Presidential Election of 2024

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      Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats

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      The Paley Center for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing,” the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003. Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym POTUS), while others turned out to be — well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental.Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode called “Two Cathedrals,” a serious illness that Bartlet had been concealing from the public had come to light, and the president, hobbled, faced the question of whether to run for re-election. “Yeah,” he said in the third season opener. “And I’m going to win.”Which is exactly what President Biden has been signaling since the day after his bad night.Because I needed the “West Wing” audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.But what if the show had gone another way?What if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?We’d have had Bartlet drop out of the race and endorse whoever had the best chance of beating the guy.The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.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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      A Week After Shooting, Trump Leaves Unity Behind and Returns to Insults and Election Denial

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      At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.Even as Mr. Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace Mr. Biden on their ticket as an anti-democratic effort.By contrast, Mr. Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020 election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Mr. Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Mr. Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.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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      Secret Service Says It Denied Earlier Trump Requests for More Federal Resources

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      In a reversal, a spokesman said the service had turned down requests from former President Donald J. Trump’s team over the past two years, though he said the requests did not include the recent rally in Pennsylvania.The Secret Service acknowledged on Saturday that it had turned down requests for additional federal resources sought by former President Donald J. Trump’s security detail in the two years leading up to his attempted assassination last week, a reversal from earlier statements by the agency denying that such requests had been rebuffed.Almost immediately after a gunman shot at Mr. Trump from a nearby warehouse roof while he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pa., last weekend, the Secret Service faced accusations from Republicans and anonymous law enforcement officials that it had turned down requests for additional agents to secure Mr. Trump’s rallies.“There’s an untrue assertion that a member of the former president’s team requested additional resources and that those were rebuffed,” Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said last Sunday, the day after the shooting.Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said on Monday that the accusation that he had issued the denials was “a baseless and irresponsible statement and it is one that is unequivocally false.”On Saturday, Mr. Guglielmi acknowledged that the Secret Service had turned down some requests for additional federal security assets for Mr. Trump’s detail. Two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the Trump campaign had been seeking additional resources for the better part of the time that Mr. Trump had been out of office. The denied requests for additional resources were not specifically for the rally in Butler, Mr. Guglielmi said.U.S. officials previously said the Secret Service had enhanced security for the former president before the Butler rally because it had received information from U.S. intelligence agencies about a potential Iranian assassination plot against Mr. Trump.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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      Is This the Summer of the Kamala Harris Coconut Pina Colada?

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      As the vice president’s name is floated as a potential presidential candidate, the internet took a goofy Kamala Harris meme and made it a drink.When things go kerflooey in American political life, the time is always right to reach for a dumb internet trope. Mostly harmless, these are needful distractions from difficult truths. So while the annals will remember this as a summer of reckonings with the nature of democracy, history’s footnotes may also record the Kamala Harris coconut tree meme.Some background: Since early July, the internet (well, X; Instagram has given it a pass) has been abuzz with stories examining and professing to explain a meme involving the vice president and remarks she made a year ago quoting a comment her mother often made during her childhood.“She would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree,’” Ms. Harris said during a 2023 speech at a White House initiative on advancing educational equity for Hispanic people. Dated without a doubt, the expression was not as incomprehensible as Gen Z commentators had it, its language vaguely Depression-era, when the generationally clueless were often said to have been found “under a cabbage leaf.”When the online chattering classes from the opposition got hold of the clip, it quickly became part of an archive of mostly derogatory Harris kooky-isms — her uproarious and sometimes situationally inappropriate laugh, her dance moves and anecdotes that can seem inapt. Detractors pilloried her. Stans of the KHive hearted her for an individuality seldom on public display in public life.A Kamala Harris coconut piña colada may be fun to consider, but it may not be her drink of choice.David Walter Banks 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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      Trump and Zelensky Speak by Phone as Ukraine Worries About U.S. Backing

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      Former President Donald J. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke over the phone late this week amid mounting concern in Kyiv that a second Trump administration would spell the end of American support in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.Ukrainian officials worry that if a re-elected Mr. Trump kept to his vow to end the war quickly — he has suggested that he could end it in one day — it would allow Russia to keep the territory it occupies and leave it in a position to attack Ukraine again.In a social media post about the call, which took place on Friday, Mr. Trump said that, as president he would “bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives.” He said both Russia and Ukraine “will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence.”Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on Friday that he had underlined in the call “the vital bipartisan and bicameral American support for protecting our nation’s freedom and independence.” He said he and Mr. Trump had agreed “to discuss at a personal meeting what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting.”It was the first call between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump since the former American president left office in 2020. Although the Ukrainian authorities have tried to remain neutral in the U.S. presidential campaign, officials have started building bridges with Mr. Trump’s camp, hoping to shape his views on Ukraine.Oleksandr Kraiev, the head of the North America Program at Ukrainian Prism, a Kyiv-based think tank, said Ukrainian diplomats had been working on strategies to persuade Mr. Trump to continue supporting Ukraine, mindful that he can be unpredictable in foreign policy. The Republican Party’s platform does not include the word Ukraine, referring only to a broad goal of restoring “peace in Europe.”Mr. Kraiev said that Kyiv could frame its objectives as in being in line with two of Mr. Trump’s top interests: his image as a strong leader and his defense of the American economy.“We can connect with Trump on these two specific topics,” Mr. Kraiev said. More

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      Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality

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      Four years ago the Republican convention was a bizarre spectacle, a cross between a Napoleonic fantasy and a Leni Riefenstahl movie. The dominant image was of an imperial dynasty laying claim to forever rule. I expected more of the same when I tuned in on Monday night to watch this year’s convention, but amped up even further by the weekend’s terrifying near-miss assassination attempt.What I saw instead was an even-toned, inclusive performance that seemed designed to resemble conventions of a more, well, conventional era, or perhaps just entertainment-world award shows. The lineup of speakers offered racial, gender and even ideological diversity — including the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, who announced from the main stage that his organization was “not beholden to anyone or any party.”You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump on everything was a consistent talking point. As for the shooting, it had been instantly mythologized as a miracle of survival: Speaker after speaker, including Trump himself, credited the Almighty with saving the former president so he could save America. There was no reference to the speculation, multiplying across the internet, that the deep state was behind the assassination attempt. Even Donald Trump was, by his standards, cogent and calm.While one half of the electorate was being served this bland spectacle, the other half struggled to follow a dispiriting and confusing story in which the stakes in the presidential election are existential — and the only man who can save American democracy is President Biden. Even as more and more funders, political operatives and ordinary Democratic voters said that he should withdraw his candidacy, the campaign told them to put their faith in a frail, diminished man — worse than that, it insisted that he was neither frail nor diminished.In the interview with Lester Holt that was broadcast on the first night of the Republican convention, Biden’s most energetic moment came when he lashed out at the press for criticizing him rather than his opponent — a favorite tactic of demagogues everywhere. If the media criticize him, then the media are bad. If the polls show a lack of support for his candidacy, then the polls are wrong. If his allies are trying to save him from himself, then they are no longer his allies. The president and his campaign have adopted the habits of the monster they promise to save us from.The week felt like an emotional reprise of the early months (or was it years?) of the Trump presidency. Every day, it seemed, brought news that felt like it would change history. We assimilated it and moved on, getting up in the morning, going about our business, pausing to express shock at another piece of news, and starting the cycle over again. We developed the ability to feel simultaneously shaken and bored, dismayed and indifferent. As media outlets engaged with Trump’s lies — some enthusiastically and others because it could not be avoided — we grew accustomed to an ever growing gap between reality as we experienced it and the ways in which it was reflected back to us by politicians and journalists.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 Some of the Loudest Cheers for Trump Are Coming From Silicon Valley

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      Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology have endorsed former President Donald Trump. How did the Democrats lose Silicon Valley? Or did they?If you read the headlines this week about Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology moving to support former President Trump’s re-election, it appeared a sea change had taken place in Silicon Valley, long considered a Democrat hotbed.The loudest donors in Silicon Valley are promoting Trump at a time when the tech world as a whole is ascending in Washington, with billionaires using their ballooning wealth and media foothold to exert influence. Their voices are made all the more prominent amid the conspicuous neutrality of Big Tech leaders like the Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai and the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who are possibly afraid of invoking Trump’s ire and employee backlash.It wasn’t always this way. But big technology’s relationship with government, once symbiotic, attracted new scrutiny from Silicon Valley’s libertarian masses after social media companies tamped down on misinformation, drawing accusations that they were ceding to an overstepping government.For some, the infractions were more personal. Musk was brushed off by President Biden over his anti-union stance and excluded from an electric vehicle event at the White House in 2021. Now Musk, who has voted for Democrats in the past and has said he created Tesla to help one of Biden’s biggest ambitions, preventing climate change, has become among the party’s biggest detractors.Then there are issues in California, like rising taxes and a crime wave in San Francisco; the anti-woke movement; and regulatory battles over antitrust, crypto, and artificial intelligence that have high stakes in Silicon Valley.The question now is whether Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters are heralding a larger shift in the tech world, or if they’re merely demonstrating that their voices are more powerful in politics than ever.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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      Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go!

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      Everyone wants Joe Biden gone.Even the people who don’t want him gone really want him gone.“Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” said one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”I have many happy memories of Rehoboth Beach. I went there growing up and have Proustian recollections of crispy French fries with vinegar sold on the Boardwalk. But now my gladdening images have been replaced by a maddening one: President Biden hunkered down in his house there, recovering from Covid, resisting talking to anyone who will tell him the truth, hoarsely yelling, “Get off my beach!” at the growing list of Democratic lawmakers and donors trying to warn him that he is pulling down his party and the country.It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy.The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.Shockingly, even as the Republicans roar out of Milwaukee, vibrating with joy, Biden’s brain trust continues to run a lousy campaign, as though nothing has changed. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, went on “Morning Joe” Friday to say that the polls aren’t as bad as they are, that Biden is “more committed than ever” to running and that, when 100,000 homes got a knock on the door this past week, 76 percent of the respondents “are with Joe Biden.” Then, as Alex Thompson reported for Axios, Dillon went from cable news to a rah-rah call telling staffers not to pay attention to cable news because “the people in our country are not watching cable news.”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