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      The Last Time a Former President Was Shot at While Seeking a Comeback

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      One hundred and twelve years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning to return to the presidency when a gunman opened fire. He gave his speech anyway with a bullet in his chest.Donald J. Trump is not the first former president to survive an assassination attempt while trying to reclaim his old office. More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was shot just before he was scheduled to go onstage at a campaign event — and went ahead to give his speech anyway with a bullet in his chest.Roosevelt’s gritty response to the attack in 1912 proved to be the stuff of legends and helped cement his reputation for toughness. To that point in American history, three other presidents had been killed by assassins, including William McKinley, whose death elevated Roosevelt, then the vice president, to the presidency. But as of then, no current or former president had been shot without dying.Roosevelt, like Mr. Trump, was staging a comeback attempt, running again four years after moving out of the White House. Unlike Mr. Trump, Roosevelt had left office voluntarily, declining to run in 1908 after serving nearly two terms. Instead, he had helped elect his protégé, William Howard Taft. But within four years, the two had a falling out and Roosevelt decided to challenge Taft for the presidency.Although Taft beat him for the Republican nomination at the G.O.P. convention, Roosevelt broke off from his old party to form the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, so that he could compete in the fall contest against Taft and Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic governor of New Jersey.On Oct. 14, 1912, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, coincidentally the same city where Mr. Trump is scheduled to be nominated this week. As Roosevelt left the Gilpatrick Hotel to head to a nighttime speaking event, a man named John Schrank approached and opened fire with a Colt revolver. Several men tackled Schrank, but Roosevelt stopped the crowd from killing him on the spot.Roosevelt’s bloodstained shirt, photographed after an assassination attempt on Oct. 14, 1912.Harlingue/Roger Viollet,via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Democrats Fear Safe Blue States Turning Purple as Biden Stays the Course

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      Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe.As President Biden insists he will stay in the presidential race, Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed that his presence on the ticket is transforming the political map, turning light-blue states into contested battlegrounds.Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month.Some polls in these states suggest a tightening race between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, with one showing a virtual tie in Virginia, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004, and another showing Mr. Trump squeaking ahead in New Hampshire, which has been in the Democratic column since 2000.On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report, a prominent elections forecaster, downgraded New Hampshire and Minnesota from “likely” wins for Mr. Biden to only leaning in his direction. And in a meeting at the White House last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state, according to two people briefed on her comments.The shakiness in the fringe battleground states is an alarming sign for Mr. Biden’s hopes in must-win contests that were already expected to be close, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An expanding battleground map could force his campaign to divert resources away from the traditional swing states, where he has been falling further and further behind.But Mr. Biden has given no indication he is going anywhere, telling reporters at a high-profile news conference on Thursday that “I’m determined I’m running” and pushing back on his poor polling numbers.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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      Who Is Lloyd Doggett? Texas Democrat Calls for Biden to Exit Race

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      Representative Lloyd Doggett, a little-known Texas progressive, on Tuesday became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Biden to step aside as the party’s nominee after a halting debate performance that has raised major questions about his health, age and mental acuity.In going public with his concerns, Mr. Doggett, who has represented his Austin-based district for close to 30 years, spoke aloud what most other Democrats have only dared to say in private since Thursday’s debate.Mr. Doggett is a rank-and-file congressman with little national profile. But his public statement gave voice to a growing sense of doom and worry among Democrats about whether Mr. Biden can continue as the party’s nominee, and if by doing so he might cost the party not only the White House but also any chance of controlling Congress.“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Mr. Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, the congressman said he made the decision to break with his party and call for Mr. Biden to take himself out of the race after feeling “alarmed” as he watched the debate with his wife at their Washington home.He was dismayed when Mr. Biden did not even try to debunk many of the falsehoods that former President Donald J. Trump put forward in his answers. He was disconcerted when the president seemed to lose his train of thought and trail off in discussing health care, ending an answer with the words, “we beat Medicare.” And “we were all troubled,” he said, by Mr. Biden’s lack of forceful answers on abortion and reproductive freedom.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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      Supreme Court Immunity Ruling Escalates Long Rise of Presidential Power

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      Beyond Donald J. Trump, the decision adds to the seemingly one-way ratchet of executive authority.The Supreme Court’s decision to bestow presidents with immunity from prosecution over official actions is an extraordinary expansion of executive power that will reverberate long after Donald J. Trump is gone.Beyond its immediate implications for the election subversion case against Mr. Trump and the prospect that he may feel less constrained by law if he returns to power, the ruling also adds to the nearly relentless rise of presidential power since the mid-20th century.It had seemed like a constitutional truism in recent years when more than one lower-court opinion addressing novel legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking behavior observed that presidents are not kings. But suddenly, they do enjoy a kind of monarchical prerogative.“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an outraged dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”Dismissing those worries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, argued that presidents stand apart from regular people, so protecting them from prosecution if they are accused of abusing their powers to commit official crimes is necessary.“Unlike anyone else,” he wrote, “the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.”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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      The White House Brushed Off Questions About Biden’s Age. Then the Debate Happened.

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      President Biden’s allies can no longer wave away concerns about his capacity after his unsteady performance at Thursday’s debate as worries among Democrats grow.Ever since President Biden announced last year that he would run again, those in his inner circle closed ranks and brushed off the obvious question: No, they insisted, he was not too old to seek re-election.The news media, they said, was unfairly fixated on his age. Republicans were posting wildly distorted video clips on social media making him look more feeble than he actually is. Hand-wringing Democrats fretting over the prospect of an octogenarian president turning 86 by the end of a second term were just “bed-wetters.”Then the debate happened. And now the days of denial at the White House are over. No longer can the president’s confidants simply wave away concerns about his capacity after his unsteady performance at Thursday night’s showdown with former President Donald J. Trump. Struggling to contain a brush fire of alarm within the Democratic Party, his team is now forced to confront the issue head on.Mr. Biden, 81, admitted himself on Friday that he is no longer a young man and that he has lost a step debating, even as he made a more forceful case for himself at an energized rally in Raleigh, N.C., than he had on the debate stage in Atlanta the night before. The Biden team seized on validation from Democratic allies like former President Barack Obama and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina to reject calls on the president to cede the nomination to a younger candidate.But many distressed Democrats, including some in his own administration, were left wondering how it had come to this and, fairly or not, faulted the president’s team for letting it happen: How could those closest to Mr. Biden not have talked him out of running? How could they have agreed to debate knowing that he might stumble so badly? How could they not have prepared him better for the predictable challenges during a week hidden away at Camp David?“Last night was kind of shocking because we’d heard they’d been preparing and so on,” David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said the morning after the debate. “And the first 10 minutes were a disaster, and it’s hard to understand how that happened.” As it turned out, he added, “this was a great opportunity to allay people’s concerns and it had the opposite effect.”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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      Why Is Biden Going to Europe Twice in a Week?

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      The White House won’t say, but the politics seem clear: Three down days in Europe “might not look right.”Air Force One is plenty comfortable if you are its most privileged frequent flier, with a comfortable bedroom and a spacious office.Still, most American presidents will try to avoid making two back-to-back round trips to Europe, separated by about 60 hours on the ground at home. Yet that is what President Biden is pulling off this week — for reasons few at the White House seem eager to discuss.Mr. Biden left the United States for D-Day celebrations in France last Wednesday, June 5, stayed the weekend for a state dinner in Paris, and returned to his home in Delaware late Sunday. He left Washington again early Wednesday, June 12, to fly to the southeast coast of Italy for the annual gathering the Group of 7, the traditional summit of leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.When Mr. Biden looks back at those two round trips — roughly a day and a half of flying, all told — he may remember only what happened in between: the conviction of his only living son, Hunter Biden, on charges of lying to obtain a gun permit.But the two round trips beg the question: Why didn’t he just stay in Europe for a couple days, play a round of golf, visit some American troops, maybe huddle with a foreign leader or two? He is, after all, 81, and some of his aides who are half his age were complaining about lost sleep cycles.The White House’s explanation for four trans-Atlantic crossings in nine days was simply that Mr. Biden had commitments in Washington. But by presidential standards, his public schedule looked light: a lunch with Vice President Kamala Harris and a speech to a gun-safety group. Hunter Biden’s trial also loomed over the planning, though it was impossible to know when these trips were planned that the case would go to the jury and a verdict would be rendered in the three days between the D-Day trip and the G7 meeting. As it turned out, Mr. Biden shuttled back to Delaware on Tuesday afternoon to be with his son before taking off again in the morning.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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      A Felon in the Oval Office Would Test the American System

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      The system of checks and balances established in the Constitution was meant to hold wayward presidents accountable, but some wonder how it will work if the next president is already a felon.The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come. He might not have anticipated all the particulars, such as the porn actress in the hotel room and the illicit payoff to keep her quiet. But he feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable. “Away with your president,” he declared, “we shall have a king.”That was exactly what the founders sought to avoid, having thrown off the yoke of an all-powerful monarch. But as hard as they worked to establish checks and balances, the system they constructed to hold wayward presidents accountable ultimately has proved to be unsteady.Whatever rules Americans thought were in place are now being rewritten by Donald J. Trump, the once and perhaps future president who has already shattered many barriers and precedents. The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.And it raises fundamental questions about the limits of power in a second term, should Mr. Trump be returned to office. If he wins, it means he will have survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, civil judgments for sexual abuse and business fraud, and a felony conviction. Given that, it would be hard to imagine what institutional deterrents could discourage abuses or excesses.Moreover, the judiciary may not be the check on the executive branch that it has been in the past. If no other cases go to trial before the election, it could be another four years before the courts could even consider whether the newly elected president jeopardized national security or illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election, as he has been charged with doing. As it is, even before the election, the Supreme Court may grant Mr. Trump at least some measure of immunity.Mr. Trump would still have to operate within the constitutional system, analysts point out, but he has already shown a willingness to push its boundaries. When he was president, he claimed that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” After leaving office, he advocated “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to return to power right away without another election and vowed to dedicate a second term to “retribution.”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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      Book Review: ‘The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt,’ by Edward F. O’Keefe

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      In “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt,” Edward F. O’Keefe explores the informal kitchen cabinet that helped Roosevelt, the 26th president, speak softly and carry a big stick.THE LOVES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT: The Women Who Created a President, by Edward F. O’KeefeWe in the United States have yet to be officially led by a woman in the presidency. But in subtle ways, we have come closer than we might think. In certain presidencies, first ladies played vital roles behind the scenes, guiding their husbands with both emotional support and shrewd political advice. Dolley Madison springs to mind; so does Edith Wilson, who wielded near-presidential powers as she restricted access to her husband, Woodrow, after a series of strokes that weakened his body and mind.Surprisingly, a president who was almost cartoonishly masculine can now be added to the list of leaders who depended on their better halves; Theodore Roosevelt was surrounded by female advisers throughout his life. As Edward F. O’Keefe explains in his new book, “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt,” the coterie of Teddy-whisperers included his mother (called Mittie), two wives (Alice and Edith), two talented sisters (known as Bamie and Conie) and his daughter Alice.All were strong individuals, albeit very different. Two left the story early — on Valentine’s Day in 1884, when Roosevelt lost his wife and his mother on the same day. His sisters were there to help him pick up the pieces, and his second wife, Edith, became the perfect political partner: gracious, shrewd and strong (as she needed to be, to restrain his occasional errors in judgment). Collectively, Edith, Bamie and Conie formed a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and O’Keefe presents Roosevelt’s presidency as something of a feminist achievement.At first blush, this is counterintuitive, for T.R., as he was widely known, was an Alpha president for an Alpha age. As the United States began to flex its muscles on the world stage, he was everywhere — building up the Navy, charging up San Juan Hill and generally doing the kinds of things men liked to do. He compared himself to a Bull Moose, talked of big sticks and celebrated masculine achievement whenever he could. Famously, he lionized “the man in the arena,” his face “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” For T.R., life was a public bromance.But he was not, actually, alone in the arena. As O’Keefe shows, with meticulous research, Roosevelt’s wife and sisters were always there, in the background, cleaning up messes and helping him to make good decisions. The title is slightly misleading; this is not a potboiler about romantic escapades, but rather a careful study of a president whose career was shaped from the outset by exceptional advisers.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