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      Biden Says Only ‘Lord Almighty’ Could Make Him Quit Race

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      President Biden dismissed concerns about his age, his mental acuity and polls showing him losing his re-election bid.President Biden on Friday dismissed concerns about his age, his mental acuity and polls showing him losing his re-election bid, saying in a prime-time interview that his sharpness is tested every day while he is “running the world.” He vowed to drop out only if “the Lord Almighty” tells him to.During a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, which aired unedited, Mr. Biden, 81, said there was no need for him to submit to neurological or cognitive testing. He said he simply did not believe the polls showing him losing. And asked how he would feel if former President Donald J. Trump were elected in November, he brushed off the question.“I feel as long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Mr. Biden said in an interview that was intended to assuage growing concerns about his age following last Thursday’s debate. But speaking in a hoarse voice and defiant throughout, there was little indication that the interview would do much to staunch the bleeding during the deepest crisis of this long political career.Again and again, Mr. Biden told Mr. Stephanopoulos that voters should consider his accomplishments in office.“Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me?” he said. “Who’s going to be able to be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where, at least we’re checkmating China now? Who’s going to do that? Who has that reach?”Mr. Biden repeatedly waved off “hypothetical” questions about whether he would step aside for another Democrat if people he respects say that he can’t win in the fall.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 More French Youth Are Voting for the Far Right

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      Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people often tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.Young people at an anti-far-right gathering in Paris after the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections. 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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      Biden les dijo a sus aliados que los próximos días serán cruciales para salvar su candidatura

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      Los comentarios del presidente son el primer indicio de que está considerando seriamente si puede recuperarse de su actuación en el debate. La Casa Blanca dijo que el reporte era falso.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El presidente Joe Biden les ha dicho a algunos aliados clave que sabe que los próximos días son cruciales y que entiende que quizá no pueda salvar su candidatura si no logra convencer a los votantes de que está a la altura del cargo tras su desastrosa actuación en el debate de la semana pasada.Según dos aliados que han hablado con el mandatario, Biden ha enfatizado que sigue profundamente comprometido con los esfuerzos por su reelección, pero entiende que su viabilidad como candidato está en juego.El presidente trató de proyectar confianza el miércoles en una llamada con su equipo de campaña, incluso cuando funcionarios de la Casa Blanca trataban de calmar los nervios en las filas del gobierno de Biden.“Nadie me está echando”, dijo Biden en la llamada. “No me voy”.La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris también estaba en la conversación telefónica.“No retrocederemos. Seguiremos el ejemplo de nuestro presidente”, afirmó Harris. “Lucharemos y venceremos”.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 We in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?

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      When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing with other people.“I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. (I’m not using her last name because one of the tenets of her 12-step program is anonymity.) “It’s about making a connection with a higher power. It’s about trying to improve that connection with prayer and meditation,” she said.Maggie lost her taste for organized religion, she said, after being disappointed by the way her church handled a situation in which a minister had an affair with an employee. She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members. People talk about “what’s really going on in their lives,” she said. “It’s refreshing and often relatable, and it feeds me.”As I read and listened to the wide range of spiritual stories that readers shared with me over the past few weeks, I thought about the way that nones — the catchall term that describes atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — can imply blankness and almost a kind of nihilism.But as I learn more about the idea and the history of being spiritual but not religious, and the growth of this self-definition over the past few decades, alongside the documented move away from traditional church attendance, I wondered if I hadn’t given enough weight to new expressions of faith. Rather than seeing this moment as reflecting the slow demise of organized religion in America, one that leaves some people bereft of community and meaning, it’s worth asking if we’re in the middle of the birth of a messy new era of spirituality.First, I want to be honest that I’m not going to be able to give a definitive answer through the data here. The polling around questions of spirituality is pretty noisy, because the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are “so amorphous and they overlap so greatly,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University and the author of “Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America,” when we spoke last week.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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      Biden to Hold Crisis Meeting With Democratic Governors at the White House

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      The president is trying to reassure his supporters that he can still win in November despite his debate debacle last week.President Biden is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with several Democratic governors in a closed-door meeting at the White House, part of a push to reassure the president’s supporters that he can still win the election in November despite his debate debacle last week.The White House has not released the names of the governors who will be meeting with Mr. Biden in the Roosevelt Room, just down the hall from the Oval Office.The meeting was added to the president’s schedule even as he is trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in the middle of the biggest political crisis since he took office almost four years ago. Before meeting with the governors, Mr. Biden will posthumously present the Medal of Honor to two Civil War Army soldiers for their actions fighting the Confederacy in 1862.But the situation swirling around the president is anything but normal.Democrats are openly talking about whether Mr. Biden, 81, should abandon his bid for re-election because he is too old to effectively campaign against former President Donald J. Trump. Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, called for Mr. Biden to step aside on Tuesday.At the same time, the first independent polls since the debate are beginning to emerge, showing that the president has lost ground against Mr. Trump. A CNN poll showed Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump by six percentage points, 49 percent to 43 percent. A series of polls by a pro-Biden super PAC leaked to the news site Puck showed the president slipping across the battleground states and in New Mexico, New Hampshire and Virginia, where he was previously winning.Privately, Mr. Biden and his top lieutenants are trying to reassure lawmakers, donors and activists that he can turn things around. Publicly, the White House and the campaign have scheduled a series of events intended to show voters that the debate was just an off night.Mr. Biden will sit for an interview with the ABC host George Stephanopoulos on Friday, his first lengthy interview since the debate. That same day, he will travel to Madison, Wis., for a campaign event. On Sunday, he will campaign in Philadelphia. More

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      There’s No Reason to Resign Ourselves to Biden

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      Though Joe Biden’s debate performance last week was among the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed, it at least seemed to offer clarity. Suddenly, even many people who love this president realized that his campaign has become untenable.For years, loyal Democrats have been suppressing their private anxiety about Biden’s decline. In the debate’s miserable aftermath, there was finally space to acknowledge the obvious: Biden is too old for this. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote. The Democratic Party’s predicament is an awful one, but there was a cold, flinty relief in being forced to reckon with it.Since then, however, the Biden campaign has quickly moved to squash that reckoning, framing the divide in the Democratic Party as one between naïve, hysterical outsiders and savvy, resolute insiders. Biden surrogates fanned out to discount the debate as a single “bad night.” A campaign email slammed those calling on the president to step aside as the “bed-wetting brigade,” and offered tips for responding to “your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important podcasters,” an apparent reference to the former Obama officials who host “Pod Save America.” On Monday, I listened to a recording of a Zoom meeting with Biden’s national finance committee in which his deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, accused the media of blowing the debate “out of proportion,” and his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, compared it to Barack Obama’s lackluster performance against Mitt Romney in 2012.Some allies of the president have even suggested that Democrats learn from Donald Trump’s unswerving followers. “If Republicans are standing lock step” with the 78-year-old disgraced criminal Trump, said the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, “then Democrats damn well should be standing lock step with their ethical and morally decent 81-year-old president.”I don’t blame people in the Biden camp for doing everything they can to tamp down an intraparty revolt. That’s their job, and I take some comfort that they’re doing it as well as is possible, since if Biden is the nominee, it’s imperative that he defeats Trump. But as long as there’s time to replace Biden, Democrats should not allow themselves to be bullied into fatalism and complacency.More than a setback, Biden’s showing at the debate was a revelation, confirming the worst fears of his doubters. Since then, several news reports have made it clear that the Biden we all saw onstage is familiar to those who see him behind the scenes. Axios reported that, according to presidential aides, Biden is alert and engaged from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but not necessarily outside of those hours. The Wall Street Journal reported that European officials were worried about Biden’s “focus and stamina” even before the debate, “with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” This is not a fixable problem.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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      This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      What Is the Democratic Party For?Top Democrats have closed ranks around Joe Biden since the debate. Should they?On Thursday night, after the first presidential debate, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner interviewed Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “You were out there getting a chorus of questions about whether Biden should step down,” she said. “There is a panic that has set in.”Newsom’s reply was dismissive. “We gotta have the back of this president,” he said. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”Perhaps a party that wants to win? Or a party that wants to nominate a candidate that the American people believe is up to the job? Maybe the better question is: What kind of party would do nothing right now?In February, I argued that President Biden should step aside in the 2024 election and Democrats should do what political parties did in presidential elections until the 1970s: choose a ticket at their convention. In public, the backlash I got from top Democrats was fierce. I was a bed-wetter living in an Aaron Sorkin fantasyland.In private, the feedback was more thoughtful and frightened. No one tried to convince me that Biden was a strong candidate. They argued instead that he couldn’t be persuaded to step aside, that even if he could, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election and that if a convention didn’t choose Harris, passing her over would fracture the party. They argued not that Biden was strong but that the Democratic Party was weak.I think Democrats should give themselves a little bit more credit. Biden’s presidency is proof of the Democratic Party’s ability to act strategically. He didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he set the hearts of party activists aflame. Support for him always lacked the passion of support for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or even Andrew Yang. Biden won because the party made a cold decision to unite around the candidate it thought was best suited to beating Donald Trump. Biden won because Democrats did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do.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 Erodes Biden’s Lead in 2024 Election Fundraising After Conviction

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      Just two months ago, President Biden appeared to have a daunting financial advantage. Then Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, and Republicans’ wallets opened.Former President Donald J. Trump out-raised President Biden for the second consecutive month in May, outpacing his successor by roughly $81 million in donations over the last two months as he rode a surge of financial support after his felony conviction.In May, Mr. Biden’s campaign and its joint operation with the Democratic National Committee raised $85 million, compared with $141 million for Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to the two campaigns. In April, the Trump team also brought in $25 million more than the Biden team.The Biden campaign said it entered June with $212 million on hand combined with the party. The Trump operation and R.N.C. have not released a full tally of their cash on hand since the end of March. A partial count on Thursday, revealed in Federal Election Commission filings, showed that Mr. Trump had amassed a war chest of at least $170 million with the party.Overall, Mr. Trump was a daunting $100 million behind Mr. Biden at the start of April. In two months, he cut that cash deficit by at least half.The full accounting of both sides’ finances will be made public in federal filings next month. But the combination of Mr. Trump’s improved fund-raising and Mr. Biden’s heavier spending on advertising this spring appears to put the two sides on a path to enter the summer relatively close to financial parity.“Yes, Trump is raising a lot more money now, and that should scare people,” said Brian Derrick, a strategist who founded a Democratic fund-raising platform called Oath. “But at the end of the day, Biden has the funds that he needs to run a really strong campaign.”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