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    Assessing JD Vance’s Appeals to the Middle Class on the Campaign Trail

    The Republican vice-presidential nominee has assailed Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions with inaccurate claims.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who rose to fame detailing his Appalachian roots in a best-selling memoir, has made appeals to working-class and middle-class voters a core tenet of his campaign messaging.In rallies and interviews, Mr. Vance has sought to portray the Republican ticket as a champion of everyday people, first-time home buyers and autoworkers by misleadingly describing Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions on housing, trade and manufacturing.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What Was Said“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”— in a local news interview in AugustThis is exaggerated. Economists and real estate experts say that while migration, including illegal immigration, has contributed to population growth and thus demand for housing, it is not a main driver of the country’s housing affordability crisis. A lack of supply is the primary culprit, they said.Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Mr. Vance’s claim “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.”After the Great Recession, the number of new homes built annually plummeted and never really recovered in the two decades that followed. As a result, researchers and real estate firms now estimate a nationwide shortage of 1.5 million to seven million housing units.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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    El incidente de Trump en Arlington es inédito

    Donald Trump no es el primer candidato que infringe la prohibición de actividades partidistas en el Cementerio Nacional de Arlington. Pero nadie ha respondido tan hostilmente como su campaña.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En noviembre de 1999, el senador John McCain, republicano por Arizona y ex prisionero de guerra en Vietnam, quien era ampliamente considerado un héroe militar, dijo que su recién lanzada campaña presidencial había cometido “un error muy grave”.McCain, que en aquel momento iba muy por detrás de George W. Bush en la carrera por la nominación de su partido, había producido un anuncio de campaña en el que destacaba su carrera como piloto de la Marina y su reverencia por sus compañeros de servicio. En un momento dado, el anuncio mostraba a McCain caminando solemnemente por el Cementerio Nacional de Arlington.El Ejército no tardó en decir que la campaña de McCain nunca había solicitado permiso para filmar en el cementerio. Incluso si lo hubiera hecho, dijo entonces un portavoz del Ejército, la solicitud habría sido denegada porque las actividades partidistas están prohibidas en las instalaciones del Ejército. Un portavoz de la campaña dijo que el video procedía de una de las visitas periódicas del senador a las tumbas de su padre y su abuelo.Fue un incidente político de campaña que se pareció bastante, antes de divergir bruscamente, a otro que tuvo lugar la semana pasada. Un portavoz del Ejército dijo el jueves que la campaña del expresidente Donald Trump tampoco había recibido permiso para filmar en una zona restringida del Cementerio Nacional de Arlington durante la visita de Trump el lunes, y que no podía haberlo recibido porque violaría la ley federal.El Ejército emitió una rara reprimenda pública a los funcionarios de la campaña de Trump por los ataques que dirigieron a un trabajador del cementerio que había tratado de detener la filmación. (Un portavoz de la campaña había acusado al trabajador de sufrir un “episodio de salud mental”). La campaña de Trump había sido informada de que filmar con fines de campaña iba en contra de las normas del Ejército y, sin embargo, los funcionarios de la campaña siguieron adelante, incluso, según el Ejército, empujando físicamente al trabajador del cementerio.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 Campaign Pushes Back at Harris With Gold Star Families’ Statement

    The partisan dispute over Arlington National Cemetery escalated on Sunday when the campaign of former President Donald J. Trump published statements from family members of slain U.S. troops attacking Vice President Kamala Harris after she criticized Mr. Trump for politicizing the cemetery.It was the latest effort by the Trump campaign to defend itself after a physical altercation between a Trump aide and a cemetery official that was triggered by the campaign defying a ban on political campaigning at the Arlington cemetery in Virginia during Mr. Trump’s visit last week. Most of the family members who were with Mr. Trump for that visit signed onto the statement promoted by the Trump campaign.The Army said in a statement on Thursday that an official at Arlington National Cemetery was physically pushed by a Trump campaign aide after she tried to stop the campaign from filming in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery. Trump campaign officials then insulted the cemetery worker — insisting that there was no physical altercation and that they were prepared to release footage to prove it, but the campaign has not done so.In her first public comments on the situation, Ms. Harris said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Trump had desecrated the cemetery — considered to be among the most sacred of American institutions. Ms. Harris said that the Arlington cemetery was a solemn place that should be free of politics, describing the campaign’s filming of Section 60 — largely reserved for service members killed in recent wars overseas — as “a political stunt.”The Trump campaign then released the statement signed by family members of 7 of the 13 U.S. troops killed by a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport during the withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.The statement spoke of the heroism of the troops killed at Abbey Gate, and the grief that the family members have felt in the three years since their loved ones were killed. But it also sought to blame Ms. Harris for the politicization of the cemetery, asserting that it was the vice president who had “disgracefully twisted” Mr. Trump’s visit “into a political ploy,” and effusively praised Mr. Trump’s leadership, with the family members of the troops asserting that “if he were still commander in chief, our children would be alive today.”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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    Fund-Raiser for Jan. 6 Rioters at Trump’s Golf Club Is Postponed

    A gala event to raise money for some of the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set to take place on Thursday at former President Donald J. Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, has been postponed, according to the event website.While Mr. Trump had not been planning to attend the soiree — billed as the J6 Awards Gala — the event attracted attention for the way it reinforced the strong connections he has maintained with those who stormed the Capitol on his behalf at an awkward moment: just as his campaign to return to the White House enters its final stages.The event’s website did not provide a reason for the delay or mention a new date when it might take place. But the primary planner, Sarah McAbee, who runs a nonprofit organization called the Stand in the Gap Foundation, which supports Jan. 6 defendants, said she would try to reschedule it for after the November election, perhaps in February, according to text messages obtained by The New York Times.“I want you to know that we fought until the absolute last minute to have the event,” the text messages said, “but there were multiple issues outside of our control, the main one being safety concerns of attendees and staff.”Ms. McAbee is the wife of Ronald Colton McAbee, a former deputy sheriff from Tennessee who is serving five years in prison after being convicted of attacking police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The event’s location, Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., highlighted the former president’s attempts to normalize the events of Jan. 6, including by often praising those who took part in the Capitol attack.Gala attendees were asked to shell out $2,500 for a single ticket (or $50,000 for a “platinum table” of 12) for the chance to mingle with the families of indicted rioters and to win a custom plaque commemorating “Justice for All,” a song featuring a choir of some of the most violent riot defendants who are now locked up in Washington’s local jail, along with Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.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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    The Cass Report: Biased or Balanced?

    More from our inbox:Child Tax Credits Can Save Women’s LivesWake Up, RepublicansRicardo TomásTo the Editor:Re “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids,” by Lydia Polgreen (column, Aug. 18):Thank you to Lydia Polgreen for this thoughtful, well-researched piece. She clearly identified the faulty and dangerous unspoken premise of the Cass report and much of the reporting on this topic: that being transgender is socially deviant and harmful, and we should do everything in our collective power to reserve gender-affirming care for those we deem virtuous enough to become “good” members of society.She also pointed out critics’ double standards. Our medical system routinely provides — without controversy — the same gender-affirming medications to cisgender children and adolescents that it provides to trans children and adolescents. The issue is clearly not “concern for children” but the deep-rooted transphobia that this “concern” masks.What if we didn’t think of being trans as being deviant or broken? What if we saw it for what it is: an identity as old as human existence that is as worthy of respect and celebration as any other, especially amid this climate of fear? What if we focused less on creating unnecessary barriers to care and more on protecting the right to self-determination and access to health care that respects each person’s unique needs?Libby Hartle-TyrrellBrooklynTo the Editor:Lydia Polgreen speculates on the legitimacy of the Cass report in what I see as an effort all too common among public figures: to burnish their liberal credentials at the expense of families like mine. They state that pediatric gender transition is too politicized, but blame only the Republicans. But I wish, I beg, that they talk to parents like me.Many of us are liberal, (formerly) Democratic professionals whose kids have been caught up in the left’s politicization of this issue. Our kids — who are smart, but struggle with mental health issues and anxiety — spent too much time online during Covid and self-diagnosed themselves as gender dysphoric. Meanwhile, activists have aggressively pushed an affirm-or-else, one-size-fits-all policy on educators, mental health providers and doctors.This confluence has created a dystopian nightmare for well-educated, thoughtful and compassionate parents who urge caution and question medicalization. People who we used to align with politically are telling our kids that we are transphobic and support their cutting us off. We grieve and watch in horror as our vulnerable kids permanently scar their bodies, reproductive organs and voices.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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    Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

    Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris.In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.“Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. “Kamala Harris could never.”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’s Team, With a Wink, Insists She’s an Underdog

    Her campaign’s message that Democrats are losing, which she never voiced when President Biden was tanking the ticket, is an artful attempt to lower expectations.Days before the debate that ended up cutting off President Biden’s path to a second term, his campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, defiantly set expectations: “We are going to win,” she said in an interview with the news site Puck.Fast-forward 10 weeks. Democrats have a more popular nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, torrents of grass-roots campaign cash that Mr. Biden could have only dreamed of, a well-received convention and a running mate who has energized the party’s liberal base.Ms. O’Malley Dillon somehow seems less optimistic.“Make no mistake,” she wrote in a campaign memo released on Sunday morning. “We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.”How can it be that a campaign that by all metrics is better off than it was in late June is now pushing a narrative that things are worse than they were when Mr. Biden was in the race?It is because the Harris operation, like any campaign riding a wave of momentum, is suddenly worried about overconfidence. The New York Times’s polling average has shown her ahead since Aug. 6, the day she unveiled Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. And the mood carried over from the Democratic National Convention is hardly one of a party despairing about its chances against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden never declared his campaign an underdog. Neither did Ms. Harris until July 27. Before that, with Mr. Biden still running, she had nothing but confidence in public. Several times in the post-debate period, as Mr. Biden’s campaign began to look like a rolling catastrophe, Ms. Harris declared that they would be re-elected.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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    Former Miss Teen USA Contestant Rebukes Vance for Using Her Flub to Attack Harris

    Caite Upton wrote on social media that “online bullying needs to stop,” after JD Vance posted a clip of her mangled answer from the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant to mock Kamala Harris.Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who since becoming former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate in July has been criticized on several occasions for comments demeaning women, found himself again embroiled in controversy this week when he used a viral clip of a beauty pageant contestant’s meltdown to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.On Thursday, Mr. Vance shared a video clip from the 2007 Miss Teen USA competition in which Caite Upton, who was representing South Carolina, gave a mangled answer to a question about why many Americans could not locate the United States on a map.“BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Mr. Vance wrote on X.That evening, CNN was set to broadcast the first major interview with Ms. Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. quickly reposted Mr. Vance’s post, writing: “This is total Fake News from JD. We all know that Kamala isn’t that articulate.”In a social media post on Friday, Ms. Upton objected to Mr. Vance’s dredging up the 17-year-old clip of her pageant struggles, remarks that were reported by The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., and later deleted, after she appeared to have deactivated her account on X.“Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop,” she wrote, according to the newspaper.A representative for Ms. Upton, who competed in the pageant under the name Lauren Caitlin Upton, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.In 2015, Ms. Upton told New York magazine that the embarrassment she felt over the viral video had led to depression and thoughts of suicide.When Mr. Vance was asked whether he had been aware of Ms. Upton’s mental health challenges during an appearance on CNN on Friday, he said that he had not at the time he posted the clip.“My heart goes out to her, and I hope that she’s doing well,” he said.When asked whether he wanted to apologize, Mr. Vance said that he did not have regrets.“Politics has gotten way too lame,” he said, adding, “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin.” More