Presidential Election of 2024

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      Illegal Border Crossings Plummeted in January

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      The number of people crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico has dropped by 50 percent in the past month, authorities said on Tuesday, as President Biden comes under growing pressure from both parties over security at the border.U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it had encountered migrants between ports of entry 124,220 times in January, down from more than 249,000 the previous month.The figures do not change the fact that the number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels during the Biden administration, and crossings typically dip in January. Immigration trends are affected by weather patterns and other issues, making it difficult to draw conclusions from monthly numbers.But the drop in crossings was a glimmer of good news for the Biden administration as House Republicans impeached Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, on Tuesday on charges of willfully refusing to enforce border laws. (Their first attempt ended in defeat.)The figures also amounted to a respite for some large American cities grappling with the burden of sheltering migrants during the wintertime.In New York City, which is housing more than 65,000 migrants in hotels, shelters and tents, the number of migrants entering the city’s care over the last month plunged to about 1,600 per week, down 55 percent from 3,600 per week in December.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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      Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby Share an Uncomfortable White House Spotlight

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      The White House heralded Karine Jean-Pierre as a trailblazing press secretary. But it has increasingly relied on John Kirby, a longtime Washington hand, to spread its message.On the day she was named the first Black and first openly gay White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre said she hoped her appointment might inspire other people who, like her, never imagined occupying the pre-eminent role in political communications.“I think this is important for them to see this,” she said in May 2022.Americans are seeing less of her lately.Since the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, Ms. Jean-Pierre has yielded the spotlight to a lower-ranking official, John F. Kirby. For months, Mr. Kirby has regularly co-hosted her daily briefings, often fielding more questions from journalists than she does, and appeared more frequently on major political news programs as the administration’s spokesperson.Mr. Kirby, 60, a retired Navy admiral who previously worked at the Pentagon and the State Department, is better versed in foreign affairs at a time of war in Ukraine and the Middle East. He evinces a clarity and comfort at the lectern that can sometimes elude Ms. Jean-Pierre, 49, a more rote public speaker with less experience tussling with an adversarial press.The White House attributes Mr. Kirby’s larger role to the flurry of international news and says he will brief less often once the Middle East crisis ebbs. But the perception in Washington that President Biden has allowed Mr. Kirby, who is white, to upstage a Black woman as the face of his White House has turned their double act into a third-rail subject.“Can’t think of many topics I’d like to opine on less,” said one Biden supporter and Democratic strategist, who deemed the subject too politically and culturally sensitive to discuss with their name attached.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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      Meet the Woman Who Helped Pay for That R.F.K. Super Bowl Ad

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      Nicole Shanahan, a Bay Area lawyer once married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, gave $4 million and creative guidance to a group backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid.Super Bowl ads cost a fortune. So when a group backing the presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran a 30-second ad for him during Sunday night’s game, the political world took notice.How had the super PAC of a long-shot independent candidate paid for such a costly spot, and whose idea was it to adapt a vintage John F. Kennedy ad for his nephew’s campaign?A major source of the funding — and the creative guidance — it turns out, was Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer, entrepreneur and Democratic donor who was once married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin.In an interview on Monday, Ms. Shanahan said she had given $4 million to the super PAC, American Values 2024, about a week before the game, for the express purpose of helping pay for a Super Bowl ad. She also helped coordinate the ad’s production, she said, including navigating concerns from CBS Sports and Paramount, which broadcast the Super Bowl.“It seems like a great opportunity to highlight that he’s running for president,” Ms. Shanahan said. She said part of her motivation was concern about the environment, vaccines and children’s health, and her belief that Mr. Kennedy was willing to challenge the scientific establishment.“I do wonder about vaccine injuries,” she said, although she clarified that she is “not an anti-vaxxer,” but wanted more screening of risks for vaccinations. “I think there needs to be a space to have these conversations.”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 Steps Up, Helping Biden Just When the President Needs Him

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      Donald J. Trump’s stunning statement supporting a Russian attack against “delinquent” NATO allies takes attention away from unwelcome questions about the president’s age and provides the Biden camp a useful contrast.If anyone gets a thank-you note from President Biden for helping get him out of a jam in recent days, it should probably be former President Donald J. Trump.Just when Mr. Biden was swamped by unwelcome questions about his age, his predecessor and challenger stepped in, rescuing him with an ill-timed diatribe vowing to “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies that do not spend enough on their militaries.The stunner from Mr. Trump over the weekend not only drew attention away from the president’s memory problems, as detailed in a special counsel report, but also provided a convenient way for Mr. Biden’s defenders to reframe the issue: Yes, they could now say, the incumbent may be an old man who sometimes forgets things, but his challenger is both aging and dangerously reckless.It was not the first time, nor likely will it be the last, that Mr. Trump has stepped up when an adversary was in trouble to provide an escape route with an ill-considered howler of his own. Mr. Trump’s lifelong appetite for attention has often collided with his evident best interest. For Mr. Biden, that may be the key to this year’s campaign, banking on his opponent’s inability to stay silent at critical moments and hoping that he keeps reminding voters why they rejected him in 2020.“There’s a saying that the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost the party nomination that year to Mr. Trump. “Since Trump is his own worst enemy, he’s arguably Biden’s best friend.”That does not mean that age is no longer a political liability for Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest president in American history and would be 86 at the end of a second term. While Mr. Trump is close behind him at 77, the special counsel’s characterization of the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” proved searing and damaging.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’s Age Is a Campaign Problem, Not a Governing One

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      Last fall I found myself at a dinner party that included a former Biden administration official and a Democratic donor, and the conversation turned, naturally, to President Biden’s age and his prospects for re-election. The ex-official said that from inside the White House, where people experience the policymaking process firsthand, Biden was overwhelmingly seen as an effective leader who should run again. The donor, on the other hand, saw Biden mostly at the fund-raisers where watching the president’s meandering speeches left him terrified about the upcoming campaign. The gulf in their perceptions, I think, speaks to the fact that Biden’s age has impaired his ability to campaign much more than his ability to govern, which has created an impossible dilemma for the Democratic Party.I have argued since 2022 that Biden shouldn’t run again because he’s too old, but there’s never been much sign that his advanced age affects his performance in office. I’m not aware of any leaks from the White House suggesting that Biden is confused, exhausted or forgetful when setting priorities or making decisions. It’s not just Democratic partisans who find Biden more impressive up close than his frail, halting image in the media would suggest. As Politico reported of the ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy, “On a particularly sensitive matter, McCarthy mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” There are obviously things Biden does that I disagree with; I wish he’d take a much harder line with Israel over civilian casualties in Gaza. But while his reluctance to publicly criticize Israel might stem from an anachronistic view of the country — Biden likes to talk about the Labor Zionist prime minister Golda Meir, who left office 50 years ago — his position is a mainstream one in the Democratic Party and can’t be attributed to senescence.Because Biden has delivered on many Democratic priorities, there was never any real push within the party to get him to step aside, forfeiting the advantages of incumbency in favor of a potentially bruising primary contest. But it’s obvious to most people watching the president from afar that he looks fragile and diminished and that his well-known propensity for gaffes has gotten worse. Poll after poll shows that voters are very concerned about his age. That’s why the special counsel Robert Hur’s gratuitous swipes at Biden as someone who might seem to a jury like a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” have caused an epic freakout among Democrats. His words brought to the surface deep, terrifying doubts about Biden’s ability to do the one part of his job that matters above all others, which is beating Donald Trump.That’s true even though the report by Hur, a former Trump appointee tapped by Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, looks like a partisan hit job. (Democratic attorneys general have a terrible habit of appointing Republican special counsels in an effort to display their own impartiality — a type of moral preening that Republican administrations rarely fall victim to.) Since Hur decided not to charge Biden with any crimes, his comments about Biden’s age, particularly his claim that Biden couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died, seemed designed to shiv him politically. If so, it worked.Some Democrats are now comparing the media fixation on Biden’s age to the saturation coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails eight years ago, and there are similarities. Betty Friedan wrote that “housewifery expands to fill the time available,” and the same is true of bad political news. Trump’s scandals are so multifarious that each one tends to get short shrift, while his opponents’ weaknesses and missteps can be examined at length precisely because there are fewer of them. This asymmetry worked to Trump’s advantage in 2016, and it’s helping him now.But there’s also a crucial difference between Clinton’s emails and Biden’s years. Clinton’s vulnerability was never really about her insufficient care with information security protocols. Instead, the emails became a symbol of a powerful but inchoate sense, magnified by disproportionate press attention, that she was devious and deceptive. Biden’s age is a much more straightforward issue; people think he’s too old because of how he looks and sounds. Pretending it’s not a problem isn’t going to make voters worry about it less; it’s just going to make them feel they’re being lied to.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 Faces Supreme Court Deadline on Claim of Absolute Immunity

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      A federal appeals court gave the former president until Monday to ask the justices to pause its ruling while he pursues an appeal.Former President Donald J. Trump is expected to file a last-ditch effort on Monday in the Supreme Court to press his claim of total immunity from criminal prosecution.When a federal appeals court last week rejected the claim, it temporarily paused its ruling, saying it would return the case to the trial court on Monday, allowing Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to restart proceedings in the case that had been frozen during the appeal. But the appeals court added that it would extend the pause until the Supreme Court rules — if Mr. Trump asks the justices to intervene by filing an application for a stay with them by Monday.That makes it virtually certain that Mr. Trump will file such an application in the coming hours, meaning that the Supreme Court will soon be poised to determine whether and how fast his federal trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election will proceed.It has several options. It could deny a stay, which would restart the trial. It could grant a brief stay and then deny a petition seeking review, which would effectively reject Mr. Trump’s immunity argument and let the appeals court’s ruling stand.It could hear his appeal on a fast track, as it is doing in a separate case on Mr. Trump’s eligibility to hold office. Or it could hear the case on the usual schedule, which would most likely delay any trial past the election.Timing, in other words, is everything. Unless the justices move quickly, the trial could be pushed into the heart of the 2024 campaign, or even past the 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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      Trump’s Carter Problems vs. Biden’s Reagan Possibilities

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      The low approval rating and various political headwinds for President Biden have invited comparisons with another first-term Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and the challenges he faced running for re-election in 1980. Many Republicans are thinking about his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, bullish that Donald Trump also has what it takes to oust a flagging incumbent.It is true that the 2024 race is shaping up to be a 1980 replay of sorts, but with an important twist. The more significant comparisons could be between Mr. Trump and Mr. Carter and their difficulty in winning over voters and, even more, between Mr. Biden and Mr. Reagan and their attempts to address doubts about their age — which are flaring again for Mr. Biden.To be sure, Carter-Biden comparisons are real: Mr. Biden’s third-year job approval average was the lowest for a sitting president since Mr. Carter’s, and Americans were dissatisfied with the economy and with the direction of the country under both men.But what became increasingly clear throughout 1980 was that there was a ceiling on voter support for Mr. Carter. The electorate had already decided it didn’t want to give him a second term. Mr. Carter’s job approval at the end of March was close to his final 41 percent share of the vote in November.In this year’s race, it is Mr. Trump who closely resembles Mr. Carter in the most important ways, including his ceiling of political support.For one, the most galvanizing and divisive figures in 1980 and today were Mr. Carter and Mr. Trump. As with Mr. Carter, most voters have firm opinions about Mr. Trump. His ability to inspire his base is matched only by his ability to alienate the rest of the electorate — as evidenced by the Republican Party taking beatings in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 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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      Yes, Biden’s Age Matters

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      One of the most difficult conversations you can have in life is with a parent or peer who is becoming too old and infirm to work. Whether the infirmity is physical or mental, often your loved one is the last person to realize his own deficiencies, so he may interpret respectful, genuine concern as a personal attack.This conversation is difficult enough when it’s conducted entirely in private with friends and family. It’s infinitely more difficult when it plays out in public and involves the president of the United States.The top-line conclusion of the special counsel Robert Hur’s report regarding the discovery of classified information at Joe Biden’s home is good for the president. It found, in no uncertain terms, that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” It said prosecution would be inappropriate “even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The report even did the president the favor of clearly and unequivocally distinguishing his treatment of classified materials from Donald Trump’s vastly worse misconduct in his own retention-of-documents case.But the report presented what may be a worse assessment for Biden than the matter of guilt, which is its description of one reason he won’t be prosecuted: The special counsel found that Biden lacked the requisite degree of criminal willfulness in part because of his fading memory. The report characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and said he had “diminished faculties in advancing age.” To bolster this assertion, the report provided some damaging details, including claims that Biden couldn’t remember the dates when he was vice president and couldn’t remember “even within several years” when his son Beau died.The report understandably angered Biden, but in a fiery news conference after the report was released, he confused the president of Egypt with the president of Mexico. In isolation, the gaffe was minor — less serious, for instance, than Donald Trump recently confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi — but the timing was terrible. The mistake, coming on the heels of two incidents in recent days in which Biden confused French and German leaders with their deceased predecessors, only served to bolster the special counsel’s conclusions.Democratic partisans may be furious that the special counsel was so blunt about Biden’s memory. But willfulness and intent are necessary elements of the underlying crimes, so Hur had to explore Biden’s mental state, and include illustrative details.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