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    Don’t Underestimate the Mobilizing Force of Abortion

    Poland recently ousted its right-wing, nationalist Law and Justice Party. In 2020, a party-appointed tribunal severely restricted the country’s abortion rights, sparking nationwide protests and an opposition movement. After a trip to Poland, the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg came to recognize that similar dynamics could prevail in the United States in 2024. In this audio essay, she argues that Joe Biden’s campaign should take note of what a “powerful mobilizing force the backlash to abortion bans can be.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday, and can be found in the audio player above.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Getty ImagesThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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    King Charles’s Cancer Diagnosis May Reshape How U.K. Monarchy Works

    Britain’s king has been a highly visible royal, making hundreds of public appearances. As he steps back from view, who will fill the gap?Queen Elizabeth II liked to say that she needed to be seen to be believed. Now it falls to her son King Charles III to test that principle, after a cancer diagnosis that will force him out of the public eye for the foreseeable future.For a family that has cultivated its public image through thousands of appearances a year — ribbon-cuttings, ship launchings, gala benefits, investiture ceremonies, and so on — the sidelining of Charles may finally force the royals to rethink how they project themselves in a social-media age.The king’s illness is the latest blow to the British royal family, which has seen its ranks depleted by death (Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip), scandal (Prince Andrew), self-exile (Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan), and other health woes (Catherine, the wife of Prince William).Charles, who is 75, took part in 425 royal engagements in 2023, his first full year on the throne, according to a count by The Daily Telegraph. That made him the second hardest-working royal after his younger sister, Princess Anne, who did 457. Both were busier than in the previous year, when Elizabeth, though in the twilight of her life, still appeared in public sporadically.While Anne, 73, shows little sign of slowing down and William plans to return to public duties while his wife convalesces at home from abdominal surgery, even a temporary absence of the king from the public stage would put heavy pressure on the family’s skeleton crew of working royals.Princess Anne, left, during royal duties on Tuesday, giving an honor to Nicholas Spence, an operatic tenor.Yui Mok/Press Association, via Associated PressWe 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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    Germany Braces for Decades of Confrontation With Russia

    Leaders are sounding alarms about growing threats, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz is wary of pushing the Kremlin, and his own ambivalent public, too far.Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.“Nobody knows how or whether this will last,” Mr. Pistorius said of the current war, arguing for a rapid buildup in the size of the German military and a restocking of its arsenal.Mr. Pistorius’s public warnings reflect a significant shift at the top levels of leadership in a country that has shunned a strong military since the end of the Cold War. The alarm is growing louder, but the German public remains unconvinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.The defense minister’s post in Germany is often a political dead end. But Mr. Pistorius’s status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others — including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz — do not enjoy.As Mr. Scholz prepares to meet President Biden at the White House on Friday, many in the German government say that there is no going back to business as usual with Mr. Putin’s Russia, that they anticipate little progress this year in Ukraine and that they fear the consequences should Mr. Putin prevail there.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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    MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Grounded in Reality

    A few days ago, Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota — a MAGA hard-liner sometimes mentioned as a potential running mate for Donald Trump — warned that President Biden is “remaking” America, turning us into Europe. My first thought was: So he’s going to raise our life expectancy by five or six years? In context, however, it was clear that Noem believes, or expects her audience to believe, that Europe is a scene of havoc wrought by hordes of immigrants.As it happens, I spent a fair bit of time walking around various European cities last year, and none of them was a hellscape. Yes, broadly speaking, Europe has been having problems dealing with migrants, and immigration has become a hot political issue. And yes, Europe’s economic recovery has lagged that of the United States. But visions of a continent devastated by immigration are a fantasy.Yet such fantasies are now the common currency of politics on the American right. Remember the days when pundits solemnly declared that Trumpism was caused by “economic anxiety”? Well, despite a booming economy, there’s still plenty of justified anxiety out there, reflecting many people’s real struggles: America is still a nation riddled with inequality, insecurity and injustice. But the anxiety driving MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience.That is, at this point, Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well, not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people.This is most obvious when it comes to the U.S. economy, which had a very good — indeed, almost miraculously good — 2023. Economic growth not only defied widespread predictions of an imminent recession, it also hugely exceeded expectations; inflation has plunged and is more or less where the Federal Reserve wants it to be. And people are feeling it in their own lives: 63 percent of Americans say that their financial situation is good or very good.Yet out on the stump a few days ago, Nikki Haley declared that “we’ve got an economy in shambles and inflation that’s out of control.” And it’s likely that the Republicans who heard her believed her. According to YouGov, almost 72 percent of Republicans say that our 3-2 economy — roughly 3 percent growth and 2 percent inflation — is getting worse, while only a little over 6 percent say that it’s getting better.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?  More

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    Why Americans Are Feeling Better About the Economy

    In 2022, Republicans seemed to have an easy path to regaining the White House, no actual policy proposals required. All they had to do was contrast Donald Trump’s economic record — which they portrayed as stellar — with the lousy economy under President Biden.That rosy view of the Trump economy involved a lot of selective forgetting — more about that in a minute. But the Biden economy was indeed troubled for much of 2022, with the highest inflation in 40 years. Jobs were plentiful, with unemployment near a 50-year low, but many economists were predicting an imminent recession.Since then, however, two terrible things have happened — terrible, that is, from the point of view of Republican partisans. First, the economy has healed: Inflation has plunged without any major rise in unemployment. Second, Americans finally seem to be noticing the good news.Before I get to that, however, let’s talk for a second about Biden’s predecessor. How can people claim that Trump presided over a great economy when he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he arrived?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?  More

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    New Hampshire Street Signs Tell the Story of the Republican Primary

    This street corner tells the tale of the Republican primary.If you want to understand the New Hampshire primary, stand at the corner of West Broadway and Valley Street in Derry, N.H.There are two huge yard signs — one for Nikki Haley and one for Donald Trump — on adjacent houses. Perhaps a neighbor-on-neighbor feud?Not exactly: When my colleague Michael Bender headed there recently, neighbors told him that the pro-Haley house had been vacant for years, and that political campaigns often planted their signs there. And the pro-Trump house was actually owned by an absentee landlord who lives in Florida.It felt like one big metaphor for this campaign. The race looks like a real contest, with yard signs and all the usual campaign events. Yet when you dig a little deeper, there’s far less going on than it may seem.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?  More

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    The Lost DeSantis Moment

    For months, he routinely led Donald Trump in head-to-head polls and gave a possible glimpse at a post-Trump Republican future.Ron DeSantis after winning re-election as Florida governor in 2022. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesRon DeSantis began the 2024 campaign as a formidable candidate, with early poll numbers that rivaled or even exceeded the likes of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.In the end, that early strength meant only that he had more room to fall.There are countless reasons Mr. DeSantis fell apart and ultimately ended his campaign Sunday — including that his opponent proved once again to be a juggernaut. Perhaps Mr. DeSantis might have won the nomination in most other years, if he hadn’t been going against a former president.But rather than dwell on his losing campaign, it’s worth returning to his apparent strength at the outset — that brief moment when Mr. DeSantis, or at least the idea of Mr. DeSantis, routinely led Mr. Trump in high-quality head-to-head polls.In the eight years since Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination, this was the only moment when Republican voters appeared willing to go a different direction. Mr. DeSantis didn’t capitalize on the moment, but nonetheless it’s the only glimpse we’ve had into the post-Trump Republican Party. We saw something that might bring it about, and we saw what it might look like.What brought it about: the midtermsOver the last eight years, Mr. Trump has said and done countless things that might have doomed any other politician. He’s been impeached twice. He encouraged what turned into the Jan. 6 riot. He’s been charged with multiple federal crimes. None of it really made any difference in his support.That is, until November 2022. The disappointing Republican showing in the midterms damaged Mr. Trump in the polls, and Mr. DeSantis surged to take a clear lead in head-to-head polls that lasted for months.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?  More

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    Last Exit Before Trump: New Hampshire

    Tuesday’s primary election will probably decide whether there will be a race at all.Newport, N.H., last week. CJ Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockLet’s be blunt about the stakes of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.If Donald J. Trump wins decisively, as the polls suggest, he will be on track to win the Republican nomination without a serious contest. The race will be all but over.The backdrop is simple: Mr. Trump holds a dominant, 50-plus-point lead in the polls with just seven weeks to go until the heart of the primary season, when the preponderance of delegates will be awarded. His position has only improved since Iowa, with national polls now routinely showing him with over 70 percent of the vote.Even skeptical Republican officials are consolidating behind the party’s front-runner. Ron DeSantis’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Mr. Trump is only the latest example.The polling by state isn’t much better for Nikki Haley, the only remaining opponent for Mr. Trump. He leads Ms. Haley by at least 30 points in all of the states after New Hampshire until Super Tuesday. So without a monumental shift in the race, he will secure the nomination in short order. More