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      How to Watch Biden’s Speech Tonight on Exiting the Presidential Race

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      President Biden will address the nation tonight for the first time since ending his re-election campaign on Sunday and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket, a decision that has reset the party’s once-bleak political outlook.What time is his speech?Mr. Biden will address the nation at 8 p.m. Eastern from the Oval Office.Will it be streamed?The New York Times will stream Mr. Biden’s speech, alongside real-time commentary and analysis from reporters. USA Today and C-SPAN also plan to stream it live.Where else can I watch it?Most cable news outlets, including ABC, are expected to carry Mr. Biden’s address He is the first sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 not to seek a second term.Why now?Mr. Biden, who had been recovering from the coronavirus at his Delaware beach home, has been mostly out of sight since last week. He announced his decision to drop out of the race in a letter posted on X. On Monday, Mr. Biden called into a meeting led by Ms. Harris at the Wilmington, Del., headquarters of what used to be their joint campaign and insisted that he would be “fully, fully engaged” in helping to get her elected. More

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      Trump Demands Equal Airtime in Light of Biden’s Planned Address

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      President Biden is set to address the nation on Wednesday night from the Oval Office to discuss the end of his re-election bid.Ahead of President Biden’s planned prime-time address from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, former President Donald J. Trump and his campaign sent a letter to ABC, NBC and CBS on Tuesday demanding that Mr. Trump be given equal airtime.Mr. Biden is expected to address his decision to end his re-election campaign and outline his plans for the rest of his time in office. In a social media post, he wrote that he would discuss “what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people.”But in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, the Trump campaign’s general counsel, David Warrington, asserted in advance of Mr. Biden’s speech that it would most likely address Mr. Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.Based on that assumption, Mr. Warrington wrote, “it appears that President Biden’s speech will not be a bona fide news event, but rather, a prime-time campaign commercial.” Citing the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule, Mr. Warrington insisted that Mr. Trump be given similar time on air, arguing that Mr. Biden’s address was a “campaign speech,” even as Mr. Biden is no longer technically a candidate for the presidency.None of the broadcast networks responded to a request for comment on Tuesday night. A Trump campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to request for comment.The Trump campaign’s letter was a throwback to an earlier, pre-cable era in television, when the broadcast networks were held to strict “public interest” standards to ensure that their local stations aired all sides of the issues and gave candidates equal access to the airwaves.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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      Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality

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      Four years ago the Republican convention was a bizarre spectacle, a cross between a Napoleonic fantasy and a Leni Riefenstahl movie. The dominant image was of an imperial dynasty laying claim to forever rule. I expected more of the same when I tuned in on Monday night to watch this year’s convention, but amped up even further by the weekend’s terrifying near-miss assassination attempt.What I saw instead was an even-toned, inclusive performance that seemed designed to resemble conventions of a more, well, conventional era, or perhaps just entertainment-world award shows. The lineup of speakers offered racial, gender and even ideological diversity — including the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, who announced from the main stage that his organization was “not beholden to anyone or any party.”You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump on everything was a consistent talking point. As for the shooting, it had been instantly mythologized as a miracle of survival: Speaker after speaker, including Trump himself, credited the Almighty with saving the former president so he could save America. There was no reference to the speculation, multiplying across the internet, that the deep state was behind the assassination attempt. Even Donald Trump was, by his standards, cogent and calm.While one half of the electorate was being served this bland spectacle, the other half struggled to follow a dispiriting and confusing story in which the stakes in the presidential election are existential — and the only man who can save American democracy is President Biden. Even as more and more funders, political operatives and ordinary Democratic voters said that he should withdraw his candidacy, the campaign told them to put their faith in a frail, diminished man — worse than that, it insisted that he was neither frail nor diminished.In the interview with Lester Holt that was broadcast on the first night of the Republican convention, Biden’s most energetic moment came when he lashed out at the press for criticizing him rather than his opponent — a favorite tactic of demagogues everywhere. If the media criticize him, then the media are bad. If the polls show a lack of support for his candidacy, then the polls are wrong. If his allies are trying to save him from himself, then they are no longer his allies. The president and his campaign have adopted the habits of the monster they promise to save us from.The week felt like an emotional reprise of the early months (or was it years?) of the Trump presidency. Every day, it seemed, brought news that felt like it would change history. We assimilated it and moved on, getting up in the morning, going about our business, pausing to express shock at another piece of news, and starting the cycle over again. We developed the ability to feel simultaneously shaken and bored, dismayed and indifferent. As media outlets engaged with Trump’s lies — some enthusiastically and others because it could not be avoided — we grew accustomed to an ever growing gap between reality as we experienced it and the ways in which it was reflected back to us by politicians and journalists.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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      Kimberly Guilfoyle’s 2020 R.N.C. Speech Was Widely Mocked

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      Four years ago, Kimberly Guilfoyle delivered a dark, high-decibel, six-minute address to the Republican National Convention that made her the subject of derisive jokes from pundits and late-night comedians.In her 2020 speech, Ms. Guilfoyle accused Democrats of peddling a menacing socialist agenda and seeking to brainwash Americans with a “weak, dependent liberal victim ideology.”But it was the volume of her voice that drew the most attention.Stephen Colbert of the “Late Show” characterized Ms. Guilfoyle as a “vengeful banshee who will haunt your dreams.” James Poniewozik, The New York Times’s chief TV critic, wrote that her speech had threatened to “Make America Deaf Again.” And Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” wished a “speedy recovery” to anybody who had listened through headphones.On Wednesday, Ms. Guilfoyle, a 55-year-old former Fox News host who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr. and was a top fund-raising official for his father’s 2020 campaign, is getting another shot at the R.N.C. spotlight.In 2020, wearing a striking red dress, Ms. Guilfoyle said Democrats had turned California, where their party controls the state government (her ex-husband, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is its governor), into a “land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”Her voice seemed to grow louder during her remarks. As she finished, she smiled widely, stretched her hands toward the camera and declared in a near-shout that “the best is yet to come.” More

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      Why Trump’s Speech After His Guilty Verdict Was All Business, No Politics

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      In his post-verdict remarks, the former president sounded less like a political martyr than like a motorist trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket.The way to evaluate a political speech — I mean as a literary critic, not as a pundit or a partisan — is to examine how the rhetoric rises to the occasion. Does the moment demand gravity or transcendence? Humility or defiance? Do the speaker’s words answer the call of history?In the case of Donald J. Trump’s 33-minute address in the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday, the occasion was both bizarre and momentous. A former president on the brink of becoming, for the third time in a row, the nominee of his party, stood convicted of 34 felonies. That nothing remotely similar has ever happened before is sufficient to guarantee the speech a place in the annals of American political discourse.As text and performance, though, the thing was kind of a slog. Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand. He did some of that on Friday, but his manner was subdued. The matter was also curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.The persona Mr. Trump presented on Friday was that of an aggrieved New York businessman — a Trump that seemed like a throwback to an earlier, pre-MAGA era. He didn’t sound like a candidate in campaign mode. The showboating populism that he brings to his rallies — the mix of piety and profanity that gets the crowds going — was hardly in evidence.It’s true that he began and ended with familiar tropes and themes, painting a grim picture of a declining, crime-ridden American overrun by foreigners (some speaking languages “that we haven’t even heard of”). He framed his legal troubles as an assault on the Constitution and used religious imagery to depict what had happened in the courtroom. Some witnesses were “literally crucified” by the judge, Juan Merchan, “who looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil.”As a longtime journalist (and lifelong pedant), I’m compelled to point out that nobody was literally crucified. And as a student of Renaissance love poetry, I’m tempted to linger over Mr. Trump’s oddly tender description of the “highly conflicted” judge: “He looks so nice and soft.” A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America’s streets, of Little League ball fields swamped by migrant encampments, of “record levels of terrorists” flooding the country.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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      RFK Jr. and Trump Go to Battle Over Libertarian Party Voters

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his case to the Libertarian Party convention on Friday, jumping into a fight over right-leaning, independent-minded voters.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president, pitched his bid to the Libertarian Party on Friday, telling a potentially critical group of voters that he stands with them on “valuing personal liberty” and vowing to protect their rights to speak, to assemble and to “keep and bear arms.”In a speech that was as much a lecture on constitutional law as it was a political appeal, Mr. Kennedy, a former Democrat and environmental lawyer, railed against government overreach to a largely receptive audience of fellow government skeptics. He slammed what he called a “program of coercion, and information control” during the Covid pandemic, accusing President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump of failing to protect liberties.Mr. Kennedy spoke as the party met to select its presidential nominee, a prize that will land the winner on ballots in at least 37 states. Mr. Kennedy has fitfully courted the nomination for months, as he undertakes the expensive and complex process of qualifying as an independent. But he recently said he did not intend to run as a Libertarian, and several party leaders and delegates say it is unlikely he will win the nod when the delegates vote this weekend.Mr. Kennedy was not the only non-Libertarian presidential candidate on the convention lineup: Former President Donald J. Trump is set to address the group on Saturday night.The attention to an often-overlooked minor party underscored the tug of war over right-leaning, independent-minded voters. In a race likely to be decided by narrow margins, Mr. Trump cannot afford to lose any votes. And Mr. Kennedy, with his anti-establishment message and zigzagging ideology, has been veering into Mr. Trump’s lane.Recent polls suggest that Mr. Kennedy could draw support away from both Mr. Trump and President Biden in a general election. He is polling at around 10 percent of registered voters across battleground states, recent polls from The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer show.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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      Stefanik to Denounce Biden, and Praise Trump, in Speech to Israel’s Parliament

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      Representative Elise Stefanik of New York will be the highest-ranking House Republican to address the Israeli Parliament since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack with a speech on Sunday that is expected to deliver a forceful rebuke of President Biden and his fellow Democrats while presenting her party as the true allies of the Jewish state.Ms. Stefanik’s speech comes as the Biden White House is urging Israel to end the war in Gaza, and it builds on the Republican political strategy to capitalize on Democratic divisions over Israel’s response to the terrorist attacks.That strategy, which has played out in Congress for the past six months, has included a largely symbolic House vote on Thursday aimed at rebuking Mr. Biden for pausing an arms shipment to Israel and compelling his administration to deliver those weapons quickly.Mr. Biden recently put a hold on military aid out of concern that Israel would use the weapons on Rafah, a crowded city in southern Gaza. The administration has also told Congress that it plans to sell more than $1 billion in new weapons to Israel.“I have been clear at home, and I will be clear here,” Ms. Stefanik is expected to say in her speech, according to a prepared version of her remarks reviewed by The New York Times. “There is no excuse for an American president to block aid to Israel.”Her remarks also appear designed to curry favor with former President Donald J. Trump, who has mentioned Ms. Stefanik, a former George W. Bush White House aide and staunch defender of Mr. Trump, as a potential vice-presidential candidate.While a time-honored adage of American politics has held that partisanship ends at the water’s edge, Ms. Stefanik’s remarks may help strengthen her bona fides with the former president by paying little mind to the principle and decorum behind that unwritten rule.Ms. Stefanik has positioned herself as one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal defenders in Congress, a role she first staked out during his first impeachment in 2019. Her prepared remarks for Sunday mention Mr. Trump by name three times while highlighting several of his administration’s accomplishments, including a package of Middle East deals known as the Abraham Accords and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.“We must not let the extremism in elite corners conceal the deep, abiding love for Israel among the American people,” Ms. Stefanik plans to say. “Americans feel a strong connection to your people. They have opened their hearts to you in this dark hour.”In addition to her remarks at Jerusalem Hall in the Knesset, Ms. Stefanik will meet with Israeli officials, visit religious sites and tour locations targeted in the Oct. 7 attacks.Ms. Stefanik has played a high-profile role in the congressional investigations into antisemitism on college campuses. Her questioning of the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania presidents ultimately lead to their resignations, delivering to Ms. Stefanik her biggest star turn this Congress. More

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      Justice Thomas Denounces ‘the Nastiness and the Lies’ Faced by His Family

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      The statement was among the few public remarks he has made since revelations that he had failed to report lavish gifts and travel from wealthy conservatives.Justice Clarence Thomas denounced on Friday “the nastiness and the lies” that have shadowed him in recent years as public scrutiny has mounted over his wife’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and luxury gifts he has accepted from billionaire friends.It amounted to some of the most extensive public remarks he has made since revelations that he failed to disclose years of lavish trips from wealthy conservatives, like the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, including on private jets and a superyacht.“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” said Justice Thomas, who did not specify what he was referring to in addressing a full ballroom of lawyers and judges gathered for a judicial conference in Alabama. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”The justice faced calls for recusal after text messages and emails showed that his wife, Virginia Thomas, known as Ginni, sought to overturn the election, appealing to administration officials and lawmakers. Justice Thomas has continued to participate in a number of cases related to the 2020 election, including three about Jan. 6 on the docket this term.The remarks were part of a wide-ranging conversation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference held at a luxury resort on the waters of Mobile Bay, a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.Interviewed by a former clerk, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, now a federal judge in Florida best known for overturning the Biden administration’s mask mandate, Justice Thomas reminisced about past years on the court, when he said it would have been impossible to imagine anyone leaking opinions. That appeared to be a reference to the 2022 leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.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