Presidential Election of 2024

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Flirts With the Libertarian Party

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      Mr. Kennedy sat down with the party’s chair in July, a previously undisclosed meeting, as Democrats fret about a third party bid.For months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he plans to continue his long-shot challenge against President Biden in the Democratic primary rather than dropping out to launch a third-party bid.But lately Mr. Kennedy’s message has seemed to shift, including publicly telling a voter who asked about his plans that he was keeping his “options open.”If Mr. Kennedy does decide to leave the party of his famous father and uncles to run in the general election, one potential landing spot may be the Libertarian Party, which at the moment lacks a widely known candidate but has excelled at securing ballot access.In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.“He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.” “My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”In a June interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged his ideological disagreements with the party — including on issues like environmental protection, abortion and civil rights — while also saying, “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”In a general election, Democrats worry that a third-party run by Mr. Kennedy could draw votes away from Mr. Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump. They have expressed similar concerns about No Labels, the bipartisan group trying to recruit a moderate candidate for a third-party run, and also about the progressive scholar Cornel West, who is already in the race to lead the Green Party’s ticket for 2024.Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.“It would be very bad” if Mr. Kennedy runs as a Libertarian, Mr. Bennett said. “We’ve been very clear that third parties in close elections can be very dangerous and would almost certainly hurt the president. That would be true of a No Labels candidate and it would be true of R.F.K.”Dennis Kucinich, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said there was “no truth” to the idea that Mr. Kennedy could run as a Libertarian. He said the meeting with Ms. McArdle simply offered “further proof of Mr. Kennedy’s appeal across the political spectrum.”“We have not sought the favor of any other political party,” Mr. Kucinich said.Ms. McArdle said that the meeting, at the libertarian FreedomFest convention, had been requested by Heal the Divide, a pro-Kennedy super PAC, and that she spoke with Mr. Kennedy for nearly an hour but had not had further meetings. He separately met with other leaders of the libertarian movement at the conference, she added.Mr. Kennedy, who is perhaps best known for his conspiracy theories about the safety of vaccines, would likely become a favorite to win the Libertarian nomination given his national name recognition. In the Democratic primary, Mr. Kennedy is trailing Mr. Biden by roughly 50 points, according to 538’s national polling average, and his bid against the incumbent president is not seen as competitive. He has argued that Mr. Biden’s allies at the Democratic National Committee are trying to squeeze him out of the race, including by moving to hold the party’s first primary in the Biden-friendly state of South Carolina.In past comments, Mr. Kennedy committed to sticking with the party long identified with the Kennedy clan. Late last month, Mr. Kennedy told Fox News that his mission was to “summon the Democratic Party back to its traditional ideals.” But more recently, Mr. Kennedy has seemed to hint that could change. In response to a South Carolina voter’s question this month about whether he would launch an independent bid, Mr. Kennedy said the D.N.C. is “trying to make sure that I can’t participate at all in the political process, and so I’m going to keep all my options open,” according to ABC News.Surveys have shown that a growing number of Americans are unhappy with both major political parties. But they have also expressed little appetite for third parties.In 2016, the moderate Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, and his running mate, former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts, received 3.3 percent of the popular vote. That was the best performance by a third-party ticket since Ross Perot ran on the Reform Party ballot in 1996.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson said he thought Mr. Kennedy might struggle to win over Libertarian voters given that he is now a Democrat. But he said he would favor Mr. Kennedy over both the current and former presidents in a general election, should they all win their respective nominating contests.“If Kennedy manages to get through the process and become the Libertarian nominee, I’d vote for him in a heartbeat,” Mr. Johnson said, “because he’s not Biden and he’s not Trump.”Reid J. Epstein More

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      What Republicans Say (and Don’t Say) About the Auto Workers’ Strike

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      It has been interesting to watch the response of Republicans to the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three American car manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler).The most openly anti-worker view comes from Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who condemned the striking workers as insolent and ungrateful in a stunning display of conservative anti-labor sentiment. “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” Scott said at a campaign event in Iowa. “He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.” Scott also criticized the union’s demands. “The other things that are really important in that deal is that they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.” In America, he continued, “that doesn’t make sense.”Most other Republicans have sidestepped any discussion of the workers themselves in favor of an attack on electric vehicles and the Biden administration’s clean energy policies. “I guarantee you that one of the things that’s driving that strike is that Bidenomics, and their green energy, electric vehicle agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit, and American autoworkers know it,” former Vice President Mike Pence said during a recent interview on CNBC.Donald Trump took a similar swing at the same target. “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” Trump wrote last week. “They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto Workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States. The all Electric Car policy is about as dumb as Open Borders and No Voter I.D. IT IS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER!”That much was expected. But beyond the presidential contenders, there were also the ostensibly populist Republicans who have placed workers at the center of their case.“Autoworkers deserve a raise — and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the U.S. auto industry and making China rich,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio wrote that he was “rooting for the autoworkers across our country demanding higher wages and an end to political leadership’s green war on their industry.” Likewise, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida pinned the strike on “a radical climate agenda that seeks the end of gas-powered cars even if it means destroying American jobs,” adding: “Instead of supporting either union bosses or C.E.O.s we need to support American workers who want policies that protect their jobs.”You’ll notice that for all the talk about workers, not one of these more populist Republicans has actually said their demands should be met. They haven’t affirmed the right of labor to strike. They haven’t even blamed management for the strike, despite the fact that the U.A.W. is taking aim at rising corporate profits, which it believes could support higher wages, cost-of-living protections and stronger benefits — and the two-tier system that pays new workers less than veteran workers for the same work.And they haven’t voiced support for the largest, most ambitious organizing goal of the U.A.W. — the unionization of new electric vehicle and battery factories, either as part of a new contract or pursued through new organizing. If anything, Republican attacks on electric vehicles work to obscure the nature of the conflict, which is less about a new product category than about the balance of power between labor and management in the American auto industry.As (my former editor and colleague) Harold Meyerson notes in a piece for The American Prospect:The long-term future of the U.A.W. truly hinges on its ability to unionize the Big Three’s non-union competitors and their own non-union E.V. factories springing up in the right-to-work South. As today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the S.E.C. reports that total compensation (wages and benefits) for the median-paid worker at Tesla’s factories is a bare $34,084, while for the median worker at GM, it’s $80,034; at Ford, $74,691; and at Stellantis, $68,683. Total compensation at the Big Three and non-Big Three new E.V. and battery factories, as well as at the non-E.V. foreign-owned auto factories that are spread across the South, also falls well short of the levels that U.A.W. members make at the Big Three.“In short,” he concludes, “the union won’t long be able to realize the kind of gains its members need unless it can level up the standards at Tesla et al., lest it be compelled to face a long-term leveling down to Elon Musk’s idea of what a proper division of revenue should be.”Or as the U.A.W.’s first-ever directly member-elected president, Shawn Fain, wrote last week in a Guardian opinion essay co-authored with Representative Ro Khanna of California:The electric vehicle transition must be as much about workers’ rights as it is about fighting the climate crisis. We will not let the E.V. industry be built on the backs of workers making poverty wages while C.E.O.s line their pockets with government subsidies. There is no good reason E.V. manufacturing can’t be the gateway to the middle class. But the early signs of this industry are worrying. We will not let corporate greed manipulate the transition to a green economy into a roll back of economic justice.The extent to which Republicans are indifferent to these questions of power is key, because it puts the lie to the idea that the party has become pro-worker in any sense other than a few words and the occasional nod to blue-collar cultural identity. Josh Hawley, for example, opposed a 2018 effort to repeal Missouri’s anti-union “right to work” law. Marco Rubio, according to the AFL-CIO’s scorecard of members of Congress, is among the most anti-labor Republicans in the Senate. J.D. Vance railed against “union bosses” in his 2022 campaign, and Donald Trump (along with Mike Pence) ran one of the most anti-union presidential administrations in recent memory.In other words, Republican support for workers remains little more than rhetoric, signifying nothing. They have no apparent problem with management granting workers a modest increase in wages, but remain hostile to workers who seek to organize themselves as a countervailing force to corporate and financial power.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the basic analytical problem with the constant calls for Joe Biden to step away from the 2024 Democratic nomination.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.My Friday column, building somewhat on the Tuesday one, was on Donald Trump, abortion and the political burdens of presidential leadership.Trump is no longer the singular figure of 2016. He is enmeshed within the Republican Party. He has real commitments to allies and coalition partners within the conservative movement. He is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, yes, but he can’t simply jettison the abortion issue, which remains a central concern for much of the Republican base.And in the most recent episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the film “The American President” with Linda Holmes of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour.”Now ReadingSamuel Clowes Huneke on “wokeness” for The Los Angeles Review of Books.Michael Szalay on the politics of prestige television for Public Books.Dinah Birch on anonymous letters for The London Review of Books.Lola Seaton on “political capitalism” for The New Left Review.Amy C. Offner on neoliberalism for Dissent.Photo of the WeekA photo from the archive! This is the Art Deco Model Tobacco building in Richmond, Va., built around 1940. I took this photo in 2018 with a camera I have long since sold. The building itself has been converted into apartments.Now Eating: Greek-Style White BeansThis is a very simple recipe for Greek-style white beans from The Rancho Gordo Vegetarian Kitchen series, Volume 1. The book calls for lima beans, but any large white bean will do. You’ll want to use dried beans. Other than that, however, the recipe is yours to play with. I cook anchovies along with the vegetables and tomatoes for some additional umami, and I tend to let the beans cook in the oven for longer than 30 minutes — I like them a little on the drier side. I also go a little easy on the olive oil.Be sure to garnish with additional feta and a lot of herbs — dill, parsley and mint all work well here. You would also do well to buy, or make, some pita bread to have on the side.Ingredients½ cup olive oil (divided use)1 large carrot, peeled and finely chopped1 celery stalk, finely chopped½ onion, finely chopped2 tablespoons tomato paste½ pound large white beans, cooked and drained1 large, ripe tomato, chopped3 tablespoons minced fresh dillsalt and freshly ground pepperfeta cheeseDirectionsPreheat the oven to 350 degrees.In a large skillet, warm 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat. Add the carrot, celery, and onion; sauté until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste.In a large baking dish, combine the sautéed vegetables, beans, tomato and remaining olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dill. Add feta, if desired.Bake until the beans are soft and creamy, about 30 minutes. More

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      The Permanent Migration Crisis

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      On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond to a sudden rise in anti-immigration sentiment in blue cities, particularly New York, as the surge of migrants overwhelms social services and shelters.I say flailing because the fundamental problem facing the Biden administration is on the southern border, where every attempt to get ahead of the extraordinary numbers trying to cross or claim asylum has been overwhelmed.In Eagle Pass, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports that in a week, an estimated 10,000 migrants have entered the city, whose entire population is less than 30,000. The subsequent movement of migrants to places like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been encouraged by red-state governors, but under any circumstances such crowds in Eagle Pass would eventually mean rising numbers in big cities. And policies that make it easier to work in those cities, like the Biden move, are likely to encourage more migration until the border is more stable and secure.The liberal confusion over this situation, the spectacle of Democratic politicians like Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul sounding like Fox News hosts, is a foretaste of the difficult future facing liberals across the Western world.For decades, liberal jurisdictions have advertised their openness to migrants, while relying on the sheer difficulty of international migration and restrictions supported by conservatives to keep the rate of arrivals manageable, and confine any chaos to the border rather than the metropole.What’s changed, and what will keep changing for decades, are the numbers involved. Civil wars and climate change will play their part, but the most important shifts are, first, the way the internet and smartphones have made it easier to make your way around the world, and second, the population imbalance between a rich, rapidly-aging West and a poorer, younger Global South, a deeply unstable equilibrium drawing economic migrants north.All of this is a bigger problem for Europe than the United States — European aging is more advanced, Africa’s population will boom for decades (in 50 years there may be five Africans for every European) while Latin America’s birthrates have declined. The European equivalent of Eagle Pass is the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost possession, where the number of recent migrants exceeds the native population. This surge is just the beginning, Christopher Caldwell argues in an essay for The Spectator on the continent’s dilemmas, which quotes a former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy: “The migration crisis has not even started.”America’s challenge is less dramatic but not completely different. The world has shrunk, and there is no clear limit on how many people can reach the Rio Grande. So what’s happening this year will happen even more: The challenges of mass arrivals will spread beyond the border, there will be an increased demand for restrictions even from people generally sympathetic to migrants, but the sheer numbers will make any restrictions less effectual.This combination can yield a pattern like what we’ve seen in Britain after Brexit and Italy under Giorgia Meloni: Politicians are elected promising to take back control of borders, but their policies are ineffective and even right-wing governments preside over high migration rates. The choice then is to go further into punitive and callous territory, as the Trump administration did with its family-separation policy and its deal with Mexico — or else to recoil as many voters did from Trump’s policies, which encouraged the Democrats to move leftward, which left them unprepared to deal with the crisis when they came to power, which now threatens to help elect Trump once again.In a sense you might distill the challenge facing liberals to a choice: Take more responsibility for restricting immigration, or get used to right-wing populists doing it for you.But in fact the problems for both left and right will be messier than this. The populists themselves will not always know how to fulfill their promises. The interests of liberals in immigrant destinations like New York City may diverge from liberals in college towns or suburbs. The scale and diversity of migration will create unexpected alliances (a lot of Venezuelan migrants might vote for Trump if given the chance, after their experience with socialism) and new lines of internal fracture.Most likely there will be neither a punitive end to the crisis nor a successful humanitarian means of managing it. There will be a general rightward evolution, a growing tolerance for punitive measures (“Build the wall” could be a liberal slogan eventually), that has some effect on the flow of migration — but doesn’t prevent it from being dramatic, chaotic and transformative, on the way to whatever new world order may await.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Menendez Indictment Could Undercut G.O.P. Attacks on Justice Department

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      The indictment of the Democratic senator from New Jersey comes at a politically opportune moment for the besieged Justice Department.On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee repeatedly accused Attorney General Merrick B. Garland of singling out former President Donald J. Trump for selective prosecution, slamming him for what they call a “two-tiered system” of justice.Forty-eight hours later, the Justice Department indicted one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate — Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee — on bribery charges, making public a trove of evidence, including cash and gold bars stashed at his house.The department’s aggressive pursuit of Mr. Menendez appeared to undercut claims that Mr. Trump is the victim of pervasive political bias that targets leaders on the right while shielding transgressors on the left.The entanglement of electoral politics and law enforcement is becoming the norm, and the prosecution of a top Democrat up for re-election in 2024 has political as well as legal reverberations. And the indictment, brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with limited participation from the Justice Department’s national security division in Washington, comes at a politically opportune moment for the besieged department.“This case really should silence any critic who wrongly suggests that D.O.J. is politicized under Garland,” said Anthony D. Coley, a former spokesman for the department. “This D.O.J. follows the facts — and isn’t influenced by partisan politics, political affiliation or wealth — not anything but facts and law.”Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia, said recent indictments showed the department was functioning as it should. “The department goes where the facts lead them,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Trump, Hunter Biden, Menendez now. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”But the indictment could cut the other way, playing into the Republican argument, used so effectively by Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign, that Washington is a swamp lorded over by corrupt Democrats. Republican reaction to the news was initially muted, but the Republican National Committee and House Republicans took to social media in an attempt to link Mr. Menendez to President Biden and the Hunter Biden scandal.Rules adopted by Senate Democrats require Mr. Menendez to immediately step aside as chairman of his committee, as he did when he was first indicted in 2015, reclaiming his post when the charges against him were dropped three years later.Mr. Menendez, one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate, is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is now required to step down from his leadership role.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIf that buys Democrats some breathing space, it does little to weaken the longer-term political challenges, with President Biden and Senator Charles Schumer, the majority leader, likely to face increasing pressure to urge a defiant Mr. Menendez to voluntarily resign his seat.“Active matter, not going to comment,” said the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked whether the president wanted the senator to quit.Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, who would have the power to appoint Mr. Menendez’s successor, called on Mr. Menendez to resign on Friday. His message was soon followed by like-minded calls from political leaders throughout the state.Earlier in the day, several other Democrats made similar statements. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota compared the senator with Representative George Santos, the Long Island Republican indicted in May on 13 charges, including wire fraud. “It’s appalling,” Mr. Phillips told CNN.But Mr. Menendez showed no sign of backing down. Some top Democrats, including Mr. Schumer and Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, who is likely to take over his gavel on the committee, released statements urging patience while the judicial process played out.Shortly after the charges were announced, Mr. Menendez issued a blistering one-page-long denial that was not unlike the vehement pushback by Mr. Trump and his supporters in response to his multiple criminal indictments.“For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he wrote. “The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”Mr. Trump has not been accused of bribery or pay-to-play corruption. Yet Mr. Menendez’s indictment carries faint echoes of the investigation into the former president’s retention of classified documents at his Florida estate — most notably the inclusion of photographs from the senator’s house that were instantly disseminated on social media.But the charges against Mr. Menendez, whose opposition to the administration’s efforts to thaw relations with Cuba rankled many in the White House, are highly unlikely to influence the Republican strategy of undermining public confidence in the Justice Department under Mr. Garland and federal law enforcement more generally.During the contentious oversight hearing on Wednesday that foreshadowed the looming impeachment inquiry of President Biden, Republicans blasted Mr. Garland, time and again, for slow-walking the investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, while fast-tracking two indictments against Mr. Trump.“There’s one investigation protecting President Biden — there’s another one attacking President Trump,” said Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “The Justice Department’s got both sides of the equation covered.”The hearing, which lasted more than five hours, focused primarily on the department’s five-year investigation of Hunter Biden, and a plea deal negotiated by David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware overseeing the case, that would have spared Mr. Biden prison time on gun and tax charges. That agreement fell apart during a court hearing in July, and the government has indicted Mr. Biden on three felony weapons charges, while continuing its investigation into his lucrative consulting deals with foreign companies.The claim that Mr. Garland has weaponized the Justice Department for political purposes, while thus far unsupported by evidence, is a pillar of Republican messaging. Not only is it a way to rally the party’s base, but it is meant to counter a mountain of witness testimony and documentary evidence against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally retaining classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election.“Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” the attorney general said. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.” More

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      UAW Strike: Biden to Visit Michigan to Support Autoworkers on Picket Line

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      In an extraordinary show of support for organized labor, President Biden said he would join workers in Michigan on the front lines of their strike against leading automakers.President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”Earlier Friday, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign posted on social media a video of Republican presidential candidates and Fox News anchors bemoaning his support for unions. The caption from Mr. Biden read: “Yes.”Mr. Fain’s invitation came a week into an expanding work stoppage by autoworkers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis plants. The union president announced on Friday that the strike, which began last week at three plants in the Midwest, would expand to 38 more locations in 20 states across the country. He said that talks with General Motors and Stellantis had not progressed significantly, but that Ford had done more to meet the union’s demands.Mr. Biden has defended the striking autoworkers since the stoppage began last week, and the White House has dispatched Julie Su, the acting secretary of labor, and Gene Sperling, a top White House economic adviser, to seek an end to the strike.Mr. Biden has referred to himself as “the most pro-union president in American history” and has long made his alliances with and support for organized labor a central part of his political identity. But his administration’s push for a transition to electric vehicles has put him at odds with the U.A.W., because electric vehicles require fewer workers to produce.The U.A.W. has broken with other major unions in so far declining to endorse Mr. Biden’s re-election bid.Mr. Trump is skipping next week’s Republican presidential primary debate and instead delivering a speech in Michigan before current and former union workers. Mr. Trump pulled away significant portions of union workers from Democrats in his 2016 victory by denouncing international free trade agreements. In his current campaign, he has staked out a position against the federal push for more electric vehicles.Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said Mr. Biden would not be going to Michigan if Mr. Trump had not announced a trip there first. On social media, he called Mr. Biden’s visit “nothing more than a cheap photo op as he finds himself between a rock and a political hard place.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — who, like the rest of the Republican presidential candidates, trails far behind Mr. Trump — sought to inject himself into the news cycle about the strike this week by suggesting that the autoworkers should be fired, a move the companies are legally prohibited from carrying out.On Thursday, the U.A.W. postured back by filing a complaint against Mr. Scott with the National Labor Relations Board (such complaints are often dismissed). On Friday, Mr. Scott called the U.A.W. “one of the most corrupt and scandal-plagued unions in America” and said the union’s contract proposal would lead to government bailouts.Mr. Fain, who appeared at a rally with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont when the strike began, has been critical of Mr. Trump and Republicans. More

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      Influx of Migrants Exposes Democrats’ Division on Immigration

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      Democratic voters far from the border say they want leaders to do more to address the growing number of migrants in their cities, but they don’t agree on what.In recent years, Alisa Pata, a lifelong Democrat living in Manhattan, has spent far more time worrying about Donald J. Trump than immigration. But now, as she reads about the influx of migrants coming to her city, that’s starting to change.“We have too many people coming in,” said Ms. Pata, 85, as her older sister unpacked a travel Scrabble board for a game in the park. “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”Sitting a few feet away, Daniela Garduño, 24, who also supported President Biden, had the opposite view. She cringed when she heard Eric Adams, the city’s Democratic mayor, say that the asylum seekers would “destroy New York City.” It reminded Ms. Garduño of the conservative politicians in her native Texas.She left the state for New York expecting more liberal politics, said Ms. Garduño, a paralegal. “And now it seems like there’s just so many echoes.”In some of the country’s most liberal cities, Democrats are wrestling with the complications of a dysfunctional immigration system and a set of problems that for many years has largely remained thousands of miles away. The new wave of migrants, some bused north by Republican governors, is exposing fissures in a party that was for the most part unified against the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration.Most strikingly, much of the debate over incoming migrants is happening not in swing states or battleground suburban counties, but in some of the most diverse — and deeply blue — corners of the country.In interviews with more than two dozen voters in the Democratic strongholds of New York, Boston and Chicago, most embraced the migrants, whom they saw as fleeing difficult and desperate circumstances. They largely praised the Biden administration’s decision to expand temporary protected status to 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them to work legally in the United States for 18 months. Many said they believed that the new arrivals should be allowed to try to support themselves and saw plenty of available jobs to be filled.“The restaurant industry has been lacking cooks, bus people and dishwashers for years now — we were calling cooks unicorns because nobody could find them,” said David Bonomi, 47, a Democrat who owns a restaurant in Chicago’s Little Italy. “If there’s people who are here looking for a better life, looking for opportunity and willing to do those jobs, I’m absolutely for it.”But many expressed frustration with the Democratic leaders managing the new arrivals, and some worried that the Biden administration’s new order was only encouraging more people to come.“There are all kinds of empty dwellings in Chicago. Put them in there, and let them work,” said Charles Kelly, a retiree who was riding his bike in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood on Thursday. “People are lying on the sidewalks, and I’m like, why? People are begging for jobs and guess what, here’s your work force right here.”Recently arrived migrants in a makeshift shelter at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in August.Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune, via Getty ImagesBut at the same time, Mr. Kelly wondered if the border could be temporarily closed to give cities time to accommodate the migrants already here, a policy once proposed by Mr. Trump and one that would face major legal hurdles.“It’s overwhelming the system,” he said. “They should be monitored closely. I don’t know exactly how to do that but the federal and state governments should be doing more.”The reality that Democrats like Mr. Kelly are grappling with is complex. After a drop this spring, unlawful crossings at the Southern border are rising sharply, and migrants cannot work legally while they wait to be processed through the clogged courts. While allowing some to work may ease the strain, critics note that it could also encourage more to come.For decades, attempts to pass systemic fixes through Congress have crumbled. A broad immigration overhaul is now considered a nonstarter given Republicans’ internal divisions.In New York, more than 113,300 migrants have arrived since the spring of 2022. Local officials have struggled to respond, and the city has estimated that it would spend about $5 billion this fiscal year to house and feed migrants. Last fall, Mr. Adams declared a state of emergency.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants and spent at least $250 million, while Washington has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris. In Massachusetts, the state’s shelter population rose 80 percent in the last year after the arrival of thousands of migrant families. Many of the asylum seekers who have arrived in recent months are Venezuelans fleeing the economic collapse of their home country.LaQuana Chambers, 41, saw a racial bias in the way some Democratic politicians were talking about the new arrivals and denounced what she viewed as efforts to pit the migrants against citizens.“When it was Ukrainian immigrants coming in, there wasn’t this much of an uproar,” said Ms. Chambers, who works for the city’s education department and lives in Brooklyn. “If you’re white and European, people will easily digest that, they’re OK with that. But if you’re brown — no.”The situation presents a potential political danger for Mr. Biden and his party. Nationally, Republicans have gained an edge with voters on immigration over the past year. Roughly four in ten Americans said they broadly agreed with Republicans on the issue in a June survey by Pew Research Center, about 10 points more than agreed with Democrats. That was a notable shift from a year earlier, when roughly equal shares of Americans said they agreed with each party.Polling on views about the recent wave of migrants has been largely limited to New York. A survey released this week by Siena College found that 51 percent of registered Democrats in New York considered the recent migrants to be a “major problem.” Only 14 percent, however, ranked it as the single most important issue for the governor and state legislature, far fewer than those who selected economic factors like cost of living and the availability of affordable housing.Advisers to Mr. Biden’s campaign argue that the president’s voters haven’t changed their position on immigration; they just want to see steps taken to help handle the influx of migrants. The advisers said they believed those concerns would be assuaged by steps like the decision to expand temporary protected status this week.Still, some Democratic politicians have responded by adopting talking points that sound almost like they were lifted from their Republican rivals, a sign that they fear a political backlash. They have activated the national guard, petitioned the White House for expedited work authorizations and pleaded with Mr. Biden to take a more aggressive approach.Mr. Adams, who has said the president has “failed” the city by not doing more, praised Mr. Biden’s move this week to expand temporary protected status but also pressed the White House to extend protections to migrants from other nations.Mayor Eric Adams staged a rally in August to call on federal officials to expedite work authorization for asylum seekers.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMost Democratic voters said the issue was not prompting them to reconsider their support for Mr. Biden, whom they still vastly prefer over Mr. Trump or any of his Republican primary opponents. But the political implications might be most visible among swing voters in crucial suburban battlegrounds, where voters in recent elections have punished Democratic candidates for what they perceive as the declining quality of life in cities.Robert Speicher, 60, a retired social worker on Long Island who worked with undocumented immigrant families, said his heart broke for the migrants.“They just want to work and stay in the shadow. This myth that they’re here to suck our system dry — they don’t want that,” said Mr. Speicher, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and skipped the election in 2020, after being disappointed by the former president.But he added that he believed Mr. Biden’s policies had failed to secure the border, escalating what he saw as a crisis.“Why are these 500,000 people getting to cut the line?” he said. In Watertown, Mass., a city outside of Boston, Josh Fiedler, 48, said that recent reports about cities struggling to deal with the new population of migrants made him think more about the border crisis that has animated Republicans for years.But it did not lead him to support Republican solutions. He said he would like to see an increase in foreign aid to Latin American countries to improve conditions.“I didn’t realize it was a problem until it happened,” said Mr. Fiedler, a quality assurance analyst and a Democrat. “The border states have complained for a long time. Something needs to be done.”Robert Chiarito in Chicago, Melissa Russell in Somerville, Mass., and More

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      Haley Heads Into Second G.O.P. Debate on the Rise, Making Her a Likely Target

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      After her breakout performance at the first debate, the former South Carolina governor has gained attention from Republican voters and donors and is moving up in the polls.At a campaign event at a scenic country club in Portsmouth, N.H, on Thursday, James Peterson, a businessman, thrilled an audience when he stunned Nikki Haley with a question she said she had never heard before, and which cut straight to the point: 100 years from now, how do you think history will remember Donald Trump?“I always say, ‘I’ve done over 80 town halls in New Hampshire and Iowa — that’s all the debate prep I need,’ but you take it to a whole new level,” Ms. Haley said to a roar of laughter from roughly 100 Rotary Club members and their guests.She then took a quick beat before diving into a measured, yet sharpened, critique of Mr. Trump and his administration — the good, the bad, and with some subtlety, the ugly.“Time does funny things. My thought will be that he was the right president at the right time,” she said, later making clear, “I don’t think he is the right president now.”Such a thorny question might be just the type of preparation Ms. Haley, 51, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, is looking for as she heads into the next Republican presidential debate on Wednesday with real momentum — and as the likely focus of political attacks.After her last performance on the national debate stage, in which she made a strong general election pitch and tangled with opponents on foreign policy, climate and abortion, Ms. Haley has seen gains in the polls, a rush of volunteers and swelling interest from early-state voters.Recent surveys have her running third in Iowa and New Hampshire and second in her home state of South Carolina. One CNN survey showed Ms. Haley beating President Biden in a hypothetical general-election matchup.Some of her top fund-raisers said donors who had been waiting on the sidelines for a Trump alternative to emerge were coalescing behind her. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois, a top giver to her rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has transferred his allegiance to Ms. Haley.Another major backer, Eric J. Tanenblatt, an Atlanta businessman who has hosted three fund-raisers for Ms. Haley since March, said the excitement around her candidacy has increased significantly in recent weeks.“When she was here last week, we didn’t have to call people, people were calling us,” he said. He noted that the size of her events have grown, “each one bigger than the one before.” He added of his most recent gathering: “We had to turn people away — it is a good problem to have.”But even as Ms. Haley looks to replicate her debate success next week, the 2024 presidential race still appears to be Mr. Trump’s to lose. And with voters and donors starting to pay more attention, her rivals are likely to as well.Since the last debate, Ms. Haley has mostly split her time between New Hampshire and South Carolina while also making up ground in Iowa. She has continued to burnish her foreign policy credentials, criticize Republicans on spending — which played well in the first debate — and call for a change in generational leadership.On a farm last week in Grand Mound, Iowa, she drove a corn combine and spoke of the need to fix the legal immigration system to address farmers’ labor shortages against a backdrop of gleaming green tractors and American and Iowa flags. But she also pledged to defund sanctuary cities and send the military into Mexico to tackle drug cartels.In a packed auditorium at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., on Friday, Ms. Haley laid out her economic priorities, including eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax, ending green energy subsidies, overhauling social security and Medicare for younger people and withholding the pay of Congress members if they fail to pass a budget.She criticized both Republican and Democratic presidents for increasing the debt but reserved her toughest broadsides for China and Mr. Biden, whom she accused of plunging the nation into “socialism” and enlarging government, saying he was pouring money into social and corporate welfare programs that she argued were hurting the poor “in the name of helping the poor.”Ms. Haley rode a corn combine during a farm tour in Grand Mound, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHer appearances lately have drawn in moderates, independents and even some Democrats who say they like her fresh face and appeals to common sense and reason. “I like her fast thinking and proactive ideas,” said Nancy Wauters, 67, a retired medical office support staffer and an independent voter who went to see Ms. Haley speak at a Des Moines town hall last week after being impressed by her performance in the first debate.But swaying Trump die-hards who have continued to rally behind the former president has been more difficult. “I like Nikki Haley a lot,” said Barbara Miller, 64, a retired banker, at Ms. Haley’s event in Portsmouth. “But I just feel that Donald Trump is the stronger, more electable candidate.”When another voter at the country club in Portsmouth pressed Ms. Haley on how she would overcome his advantage, Ms. Haley said she expected the field to winnow after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and to come to a “head-to-head” matchup in her home state of South Carolina.Mr. Trump missing the first debate and now possibly the second was a mistake, she said.“You can’t win the American people by being absent,” she said. 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      Request for Gag Order on Trump Raises Free Speech Dilemma

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      By putting the prospect of political violence at the heart of their argument to limit the former president’s statements about the election case, federal prosecutors raised issues that have little precedent.The request by prosecutors that a judge impose a gag order on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal election-subversion case presents a thorny conflict between the scope of his First Amendment rights and fears that he could — intentionally or not — spur his supporters to violence.There is little precedent for how the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, should think about how to weigh strong constitutional protections for political speech against ensuring the functioning of the judicial process and the safety of the people participating in it.It is one more example of the challenges of seeking to hold to account a norm-shattering former president who is being prosecuted in two federal cases — and two state cases — as he makes another bid for the White House with a message that his opponents have weaponized the criminal justice system against him.“Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a law professor at Georgetown University and a criminal procedure specialist. “The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.”Citing a spate of threats inspired by the indictment of Mr. Trump in the election case, the special counsel overseeing the prosecutions for the Justice Department, Jack Smith, asked Judge Chutkan this month to order the former president to cease his near-daily habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.A proposed order drafted by Mr. Smith’s team would also bar Mr. Trump and his lawyers from making — or causing surrogates to make — public statements, including on social media, “regarding the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses.” The motion cited Mr. Trump’s attacks on former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General William P. Barr, who refused to go along with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The draft order would allow Mr. Trump to say he denies the charges “without further comment.”Jack Smith, the special counsel, asked the judge to order Mr. Trump to cease his habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA version of the motion was unsealed late last week. Judge Chutkan, of the Federal District Court in Washington, has ordered Mr. Trump’s legal team to file any opposition to it by Monday and is likely to hold a hearing on the request next month. A spokesman for Mr. Trump has called the request “blatant election interference” and a corrupt and cynical attempt to deprive the former president of his First Amendment rights.Gag orders limiting what trial participants can say outside of court are not uncommon, especially to limit pretrial publicity in high-profile cases. Courts have held that orders barring participants from certain public comments are constitutional to avoid prejudicing a jury, citing the public interest in the fair and impartial administration of trials.The context of the gag request for Mr. Trump, though, is different in fundamental ways.Mr. Smith’s filing nodded to the potential for Mr. Trump’s statements to complicate the process of seating an unbiased jury in the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in March. But the request for the gag order focused primarily on a different concern: that Mr. Trump’s angry and vengeful statements about the proceedings against him are putting people in danger now.The motion cited “multiple threats” to Mr. Smith. It noted that another prosecutor, Jay I. Bratt, had been subject to “intimidating communications” after the former president targeted him in “inflammatory public posts,” falsely saying Mr. Bratt had tipped off the White House before Mr. Trump’s indictment in the case accusing him of mishandling classified documents.And it cited the case of a Texas woman who has been charged with making death threats to Judge Chutkan last month. She left the judge a voice message using a racist slur, court filings show, and said, “You are in our sights — we want to kill you.”“If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” the message said, adding that “you will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”Prosecutors connected their request to the threats and harassment that election officials and other people carrying out election-related duties experienced after Mr. Trump attacked them in late 2020 as part of his false claims that the election had been stolen.“The defendant knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets,” the motion said, adding: “Given the defendant’s history described above and the nature of the threats to the court and to the government, it is clear that the threats are prompted by the defendant’s repeated and relentless posts.”In that sense, the request for the gag order was as much about what is sometimes called stochastic terrorism — the idea that demonizing someone through mass communication increases the chances that a lone wolf will be inspired to attack the target — as it was about more traditional concerns of keeping a jury from being influenced by statements outside of court.The request raises both legal and political issues and carries the risk of playing into Mr. Trump’s hands.The former president and his defense team have made clear that they want people to think the case is about whether he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted about the election. Mr. Smith sought to head off that move by acknowledging in the indictment that Mr. Trump had a right to lie to the public and by not charging him with inciting the Capitol riot.But the gag order request is directly about what Mr. Trump is allowed to say. Moreover, it has given him more fodder to portray the case as intended to undercut his presidential campaign — and, if he is under a gag order and loses again in 2024, to once again tell his supporters that the election was rigged.Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington has ordered Mr. Trump’s legal team to file any opposition to the motion by Monday.Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, via Associated PressWhen the motion became public, Mr. Trump riffed on it with apparent glee.“They want to see if they can silence me. So the media — the fake news — will ask me a question. ‘I’m sorry, I won’t be able to answer’ — how do you think we’ do in that election?” Mr. Trump said at a summit of religious conservatives. “So we are going to have a little bit of a fun with that, I think. That’s a tough one. Can you imagine?”Implicit in the ways he could “have a little bit of a fun” is the question of how Judge Chutkan could enforce any such order if Mr. Trump skirted its edges or even boldly defied its limits. It would be one thing for her to impose a fine, but if he refused to pay or to tone down his statements, a next step for a judge in a normal case would be to order imprisonment.Any such step in this case would be legally and politically explosive.At a hearing last month, Judge Chutkan vowed to “take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings” and warned lawyers for Mr. Trump that they and their client should consider their public statements in the case.“I intend to ensure the orderly administration of justice in this case, as I would with any other case,” she said, “and even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they could reasonably be interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process.”The judge also suggested that she could speed up the trial date as an alternative penalty. “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case, which could taint the jury pool or intimidate potential witnesses,” she said, “the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly to ensure a jury pool from which we can select an impartial jury.”Most cases about gag orders affecting criminal defendants have focused on limits imposed on what their lawyers, not the defendants themselves, can say outside of court — in part because defense lawyers typically order their clients to say nothing in public about their cases anyway. That is one of many ways Mr. Trump operates from a different playbook.In a 1991 case, which prosecutors cited in their motion, the Supreme Court upheld local court rules that bar defense lawyers from making comments outside court that are substantially likely to materially prejudice a jury. Such a regulation, it said, “constitutes a constitutionally permissible balance between the First Amendment rights of attorneys in pending cases and the state’s interest in fair trials.”But the Supreme Court also suggested that greater speech restrictions might be permissible on lawyers because they are officers of the court. The justices have never addressed what standard a gag order on a defendant must meet to pass First Amendment muster. A handful of appeals courts have addressed gag orders imposed on trial participants who are not lawyers and set different standards.Margaret C. Tarkington, a law professor at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and a specialist in lawyers’ free-speech rights, predicted that any gag order would be more likely to survive on appeal if Judge Chutkan barred Mr. Trump only from attacking witnesses and jurors. The First Amendment provides particularly strong protections for criticism of government officials, she noted.Still, Professor Tarkington acknowledged that a gag order that still permitted demonizing the judge and prosecutors would not address much of the concern that prosecutors are raising. She also said past gag-order cases offered few guideposts because Mr. Trump is such a unique figure: His megaphone and its potential impact on his more extreme supporters — as demonstrated by the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021 — puts him in a different realm.“It’s a really hard argument in normal circumstances to say the government, who is prosecuting someone, can shut them up from defending themselves in public,” Professor Tarkington said. “What makes this backward from everything else is that normally, in every criminal prosecution I can think of, the power imbalance is that the state has all the power and the defendant has none. But in this case, you have a defendant who has very significant power.”In their motion to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors also cited an appeals court ruling in 2000 that involved a rare example of a defendant who challenged a gag order. A judge had prevented all trial participants from making statements outside the court “intended to influence public opinion” about the case’s merits, and the defendant, an elected insurance commissioner in Louisiana named Jim Brown, wanted to be exempted. But the appeals court upheld it.The motion said the Brown precedent showed that the reasoning of the 1991 Supreme Court case upholding gag orders on defense lawyers “applies equally” to defendants. But prosecutors omitted another seemingly relevant factor: The gag order was lifted for about two months to avoid interfering with Mr. Brown’s re-election campaign and reimposed only after the election was over.“Brown was able to answer, without hindrance, the charges of his opponents regarding his indictment throughout the race,” the appeals court noted, adding, “The urgency of a campaign, which may well require that a candidate, for the benefit of the electorate as well as himself, have absolute freedom to discuss his qualifications, has passed.” More