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      Trump’s Return to Scene of Attack Is a Do-Over in More Ways Than One

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      Donald J. Trump returned to Butler, Pa., on Saturday for a massive rally at the fairgrounds where he was struck in July by a would-be assassin’s bullet, an event envisioned by his campaign as a show of strength and a memorial for the former volunteer fire chief who was killed during the attack. His speech quickly swung from a somber commemoration of the slain firefighter, Corey Comperatore, to a somewhat subdued, sanded-down version of his standard attacks on his opponent, complete with exaggerations and falsehoods. Mr. Trump commended his own performance in the face of adversity and brought out one of his biggest backers, the billionaire Elon Musk, who jumped up and down on the stage. For Mr. Trump, who has been jarred by the changes in the presidential race since he was attacked in Butler on July 13, the rally served another purpose: It offered him a chance to seek something of a do-over after a series of major events reshaped the contest just as the Republican convention in Milwaukee ended. The rally’s stagecraft and programming — with singers, family members and friends serving as “character witnesses” — echoed the convention’s grandiosity, down to the same opera singer who closed out the proceedings in Milwaukee performing a handful of songs.President Biden announced he was dropping his 2024 bid three days after Mr. Trump’s nominating convention, swamping all news coverage of the former president’s near-death experience and resetting the race with a new, younger Democratic opponent almost immediately. So in Butler on Saturday, Mr. Trump sought to recapture the same spirit that engulfed him in Milwaukee, where he was riding high in the polls as he was nominated for a third time just five days after the shooting. 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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      JD Smirks His Way Into the Future

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      When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called “Weakness” against Nikki Haley, a hawk.)The ad’s subtext is clearly gender, trying to exploit Kamala’s problems winning over Black and white working-class men.In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing — a lot better than Trump does — and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump vs. Harris Would Be Nothing Without Myths

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.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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      In Georgia, Black Men’s Frustration With Democrats Creates Opening for Trump

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      Most Black men in the key battleground will back Vice President Kamala Harris — but the Trump campaign has made an effort to capitalize on a sense of dissatisfaction some voters have expressed.Over the last month, Freddie Hicks, 23, has received dozens of Republican mailers addressed to him at his home in deep-blue DeKalb County, an Atlanta suburb.The messaging was largely consistent, painting Vice President Kamala Harris as a “failed leader” with “dangerously liberal” views on crime and abortion, and former President Donald J. Trump as supporting a “common sense agenda” on abortion and immigration.But it was the sheer quantity that alarmed Mr. Hicks’s father, Fred Hicks, 47, an Atlanta-area Democratic strategist. No one else in his family was being inundated like that, including him. And nothing similar was arriving from the Democrats or Ms. Harris.Mr. Hicks’s son is one of Georgia’s most sought-after voters this election: a young Black man. Mailers are only one mode of campaigning and often not the most effective way to reach voters. But anecdotes of their uneven distribution have been enough to rattle some Democrats who see lagging Black male support as a warning sign for the vice president’s campaign in the key battleground.“They are young, they’re volatile with respect to their opinions and their voting decisions and they don’t have inherently the same loyalty to the Democratic Party that say, you know, their parents do,” Fred Hicks said of young Black men like his son, whom he described nonetheless as a staunch Democratic voter. “This is concerning to me not just for the 2024 election, but the payoff, I think for Republicans could come well over the next 20 years.”Black men are rivaled only by Black women in their high turnout and loyalty to Democrats. In recent surveys, the gap in support for the party between Black men and women is the narrowest of any race. Yet, more Black men under 50 have expressed in polling and conversations their openness to voting for Mr. Trump or staying home altogether — scenarios that could decide the election in hypercompetitive states, including Georgia.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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      Liz Cheney Campaigns With Harris and Calls on Her Party to Reject Trump

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      It was an exercise in unsubtle and unlikely campaign optics: a Democratic vice president who is running for the presidency. A Republican former congresswoman who is the daughter of a staunchly conservative vice president. A small city known as the birthplace of the Republican Party in the middle of a battleground state.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris and former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the most prominent Republican to endorse her campaign, traveled to Ripon in central Wisconsin where meetings in 1854 helped form the Republican Party. Just a mile away from a one-room schoolhouse where those gatherings were held, the pair tore into former President Donald J. Trump for his role in igniting a riot at the Capitol, and they warned of the threat he poses to democracy should he return to power.Ms. Cheney said that, in November, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship should not merely be an aspiration — “it is our duty.”Her remarks, delivered with an air of somber restraint, were as much a public indictment of Mr. Trump as they were an endorsement of Ms. Harris. Calling his candidacy “a threat unlike any we have faced before,” she called on conservatives to join her in an “urgent cause” to elect Ms. Harris and to reject what she called the former president’s “depraved cruelty.”“I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law,” Ms. Cheney said of Ms. Harris, “and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children and, if I might say so, especially our little girls.”The joint appearance was one of the starkest examples to date of how Ms. Harris has endeavored to pitch herself as a unifying president who values pragmatism over partisanship. Her overarching goal is to win over moderate and independent voters who will be crucial to delivering her a decisive victory.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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      What to Know About JD Vance and Project 2025

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      Democrats have hammered former President Donald J. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, over Project 2025, a conservative policy plan that pledges a radical transformation of the federal government.At the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, Mr. Vance will spar with Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Mr. Walz has repeatedly sought to tie Mr. Vance to the project, while Mr. Vance has tried to distance himself from it.“If you’re going to take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re damn sure going to use it,” said Mr. Walz in August about the Trump campaign’s attempts to downplay Project 2025. While he and Ms. Harris frequently pin the project on Mr. Trump, the former president did not author it and, after Democratic attacks, disavowed it.The document, totaling about 900 pages, details extreme executive-branch overhauls, such as plans for disbanding several federal departments including the Education Department, rejecting the concept of abortion as health care, undoing environmental regulations and criminalizing pornography. It also proposes ending protections for many civil-service roles so they may be filled with appointees loyal to the president — a notion backed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.House Democrats attended a hearing about Project 2025 last week. Democrats have attacked the Republican ticket over the project. Will Oliver/EPA, via ShutterstockProject 2025 was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and created as a blueprint for the next Republican president, though Mr. Trump has his own platform called Agenda 47. But many of his allies and former officials from his administration helped author Project 2025, and there is considerable overlap between its proposals and Mr. Trump’s plans for a second term.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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      Newsom Tacks to the Middle With California in the Spotlight

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      While Donald J. Trump has attacked California as too liberal for the nation, Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed several bills that could have become political fodder.For much of the past year, conservatives have considered Gov. Gavin Newsom of California a perfect symbol of liberal excess, a well-coifed coastal governor with national aspirations whose state seemed to embrace undocumented immigrants while homeless encampments proliferated on the streets.It was Mr. Newsom who was invited to debate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Fox News last November. It was Mr. Newsom whose political action committee ran ads in Republican states to criticize their policies on abortion rights.But Mr. Newsom, a business owner, often governs more from the middle than his critics acknowledge. And over the past month, as he has sifted through hundreds of bills that the heavily Democratic Legislature sent his way to sign or veto by this Monday, his decisions indicate a more centrist shift than usual.With Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator from California, in a hotly contested race for the White House, Republicans have aimed a spotlight on her and Mr. Newsom’s home state. As such, the governor has been under pressure to make sure that California’s lawmakers don’t give them more ammunition for political attacks.The national political stakes are highMr. Newsom approved many measures that were in keeping with what most Americans would expect in California. There were big bills to address the state’s ongoing housing crisis; labor bills to protect the earnings of child influencers and the likenesses of Hollywood performers; and an outright ban on all plastic bags at retail stores.There was legislation to name the Dungeness crab as the official state crustacean, the banana slug as the official slug, and the black abalone as the official seashell. There was a bill pushed by celebrities like Woody Harrelson and Whoopi Goldberg that will allow Amsterdam-style “cannabis cafes” to open.There was a measure that will require health insurers to cover infertility treatment, including in vitro fertilization, as Democrats have attacked Republicans nationally for restricting access to fertility services.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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      Harris y Trump están empatados en Míchigan y Wisconsin, según las encuestas

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      La contienda se ha estrechado en dos de los estados disputados del norte, según las encuestas de The New York Times/Siena College.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y el expresidente Donald Trump están en una contienda aún más apretada en los estados en disputa de Míchigan y Wisconsin que hace solo siete semanas, según las nuevas encuestas de The New York Times y Siena College.La ventaja de Harris de principios de agosto se ha visto ligeramente reducida por la fortaleza de Trump en cuestiones económicas, según las encuestas, un hecho potencialmente preocupante para la vicepresidenta, dado que la economía sigue siendo el tema más importante para los votantes.A menos de 40 días de las elecciones, la contienda está esencialmente empatada en Míchigan, con Harris recibiendo el 48 por ciento de apoyo entre los votantes probables y Trump obteniendo el 47 por ciento, bien dentro del margen de error de la encuesta. En Wisconsin, un estado donde las encuestas suelen exagerar el apoyo a los demócratas, Harris tiene un 49 por ciento, frente al 47 por ciento de Trump.Los sondeos también revelan que Harris aventaja en nueve puntos porcentuales a Trump en el segundo distrito electoral de Nebraska, cuyo único voto electoral podría ser decisivo en el Colegio Electoral. En un escenario posible, el distrito podría dar a Harris exactamente los 270 votos electorales que necesitaría para ganar las elecciones si ganara Míchigan, Wisconsin y Pensilvania, y Trump capturara los estados en disputa del Cinturón del Sol, donde las encuestas de Times/Siena muestran que está por delante.El Times y el Siena College también analizaron la contienda presidencial en Ohio, que no se considera un estado en disputa para obtener la Casa Blanca, pero tiene una de las contiendas senatoriales más competitivas del país. Trump lidera por seis puntos en Ohio, mientras que el senador demócrata Sherrod Brown aventaja a su oponente republicano, Bernie Moreno, por cuatro puntos.How the polls compare More