Trump, Donald J

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      Trump Dislikes Ukraine for the Most MAGA of Reasons

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      It’s certainly understandable that many millions of Americans have focused on Springfield, Ohio, after the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When Trump repeated the ridiculous rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating household pets, he not only highlighted once again his own vulnerability to conspiracy theories, it put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger. Bomb threats have forced two consecutive days of school closings and some Haitian immigrants are now “scared for their lives.”That’s dreadful. It’s inexcusable. But it’s not Trump’s only terrible moment in the debate. Most notably, he refused to say — in the face of repeated questions — that he wanted Ukraine to win its war with Russia. Trump emphasized ending the war over winning the war, a position that can seem reasonable, right until you realize that attempting to force peace at this stage of the conflict would almost certainly cement a Russian triumph. Russia would hold an immense amount of Ukrainian territory and Putin would rightly believe he bested both Ukraine and the United States. He would have rolled the “iron dice” of war and he would have won.There is no scenario in which a Russian triumph is in America’s best interest. A Russian victory would not only expand Russia’s sphere of influence, it would represent a human rights catastrophe (Russia has engaged in war crimes against Ukraine’s civilian population since the beginning of the war) and threaten the extinction of Ukrainian national identity. It would reset the global balance of power.In addition, a Russian victory would make World War III more, not less, likely. It would teach Vladimir Putin that aggression pays, that the West’s will is weak and that military conquest is preferable to diplomatic engagement. China would learn a similar lesson as it peers across the strait at Taiwan.If Vladimir Putin is stopped now — while Ukraine and the West are imposing immense costs in Russian men and matériel — it will send the opposite message, making it far more likely that the invasion of Ukraine is Putin’s last war, not merely his latest.But that’s not how Trump thinks about Ukraine. He exhibits deep bitterness toward the country, and it was that bitterness that helped expose how dangerous he was well before the Big Lie and Jan. 6.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 Is Good on Abortion Rights. Now She Needs to Take It to 11.

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      Among the many critical issues at stake in the 2024 election, one will be central for many Americans: Whom do you trust to make medical decisions — women and their doctors, or Donald Trump and JD Vance?Vice President Kamala Harris cast the issue of abortion in stark relief in her first debate with former President Trump last week, striking a chord with voters across political lines. Ms. Harris’s answers on abortion emerged as her strongest moments onstage in a strong night for her overall — and provided a glimpse of a winning strategy for this election.That involves the Harris-Walz ticket turning the volume up to 11 on abortion. Ms. Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and their campaign surrogates must keep emphasizing — on the stump, in ads and at every chance they get — how Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are impossible to trust on these issues.They must refuse to let Mr. Trump and other Republicans suggest that leaving decisions about abortion up to the states is a benign proposition and continue to point to the wide-ranging impact of abortion bans on pregnancy care, miscarriage treatment and training opportunities for an entire generation of doctors.Ms. Harris would do well, even, to devote an entire speech to the issue, laying out her plan to take action in support of abortion rights, with or without Congress.At the same time, she should keep deploying campaign surrogates such as Kaitlyn Joshua, a mother from Baton Rouge, La., who described being denied care at not one but two emergency rooms in the midst of a painful miscarriage because of her state’s abortion ban. Personal stories like these can break through and reach voters more effectively than any campaign talking point. According to PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, exposure to these stories is helping to shift public opinion in support of reproductive rights — an imperative in this election and beyond.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 Springfield, Ohio, Threats Leave Haitian Residents Shaken

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      Tension hangs over the city after a week of closings and lockdowns, and the strain of recent months has led some Haitian immigrants to consider moving to bigger cities.After a week that saw schools, businesses and City Hall closed in Springfield, Ohio, by bomb threats, this weekend began with two of the city’s hospitals going on lockdown. A sweep of both facilities on Saturday morning turned up nothing, but the new threats only added to the unease hanging over the city since former President Donald J. Trump dragged it into the race for the White House.During the presidential debate on Tuesday, Mr. Trump cited a debunked rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating pets, and days later, he vowed to begin his mass deportation effort with the Haitians in Springfield, even though most of them are in the United States legally.The increasingly hostile rhetoric from Mr. Trump, other politicians and some extremist organizations has shaken some of the thousands of Haitians who have settled in Springfield in recent years.“Honestly, I don’t feel safe. It’s not good right now,” says Jean-Patrick Louisius, 40, who moved to Springfield four years ago with his wife and two daughters. He was part of an early wave of Haitian arrivals, attracted to the city by plentiful jobs and affordable housing. Estimates of the number of Haitians who have arrived in recent years range from 12,000 to 20,000.But tensions between longtime residents and more recent arrivals had been building before the national spotlight landed on the city, about 25 miles from Dayton.Even as the Haitian immigrants have been welcomed by employers and injected energy into fading neighborhoods, the arrival of thousands of people in a short period of time has strained schools and some government 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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      What to Know About Springfield, Where Thousands of Haitian Migrants Have Settled

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      Businesses needed workers, and Haitians, many already authorized to work, heard living costs were low. But the newcomers have strained resources, and that has fueled tension.Over the last few years, many immigrants from Haiti have settled in Springfield, Ohio, drawn by the low cost of living and plentiful jobs. But the pace and volume of Haitian newcomers have strained local resources and stirred some tensions. And now, ahead of the presidential election, the city has found itself caught up in the fiery debate over immigration.JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, invoked Springfield in July to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies. That month, the city’s mayor and manager went on the cable news program “Fox & Friends” calling for assistance to handle an influx that they blamed on the federal government. Then, during the presidential debate last week, former President Donald J. Trump repeated a debunked claim about Haitians in Springfield abducting and eating household pets.Jamie McGregor, left, the chief executive of McGregor Metal, an automotive parts maker in Springfield, talks with Daniel Campere, a Haitian worker.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWhat’s behind the rise of Haitians in Springfield?Thousands of new jobs had been created there, thanks to a successful effort by the city’s leadership and Chamber of Commerce to attract new business to Springfield, which sits between Columbus and Dayton. Once a manufacturing hub, Springfield saw its economy shrink after factories closed and jobs migrated overseas. By about 2015, its population had dwindled to under 60,000, from about 80,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Companies that set up shop, however, confronted a dire labor shortage.Haitians in Florida, Haiti and South America heard from friends and family about Springfield and its need for workers. They began arriving to take jobs in warehouses, manufacturing and the service sector, and employers urged the new workers to encourage other Haitians to join them.What started as a trickle swelled to a surge after the Covid-19 pandemic, coinciding with deepening political and economic instability in Haiti after the assassination of the president in 2021.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’s Proposal to End Taxes on Overtime Pay Could Cost Billions

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is calling for exempting overtime pay from taxes, the latest in a string of vague tax proposals that have befuddled tax experts, worried fiscal hawks and seemingly charmed voters.Mr. Trump floated the idea this past week during a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., telling the crowd that it would supercharge incentives to work more and put money back in the pockets of many Americans.“It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we’re doing because this is a good one,” he said.The pitch is part of what has become Mr. Trump’s playbook during the presidential race: tossing out potentially huge tax cuts, defined in just a few words, to try and win over middle- and working-class voters. He has also vowed to exempt tips from taxes and end taxes on Social Security benefits, two ideas that have proven popular. At the same time, he has said he would further cut the corporate tax rate.As with his promise to end taxes on tips, though, Mr. Trump left many key details about the overtime plan unaddressed, making it hard to estimate its costs. Among the open questions is whether overtime pay would be exempt from just the income tax or if the exception would also apply to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.There is also the issue of how many Americans could benefit from Mr. Trump’s idea. More than 34 million Americans worked over 40 hours a week in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but only a subset of that group are owed time-and-a-half pay for overtime under federal law. The rules are complex, but in general Americans earning a salary of more than $43,888 a year may not be owed overtime, depending on their job. Americans paid by the hour, currently about 55 percent of the work force, are broadly eligible for overtime pay.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 Pennsylvania, Wary Voters Wonder if Harris Can Deliver

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      Economic issues including soaring rents, student loan debt, supply chain issues and a stagnant minimum wage are on their minds.In a packed college gym in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Friday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris closed out a long, successful week by elaborating on her vision for “an opportunity economy,” a centerpiece of her presidential campaign: Three million new homes. A pledge to take on “corporate price gouging.” Tax cuts for more than 100 million Americans.About a mile away, Judith Johnson was watching Ms. Harris’s rally on television in her apartment. A registered Republican, Ms. Johnson, 54, thought Ms. Harris had been “wonderful” in the debate on Tuesday; she was eager to learn more, especially about the economy.But Ms. Johnson’s vote, at least for now, remains with former President Donald J. Trump. “He’s a businessman,” she said. “And I think he sees what’s going on.”Ms. Johnson exemplifies the challenge facing Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania and in other critical battleground states. People like her say they are open to switching their vote. But they want to know: An opportunity economy — how? And for whom?Wilkes-Barre, a former industrial city, is seat of Luzerne County, which Mr. Trump has won handily, twice. While Democrats tend to do best in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, they see narrowing the gap in places like Wilkes-Barre as key to winning the state. In 2020 President Biden, who was born in nearby Scranton, ate into Mr. Trump’s margin there by several points, part of a wave of support that lifted him to victory in the state.Polls suggest Ms. Harris may struggle to replicate that success. Despite her modest upbringing and her emphasis, on the campaign trail, on the needs of “middle-class, working people,” as she put it on Friday, she is still laboring to persuade many voters that she understands them, or that she can deliver on her promises.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 Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target

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      If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”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’s Vile Lie About Haitians Is the Latest in a Long and Grim Tradition

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      When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.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