe said that Mr. Trump, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, had a lower ceiling of support than the 42 percent backing him in the Des Moines Register poll. He claimed the real number was 37 percent and that Mr. DeSantis still needed to chase that core Trump bloc for its votes. He said that an additional 37 percent liked Mr. Trump but wanted to move on from him.“We want to show them we’re a better option — never back down, give it to the elite, like be who we are,” he said in the recording. “But the 37 percent that like Trump but want someone new, we’ve got to give them what they want, and that’s policies. Show them what the governor has done. These folks — we’ve got to get them what they need, which is common sense, which is durability and stability and a leader, vision, optics, family, Casey.”His mention of Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey, recalls a strategy memo that Mr. Roe wrote ahead of the debate in which he implored the candidate to “invoke a personal anecdote story about family, kids, Casey, showing emotion.” The memo was posted on the website of Mr. Roe’s firm to get around laws restricting how super PACs and candidates can coordinate. A person not affiliated with the DeSantis operation alerted The New York Times to its existence. Mr. DeSantis was furious about the memo, according to people with knowledge of his reaction.In the presentation to donors last Wednesday, Mr. Roe described Mr. Trump as a surefire loser who cannot win the four states he said the race would come down to.“It’s Arizona, and it’s Georgia and it’s Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And we have Senate races there that cannot overcome him on the ballot,” Mr. Roe said, though he later clarified that there was no Senate race in Georgia, according to a person familiar with the comments. “We’re going to lose them. This is not in dispute. We have to beat him and we’ve got to beat him in the next 60 days and we’ve got to beat everybody else nipping at our heels. Now. And we’ve got to separate further — now.” More

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      Choosing Hospice Care, as Jimmy Carter Did

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      More from our inbox:Changing Our Election SystemReflections on the G.O.P. DebateReplicating the ‘Magic’ of CampJimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 1966. Mr. Carter is now in home hospice, surrounded by a loving family with the resources to care for him.Horace Cort/Associated PressTo the Editor:The Aug. 29 guest essay by Daniela J. Lamas, “A Fitting Final Gift From Jimmy Carter,” is a heartfelt tribute to Mr. Carter.While Dr. Lamas acknowledges hospice’s unpopularity (noting that “the very word ‘hospice’ so often conjures the idea of death and defeat”), she nevertheless makes a persuasive case for it.Hospice is not about giving up hope — it is about making the most of the time we have left. The key to a successful hospice stay is early enrollment, and the fact that Mr. Carter has already benefited from multiple months of care is a testament to this approach.Perhaps Mr. Carter’s real gift is helping us all to overcome our reservations and misguided stereotypes about hospice care. His example should make policymakers rethink current regulations so that all Americans might one day receive — and understand — the full benefits of hospice care.Michael D. ConnellyJohns Island, S.C.The writer served as the chief executive of Mercy Health (now Bon Secours Mercy Health) and is the author of “The Journey’s End: An Investigation of Death and Dying in Modern America.”To the Editor:The idealized fantasy of at-home hospice care is just that: a fantasy.Families who turn down at-home hospice care are right to do so. At-home hospice care is extremely lucrative for the hospice agencies precisely because they provide so little care while the families do all of the work. We were told not to call 911, and most of us do not have medical or nursing training and are on our own, in way over our heads, caring for a dying loved one who may well be in distress and is often frightened.My husband’s death was traumatic for the whole family. Based on my experience, I urge families faced with the heart-wrenching decisions around end-of-life care to consider the family’s needs and the patient’s needs — not the false advertising of the hospice agencies or the naïve recommendations of doctors who don’t live with the consequences.Deena EngelGreenwich, Conn.To the Editor:As a retired hospice nurse, I can totally relate to what the Carters are going through. It is hard for people to accept that the death of a loved one will be coming soon and that fighting against it in a hospital is an unnatural way to die, involving unnecessary and meaningless care at a high cost.Being at home (or sometimes in a hospice facility) surrounded by family and friends with comfort care is much better. Being awakened to be poked and prodded 24 hours a day in a fruitless and expensive effort to keep a dying person alive is just not a good way to go. Hospice can provide all the care that a dying person needs, with much less hustle and bustle.Part of the concern about hospice care is that it uses medications that are not always used in other practices. Morphine is still the best pain control available, and hospice uses it — carefully, with strict controls. Occasionally, hospice also uses ketamine, which has a very bad rap because of abuse of the drug, but is a potent pain control drug if used properly.Hospice care is well established in other parts of the world, but in the U.S. we have a hard time accepting death as being inevitable.It warms my heart that the Carters chose hospice care. It shows yet again what forward-thinking and thoughtful people they are, setting an example for others even in death. Godspeed, Jimmy!Michael OrlinDenverChanging Our Election SystemPhoto illustration by Boris Zhitkov/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “To Improve Democracy, Get Rid of Elections,” by Adam Grant (Opinion, Aug. 23), about using lotteries to select our leaders:At first glance, Mr. Grant’s essay seems way too radical to even consider, but everyone should read and reflect on it.I, for one, am tired of constantly having to vote for the “lesser of two evils” to serve in a Congress filled with representatives who lack the basic qualifications and ethical compass to do their jobs.I am tired of the corruption in our current election system from gerrymandering, the anemic controls on campaign contributions and spending, and the infusion of shameless lying into what we call “spin” or “campaign rhetoric.”Add to that the ever-present possibility of hacks into our election systems, legislation to disenfranchise voters, and baseless allegations of voter fraud that undermine public confidence in our elections.We may not be ready to adopt Mr. Grant’s proposal, but it is an important subject for debate that should not be ignored.Bruce WilderNew OrleansTo the Editor:Adam Grant is right: Winning elections swells the egos of leaders, who imagine that they’re superior to everyone else. But so does the admission system at elite universities like the one where he and I work. The tiny fraction of applicants who get in are led to think they’re better than the vast hordes who got rejected.That’s why we should admit students using a weighted lottery, like the one Mr. Grant proposes for selecting political leaders. Students would need to demonstrate certain competencies to be considered. But their admission would also rest on luck, so they could no longer pretend that they earned their way here simply by merit.The education of our leadership class starts early. And we’re teaching all the wrong lessons.Jonathan ZimmermanPhiladelphiaThe writer teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.Reflections on the G.O.P. DebateRepublicans watched a broadcast of the debate at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“From Party Stronghold, Debate Watchers Cheered Signals From a Post-Trump Era” (news article, Aug. 25) was perceptive. However, I’d like to add two important points.First, the Republican Party is finally making headway: Its candidates for president are starting to reflect the colors of America — white, Black and Asian, with one being a woman.The second is regressive. We saw very little civility between the candidates and from the candidates to the moderators. These people are running for president of the United States, our nation’s “face” to the world. Do we want that person to be crass, rude and disruptive?Jade WuCollier County, Fla.Replicating the ‘Magic’ of CampSilvia TackTo the Editor:As a devoted former summer camper myself, I appreciate all of the joys that Sandra Fox illuminates in her guest essay “There’s No Cure for Campsickness. That’s OK.” (Opinion, Aug. 21).Summer camps offer a kind of time-bound, immersive magic that, as Dr. Fox writes, can’t be replicated at home. But it’s also worth asking why kids have such a need for “an escape, an opportunity for self-reinvention and an invitation to be messier, weirder and just more myself” in the first place.Why can’t real life be more like summer camp? It can be, and already is (at least in some respects) for young people lucky enough to attend schools that are focused on helping them grow into the best possible versions of themselves. When learning is active, immersive and meaningful, kids become fluent in addressing real-world problems. In these schools, trust, strong relationships and a healthy, respectful community are prioritized as much or more than test scores.Long live summer camp! May its magic reach and serve every child. But real life can be magical too. In fact it must be, in order for young children to grow into capable, caring adults.Andy CalkinsGloucester, Mass.The writer co-directs the nonprofit education organization Next Generation Learning Challenges. More

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      Republicans Agree on Foreign Policy — When It Comes to China

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      At first glance, last week’s Republican presidential debate revealed a party fractured over America’s role in the world. Ron DeSantis said he wouldn’t support additional aid to Ukraine unless Europe does more. Vivek Ramaswamy said he wouldn’t arm Ukraine no matter what. Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, all staunch defenders of Kyiv, pounced. Within minutes, the altercations were so intense that the moderators struggled to regain control.But amid the discord, one note of agreement kept rising to the surface: that the true threat to America comes from Beijing. In justifying his reluctance to send more aid to Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis said he’d ensure that the United States does “what we need to do with China.” Mr. Ramaswamy denounced aiding Ukraine because the “real threat we face is communist China.” Ms. Haley defended such aid because “a win for Russia is a win for China.” Mr. Pence said Mr. Ramaswamy’s weakness on Ukraine would tempt Beijing to attack Taiwan.Regardless of their views on Ukraine, Republicans are united in focusing on China. They are returning to the principle that many championed at the beginning of the last Cold War. It’s neither internationalism nor isolationism. It’s Asia First.When Americans remember the early Cold War years, they often think of Europe: NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, which justified aiding Greece and Turkey. But for many leading Republicans at the time, those commitments were a distraction: The real menace lay on the other side of the globe.Senator Robert Taft, nicknamed “Mr. Republican” because of his stature in the party, opposed America’s entrance into NATO and declared in 1948 that “the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace and safety than is Europe.” The following year, Senator H. Alexander Smith, a Republican on the Foreign Policy and Armed Services Committee, warned that while the Truman administration was “preoccupied with Europe the real threat of World War III may be approaching us from the Asiatic side.” William Knowland, the Senate Republican leader from 1953 to 1958, was so devoted to supporting the Nationalist exiles who left the mainland after losing China’s civil war that he was called the “senator from Formosa,” as Taiwan was known at the time.Understanding why Republicans prioritized China then helps explain why they’re prioritizing it now. In her book “Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism,” the historian Joyce Mao argues that Cold War era Republicans’ focus on China stemmed in part from a “spiritual paternalism that arguably carried over from the previous century.” In the late 19th century, when the United States was carving out a sphere of influence in the Pacific, China, with its vast population, held special allure for Americans interested in winning souls for Christ. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who were Christians themselves, used this religious connection to drum up American support — first for their war against Communist rivals on the Chinese mainland and then, after they fled to the island of Taiwan, for their regime there.Many of America’s most influential Asia Firsters — like the Time magazine publisher Henry Luce — were either the children of American missionaries in China or had served as missionaries there themselves. The John Birch Society, whose fervent and conspiratorial brand of anti-Communism foreshadowed the right-wing populism of today, took its name from an Army captain and former missionary killed by Chinese communists at the end of World War II.Today, of course, Americans don’t need religious reasons to put Asia first. It boasts much of the world’s economic, political and military power, which is why the Biden administration focuses on the region, too. In Washington, getting tough on China is now a bipartisan affair. Still, the conservative tradition that Ms. Mao describes — which views China as a civilizational pupil turned civilizational threat — is critical to grasping why rank-and-file Republicans, far more than Democrats, fixate on the danger from Beijing.In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.In a 2021 study, the University of Delaware political scientists David Ebner and Vladimir Medenica found that white Americans who expressed higher degrees of racial resentment were more likely to perceive China as a military threat. And it is white evangelicals today — like the conservative Christians who anchored support for Chiang in the late 1940s and 1950s — who express the greatest animosity toward China’s government. At my request, the Pew Research Center crunched data gathered this spring comparing American views of China by religion and race. It found that white non-Hispanic evangelicals were 25 points more likely to hold a “very unfavorable” view of China than Americans who were religiously unaffiliated, 26 points more likely than Black Protestants and 33 points more likely than Hispanic Catholics.This is the Republican base. And its antipathy to China helps explain why many of the right-wing pundits and politicians often described as isolationists aren’t isolationists at all. They’re Asia Firsters. Tucker Carlson, who said last week that American policymakers hate Russia because it’s a “Christian country,” insisted in 2019 that America’s “main enemy, of course, is China, and the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia aligned against China.” Mr. Ramaswamy, who is challenging Mr. DeSantis for second place in national polls, wants the United States to team up with Moscow against Beijing, too.And of course, the Republican front-runner for 2024, former President Donald Trump — deeply in tune with conservative voters — has obsessed over China since he exploded onto the national political stage eight years ago. Mr. Trump is often derided as an isolationist because of his hostility to NATO and his disdain for international treaties. But on China his rhetoric has been fierce. In 2016, he even said Beijing had been allowed to “rape our country.”Republicans may disagree on the best way forward in Ukraine. But overwhelmingly, they agree that China is the ultimate danger. And whether it’s Mr. Trump’s reference earlier this year to his former secretary of transportation as “Coco Chow” or House Republicans implying that Asian Americans in the Biden administration and Congress aren’t loyal to the United States, there’s mounting evidence that prominent figures on the American right see that danger in racial terms.That’s the problem with Republicans’ return to Asia First. Many in the party don’t only see China’s rise as a threat to American power. They see it as a threat to white Christian power, too.Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      More from our inbox:Airbrushing Older ModelsHaley’s Raised HandSea Life in CaptivityDerek AbellaTo the Editor: Re “Huh? What? There Are Ways to Improve the Sound on Your TV?” (Business, Aug. 18):As an American expat, I got a good chuckle out of Brian X. Chen’s article about poor dialogue sound quality in streaming. The premise, that using subtitles is a terrible inconvenience that diminishes one’s enjoyment of video entertainment, is one of those peculiarly American complaints that seem bizarre to many people overseas.In Chinese-speaking areas and other parts of East Asia, the wide variety of languages, accents and usages can make it tough to comprehend dialogue regardless of sound quality, so video nearly always comes with subtitles, whether it’s on TV, in a movie theater or online. Nobody here seems to mind.Indeed, the people in Malaysia who build the Sonos equipment that Mr. Chen praised must be thrilled that Americans will spend $900 on soundbars to avoid those irritating subtitles.Michael P. ClarkeTaoyuan City, TaiwanTo the Editor:We do not have to bring speakers to a movie theater to watch a movie and we should not have to put speakers on our TV sets to enjoy a television show. Modern television sets should come with high-resolution pictures and high-quality, audible sound. The quality of the sound is as important as the quality of the picture. We should not have to buy soundbars.Bill ChastainNew YorkTo the Editor:I’ve used closed captioning for a while now, not only because the sound quality on streaming services is far from as good as it should be but also because programs produced in England — many of the shows on PBS, which I like — use a lot of slang and hard-to-understand dialects.But a major problem is that some of the streaming services, like Netflix, have closed captions that are far from helpful. They come on well before or well after the spoken words, and too often they flash on so fast that it is impossible to read the entire line of dialogue.Michael SpielmanWellfleet, Mass.To the Editor:Brian X. Chen suggests that we can hear the dialogue in movies and television shows better by installing new equipment. Along with the attempts at improvements made by directors and sound mixers, producers might insist upon better diction from the actors.I’ve noticed this slurring and breathy quality in stage performers, too. Perhaps Broadway shows need closed captioning?Lawrence RaikenQueensAirbrushing Older ModelsRafael Pavarotti/VogueTo the Editor: Re “Do Supermodels Age, or Get Airbrushed Instead?” (Sunday Styles, Aug. 20):The timing couldn’t be more prescient. Just as Greta Gerwig’s irreverent blockbuster “Barbie” is sweeping theaters around the world, Vogue has released its iconic September issue featuring the likes of America’s supermodels — Linda Evangelista, 58, Cindy Crawford, 57, Christy Turlington, 54, and Naomi Campbell, 53 — on its cover.As Vanessa Friedman aptly remarks, they are “paragons of mature beauty whose years have seemingly been smoothed from their faces,” which “look so retouched that they seem more like A.I.-generated bots than actual people.” A Vogue spokeswoman claimed there was only “minimal retouching.” We know better.Although we can surely applaud Vogue’s decision to feature 50-something models on its cover, “retouching” them is perpetuating a big lie. It is, in effect, “Barbiefying” them. Barbie was the icon that fed upon young girls’ feelings of inadequacy. Now older women can gaze at Vogue’s cover and feel inadequate too. Thank you, Vogue.If Vogue, “the fashion Bible,” had elected not to retouch these mature beauties, it would have been a truly groundbreaking event. Certainly a missed opportunity.Thank you, Vanessa Friedman, for speaking truth to Vogue. As Ms. Gerwig’s Barbie comes to realize, “It’s time to change the Constitution.”Elizabeth LangerNew YorkThe writer is a co-founder of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first U.S. journal devoted to women and the law.To the Editor:I laughed this morning reading Vanessa Friedman’s column at the silliness of an article criticizing the airbrushing of aging models. The fashion industry runs on unrealistic representations of beauty. Why should those standards be different for older models?I’ve attended fashion shoots where young models had terrible acne that was ultimately airbrushed out. It seems that, no matter how young or beautiful a model is, there’s almost always flattering lighting and image manipulation. The industry runs on fantasy.So, whether or not older models have their wrinkles airbrushed seems irrelevant if everything is unrealistic. This is commerce. They aren’t profiling women curing cancer. At least now they’re democratizing fashion to allow older women to put their best selves forward, too.I hope they can continue to do that without being criticized for tricks of the trade. I think focusing on airbrushing undermines how great it is that Vogue is keeping women over 50 relevant.Jenifer VogtDobbs Ferry, N.Y.Haley’s Raised HandJoe Buglewicz for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Nikki Haley Is the Best Alternative to Trump,” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 25):Wednesday night’s Republican debate persuaded Mr. Brooks that Nikki Haley is the best alternative to Donald Trump. Yet while Mr. Brooks makes a convincing case that Ms. Haley is a preferable candidate to Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis and especially Vivek Ramaswamy, he fails to address the fact that Ms. Haley, along with every other candidate on the stage except Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, raised her hand when asked if she would support Mr. Trump if he is convicted of one or more felonies and is the Republican nominee.I would ask Mr. Brooks how Ms. Haley’s raised hand shows that she is “one of the few candidates who understands that to run against Trump you have to run against Trump”? And should that not, by itself, render her unfit to become the next president of the United States?David A. BarryCambridge, Mass.Sea Life in CaptivityLolita during a performance at the Miami Seaquarium in 1995. She has been in captivity since 1970.Nuri Vallbona/Miami Herald, via Associated PressTo the Editor: Re “Lolita the Orca, Mainstay of Miami Seaquarium for 50 Years, Dies,” by Jesus Jiménez (news article, nytimes.com, Aug. 18):I know I am not alone in grieving the tragedy of the kidnapping of this orca, also known as Tokitae, her decades spent in captivity, and her untimely death just when freedom and the possibility of being reunited with her family in the Salish Sea were close enough to touch. Her sorrowful life story hurts all the more because our human collective doesn’t seem to have learned a thing from it.Orcas remain endangered and continue to struggle to hear each other and catch dwindling salmon in polluted waters that are choking with boat noise from unceasing human commercial and recreational activity. Worse, the captive industry carries on, including in Seattle, which is intent upon building a shiny new shark tank to imprison even more animals.My hope is that Tokitae’s death will galvanize support against the captivity industry locally and beyond, and serve as a beacon of hope for other beings languishing in tanks simply so that they can be ogled by humans. Let’s honor Tokitae and her bereaved family by ensuring that nobody else has to suffer similarly.Stephanie C. BellSeaTac, Wash. More