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      Donald Trump Is Not Above the Law

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      Over the course of this summer, the nation has been transfixed by the House select committee’s hearings on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and how or whether Donald Trump might face accountability for what happened that day. The Justice Department remained largely silent about its investigations of the former president until this month, when the F.B.I. searched his home in Palm Beach, Fla., in a case related to his handling of classified documents. The spectacle of a former president facing criminal investigation raises profound questions about American democracy, and these questions demand answers.Mr. Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation. The disturbing details of his postelection misfeasance, meticulously assembled by the Jan. 6 committee, leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the Constitution and overturn the will of the American people. The president, defeated at the polls in 2020, tried to enlist federal law enforcement authorities, state officials and administrators of the nation’s electoral system in a furious effort to remain in power. When all else failed, he roused an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers.The Justice Department is reportedly examining Mr. Trump’s conduct, including his role in trying to overturn the election and in taking home classified documents. If Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff conclude that there is sufficient evidence to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt on a serious charge in a court of law, then they must indict him, too.This board is aware that in deciding how Mr. Trump should be held accountable under the law it is necessary to consider not just whether criminal prosecution would be warranted but whether it would be wise. No American president has ever been criminally prosecuted after leaving office. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he ensured that Nixon would not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Watergate scandal; Ford explained this decision with the warning that such a prosecution posed grave risks of rousing “ugly passions” and worsening political polarization.That warning is just as salient today. Pursuing prosecution of Mr. Trump could further entrench support for him and play into the conspiracy theories he has sought to stoke. It could inflame the bitter partisan divide, even to the point of civil unrest. A trial, if it is viewed as illegitimate, could also further undermine confidence in the rule of law, whatever the eventual outcome.The risks of political escalation are obvious. The Democratic and Republican parties are already in the thick of a cycle of retribution that could last generations. There is a substantial risk that, if the Justice Department does prosecute Mr. Trump, future presidents — whether Mr. Trump himself or someone of his ilk — could misuse the precedent to punish political rivals. If their party takes a majority in the House of Representatives after the midterm elections, some Republicans have already threatened to impeach President Biden.There is an even more immediate threat of further violence, and it is a possibility that Americans should, sadly, be prepared for. In the hours after federal agents began a court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, based on a warrant investigating possible violations of three federal laws, including one that governs the handling of defense information under the Espionage Act, his most fervent supporters escalated their rhetoric to the language of warfare. As The Times noted, “The aggressive, widespread response was arguably the clearest outburst of violent public rhetoric since the days leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”Mr. Garland has been deliberate, methodical and scrupulous in his leadership of the Justice Department’s investigations of the Jan. 6 attack and the transfer of documents to Mr. Trump’s home. But no matter how careful he is or how measured the prosecution might be, there is a real and significant risk from those who believe that any criticism of Mr. Trump justifies an extreme response.Yet it is a far greater risk to do nothing when action is called for. Aside from letting Mr. Trump escape punishment, doing nothing to hold him accountable for his actions in the months leading up to Jan. 6 could set an irresistible precedent for future presidents. Why not attempt to stay in power by any means necessary or use the power of the office to enrich oneself or punish one’s enemies, knowing that the law does not apply to presidents in or out of office?More important, democratic government is an ideal that must constantly be made real. America is not sustained by a set of principles; it is sustained by resolute action to defend those principles.Immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection, cabinet members reportedly debated privately whether to remove Mr. Trump from power under the authority of the 25th Amendment. A week after the attack, the House impeached Mr. Trump for the second time. This editorial board supported his impeachment and removal from office; we also suggested that the former president and lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6 plot could be permanently barred from holding office under a provision of the 14th Amendment that applies to any official who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to those who have done so. But most Republicans in the Senate refused to convict Mr. Trump, and Congress has yet to invoke that section of the 14th Amendment against him. As a result, the threat that Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters pose to American democracy has metastasized.Even now, the former president continues to spread lies about the 2020 election and denounce his vice president, Mike Pence, for not breaking the law on his behalf. Meanwhile, dozens of people who believe Mr. Trump’s lies are running for state and national elected office. Many have already won, some of them elevated to positions that give them control over how elections are conducted. In June the Republican Party in Texas approved measures in its platform declaring that Mr. Biden’s election was illegitimate. And Mr. Trump appears prepared to start a bid for a second term as president.Mr. Trump’s actions as a public official, like no others since the Civil War, attacked the heart of our system of government. He used the power of his office to subvert the rule of law. If we hesitate to call those actions and their perpetrator criminal, then we are saying he is above the law and giving license to future presidents to do whatever they want.In addition to a federal investigation by the Justice Department, Mr. Trump is facing a swirl of civil and criminal liability in several other cases: a lawsuit by the attorney general for the District of Columbia over payments during his inauguration ceremonies; a criminal investigation in Westchester County, N.Y., over taxes on one of his golf courses; a criminal case in Fulton County, Ga., over interference in the 2020 election; a criminal case by the Manhattan district attorney over the valuation of Mr. Trump’s properties; and a civil inquiry by New York’s attorney general into Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization.The specific crimes the Justice Department could consider would likely involve Mr. Trump’s fraudulent efforts to get election officials in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere to declare him the winner even though he lost their states; to get Mr. Pence, at the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election, to throw out slates of electors from states he lost and replace them with electors loyal to Mr. Trump; and to enlist officials from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense to persuade officials in certain states to swing the election to him and ultimately stir up a mob that attacked the Capitol. The government could also charge Mr. Trump with seditious conspiracy, a serious charge that federal prosecutors have already brought against leaders of far-right militia groups who participated in the Capitol invasion.The committee hearings make it clear: Mr. Trump must have known he was at the center of a frantic, sprawling and knowingly fraudulent effort that led directly to the Capitol siege. For hours, Mr. Trump refused to call off the mob.The testimony from hundreds of witnesses, many of them high-ranking Republican officials from his own administration, reveal Mr. Trump’s unrelenting efforts, beginning months before Election Day and continuing through Jan. 6, to sow doubt about the election, to refuse to accept the result of that election and then to pursue what he must have known were illegal and unconstitutional means to overturn it. Many participants sought pre-emptive pardons for their conduct — an indication they knew they were violating the law.Other evidence points to other crimes, like obstruction of Congress, defined as a corrupt obstruction of the “proper administration of the law.” The fake-elector scheme that Mr. Trump and his associates pushed before Jan. 6 appears to meet this definition. That may explain why at least three of Mr. Trump’s campaign lawyers were unwilling to participate in the plot. People involved in it were told it was not “legally sound” by White House lawyers, but they moved forward with it anyway.Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, provided powerful evidence that could be used to charge Mr. Trump with seditious conspiracy. In her public testimony at a Jan. 6 committee hearing, she said that Mr. Trump was informed that many in the throng of supporters waiting to hear him speak on the Ellipse that day were armed but that he demanded they be allowed to skip the metal detectors that had been installed for his security. “They’re not here to hurt me,” he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”If Mr. Garland decides to pursue prosecution, a message that the Justice Department must send early and often is that even if Mr. Trump genuinely believed, as he claimed, that the election had been marred by fraud, his schemes to interfere in the certification of the vote would still be crimes. And even though Mr. Trump’s efforts failed, these efforts would still be crimes. More than 850 other Americans have already been charged with crimes for their roles in the Capitol attack. Well-meaning intentions did not shield them from the consequences of their actions. It would be unjust if Mr. Trump, the man who inspired them, faced no consequences.No one should revel in the prospect of this or any former president facing criminal prosecution. Mr. Trump’s actions have brought shame on one of the world’s oldest democracies and destabilized its future. Even justice before the law will not erase that stain. Nor will prosecuting Mr. Trump fix the structural problems that led to the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War. But it is a necessary first step toward doing so.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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      There Is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem

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      Debate about the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has settled into well-worn grooves. Mr. Trump and many Republicans have denounced the act as illegitimate. Attorney General Merrick Garland is staying mostly mum. And Democrats are struggling to contain their enthusiasm.Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.But this is a fantasy. There is no scenario following from the present that culminates in a happy ending for anyone, even for Democrats.Down one path is the prosecution of the former president. This would be a Democratic administration putting the previous occupant of the White House, the ostensible head of the Republican Party and the current favorite to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 2024, on trial. That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.Some will say that Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves it — and he does. If Mr. Garland does not press charges against him for Jan. 6 or the potential mishandling of classified government documents, Mr. Trump will have learned that becoming president has effectively immunized him from prosecution. That means the country would be facing a potential second term for Mr. Trump in which he is convinced that he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.That seems to point to the need to push forward with a case, despite the risk of turning it into a regular occurrence. As many of Mr. Trump’s detractors argue, the rule of law demands it — and failing to fulfill that demand could end up being extremely dangerous.But we’ve been through a version of the turbulent Trump experience before. During the Trump years, the system passed its stress test. We have reason to think it would do so again, especially with reforms to the Electoral Count Act likely to pass during the lame duck session following the upcoming midterm elections, if not before. Having to combat an emboldened Mr. Trump or another bad actor would certainly be unnerving and risky. But the alternatives would be too.We caught a glimpse of those alternative risks as soon as the Mar-a-Lago raid was announced. Within hours, leading Republicans had issued inflammatory statements, and these statements would likely grow louder and more incendiary through any trial, both from Mr. Trump himself and from members of his party and its media rabble-rousers. (Though at a federal judge’s order a redacted version of the warrant affidavit may soon be released, so Mr. Trump and the rest of his party would have to contend with the government’s actual justification of the raid itself.)If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.The instinct of Democrats is to angrily dismiss such concerns. But that doesn’t mean these consequences wouldn’t happen. Even if Mr. Garland’s motives and methods are models of judiciousness and restraint, the act of an attorney general of one party seeking to indict and convict a former and possibly future president of the other party is the ringing of a bell that cannot be unrung. It is guaranteed to be undertaken again, regardless of whether present and future accusations are justified.As we’ve seen over and over again since Mr. Trump won the presidency, our system of governance presumes a certain base level of public spiritedness — at the level of the presidency, in Congress and in the electorate at large. When that is lacking — when an aspersive figure is elected, when he maintains strong popular support within his party and when that party remains electorally viable — high-minded efforts to act as antibodies defending the body politic from the spread of infection can end up doing enduring harm to the patient. Think of all those times during the Trump presidency when well-meaning sources inside and outside the administration ended up undermining their own credibility by hyping threats and overpromising evidence of wrongdoing and criminality.That’s why it’s imperative we set aside the Plan A of prosecuting Mr. Trump. In its place, we should embrace a Plan B that defers the dream of a post-presidential perp walk in favor of allowing the political process to run its course. If Mr. Trump is the G.O.P. nominee again in 2024, Democrats will have no choice but to defeat him yet again, hopefully by an even larger margin than they did last time.Mr. Trump himself and his most devoted supporters will be no more likely to accept that outcome than they were after the 2020 election. The bigger the margin of his loss, the harder it will be for Mr. Trump to avoid looking like a loser, which is the outcome he dreads more than anything — and one that would be most likely to loosen his grip on his party.There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win. But that’s a risk we can’t avoid — which is why we may well have found ourselves in a situation with no unambivalently good options.Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right” and is a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      American Idols: Dr. Oz, Trump and the Celebrity to Politics Pipeline

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      Celebrities. They are ubiquitous in American culture and now, ever increasingly, in our politics. From Donald Trump to Dr. Oz, the memeification of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — the power of celebrity has gripped our democracy and society. We want our elected officials to be superstars, but is that a good thing?[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.]So today, host Jane Coaston is joined by Jessica Bennett, contributing editor to Times Opinion and Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, to discuss our modern celebrity politics phenomenon and how it’s shaping our cultural and political realities. “I’m distressed that we’ve conflated celebrity and politics because I think it gives politicians the wrong goals, the wrong motives,” Bruni says. And a lot of that is on us — the fans. “We place values on celebrities that may not actually represent them, and they become something outside of themselves,” Bennett says. “They start to represent something that has nothing to do with the person who’s actually there.”Warning: This episode contains explicit language. Mentioned in this episode:“Dr. Does-It-All” by Frank Bruni in The New York Times Magazine “He’s Sorry, She’s Sorry, Everybody Is Sorry. Does It Matter?” by Jessica BennettSign up for Frank Bruni’s newsletter for New York Times Opinion here. (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Hannah Beier/ReutersThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett and Vishakha Darbha. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. More

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      The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law

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      This article has been updated to include new information about a man who attempted to breach an F.B.I. field office.It took many accidents, catastrophes, misjudgments and mistakes for Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016. Two particularly important errors came from James Comey, then the head of the F.B.I., who was excessively worried about what Trump’s supporters would think of the resolution of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.First, in July 2016, Comey broke protocol to give a news conference in which he criticized Clinton even while announcing that she’d committed no crime. He reportedly did this because he wanted to protect the reputation of the F.B.I. from inevitable right-wing claims that the investigation had been shut down for political reasons.Then, on Oct. 28, just days before the election, Comey broke protocol again, telling Congress that the Clinton investigation had been reopened because of emails found on the laptop of the former congressman Anthony Weiner. The Justice Department generally discourages filing charges or taking “overt investigative steps” close to an election if they might influence the result. Comey disregarded this because, once again, he dreaded a right-wing freakout once news of the reopened investigation emerged.“The prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an F.B.I. ‘cover-up,’ made everyone uneasy,” The New Yorker reported. In Comey’s memoir, he admitted fearing that concealing the new stage of the investigation — which ended up yielding nothing — would make Clinton, who he assumed would win, seem “illegitimate.” (He didn’t, of course, feel similarly compelled to make public the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.)Comey’s attempts to pre-empt a conservative firestorm blew up in his face. He helped put Trump in the White House, where Trump did generational damage to the rule of law and led us to a place where prominent Republicans are calling for abolishing the F.B.I.This should be a lesson about the futility of shaping law enforcement decisions around the sensitivities of Trump’s base. Yet after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Trump’s beachfront estate this week, some intelligent people have questioned the wisdom of subjecting the former president to the normal operation of the law because of the effect it will have on his most febrile admirers.Andrew Yang, one of the founders of a new centrist third party, tweeted about the “millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.” Damon Linker, usually one of the more sensible centrist thinkers, wrote, “Rather than healing the country’s civic wounds, the effort to punish Trump will only deepen them.”The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta described feeling “nauseous” watching coverage of the raid. “What we must acknowledge — even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law — is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences,” he wrote.In some sense, Alberta’s words are obviously true; Trumpists are already issuing death threats against the judge who signed off on the warrant, and a Shabbat service at his synagogue was reportedly canceled because of the security risk. On Thursday, an armed man tried to breach an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, and The New York Times reported that he appears to have attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The former president relishes his ability to stir up a mob; it’s part of what makes him so dangerous.We already know, however, that the failure to bring Trump to justice — for his company’s alleged financial chicanery and his alleged sexual assault, for obstructing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and turning the presidency into a squalid influence-peddling operation, for trying to steal an election and encouraging an insurrection — has been disastrous.What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.We do not know the scope of the investigation that led a judge to authorize the search of Mar-a-Lago, though it reportedly involves classified documents that Trump failed to turn over to the government even after being subpoenaed. More could be revealed soon: Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had filed a motion in court to unseal the search warrant.It should go without saying that Trump and his followers, who howled “Lock her up!” about Clinton, do not believe that it is wrong for the Justice Department to pursue a probe against a presidential contender over the improper handling of classified material. What they believe is that it is wrong to pursue a case against Trump, who bonds with his acolytes through a shared sense of aggrieved victimization.The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?It was Trump himself who signed a law making the removal and retention of classified documents a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those who think that it would be too socially disruptive to apply such a statute to him should specify which laws they believe the former president is and is not obliged to obey. And those in charge of enforcing our laws should remember that the caterwauling of the Trump camp is designed to intimidate them and such intimidation helped him become president in the first place.Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency

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      President Biden has said he plans to run for a second term, but his age has become an uncomfortable issue for him and his party.WASHINGTON — When President Biden leaves Tuesday night for a four-day swing through the Middle East, he will presumably be more rested than he would have been had he followed the original plan.The trip was initially tacked onto another journey last month to Europe, which would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek until it became clear to Mr. Biden’s team that such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president, or “crazy,” as one official put it.Aides also cited political and diplomatic reasons to reorganize the extra stops as a separate trip weeks later. But the reality is that managing the schedule of the oldest president in American history presents distinct challenges. And as Mr. Biden insists he plans to run for a second term, his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.Just a year and a half into his first term, Mr. Biden is already more than a year older than Ronald Reagan was at the end of two terms. If he mounts another campaign in 2024, Mr. Biden would be asking the country to elect a leader who would be 86 at the end of his tenure, testing the outer boundaries of age and the presidency. Polls show many Americans consider Mr. Biden too old, and some Democratic strategists do not think he should run again.It is, unsurprisingly, a sensitive topic in the West Wing. In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.But they acknowledged Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans. His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.Although White House officials insist they make no special accommodations the way Reagan’s team did, privately they try to guard Mr. Biden’s weekends in Delaware as much as possible. He is generally a five- or five-and-a-half-day-a-week president, although he is called at any hour regardless of the day as needed. He stays out of public view at night and has taken part in fewer than half as many news conferences or interviews as recent predecessors.Mr. Biden fell off his bike in Delaware last month. He did not appear to suffer any injuries, but the incident attracted widespread attention.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Biden fell while dismounting a bicycle last month, White House officials ruefully noticed that it was among the top stories of the week — never mind that the president works out five mornings a week, often with a physical trainer, or that many men his age hardly ride bikes anymore.Mr. Biden himself has said questions about his fitness are reasonable to ask even as he reassures Americans that he is in good shape. Even for some admirers, though, the question is whether that will last six more years.The Biden PresidencyWith midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.Struggling to Inspire: At a time of political tumult and economic distress, President Biden has appeared less engaged than Democrats had hoped.Low Approval Rating: Despite early warnings from his pollster, Mr. Biden’s approval among Americans has reached the lowest level of his presidency.Rallying Allies: Faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has set out to bolster the West and outline a more muscular NATO.Staff Changes: An increasing number of West Wing departures has added to the sense of frustration inside the Biden White House.Looking Ahead to 2024: Amid doubts from Democrats, aides say Mr. Biden is irked by persistent questions over his plans to seek re-election.“I do feel it’s inappropriate to seek that office after you’re 80 or in your 80s,” said David Gergen, a top adviser to four presidents. “I have just turned 80 and I have found over the last two or three years I think it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization. You’re not quite as sharp as you once were.”Everyone ages differently, of course, and some experts put Mr. Biden in a category of “super-agers” who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.“Right now, there’s no evidence that the age of Biden should matter one ounce,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020. “If people don’t like his policies, they don’t like what he says, that’s fine, they can vote for someone else. But it’s got nothing to do with how old he is.”Still, Professor Olshansky said it was legitimate to wonder if that would remain so at 86. “That’s the right question to be asking,” he said. “You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get.”The White House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a seven-day commander in chief. “President Biden works every day and because chief executives can perform their duties from anywhere in the world, it has long been common for them to spend weekends away from the White House,” Andrew Bates, a deputy press secretary, said after this article was published online.The president’s medical report in November indicated he had atrial fibrillation but that it was stable and asymptomatic. Mr. Biden’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” the report said, and gastroesophageal reflux causes him to cough and clear his throat, symptoms that “certainly seem to be more frequent and more pronounced.”But overall, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s physician, pronounced him “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”Questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness have nonetheless taken a toll on his public standing. In a June survey by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll, 64 percent of voters believed he was showing that he is too old to be president, including 60 percent of respondents 65 or older.Mr. Biden’s public appearances have fueled that perception. His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, “John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from Virginia.Republicans and conservative media gleefully highlight such moments, posting viral videos, sometimes exaggerated or distorted to make Mr. Biden look even worse. But the White House has had to walk back some of his ad-libbed comments, such as when he vowed a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia.Mr. Biden was famously prone to gaffes even as a younger man, and aides point to his marathon meetings with families of mass shooting victims or his working the rope line during a trip to Cleveland this past week as evidence of stamina.Mike Donilon, a senior adviser who began working for Mr. Biden some 40 years ago, said he did not see any change. “On the way back from long trips when the staff is wiped out, he’ll want to spend four hours planning for how we hit the ground running on domestic policy, when all much younger staff want to do is sleep,” he said.Mr. Biden is not the first president to confront questions of age. The issue came up repeatedly under President Donald J. Trump, who is four years younger. Mr. Trump’s diminished vocabulary, tendency to meander, sometimes incoherent remarks, light office schedule and struggles to process information led critics to conclude that he was in decline.At one point, he had trouble lifting a glass of water to his lips and stepping down a ramp, and he also made an unexplained trip to the hospital. By the end of his term, he was boasting about passing a cognitive test meant to detect signs of dementia. If he runs again in 2024, it could be a contest between two men who would serve in their 80s.Reagan had previously been the oldest president. He once joked during a debate that he would not exploit “my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”Ron Edmonds/Associated PressUntil now, the oldest president was Reagan. When a poor debate performance in 1984 briefly threatened his re-election, he recovered in his next encounter by joking that he would not exploit “my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”“Reagan understood this issue, both intuitively and he had thought it through,” said the biographer Lou Cannon. “And he told me, ‘Age will be an issue if I act old and it won’t if I don’t.’”By Reagan’s final years, a new set of aides secretly assessed whether he might have to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment’s disability clause, but ultimately concluded he was still fit. (Five years after leaving the White House, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.)Still, aides tried to limit his schedule, monitored sharply by the first lady, Nancy Reagan. “That’s one of the first lessons we had, to not overschedule,” recalled Tom Griscom, one of those aides. Nor should they send excessive briefing papers at night. “After a couple weeks,” he said, “a message came back down from Mrs. Reagan asking us not to send so much up in the evening because he would read it all,” staying up late.Mr. Biden’s advisers say he resists such management and pushes in the other direction. “He’s driving additions to his schedule all the time, whether it’s new C.E.O. calls or night meetings with members,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the deputy chief of staff who oversees his calendar.But aides are cautious about exposing him to the coronavirus. Aides are tested once a week and wear colored wristbands on the day of their test; if they plan to attend a meeting with the president on another day, then they must test that morning, too, and wear N95 masks.The White House seems equally determined to guard Mr. Biden against unscripted interactions with the news media. He has held just 16 news conferences since taking office, less than half as many as Mr. Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush had by this stage and less than a third as many as Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a longtime scholar of presidential media strategy.Likewise, Mr. Biden has given just 38 interviews, far fewer than Mr. Trump (116), Mr. Obama (198), the younger Mr. Bush (71), Mr. Clinton (75) and the older Mr. Bush (86). Mr. Biden has been more accessible taking a few questions informally after a speech or other event, which he has done 290 times, compared with 213 by Mr. Trump and 64 by Mr. Obama.During his European trip last month, foreign leaders followed his lead while protectively treating him like a distinguished elderly relative. At a photo opportunity, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany gently pointed Mr. Biden in the direction of the cameras. Just before a meeting, a reporter twice shouted a question about getting grain out of Ukraine. When Mr. Biden could not hear the question, Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, rescued him. “We’re working on it,” Mr. Johnson responded.Mr. Biden at a working lunch with other Group of 7 leaders in Germany last month. On one day of his trip, his public schedule finished with a 3:30 p.m. event.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesAt times, Mr. Biden kept a packed schedule. On the day he flew to Madrid for a NATO summit, he met with multiple leaders and finished with a dinner hosted by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain. On another day, though, he skipped evening festivities with other leaders, and his public schedule finished with a 3:30 p.m. event.But aides said he was busy and stayed up working late each night of the trip out of view — just as they say they expect him to in the coming week as he hits the road again in Israel and Saudi Arabia.Jim Tankersley More

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      Biden Irked by Democrats Who Won’t Take ‘Yes’ for an Answer on 2024

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      The White House is trying to tamp down speculation about plans to seek re-election, while aides say President Biden is bristling at the persistent questions.WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, when Senator Bernie Sanders said he would not challenge President Biden in 2024, Mr. Biden was so relieved he invited his former rival to dinner at the White House the next night.Mr. Biden has been eager for signs of loyalty — and they have been few and far between. Facing intensifying skepticism about his capacity to run for re-election when he will be nearly 82, the president and his top aides have been stung by the questions about his plans, irritated at what they see as a lack of respect from their party and the press, and determined to tamp down suggestions that he’s effectively a lame duck a year and a half into his administration.Mr. Biden isn’t just intending to run, his aides argue, but he’s also laying the groundwork by building resources at the Democratic National Committee, restocking his operation in battleground states and looking to use his influence to shape the nomination process in his favor.This account of Mr. Biden’s preparation for re-election and his building frustration with his party’s doubt is based on interviews with numerous people who talk regularly to the president. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. But several said the president and his inner circle were confounded by Democrats’ discussions about a Plan B when the one person who has defeated Donald J. Trump has made clear he intends to run again.Mr. Biden has told advisers he sees a replay of the early days of his 2020 primary bid, when some Democrats dismissed him as too old or too moderate to win the nomination. He blames the same doubters for the current round of questioning.Those skeptics grew louder over the weekend, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, when Mr. Biden restated his opposition to expanding the ranks of the high court, the left’s preferred solution to the court’s current conservative tilt. The remarks angered critics who argue that the president, who has never been comfortable elevating abortion rights and positions himself as a consensus builder, doesn’t have the temperament for partisan combat.“Too many people in our party look at the glass as half-empty as opposed to the glass as half-full,” said former Representative Cedric Richmond, whom Mr. Biden dispatched from the White House to shore up the Democratic National Committee. Accusing other Democrats of “putting too much into these polling numbers,” an allusion to Mr. Biden’s standing below 40 percent in some surveys, Mr. Richmond said there was “a wing in our party who wanted a different candidate and I’m sure they’d love to have their candidate back in the mix again.”However, it’s hardly just the president’s progressive detractors who are nervous about soaring inflation, uneasy about Mr. Biden running again, and not convinced he even should.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia at the Capitol in June.Anna Rose Layden Layden for The New York TimesSenator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who some wealthy donors are hoping will consider a third-party presidential bid, declined to say whether he would consider such a run or if he planned to back Mr. Biden. “We’re just trying to do our daily thing, brother,” Mr. Manchin said. “Trying to do what we got to do that’s good for the country.”Other interviews with Democratic lawmakers yield grave doubts about whether Mr. Biden ought to lead the party again with some concluding he should but only because there’s no clearly viable alternative.“I have been surprised at the number of people who are openly expressing concerns about 2024 and whether or not Biden should run,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, recounting a recent dinner of Democrats in the capital where several speculated about who could succeed the president.More worrisome for Mr. Biden, some ambitious Democrats have found that calling for the president to retire is a sure way to win attention. Former Representative Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, who’s hoping to unseat Gov. Henry McMaster, 75, said the president should cede the nomination “to a new generation of leadership,” as he put it on CNN last week.In some respects, Mr. Biden invited this moment. Running in the 2020 primary, the president presented himself as “a bridge, not as anything else” as he sought to rally skeptical Democrats to his candidacy. Consumed with ejecting Mr. Trump from office, the party’s voters answered that call but thought little of the implications of having an octogenarian in the Oval Office four years on.Now, over half of Democrats say they don’t want Mr. Biden to run again or aren’t sure he should, according to recent surveys.Mr. Biden’s top advisers reject the idea that an open primary would deliver Democrats a stronger standard-bearer. They fear his retirement would set off a sprint to the left. What’s more, while Vice President Kamala Harris would most likely garner substantial support, she’s unlikely to clear the field, leading to a messy race that could widen the party’s divisions on issues of race, gender and ideology.Mr. Biden has told aides he is determined to run again, although he has also noted he will take his family’s advice into account. Mr. Biden’s advisers recognize the political risk of being perceived as a one-term president and are intent on signaling that he intends to run for re-election.The president has made clear he wants a primary calendar that better reflects the party’s racial diversity, all but assuring the demise of first-in-the-nation status for the Iowa, which was hostile to Mr. Biden in his last two presidential bids. Senior Democrats are considering moving up Michigan, a critical general election state where the president has a number of allies in labor and elected office.The Democratic National Committee has been quietly preparing for the president’s re-election by pouring money and staff into eight battleground states that happen to have important midterm elections, an effort that began in the spring of last year. Mr. Biden has also accelerated his fund-raising, holding a pair of events for the committee in June that brought in $5 million, while also spending more time on Zoom sessions courting individual contributors.The president has moved to consolidate his hold on the D.N.C., and not just by sending Mr. Richmond to the committee. Mr. Biden has also shifted both his social media assets and his lucrative fund-raising list to the party, which has made the committee largely reliant on those channels for their contributions.Anita Dunn, center, speaking with Ron Klain, the chief of staff, last year during an event in the Rose Garden.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesEven more subtly, Mr. Biden has made personnel moves that indicate he’s at least preparing to run, most notably summoning Anita Dunn, a longtime adviser, back to the White House from her public affairs firm. Ms. Dunn, who helped revive the president’s moribund primary campaign in 2020; Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s top political aide; and senior adviser Mike Donilon are expected to help guide the re-election, though notably there has been no decision yet on who will formally manage the re-election outside the White House.What Mr. Biden will not do, aides say, is quiet the critics by filing his paperwork to run in 2024 before this year’s midterm elections, a step being considered by Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden’s advisers feel the move would suggest panic and create a significant fund-raising burden two years before the campaign. Should the midterms go poorly, however, the president may feel pressure to formalize his intentions sooner than what they see as the modern standard — former President Barack Obama’s April 2011 declaration.For now, the president is relying on personal diplomacy, as he did with Mr. Sanders, the Vermont independent, and the power of the presidency, to ward off would-be competitors.Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaking to abortion rights demonstrators in Chicago in May.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesEven before Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois arrived recently in New Hampshire, a traditional early voting state, Biden officials said that the governor’s office had given them a heads up about the eyebrow-raising travel and reassured them that the governor had no plan to mount a primary challenge against the president. The message was appreciated, a Biden official said, noting that Mr. Pritzker has been lobbying to get the Democrats’ 2024 convention to Chicago. Mr. Biden will make that decision later this year.White House aides have noticed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s repeated denunciations of his party leadership for not more robustly confronting Republicans. They dismissed the California governor’s critiques as those of a politician feeling his oats after easily thwarting a recall and said Mr. Newsom was in frequent contact with the West Wing. And one Biden adviser noted that Mr. Newsom feels enough affection for Mr. Biden to have posted pictures of his children with the president on social media during Mr. Biden’s trip to California last week.As for Hillary Clinton, few Biden advisers think she will mount a challenge against him, though her recent Financial Times interview made it clear she’s eager to have her voice in the political conversation. Mrs. Clinton has made little secret of her frustration that she has not been consulted more by Mr. Biden. But White House aides believe they can direct Mrs. Clinton’s energy toward assisting with the public response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.When pressed about why Mr. Biden is so intent on running again, the president’s defenders point out he did what Mrs. Clinton did not, defeat Mr. Trump.Stung about their perceived treatment, they also recall other recent Democrats — President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama — who rebounded from low approval numbers and rough midterm elections to win second terms.But Mr. Biden’s age — at 79, he is the oldest president in American history — has fueled skepticism those presidents didn’t face.“Trump is a senior citizen, too,” shoots back Fletcher Smith, a former South Carolina legislator, reprising a line White House officials use, as well.Democrats remain so alarmed by the threat that Mr. Trump, 76, represents that Mr. Biden’s aides argue they will be insulated from a primary because such a race will be perceived as effectively aiding the former president, a life-or-death question for American democracy.President Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on Monday.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesFor the most part, senior Democrats would rather avoid the question for now.Asked if he expected Mr. Biden to run again, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said: “If he runs, I’m for him.” Pressed if he thought Mr. Biden would do so, Mr. Schumer repeated the same line.One outside ally of the president and a regular White House visitor, the National Urban League president Marc Morial, played down questions about the president’s age, saying that “he still has the old Joe Biden fire.”But Mr. Morial urged the president not to dwell on the criticism. “I think sometimes if you overreact to it you give it air,” he said. 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      Will Merrick Garland Prosecute Trump? Should He?

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      Readers discuss a guest essay weighing factors such as the likelihood of conviction and the political repercussions.Attorney General Merrick Garland.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressDrew Angerer/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “What Garland Needs to Decide Before Charging Trump,” by Jack Goldsmith (Opinion guest essay, June 22):If Professor Goldsmith is right, American democracy has already lost. In spelling out the difficulties that Attorney General Merrick Garland must overcome in order to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Goldsmith all but concludes that the task is impossible. Prosecution will be portrayed as a political vendetta. Proving Mr. Trump’s guilty intent will be exceedingly hard, making an acquittal likely. And an acquittal will be seen by Mr. Trump and his supporters as a vindication.At the same time, Mr. Goldsmith concedes that a decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump will effectively place the president above the law. This bodes ill should Mr. Trump or someone like him again occupy the Oval Office.Is this really Mr. Garland’s only choice: a trial that threatens to tear an already divided nation apart, or allowing Mr. Trump to get away scot-free at the cost of undermining the rule of law? For the sake of democracy, there must be another option.Stephen NewmanTorontoThe writer is an associate professor of politics at York University.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith is right to praise Attorney General Merrick Garland for “gathering as much information as possible” before deciding whether to prosecute former President Donald Trump for defrauding the American people and interfering with the work of Congress.Professor Goldsmith is wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Garland’s decision to indict Mr. Trump would be “a cataclysmic event from which the nation would not soon recover.” The cataclysm is already here, and it is of Mr. Trump’s making, not Mr. Garland’s.Once and for all, we must stop Donald Trump’s big lies, his intimidation of anyone who opposes him and his thinly veiled calls to violence. The only solution is to impose the forceful countermeasures of the law.Mr. Trump rode the whirlwind, and he must now reap the consequences if our democracy is to survive.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.To the Editor:I’m so tired of hearing about the damage we may inflict on the nation and the presidency by holding Donald Trump to the same standard as any other citizen. Such concerns must be weighed against the very real damage caused by future presidents following the precedent he has established, operating the White House like a mob boss and pardoning his cronies when they do his bidding.This is a crossroads for America. We can have only one standard for justice. Afford Donald Trump the same justice as any other citizen and let the chips fall where they may. When in doubt, perhaps it’s time to just default to doing the right thing.Lawrence LobertGrosse Pointe Park, Mich.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith suggests that, in weighing whether to indict Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland must consider “whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump.” It is, he argues, “a judgment call about the nature, and fate, of our democracy.”Quite so. And that is why Mr. Goldsmith errs in suggesting that the judgment should be made by Mr. Garland. Rather, it should be made by President Biden in deciding whether to pardon Mr. Trump. That is how the issue was resolved when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a compelling precedent for the current situation.Douglas M. ParkerOjai, Calif.The writer served in the White House Counsel’s Office during the Watergate investigations.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith’s masterful exposition of the problems arising from seeking to hold Donald Trump criminally liable highlights the tragedy of the failure to remove him through the impeachment process. History will judge craven senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton as the villains responsible for an American tragedy. They knew better but refused to risk their personal political ambitions.How sad for America that the lessons of “Macbeth” elude so many United States senators.Allan RothAuburndale, Mass.The writer is a lawyer and a retired professor from Rutgers law and business schools.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith identifies very legitimate concerns facing Attorney General Merrick Garland as he wades through the complexities of indicting, charging and prosecuting Donald Trump. And yet, it seems to me unconscionable and immoral to let Mr. Trump slither away from accountability given the mountain of evidence proving beyond any doubt that he very intentionally attempted to subvert the 2020 election.A possible Plan B? The district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, must move forward immediately and indict and prosecute Mr. Trump under that state’s laws. With the addition of the fruits of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, there is now more than enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with state felony offenses that would likely land him behind bars and prevent him from ever running for public office again, which is the very least of what he deserves and this country needs.Laurie KorenbaumBrooklynThe writer is a former federal prosecutor.To the Editor:The nation is being held hostage by a sore loser. If Donald Trump is not held accountable for the events of Jan. 6, the precedent is set for every future election when the loser doesn’t agree with the outcome. We would invite anarchy in every election.I think it’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation, but the lack of consequences to bad behavior encourages more of the same.Fran HochmanGreat Neck, N.Y. More

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      A Recession Would Hurt Democrats. Some Warn It’d Also Hurt Democracy.

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      By trying to tame inflation, some commentators say, the Federal Reserve could bring about a recession — just as an unrepentant Donald Trump appears to be eyeing another White House bid.Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, made the understatement of the year on Wednesday when he noted offhandedly to reporters, “Clearly, people do not like inflation.”And how.According to Fox News’s latest national poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that “inflation and higher prices” represented the most important issue influencing their ballot decision in November. Just 12 percent of voters called guns their top priority, the second-place issue. Seventy-one percent disapproved of the job President Biden is doing on inflation.This is not exactly a vote of confidence in the federal government. In the past, this level of public dissatisfaction has typically led to major political upheaval.Inflation ran at a rate of 8.6 percent in May, the fastest annual pace in four decades. Voters do not seem to be buying the White House’s argument, backed up by the Fed and places like the World Bank, that global factors beyond Biden’s control like the pandemic, supply-chain crises and the war in Ukraine are driving the increase in prices.Nor do they seem to be giving the administration much credit for an unemployment rate that is down to 3.6 percent, just a tick above its prepandemic level.The Fed might be Biden’s best hope. After the Federal Open Market Committee announced on Wednesday that it would raise short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, Powell said the Fed’s goal was to bring inflation closer to its 2 percent target while keeping the labor market “strong.”He hastened to add: “We’re not trying to induce a recession now. Let’s be clear about that.”‘A democracy-wrecking election’Yet some commentators, notably David Frum of The Atlantic, have begun to fret that in trying to tame inflation, the Fed will do exactly that — start a recession, just in time to doom Biden or whomever Democrats nominate in his stead in 2024.Understand Inflation and How It Impacts YouInflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Greedflation: Some experts contend that big corporations are supercharging inflation by jacking up prices. We take a closer look at the issue. Inflation Calculator: How you experience inflation can vary greatly depending on your spending habits. Answer these seven questions to estimate your personal inflation rate.For Investors: At last, interest rates for money market funds have started to rise. But inflation means that in real terms, you’re still losing money.Frum noted the historically tight link between economic growth and a president’s chances of re-election. Citing the possibility that an unrepentant Donald Trump will run again, he argued that a downturn this year or next could result in “a democracy-wrecking election the next year.”He concluded: “So the Federal Reserve has a more than usual obligation this week to measure its policy appropriately. A miscalculation in monetary policy in 2022 could reverberate through long ages of American history ahead.”Others have criticized Biden’s decision last fall to nominate Powell for a second term, leaving the president handcuffed in blaming the Fed chair for the parlous state of the economy. Powell was, after all, Trump’s pick for Fed chair — and Biden, the thinking goes, could have thrown him overboard and started afresh.That would have been a very Trump-like move. Powell resisted months of intense pressure from the 45th president to lower interest rates, including comments describing the low-key Fed chairman as an “enemy” of the United States. Central bankers prize their distance from politics, mindful that their credibility with financial institutions around the world is crucial to their effectiveness.So in renominating Powell, Biden made sure to emphasize his respect for his institutional prerogatives. “My plan is to address inflation,” the president said. “It starts with a simple proposition: Respect the Fed and respect the Fed’s independence.”Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, with President Biden last month. Some Democrats had urged Biden to choose a Fed chair of his own.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Fed’s relationship with politicsLet’s set aside the fraught question of whether Trump’s re-election could bring about the end of American democracy. Does the Fed, in fact, have an “obligation” to consider how its actions might affect the U.S. political system?On a simple reading of the law, not really. The Federal Reserve Act gives the Fed the authority to regulate the nation’s money supply, to foster the “long-run potential” of the U.S. economy and to promote the goals of “maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.”Frederic Mishkin, a former member of the Fed’s board of governors, no doubt spoke for many in the finance world when he wrote in an email, “I most strongly disagree with the view that the Federal Reserve should adjust its policy to favor or harm any politician.”He added, “The Fed should be as apolitical as possible, and its policy focus should be on stabilizing both inflation and output fluctuations, as is mandated by congressional legislation.”But it’s hard to divorce the Fed from its historical roots, founded as it was in an era of great political turmoil driven by frequent financial panics.The Fed was successfully established in 1913 because President Woodrow Wilson won the assent of William Jennings Bryan, the most influential populist leader of the time, by guaranteeing that government officials appointed by the president, not private sector bankers, would run the board.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More