Presidential Election of 2024

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      Who Is Lloyd Doggett? Texas Democrat Calls for Biden to Exit Race

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      Representative Lloyd Doggett, a little-known Texas progressive, on Tuesday became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Biden to step aside as the party’s nominee after a halting debate performance that has raised major questions about his health, age and mental acuity.In going public with his concerns, Mr. Doggett, who has represented his Austin-based district for close to 30 years, spoke aloud what most other Democrats have only dared to say in private since Thursday’s debate.Mr. Doggett is a rank-and-file congressman with little national profile. But his public statement gave voice to a growing sense of doom and worry among Democrats about whether Mr. Biden can continue as the party’s nominee, and if by doing so he might cost the party not only the White House but also any chance of controlling Congress.“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Mr. Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, the congressman said he made the decision to break with his party and call for Mr. Biden to take himself out of the race after feeling “alarmed” as he watched the debate with his wife at their Washington home.He was dismayed when Mr. Biden did not even try to debunk many of the falsehoods that former President Donald J. Trump put forward in his answers. He was disconcerted when the president seemed to lose his train of thought and trail off in discussing health care, ending an answer with the words, “we beat Medicare.” And “we were all troubled,” he said, by Mr. Biden’s lack of forceful answers on abortion and reproductive freedom.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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      Tim Ryan Says Kamala Harris Should Replace Biden as Democratic Nominee

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      Tim Ryan, a former Ohio congressman, called on Democrats to replace President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the party’s ticket in the November election against former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Ryan, in a Newsweek opinion column, wrote that he had lost confidence in Mr. Biden’s ability to defeat his rival after watching the president struggle in Thursday’s head-to-head debate with Mr. Trump. He noted that Mr. Biden had said he would be a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, an idea he said he liked. “Regrettably, that bridge collapsed last week,” he wrote.“Witnessing Joe Biden struggle was heartbreaking,” Mr. Ryan wrote of the debate. “And we must forge a new path forward.”In 2020, Mr. Ryan endorsed Biden after his own bid for the party’s nomination failed. During the midterm elections in 2022, he lost his bid for Senate in Ohio to J.D. Vance, a Republican who is said to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist of running mates.Since Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance last week, the noise has intensified about whether Democrats should replace him as the party’s nominee. He is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in August in Chicago.While figures such as Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, the governors of Michigan and California, have drawn attention as potential replacements, Mr. Ryan wrote that Ms. Harris gives Democrats their best shot at holding the presidency. “Those who say that a Harris candidacy is a greater risk than the Joe Biden we saw the other night and will continue to see are not living in reality,” he wrote. “It is not just utterly preposterous for the haters to say that, it is insulting.” More

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      How Partisan Media Covered the Trump Immunity Decision

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      Liberal and conservative media outlets alike on Monday gave top billing to the news that the Supreme Court granted former President Donald J. Trump significant immunity from prosecution.But the similarities stopped there.Liberal outlets criticized the ruling as a biased move from a conservative Supreme Court. They said it only heightened the stakes for November’s general election, since the decision complicates the criminal case that accuses Mr. Trump of trying to overturn the last election.Many conservative outlets offered a relatively straightforward assessment of the decision, which left to lower courts to decide which aspects of Mr. Trump’s conduct were protected from prosecution. But several conservative commentators nonetheless celebrated the 6-3 decision and admonished Democrats who opposed it.Here’s how a selection of outlets covered the news:FROM THE LEFTMeidasTouchThe court’s ruling found Mr. Trump was immune from being prosecuted for “official” acts during his presidency, but said he was not immune from being prosecuted for “unofficial” conduct.Such broad immunity was needed to maintain “an energetic, independent executive,” according to the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The ruling also said a district court would have to decide what entailed official and unofficial conduct, including Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. That process would likely delay any trial of Mr. Trump until after November’s election.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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      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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      Jill Biden Is Vogue’s Cover Star

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      During the most challenging period of President Biden’s re-election bid, the first lady appears on the cover of a high-fashion bible.The August cover of Vogue featuring Dr. Jill Biden was released online Monday — four days after the big debate — and brought with it a fresh round of scrutiny over her role as a die-hard campaigner for her husband, who is locked in a nail-biting campaign for re-election.During much of President Biden’s term, the first lady was a figure of minimal controversy. That began to shift when campaign season heated up. Laura Ingraham of Fox News claimed that Dr. Biden was covering up the president’s unfitness out of her own desire for political power and prestige. Sounding the same theme, The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, began referring to her as “Lady Mac-Biden.”Dr. Biden took center stage after Mr. Biden struggled to finish his sentences during a dismal debate performance on Thursday against former President Donald J. Trump. Afterward, The New York Times reported that Dr. Biden was the first person he had turned to: “The first lady’s message to him was clear: They’d been counted out before, she was all in, and he — they — would stay in the race.”On the Vogue cover, Dr. Biden wears a white Ralph Lauren tuxedo dress. She was photographed in the spring by Norman Jean Roy, whose recent contributions to Vogue include portraits of Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. The accompanying profile of the first lady, by Maya Singer, describes her as a “vision of calm amid utter cacophony.”Dr. Biden has been on the cover of Vogue twice before. Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, noted that an appearance on the Vogue cover is a “rite of passage” for first ladies. Still, Ms. Brown added, the implications of Dr. Biden’s appearance on the cover of a fashion magazine are “always a risk.” And at this moment, the Vogue cover “is not particularly helpful,” she added.Soon after the magazine posted the cover image to its Instagram account on Monday, the comments were overwhelmingly negative. Some were from Trump supporters who took Dr. Biden’s appearance as an opportunity to complain about the fact that Melania Trump had been passed over for a Vogue cover when she was first lady. A number of other critical remarks seemed to come from Democrats, one of whom argued that Dr. Biden was pursuing her and her husband’s own ambitions “at the expense of Americans safety and happiness.”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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      Two More Democratic Lawmakers Express Concern About Biden After Debate

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      Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said he was “horrified” by the debate. Representative Debbie Dingell said “the campaign needs to listen to us.”Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he was surprised and “horrified” by President Biden’s frail appearance in his debate against former President Donald J. Trump and pleaded with Mr. Biden and his campaign to be candid about his current condition.In an interview with WPRI, a television station in Providence, Mr. Whitehouse, who in March defended Mr. Biden as “the only option that we have” to defeat Mr. Trump in the election, expressed alarm and said that he had “never seen” Mr. Biden in that kind of condition before.“Like a lot of people, I was pretty horrified,” Mr. Whitehouse said Monday, adding that he wanted “the president and his team to be candid about his condition, that this was a real anomaly and not just the way he is these days.”Mr. Whitehouse was joined in his concerns by Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat in a deep blue district that encompasses Ann Arbor. Ms. Dingell criticized the Biden campaign for reports that its leaders were “going to stick to their strategy” and were considering holding some kind of interview or news conference to allay concerns about the president.“One interview isn’t going to fix this,” Ms. Dingell said in an interview on CNN, adding: “I think the campaign’s got to listen to people. And by the way, I think the campaign needs to listen to us.”She continued: “I know how to win campaigns. My strategy is to stick my ear to the ground and know what people are saying.”The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.It was the latest in a wave of reactions among Democrats concerned about Mr. Biden and his re-election campaign. The campaign and Biden allies have sought to tamp down the panic that has gripped the party and its wealthy donors in the aftermath of the debate. Top Democratic lawmakers fanned out on Sunday to defend the president and reassure his supporters.But Ms. Dingell’s and Mr. Whitehouse’s comments on Monday demonstrated that questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness for another four years in office will continue to linger heading into the Democrats’ nominating convention in August. More