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    Gabbard Claims Obama Administration Tried to Undermine Trump in 2016

    Democrats denounced a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as politically motivated and error-ridden.The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes.Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.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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    Are the Courts Checking Trump — or Enabling Him?

    A former federal judge weighs in.In this episode of “The Opinions,” the editorial director David Leonhardt talks to a conservative former federal judge, Michael McConnell, about the role of the courts in President Trump’s second term.Are the Courts Checking Trump — or Enabling Him?A former federal judge weighs in.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the director of the New York Times editorial board. Every week I’m having conversations to help shape the board’s opinions.One thing that I find useful right now is talking with President Trump’s conservative critics. They tend to be alarmed by the president’s behavior, but they also tend to be more optimistic than many progressives about whether American democracy is surviving the Trump presidency. And that combination helps me and my colleagues think about where the biggest risks to our country really are.One area I’ve been wrestling with is the federal court system. I want to understand the extent to which the courts are acting as a check on President Trump as he tries to amass more power, or whether the courts are actually helping him amass that power.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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    The Grip That Race and Identity Have on My Students

    In the spring of 2023, in a cramped classroom in the Hudson Valley, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the courage to think about race in unconventional ways. It revolved around reading books by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson and Albert Murray. These minds had shaped and refined my thinking about the idea of America, the fundamentally mongrel populations that inhabit it, as well as the yet-to-be-perfected flesh-and-blood nation of the future we might one day bring forth in unison.Early in the semester, as I waxed exuberant about the unifying possibilities of the 2008 election, I was met by a conference table ringed with blank stares. For my clever and earnest students, I realized, the earth-shattering political achievements of the beleaguered but still unfolding present were nothing but the vaguest rumor of an abstract history.“Professor,” a diligent young woman from Queens who described herself as Latina and applied a no-nonsense activist lens and corresponding vocabulary to most engagements with the world, voiced what all her classmates must have been thinking. “I was 4 years old in 2008. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”Their experience of this country, and themselves, couldn’t have differed more from my own, or from many of the 19th- and 20th-century authors on our syllabus. I assigned these writers because they had so courageously laid the intellectual and moral framework that a figure like Barack Obama would one day harness.I am old enough now to appreciate that there can be only one politician in your lifetime who can truly move you to dream. I feel lucky to have had that experience through Mr. Obama. My students that semester — white, Latino and Asian teens and 20-somethings whose political views had been forged in relation to the reactionary populism of Donald Trump and through a certain skepticism of the American idea itself — had yet to encounter such an inspirational figure. Race pessimism, even a kind of mass learned helplessness, was instead the weather that enveloped them.When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness. Most maintained that one could no more “retire” from race, as Adrian Piper — another of the authors we wrestled with — aspired to do, than one could teleport up from the classroom.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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    Can Democrats Find Their Way on Immigration?

    The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch.Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still.Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction.Last year, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration, nearly twice as many as in 2020, and the first time since 2005 that a majority had said so. The embrace of a more punitive approach to illegal immigration includes not only white voters but also working-class Latinos, whose support Democrats had long courted with liberal border policies.“When you have the most Latino district in the country outside of Puerto Rico vote for Trump, that should be a wake-up call for the Democratic Party,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who saw Mr. Trump win every county in his district along the border with Mexico. “This is a Democratic district that’s been blue for over a century.”The Trump administration is pursuing the harshest crackdown on immigrants since World War II, an effort many Democrats see as a national crisis.Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The New York TimesWe 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 Road Map for Undoing the Damage of the Big, Awful Bill

    In the 30 years I have been a part of fiscal policymaking I don’t think I have ever seen a legislative push as impressive as the passage of President Trump’s big, dubious tax and policy bill.Don’t get me wrong: The consequences for health insurance, poverty, climate change and macroeconomic stability, in roughly that order of importance, will be horrendous. The Medicaid and other health care changes would undo about three-quarters of the coverage expansion from President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion. The law repeals much of what Joe Biden did for climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. The tax provisions sustain most of the cuts from Mr. Trump’s first term and add in several others for good measure.But before Democrats — and hopefully some Republicans — even try to fix the damage, they should learn the lessons of how the Republicans got all this done, working against tremendous odds on a much faster timetable than the major legislative accomplishments from Mr. Trump’s three predecessors.The first lesson is that ideas really do matter. This legislation did not happen because the public or lobbyists were clamoring for it. Instead Donald Trump and congressional Republicans wanted it and were willing to overcome public disfavor and opposition from vested interests.Sure, special interests were at play in ways big (preserving workarounds to limits on state and local tax deductions) and small (getting new tax breaks for Alaskan whaling captains). But no major lobbying groups were asking for the broad contours of this legislation. The health care industry, which is expected to lose about half a trillion dollars, and the energy industry, which is losing huge tax breaks and subsidies, put up a fight. Their opposition, like that of other industries, went nowhere. And neither did Elon Musk’s — further evidence that oligarchy is the wrong lens through which to view this political moment.The second lesson is that while ideas matter, expert ideas do not necessarily matter. Past fiscal debates have divided economists and policy wonks. In President Trump’s first term, some economists would write opinion articles or go on TV news programs defending his tax cuts as adding to growth while other economists (including me) would write rebuttals.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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    Who Is David Huerta, the Labor Leader Arrested in Los Angeles?

    A well-known figure in the California labor movement for decades, he is now the president of the Service Employees International Union of California. The arrest of the prominent California union leader David Huerta on Friday as he protested an immigration raid in Los Angeles quickly drew condemnation from national labor activists and Democrats.Mr. Huerta — the president of the Service Employees International Union of California — was released on Monday but is still facing charges. He has become a symbol for those protesting the Trump administration’s immigration raids. The protests were further inflamed by the president’s decision on Saturday to send 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell demonstrations, followed by his decision on Monday to more than double that deployment.Here’s what we know.Why was Mr. Huerta arrested?On Friday, Mr. Huerta was detained by federal agents while protesting an immigration raid at a work site in downtown Los Angeles. He was charged with one count of conspiracy to impede an officer. According to a criminal complaint, federal agents conducted search warrants at four businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants and falsifying employment records. Mr. Huerta arrived at the work site in the early afternoon, with protesters already gathered. Mr. Huerta and others were accused of “communicating with each other in a concerted effort to disrupt the law enforcement operations,” according to the criminal complaint.The complaint also accused Mr. Huerta of yelling at officers and sitting cross-legged in front of a vehicular gate, as well as urging demonstrators to “stop the vehicles,” and continue protesting.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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    Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

    In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.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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    The Tragedy of Joe Biden

    The denouement of Joe Biden is unbearably sad.The Irishman who could spend 45 minutes answering one question lost his gift of gab. The father who saw two of his children die and two spin into addiction wilted under the ongoing stress, especially when Hunter Biden — “my only living son,” as Joe called him — got tangled in the legal system.The gregarious pol, who loved chatting up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, ended up barricaded in his Rehoboth, Del., house with Covid, furious at everyone, proclaiming his oldest friends disloyal naysayers. He was fuming at nearly everyone except Jill, Hunter and the cordon sanitaire of aides who had fueled his delusions that he could be re-elected despite his feeble and often incoherent state at 81.And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century. And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books.It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.If presidents get reduced to their essence, Joe Biden’s is a chip on his shoulder.He did not want to hear from former President Barack Obama that he should pass the torch to someone younger, so Obama tried to work obliquely through others to ease him out. Biden saw Obama as the one who pushed him aside in 2015 for Hillary Clinton, a fellow member of the elite world of Ivy Leaguers, a world Biden always felt was sniffy toward him.Obama gave Biden a consolation prize in 2017, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, when Joe wanted a different piece of metal: Excalibur. Biden’s chip grew larger.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