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      Criticizing Trump, Harris Says Arlington Is ‘Not a Place for Politics’

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign filmed him at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, which led to a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday for his visit on Monday to Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign’s filming of him in a heavily restricted area caused a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. In her first public comments on the situation, Ms. Harris said that Mr. Trump had desecrated a solemn place that should be free of politics when he appeared there for a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years ago. “Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Ms. Harris wrote on X. Ms. Harris wrote that she had visited Arlington National Cemetery several times as vice president and that she would never attempt to use that setting for activities related to the campaign. “It’s not a place for politics,” she wrote. Mr. Trump, in recent days, has hit back hard at critics of his visit to the cemetery, saying that families of some of the fallen service members had asked him to take photos with them there. Soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknowns during former President Donald J. Trump’s visit, on Monday in Arlington, Va.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday, but his allies rushed to his defense, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.“President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence,” Mr. Vance wrote on X, responding directly to Ms. Harris. “Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden-Harris administration, which the former president has sought to cast as weak and dysfunctional. President Biden made the final decision to end America’s nearly 20-year military occupation in Afghanistan. But it was Mr. Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for the U.S. exit.At a campaign event on Thursday in Potterville, Mich., Mr. Trump said that he was honored to take photos with the family members of some of the fallen service members at the cemetery and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had “killed their children” with their “incompetence.” More

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      Has the Spread of Tipping Reached Its Limit? Don’t Count on It.

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      Americans are being asked to tip more often and in more places than ever before: at fast food counters and corner stores, at auto garages and carwashes, even at self-checkout kiosks. That has rankled many customers and divided both employers and tipped workers.It may soon get worse. Both major-party presidential candidates have embraced proposals to eliminate income taxes on tips, a move that would, in effect, subsidize tipping and prompt more businesses to rely on it.Economists across the political spectrum have panned the tax idea, arguing that it is unfair — favoring one set of low-wage workers over others — and could have unintended consequences. Even some tipped workers and groups that represent them are skeptical, worrying that over the long term the policy could result in lower pay.But the debate alone underscores how service-sector workers have emerged from the pandemic as an economically and politically potent force. The spread of tipping in recent years was, in part, a result of the intense demand for workers, and the leverage it gave them. The presidential candidates’ dueling proposals signal that they see the nation’s roughly four million tipped workers as a constituency worth wooing.“I do think it’s a reflection of this change in which people are finally hearing and recognizing that these workers matter,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, an advocacy organization. “Tipped workers had never seen their needs named in any way by any presidential candidate, ever.”Ms. Jayaraman isn’t a fan of the tax exemption idea, though she is optimistic that the attention being paid to the issue could lead to policies she considers more important. One is the elimination of the subminimum wage, which allows businesses in some states to pay workers as little as $2.13 an hour as long as they receive enough in tips to bring them up to the full minimum wage.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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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.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 Attacks on Harris Invoke Ancient Roman Misogyny

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      Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.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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      At Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Tries to Explain Arlington Cemetery Clash

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      Former President Donald J. Trump grappled on Friday with the lingering fallout from his visit to Arlington National Cemetery this week, offering an extended defense of his campaign’s actions leading up to an altercation between a Trump 2024 staff member and a cemetery official.Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.Accusing President Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Mr. Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.” He repeated the accusation at an event in Washington on Friday night hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group focused on education.The controversy over the cemetery photographs has overshadowed the political intent of Mr. Trump’s visit: He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.Instead, Mr. Trump has found himself struggling this week to fend off new criticisms of his long-scrutinized treatment of America’s veterans and fallen service members. At the same time, he has been twisting himself in knots to navigate the politics of in vitro fertilization and abortion rights and has confronted negative headlines for making obscene attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.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 debería tener mucho miedo de debatir con Kamala Harris

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      Es fácil encontrar ejemplos de respuestas vacuas y engañosamente reflexivas que rozan lo caricaturesco de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, y es sencillo concluir que esa mezcolanza retórica es lo que ha postergado encuentros con periodistas serios, porque no es ágil en situaciones sin un guion o desenvuelta con los datos necesarios. En todo caso, esos son los argumentos de los republicanos.Pero esa valoración ignora su actuación en un debate en 2020 con el vicepresidente de entonces, Mike Pence. ¿Lo recuerdan? Fue un encuentro con mucho en juego y tan arriesgado como cualquier entrevista con cualquier peso pesado de los medios, y ella lo hizo bien. Mejor que bien, de hecho. Varias encuestas posteriores al debate, entre ellas una publicada por 538 y otra por CNN, concluyeron que Harris había ganado. Es cierto que Pence se enfrentaba a la decisión de una mosca de posarse sobre su cabeza, pero aun así. Él llevaba más tiempo en la escena política nacional que ella, y ella no vaciló.Por eso, las recientes quejas y amenazas de Donald Trump de retirarse del debate previsto en ABC News el 10 de septiembre tienen todo el sentido. Debería tener dudas. De hecho, debería tener miedo.A pesar de todas sus fanfarronadas absurdas sobre sus anteriores actuaciones en debates, muchas de ellas han sido risibles: una combinación de burlas pueriles, mentiras sin paralelo, quejas, explosiones, desprecio y regodeo. ¿Se acuerdan de esos bailes caricaturescos que hacen los jugadores de fútbol cuando han llegado a la zona de anotación en el último cuarto de un partido reñido? Ese es Trump en el atril del debate, solo que no ha marcado ni un touchdown. Ni siquiera ha movido el balón ni un milímetro.Me refiero a sus trucos con sus rivales por la nominación presidencial republicana en 2016, en tres encuentros con Hillary Clinton en las elecciones generales de ese año y en dos con Joe Biden en las elecciones generales de 2020. (Se saltó los debates de las primarias republicanas de 2024, sabiamente, dada su ventaja sobre los demás aspirantes).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 Says He’ll Vote Against Florida’s Abortion Rights Measure After Conservative Backlash

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said on Friday that he would vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would expand abortion access in the state, clarifying his stance after having suggested a day earlier that he might support the measure.“I’ll be voting no,” Mr. Trump told Fox News, even as he said he disagreed with his home state’s current ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.Passage of the ballot measure, called Amendment 4, would allow patients to seek an abortion up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Mr. Trump, who had long avoided taking a firm position on the measure, said he was “going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” His campaign promptly sought to clean up those remarks, saying in a statement that they were not indicative of how he would vote in November.His comments were also met with backlash from social conservatives and abortion opponents. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, said Mr. Trump would be undermining a long-held opposition to abortions after five months of pregnancy if he voted for the measure.“We strongly support Florida’s current heartbeat law,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement, adding that she had also spoken privately with the former president. “For anyone who believes in drawing a different line, they still must vote against Amendment 4, unless they don’t want a line at all.”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 Claimed a Fake Taylor Swift Endorsement. Fans Are Not Happy.

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      Nine days after former President Donald J. Trump falsely claimed to accept an endorsement from the pop superstar Taylor Swift, thousands of Swift fans, including some high-profile cultural and political figures, gathered on a video call with the goal of ensuring his defeat.They shared their favorite Swift songs. They quoted their favorite Swift lines. And then they assailed Mr. Trump’s political agenda as a threat to women.One fan, the singer Carole King, sang Ms. Swift’s song “Shake It Off.” Another, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, described Mr. Trump as a bully who was “trying to claw us back into the dark days.”Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who attended two concerts on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, made a series of jokes at Mr. Trump’s expense that played on the singer’s lyrics.They all were gathered on Tuesday under the banner of Swifties for Kamala, a group that is not officially affiliated with Vice President Kamala Harris or Ms. Swift — who has not publicly endorsed a candidate in the election — but that is seeking to deploy the intensity of Ms. Swift’s vast fan base in support of Ms. Harris’s bid for the White House.“For me, Kamala is really a relaxing thought,” Emerald Medrano, 22, a founder of the group, said on the call, alluding to the singer’s lyrics in the song “Karma.”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