Presidential Election of 2024

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      Fact-Checking Mike Pence on the Campaign Trail

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      The former vice president has made misleading claims about abortion, fiscal policy and military spending.Since beginning his long-shot presidential campaign in June, former Vice President Mike Pence has struggled to gain traction among Republican primary voters.Mr. Pence has consistently polled in the single digits behind the two leading contenders: his onetime running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The former vice president has broken with them most starkly on their approaches to Social Security and Medicare. He has also carved out clear positions supporting a 15-week national abortion ban and wholeheartedly backing American involvement in the war in Ukraine.Mr. Pence has made some inaccurate claims along the way. Here’s a fact check of some of his recent remarks on the campaign trail.AbortionWhat Mr. Pence Said“I did, this week, call on every other candidate for the Republican nomination to support a minimum standard of a 15-week ban on abortion at the national level that would align American law with most of the countries in Europe that literally ban abortion after 12 to 15 weeks. Our laws at the national level today are more aligned with North Korea, China and Iran than with other Western countries in Europe.”— in a June interview on Fox News SundayThis is misleading. Mr. Pence’s comparison is overly simplistic and glosses over how abortion laws in Europe work in practice. It is also worth noting that many European countries are moving toward relaxing abortion restrictions, not imposing additional ones, as The Upshot has reported.Of some four dozen countries in Europe, almost all have legalized elective abortion before 10 to 15 weeks of pregnancy. All of these countries allow abortions after the gestational limit if the mother’s life is in danger and about half do so for cases involving sexual violence — two exceptions that Mr. Pence has said he also supports. But many also allow for broader exceptions, like the socioeconomic circumstances or mental health of the mother, which Mr. Pence’s proposal does not include.In Britain, for example, an abortion must be approved by two doctors, but those requests are generally granted up to 24 weeks. In Denmark and Germany, exceptions for gestational limits of 12 weeks are made for mental and physical health as well as living conditions.At least three countries also have more permissive gestational cutoffs than Mr. Pence’s proposal: Iceland at 22 weeks, the Netherlands at 24 weeks and Sweden at 18 weeks.In contrast, China allows elective abortions without specifying gestational limits in its national laws, according to the World Health Organization. China also has said in recent years that it will aim to reduce the number of “medically unnecessary” abortions, and at least one province has prohibited abortions after 14 weeks.North Korea’s laws on abortion are unclear. In 2015, the authorities issued a directive barring doctors from performing abortions, according to the World Health Organization, but “there are no documents after 2015” on the legality of the procedure.In the United States, after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion last summer, the legal status of abortion varies widely from state to state. In some, the procedure is banned with no exceptions, and in others it is enshrined as a right with no gestational limits. A spokesman for Mr. Pence cited nine such states as exceptionally nonrestrictive.Fiscal policyWhat Mr. Pence Said“Well, first off, look, Joe Biden’s policy on our national debt is insolvency. And, sadly, my former running mate’s policy is identical to Joe Biden’s. Both of them say they’re not even going to talk about common sense and compassionate reforms to entitlements to spare future generations of a mountain range of debt.”— in the Fox News Sunday interviewThis is exaggerated. Asked about his calls to overhaul Social Security and Medicare, Mr. Pence criticized Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s approaches to the social programs as irresponsible. While both have said they would not cut benefits, only Mr. Biden has proposed tax increases to shore up both programs. But equating that position to one of accepting total insolvency is overstated.Currently, Social Security and Medicare both face financial shortfalls. The fund that pays for Social Security retirement benefits is projected to be depleted by 2033, and the fund that pays hospitals for Medicare patients will be exhausted in 2031. At those points, the funds will be able to pay for only 77 percent of retirement benefits and 89 percent of scheduled fees to hospitals.During the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden proposed increasing taxes on high-income earners to pay for additional Social Security benefits. The extra funding would reduce the program’s financial shortfall, though the revenue would not close the gap entirely. While his latest presidential budget, released in March, does not mention that proposal, it does include a plan to extend the solvency of Medicare by 25 years by imposing higher taxes on the wealthy.Mr. Trump’s position on social safety net programs is a bit harder to pin down. In January 2020, he said he would be willing to consider cuts to the social safety nets “at some point” — though he quickly tried to walk back his comments and vowed to protect Social Security. His last presidential budget proposal, in February 2020, did not cut benefits to either program, but sought Medicare savings through a dozen tweaks like reducing payments to providers and reducing the cost of prescription drugs.More recently, Mr. Trump vowed in a speech in March at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “we are never going back” to proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age or cut Medicare benefits. But Mr. Trump has not yet outlined his stance on either program in more detail or addressed their solvency issues in this campaign cycle.The Pence campaign argued that neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden has a current plan for Social Security, and that Mr. Biden’s plan for Medicare just delays the financial shortfall.Mr. Pence has made misleading claims about abortion, fiscal policy and military spending.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesClassified documentsWhat Mr. Pence Said“I mean, when I informed the Department of Justice that we had classified materials potentially in our home, they were at my home. The F.B.I. was on my front doorstep the next day. And what we found out was that, when Joe Biden apparently alerted the Department of Justice, 80 days later, they showed up at his office.”— in a CNN town hall in JuneThis is exaggerated. Upon the discovery of classified documents in their personal residences, Mr. Pence and Mr. Biden both cooperated with government inquiries. Mr. Pence has a point that the Justice Department’s responses to the discoveries were not identical, but he is overstating the differences.In Mr. Biden’s case, the searches occurred a few weeks — not three months — after the discovery of classified documents. In Mr. Pence’s case, the search occurred about three weeks later.On Nov. 2, lawyers for Mr. Biden discovered classified documents at the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank in Washington. On the same day, according to Biden administration officials, the lawyers alerted the National Archives and Records Administration, which is responsible for securing such documents. The next day, the National Archives retrieved the documents and referred the matter to the Justice Department. The F.B.I. searched the think tank in mid-November.On Dec. 20, Mr. Biden’s aides discovered a second set of classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Del. The same day, they alerted the U.S. attorney leading the investigation about the discovery. A month later, on Jan. 20, the F.B.I. searched the residence and seized additional documents. And on Feb. 1, the F.B.I. searched Mr. Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but did not find additional classified documents.The discovery of classified documents in Mr. Biden’s possession prompted aides for Mr. Pence to search his home in Indiana out of caution. They found about a dozen documents with classified markings on Jan. 16 and alerted the National Archives to the discovery in a letter dated Jan. 18. The Justice Department, rather than the records agency, then retrieved the documents from Mr. Pence’s home on Jan. 19. Nearly a month later, on Feb. 10, the F.B.I. searched Mr. Pence’s home and found one additional document.The Pence campaign argued that the Justice Department, in directly requesting the documents from Mr. Pence, bypassed the standard procedures, which did not occur in Mr. Biden’s case.Unlike the Biden and Trump cases, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland did not appoint a special counsel to investigate Mr. Pence’s handling of classified materials. The Justice Department has also declined to prosecute Mr. Pence while the inquiry into Mr. Biden remains ongoing.Funding for the militaryWhat Mr. Pence Said“Since Joe Biden took office, he’s been working to cut military spending.”— at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa in JulyThis is false. Mr. Biden’s annual budgets have generally asked for more funding for the military, and actual spending has increased each year.Mr. Biden’s first budget, released in 2021, proposed $715 billion for the Pentagon, essentially keeping funding level. That was a 1.6 percent increase from the previous year and a 0.4 percent decrease when adjusted for inflation. In December of that year, he signed into law a $770 billion defense package.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Biden’s proposals and congressional appropriators amped up military spending even more.The budget he released in 2022 requested $773 billion in military spending, a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year. He eventually signed into law an $858 billion spending policy bill.And Mr. Biden’s latest budget, released in March, asked for $842 billion for the military, a 3.2 percent increase from the previous year, and $886 billion total for national defense. That legislation is currently going through the appropriations process in Congress. The Pence campaign argued that this amounted to a cut, as the rate of inflation outstrips the rate of increase.At the Iowa event, Mr. Pence cited Mr. Biden’s debt ceiling deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as an example of a proposed 1 percent cut to the military. Under that deal, military spending is set at the president’s proposed amount of $886 billion and would rise to $895 billion in 2025. But all spending, for both the military and domestic programs, would be subject to a 1 percent cut if Congress does not pass annual spending bills by January.We welcome suggestions and tips from readers on what to fact-check on email and Twitter. More

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      The Stagnation of Ron DeSantis

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      Is it possible to rapidly “reboot” a struggling presidential campaign? Pundits have to hope so, since otherwise our advice-giving beat becomes a bit irrelevant. But thinking back over recent primary candidacies that seemed to sag and then recovered, from John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008 to Joe Biden in 2020, it’s hard to identify brilliant strategic pivots. Instead what you see is candidates with fundamental strengths who hung around until events conspired to make those strengths more relevant, their opponents’ weaknesses more manifest, and their campaigns suddenly triumphant.For Ron DeSantis, currently engaged in a campaign reset after months of stagnant polling, there’s no way to sell these case studies to his restive donors. “Don’t worry, we’re going to hang around and hope things break our way at the last minute” isn’t exactly an inspiring rallying cry, especially for a candidate who briefly seemed poised to become the 2024 front-runner, but now languishes 20 or 30 points behind Donald Trump.And it’s easy enough to list things that DeSantis could be doing differently. Some of them, like talking less about the swiftly-receding Covid era and seeking combat with the mainstream media, are obvious enough that the campaign is already trying to adapt. Other possibilities seem to still elude his team — above all, the benefits of breaking out of the movement-conservative box a bit more, making big promises on economic as well as social policy, and avoiding a replay of Ted Cruz’s ideologically self-limiting 2016 campaign.But any benefit from these shifts is likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. Meanwhile, the reset that’s so often urged on DeSantis — the idea that he needs to go hard after Trump’s unfitness for high office — is a theory supported by exactly zero polling evidence.The reality is that if there were some obvious path to rising higher in the polls at this stage of the campaign, another Republican candidate would have probably discovered it. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio, no great DeSantis admirer, pointed out a week ago, amid all the talk about his faltering campaign the Florida governor’s support “exceeds the combined share of every candidate who’s trailing him, a field that includes a sitting senator, two former governors, and the most recent former vice president of the United States.”The Trump-friendly Vivek Ramaswamy, often portrayed as the breakout figure in the non-DeSantis field, stands just shy of 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The most forthrightly anti-Trump figure, Chris Christie, stands at 2 percent. The sunny donor favorite Tim Scott is at 3 percent.Those numbers make DeSantis’s stagnant 20 percent look pretty good, and his Trump-adjacent positioning like a much stronger play than the alternatives.Yes, it’s not as strong as it looked during Trump’s post-midterm swoon. But the argument I made back then — that Trump was far more likely to lose in a fade than in a knockout — isn’t obviated by the fact that he hasn’t faded yet. Quite the reverse: It’s precisely Trump’s recovery and resilience amid multiplying indictments that suggests the futility of a Christie-style assault, while leaving DeSantis’s more hedged strategy with a narrowing but still discernible path.That path looks like this: First, in Iowa, DeSantis needs some of the very conservative voters who temporarily backed away from Trump after the midterms to back away again. Then in New Hampshire, he needs the momentum of an Iowa victory to reconcile the party’s moderates to the necessity of rallying to him, instead of sticking with Scott or Christie or Nikki Haley. Pull off that combination, and he’s well positioned for South Carolina, Florida and beyond.There’s no reason to expect things to play out this way. We’ve seen repeatedly how Trump’s supporters always seem to want to return to him, and how Trump’s skeptics always seem incapable of uniting effectively. We haven’t seen enough potency from DeSantis-the-candidate to expect him to make those patterns break.But sitting at 20 percent for a long time and then riding an early primary victory to consolidation is an imaginable scenario, at least, and one that tracks with recent examples of campaigns that first disappointed and ultimately surged. Whereas all the other scenarios for beating Trump, whether involving current contenders or some late-entering white knight, seem like wishcasting from Republicans who don’t want to settle for DeSantis.Maybe this will change in the debate season, whose set-pieces are more likely to actually reset DeSantis’s campaign than any move his team makes now, while giving his rivals their best opportunities to shake his hold on second place.But pending those confrontations, the disappointment with DeSantis doesn’t change the fact that the guy stagnating in second is more likely to finish first than all the distant others.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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      The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

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      WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?Or is Smith Muellering it?We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.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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      Tim Scott Is Turning Heads With Donors and Early-State Voters

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      The South Carolina senator is gaining in early-voting states and has money, a positive message and a compelling story. Now he needs to take on the Republican front-runners.He is rising in the polls and turning heads in Iowa and New Hampshire, behind heavy spending on ads that play to voters’ appetite for a leader who is upbeat and positive in a dark political moment.He has experience, a compelling personal story and a campaign war chest that gives him staying power in a Republican primary that so far has been a two-man race. And among Republican voters, he is the candidate that everyone seems to like.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is perfectly positioned to seize the moment if former President Donald Trump collapses under the weight of his criminal cases or if the challenge to him from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida evaporates.The only question is whether either moment will come.Mr. Scott’s growing popularity in early primary states has made him more of a contender in the still-young primary campaign and — in the eyes of current and potential supporters, and donors — a possible alternative to Mr. DeSantis, who is seen as an alternative to Mr. Trump.Andy Sabin, a wealthy metals magnate who switched his allegiance from Mr. DeSantis to Mr. Scott and is hosting a fund-raiser for three dozen wealthy donors in the Hamptons next month, cited his frustration with the front-runners and said he hoped that more in the donor class would join him in backing Mr. Scott. Prospective donors, Mr. Sabin said, “all want to see what he’s about.”“They’re disenchanted with Trump and DeSantis,” he said. “And the others, I’ve seen very little momentum.”Since he entered the race in May, Mr. Scott’s standing has slowly crept up in Iowa and New Hampshire. A University of New Hampshire poll of likely voters, out Tuesday, found him in third place among the state’s primary voters, with 8 percent of the vote, ahead of former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, both of whom have focused intensely on the state.He is also running third in recent Iowa polls — at around 7 percent — and a few national polls have shown him as the second choice for many supporters of Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis, though it comes at a time when primary voters not committing to Mr. Trump are often considering several candidates.Mr. Scott’s strength in early states has caught the eye of other potential donors, including the billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, who met with Mr. Scott in South Carolina this month. In August, Mr. Scott will make a fund-raising swing through at least five states, including Colorado, Tennessee and Wisconsin.While he has not been as much of a presence on the campaign trail as his rivals have, Mr. Scott and his allied groups have poured considerable money into Iowa and New Hampshire, spending $32 million to run ads through January 2024 — more than any other Republican candidate or group on the airwaves, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. Mr. Scott is the only Republican contender who has booked ad time that far ahead.Mr. Scott, who has outspent his rivals on advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire, hopes to raise his national profile in next month’s first Republican debate.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Scott’s supporters say his positive campaign message and general appeal provide a contrast with the primary’s front-runners. The highest-ranking Black Republican, he is running on an only-in-America story as a candidate and a senator with roots in a low-income Charleston community.Still, though Mr. Scott has shown some momentum in the early states — including his home state — Republican voters have yet to flock to him en masse, and he is still relatively unknown nationally.A Quinnipiac University poll of voters nationwide found him tied with Mr. Christie in the primary among likely Republican voters, behind Ms. Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, who are tied for third. And while he is well-liked in early primary states, more than half of Republican voters surveyed nationally said they did not know enough about him to have an opinion.Alex Stroman, the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, acknowledged the issue but said that it was solvable. “I think that the more people are introduced to Tim Scott, that they are going to like Tim Scott,” he said. “The problem is, it is a crowded primary.”Asked during a town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday how voters should contend with such a crowded field, Mr. Scott said he expected that “the field will dwindle pretty quickly” by the time voters cast ballots in the state’s February primary election.Mr. Scott’s campaign has been focused on a positive message and his faith. But some conservatives have said he needs to sharpen his message on key issues.Mic Smith/FR2 Associated Press, via Associated PressThe first opportunity to introduce himself to a national audience will be the Aug. 23 Republican debate. Mr. Scott’s campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, said recently that Mr. Scott had met the donor and polling thresholds to be on the debate stage. Mr. Scott, who raised more than $6 million in the second quarter, has more than $20 million in the bank — one of the largest war chests in the primary and enough, Ms. DeCasper maintained, to keep his campaign afloat through the Iowa caucuses and all three of the early state primaries.“At the end of the day, candidates can post any number they want,” she said. “But the name of the game is how much actual cash you have on hand that’s available for use in the Republican primary.”On Tuesday, Trust in the Mission PAC, a group supporting Mr. Scott, announced that it would spend $40 million on broadcast and digital advertising in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — a gigantic outlay that far outpaces the spending of any other candidate in the G.O.P. field and could possibly reshape it.The PAC’s spending reflects a huge bet on increasing Mr. Scott’s profile, especially as he maintains a relatively limited presence on the campaign trail: He has relegated his time in early primary states this month to the few days of the week that he is not in the Senate. The group has already shelled out more than $7 million on advertisements through the summer; the $40 million buy will kick in beginning in September. It is also helping fund a small field operation of about a dozen canvassers in the early primary states.One challenge Mr. Scott still faces is presenting a policy message that separates him from the rest of the Republican primary field. His advertisements in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are biographical, and some touch on national security, warning of the threat that China could pose, while others seize on cultural issues, criticizing Democrats’ policies on education and their views on race.But trying to appeal to a broad swath of Republican voters without alienating key portions of the party’s primary electorate has proved challenging.Terry Amann, an Iowa pastor who has met with most of the Republican candidates, said Mr. Scott needed to articulate a more solid policy plan to connect with the conservative evangelicals who could decide the caucuses in January. Though the senator’s conservative message and his frequent biblical allusions have endeared him to many Republican faith-based voters, Mr. Amann said, Mr. Scott has not clearly defined his stance on abortion restrictions.“If you’re going to be the candidate that stands out on faith, there are some issues that I believe are worth laying it down for, and that’s one of them,” he said. “That would be my challenge to him if he wants to step off from the rest of the pack.”With just over a month until the first debate and six months until the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Scott’s campaign still sees an opening to refine his message and consolidate more voters. Still, while he tries to surpass Mr. DeSantis, the bigger challenge will be wresting the support of more than half of Republican primary voters from Mr. Trump.“These campaigns, candidates, have to figure out what the hell they want voters to know about them,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire. Mr. Scott, because of his background, has a unique story to tell, which can get “people to listen a little bit,” Mr. Carney said. “That’s a great advantage.”But, he added, “the point isn’t just to get their interest — then you have to make the deal.”You have to sell the deal.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      DeSantis Faces Swell of Criticism Over Florida’s New Standards for Black History

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      In one benchmark, middle schoolers would learn that enslaved Americans developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.Mr. DeSantis has made fighting a “woke” agenda in education a signature part of his national brand. He overhauled New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college, and rejected the College Board’s A.P. course on African American studies. And his administration updated the state’s math and social studies textbooks, scrubbing them for “prohibited topics” like social-emotional learning, which helps students develop positive mind-sets, and critical race theory, which looks at the systemic role of racism in society.With Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Biden now both official candidates in the 2024 campaign, each side quickly accused the other of pushing propaganda onto children.Florida’s rewrite of its African American history standards comes in response to a 2022 law signed by Mr. DeSantis, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.The new standards seem to emphasize the positive contributions of Black Americans throughout history, from Booker T. Washington to Zora Neale Hurston.Fifth graders are expected to learn about the “resiliency” of African Americans, including how the formerly enslaved helped others escape as part of the Underground Railroad, and about the contributions of African Americans during westward expansion.The teaching of positive history is important, said Albert S. Broussard, a professor of African American studies at Texas A&M University who has helped write history textbooks for McGraw Hill. “Black history is not just one long story of tragedy and sadness and brutality,” he said.But he saw some of Florida’s adjustments as going too far, de-emphasizing the violence and inhumanity endured by Black Americans and resulting in only a “partial history.”“It’s the kind of sanitizing students are going to pick up,” he said. “Students are going to ask questions and they are going to demand answers.”The Florida Department of Education said the new standards were the result of a “rigorous process,” describing them as “in-depth and comprehensive.”“They incorporate all components of African American History: the good, the bad and the ugly,” said Alex Lanfranconi, the department’s director of communications.One contested standard states that high school students should learn about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during race massacres of the early 20th century, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre. In that massacre, white rioters destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., and as many as 300 people were killed.By saying that violence was perpetrated not just against but “by African Americans,” the standards seem to grasp at teaching “both sides” of history, said LaGarrett King, the director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo.But historically, he said, “it’s just not accurate.”By and large, historians say, race massacres during the early 1900s were led by white groups, often to stop Black residents from voting.That was the case in the Ocoee Massacre of 1920, in which a white crowd, incensed by a Black man’s attempt to vote, burned Black homes and churches to the ground and killed an unknown number of Black residents in a small Florida town.Geraldine Thompson, a Democratic state senator who pushed to require Florida schools to teach the massacre, said she was not consulted in the formation of the new standards, though she holds a nonvoting role on the Commissioner of Education’s African American History Task Force.She said she would have objected to the standards as “slanted” and “incomplete.” She questioned, for instance, why more emphasis was not placed on the history of African people before colonization and enslavement.“Our history doesn’t begin with slavery,” she said in an interview. “It begins with some of the greatest civilizations in the world.”The Florida standards were created by a 13-member “work group,” with input from the African American history task force, according to the Florida Department of Education.Two members of the work group, William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, released a statement responding to critiques of one of the most dissected standards, depicting enslaved African Americans as personally benefiting from their skills.“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited,” they said, citing blacksmithing, shoemaking and fishing as examples.“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history,” they said. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”Florida is one of about a dozen states that require the teaching of African American history.Other states with such mandates include South Carolina, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey.The state mandates date back decades — Florida’s was passed in 1994 — and often came in response to demands from Black residents and educators, said Dr. King, at the University at Buffalo.“There is a legacy of Black people fighting for their history,” he said.But for as long as Black history has been taught, he said, there has been debate about which aspects to emphasize. At times, certain historical figures and story lines have emerged as more palatable to a white audience, Dr. King said.“There is Black history,” he said. “But the question has always been, well, what Black history are we going to teach?”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Trump Classified Documents Trial Set for May 2024

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s request to delay the trial until after the election but pushed the start date past the Justice Department’s request to begin in December.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two-and-a-half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary race contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of the delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.The Justice Department declined to comment on Judge Cannon’s decision. But it did not come as a surprise to prosecutors, who set their initial, aggressive timetable expecting that she would select a date, probably sometime in the first half of 2024, and reject the Trump legal team’s request to push it past the election, according to a person familiar with the situation.It is not clear whether the May 2024 date will hold. As part of her order, Judge Cannon designated Mr. Trump’s case as “complex,” a move that could allow for additional delays.In a 38-count indictment filed last month by Mr. Smith’s office, the former president was charged with illegally holding on to a trove of 31 documents containing sensitive national security information in violation of the Espionage Act. He was also accused of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.Setting the schedule for Mr. Trump’s trial was the first significant decision in the case for Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020. She was randomly assigned to the case in June and faced enormous scrutiny after having made some rulings last year in a related matter that were favorable to Mr. Trump and that were ultimately overturned in a stinging reversal by a federal appeals court.But in her scheduling order on Friday, she split the difference between the two sides, giving neither the government nor the defense what they had wanted.She rejected Mr. Trump’s requests to delay the trial until after the election or to put off setting any schedule at all for the moment, saying that some basic amount of case management was required. But she also noted that the government’s proposal to seat a jury in December was “atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.”Judge Cannon listed a number of reasons the case needed time to move toward trial.The amount of discovery evidence that Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have to sort through was “voluminous,” she wrote. It included more than 1 million pages of unclassified material, at least nine months of surveillance camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of classified documents. There was also additional discovery material from electronic devices seized by the government during its investigation.All of that, Judge Cannon wrote, was on top of what is expected to be a constellation of complex pretrial motions filed by Mr. Trump’s legal team.During the hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Trump said they might file motions arguing that Mr. Trump was allowed to remove documents from the White House under the Presidential Records Act and attacking the special counsel’s authority to bring charges in the first place.They also noted that they would probably question the classification status of certain documents central to the case and challenge the validity of the grand jury process in Washington and Miami that led to the indictment.“The court will be faced with extensive pretrial motion practice on a diverse number of legal and factual issues,” Judge Cannon wrote.Mr. Trump is also under indictment in Manhattan on charges stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That case is scheduled to go to trial in March 2024.He was also informed this week that he could be indicted on federal charges related to his efforts to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, and the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is completing an investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss in Georgia.Maggie Haberman More

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      Hard Questions if Biden’s Approval Doesn’t Follow Economy’s Rise

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      This is about the time when many presidents see their standing turn around, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.President Biden promoting domestic chip manufacturing.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesDoesn’t it feel as if everything’s breaking President Biden’s way lately?His chief rival — whom Mr. Biden already beat in 2020 and whom Democrats, in a sense, beat again in the midterms — is facing criminal indictments and yet currently finds himself cruising to the nomination anyway.The economy — which teetered on the edge of recession for two years with inflation rising and real wages declining — seems as if it might be on track for a soft landing, with inflation falling, real wages rising and the stock market recovering.The backlash against “woke” — a topic Republicans seemed most keen on exploiting in the Biden era — appears to have receded significantly, whether because Donald J. Trump has taken up much of the oxygen; conservatives have overreached; or progressives have reined in their excesses and fallen back to defense after conservatives went on offense.It’s probably too soon to expect these recent developments to lift Mr. Biden’s approval ratings, which remain mired in the low 40s. But if these trends persist, many of the explanations for Mr. Biden’s low approval will quickly become less credible. If his numbers don’t start to move over the next several months — with the wind seemingly at his back — it will quickly begin to raise more serious questions about his standing heading into the 2024 election.To this point in his presidency, it has been fairly easy to attribute his low ratings to economic conditions. Yes, unemployment was low and growth remained steady. But inflation surged, real incomes dropped, stocks fell into a bear market, a recession seemed imminent, and voters could see the signs of a struggling economy everywhere, including supply chain shortages and onerous interest rates.It’s fair to question whether economic conditions have actually been as bad as voters say, but it’s also fair to acknowledge these kinds of conditions can yield a pessimistic electorate. Two bouts of inflation that are reminiscent of today’s post-pandemic economy — the postwar economies of 1920 and 1946 — were catastrophic for the party in power, even as unemployment remained low by the standards of the era.Historically, it can feel as if almost every major political upheaval comes with inflation, whether it’s the Great Unrest in Britain, the Red Summer in the U.S. or even the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. If high bread prices can be argued to have helped cause the French Revolution, it’s easy to accept that 9 percent inflation (at its peak in June 2022) could hurt Mr. Biden’s approval ratings by five or 10 percentage points.But if inflation has been what’s holding Mr. Biden back, it’s hard to say it should hold him back for too much longer. Annual inflation fell to 3 percent last month, and real incomes have finally started to rise. The stock market — one of the most visible and consequential measures of the economy for millions of Americans — has increased around 15 percent over the last six months. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index surged 13 percent in July, reaching the highest level since September 2021 — the first full month Mr. Biden’s approval ratings were beneath 50 percent.There’s another factor that ought to help Mr. Biden’s approval rating: the onset of a new phase of the Republican primary campaign, including debates. As the Republican candidates become more prominent in American life, voters may start judging Mr. Biden against the alternatives, not just in isolation. Some of the Democratic-leaning voters who currently disapprove of Mr. Biden might begin to look at the Biden presidency in a different light.Perhaps in part for these reasons, this is about the time when many presidents see their standing turn around. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s approval ratings were clearly on the upswing at this stage of the election cycle — though both were still beneath 50 percent — as voters began to see and feel an improving economy.We will see in the months ahead whether Mr. Biden’s ratings begin to increase. I wouldn’t expect it to happen quickly: Mr. Reagan and Mr. Clinton’s ratings increased by less than a point per month between roughly this time and their re-election. Barack Obama’s ratings increased at a similar, if slightly slower, pace from his post-debt-ceiling-crisis nadir a little later in the year.But even if it is not quick, I would expect Mr. Biden’s ratings to begin to increase if these conditions remain in place. Today’s era may be polarized, but there are plenty of persuadable and even Democratic-leaning voters — who disapprove of his performance — available to return to his side.If the economy keeps improving and yet his ratings remain stagnant in the months ahead, it will gradually begin to raise hard questions about the real source of his weakness — including the possibility that his age, by feeding the perception of a feeble president, prevents voters from seeing him as effective, whatever his actual record. More

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      Trump Seeks UAW Endorsement as the Union Wavers on Backing Biden

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      A video from the former president attacked electric vehicles, predicting the demise of the American automotive industry.Donald J. Trump, seeing an opening with organized labor, appealed on Thursday for an endorsement from the United Auto Workers for his White House bid and said only his return to the presidency could save the automotive industry from President Biden’s “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade.”Mr. Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the state of the American auto industry does not comport with the reality of an auto sector that has steadily gained jobs over the past three years. But there has been friction between the White House and the new leadership of the old-line industrial auto union.The United Auto Workers, which has a record of backing Democratic candidates for president, including Mr. Biden, has been angered with the Biden administration for pumping tax money into nonunion electric vehicle suppliers, and has withheld its endorsement, even as most labor unions have rushed to back Mr. Biden’s re-election. The U.A.W.’s new president, Shawn Fain, met with Mr. Biden in the White House on Wednesday as contract talks with the Big Three automakers heat up over electric vehicle parts suppliers.In a video on Thursday, Mr. Trump predicted the demise of American auto manufacturing and the “slaughter” of 117,000 auto jobs. “I hope United Auto Workers is listening to this because I think you’d better endorse Trump,” he said. He explicitly warned that Mr. Biden’s policies would cost jobs in the key swing state of Michigan, as well as the more reliably Republican states of Ohio and Indiana.The auto industry has actually gained jobs steadily since Mr. Trump left office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment among auto manufacturers and their parts suppliers reached 1,071,600 in June, up 129,000 since December 2020, the last full month of Mr. Trump’s presidency.Mr. Trump’s insistence that electric vehicles are piling up unsold on car lots contradicts the industry’s own view of its inventory.“We would assert that demand for traditional vehicles and for electric vehicles is strong,” said Matt Blunt, a former Republican governor of Missouri, now president of the American Automotive Policy Council, the domestic auto industry’s trade association in Washington. “This is a time of dramatic transition, but the U.S. industry is well positioned.”But the tension between the U.A.W. and the Biden administration is real. It takes fewer workers to assemble an electric vehicle than one with an internal combustion engine. That has made organizing parts suppliers, especially battery makers, an imperative of the union’s insurgent new leadership.Yet much of the new battery investment prompted in part by Mr. Biden’s climate change policies and infrastructure law is landing in the union-resistant Southeast, especially Georgia, a vital battleground state in the 2024 election. That state has had more than 40 electric vehicle-related projects introduced since 2020, promising investments worth $22.7 billion and the creation of 28,400 jobs.Mr. Biden was at Philadelphia’s shipyard on Thursday, talking up new rules attached to his climate change law intended to help union apprenticeship programs vault workers into the middle class without a college degree.“A lot of my friends in organized labor know, when I think climate, I think jobs,” he said. “I think union jobs.”But Mr. Trump, looking beyond the Republican primaries to a rematch with Mr. Biden, continues to aim for the vote of union workers, if not their leaders. More