Presidential Election of 2024

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      Living and Struggling With Long Covid

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      More from our inbox:Being Jewish in AmericaBlack Voters, Beware the G.O.P.Liz Cheney’s Book: ‘Too Little, Too Late’Students Know We Need Free SpeechHolly StapletonTo the Editor:Re “What Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me,” by Ed Yong (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 22):As a Covid long-hauler (going on three years now!), I found it validating and even supportive to read Mr. Yong’s essay. It was particularly validating to have the acknowledgment of post-exertional malaise (PEM). This so aptly describes much of my life.For example, I apologize to my dog before going on a shorter-than-usual walk. I have to plan for seemingly mundane tasks of self-care and home care: taking a shower, changing clothes, doing the dishes, sweeping my apartment, doing laundry, etc. I put these tasks in my calendar, and even then the expectation of the aftermath makes me feel incapable, desperate and overwhelmed.I appreciated Mr. Yong’s astute acknowledgment that symptoms are often dismissed because of sexism (I’m transgender). And I was denied disability because it was determined that I was functional enough to wrap silverware in napkins. Yes indeed, treatment is not only a medical issue, but also a social one.Mr. Yong made it clear that his journalism has been transformed by doing research in a more integrative manner, especially actually being with current long-haulers. I’m immensely grateful to him for his journalism and to The Times for publishing it.(I earned my Ph.D. in 2012, and it’s taken me two days to write this.)River Jackson-PatonDallasTo the Editor:Ed Yong’s guest essay is right on point. Long Covid is real, and the public needs to be educated about it.My experience with Covid is that of a former registered nurse in the thick of it. I watched so many patients and co-workers get sick, some dying, some getting better, and some who are still struggling with long Covid.It is very hard for me to hear someone, usually an anti-vaxxer, say, “They should just let everyone get Covid and get it over with.”I hear this quite often and my response is always, “Are you familiar with long Covid?” I always get one of two responses: “No” or “That’s made up.” Then I try to educate.Donna HuntAtascadero, Calif.To the Editor:I appreciate Ed Yong’s extraordinary reporting on long Covid and his opinion piece about the health care system’s failure to take chronic illness patients seriously. What many do not realize is that years and even decades before the pandemic caused long Covid, many patients, including me, struggled to find doctors and treatments for many of the same health problems that long Covid patients face.I cannot give you a single name for our illness because it does not yet exist. I and countless other patients have a slew of diagnoses, including autoimmune diseases, mast cell disorders, connective tissue disorders and dysautonomia. Many of us are disabled and homebound or bedbound.Doctors for these disorders were already hard to find, and the surge of long Covid patients has made accessing knowledgeable care more difficult. I hope the increased demand will inspire more doctors to study and treat these conditions. Now that even more patients are suffering, we need to stop dismissing this constellation of illnesses.Rachel GravesTacoma, Wash.Being Jewish in AmericaPhotographs of some of the hostages captured by Hamas on display by the Western Wall in Jerusalem.Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7,” by Bret Stephens (column, Dec. 20):American democracy has promised a land, as Mr. Stephens says, “in which you didn’t have to hide.” Mr. Stephens writes despairingly about the loss of this promise, and there’s no doubt that, today, America’s promise feels remote to many. For Jews, an eroding democracy brings with it a profound sense of trauma and fear.Yet the most appropriate Jewish response to this challenge is not despair, but determination. If our institutions are buckling, let’s reinforce them with forums for civic learning. If our civic culture is fraying, let’s repair it with opportunities for dynamic and respectful conversation. If our democracy is under threat, let’s take actions that strengthen it — right now, and in communities across the country.For nearly two and a half centuries, even amid painful setbacks, the United States has offered one of the last, best places to be Jewish — not because it catered to Jews, but because its democratic pluralism, albeit aspirational and imperfect from the beginning, allowed minorities like ours an opportunity to live freely.When that democratic pluralism struggles, we shouldn’t prematurely mourn its loss. We should repair it instead. This is not naïveté; it’s the agency our parents and grandparents came here looking for.Aaron DorfmanNew YorkThe writer is the executive director of A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy, a network of synagogues and Jewish groups.Black Voters, Beware the G.O.P.Kshaun Williams says he has seen his life become harder because of rising inflation under President Biden.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Black Voters in Georgia Say Biden Has Forgotten Them,” by Mara Gay (Opinion, Dec. 24):Ms. Gay cautions that Black voters in Georgia feel ignored and abandoned and may desert the Democratic Party in the coming presidential election. While her conclusions are highly debatable, there is no such doubt regarding the alternative.The Republican Party of Donald Trump has rolled back voting rights, gerrymandered predominantly Black districts, eliminated or scaled back social programs that aid the poor and sent federal troops to crack down on anti-racism protests.Should Georgia’s Black voters leave the Democrats for the Republicans, they will quickly learn the real meaning of abandonment.Tom GoodmanPhiladelphiaLiz Cheney’s Book: ‘Too Little, Too Late’Jonathan Ernst/ReutersTo the Editor:It’s with some relief that I read Carlos Lozada’s Dec. 21 column, “Liz Cheney’s Checkered History of the Trump Era.”Ms. Cheney worries about the prospect of another Donald Trump tenure in the White House, but I worry just as much about Ms. Cheney’s rush to sainthood as she plugs her new book and her ostensibly revised views.As Mr. Lozada reminds us, Ms. Cheney, right along with other Trump molls and henchmen in the G.O.P., long pledged obeisance to Mr. Trump. She — no less than the people she now criticizes — got us to this awful, scary time and place, and she shouldn’t get a pass now for what is at best a clear case of “too little, too late.”Beth Z. PalubinskyPhiladelphiaStudents Know We Need Free SpeechTim EnthovenTo the Editor:Re “Students Can Show Us the Way to Free Speech,” by Sophia Rosenfeld (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 18):Ms. Rosenfeld’s essay thoughtfully reminds us that we, as the parenting, teaching and older generations, don’t always have better answers to questions about free speech than our children and students. Indeed, as Ms. Rosenfeld writes, “The sky really isn’t falling.” Our youth are more capable of finding reasonable solutions than we think.I recently attended my son’s college graduation. For weeks before going, I loathed what I thought would surely be a depressing carnival of elite righteousness. Instead, I experienced something far more reassuring about our future.I conversed with my son’s classmates to hear their views about free speech, wokeness and education. Not surprisingly, they are intelligent, insightful, compassionate, but most of all, keenly aware of what is broken. They are respectful and friendly to each other, even when they disagree.Now is the time for the preachy older generations to step aside and trust the younger generations. They can and are navigating the treacherous waters of our time just fine.Nao MatsukataBethesda, Md. More

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      Will the Economy Help or Hurt Biden ’24? Krugman and Coy Dig Into Data.

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      Peter Coy: Paul, I think the economy is going to be a huge problem for President Biden in 2024. Voters are unhappy about the state of the economy, even though by most measures it’s doing great. Imagine how much unhappier they’ll be if things get worse heading into the election — which I, for one, think is quite likely to be the case.Paul Krugman: I’m not sure about the politics. We can get into that later. But first, can we acknowledge just how good the current state of the economy is?Peter: Absolutely. Unemployment is close to its lowest point since the 1960s and inflation has come way down. That’s the big story of 2023. But 2024 is a whole ’nother thing. I think there will be two big stories in 2024. One, whether the good news continues, and two, how voters will react to whatever the economy looks like around election time.Paul: Right now many analysts, including some who were very pessimistic about inflation last year, are declaring that the soft landing has arrived. Over the past six months the core personal consumption expenditures deflator — a mouthful, but that’s what the Federal Reserve targets — rose at an annual rate of 1.9 percent, slightly below the Fed’s 2 percent target. Unemployment is 3.7 percent. The eagle has landed.Peter: I question whether we’ve stuck the soft landing. I do agree that right at this moment things look really good. While everyone talks about the cost of living going up, pay is up lately, too. Lael Brainard, Biden’s national economic adviser, points out that inflation-adjusted wages for production and nonsupervisory workers are higher now than they were before the Covid pandemic.So let’s talk about why voters aren’t feeling it. Is it just because Biden is a bad salesman?Paul: Lots of us have been worrying about the disconnect between good numbers and bad vibes. I may have been one of the first people to more or less sound the alarm that something strange was happening — in January 2022! But we’re all more or less making this up as we go along.The most informative stuff I’ve seen recently is from Briefing Book, a blog run by former White House staffers. They’ve tried to put numbers to two effects that may be dragging consumer sentiment down.One effect is partisanship. People in both parties tend to be more negative when the other party controls the presidency, but the Briefing Book folks find that the effect is much stronger for Republicans. So part of the reason consumer sentiment is poor is that Republicans talk as if we’re in a depression when a Democrat is president, never mind reality.Peter: That is so true. And I think the effect is even stronger now than it used to be because we’re more polarized.Paul: The other effect affecting consumer sentiment is that while economists tend to focus on relatively recent inflation, people tend to compare prices with what they were some time in the past. The Briefing Book estimates suggest that it takes something like two years or more for lower inflation to show up in improved consumer sentiment.This is one reason the economy may be better for Democrats than many think. If inflation really has been defeated, many people haven’t noticed it yet — but they may think differently a little over 10 months from now, even if the fundamentals are no better than they are currently.I might add that the latest numbers on consumer sentiment from several surveys have shown surprising improvement. Not enough to eliminate the gap between the sentiment and what you might have expected from the macroeconomic numbers, but some movement in a positive direction.Peter: That makes sense. Ten months from now, people may finally be getting over the trauma of high inflation. On the other hand, and I admit I’m not an economist, I’m still worried we could have a recession in 2024. Manufacturing is soft. The big interest rate increases by the Fed since March 2022 are hitting the economy with a lag. The extra savings from the pandemic have been depleted. The day after Christmas, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said the share of Americans in financial distress over credit cards and auto loans is back to where it was in the depths of the recession of 2007-9.Plus, I’d say the labor market is weaker than it looked from the November jobs report. (For example, temp-agency employment shrank, which is an early warning of weak demand for labor.)Also, small business confidence remains weak.Paul: Glad you brought up small business confidence — I wrote about that the other week. “Hard” indicators like hiring plans are pretty strong. “Soft” indicators like what businesses say about future conditions are terrible. So small businesses are in effect saying, “I’m doing OK, and expanding, but the economy is terrible” — just like consumers!I’m not at all sure when the Fed will start cutting, although it’s almost certain that it eventually will, but markets are already effectively pricing in substantial cuts — and that’s what matters for the real economy. As I write this, the 10-year real interest rate is 1.69 percent, down from 2.46 percent around six weeks prior. Still high compared with prepandemic levels, but financial conditions have loosened a lot.Could there be a recession already baked in? Sure. But I’m less convinced than I was even a month ago.Peter: The big drop in interest rates can be read two ways. The positive spin is that it’ll be good for economic growth, eventually. That’s how the stock market is interpreting it. The negative spin is that the bond market is expecting a slowdown next year that will pull rates down. Also, what if the economy slows down a lot but the Fed doesn’t want to cut rates sharply because Fed officials are afraid of being accused by Donald Trump of trying to help Biden?Paul: I guess I think better of the Fed than that. And always worth remembering that the interest rates that matter for the economy tend to be driven by expectations of future Fed policy: The Fed hasn’t cut yet, but mortgage rates are already down substantially.Peter: Yes.Paul: OK, about the election. The big mystery is why people are so down on the economy despite what look like very good numbers. At least part of that is that people don’t look at short-term inflation, but at prices compared with what they used to be some time ago — but people’s memories don’t stretch back indefinitely. As I said, the guys at Briefing Book estimate that the most recent year’s inflation rate is only about half of what consumers look at, with a lot of weight on earlier inflation. But here’s the thing: Inflation has come way down, and this will gradually filter into long-term averages. Right now the average inflation rate over the past 2 years was 5 percent, still very high; but if future inflation runs at the 2.4 percent the Fed is now projecting, which I think is a bit high, by next November the two-year average will be down to 2.7 percent. So if the economy stays where it is now, consumers will probably start to feel better about inflation.Peter: Except that perceptions of inflation are filtered through politics. Food and gasoline are more expensive for Trump supporters than Biden supporters, if you believe what people tell pollsters. That’s not going to change between now and November.The Obama-Biden ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008 because voters blamed Republicans for the 2007-9 recession. Obama-Biden had a narrower win in 2012 against Romney-Ryan, and I think one factor was the so-called jobless recovery from that same recession. That’s why Biden is supersensitive about who gets credit and blame for turns in the economy.For the record, Trump might be president right now if it hadn’t been for the Covid pandemic, which sent the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent in April 2020. The economy was doing quite well before that happened. A lot of Republicans are nostalgic for Trumponomics, although I think the economy prospered more in spite of him than because of him. Thoughts?Paul: Most of the time, presidents have far less effect on the economy than people imagine. Big stimulus packages like Barack Obama’s in 2009 and Biden’s in 2021 can matter. But aside from pandemic relief, which was bipartisan, nothing Trump did had more than marginal effects. His 2017 tax cut didn’t have much visible effect on investment; his tariffs probably on net cost a few hundred thousand jobs, but in an economy as big as America’s, nobody noticed.Peter: Just speculating, but I wonder if when people say they trust Trump more than Biden on the economy, they’re feeling vibes more than parsing statistics. You know, “We need a tough guy in the White House!”Paul: People definitely aren’t parsing statistics. Only pathetic nerds like us do that. And while Trump wasn’t actually a tough economic leader, he literally did play one on TV.But we don’t really know if that matters, or whether people are still reacting to the shock of inflation and high interest rates, which they hadn’t seen in a long time. Again, the best case for Biden pulling this out is that voters get over that shock, with both inflation and interest rates rapidly declining.Oh, and falling interest rates mean higher bond prices, and often translate into higher stock prices, too — which has also been happening lately.Peter: True, Paul. But cold comfort for people who don’t own stocks and bonds. Or who do own stocks and bonds in their retirement plans but don’t think of themselves as part of the capitalist class. To win in November, Biden and his team are going to need to be perceived as doing something for the working class and the middle class. That’s why you see the White House talking about eliminating junk fees and capping insulin prices.Paul: For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people judge the economy in part by the stock market, even if they don’t have a personal stake. That’s why Trump boasted about it so much, and has lately been trying to say that Biden’s strong stock market is somehow a bad thing.Finally, there are some indications that Democrats in particular are feeling better about the Biden economy. The Michigan survey tracks sentiment by partisanship. The numbers are noisy, but over the past few months Democratic sentiment has been slightly more positive than it was in the months just before the pandemic struck.Peter: Paul, how important do you think the economy will be to voters compared to other issues, such as Trump’s fitness for office, Biden’s age, abortion access, et cetera? I mean, if it’s not important, why are we even having this conversation?Paul: The economy surely matters less than it did when Republicans and Democrats lived in more or less the same intellectual universe — everyone agreed that the economy was bad in 1980 or 2008; now, Dems are fairly positive while Republicans claim to believe that we’re in a severe downturn. But there are still voters on the margin, and weak Democratic supporters who will turn out if they have a sense that things are improving.Peter: Democratic strategists think the election might come down to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, assuming that Biden holds Michigan and New Hampshire and loses Arizona and Georgia. Any thoughts about the economic outlook for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?Paul: No strong sense about either state. But one little-noticed fact about the current economy is how uniform conditions are. In 2008, so-called sand states that had big housing bubbles were doing much worse than states that didn’t; now unemployment is low almost everywhere.Of course, all political bets are off if we have a recession. But there’s a reasonable case that the economy will be much less of a drag on Democrats by November, as the reality of a soft landing sinks in.Oh, and my subjective sense is that for whatever reason, media coverage of the economy has turned much more positive lately. I have to think this matters, otherwise, what are we even doing? And until recently, media reports tended to emphasize the downsides — “Great jobs numbers, and here’s why that’s bad for Biden” has become a sort of running joke among people I follow. These days, however, we’re starting to see reports acknowledging that we’ve had an almost miraculous combination of strong employment and falling inflation.Peter: Paul, what economic indicators will you be paying the most attention to in the next few months with regard to the election? I’ll nominate inflation and unemployment, although those are kind of obvious.Paul: Unemployment, for sure. On inflation, I’ll be watching longer-term measures: Will inflation be low enough to bring down two- or three-year averages? And especially highly visible stuff, like groceries. Thanksgiving dinner was actually cheaper in 2023 than in 2022. Will grocery prices be subdued enough to reduce the amount of complaining?Oh, and I’ll be looking at consumer sentiment, which as we’ve seen can be pretty disconnected from the economy but will matter for the election.Peter: Happy New Year!Source photographs by Caroline Purser and Anagramm/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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      What Are Young Voters Looking For?

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      Want to ruin a Democratic strategist’s New Year? Bring up President Biden’s popularity problem with younger voters.The strategist may start furiously tap-dancing about this outreach plan or that policy achievement. But she has seen the polling trend line. She has heard the focus groups. She knows that millennials and Gen Z-ers are not feeling the Biden love. Many are threatening to sit out next year’s election. Some are flirting with supporting Donald Trump — or a third-party rando.And even if only a few of them follow through, the president and his party could be in big trouble. Americans younger than 45 have saved the Democrats from disaster in multiple recent elections. Their creeping alienation has the blue team rattled and raging: For the love of God, what will it take to lock in these voters?!This is not a new question. The political world, especially the Democratic Party, has long been in search of the secret formula for wooing younger voters to the polls. Strategists noodle over which issues members of this cohort care about, which candidates they connect with, how best to reach them. In 1994, Bill Clinton ventured onto MTV and overshared about his underwear in an effort to impress the young ’uns. Now that is desperation.Spoiler: There is no secret formula. Or rather, there is a whole host of formulas with scores of constantly shifting variables. Millennials and Gen Z-ers don’t just expect different things from candidates than do older voters; they approach the entire concept of voting differently, generally in ways that make them harder to persuade and mobilize.The people who obsess about this issue for a living can overwhelm you with data and analysis, competing priorities and suggestions. Even the bits they think they have figured out can abruptly shift. (Just when some thought they had a solid grip on this election, along came the war in Gaza.) All that, of course, is on top of the concrete systemic challenges of getting younger people registered for, informed about and comfortable with voting in general.As a close friend who spent years neck deep in the political weeds of cultivating younger voters observed, “The big theme is that there is no theme.”And yet there are a few recurring subthemes that bubble up when you talk with the professionals and with the younger voters themselves. These insights won’t crack the turnout code. Or necessarily save Mr. Biden’s presidency. But they do shed light on some of the more amorphous reasons younger Americans are so hard to turn out — and can maybe even point a way forward.“The No. 1 rule when you’re talking about young people: They may be progressive, but they are not Democrats,” warned Joshua Ulibarri, a partner with the Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. “They don’t turn out for parties.”Younger Americans may vote more Democratic than their elders, but that does not mean they want to join the team. And while their politics are generally to the left of the party’s center of gravity, this isn’t merely a matter of ideology.“Parties are institutions, and Gen Z-ers aren’t really into institutions,” said Morley Winograd, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California. The research on Gen Z-ers indicates they have little trust in most major U.S. institutions, and it’s hard to get more establishment or institutional than a political party. Certainly among the Gen Z-ers I know (I have kids, and they have friends), maintaining their independence from and skepticism of a compromised political establishment they feel is not working for them is a point of pride.Today’s hyperpartisan system, with its Manichaean mentality, can make parties even more unappealing for younger voters, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, whose specialty is younger voters. “They are not willing to take that responsibility to have to defend one party and create an enemy of the other.”And definitely don’t expect them to be moved by appeals to help a party take control of Congress or even the White House, Mr. Ulibarri said.Younger voters also are less inclined to turn out simply because they like a candidate’s personality. Now and then, one comes along who inspires them (think Barack Obama) or, alternatively, outrages them enough to make them turn out in protest (think Donald Trump). But more often they are driven by issues that speak to their lives, their core values or, ideally, both.The most outstanding current example of this is the issue of abortion rights, which has emerged as a red-hot electoral force since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Younger voters express anxiety about the practical repercussions of this decision and fury at the government intrusion into people’s personal lives. The issue has a clarity, immediacy and tangibility that appeal to younger voters. This is especially true when it appears as a stand-alone ballot initiative.Younger voters’ focus on issues and values rather than candidates and parties raises the question of whether ballot initiatives could be a way to engage them and propel them to the polls. Supporting such measures is more straightforward than embracing candidates. Plus, they have the advantage of not being (or at least not seeming) as entangled with a particular party. They have more of a direct-democracy vibe. (Please refer to: Institutions suck.) How much more satisfying is it to vote for an issue you are passionate about than for some flawed politician with a fake smile making promises you’re pretty sure he won’t keep?Supporting a candidate, any candidate, means accepting that person’s foibles and flaws along with the good parts. It requires balancing multiple concerns and priorities. And the longer the candidate’s record in public office, the more variables there are to consider. Just take the example currently giving the Biden campaign the worst nightmares: For progressives, at what point does Mr. Biden’s handling of Gaza outweigh his embrace of, say, combating climate change or protecting abortion access or supporting labor unions? What if the only alternative is another Trump term?For younger voters who reject the team mentality of party voting, these equations get complicated and frustrating — often frustrating enough to just skip voting altogether. When researchers ask younger people why they don’t vote, one of the top responses, if not the top one, is: I didn’t feel I knew enough about the candidates.Part of younger voters’ disenchantment may be wrapped up in the nature of progressivism. Younger voters tend to be more progressive than older ones, and progressives, by definition, want government to do more, change more, make more progress. You often hear variations on: Sure, the president did ABC, but what we really need is DEFGHIJXYZ. Or: This climate initiative/health care plan/caregiving investment/pick your policy achievement doesn’t go nearly far enough.This is not to suggest that Mr. Biden hasn’t racked up some notable missteps (Afghanistan!) and failed promises (the student debt mess). But expectations are an inextricable factor. Harvard’s Theda Skocpol refers to “the presidential illusion” among those on the political left, the longstanding idea that the president is a sort of political Svengali and that federal leadership can counter conservatism in states and localities. When reality sets in, these supporters are not shy about expressing their disappointment.Of course, most voting in America calls for choosing between candidates, in all their messy imperfection. Younger voters are less likely than older ones to have resigned themselves to this, to have curbed their expectations and idealism. So where does all this leave campaigns and, trickier still, parties desperate to win over younger voters?Younger voters need to be reminded of the concrete changes their votes can effect. Because of the 2020 election, the Biden administration has pushed through a major investment in fighting climate change; billions of dollars for infrastructure are flowing into communities, including rural, economically strapped areas; the first African American woman was appointed to the Supreme Court; many judges from notably diverse professional backgrounds have been placed on the lower courts, and so on.The dark corollary to this is detailing the explicit damage that can be done if young people opt out, an especially pressing threat with Mr. Trump on the vengeance trail. Separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, stacking the Supreme Court with abortion-hostile justices, effectively declaring war on science — these were the fruits of the Trump administration. And that’s before you get to his persistent assault on democracy. Think of it all as his practice run, then imagine where another four years could take us.The key is figuring out and effectively communicating the right balance of positive and negative partisanship for the moment, said Mr. Della Volpe, stressing, “The recipe for 2020 will not be the same as 2024.”Another basic step: Candidates need to make clear that they understand and share younger voters’ values, even if they have different plans for working toward realizing their goals. Strategists point to the shrewd decision by Team Biden, after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 primary contest, to form working groups with Mr. Sanders’s team, stressing their shared values. Connecting elections to something that resonates with younger voters — that is meaningful to their lives — is vital, said Abby Kiesa, the deputy director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a research group at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life that focuses on youth civic engagement. Issue groups can play a useful role in this, she said.Most broadly, everyone from interest groups to parties to candidates needs to push the message that a democratically elected government can still achieve big things. This goes beyond any specific bill or appointee. Younger Americans aren’t convinced that government can make meaningful progress. Some days it is hard to blame them. But this cynicism has terrible implications for democracy, and all of us would do well to fight it.The 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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Biden Lies Low in St. Croix During Holiday Week

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      The president is enjoying a working vacation, a White House official said. Residents hope to bring attention to the Virgin Islands’ economic troubles.As wars rage in Gaza and Ukraine, migrants stream illegally into the United States in record numbers and an intense 2024 campaign season looms, President Biden is lying low.Here on tropical St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Mr. Biden; the first lady, Jill Biden; and their granddaughter Natalie are spending New Year’s week in a secluded oceanfront villa overlooking the turquoise Caribbean, the president is staying mostly out of the spotlight.On Saturday, Mr. Biden made his first public appearance, venturing out to attend mass at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Christiansted, the largest town in St. Croix. He and Dr. Biden later taped an interview with Ryan Seacrest, due to air on New Year’s Eve as part of ABC’s “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest.” In the evening, the president and first lady dined at Too Chez, one of the island’s top restaurants, and he afterward revealed his New Year’s resolution.“To come back next year,” Mr. Biden said.Republicans have roundly criticized Mr. Biden’s island getaway, which began just a day after he returned to the White House from spending Christmas with family at Camp David.Several lawmakers accused the president of failing to address the migrant surge along the southern U.S. border by taking time away. And on Thursday, when the White House announced in the morning that there would be no public events for Mr. Biden that day as temperatures hovered in the 80s on St. Croix, an arm of the Republican National Committee pounced.“Illegal immigrants are pouring across the open southern border by the tens of thousands every day,” the group RNC Research wrote on the social media site X, adding that Mr. Biden, “on his second vacation in a week — called it a day before noon.”President Biden attended mass on Saturday at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Christiansted, the largest town in St. Croix.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesJulian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, said that presidential vacations are virtually always denounced by the opposing party.But even a commander in chief needs to unwind sometimes, Mr. Zelizer noted, and, in this day and age, no president is ever truly unplugged.“It’s not as if the president takes a vacation like many of us and just sits around on the beach or something,” he said. “They go with their full presidential apparatus and they’re surrounded by their advisers.”A White House official described Mr. Biden’s trip as a working vacation. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, accompanied the president to St. Croix and has briefed him multiple times since arriving, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s schedule.On Friday, Mr. Biden condemned Russia for launching what he called the largest aerial assault on Ukraine since the start of the war, and he issued a statement warning that President Vladimir V. Putin “must be stopped.” Asked Saturday if he planned to speak with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine after Russia’s latest attacks, Mr. Biden replied, “I speak to him regularly.”He also called on Congress on Friday to approve national security funding for Ukraine and Israel, which has been tied to negotiations over border and immigration policies, and White House officials said the president was closely monitoring those talks, too.Many St. Croix residents said that, even though Mr. Biden was staying largely out of the public eye this year, they appreciated that his visits have helped highlight the history of the island, which was once home to the founding father Alexander Hamilton. They described it as a quirky, warmhearted island where stray cats are well fed at five-star resorts. In Lin Manuel-Miranda’s musical “Hamilton,” St. Croix features only as the “forgotten spot in the Caribbean,” from which a young Hamilton pulled himself out of poverty.Mr. Biden’s visit is his second to St. Croix as president, but the Bidens have traveled there more than a dozen times over the years.“He loves St. Croix, and we really love having him here,” said Leonore Gillette, a retired schoolteacher who has lived on the island for 45 years.“We certainly appreciate the infusion of activity,” said Nadia Bougouneau, another longtime resident who works at the Buccaneer, a resort that was filled to capacity with Secret Service agents and members of the media traveling with Mr. Biden. The president played on the 18-hole golf course at the resort last year with his grandson Hunter.Several people, including the governor of the Virgin Islands, fondly recalled Mr. Biden’s visits before he was president — and the Secret Service was not blocking miles of roads for security. Back then, locals and tourists said they would run into him biking, jogging or picking up coffee at Ziggy’s, an island market and gas station on the east end.“We feel like he’s a Virgin Islander,” Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said.“Before he was president, I would be downtown at night and see him in a restaurant, and I’d be sitting with people and say, ‘That’s Joe Biden.’ And people would say, ‘No way,’” he recalled.These days, the governor said, Mr. Biden’s visit gave him a chance to highlight some of the issues facing the U.S. Virgin Islands, which is heavily dependent on tourism and still working to recover from the hurricanes Irma and Maria.Mr. Bryan called the islands’ most serious challenge a requirement to match 10 percent of $15 billion in federal hurricane reconstruction aid. He said the money, and the ability of the Virgin Islands to repair its water systems and other major projects, could be jeopardized because the government cannot afford the approximately $1.5 billion match. The Virgin Islands, home to about 87,000 people, has an annual budget of $1.2 billion.Still, Mr. Bryan said, he does not view Mr. Biden’s New Year’s visit as the best time to make his case to the president.President Biden’s motorcade driving through Christiansted. The U.S. Virgin Islands are still working to recover from the hurricanes Irma and Maria.Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times“To be honest, I preferred it when he wasn’t president because he spent more time with me,” he joked, adding that this year, “I really try to stay away from him so he can get a chance to rest, because he’s going to need it to go into this election.”Mr. Biden is entering 2024 with a persistently low job approval rating of 39 percent, according to December polling from Gallup, the worst of any modern-day president seeking re-election. Mr. Zelizer said that makes the policy challenges Mr. Biden faces in the Middle East and Ukraine — and with Congress — all the more difficult.“All of this is going to be waiting for him when he comes back to Washington, and he knows it,” Mr. Zelizer said. He added, “It’s going to be a tough year.” More

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      Would Keeping Trump Off the Ballot Hurt or Help Democracy?

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      Some critics say the battles over the former president’s ballot status are turning him into a martyr and eroding faith in American elections.As the top elections official in Washington State, Steve Hobbs says he is troubled by the threat former President Donald J. Trump poses to democracy and fears the prospect of his return to power. But he also worries that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado to bar Mr. Trump from presidential primary ballots there could backfire, further eroding Americans’ fraying faith in U.S. elections.“Removing him from the ballot would, on its face value, seem very anti-democratic,” said Mr. Hobbs, a Democrat who is in his first term as secretary of state. Then he added a critical caveat: “But so is trying to overthrow your country.”Mr. Hobbs’s misgivings reflect deep divisions and unease among elected officials, democracy experts and voters over how to handle Mr. Trump’s campaign to reclaim the presidency four years after he went to extraordinary lengths in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While some, like Mr. Hobbs, think it best that voters settle the matter, others say that Mr. Trump’s efforts require accountability and should be legally disqualifying.Challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 32 states, though many of those challenges have gained little or no traction, and some have languished on court dockets for months.The decisions happening right now come amid a collapse of faith in the American electoral system, said Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in election law and democracy.“We are walking in new constitutional snow here to try and figure out how to deal with these unprecedented developments,” he said.Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs at a debate in 2022.Ted S. Warren/Associated PressProfessor Persily and other legal experts said they expected the United States Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot, perhaps sidestepping the question of whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection. Mr. Persily is hopeful that whatever ruling the court issues will bring clarity — and soon.“This is not a political and electoral system that can deal with ambiguity right now,” he said.Mr. Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that robbed voters of their right to choose candidates. They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot after campaigning in the past two elections as champions of democracy.After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement: “Apparently democracy is when judges tell people they’re not allowed to vote for the candidate leading in the polls? This is disgraceful. The Supreme Court must take the case and end this assault on American voters.”Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and Mr. Trump’s most ardent critic in the Republican primary, warned that Maine’s decision would turn Mr. Trump into a “martyr.”But other prominent critics of Mr. Trump — many of them anti-Trump Republicans — said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol now required an extraordinary intervention, whatever the electoral consequences.The challenges are based on a Reconstruction Era provision of the 14th Amendment that prohibits anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection from holding federal or state office.Former President Donald Trump spoke at an event in Reno, Nevada, this month.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesJ. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal appeals court judge, hailed Colorado and Maine’s decisions as “unassailable” interpretations of the Constitution. Officials in Maine and Colorado who disqualified Mr. Trump from the ballot have written that their decisions stemmed from following the language of the Constitution.But on a recent sunny Friday afternoon in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Deena Drewis, 37, a copy writer, and Aaron Baggaley, 43, a contractor, both of whom have consistently voted for Democrats, expressed a queasy ambivalence over such an extraordinary step.“I’m really just conflicted,” Mr. Baggaley said. “It’s hard to imagine he didn’t fully engage in insurrection. Everything points to it. But the other half of the country is in a position where they feel like it should be up to the electorate.”Officials in Democratic-controlled California have shown little appetite for following Colorado and Maine. California’s Democratic secretary of state, Shirley Weber, announced on Thursday that Mr. Trump would remain on the ballot, and Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed calls by other Democrats to remove him. “We defeat candidates at the polls,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “Everything else is a political distraction.”In interviews, some voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Mr. Trump because he had not been criminally convicted of insurrection. They worried that red-state officials could use the tactic to knock Democratic candidates off future ballots, or that the disqualifications could further poison the country’s political divisions while giving Mr. Trump a new grievance to rail against.“Attempts to disqualify demagogues with deep popular support often backfire,” said Yascha Mounk, a professor and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about threats to democracies. “The only way to neutralize the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to beat them at the ballot box, as decisively as possible and as often as it takes.”Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, in January. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated PressThe decisions by Colorado’s highest court and Maine’s secretary of state barring Mr. Trump from state primary ballots are on hold for now and are likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.While most of the challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been proceeding in federal or state courts, Maine’s constitution required the voters seeking to disqualify Mr. Trump to file a petition with the secretary of state, putting the politically volatile and hugely consequential decision into the hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.Her counterparts in other states said that they had spent months discussing whether they could face a similar decision, and that they had been talking with other elections officials and their legal teams about the thickets of state laws governing each state’s elections.In Washington State, Mr. Hobbs said he did not believe he had the power as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Mr. Trump from the ballot. He was relieved, he said, because he did not think one person should have the power to decide who qualifies to run for president.The stakes for the nation were enormous, Mr. Hobbs said, because of the damage Mr. Trump had already done to faith in the nation’s elections.“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. “This is going to be a long-term effort to try to regain trust among those who have lost it.”Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this week that she supported decisions by Ms. Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot.Election workers and secretaries of state have increasingly become the targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Ms. Griswold said she had received 64 death threats since the lawsuit seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot was filed by six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado.“All of us swear to uphold our state constitution and the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Griswold said. “Making these decisions takes bravery and courage.”Her office announced this week that, because Mr. Trump’s case had been appealed, his name would be included on Colorado’s primary ballots unless the U.S. Supreme Court said otherwise or declined to take up his case.In Arizona, placing Mr. Trump on the ballot was a more cut-and-dry decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state. He said that state law required him to list any candidate who had been certified in two other states.He called the blizzard of legal rulings, dissents and contradictory opinions swirling around Mr. Trump’s place on the ballot a “slow rolling civics lesson” that demonstrated the country’s democratic resilience.“I kind of celebrate the notion it’s complicated,” he said. “We’re having this conversation because that’s what democracy is about.”Mitch Smith More

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      Debbie Dingell: Why Standing Up to Trump Is Worth the Pain

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      “Rot in hell.”Those words were part of Donald Trump’s Christmas Day message, spewed at his political enemies. The next day, when I was asked during a CNN interview about the increased violence in this country, I responded honestly that I thought the former president’s message was wrong and divisive. I’m not afraid to say what I think, even when that means there may be unpleasant repercussions and threats from the former president and his supporters. A lot of us may face this type of conflict in the year ahead. I am particularly familiar with this, as Mr. Trump has targeted me in the past in ways that have been very difficult.I was married to a great and wise man with whom I shared an incredible love for decades. I miss John every day. On the day that he died, in 2019, he dictated an op-ed to me that would be titled “My Last Words for America.” He observed, “In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.” Months after his death, when I voted for the first articles of impeachment against President Trump, he launched into a brutal attack saying that John was “looking up” at me (implying he was in hell). That’s the Trump way — the cruelty is the point, yet that awareness doesn’t make it any less painful. We’re human. He knows that, and he thrives on it.I am not seeking a fight with Mr. Trump. It’s not easy to tangle with him, especially after that experience involving John. But I do know that hateful rhetoric cannot be ignored or become normalized. We have to stand up to bullies in this country, and we have to call out indignities. My bluntness about “rot in hell” being unacceptable was my unfiltered reaction and I stand by it. In my view, the only way you can deal with bullies is to consistently call out their inexcusable behavior and stand in defense of those they choose to target. Trust me, I know it can wear you down — but we can’t grow tired, and we must push back on the hatred when we see it, calling it out, using language everyone understands and in ways that prevent it from seeping into our everyday lives and routines.Being in Mr. Trump’s tunnel of hate is not enjoyable. Frankly, it’s often frightening. Like many of my colleagues, I have received hostile calls, antagonistic mail and death threats, and I have had people outside my home with weapons. And it reflects the vitriol, bullying, rage and threats we are witnessing across the country today — from our exchanges on social media to dialogue with each other and with those in our workplaces, schools, gathering places, families and communities. It’s a real danger to our democracy and our safety.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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      Trump’s Team Prepares to File Challenges on Ballot Decisions Soon

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      The cases in Colorado, Maine and other states are requiring former President Donald J. Trump to devote resources already spread thin across four criminal indictments.Former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers are preparing as soon as Tuesday to file challenges to decisions in Colorado and Maine to disqualify Mr. Trump from the Republican primary ballot because of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to a person familiar with the matter.In Maine, the challenge to the secretary of state’s decision to block Mr. Trump from the ballot will be filed in a state court. But the Colorado decision, which was made by that state’s highest court, will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to face fresh pressure to weigh in on the issue.On Thursday, Maine became the second state to keep Mr. Trump off the primary ballot over challenges stemming from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that any officer of the United States who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution cannot “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”“Every state is different,” Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, told a local CBS affiliate on Friday morning. “I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. I fulfilled my duty.”Mr. Trump has privately told some people that he believes the Supreme Court will overwhelmingly rule against the Colorado and Maine decisions, according to a person familiar with what he has said. But he has also been critical of the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices, creating a supermajority. The court has generally shown little appetite for Mr. Trump’s election-related cases.Mr. Trump has expressed concern that the conservative justices will worry about being perceived as “political” and may rule against him, according to a person with direct knowledge of his private comments.Unlike with the Colorado decision, which caught many on Mr. Trump’s team by surprise, the former president’s advisers had anticipated the Maine outcome for several days. They prepared a statement in advance of the decision and had the bulk of their appeal filing written after the consolidated hearing that Ms. Bellows held on Dec. 15, according to a person close to Mr. Trump.The people who have filed ballot challenges have generally argued that Mr. Trump incited an insurrection when he encouraged supporters to whom he insisted the election was stolen to march on the Capitol while the 2020 electoral vote was being certified. The former president has been indicted on charges related to the eventual attack on the Capitol, but he has not been criminally charged with “insurrection,” a point his allies have repeatedly made.On his social media site, Truth Social, Mr. Trump has highlighted commentary from Democrats who have suggested discomfort with the ballot decisions.In Maine, the move was made unilaterally by Ms. Bellows after challenges were filed. Trump allies have repeatedly highlighted Ms. Bellows’s Democratic Party affiliation and the fact that she is not an elected official, but an appointed one.The twin decisions have created an uncertain terrain in the Republican nominating contest with elections in the early states set to begin on Jan. 15, with Iowa’s caucuses. Additional ballot challenges may be filed in other states, although so far several have fizzled.This week, a Wisconsin complaint trying to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot there was dismissed, and the secretary of state in California said Mr. Trump would remain on the ballot in that state. According to the website Lawfare, 14 states have active lawsuits seeking to remove Mr. Trump, with more expected to be filed. A decision is expected soon in a case in Oregon.The Colorado and Maine decisions require an additional focus of resources and attention for a Trump team that is already spread thin across four criminal indictments in four different states.But two people close to Mr. Trump, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, described that reality as already baked in for a Trump team that has been focused on legal issues for most of the last two years. They argued that, in the short term, the former president would see political benefits along the lines of what he saw when he was indicted: a rallying effect among Republicans.Mr. Trump and his team have tried to collapse these cases into a single narrative that Democrats are engaged in a “witch hunt” against him, and they have used the election suits to suggest that Democrats are interfering in an election — an attempt to turn the tables given that Mr. Trump’s monthslong effort to undermine the 2020 election is at the heart of legal and political arguments against him.“Democrats in blue states are recklessly and un-Constitutionally suspending the civil rights of the American voters by attempting to summarily remove President Trump’s name from ballots,” Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times.The ballot rulings have become another focus for the mainstream and conservative news media, chewing up time and attention that Mr. Trump’s primary rivals, who trail him by wide margins in polls, need in hopes of catching up.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is among those challenging Mr. Trump for the nomination, told CNN that the decision “makes him a martyr,” adding, “He’s very good at playing ‘Poor me, poor me.’ He’s always complaining.”Because of a number of factors, it is unclear how much of a practical effect the efforts to remove Mr. Trump from primary ballots will have for the Republican nominating contest. In the case of Colorado, where the state’s top court reversed a lower-court ruling and declared Mr. Trump ineligible for the primary, he remains on the ballot while he asks the Supreme Court to intervene. More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.The 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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More