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      Hunter Biden Isn’t Hiding. Even Some Democrats Are Uncomfortable.

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      Hunter Biden’s public appearances came across as a message of defiance by the president, who is determined to show that he stands by his son.During last week’s state dinner at the White House, Hunter Biden seemed to be everywhere. Upbeat and gregarious, he worked the pavilion with grins and gusto, shaking hands and hugging other guests.One guest who surely did not want to chitchat with him, though, was Merrick B. Garland, the attorney general whose Justice Department just two days earlier reached a plea agreement in which the president’s son will likely avoid prison time.The presence of the younger Biden at such a high-profile event so soon after the plea deal proved to be the buzz of the evening. It was all the more attention-grabbing given the risk of an accidental encounter with the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, who would rather cut off a thumb than be caught looking chummy with the target of an investigation that he had guaranteed would be conducted by the book.It did not go unnoticed either when, just days later, there was Hunter Biden getting on and off Marine One with the president heading to and from Camp David for the weekend.In the nation’s capital, where such things are rarely accidental and always noticed, the oh-so-public appearances came across as an in-your-face message of defiance by a president determined to show that he stands by his son in the face of relentlessly toxic attacks. Yet some Democrats, including current and former Biden administration officials, privately saw it as an unnecessary poke-the-bear gesture.“He knew exactly what he was doing, and he was willing to sustain the appearance issues to send a message to his son that he loves him,” said Norman Eisen, who was the ethics czar in President Barack Obama’s White House when Mr. Biden was vice president.Had he been advising Mr. Biden, Mr. Eisen said, he would have warned him about “the flak they were going to take” but added that it would be a matter of optics, rather than rules. “That’s probably more of a question for an etiquette czar than an ethics czar,” he said. “Certainly, there’s no violation of any ethics rule as long as they didn’t talk about the case.”The White House said Mr. Biden was simply being a father.“In all administrations, regardless of party, it’s common for presidential family members to attend state dinners and to accompany presidents to Camp David,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said on Tuesday. “The president and first lady love and support their son.”The visuals at the White House in the week since Hunter Biden’s plea deal was announced highlight the thorny situation for a president with a 53-year-old son traumatized by family tragedy and a devastating history of addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine. While Democrats scorn the conspiratorial fixation of the hard right on Hunter’s troubles, some of the president’s allies privately complain that, however understandably, he has a blind eye when it comes to his son. They lament that he did not step in more assertively to stop the younger man from trading on the family name in business dealings.It is not a subject that advisers raise with Mr. Biden easily, if at all, and so many of them are left to watch how he handles it and react accordingly. They take solace in the belief that many Americans understand a father’s love for his son, even one who makes mistakes, and in the assumption that it will not significantly hurt Mr. Biden’s bid for re-election next year any more than it did his victory over President Donald J. Trump in 2020. And they recognize that no matter what the family does, Hunter will be a target for the next 16 months.The plea deal last week was fraught for many reasons. It meant that the president’s son was admitting to criminal behavior by failing to file his taxes on time and would be subject to a diversion program on a felony charge of illegal gun possession, but would be spared time behind bars if a judge approves. Republicans immediately denounced it as a “sweetheart deal” by the Biden team.In fact, the decision was announced by a Trump appointee, David C. Weiss, a U.S. attorney who was kept on by the Biden Justice Department so as not to appear to interfere in his inquiry into Hunter Biden. Mr. Garland and Mr. Weiss have both insisted that Mr. Weiss had what he called “ultimate authority” over the case.There is no evidence that the president or the White House has played any role — unlike Mr. Trump, who while in office openly and repeatedly pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies and drop cases against his allies.But congressional Republicans have been promoting two I.R.S. “whistle-blowers” who assert that the Justice Department restrained Mr. Weiss, despite his own denial. Republicans plan to call Mr. Weiss to testify in coming days and are threatening to impeach Mr. Garland.One of the I.R.S. agents produced a message sent by Hunter Biden in 2017 invoking his father, who was then out of office, in pressuring a potential Chinese business partner to agree to a deal. While repeating that the president “was not in business with his son,” the White House has not disputed the authenticity of the message nor commented on the impression that Mr. Biden, as a former vice president, may have been used to secure business.Asked by a reporter on Monday whether he had lied when he previously said he did not discuss Hunter’s business dealings with him, the president said simply, “No.”Hunter Biden has appeared with his father since the start of his presidency, including previous trips to Camp David or the family home in Delaware. Hunter attended the first state dinner of the Biden presidency in December and accompanied his father on a trip to Ireland this spring.So in that sense, it might not have been all that surprising that he showed up last Thursday for the state dinner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. But it quickly set off Republicans and conservative media.“Hunter and Merrick hanging out at Joe’s place?” Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on Twitter. “Classic Biden Crime Family.”Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, said on Fox Business: “We saw a fancy state dinner at the White House, and you have the person who’s accused of these criminal allegations and also the department that has slow-walked these allegations, the leader of that department, seated and dining at the same table. All of this smells bad.”The tuxedo-clad Hunter Biden appeared in high spirits at the dinner, making his way around the pavilion set up on the South Lawn. He put his arm around Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator and former senator from Florida, and gave a friendly shoulder grip to Andy Moffit, the husband of Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary. Contrary to Mr. Smith, Mr. Garland was not at the same table and stayed resolutely on the other side of the pavilion, at least while reporters and photographers were there to watch.While Mr. Garland was invited weeks beforehand, some who know him suspected he must not have known that Hunter Biden would be there and likely would have been upset to be put in such an awkward position. One person familiar with the dinner said those not on the White House staff were not given the guest list in advance. Representatives for the White House and Justice Department would not say whether the president’s staff gave the attorney general a heads up.Still, even Democrats who would have preferred that Mr. Biden had not made such a public display of his son in the immediate aftermath of the plea deal bristle at criticism from Republicans who have shown little interest in nepotism involving Mr. Trump, who put his daughter and son-in-law on the White House staff and whose children have profited off his name for years.David M. Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said the state dinner made clear what Mr. Biden wanted to make clear — that he would not walk away from his son. “That may cause him problems, but it also reinforces a truth about a guy who has suffered great loss in his life and loves his kids,” he said.Richard W. Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, later ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat and has been critical at times of ethical decisions by the Biden team, said the president is forced to balance his personal and campaign imperatives.“These are the political calls that are made by the president,” said Mr. Painter, who according to media reports has been consulted by Hunter Biden’s lawyers about setting up a legal defense fund. “He wants to protect his political position running for re-election. He also wants to be a good father. That was his decision. You’re going to get heat. But I understand why he made the decision.”Glenn Thrush More

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      McCarthy Questions Strength of Trump’s Candidacy, Then Quickly Backtracks

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      The House speaker angered Donald J. Trump’s allies by saying he did not know whether the former president was the strongest candidate to beat President Biden.Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday declared Donald J. Trump the “strongest political opponent” against President Biden, rushing to make clear his loyalty to the former president just hours after suggesting in a televised interview that Mr. Trump might not be the Republican presidential candidate best positioned to prevail in the 2024 election.The hurried attempt at ingratiating himself to Mr. Trump underscores Mr. McCarthy’s fear of alienating the former president as he struggles to keep together his fractious House majority and withstand mounting pressure from right-wing lawmakers loyal to Mr. Trump. And it reflected the precarious position of Mr. McCarthy, who has not endorsed Mr. Trump or any other candidate, as the G.O.P. presidential primary takes shape.His latest difficulties began on Tuesday morning when, during an interview with CNBC, Mr. McCarthy wondered whether it would be good for the party to have Mr. Trump as its presidential nominee given his legal troubles.“Can he win that election? Yeah, he can win that election,” Mr. McCarthy said. “The question is, is he the strongest to win the election; I don’t know that answer.”The comment irked Mr. Trump’s allies, setting off an urgent effort by Mr. McCarthy to walk it back. He contacted Breitbart News, the right-wing news outlet, to offer an exclusive interview in which he said the former president was “stronger today than he was in 2016” and blamed the media for “attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans.”“The only reason Biden is using his weaponized federal government to go after President Trump is because he is Biden’s strongest political opponent, as polling continues to show,” Mr. McCarthy told Breitbart in comments he later provided as a written statement.Mr. McCarthy also called Mr. Trump Tuesday, according to three people familiar with the exchange, two of whom characterized the conversation as an apology.The immediate damage control reflected how dependent Mr. McCarthy remained on Mr. Trump as he faced criticism from his right flank, and how his alliance with the conservative media ecosystem has helped to insulate him. In the past, Breitbart has helped wage public campaigns against mainstream Republican leaders, including Mr. McCarthy’s predecessors John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan, who refused to bend to the will of the party’s hard right.But Mr. McCarthy has cultivated a relationship with the website. Its story on Tuesday highlighted Mr. McCarthy’s full-throated defense of Mr. Trump and accused mainstream media of taking his comments out of context.Mr. McCarthy has not officially endorsed Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and has been advised by people like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a frequent outside adviser, not to do so.Still, his speakership at critical inflection points has depended on the support of Mr. Trump, who could easily exacerbate tensions between Mr. McCarthy and hard-right lawmakers by encouraging them to defy his leadership. Mr. McCarthy has been careful to show no daylight between him and the former president.In trying to keep his fragile majority together, Mr. McCarthy has at key moments allowed the House to become Mr. Trump’s instrument of revenge and retaliation.He savaged Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, even before Mr. Trump was officially indicted in New York on charges that he orchestrated the cover-up of a $130,000 hush-money payment made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. He also authorized three of his committee chairmen to insert themselves into the criminal inquiry, demanding that the prosecutor provide communications, documents and testimony.Mr. McCarthy has likewise raged against the Justice Department for indicting Mr. Trump over his handling of classified documents. He said last week that he supported a resolution calling for Mr. Trump’s two impeachments to be expunged.Mr. McCarthy has a cordial, if not close, relationship with Mr. Trump, whom he has credited with helping him win the fraught race for speakership.Tuesday’s dust-up recalled another, far more dramatic instance when Mr. McCarthy rushed to paper over a potential rift between himself and Mr. Trump.After taking to the House floor after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to say that Mr. Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack, Mr. McCarthy famously sought to mend his relationship with the man who remained the most popular political force on the right.Just over a week after Mr. Trump left the White House, Mr. McCarthy paid him a visit at Mar-a-Lago, smiling and presenting what has continued to be a united front. More

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      DeSantis’s Pitch to New Hampshire Focuses Heavily on Florida

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      Focusing heavily on Florida at his first town-hall event in the Granite State, Ron DeSantis drew a reception that was sometimes warm, sometimes more skeptical — especially on the issue of abortion.At his first town-hall event in New Hampshire, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida talked on Tuesday about illegal immigration in Texas, crime in Chicago, disorder on the streets of San Francisco and the wonders of nearly every aspect of Florida — a state he mentioned about 80 times.Roughly an hour into the event, Mr. DeSantis finally got around to saying “New Hampshire.”His relentless focus on Florida was at times well received in a state that will play a key role in deciding who leads the Republican Party in the 2024 election against President Biden. Mr. DeSantis’s comments seemed to especially resonate when he connected his actions at home to issues of importance to New Hampshire residents, like the flood of fentanyl and other deadly drugs into their communities.Still, his self-confident lecture about his record as Florida’s governor left the distinct impression that he believes Republican voters need what he is offering them more than he is interested in what he could learn from their questions.“Every year I’ve been governor, we’ve decreased the assumptions in our pension fund,” he boasted, digging deep into the Florida policy weeds. “In other words, you know, whatever it was when I came in was rosier. And we always reduced down to ensure that no matter what happens, our pension system is going to be funded. I think we’re like eighth-best in the country with that.”Even his jokes were Florida-centric, sometimes to the point of obscurity to the crowd of roughly 250 people who packed a carpeted banquet hall in Hollis, a few miles from the Massachusetts border. The audience reaction was muted when he joked about property prices rising in Naples, Fla., to make a point about Chicago residents fleeing south to his state.After facing criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held recent town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire. David Degner for The New York TimesThe main ideological skepticism in the audience concerned Mr. DeSantis’s hard-line stance against abortion — a position that is popular in heavily evangelical states like Iowa but less so in more secular New Hampshire.Like several other Republican women in attendance, Jayne Beaton, 65, of Amherst, N.H., said she came with questions about the candidate’s position on abortion, and the six-week ban he signed in Florida.“I predict it’s going to be an issue for him,” she said. “With everything else” in his platform, she added, “I’m onboard and excited, but I’m less sure about abortion, and the six-week ban.”After taking criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire since Thursday. Although he has rarely faced tough questions, he has seemed relatively comfortable in these unscripted moments, asking voters their names, thanking military veterans for their service and occasionally cracking jokes.Such casual interactions are especially important in New Hampshire — the first-in-the-nation primary state whose residents are accustomed to vetting presidential candidates over and over in intimate settings.“It is a little different here than it is in any other state,” Jason Osborne, the Republican majority leader of the New Hampshire House, who has endorsed the Florida governor for president, said in a phone interview before the event on Tuesday. “We’re so small, we’re the first, so the most candidates are going to touch the state than any others.”Mr. DeSantis, who has a reputation for being somewhat socially awkward, is working hard to overcome a deficit of roughly 30 percentage points in the Granite State against former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. He spent more time answering questions from voters in Hollis than he has at any event since announcing his candidacy in May.The audience, which included many out-of-staters who traveled hours to see Mr. DeSantis, seemed to appreciate that he had showed up. Several told him they admired his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida. In a veterans-heavy state, he was also thanked for his military service and received applause when he said he was the only veteran running in the Republican field.Mr. DeSantis ducked only one question. A teenage boy invited him to condemn Mr. Trump’s efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. DeSantis declined to do so. All he would say was that he did not “enjoy seeing, you know, what happened” that day, but that he had nothing to do with it and Republicans needed to look forward, not backward, because if they dwelled on the past they would lose elections.When he was finally asked about Florida’s six-week abortion ban, Mr. DeSantis seemed comfortable answering the question and, unlike Mr. Trump, he made no effort to contort himself to appeal to more moderate voters. He said he believed that in America, “life is worth protecting,” and it was important to provide services to support low-income and single mothers.Doreen Monahan, 65, of Spofford, N.H. — who asked Mr. DeSantis the question about abortion, and the burden placed on taxpayers when women who cannot get abortions bear unwanted children — said later that she had been reassured by his answer, including his mentions of beefed-up postnatal care and adoption programs.“It’s nice that they have some options,” she said. “I have friends who waited years to adopt.”She said she had reached out to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign to ask about exceptions to the six-week ban, and felt more comfortable after hearing details.Mr. DeSantis pitched two main arguments against Mr. Trump, without naming him. The first was that change could not come to Washington if Republicans kept losing elections. The second was his theme of “no excuses” — a shot at Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on core promises such as completing a wall along the southern border.An older man told Mr. DeSantis that he had voted twice to “drain the swamp,” but that it never happened. He wanted to know what Mr. DeSantis would do differently from Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis opened his response by recalling how exciting it was in 2016 to hear the rally chants of “drain the swamp.” But then he took two unsubtle shots at the former president.Mr. DeSantis said that “the swamp” in Washington was worse now than ever and that to “break the swamp,” a president must be disciplined and focused, and have the “humility” to understand he cannot do it on his own. The audience cheered when he promised to fire the Trump-appointed F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”Mr. DeSantis made a campaign stop on Monday in Eagle Pass, a Texas city on the border.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis seemed at his most animated toward the end of the rally when a woman asked him about Covid vaccines. In response, the governor denounced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, calling their efforts to promote vaccines a “total disaster.” He also attacked big pharmaceutical companies, and highlighted a study by Florida’s health department that purported to show elevated health risks for young men who took mRNA vaccines but that was widely criticized by scientists.“These Covid restrictions and mandates were not about your health,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It was about them controlling your behavior.”The DeSantis campaign has leaned heavily into criticizing how Mr. Trump handled the pandemic, seeing widespread anger among Republicans over vaccines, masking, school closures and social-distancing measures as an opportunity to peel voters away from the former president.The crowd responded approvingly to Mr. DeSantis’s eight-minute tirade against what he called “the medical swamp.”Mark Pearson, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview this month that he had seen the governor grow more confident as a retail politician.In May, Mr. Pearson said, he told Mr. DeSantis that he needed to engage directly with New Hampshire voters.“I told him, ‘Here’s what I suggest you do: You walk the rope line, you drop into the diners, you go to the small venues,’” he recounted. “‘But it better be real, Ron, because we can smell a phony from a mile away, because we’ve been doing this for a hundred years.’” More

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      Can DeSantis Break Trump’s Hold on New Hampshire?

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      Donald Trump is looking to the state as an early chance to clear a crowded field, while Ron DeSantis’s camp is banking on winnowing the Republican race to two.Former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are holding dueling events on Tuesday in New Hampshire, but from vastly different political positions: one as the dominant front-runner in the state, the other still seeking his footing.Strategists for both campaigns agree that the state will play a starring role in deciding who leads the Republican Party into the 2024 election against President Biden.Mr. Trump sees the first primary contest in New Hampshire as an early chance to clear the crowded field of rivals. And members of Team DeSantis — some of whom watched from losing sidelines, as Mr. Trump romped through the Granite State in 2016 on his way to the nomination — hope New Hampshire will be the primary that winnows the Republican field to two.“Iowa’s cornfields used to be where campaigns were killed off, and now New Hampshire is where campaigns go to die,” said Jeff Roe, who runs Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down. Mr. Roe retains agonizing memories from 2016, when he ran the presidential campaign of the last man standing against Mr. Trump: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.New Hampshire’s voters are known for being fickle and choosy, sometimes infuriatingly so. The joke is that when you ask a Granite Stater whom they’re voting for, they say, “I don’t know, I’ve only met the candidate three times.”Mr. DeSantis is campaigning in Iowa, another early-voting state.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesYet midway through 2023, the state — more secular than Iowa and with a libertarian streak — appears frozen in place. Mr. Trump, now twice indicted and twice impeached, is nowhere near as dominant with Republicans as he was in 2020, but he is stronger than he was in 2016, and his closest challenger is well behind him.In 2016, Mr. Trump won New Hampshire with a blunt and incendiary message, fanning flames about terrorist threats and without doing any of the retail politicking that’s traditionally required. But local operatives and officials believe that Mr. Trump, with his decades-long celebrity status, is the only politician who could get away with this.“It’s definitely not going to be something that someone like Ron DeSantis can pull off,” said Jason Osborne, the New Hampshire House majority leader who endorsed the Florida governor for president. “He’s got to do the drill just like everybody else.”Polls suggest there is an opening for a Trump alternative. But to be that person, Mr. DeSantis has miles of ground to make up.As recently as January, Mr. DeSantis was leading Mr. Trump in the state by a healthy margin, according to a poll by the University of New Hampshire. But Mr. DeSantis has slipped considerably, with recent polling that suggests his support is in the teens and more than 25 percentage points behind Mr. Trump.In a move that some saw as ominous, Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, went off the airwaves in New Hampshire in mid-May and has not included the state in its latest bookings, which cover only Iowa and South Carolina.DeSantis allies insist the move was intended to husband resources in the Boston market, which they said was an expensive and inefficient way to reach primary voters. And they said Mr. DeSantis would maintain an aggressive schedule in the state.“We are confident that the governor’s message will resonate with voters in New Hampshire as he continues to visit the Granite State and detail his solutions to Joe Biden’s failures,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, said in a statement.Still, so much of Mr. DeSantis’s early moves seem aimed at Iowa and its caucuses that are dominated by the most conservative activists, many of whom are evangelical. In contrast, New Hampshire has an open primary that will allow independents, who tend to skew more moderate, to cast ballots. And without a competitive Democratic primary in 2024 they could be a particularly sizable share of the G.O.P. primary vote.Iowa is where Mr. DeSantis held his first event and where his super PAC has based its $100 million door-knocking operation.Mr. DeSantis’s signing of a six-week abortion ban is unlikely to prove popular in New Hampshire, where even the state’s Republican governor has described himself as “pro-choice.” Trump supporters at a DeSantis event in Manchester, N.H., this month. David Degner for The New York TimesThe clashing Trump and DeSantis events this week have jangled the nerves of local officials. Mr. DeSantis’s decision to schedule a town hall in Hollis on Tuesday at the same time that the influential New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women is hosting Mr. Trump at its Lilac Luncheon has prompted a backlash. The group’s events director, Christine Peters, said that to “have a candidate come in and distract” from the group’s event was “unprecedented.”Mr. DeSantis’s town hall will mark his fourth visit to New Hampshire this year and his second since announcing his campaign in May.Mr. DeSantis did collect chits in April when he helped the New Hampshire Republican Party raise a record sum at a fund-raising dinner. And he has gathered more than 50 endorsements from state representatives. But before the town hall on Tuesday, he had not taken questions from New Hampshire voters in a traditional setting.During his last trip to the state — a four-stop tour on June 1 — Mr. DeSantis snapped at a reporter who pressed him on why he hadn’t taken questions from voters.“What are you talking about?” Mr. DeSantis said. “Are you blind?”New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, said in an interview that there was “a lot of interest” in Mr. DeSantis from voters who had seen him on television but wanted to vet him up close.“Can he hold up under our scrutiny?” Mr. Sununu said. “I think he’s personally going to do pretty well here,” he added, but “the biggest thing” on voters’ minds is “what’s he going to be like when he knocks on my door.”New Hampshire’s voters will indeed be subjected to thousands of DeSantis door-knocks — but not from the man himself. He has outsourced his ground game to Never Back Down, which is expected to have more than $200 million at its disposal. The group has already knocked on more than 75,000 doors in New Hampshire, according to a super PAC official, an extraordinary figure this early in the race.But Mr. DeSantis still faces daunting challenges.Mr. Trump remains popular among Republicans, and even more so after his indictments. And he is not taking the state for granted. Unlike in 2016, his operation has been hard at work in the state for months, with influential figures like the former Republican state party chairman Stephen Stepanek working on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s super PAC has hammered Mr. DeSantis with television ads that cite his past support for a sales tax to replace the federal income tax — a message tailored to provoke residents of the proudly anti-tax state. The large field in the Republican race is a key challenge for Mr. DeSantis, as he seeks Republican voters looking for a Trump alternative.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s biggest problem is the size of the field. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, camped out in the state in 2016 and appeared to be making headway in consolidating some of the anti-Trump vote in recent polls.The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has already spent around 20 days campaigning in the state, according to his adviser Tricia McLaughlin. Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is another frequent visitor. Both have events in the state on Tuesday. Additionally, the campaign of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has already spent around $2 million in New Hampshire.If these candidates stay in the race through early next year, a repeat of 2016 may be inevitable. In a crowded field, Mr. Trump won the state with over 35 percent of the vote. In the meantime, Mr. DeSantis needs “a defining message that gets beyond the small base he has,” said Tom Rath, a veteran of New Hampshire politics who has advised the presidential campaigns of Republican nominees including Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. “He needs to do real retail, and so far there is no indication that he can do that.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      How Vivek Ramaswamy Made the Fortune Fueling His Presidential Run

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      On the campaign trail, as he lays out why he is a different kind of presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy calls himself a Harvard-trained “scientist” from the lifesaving world of biotechnology.“I developed a number of medicines,” Mr. Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and conservative writer, told a gathering at a construction firm this month in Davenport, Iowa. “The one I’m most proud of is a therapy for kids, 40 of them a year, born with a genetic condition who, without treatment, die by the age of 3.”The reality of Mr. Ramaswamy’s business career is more complex, the story of a financier more than a scientist, and a prospector who went bargain hunting, hyped his vision, drew investment and then cashed out in two huge payouts — totaling more than $200 million — before his 35th birthday.Mr. Ramaswamy’s enterprise is best known for a spectacular failure. As a 29-year-old with a bold idea and Ivy League connections, he engineered what was at the time the largest initial public offering in the biotechnology industry’s history — only to see the Alzheimer’s drug at its center fail two years later and the company’s value tank.But Mr. Ramaswamy, now 37, made a fortune anyway. He took his first payout in 2015 after stirring investor excitement about his growing pharmaceutical empire. He reaped a second five years later when he sold off its most promising pieces to a Japanese conglomerate.The core company Mr. Ramaswamy built has since had a hand in bringing five drugs to market, including treatments for uterine fibroids, prostate cancer and the rare genetic condition he mentioned on the stump in Iowa. The company says the last 10 late-stage clinical trials of its drugs have all succeeded, an impressive streak in a business where drugs commonly fail.Mr. Ramaswamy’s resilience was in part a result of the savvy way he structured his web of biotechnology companies. But it also highlights his particular skills in generating hype, hope and risky speculation in an industry that feeds on all three.“A lot of it had substance. Some of it did not. He’s a sort of a Music Man,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat and former health secretary during the Obama administration who advised two of Mr. Ramaswamy’s companies.For his part, Mr. Ramaswamy said that criticism that he overpromised was missing the point. Although he promoted the potential of the doomed Alzheimer’s drug, he now says he was actually selling investors on a business model.“The business model was to develop these medicines for the long run. That’s the punchline, that’s the most important point,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s wealth is now underwriting a long-shot run for the Republican nomination that includes a campaign jet, plush bus and $10.3 million of his own money and counting. On the campaign trial, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.He is the child of Indian immigrants, and “privilege,” he said recently in Iowa, “was two parents in the house with a focus on education, achievement and actual values. That gave me the foundation to then go on to places like Harvard and Yale and become a scientist.”With an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard, Mr. Ramaswamy isn’t really a scientist; he made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Along the way, he invested in biotech and became enamored with an idea for developing high-risk prescription drugs: scour the patents held by pharmaceutical giants, searching for drugs that had been abandoned for business reasons, not necessarily for lack of promise. Buy the patents for a song, and bring them to market.Mr. Ramaswamy made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Forbes MagazineIn 2014, Mr. Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences — incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda and backed by nearly $100 million in funding from investors including QVT, a hedge fund that employed Mr. Ramaswamy after college.Using his connections and his confidence, Mr. Ramaswamy assembled a star-studded, bipartisan advisory board. A friend from Harvard helped him recruit Democrats, including Ms. Sebelius; Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader; and Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.The Republicans included former Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mark McClellan, a prominent former health regulator.Ms. Sebelius said she was swayed by Mr. Ramaswamy’s promises of bringing critical drugs to market affordably.“It was an entrepreneurial view of how to lower drug prices,” she said of his pitch. “We shared a lot of the mission and vision.”But in making his pitch to a different crowd, Mr. Ramaswamy was blunt about Roivant’s chief aim.“This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasted in a cover story in Forbes.The “Roi” in the company’s name stands for return on investment.In late 2014, the Roivant subsidiary that would be called Axovant bought for $5 million upfront — pocket change in the biotech industry — an Alzheimer’s drug that GlaxoSmithKline had given up on after four failed clinical trials.Mr. Ramaswamy speaking in 2015 at the Forbes Under 30 Summit.Lisa Lake/Getty ImagesSix months later, before starting any new clinical trials for the drug, Mr. Ramaswamy took Axovant public in a debut that sent the company’s market value to nearly $3 billion.Around that time, the company reported it had just eight employees, including Mr. Ramaswamy’s mother and brother, both of them physicians.Mr. Ramaswamy was a powerful salesman. He talked up the Alzheimer’s drug, intepirdine, as a potential breakthrough that “could help millions” of people. “The potential opportunity is really tremendous for delivering value to patients,” he said on CNBC.Patrick Machado, a former director of Roivant and Axovant, described Mr. Ramaswamy as “brilliant and audacious.” Others said Mr. Ramaswamy was overpromising.Thanks to the public stock offering, Mr. Ramaswamy held a large and suddenly extraordinarily valuable stake in Axovant through its parent company Roivant, which was still privately held and controlled about 80 percent of Axovant.With the drug headed into a crucial clinical trial, he set out to raise more money to finance his broader ambitions with Roivant.In late 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy sold off a portion of his Roivant shares to an institutional investor, Viking Global Investors, that wanted in. The sale was a major payday: On his 2015 tax return, Mr. Ramaswamy claimed more than $37 million in capital gains.In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said he cashed out only to make room for Viking, not to hedge his bets ahead of intepirdine’s clinical trial.“We were forced to sell,” he said, “and in some ways it’s a regret because the shares would be more valuable today if they hadn’t been sold.”In 2017, Mr. Ramaswamy made his pitch to Masayoshi Son, the founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank who runs the world’s largest tech investment fund. His presentation included slides mimicking ones Mr. Son is known for, with charts showing an arrow shooting up and to the right, according to a person familiar with Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch who was not authorized to speak publicly.In August 2017, SoftBank led an investment of $1.1 billion in Roivant. The investment wasn’t about getting in on Axovant; SoftBank thought intepirdine was unlikely to succeed, the person said. But SoftBank was seeking to invest in Mr. Ramaswamy’s wider drug portfolio, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.SoftBank declined to comment.A few weeks later, the Alzheimer’s drug’s clinical trial failed. The stock price plunged, losing 75 percent of its value in a single day. The stock slid further in the months that followed and never recovered before the company was dissolved this year.Mr. Ramaswamy declined to disclose how much he lost on paper because of the drug’s failure.Thanks to the way he structured his biotechnology empire, he did not hold a direct stake in Axovant. His personal stake was through Roivant, allowing Mr. Ramaswamy to weather the storm. QVT, the hedge fund where Mr. Ramaswamy once worked, had also invested in Roivant, insulating it from much of the fallout. QVT did not respond to a request for comment.But some investors lost real money on Axovant. One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. (The fund declined to comment.)But for many Axovant shareholders who lost money, many of whom were sophisticated institutional investors, the loss was one missed gamble on a high-risk, high-reward stock within a large portfolio of safer bets.Mr. Ramaswamy campaigning in Iowa this month. On the campaign trail, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWith intepirdine’s failure, Mr. Ramaswamy ran into the hard reality of biology, said Derek Lowe, a longtime pharmaceutical researcher and industry commentator. “The patients’ diseased cells that you’re trying to treat don’t really care how hard-charging you are,” he said.“I think whipping people up into thinking this was a wonder drug was unconscionable,” he said. (Mr. Lowe bet against Axovant’s stock and made about $10,000 from the drug’s failure, he said.)Mr. Ramaswamy has expressed regret for years about the failure of his drug for Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long bedeviled researchers. And the criticism that he profited while his investors lost angers him, he said.“On a personal level, it grates on me a little bit,” he said. “The business model of Roivant was to see these drugs through the market, and we could have cashed out big, and employees could have cashed up big, but that was not the business model.”But Mr. Ramaswamy did eventually cash out on Roivant.In 2019, Roivant sold off its stake in five of its most promising spinoff companies to Sumitomo, a giant Japanese conglomerate.That proved to be Mr. Ramaswamy’s biggest payday. His 2020 tax return included nearly $175 million in capital gains.In recent years, Mr. Ramaswamy has stepped back from Roivant, leaving his roles as chief executive in 2021 and chairman in February. He remains the sixth largest shareholder in the company, with a stake currently valued at more than $500 million. (He has yet to file personal financial disclosures for his presidential run, but he has released 20 years of tax returns, which were provided to The Times by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two Yale Business School academics who have studied Mr. Ramaswamy’s business record. The candidate has also called for his competitors in the Republican race to do the same.)Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch that his business model would lead to affordable drug prices has not come to pass. One example is the product for which he has said he is most proud, a one-time implant for children with a rare and devastating immune ailment. When Enzyvant, the Roivant spinoff company by then controlled by Sumitomo, won regulatory approval in 2021, it set a sticker price of $2.7 million.Sumitomo declined to comment. More

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      A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime

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      If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.Not a crime: Federal crimes.All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.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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      Ron DeSantis Calls for ‘Deadly Force’ Against Suspected Drug Traffickers

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      Campaigning in a Texas border city, the Florida governor laid out a series of hard-right immigration proposals, including some that would face legal roadblocks or test the limits of presidential authority.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made a campaign stop in the border city of Eagle Pass, Texas.Brent McdonaldGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday proposed a host of hard-right immigration policies, floating the idea of using deadly force against suspected drug traffickers and others breaking through border barriers while “demonstrating hostile intent.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said after a campaign event on a sweltering morning in Eagle Pass, a small Texas border city. “If you drop a couple of these cartel operatives trying to do that, you’re not going to have to worry about that anymore,” he added. He said they would end up “stone-cold dead.”He did not clarify how Border Patrol officers or other law enforcement authorities might determine which people crossing the border were smuggling drugs. He said only that “if someone is breaking through the border wall” while “demonstrating hostile intent or hostile action, you have to be able to meet that with the appropriate use of force.”Mr. DeSantis’s proposal served as an escalation of Republican messaging on the border and was part of a host of plans he unveiled in an effort to match the hard-line immigration stance of former President Donald J. Trump, who privately suggested shooting migrants in the legs during his administration.Mr. DeSantis said that if elected, he would seek to tear down some of the pillars of American immigration law, such as the automatic granting of citizenship to those born in the United States.And he said his administration would “fully deputize” state and local law enforcement officers in states like Texas to arrest and deport migrants back to Mexico — a power now reserved for the federal government — and to detain migrant children indefinitely, despite a court order imposing strict limits on the practice. He also promised to end “phony asylum claims.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said of drug traffickers after the campaign event, held on a sweltering morning in Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThose policies are sure to appeal to conservative voters in the Republican presidential primary contest, but they would be likely to run into legal roadblocks and could test the limits of presidential authority. The Constitution has been held to guarantee birthright citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states cannot enact their own immigration policy.And while Mr. DeSantis argued that the country needed harsh new immigration rules because the current ones were encouraging dangerous border crossings and the mistreatment of migrant children, some of his proposals could also endanger migrants, including the use of “deadly force” against people cutting through the border wall.“You do it one time and they will never do it again,” he said.His campaign said in a news release that he would follow “appropriate rules of engagement” and that the rules would apply to “those trying to smuggle drugs into the United States.” (The overwhelming majority of drugs are smuggled in commercial vehicles coming across official ports of entry, not carried by migrants, according to U.S. border authorities.)Another plan Mr. DeSantis put forward, which would require certain asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, was previously employed by Mr. Trump, drawing criticism for forcing migrants to live in squalid tent camps where some were reportedly subjected to sexual assault, kidnapping and torture.Mr. DeSantis has made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign, but he has presented few specifics until now. Other policy proposals he released on Monday included:Deploying the military to “assist” Border Patrol agents until a wall is finished.Cracking down on Mexican drug cartel activity, including by blocking precursor chemicals used to manufacture drugs “from entering Mexican ports,” if the Mexican government does not act to stop the cartels.Detaining all migrants who cross the border without authorization until their immigration court hearing date. (Such a policy would most likely require the creation of a vast new prison system.)“These are ideas that have rightly been categorized for a really long time as radical and extremist,” said Aron Thorn, a senior lawyer in the Beyond Borders Program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.The policy rollout on Monday suggested that Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls, was trying to outflank the former president on immigration. Mr. DeSantis — whose “stop the invasion” language is a hallmark of America’s far right — has argued that he is the candidate most likely to enact conservative immigration policies. He has accused Mr. Trump of “running to the left,” saying that “this is a different guy today than when he was running in 2015 and 2016.”But even among voters who came to see Mr. DeSantis on Monday at a cinder-block-and-steel Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Eagle Pass, some said that they remained more inclined to vote for Mr. Trump.“He’s Trump 2.0, but this isn’t his time,” said John Sassano, 60, a retired teacher in Eagle Pass who described himself as a former Democrat. “I’d love to see him as V.P.”Sandy Bradley, 66, a retired government worker, traveled with two friends from Del Rio, a nearby border town, to hear Mr. DeSantis, buying festive cowboy hats at a Walmart on the way. “I think he will catch up,” she said, adding that Mr. DeSantis seemed to share her Christian values.She added that she wanted a candidate who would address illegal immigration and “stop all the influx.”Mr. DeSantis went directly from the event to a news conference at a ranch along the Rio Grande outside town where the state of Texas had recently constructed fencing with concertina wire in an area where migrants often cross.“This is an ongoing problem,” said Ruben Garibay, who owns the ranch. Mr. Garibay, wearing a black cowboy hat and speaking in the shade of a tree as the temperature neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, said he had agreed to host Mr. DeSantis but had yet to make up his mind about which candidate to support. “It’s a little early in the game,” he said.Mr. Trump first deployed a so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which the Biden administration later reversed. He also proposed ending birthright citizenship during his first campaign, although he failed to do so while in office, and has recently renewed those calls as a candidate. And, of course, he ran in 2016 on building a wall at the southern border, an issue that helped propel him to the White House.On his social media site on Monday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. DeSantis’s “sole purpose in making the trip was to reiterate the fact that he would do all of the things done by me in creating the strongest Border, by far, in U.S. history.”Hundreds of migrants waiting inside a makeshift migrant camp to be loaded onto buses and taken for processing at a Customs and Border Protection substation in El Paso, Texas, in May. Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesAs governor, Mr. DeSantis last month sent hundreds of Florida law enforcement officers and Florida National Guard members to Texas, saying President Biden had failed to secure the border, a repeat of a similar effort in 2021 ahead of Mr. DeSantis’s re-election campaign.This year, Mr. DeSantis also signed a bill cracking down on undocumented immigrants that was seen as one of the harshest such measures in the country. And he announced a national coalition of more than 90 local sheriffs who said they would band together to fight gang activity and illegal drugs that they argue are the result of the Biden administration’s border policies. (Only a few of the sheriffs are from border states.)Some immigration analysts questioned the viability of Mr. DeSantis’s proposals, suggesting they were driven by the political imperatives of a presidential campaign.“The bulk of the proposal is the usual laundry list of Republican talking points that have not been successful, either in Congress or in the court of public opinion,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, citing the idea to end birthright citizenship, among other proposals. “The purpose is probably not a serious policy debate but instead to focus on an issue that is a weakness for Biden and a sensitive one for Trump.”And Jennie Murray, the president of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit group that advocates immigration policies that address economic and national security needs, pointed to the difficulties in actually carrying out Mr. DeSantis’s plans.“Deporting huge numbers of immigrants would be costly and extremely detrimental, especially during these times of historic labor shortages,” she said.Miriam Jordan More

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      While We Wait for the Supreme Court to Make Up Its Mind …

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, I hope your summer is off to a great start. We’re in the season of Supreme Court decisions, waiting any day for the Harvard and U.N.C. ruling to come down. Assuming the court overturns affirmative action for private and public universities, and maybe beyond that, what do you think the effect will be?Gail Collins: Bret, I guess we’ll have to see the how and the why of the much-dreaded decision before it’s possible to tell.Bret: The fine print is what has really mattered in past affirmative action cases, going back to the Bakke decision in 1978, which ruled that explicit racial quotas were unconstitutional, but that race could be considered a plus factor in admissions.Gail: I’m hoping the court will leave some room for schools and employers to continue taking race into account — and also things like economic background, childhood home environment — factors that help produce a diverse America where people who come from impoverished communities and disadvantaged homes can get some breaks.Bret: I’d have a much easier time accepting affirmative action if the principal criterion was class, not race. If universities thought of themselves more as ladders of social mobility and less as curators of racial rebalancing, they could still give a lot of poorer minorities a lift while also opening their doors to larger numbers of low-income white students who might otherwise have been denied a shot at admission.Gail: You can’t leave race out, but yes, it’s important to mix it with other parts of a biography. We have to protect schools’ right to create a diverse freshman class every year — one that will help students learn the joys and struggles and fun and exasperation that comes from living with people who aren’t like you in color, creed or background.Bret: Or viewpoint. Diversity is also about making sure universities don’t become ideological monocultures where people look different but share nearly all the same opinions and assumptions.Gail: To me, diversity is a very, very important goal — you don’t want to be living in a world in which all the folks of one race or class never interact with folks from another.How about you?Bret: Diversity can be a virtue, but it doesn’t have to apply in every conceivable setting or override other considerations, especially academic excellence. I don’t think it’s any secret that students whose families are from East and South Asia outperform many of their peers in high school academics, just as Jewish kids from immigrant backgrounds did a couple of generations ago. If the end of affirmative action means that top-tier universities will be demographically overrepresented with students of Asian background for the simple reason that they worked that much harder to get there, should that be considered a problem?Gail: Of course we have to include, and celebrate, the many fabulous students with East and South Asian backgrounds. And part of the educational opportunities they deserve is a chance to be in school with kids from other backgrounds. So that they graduate with the ability to work with, supervise and take directions from Black, white and Hispanic colleagues.It’s a win-win.Bret: It would be win-win if universities vastly expanded their enrollments, perhaps by doing more of the coursework online, so that every academically qualified student got in. For now it’s zero-sum: At Harvard in 2013, according to the initial lawsuit, the admission rate for Asian American students was 19 percent, even though 43 percent of the admitted class would have been Asians if based on academic performance alone.Gail: Have a feeling this isn’t going to be the last time we debate this issue. But Bret, we’ve had a busy news week and I want to check in on some of the big developments. Starting with … Hunter Biden! Am I right in recalling he’s not your favorite presidential offspring?Bret: He’s running neck-and-neck with Don Jr. and Eric in that contest, though I hear that James Madison’s stepson, Payne Todd, may have been the worst of them all.Gail: Hunter’s legal issues seem to have been pretty much resolved — he’s pleading guilty to two far-from-major tax crimes, getting probation and pledging to remain drug-free for two years.Bret: For which we wish him well.Gail: Two questions: Is this resolution fair? And what political impact will it have? Some Republicans are acting as if this is gonna be a large cloud over the Biden administration. That the president won’t be able to campaign for re-election without being followed by “Huckster Hunter’s Dad” banners.Bret: Hard to judge without seeing all the evidence. The U.S. attorney in the case, David Weiss, was appointed by Donald Trump and kept in his job by Merrick Garland to complete the investigation, so this hardly seems a case of partisan favoritism. And Weiss says the investigation is “ongoing,” which I have to assume means he’s taking a close look at Hunter’s fishy foreign business deals.But the political timing is lousy and plays into Donald Trump’s narrative that the Biden administration is weaponizing the Justice Department against him while letting off Biden’s son with a slap on the wrist.Gail: I’ve always believed that as long as there was no reasonable evidence that Joe was actually involved in any of Hunter’s smarmy let’s-make-a-deal-did-you-happen-to-notice-my-last-name schemes, the whole thing has no political impact whatsoever. Nobody but desperate Republicans cares about Hunter’s misdeeds, and if anything, I think he stirs sympathy for his father.Bret: Well, desperate Republicans means tens of millions of Americans. But since we keep touching on the subject of errant children of famous politicians, your thoughts on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?Gail: I know the polls suggest he might be a problem for Biden. A good chunk of that is just boredom with the current election picture and name recognition for Junior. Once voters take a serious look at him, his anti-vaccine craziness and overall right-wing loopiness, I’m confident those polls will plummet.Bret: I would call it left-wing loopiness, but go on.Gail: Nevertheless, if he runs as a third-party candidate, he always has the potential to screw things up — just a sliver of votes in a swing state could do the trick. Which is why I’m so hostile to third-party presidential candidates.Bret: I don’t see him running, Nader-like, as a third-party candidate. But I think one reason some Democrats are rallying to him is because they are wary of the idea of a second Biden term, even if they think he’s done a decent job in his first.Gail: We were both hoping Biden wouldn’t run again because of the age issue, but here we are. And he’s still a thousand leagues better than Trump, who’s only a few years younger. So Joe’s the one.Bret: They see him as old and faltering, they don’t think Kamala Harris is up to the job if she needs to succeed him, and they worry that any Republican save Trump could defeat him. If Bobby Jr. wins in New Hampshire because Biden isn’t even on the ballot, it could shake things up, and he could wind up being the Eugene McCarthy of this political season: not the nominee, but the catalyst for change. I’ve been saying this for months, and I’m still willing to bet you a good Zinfandel that Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, is the surprise Democratic nominee next summer. Mark Leibovich seems to agree, by the way.Gail: All I will say is that I am looking forward to the Zinfandel.Bret: And speaking of catalysts, how about that Chris Christie?Gail: He’s not going to be elected president, but gosh I would so love to see him in the Republican primary debate this August. Think there’s a chance he’ll raise enough money to qualify?Bret: For sure. He’ll get it because he’s a bring-the-popcorn sort of candidate who will make the debates interesting and because a lot of the big Republican donors long ago soured on Trump and because all the other Republicans in the race look like a bunch of moral midgets auditioning for cabinet-level jobs in the next G.O.P. administration and because the choice of Ron DeSantis or Trump is starting to look about as appetizing as the choice between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin — scorpions in the proverbial bottle who really deserve each other.Gail: This is the reason you’re my favorite Republican.Bret: Ex-Republican. Still conservative.Christie’s essential theory of the race is that the only way to defeat Trump is the “They pull a knife, you pull a gun” theory that Sean Connery espoused as the best way to defeat Al Capone in “The Untouchables.” Except Christie aims to bring a .44 magnum, a rocket-propelled grenade and maybe even some HIMARS artillery — rhetorically speaking, of course.Gail: Of course.Bret: Which is all another way of saying that he’ll tell the truth about Trump. It will be a joy to watch, however it turns out.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