Presidential Election of 2024

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      Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny

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      Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a convention of the Moms for Liberty in Washington.It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.Their parental preoccupations were made apparent by the programming and pamphleteering on display. There were panels called “What Does It Mean to Abolish the Department of Education?” and “Moms Know Best: Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools.” There was literature on child sex trafficking and on the damage wrought by Covid-era school closures, and there were copies of a book titled “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.”The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.The attendees of the summit are among the voters whom Mr. Trump needs to win over.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters“These are women that have largely never been political,” Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder, said. “They’re people who, in the busiest time of their lives, realized that they needed to get involved in politics.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Criticizing Trump, Harris Says Arlington Is ‘Not a Place for Politics’

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign filmed him at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, which led to a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday for his visit on Monday to Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign’s filming of him in a heavily restricted area caused a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. In her first public comments on the situation, Ms. Harris said that Mr. Trump had desecrated a solemn place that should be free of politics when he appeared there for a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years ago. “Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Ms. Harris wrote on X. Ms. Harris wrote that she had visited Arlington National Cemetery several times as vice president and that she would never attempt to use that setting for activities related to the campaign. “It’s not a place for politics,” she wrote. Mr. Trump, in recent days, has hit back hard at critics of his visit to the cemetery, saying that families of some of the fallen service members had asked him to take photos with them there. Soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknowns during former President Donald J. Trump’s visit, on Monday in Arlington, Va.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday, but his allies rushed to his defense, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.“President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence,” Mr. Vance wrote on X, responding directly to Ms. Harris. “Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden-Harris administration, which the former president has sought to cast as weak and dysfunctional. President Biden made the final decision to end America’s nearly 20-year military occupation in Afghanistan. But it was Mr. Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for the U.S. exit.At a campaign event on Thursday in Potterville, Mich., Mr. Trump said that he was honored to take photos with the family members of some of the fallen service members at the cemetery and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had “killed their children” with their “incompetence.” More

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      Maybe We Are Asking Presidential Candidates the Wrong Questions

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      If the goal of the CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was to relitigate the campaign controversies of the last month — to get the candidates to talk about the major narratives of the election so far — then it was a rousing success. Harris easily dispatched questions about her identity and gave a strong defense of President Biden’s record. Walz, likewise, made short work of the charge that he had misled the public when he spoke about using one fertility treatment when it was actually another, similar treatment.But if the goal was to learn something about a prospective President Harris — to gain insight into how she might make decisions, order priorities and approach the job of chief executive — then I think the interview was not a success. Not so much for Harris or the viewing public.It might be interesting to journalists to know how Harris explains her changing views from 2019, when she ran for the Democratic nomination, to now, when she is the nominee. But it is not at all clear to me that it is interesting to viewers, who may be less concerned with how she deals with the question and more concerned with the actual substance of what she wants to do as president. A soft-focus question about a photograph, however iconic, seems less valuable than a question about Harris’s view of the presidency now that she’s spent almost four years in the passenger’s seat as vice president.Speaking for myself, I am less interested in hearing candidates navigate controversies or speak to narratives than I am in hearing them talk, for lack of a better term, about their theory of the office. How does a candidate for president conceptualize the presidency? What would she prioritize in office and how would she handle an endless onslaught of crises and issues that may, or may not, demand her attention? How does she imagine her relationship with Congress and how would she try to achieve her goals in the face of an opposition legislature? How does she imagine her relationship with the public and what value does she place on communication and the bully pulpit? Are there presidents she most admires — and why? Are there presidential accomplishments that stand out and how so? What are the worst mistakes a president can make? Why do you want this job in the first place?I can think of other questions along these lines, but you get the gist. To know what candidates for president think about the office and their role in it is, I believe, a better guide to what they may do in the White House than almost anything else. The only thing better is prior experience. These kinds of questions may not make for the most scintillating television, but I think they could provide the kind of insights that could actually help Americans decide what they want out of a national leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Has the Spread of Tipping Reached Its Limit? Don’t Count on It.

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      Americans are being asked to tip more often and in more places than ever before: at fast food counters and corner stores, at auto garages and carwashes, even at self-checkout kiosks. That has rankled many customers and divided both employers and tipped workers.It may soon get worse. Both major-party presidential candidates have embraced proposals to eliminate income taxes on tips, a move that would, in effect, subsidize tipping and prompt more businesses to rely on it.Economists across the political spectrum have panned the tax idea, arguing that it is unfair — favoring one set of low-wage workers over others — and could have unintended consequences. Even some tipped workers and groups that represent them are skeptical, worrying that over the long term the policy could result in lower pay.But the debate alone underscores how service-sector workers have emerged from the pandemic as an economically and politically potent force. The spread of tipping in recent years was, in part, a result of the intense demand for workers, and the leverage it gave them. The presidential candidates’ dueling proposals signal that they see the nation’s roughly four million tipped workers as a constituency worth wooing.“I do think it’s a reflection of this change in which people are finally hearing and recognizing that these workers matter,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, an advocacy organization. “Tipped workers had never seen their needs named in any way by any presidential candidate, ever.”Ms. Jayaraman isn’t a fan of the tax exemption idea, though she is optimistic that the attention being paid to the issue could lead to policies she considers more important. One is the elimination of the subminimum wage, which allows businesses in some states to pay workers as little as $2.13 an hour as long as they receive enough in tips to bring them up to the full minimum wage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters

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      Some of the best advice Democrats have received recently came from Bill Clinton in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.First, he warned against hubris: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.” That’s something that any Clinton understands in his — or her — gut.Second, related and even more important, he cautioned against demeaning voters who don’t share liberal values.“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”That’s critical counsel because too often since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Attacks on Harris Invoke Ancient Roman Misogyny

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      Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Tries to Explain Arlington Cemetery Clash

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      Former President Donald J. Trump grappled on Friday with the lingering fallout from his visit to Arlington National Cemetery this week, offering an extended defense of his campaign’s actions leading up to an altercation between a Trump 2024 staff member and a cemetery official.Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.Accusing President Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Mr. Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.” He repeated the accusation at an event in Washington on Friday night hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group focused on education.The controversy over the cemetery photographs has overshadowed the political intent of Mr. Trump’s visit: He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.Instead, Mr. Trump has found himself struggling this week to fend off new criticisms of his long-scrutinized treatment of America’s veterans and fallen service members. At the same time, he has been twisting himself in knots to navigate the politics of in vitro fertilization and abortion rights and has confronted negative headlines for making obscene attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More