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      Trump and Zelensky Speak by Phone as Ukraine Worries About U.S. Backing

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      Former President Donald J. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke over the phone late this week amid mounting concern in Kyiv that a second Trump administration would spell the end of American support in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.Ukrainian officials worry that if a re-elected Mr. Trump kept to his vow to end the war quickly — he has suggested that he could end it in one day — it would allow Russia to keep the territory it occupies and leave it in a position to attack Ukraine again.In a social media post about the call, which took place on Friday, Mr. Trump said that, as president he would “bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives.” He said both Russia and Ukraine “will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence.”Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on Friday that he had underlined in the call “the vital bipartisan and bicameral American support for protecting our nation’s freedom and independence.” He said he and Mr. Trump had agreed “to discuss at a personal meeting what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting.”It was the first call between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump since the former American president left office in 2020. Although the Ukrainian authorities have tried to remain neutral in the U.S. presidential campaign, officials have started building bridges with Mr. Trump’s camp, hoping to shape his views on Ukraine.Oleksandr Kraiev, the head of the North America Program at Ukrainian Prism, a Kyiv-based think tank, said Ukrainian diplomats had been working on strategies to persuade Mr. Trump to continue supporting Ukraine, mindful that he can be unpredictable in foreign policy. The Republican Party’s platform does not include the word Ukraine, referring only to a broad goal of restoring “peace in Europe.”Mr. Kraiev said that Kyiv could frame its objectives as in being in line with two of Mr. Trump’s top interests: his image as a strong leader and his defense of the American economy.“We can connect with Trump on these two specific topics,” Mr. Kraiev said. 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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      Why Some of the Loudest Cheers for Trump Are Coming From Silicon Valley

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      Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology have endorsed former President Donald Trump. How did the Democrats lose Silicon Valley? Or did they?If you read the headlines this week about Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology moving to support former President Trump’s re-election, it appeared a sea change had taken place in Silicon Valley, long considered a Democrat hotbed.The loudest donors in Silicon Valley are promoting Trump at a time when the tech world as a whole is ascending in Washington, with billionaires using their ballooning wealth and media foothold to exert influence. Their voices are made all the more prominent amid the conspicuous neutrality of Big Tech leaders like the Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai and the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who are possibly afraid of invoking Trump’s ire and employee backlash.It wasn’t always this way. But big technology’s relationship with government, once symbiotic, attracted new scrutiny from Silicon Valley’s libertarian masses after social media companies tamped down on misinformation, drawing accusations that they were ceding to an overstepping government.For some, the infractions were more personal. Musk was brushed off by President Biden over his anti-union stance and excluded from an electric vehicle event at the White House in 2021. Now Musk, who has voted for Democrats in the past and has said he created Tesla to help one of Biden’s biggest ambitions, preventing climate change, has become among the party’s biggest detractors.Then there are issues in California, like rising taxes and a crime wave in San Francisco; the anti-woke movement; and regulatory battles over antitrust, crypto, and artificial intelligence that have high stakes in Silicon Valley.The question now is whether Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters are heralding a larger shift in the tech world, or if they’re merely demonstrating that their voices are more powerful in politics than ever.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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      Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go!

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      Everyone wants Joe Biden gone.Even the people who don’t want him gone really want him gone.“Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” said one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”I have many happy memories of Rehoboth Beach. I went there growing up and have Proustian recollections of crispy French fries with vinegar sold on the Boardwalk. But now my gladdening images have been replaced by a maddening one: President Biden hunkered down in his house there, recovering from Covid, resisting talking to anyone who will tell him the truth, hoarsely yelling, “Get off my beach!” at the growing list of Democratic lawmakers and donors trying to warn him that he is pulling down his party and the country.It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy.The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.Shockingly, even as the Republicans roar out of Milwaukee, vibrating with joy, Biden’s brain trust continues to run a lousy campaign, as though nothing has changed. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, went on “Morning Joe” Friday to say that the polls aren’t as bad as they are, that Biden is “more committed than ever” to running and that, when 100,000 homes got a knock on the door this past week, 76 percent of the respondents “are with Joe Biden.” Then, as Alex Thompson reported for Axios, Dillon went from cable news to a rah-rah call telling staffers not to pay attention to cable news because “the people in our country are not watching cable news.”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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      Gunman at Rally for Former President Trump Had Drone in Car

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      Investigators have information that suggests a man intent on assassinating former President Donald J. Trump flew the device over the campaign event location on the day of the shooting.Times reporters flew a drone over the rally site three days after the shooting from a publicly accessible street. Aerial footage would have allowed the gunman to survey the site.Video by Charlie Smart and Leanne AbrahamInvestigators found a small drone in the car owned by the gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump — and believe it was used to survey the site of Mr. Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., at least once before the shooting, according to law enforcement officials.Thomas Crooks, 20, visited the area near the fairgrounds used for the rally on July 7 — six days before the event — and appears to have made another trip the morning of the shooting, according to geolocation data found on one of his two cellphones, the officials said.At some point last Saturday, Mr. Crooks seems to have flown the drone to gather footage for a layout of the Butler Farm Show grounds using a preprogrammed flight path, according to an official briefed on the situation who requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak about a continuing investigation.The discovery of the drone was delayed when investigators found two rudimentary explosive devices in his Hyundai Sonata shortly after Mr. Crooks — a highly intelligent and technologically sophisticated community college graduate — was felled by a sniper after bloodying Mr. Trump’s ear, killing a man in the crowd and seriously injuring two other people.Investigators also found several magazines for the rifle he used and a bulletproof vest in the vehicle.Over the past several days, F.B.I. technicians analyzed the drone in its lab, along with two of Mr. Crooks’s phones and other electronic devices in hopes of determining his motive.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 Can’t Help Himself. Will That Help Him Win?

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      The R.N.C. ended with uncertainty about whether Trump can capitalize on the opportunity ahead.The latestPresident Biden is maintaining his public defiance as more Democratic lawmakers call for him to exit the presidential race.A call with Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to reassure major donors that there was little to worry about.More than 25 million people watched former President Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention.It was all going so well.The delegates in front of former President Trump were euphoric. The fake White House gleamed behind him. Everyone there, from the show runners to Hulk Hogan to Melania Trump, had nailed their role in a glitzy production aimed at returning Trump to the real Oval Office.Well, almost everyone.“I’d better finish strong,” Trump said, nearly 45 minutes into his acceptance speech. “Otherwise, we’ll blow it, and we can’t let that happen.”More than forty-six minutes later, when he finally finished a winding speech that grew heavy with grievance, it was clear that the person most likely to stop him from becoming the 47th president, the person most likely to blow it, was Trump himself. He couldn’t help it.Until then, the four-day spectacle that unfolded in Milwaukee had been a smooth celebration of the rise and astonishingly good luck of a former president who has consolidated the support of his party. But now, with the balloons popped and the T-R-U-M-P lights turned off, Trump has shown Republicans that he might be unable to seize fully the opportunity that has been laid out in front of him.An earthly celebrationAs Trump took the stage in Milwaukee, Democrats were having a full-on meltdown over President Biden and were trading polling showing that he could not win. They will spend much of the weekend with their eyes trained on Rehoboth Beach, Del., looking for white smoke as a president isolated by Covid-19 and the screaming doubts of his party drags out a Shakespearean drama over the future of his ambition.In Milwaukee, by contrast, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. The week was an ode to a former president that a bullet had missed, and a sacrament for a man who many at the convention believed was protected by God. Earthly factors were working in his favor, too: Television screens had showed battleground polls leaning Trump’s way. And the convention itself was going off without a hitch.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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      Donald Trump Promised a Softer Image. He Delivered Hulkamania.

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      The last night of the Republican National Convention featured glimpses of a more sober tone — and a whole lot of testosterone.Who is Donald J. Trump?After over four decades of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV stardom and presidential politics, you would think this would be a settled question. But after his near assassination in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention teased that the former president was going to unveil a softer, changed version of himself. He would recast his acceptance speech to emphasize “unity,” a word that, in four days of TV coverage, was endlessly parroted and rarely defined.Mr. Trump turned himself into his own surprise guest. Would the final night of the convention portray him as a bellicose, combative alpha male, or as a sensitive late convert to empathy and self-reflection?The answer was: Yes, and yes. The night began with a pageant of hypermasculinity, with musclemen and ripped garments. It led to Mr. Trump’s taking the stage with a new, somber voice as he recounted his brush with death. Then, over the course of a digressive hour-and-a-half speech, he somehow changed back before our eyes.First came The Man Show. The introductory hours of the night featured a rotation of admirers, heavily male, who cited Mr. Trump’s close call and defiant survival as testimony to his macho fighting spirit.This is what male identity politics looks like. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality — who has embraced the alt-right angst over testosterone levels — spoke off the cuff, suggesting that the shooting established Mr. Trump as a leader on a biological level. “A leader is the bravest man,” Mr. Carlson said. “This is a law of nature.”Kid Rock retooled his rap-metal anthem “American Bad Ass,” exhorting the delegates to throw up their fists and “Say fight! Fight! Say Trump! Trump!” Dana White, the beefy chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduced Mr. Trump.But the splashiest spectacle brought Hulkamania to Milwaukee. Terry G. Bollea, the handlebar-mustached wrestler who performs as Hulk Hogan, took the stage in character to praise “my hero, that gladiator,” working himself into a rage over the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life and ripping open his shirt to expose a “TRUMP-VANCE” tank top.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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      Spotted at the RNC: Melania Trump, and Many Faux Ear Bandages

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      As the Republican National Convention drew to a close, it painted a red, white and blue picture.On the final night of the Republican convention, just in time for her husband’s official nomination as his party’s presidential candidate, Melania Trump finally took her place by his side — sort of.She was the last Trump family member to make her entrance at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, stoking the will-she-or-won’t-she anticipation to the end, arriving well after Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who have also been largely absent during the campaign; Don Jr. and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle; Eric Trump and his wife, Lara; and Tiffany Trump and her husband, Michael Boulos. (Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s son with Melania, did not appear, but assorted grandchildren did.)She walked in alone, in a red suit and towering red heels, hair down, bestowing queenly waves on an adoring crowd.Melania Trump enters on the red carpet at the final night of the Republican convention.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIf the suit struck a chord, that may be because it had been seen before. Mrs. Trump had worn the ensemble — from Dior, with a New Look silhouette — in 2017, when, as first lady, she visited Paris with her husband for the Bastille Day celebrations. For anyone who remembers that suit, seeing it again was like sliding down a wormhole to the recent past when the Trumps occupied the White House — a further reminder, like the virtual White House projected behind Mr. Trump as he made his speech, of the point of the whole shebang.Mrs. Trump was offering something of a preview of how she may again play her part. (Not to mention the fact that, despite Mr. Trump’s statements about manufacturing in America and buying American, she has never seemed all that interested in that idea.)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