Presidential Election of 2024

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      Biden Campaign Aims to Calm Worries About His Age

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      With low approval ratings and shaky public performances, the president and his team are planning an ad blitz and trying to reassure voters about his age.With stubbornly subterranean approval numbers, President Biden is taking early steps to shore up his re-election candidacy with a multipronged strategy that includes a costly advertising campaign and leveraging the powers of the bully pulpit.During his recent trip to India and Vietnam, Mr. Biden’s aides aggressively pushed back on suggestions that he has lost a step, highlighting his busy schedule as a sign of his vigor. Back home, his campaign broadcast a television ad depicting a previous overseas trip — a secret journey to Ukraine in February that the White House has trumpeted as a triumph of daring and a foreign policy tour de force.That ad comes three weeks into a $25 million battleground state campaign to promote Mr. Biden’s economic record to a public that remains skeptical of the so-called Bidenomics pitch he began making this summer.Such an ad blitz is notably early for an incumbent, in the face of concerns that Mr. Biden is struggling to maintain support among young, Black and Latino voters — key parts of the coalition that lifted him to office in 2020. While Mr. Biden’s TV ads do not frontally address a central concern raised by Democratic voters — his age — they showcase his vitality and stamina.The Ukraine ad features footage of Mr. Biden striding confidently alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky during a surprise visit to Kyiv to support the war effort. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” a narrator says. It ends bluntly, “Biden. President.”Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement: “As Republicans fight each other in their divisive primary, we are building a campaign that is working to break through in a fragmented media environment, and speaking to the general-election audience in the battleground states that will decide next year’s election.”Democratic strategists say that many of the worries are overblown and that Mr. Biden has plenty of time to improve his numbers. Last week, Jim Messina, the campaign manager of President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, who has become a leading voice of the don’t-panic-about-Biden chorus, circulated a 24-page presentation suggesting that the political environment was good for Democrats and calling for “bedwetters” in their ranks to relax.“Polling 15 months out is notoriously ridiculous,” Mr. Messina said in an interview. “If you were just playing poker, you would rather have Joe Biden’s cards than Donald Trump’s.”But Mr. Biden gave his Republican critics some fresh ammunition to question his physical and mental competence at a news conference in Vietnam, telling reporters at one point he was ready to go to bed. He also made a meandering and culturally awkward reference to John Wayne, who last acted in a film in 1976, nearly a half-century ago.Mr. Biden is operating in a bit of a political vacuum, as Republicans go through their primary process. Once a challenger emerges, party strategists say, Democrats will see Mr. Biden as the stronger choice and rally behind the president.Joe Trippi, a Democrat who has worked on presidential campaigns over five election cycles, said all incumbent presidents over the past decade were nearly tied with their rivals in September of the year before the election.“I’ve seen this movie over and over and over,” he said. “Every sitting president has been sitting exactly in the same place — in a dead heat.”The $25 million the campaign is spending on new ads amounts to a small fraction of what is expected to be the total cost of Mr. Biden’s campaign. In 2020, he made history by raising $1 billion for his run. This time, Mr. Biden’s initial fund-raising has been slower, impeded in part by an across-the-board decline in online contributions and the absence of liberal outrage about Mr. Trump’s presidency.Still, Mr. Biden is jumping into the political fray far earlier than his predecessors did. President Barack Obama did not begin running re-election TV ads until after Thanksgiving in 2011. His first spot was a straight-to-camera invitation to supporters to “let me know you’re in,” rather than an effort to reassure supporters about his record in office.While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings were, like Mr. Biden’s, quite low, he did not face widespread doubts within his party about whether he should seek re-election.In a different era of politics and television, the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign did not begin advertising until March of the election year — after John Kerry had effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.Mr. Biden’s campaign says it began advertising earlier than in previous cycles because it is harder to reach broad audiences in an era of cord-cutting. TV networks are not inclined to carry prime-time presidential speeches about policy developments that are often months old, and Mr. Biden is an unsteady performer in front of a microphone. Advertisements can both be seen by a target audience and prompt coverage about them in the news media, and are one of the luxuries of being the incumbent.“Trump could easily define a narrative that kind of rewrites his own history as well as Biden’s history, and that needs to be countered,” said Teddy Goff, the digital director for Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign.Even Mr. Biden’s public in-person events don’t always show the president in the most favorable light. He often speaks softly or holds a microphone too far from his mouth, making it difficult for the audience to follow what he is saying — and making images of fired-up supporters tougher to come by.“It was tough to hear,” Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, Wis., said after seeing Mr. Biden speak in Milwaukee last month. “The acoustics were bad. Having a rally in a factory is tough.”Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, aggressively pushed back on social media after a headline said Mr. Biden was running “a bunker campaign.” “Presidents shall never sleep,” he wrote in one sarcastic post.Unlike the 2020 race, which was largely conducted remotely because of the pandemic, Mr. Biden’s 2024 effort will have to look more like a traditional campaign, with speeches and events that might make the president show his age.The latest chatter about Mr. Biden’s political standing followed a poll from CNN that was full of grim numbers for the president. The findings suggested that Democratic and independent voters had concerns about Mr. Biden himself, not his legislative record. Two-thirds of Democrats surveyed said they would prefer that the party nominate someone else as president. And 63 percent of Democrats said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden’s candidacy was his age, mental acuity or health.Just 4 percent of Democrats polled by CNN said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden was his handling of the economy — the subject that has been the focus of most of the campaign’s advertising so far.Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks to strengthen the party’s bench by recruiting Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said that expanding the Democratic argument beyond Mr. Biden to convey the broader stakes of the election for issues like abortion rights and climate change would be crucial.“He really has to make the campaign beyond just Joe Biden,” she says. “If it’s bigger than him, it will energize younger voters and voters of color and women.” More

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      Manhattan Judge May Be Open to Moving Trump Trial Date as Cases Mount

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      The judge, Juan M. Merchan, said in a letter that while he was not yet ready to discuss potential changes to the March 25, 2024, trial date, he would be willing to have the conversation in February.The judge presiding over the criminal case against Donald J. Trump in Manhattan signaled that he could be open to changing the date of the trial — now set for March 2024 — in light of the handful of other potential trials the former president now faces.But in a letter sent to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said he would wait until February to have that discussion, given Mr. Trump’s “rapidly evolving trial schedule.”In March, the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against Mr. Trump stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star. The trial was soon scheduled for next March. But in the months that followed, Mr. Trump was indicted three more times. The cases, taken together, have created a legal logjam that coincides with the former president’s third run for the White House.In his letter to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, Justice Merchan wrote that he did not believe it would be fruitful to discuss a potential change this month, “in light of the many recent developments involving Mr. Trump.”Justice Merchan said that such a conversation would be more productive in February, when prosecutors and defense lawyers are scheduled to meet for a decision on motions.“We will have a much better sense at that time whether there are any actual conflicts and if so, what the best adjourn date might be for trial,” the judge wrote in the letter, which was dated Sept. 1, 2023, but only recently became public.The letter provides a look behind the scenes at the complications that have ensued after Mr. Trump was charged with felonies by three different prosecutors in four different states. He is scheduled to be put on trial four times next year, though many experts believe that only one or two of the trials will actually take place, given the complexity of the scheduling and the fact that Mr. Trump is again running for president.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, has said that he would not insist on being the first to try Mr. Trump, though he added that scheduling decisions ultimately fell to Justice Merchan.The judge’s letter was a response to Mr. Blanche, who on Aug. 30 asked for a status conference at which to discuss the trial date. Because Justice Merchan declined the request, lawyers will be expected to keep to the schedule the court already set, and the pretrial process will remain on track, regardless of whether the trial itself takes place as scheduled.Justice Merchan has also spoken to Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge presiding over the case in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and that is scheduled to go to trial on March 4, 2024. It is not clear what they discussed, but prosecutors have said that in that case, the government could take between four and six weeks to present its case to the judge.Mr. Trump’s other federal trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024 — in that case, Mr. Trump is charged with illegally retaining dozens of classified documents. His fourth trial — in Georgia, and also related to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — has yet to be scheduled.Kate Christobek More

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      China Sows Disinformation About Hawaii Fires Using New Techniques

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      Beijing’s influence campaign using artificial intelligence is a rapid change in tactics, researchers from Microsoft and other organizations say.When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States.The move also comes as the Biden administration and Congress are grappling with how to push back on China without tipping the two countries into open conflict, and with how to reduce the risk that A.I. is used to magnify disinformation.The impact of the Chinese campaign — identified by researchers from Microsoft, Recorded Future, the RAND Corporation, NewsGuard and the University of Maryland — is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories.Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, whose researchers analyzed the covert campaign, sharply criticized China for exploiting a natural disaster for political gain.“I just don’t think that’s worthy of any country, much less any country that aspires to be a great country,” Mr. Smith said in an interview on Monday.China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the United States was spending on the war in Ukraine and that suggested the cash would be better spent at home for disaster relief.The researchers suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election. That is the pattern that Russia set in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election.“This is going into a new direction, which is sort of amplifying conspiracy theories that are not directly related to some of their interests, like Taiwan,” said Brian Liston, a researcher at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company based in Massachusetts.A destroyed neighborhood in Lahaina, Hawaii, last month. China has made the wildfires a target of disinformation.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIf China does engage in influence operations for the election next year, U.S. intelligence officials have assessed in recent months, it is likely to try to diminish President Biden and raise the profile of former President Donald J. Trump. While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans who remember Mr. Trump’s effort to blame Beijing for what he called the “China virus,” the intelligence officials have concluded that Chinese leaders prefer Mr. Trump. He has called for pulling Americans out of Japan, South Korea and other parts of Asia, while Mr. Biden has cut off China’s access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them.China’s promotion of a conspiracy theory about the fires comes after Mr. Biden vented in Bali last fall to Xi Jinping, China’s president, about Beijing’s role in the spread of such disinformation. According to administration officials, Mr. Biden angrily criticized Mr. Xi for the spread of false accusations that the United States operated biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.There is no indication that Russia and China are working together on information operations, according to the researchers and administration officials, but they often echo each other’s messages, particularly when it comes to criticizing U.S. policies. Their combined efforts suggest a new phase of the disinformation wars is about to begin, one bolstered by the use of A.I. tools.“We don’t have direct evidence of coordination between China and Russia in these campaigns, but we’re certainly finding alignment and a sort of synchronization,” said William Marcellino, a researcher at RAND and an author of a new report warning that artificial intelligence will enable a “critical jump forward” in global influence operations.The wildfires in Hawaii — like many natural disasters these days — spawned numerous rumors, false reports and conspiracy theories almost from the start.Caroline Amy Orr Bueno, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security, reported that a coordinated Russian campaign began on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, on Aug. 9, a day after the fires started.It spread the phrase, “Hawaii, not Ukraine,” from one obscure account with few followers through a series of conservative or right-wing accounts like Breitbart and ultimately Russian state media, reaching thousands of users with a message intended to undercut U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.President Biden has criticized President Xi Jinping of China for the spread of false accusations about the United States and Ukraine.Florence Lo/ReutersChina’s state media apparatus often echoes Russian themes, especially animosity toward the United States. But in this case, it also pursued a distinct disinformation campaign.Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a “weather weapon” for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed “the amazing truth behind the wildfire.” Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists.Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile. According to Recorded Future, the Chinese content often echoed — and amplified — posts by conspiracy theorists and extremists in the United States, including white supremacists.The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani.The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft’s researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. “These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used” by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. “They do not appear to be present elsewhere online.”Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, said that China appeared to have adopted Russia’s playbook for influence operations, laying the groundwork to influence politics in the United States and other countries.“This would be Russia in 2015,” he said, referring to the bots and inauthentic accounts Russia created before its extensive online influence operation during the 2016 election. “If we look at how other actors have done this, they are building capacity. Now they’re building accounts that are covert.”Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.“We’ve always been able to come together in the wake of humanitarian disasters and provide relief in the wake of earthquakes or hurricanes or fires,” said Mr. Smith, who is presenting some of Microsoft’s findings to Congress on Tuesday. “And to see this kind of pursuit instead is both, I think deeply disturbing and something that the global community should draw a red line around and put off-limits.” More

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      ‘Virginia Is the Test Case’: Youngkin Pushes for G.O.P. Takeover This Fall

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      Glenn Youngkin, a popular Republican governor with national ambitions, is trying to help his party take full control of state government in crucial legislative races this year. Virginia, whose off-year elections are usually closely watched as an indicator of the national mood, has been mostly out of the spotlight this year, overshadowed by the Republican presidential primary and the looming general election clash.But with every seat in the Legislature up in eight weeks, the stakes are unusually high, with Republicans in position to swing the entire state, just four years after Democrats did the same. The effort, led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a popular Republican with national ambitions, is likely to serve as an early read on the politics of 2024, spinning out lessons for both parties, especially on abortion.Democrats have made abortion rights their top issue, warning that if Republicans win full control of the General Assembly, then Virginia will join other Southern states by sharply restricting abortion access.A winning night for Democrats on Nov. 7, however, will show that abortion remains just as potent a get-out-the-vote issue for the party as it has been in a string of state elections since the reversal of Roe v. Wade.With Mr. Youngkin overseeing his party’s message, the Republican pitch to turn out voters is less conservative red meat than roast chicken — a Republican comfort menu of tax cuts, job creation and parental influence over schools, which the governor labels “common-sense conservative policies.”On abortion, Mr. Youngkin, who is not on the ballot, wants to ban the procedure after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. If Republicans take majorities in both legislative chambers — and both are in play — the takeaway is likely to be that the party cracked the code with suburban swing voters on abortion by offering a more middle-of-the-road position than the near total bans passed in deep-red states.“This election is going to matter, it’s going to set things up for 2024,” said Don Scott, the Democratic leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, who is one his party’s lead strategists. “If Virginia goes the wrong way, the narrative is going to be the Republicans have figured out the right election combination to overcome their extremism on abortion.”And it could be a road map for Republicans in other states who are looking to defuse the issue after election losses following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.All 40 seats in the Virginia Senate and all 100 in the House are on the ballot. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and Democrats narrowly control the Senate. Strategists on both sides agree that each chamber is up for grabs.Supporters signed the campaign bus to commit to voting early.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“Folks, hold our House and flip our Senate, we know how to do this,” Mr. Youngkin urged a crowd on Saturday in a swing House district south of Richmond. He added: “Virginia is the test case.”He did not mention that another upshot of Republicans’ taking full control of state government is that Mr. Youngkin would further ascend as a national figure. Although he earlier teased a presidential run for 2024 — encouraged by many wealthy out-of-state donors and conservative media outlets who still yearn for him to get in the race — he has batted away the calls for months, saying his sole focus is turning the state.Although he has not ruled out a late entry into the primary, the political calendar and the polls argue strongly against such a move. Filing deadlines for the ballot in the early primary states of South Carolina and Nevada will have passed by November. In a recent Roanoke College Poll, 51 percent of Virginians approved of Mr. Youngkin’s job as governor, but only 9 percent of Republicans in his home state want him to be the 2024 nominee, versus 47 percent who favor Donald J. Trump.Mr. Youngkin, a wealthy former financial executive, has raised record sums for the Spirit of Virginia, his political committee supporting legislative candidates. The group says it pulled in $3.3 million in August and has raised $12 million since March. It is underwriting a tour of swing districts with Mr. Youngkin urging supporters to sign the side of a bus to show their commitment to voting early starting Sept. 22 — a practice that Mr. Trump had made toxic with the G.O.P. base, but has recently embraced.With Democrats lacking a comparable state leader this year, Virginia’s Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, have raised alarms in recent weeks that the party was falling behind in fund-raising and mobilization.The White House heard the pleas, and President Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to funnel $1.2 million to the Majority Project, the Democratic group in Virginia coordinating door-knockers and other voter outreach in key districts.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Virginia Democrats won full control of state government in elections in 2017 and 2019. In 2021, Mr. Youngkin and down-ballot Republicans profited from a backlash over pandemic-era school closures as well as rising inflation under Mr. Biden.“I’d love to have said that Virginia is solidly blue; that’s clearly not the case,” Mr. Warner said in an interview. Control of each chamber is likely to come down to a handful of races: four seats in the Senate and seven in the House that are considered tossups, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.Many of the seats are in the exurbs of Virginia’s metropolitan areas — greater Washington, Richmond and Hampton Roads — a frontier of swing voters, many college-educated, the kind of voters who have had starring roles in elections across the U.S. in recent years.Democratic strategists said they needed to win only one of the four tossup Senate seats to hold their current majority. They are encouraged that Democratic congressional candidates carried all of the districts in the 2022 midterms. Republicans counter that Mr. Youngkin won the same districts in his 2021 election, and that he remains popular.Mr. Youngkin branded himself the “parents’ rights” candidate, and is aiming to bring his success on education issues to the state races.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesOne of the most closely watched races is between two first-time Senate candidates in Loudoun County, a Washington exurb that became a national flashpoint in 2021 after conservative attacks on its public school policies on diversity and transgender students.Mr. Youngkin seized on those cultural issues to brand himself the “parents’ rights” candidate, which helped power his victory. In office, he banned critical race theory in K-12 schools (although educators said C.R.T. had no influence on curriculums), set up a tip line for parents to report about teachers and gave parents control of the names and pronouns their children used in school.Whether these issues still motivate voters is one of the unknowns in this year’s election. Mr. Youngkin is betting that they do and is holding a “Parents Matter” town hall-style event in Loudon County on Tuesday. Over the weekend, the governor went on “Fox News Sunday” to announce he had pardoned a father arrested in a 2021 incident at a Loudoun County School Board meeting where the father had criticized officials after his daughter was sexually assaulted in school.Russet Perry, the Democrat running for the open Senate seat in the county, said that when she knocks on the doors of swing voters, the top education issue she hears is concerns over school shootings, not culture-war matters.“Parents are a little tired of the politics intentionally injected into the schools by people who do not live here, including Glenn Youngkin,” said Ms. Perry, a former prosecutor with a daughter who is a high school freshman in public school.Across the state, the Democratic message is that Republicans are “extremists” and if they win full control in Richmond, they will seek strict abortion limits.But Mr. Youngkin has mostly focused his message elsewhere. In his 18-minute speech to rally Republicans on Saturday in Prince George, Va., he did not utter the words “abortion” or “pro-life,” instead stressing “common sense” policies.After a half-hour of greeting supporters, as aides hustled him to his car, he responded to a reporter’s shouted question about whether he would sign a six-week abortion ban.“Virginians elected a pro-life governor,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think we can ask all kinds of hypothetical questions. What I’ve been very clear on — and I’d appreciate you writing it clearly — is that I support a bill to protect life at 15 weeks.” More

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      Why We Are So Obsessed With Biden’s Age

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      To our intensifying discussion about whether President Biden has grown mentally fuzzy and too old for a second term, I’d like to add this question: How would we even notice Donald Trump’s lapse into incoherence, when derangement is essentially his brand?Pretty much any interview he gives is a babble bonanza, and his recent lovefest with Tucker Carlson was no exception. He went on wacky tangents, including one about the wages of building the Panama Canal: “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito. Malaria. We lost 35,000 people. We lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world.”“One of the nine wonders,” he added, then corrected himself. “No, no, it was one of the seven.” Seven, nine – he seemed unable to decide, unwilling to commit. “You could make nine wonders,” he ventured. I guess that’s some limit. Once you hit 10, they’re just curiosities. Wonder-ettes.But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?Most certainly not. And that’s both noteworthy and troubling, because we can’t know — really know — that Biden’s occasionally prolonged, futile search for the right word or name is firmer evidence of cognitive fade than Trump’s hallucinatory musings are.I’m not claiming that Biden, 80, and Trump project the same degree of vigor. I have eyes and ears. Trump talks louder and faster than Biden does and moves with a thudding force. He’s like a freight train to Biden’s cable car, or a big, bulbous tuba to Biden’s tremulous piccolo. Listening to Biden, I want a volume knob I can turn up. Listening to Trump, I crave nonsense-canceling headphones.I’m also aware and suspicious of the paucity of Biden’s interactions with journalists, his avoidance of unscripted public appearances and a schedule that can seem strangely light. I’ve heard from influential Democrats who have crossed paths with him and were alarmed by how slowly he was moving and how disoriented he seemed.But the situation is more complicated than that, and the conversation about it omits dynamics that it shouldn’t. Trump is a mere three years younger than Biden, and he’s overweight. His diet is garbage. His cardio is golf putts. Biden, on the other hand, is a trim tribute to regular exercise.And Trump diverts attention from his age by going to significant lengths to conceal it.A thought exercise: Imagine Biden with more hair — or at least some swooping, swirling, painstakingly contrived facsimile of more hair. Color it a shade of orange-gold that’s less a sneaky evasion of gray than a desperate pummeling of it. Now get to work on his face. Cloak his age spots under a fake tan. Spackle his wrinkles with makeup. Then dress him in suits so dark and baggy that they veil time’s toll on the body they’re tenting.You’ve turned Biden at least partway into Donald Trump. Does he seem a little less ancient?In several recent surveys, roughly three in four Americans, including a majority of Democrats, deemed Biden too old to be effective through a second term. In a recent Associated Press/NORC poll, a much smaller fraction — just over half — expressed reservations about Trump’s age.At least a bit of that discrepancy surely reflects right-wing media organizations’ obsessive focus on Biden’s stumbles and mumbles and such. Their left-wing counterparts don’t home in on Trump’s dubious physical fitness in the same way –— they have so much else on their radar. After all, a candid image of Trump in flab-revealing golf wear or a shot of the wind exposing the truth about his tresses matters little next to candid audio of him hectoring a state official in Georgia to steal the 2020 election.With Trump, it is always thus: The frequency of his outrages and volume of his vices guarantee that no single flaw stands out as it should. It’s just another ingredient in a gumbo of God-help-us.We should also bear in mind that all the hints of Biden’s feebleness are amplified by a larger narrative of older politicians clinging to power despite their obvious physical deterioration. Every image of Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, being wheeled through the Capitol hurts Biden. So does every second that Senator Mitch McConnell, 81, stands frozen and speechless before a group of journalists.“I see people lumping every old person together and using the term ‘gerontocracy’,” Rosanne M. Leipzig, who specializes in geriatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, told me. But Biden isn’t McConnell, no more than McConnell is Feinstein. “There’s no group of people who are more different than older adults,” Leipzig said. “We even have a term for it — the heterogeneity of aging.”Biden is also hurt, in a different way, by Representative Nancy Pelosi, 83, who seems amply vigorous but surrendered her position of House Democratic leadership last year with the proclamation that “the hour has come for a new generation.” If that’s true in the House, why not in the White House?Bob Kerrey, a former senator and onetime governor who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, told me: “I would rather Joe did what Nancy did.” Kerrey turned 80 himself just two weeks ago, and he said that he’d never pursue the presidency at his age.“It’s an offensive act if I were to do it,” he said. “I had my chance.” He added that there are “plenty of 40- and 60-year-olds who can step up and run.” But he’s cognitively up to the task, he said, and so is Biden. Believing in generational change doesn’t mean disbelieving Biden’s competence.And judging competence can be a guessing game, given the partial and selective information that most older political candidates and their physicians divulge. To determine aging’s impact “through superficial means is not an accurate measure,” Bob Blancato, the national coordinator of the Elder Justice Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group, cautioned. “Aging is a profoundly personal journey.”Similarly, our takes on it are subjective — and can be colored by irrelevant details. Leipzig noted that to some people, Biden’s cultural frame of reference, embrace of tradition and old-fashioned vocabulary (“God love ya’,” “c’mon man,” “malarkey”) read old, while Trump’s rebel pose reads young.I happen to think that Democrats would be safer with a nominee who’s younger than Biden is and radiates more energy than he does. But I believe at least as strongly that if the unideal choice before Americans winds up being Biden, with his imperfections, or Trump, with his, rejecting Biden because of how old he has grown isn’t a grown-up decision.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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      Which Crisis Should We Talk About First?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Democratic mayors and governors are warning the Biden administration that the migrants crossing our southern border are straining their cities and states to the breaking point. New York City alone is sheltering and feeding an average of 59,000 migrants a day. What’s your advice to the White House?Gail Collins: Easy stuff first, Bret. There are job openings many newcomers could fill in areas like food service, if they’re given the ability to work. And the federal government needs to give stressed-out regions — particularly New York City — a whole lot more help when it comes to housing.Bret: I’m definitely in favor of handing out work permits, if that’s what you mean. Please go on.Gail: Making more housing available has to include building new accommodations and transforming existing city buildings, both residential and those with unneeded office space. Over the long run, we absolutely have to open up options for multifamily housing in suburban areas that have long resisted it.As to the border itself, Biden is trying to tighten up the whole immigration process, but a lot of his initiatives have been challenged in court. The administration has expanded federal border resources in an effort to make processing families faster. Although of course there’s still more that should be done.OK, your turn.Bret: Assuming the president wants to get re-elected, while preserving the possibility of immigration reform sometime in the next, oh, 100 years, he has to get control of the border. Right now. Jobs can take months to fill and housing takes years to build — not to mention that there are plenty of U.S. citizens who ought to be the administration’s first priority when it comes to affordable housing.In the meantime, we’ve had a 30-month crisis that too many Democrats downplayed until it became a blue-state problem. Millions of people have entered the country illegally and tens of thousands in New York are now living off government assistance. Working-class people are afraid they are going to be priced out of low-paying jobs by desperate migrants.My advice to the president: Ask for the resignation of Alejandro Mayorkas, his failed homeland security secretary. Put a highly respected former military officer, like retired Adm. William McRaven, in the job. Call up 10,000 active duty troops to help police the border. Work with Mexico to further strengthen its border with Guatemala. And invest infrastructure funds to build that damned wall. Because if Biden doesn’t get control of the border, it will become Donald Trump’s signature — and possibly winning — issue in next year’s campaign.Gail: Ah, Bret, once again you lose me at the wall. Which isn’t very useful at stopping migrants but is great as a symbol of our worst impulses — the evolution from our image as welcoming land of liberty to cranky neighbor warning the kids to stay out of his backyard.Bret: It’s one thing when several kids come into the cranky neighbor’s backyard. It’s quite another when several million do, then raid his fridge and medicine cabinet and never want to go home.Gail: Speaking of kids — I know this is not a terrific segue — I guess we should discuss the Hunter Biden situation.Bret: I think of it as two situations: the first about Hunter, the second about Joe.Regarding the first, I don’t see why the son of any president — but particularly a Democratic president who favors gun control and believes the rich should pay their taxes — should not face stiff penalties for blowing off paying his taxes and also for buying a gun while addicted to drugs.As for the second, at a minimum I’d like to know how the president’s story went from “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” to the White House’s tacit admission that Hunter would put his dad on the line when speaking to business associates, ostensibly just to make small talk but very likely as a way of selling the Biden “brand.” I’d also like to know why Biden used email aliases during his vice presidency to communicate with Hunter. The answers might well turn out to be innocent. But that’s all the more reason to respond to the questions rather than evade them.Gail: We definitely have two different Hunter Biden issues: what punishment he deserves and how much of an impact his messy saga should have on our opinion of his father.Bret: The father who, I should underscore, I will probably find myself voting for next year barring the miracle of a Nikki Haley or Chris Christie candidacy on the Republican line. Go on.Gail: As to the first, we have a guy who lied, when filling out the paperwork to buy a gun, about whether he was a drug addict. And who failed to pay all his 2017 and 2018 taxes. Hunter was going to get 24 months probation, until his plea deal collapsed.This is a combo for which low-income folks with no friends in high places would probably get a stiffer punishment. But I am also sure that any Republican senator’s son who got in similar trouble would not in a billion years go to jail.Do you disagree?Bret: I’m sure you’re right — and that’s wrong in itself. But Hunter definitely deserved stiffer punishment than the wrist-slap he seemed on his way to getting before his plea bargain fell apart this summer.Gail: On the second count, it is pretty clear that Joe Biden helped Hunter get some business cred by reminding potential clients that Dad was vice president.Bret: Meaning that Joe could have been turning himself into a willing participant in some pretty shady business dealings in places like Ukraine, where he was supposed to be the Obama administration’s point man for fighting corruption.Gail: Even if that’s the version of the saga voters buy, I find it extremely hard to imagine this is going to have any impact on the president’s re-election prospects. You have here a guy who lost his first wife and a daughter in a terrible car crash and his beloved older son after a long cancer battle. Don’t think most Americans will hold his attempts to aid the surviving son against him. While he’s running against a man whose family profited shamelessly from foreign business ties during the presidency.Bret: I truly feel for the president when it comes to the tragedies in his life. And I have zero sympathy for Trump or his sleazy family. But that doesn’t change the fact that Hunter is also sleazy and that, at a minimum, Joe shouldn’t make a habit of having Hunter constantly by his side.Gail: I know the Republicans can’t let a day go by without howling about Hunter, but I truly don’t think the country cares.Bret: Not sure you’re right about that. Democrats are really underestimating the impact this could have on the election. A CNN poll published last week found that 61 percent of Americans think Joe was involved in Hunter’s business dealings and that 55 percent think he acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter. What that does is to diminish Biden’s claim to represent honesty and decency in the White House. A similar thing happened in 2016 when Democrats went after Trump on his sexual ethics, and Trump struck back by bringing Juanita Broaddrick to his second debate with Hillary Clinton, to remind the country about Bill’s sexual ethics. The risk is that undecided voters conclude that both sides are morally tainted so they may as well vote their pocketbook interests.Gail: I just feel the only people who are going to vote against Biden because of Hunter are people who were going to vote against Biden for something anyway.Bret: Different subject, Gail. Nancy Pelosi just announced she intends to run for re-election, when she’ll be 84. I realize she’s no longer in a leadership position, but given Mitch McConnell’s and Dianne Feinstein’s and, well, Joe Biden’s diminished capacities, wouldn’t it be better for her to retire in good health and make way for someone a little younger?Gail: The super-important fact about Nancy Pelosi’s career decision is that she opted to give up one of the nation’s most powerful posts because she felt a younger leader could do it better.Bret: True, and she deserves credit for that. I’d still suggest she take a look at some of her generational peers in politics, including McConnell and Feinstein, and ask herself if that’s the best way to walk off the political stage.Gail: The nation is growing older and people need to believe that they can step aside for the next generation of leaders without totally retiring from public life. So, hey, I’m a Pelosi rooter on this front.Bret: I’ll defer to you on this subject. And speaking of immortality, I need to put in a word for Rebecca Chace’s wonderful obituary of Edith Grossman, the great translator of Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel de Cervantes. I started reading García Márquez in Spanish as a kid — he lived just a few blocks from us on the south side of Mexico City — and then I read some of the same books in her English translations when I was a bit older. Grossman’s translations somehow managed to make him a more vivid, lucid, enchanting writer.She wasn’t just a translator. She was an artist.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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      Covid Hero or ‘Lockdown Ron’? DeSantis and Trump Renew Pandemic Politics

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      The Florida governor has recently highlighted his state’s response to the coronavirus in hopes of striking some distance from Donald Trump.Hank Miller, a 64-year-old Iowa farmer, started paying attention to Gov. Ron DeSantis during the coronavirus pandemic, when the Florida governor was a constant presence on Fox News highlighting the reopening of his state.While Mr. Miller voted for former President Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2020, he now plans to support Mr. DeSantis, in part, he said, because he was “disappointed” with Mr. Trump for following the advice of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom Mr. DeSantis has said should be prosecuted.“I liked how DeSantis responded to the pandemic,” Mr. Miller said at a coffee shop in Grundy Center, Iowa, where Mr. DeSantis campaigned on Saturday. “He didn’t just shut things down.”Mr. DeSantis, far behind Mr. Trump in the polls in Iowa and nationally, is clearly hoping that such feelings are widespread among Republican primary voters. The governor’s record on Covid-19 provides perhaps his strongest contrast with the former president, whose administration spearheaded the development of the coronavirus vaccines that are now deeply unpopular with the Republican base.The virus could be an important wedge issue for Mr. DeSantis, who at times has struggled to provide voters with a clear case for why he would be a better president than Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner. But there are questions about whether a pandemic that many Americans see as long over will resonate with the electorate in 2024.Now, a recent resurgence of Covid-19 cases is giving Mr. DeSantis a chance to press the argument. In response to the uptick, a small number of schools, universities and hospitals have told students, patients and employees to wear masks again. Mr. DeSantis and other Republicans have seized on that as evidence that the Covid-19 debate, which they frame as a civil rights battle, is far from over.Mr. DeSantis emphasized that point during his swing through Iowa on Saturday. “When you have people going back to restrictions and mandates, this shows that this issue has not died,” he told reporters outside the coffee shop in Grundy Center. “This shows that if we don’t bring accountability with my administration, they are going to keep trying to do this.”Since returning to the campaign trail after Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida last month, Mr. DeSantis has seemingly made the virus his No. 1 issue. He has appeared repeatedly this past week on Fox News and other conservative media outlets lauding his pandemic policies, and has done interviews with local news media outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire. He even held a news conference in Jacksonville — in his role as governor — to promote the way he handled the virus.“I can tell you here in Florida, we did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state,” Mr. DeSantis said on Thursday at the event in Jacksonville, which, in the absence of formal policy announcements, had the feel of a campaign rally.Mr. DeSantis is taking advantage of an apparent shift in the national mood on the virus, even among Democrats. Only 12 percent of Americans say they typically wear a mask in public, according to a poll conducted in August by Yahoo News and YouGov.President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask days after the first lady, Jill Biden, was diagnosed with Covid-19.Al Drago for The New York TimesAfter the first lady, Jill Biden, was recently diagnosed with Covid-19, President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask. Although he had tested negative, Mr. Biden said he was told he needed to continue masking for 10 days.“Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on when I walked in,” Mr. Biden said, holding up his mask.As Mr. DeSantis has elevated the issue of Covid-19 once more, the Trump campaign has responded by accusing Mr. DeSantis of hypocrisy, pointing out that he did issue shut down orders and at one point praised Dr. Fauci.“Lockdown Ron should take a look in the mirror and ask himself why he’s trying to gaslight voters,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement.But while many Republican governors shut down their states at the pandemic’s start, Mr. DeSantis was early to fully reopen.Mr. Trump, who was always skeptical of masking and other public health measures, has also begun talking about Covid-19 restrictions on the trail.“The radical Democrats are trying hard to restart Covid hysteria,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at a rally in Rapid City, S.D. He has also downplayed the role Dr. Fauci played in his administration.Still, as Republican candidates try to resuscitate the pandemic as a political issue, they may face virus weariness.During Mr. DeSantis’s Saturday bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024, even if they admired the governor’s record.“We don’t need to hear about it,” said Dave Sweeney, a retired farmer who said he was trying to decide between supporting Mr. DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. “It’s not really an issue anymore.”It’s possible that audiences in places like New Hampshire, which imposed more stringent public health measures than Iowa, may be more receptive.In the run-up to his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis signed a series of public health laws in Florida that he often points to on the trail, including ones banning mask and vaccine mandates. He also instigated a state grand jury investigation into possible “misconduct” by scientists and vaccine manufacturers. (No charges have been brought.)While Mr. DeSantis says his Covid-19 policies protected Floridians from government overreach and kept the economy going, the state suffered a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths during the Delta wave of the virus in 2021, after Mr. DeSantis stopped preaching the virtues of vaccines, a New York Times investigation found.During Mr. DeSantis’s recent bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesStill, such criticisms are unlikely to matter in a Republican primary where many voters discount the severity of a virus that has killed more than a million Americans since 2020.“I think it’s a common cold,” said Roger Hibdon, 32, an engineer from Grundy Center. “I’m not worried about it.”Michael Gold More