Presidential Election of 2024

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    Democrats Argue That the 2024 Election Actually Had Its Bright Spots

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    Some leaders have begun to put a sunnier spin on the November outcome by pointing to down-ballot victories — a possible sign that Democrats may not tear down their party after all.For most Democrats, losing to Donald J. Trump was a devastating gut punch that sent them hurtling into the political abyss.But to hear some party leaders and their allies talk, Democrats had plenty of November victories to be proud of.Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wrote a 2,600-word memo to party members last week that pointed to down-ballot triumphs and declared, “Democrats beat back global headwinds that could’ve turned this squeaker into a landslide.”Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, wrote in a statement recently that his caucus had “defied political gravity,” a reference to the newly released “Wicked” movie that was soon echoed by Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat.And further down the ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wrote in its year-end report that the party’s successes in statehouse races represented “one of the most shocking election results in modern history” — even though Democrats lost majorities in chambers in Michigan and Minnesota.These sunny-side-up views of the election serve as something of an antidote to the notion that Democrats, humbled by their 2024 mistakes, are about to begin rebuilding their party from the ground up.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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      Amazon planea donar 1 millón de dólares al fondo de investidura de Trump

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      La decisión forma parte de un patrón en el que empresas tecnológicas están tomando medidas para reparar sus relaciones con el presidente electo.Amazon dijo el jueves que tenía previsto donar un millón de dólares al fondo de investidura del presidente electo Donald Trump, como parte de un patrón en el que las empresas tecnológicas y sus dirigentes están tomando medidas para reparar sus relaciones con Trump.Meta, la empresa matriz de Facebook, dijo el miércoles que iba a donar un millón de dólares al fondo de investidura, apenas unas semanas después de que Zuckerberg se reuniera con Trump en Mar-a-Lago.Amazon y su fundador, Jeff Bezos, quien también es propietario de The Washington Post, han tenido una historia turbulenta con Trump. Trump había albergado durante mucho tiempo frustración con Bezos por los reportajes de The Washington Post. Durante su primer gobierno, Trump también cuestionó que el Servicio Postal de Estados Unidos concediera a Amazon un trato preferencial, y Amazon acusó a Trump de presionar indebidamente al Pentágono para que denegara a la empresa un importante contrato de computación en la nube.Pero durante el verano, Bezos habló con Trump después de que el expresidente fuera tiroteado en un acto de campaña, y en las redes sociales elogió la “gracia y valentía de Trump bajo fuego literal”. Más recientemente, Bezos ha dicho que se siente “muy optimista” sobre el próximo gobierno de Trump.En la Cumbre DealBook celebrada en Nueva York el 4 de diciembre, Bezos dijo que Trump “parece tener mucha energía en torno a la reducción de la regulación. Y mi punto de vista es que, si puedo ayudarlo a hacerlo, lo ayudaré, porque tenemos demasiada regulación en este país”.Amazon también dijo que retransmitiría en directo la toma de posesión el mes que viene, como ya ha hecho con las anteriores. The Wall Street Journal ya había informado de la donación.Trump dijo el jueves que Bezos, quien preside el consejo de administración de Amazon, se reuniría con él la próxima semana. Trump dijo que quería obtener ideas de Bezos y de otros líderes tecnológicos.Los regalos a los comités de investidura, que no tienen límites de contribución, son populares entre las empresas y los particulares deseosos de ganarse el favor de un gobierno entrante. El comité de investidura de Trump ofrece beneficios de alto nivel a los donantes que contribuyan con un millón de dólares.Amazon donó 57.746 dólares al comité de investidura de Trump en 2017, según OpenSecrets, que realiza un seguimiento de las donaciones políticas. La empresa dijo que la campaña de Joe Biden no aceptó donaciones de empresas tecnológicas en 2020.Karen Weise escribe sobre tecnología y reside en Seattle. Su cobertura se centra en Amazon y Microsoft, dos de las empresas más poderosas de Estados Unidos. Más de Karen WeiseMaggie Haberman es corresponsal política sénior e informa sobre la campaña presidencial de 2024, las contiendas electorales en todo Estados Unidos y las investigaciones sobre Trump. Más de Maggie Haberman More

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      The Fed Is Stuck Fighting the Last War

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      Mired in a battle to contain surging prices, the central bank also needs to be nimble enough for the economic downturns to come, our columnist says.The battle against inflation during the Biden years is almost behind us. But we’re in danger of learning the wrong lessons from it.The Federal Reserve, holding its last meeting of the year this coming week, has been fighting runaway consumer prices for nearly three years. So far, at least, it has managed an unusual feat: The rate of inflation has dropped sharply from its peak and there has been no recession.Yet the Fed is stuck in a difficult place. With prices still rising faster than the central bank’s 2 percent target, the incoming Trump administration will be hypersensitive about inflation, which was a decisive factor in the November elections. At the same time, the new administration’s policies on tariffs and immigration could set off another inflation surge. So the Fed must remain acutely vigilant on the inflation front.But it will have to keep experimenting, to be ready for the curve balls coming from future recessions. Some economists believe the Fed would gain flexibility if it reconsidered its 2 percent inflation target, though they say the central bank can’t take that step now because it is under too much pressure to preserve its own institutional independence.Still, a single-minded focus on inflation could leave the Fed without the right tools for coping with economic downturns ahead.The Fed’s predicament reminds me of a general who is endlessly fighting the last war — conscientiously dissecting the tactics of recent battles and failing to prepare properly for the next ones.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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      Amazon Plans $1 Million Donation to Trump’s Inaugural Fund

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      Amazon said on Thursday that it was planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural fund, part of a pattern in which tech companies and their leaders are taking steps to repair their relationships with Mr. Trump.Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said on Wednesday that it was putting $1 million into the inaugural fund, just weeks after Mr. Zuckerberg met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago.Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, have had a rocky history with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump had long harbored frustration with Mr. Bezos over reporting in The Washington Post. During his first administration, Mr. Trump had also questioned whether the U.S. Postal Service gave Amazon a sweetheart deal, and Amazon accused Mr. Trump of improperly pressuring the Pentagon to deny the company a major cloud computing contract.But over the summer, Mr. Bezos spoke with Mr. Trump after the former president was shot at a campaign event, and on social media he praised Mr. Trump’s “grace and courage under literal fire.” More recently, Mr. Bezos has said that he is “very optimistic” about the incoming Trump administration.At the DealBook Summit in New York on Dec. 4, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Trump “seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.”Amazon also said it would livestream the inauguration next month, as it has done with previous inaugurations. The donation was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.Mr. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Bezos, who chairs Amazon’s board, was meeting him next week. Mr. Trump said he wanted to get ideas from Mr. Bezos and other tech leaders.Gifts to inaugural committees, which do not have contribution limits, are popular among businesses and individuals eager to curry favor with an incoming administration. Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee is offering top-tier benefits to donors who contribute $1 million.Amazon gave $57,746 to Mr. Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations. The company said the Biden campaign did not accept donations from tech companies in 2020. More

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      Donald Trump Is Time’s Person of the Year

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has both derided Time magazine and pined for its approval, was named the publication’s person of the year on Thursday.Mr. Trump also received the title in 2016, after his first presidential election victory, and now joins a group of 16 people who have been chosen more than once. The club includes the last three two-term presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only person to have been given the title three times.)Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor in chief, wrote in the magazine that the choice was not a difficult one: “On the cusp of his second presidency, all of us — from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics — are living in the Age of Trump.”Mr. Trump, who rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, has had a tempestuous relationship with Time. After being named person of the year in 2016, he described the magazine as a “very important” publication and said it had granted him a “tremendous honor.”But Mr. Trump, who had won a polarizing presidential race in which he lost the popular vote, bristled at Time’s cover, which described him as “president of the divided states of America.”“I didn’t divide,” he objected in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show, adding: “We’re going to put it back together. And we’re going to have a country that’s very well healed.”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 Picks Ed Martin, ‘Stop the Steal’ Promoter, for Management and Budget Staff Chief

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      Ed Martin, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be the chief of staff for his Office of Management and Budget, is an anti-abortion activist who helped to organize the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the 2020 election for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin, a longtime Republican operative in Missouri, served as chief of staff to former Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri nearly two decades ago and ran the state party 10 years ago. But it was his alignment with the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly in the last few years of her life that amplified his national profile as a conservative hard-liner.In saying on Tuesday that he had selected Mr. Martin to serve at the O.M.B., Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Martin had co-written a book with Ms. Schlafly — published a few days after she died in September 2016 — which urged conservatives to vote for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin has continued to promote his alignment with Ms. Schlafly through an organization he runs bearing her name, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles.Mr. Martin will work under Russell Vought, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s who ran O.M.B. for part of his first administration. Mr. Trump also on Tuesday named Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who recently lost the attorney general race in North Carolina, as deputy director of O.M.B.The office is expected to play a crucial role within the Trump administration in helping Mr. Trump to wield power across federal agencies. Mr. Vought was one of the influential figures behind Project 2025, the blueprint that the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have mapped for the Trump administration. Mr. Trump during the election distanced himself from the project but has since been plucking people affiliated with it to serve under him.Mr. Martin did not respond to immediate requests for comment.Mr. Martin worked with Mr. Vought on the Republican National Committee’s new policy platform, which pulled back some of the party’s hard-line language on abortion. Yet Mr. Martin has backed anti-abortion policies that include a national ban, and has expressed openness to the idea that women and doctors should be prosecuted for abortion.He also served as an organizer and financier in the “Stop the Steal” movement trying to promote efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Congressional Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a speech outside the building a day earlier, Mr. Martin spoke of “die-hard true Americans,” and said he would work until “we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.” After that he helped usher a small right-wing organization once associated with Ms. Schlafly, America’s Future, over to retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a major promoter of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Flynn and other family members who work at the organization have turned the group into a backer of far-right conspiratorial ideology. More

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      Scholz Calls for Confidence Vote, in Step Toward German Elections

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      Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had few alternatives after his three-party coalition broke up, is widely expected to lose when Parliament takes up the measure on Monday.Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany called for a confidence vote in Parliament on Wednesday, taking the first formal step toward disbanding the German government and leading to snap elections likely to oust him from office.The move, culminating in a parliamentary vote on Monday, became all but necessary in November, when the chancellor fired his finance minister, precipitating the breakup of his fragile three-party coalition.“In a democracy, it is the voters who determine the course of future politics. When they go to the polls, they decide how we will answer the big questions that lie ahead of us,” Mr. Scholz said from the chancellery in Berlin on Wednesday.Mr. Scholz expects to lose the vote. The collapse of the government along with the early election on Feb. 23 amount to an extraordinary political moment in a country long known for stable governments.The political turbulence in Germany and the fall last week of the government in France have left the European Union with a vacuum of leadership at critical moment: It is facing challenges from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the imminent return to the presidency of Donald J. Trump in the United States.Mr. Trump has threatened a trade war with Europe and has consistently expressed skepticism about America’s commitment to the NATO alliance that has been the guarantor of security on the continent for 75 years.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 Offers Confusing Clues on Syria

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      The president-elect faces hard choices about the country’s post-Assad future. His vows not to get involved might be hard to keep.President-elect Donald J. Trump will inherit a dangerous new Middle East crisis in Syria when he assumes office in January. But how he might approach a nation now controlled by rebels with terrorist roots is unclear, and may be decided by fierce competing arguments among advisers and foreign leaders in the months to come.There are many good reasons to expect Mr. Trump to take a hands-off approach to Syria, which erupted into civil war in 2011. One is Mr. Trump’s apparent disdain for the country, which he has branded a land of “sand and death.”Mr. Trump has also long railed against broader U.S. efforts to reshape former Middle East dictatorships such as Iraq and Libya, in what he calls America’s “endless wars.” As rebels entered Damascus, Syria’s capital, over the weekend, Mr. Trump posted on social media that the country was “a mess” and that the United States “should have nothing to do with it.”“This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved,” Mr. Trump wrote, in all capital letters.The sentiment was echoed on social media by Vice President-elect JD Vance, a fervent critic of American foreign policy overreach.Mr. Trump plans to nominate Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, as his director of national intelligence. She has spent years arguing that the United States has no business getting involved in Syria’s long-running civil war.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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      Scott Bessent, Trump’s Pick for Treasury Secretary, Doesn’t Fit the President-Elect’s Loyalist Mold

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      A hedge-fund titan who worked for George Soros. A deep-rooted Southerner with a fondness for high-end real estate. A gay man, married with children. Who is Scott Bessent?A capitalist with a soft spot for royalty. A deep-rooted Southerner with a fondness for stylish New York locales. A gay man, married with children, who has embraced a Republican Party that has sometimes vilified elements, and individuals, of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.Such are the crosscurrents coursing through the biography of Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary. The appointment would give him vast power over the nation’s economic plans — and place him fifth in line for the presidency, potentially the highest governmental position ever held by a gay person.A hedge-fund titan with a formidable professional pedigree, Mr. Bessent, 62, has been a quiet presence in New York’s social scene since the 1990s, when he worked for George Soros, the liberal megadonor and financier, eventually managing tens of billions of dollars in assets.He counts among his friends a group of elegant socialites and women of the world, Capote-ian swans of a different era, including the president-elect’s former sister-in-law Blaine Trump, Princess Firyal of Jordan and Queen Camilla, whom he once hosted at his Hamptons home — and forced to smoke her cigarettes outside. He is friends, too, with King Charles III, who has regularly hosted him at Buckingham Palace. Mr. Bessent no longer has a home in New York City, and is instead schooling his two children, Charlotte and Cole, ages 11 and 15, in London with his husband, John Freeman, a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, whom he married in 2011. The family also has homes in Charleston, S.C. — the state where Mr. Bessent was raised — and in Lyford Cay, a gated community in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, which advertises itself as “one of the Caribbean’s most elegant and exclusive enclaves.”But Mr. Bessent’s family history is also pocked with hardships, including two bankruptcies for his father — a decade apart, in 1969 and 1979 — and the 2022 death of his younger sister, Wyn Nicole Bessent, who had worked as a public defender and seemingly lived a simpler life far removed from her brother’s glittering existence.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