More stories

  • in

    Secret Service Director Resigns After Trump Assassination Attempt

    Kimberly A. Cheatle gave up her post Tuesday after security failures that allowed a gunman to shoot at former President Donald J. Trump at an open-air rally.The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned on Tuesday, after security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump and calls for her to step down from prominent Republican lawmakers.In an email to Secret Service agents on Tuesday, Ms. Cheatle said that one of the Secret Service’s foremost duties is to protect the nation’s leaders and that the agency “fell short of that mission” in failing to secure a campaign rally from a gunman on July 13.“I do not want my calls for resignation to be a distraction from the great work each and every one of you do towards our vital mission,” Ms. Cheatle said in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times.She said she was deeply committed to the agency but added that, “in light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your director.”President Biden, in a statement Tuesday, thanked Ms. Cheatle for answering his call to lead the agency. “As a leader, it takes honor, courage and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service.”Mr. Biden said he would appoint a new director soon.The resignation is a rapid fall for the agency veteran who protected Dick Cheney and Mr. Biden in their vice-presidential tenures and was publicly supported by Biden administration officials after the gunman shot at Mr. Trump. The glaring security mistakes before the shooting, however, and the heated criticism that Ms. Cheatle faced in the days since had left her position increasingly in doubt.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

  • in

    Lo que Joe Biden hizo es extraordinario

    En las próximas horas y días, muchos analistas políticos dirán que el presidente Joe Biden se sintió acorralado y no tuvo más remedio que ponerle fin a su campaña a la reelección. De manera dolorosa, sus limitaciones habían quedado al descubierto. Había perdido la confianza del Partido Demócrata. Se tambaleaba hacia una revuelta interna cada vez más desagradable o hacia una derrota potencialmente desgarradora ante Donald Trump. Retirarse no fue un acto de gracia. Fue preservar la reputación.Todo eso es correcto. Pero no es toda la verdad. No es la historia completa. Ignora la grandeza de lo que Biden hizo: su peculiaridad histórica, su agonía emocional, su humildad esencial.Sí, su decisión de abandonar sus aspiraciones a un segundo periodo y dejar que otro demócrata más joven buscara la presidencia llegó semanas más tarde de lo que habría sido ideal, después de demasiado secretismo, demasiada arrogancia, demasiada negación. Llevó al límite las ilusiones, mientras se mofaba de las encuestas, atacaba a los medios y reclamaba omnisciencia de una manera que recordó de manera inquietante a las bravatas populistas de Trump. (“Me siento muy frustrado por las élites”, “Miren las multitudes”). Pero eso no elimina el enorme impacto y ejemplo extraordinario que implica renunciar a su candidatura.Su salida de la contienda presidencial genera un tipo y una dimensión de incertidumbre sobre quién será la persona nominada de uno de los principales partidos políticos —y qué tipo de operación apresurada y tardía puede llevar a cabo— que no tiene precedentes pragmáticos en la política estadounidense moderna. Puede que su respaldo a Kamala Harris y el estatus tradicional de la vicepresidenta como aparente sucesora se traduzcan en su rápida designación. Es también posible que no sea el caso. Harris tiene muchos escépticos, y muchos demócratas prominentes anhelan una competencia real, no una transición de la indulgencia obligatoria de Biden a la lealtad forzada a Harris.Esto es terra incognita. Aunque en 1964 y 1968 los republicanos y los demócratas, respectivamente, empezaron sus convenciones sin tener claro el resultado, los aspirantes habían estado dando a conocer sus plataformas y compitiendo por la nominación durante gran parte del año. No estaban en una contienda apresurada luego de un volantazo a mediados de julio que ha hecho que muchos estadounidenses estén en vilo.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

  • in

    Trump Appeals $454 Million Judgment in N.Y. Civil Fraud Case

    Lawyers for Donald J. Trump challenged the judgment handed down by Justice Arthur F. Engoron, who found that Mr. Trump had conspired to manipulate his net worth to receive favorable terms on loans.Lawyers for Donald J. Trump filed an appeal on Monday evening seeking to dismiss or drastically reduce the $454 million judgment levied against him this year in a New York civil fraud case, the latest maneuver in the former president’s multiple legal battles.The filing made a raft of arguments questioning the judgment handed down in February by Justice Arthur F. Engoron, who found that Mr. Trump had conspired to manipulate his net worth and lied about the value of his properties to receive more favorable terms on loans.The suit was brought by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, a Democrat, who hailed her victory over Mr. Trump as having demonstrated that “there cannot be different rules for different people in this country.”In their lengthy appeal to the First Department of the State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, however, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that many of the deals in question in Ms. James’s suit had occurred long ago and that the statute of limitations for violations it cited had run out.They also questioned the size of the judgment awarded by Justice Engoron, calling it disproportionate and suggesting that the judge had overcounted damages and miscalculated the profits from some of the properties named in Ms. James’s suit.Taken as a whole, the appeal — peppered with talking points from Mr. Trump’s campaign and his public criticism of the case — seeks to show that the former president’s dealings were business as usual, and that no harm was caused.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

  • in

    Kamala Harris recibe cifra récord de donaciones para su candidatura

    Tan solo la oleada de donaciones en línea alcanzó un máximo de 11,5 millones de dólares en una sola hora el domingo por la noche.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris recaudó 81 millones de dólares en las primeras 24 horas desde que anunció su candidatura a la presidencia, informó su campaña, una cifra récord mientras los demócratas daban la bienvenida a su candidatura con una de las mayores avalanchas de dinero de todos los tiempos.Su campaña declaró que 888.000 donantes habían contribuido en su primer día, el 60 por ciento de los cuales estaban haciendo su primera contribución durante la contienda de 2024. La campaña dijo también que había inscrito a 43.000 de esos donantes para aportaciones recurrentes.La campaña de Harris no desglosó qué parte de los 81 millones de dólares se recaudó en línea mediante donaciones de pequeño importe frente a las de grandes donantes.Pero ActBlue, el portal digital de donaciones para los demócratas, había procesado más de 90 millones de dólares en el mismo periodo de 24 horas, según un análisis del New York Times de las contribuciones en línea de la plataforma.La oleada de donaciones en línea alcanzó un máximo de 11,5 millones de dólares en una sola hora el domingo por la noche.El partido se está uniendo rápidamente en torno a Harris. Las donaciones ayudarán a reconstruir un fondo que corría el riesgo de agotarse en las semanas de incertidumbre tras el mal debate del Biden, luego de que los grandes donantes pausaran sus aportes.Una de las fuentes de dinero fue una llamada el domingo por la noche con un grupo llamado Win With Black Women (Gana con las mujeres negras), que la campaña de Harris dijo que había recaudado 1,6 millones de dólares.En total, el domingo fue el tercer día de mayor recaudación en la historia de ActBlue. El máximo histórico se produjo el día después de la muerte de la jueza Ruth Bader Ginsburg en septiembre de 2020, cuando ActBlue procesó unos 73,5 millones de dólares. El segundo día más alto fue el día después del primer debate entre Biden y el expresidente Donald Trump, que coincidió con un plazo límite clave de recaudación de fondos.El lunes iba camino de ser otro gran día para las donaciones, con ActBlue superando los 30 millones de dólares procesados a media tarde. El contador de ActBlue incluye todas las donaciones en línea realizadas en la plataforma, incluidas las destinadas a candidatos a la Cámara de Representantes y al Senado, así como a organizaciones sin fines de lucro de izquierda.Shane Goldmacher es un corresponsal de política nacional y cubre la campaña de 2024 y los principales sucesos, tendencias y fuerzas que moldean la política estadounidense. Se le puede contactar en shane.goldmacher@nytimes.com. Más de Shane Goldmacher More

  • in

    Antisemitism on Campuses, Ivy and Beyond

    More from our inbox:A Middleman’s Role in Drug PrescriptionsObjection, Your HonorTrump vs. the Environment Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?,” by Bret Stephens (column, June 26):Mr. Stephens has issued a sobering and well-documented indictment of antisemitism on elite campuses. The question asked by the headline is timely and troubling for many Jewish high school students and their families.As noted by Mr. Stephens, confused administrators and revisionist curriculums contributed to this crisis. But the insensitivity and hypocrisy of supposedly idealistic and enlightened college students may be the most striking and unkind cut of all.“Safe spaces” and rules against “microaggressions” have become commonplace on campuses. Yet when Jewish students made it known that calling for deadly attacks on Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) is offensive and intimidating, they were ignored.Chants in favor of colonization or racism would never — and should never — be met with such indifference. It hurts.Perhaps the headline of Mr. Stephens’s column should be rephrased: “Have Elite Universities Abandoned American Jews?”Alan M. SchwartzTeaneck, N.J.To the Editor:While the Ivies have claimed the antisemitism spotlight this year, Jew-hatred is flourishing on many other campuses, including mine, the University of California, Davis.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

  • in

    I Was a White House Doctor. Presidents Should Have to Take Cognitive Tests.

    The job of president is physically and mentally demanding. I witnessed this firsthand as a White House physician for three presidents, including as the designated physician to the president for Barack Obama during his first term. My presidential patients often worked 12-hour days seven days a week. The leader of the free world travels constantly, and participates in or leads briefings in which he must retain huge amounts of information.Health scares can happen at any moment. My role as White House physician was to keep the president healthy and performing optimally, and to provide the public with a candid medical assessment of his ability to carry out the duties of his office.I participated in tabletop exercises in the Situation Room to go over how to follow Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which deals with succession in the event the president is disabled or incapacitated. Typically, the 25th Amendment came into play when a president was going under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy or scheduled surgical procedure.It is widely assumed that the physician to the president will gather and provide pertinent medical information to those contemplating whether the amendment needs to be invoked. This is not stipulated, but most in the medical community agree that the appropriate role for a physician is to offer a medical opinion, based on facts, that is then weighed by the patient — in this case the president — and those around him.The debates around the fitness of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the last several weeks have created new pressure to start having serious conversations about exactly how the White House medical team should evaluate presidents and determine their fitness for duty — cognitively as well as physically. This has been the subject of decades of discussion within the White House medical team as well as with the broader medical community.Many Americans may want the White House medical team to take a more active role in declaring the president fit for duty. Many would probably like to see the same standard apply to candidates running for president as well. For those things to happen, these medical teams will need access to more data about these individuals than they now collect. And perhaps even more important, we should seriously consider the need for an age limit for those running for president, given the high stakes of the office and the realities of cognitive decline with aging.Many cognitive abilities decrease with ageWhile we retain much of our vocabulary as we get older, cognitive abilities such as speed and reasoning tend to decline more rapidly after age 60. More

  • in

    Democratic Elites Were Slow to See What Voters Already Knew

    President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree on this much: It is the elites who are trying to take Biden down, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters. But when I started arguing in February that his age would mortally wound his candidacy, it didn’t feel that way to me. I saw the elites propping him up, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters.Who’s right?Maybe we both are. In any system, elites are most visible when they are fractured and factions are acting against each other. In July 2023 — before the primaries, before last month’s debate — a Times/Siena poll found that Democratic primary voters, by 50 to 45 percent, preferred that the party nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.But the Democratic Party’s elites were in lock step around Biden. They refused to listen to what their voters were saying. The fact that he was barely campaigning or giving unscripted interviews was rationalized rather than criticized. No major Democrats decided to challenge him for the nomination. Representative Dean Phillips’s effort to draft alternative candidates was rebuffed and his subsequent primary challenge ignored. Some of this reflected confidence in the president. Some of it reflected the consequences of challenging him.The White House and the Democratic Party apparatus it controls are powerful. Congressional Democrats will not get their bills prioritized or their amendments attached if they are too critical of the party leadership. Nonprofit leaders will stop getting their calls returned. Loyal party donors will abandon you if you’re branded a heretic. “I would be crucified by them if I spoke out of line,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News early this month. “I know when you get out of line, they all of a sudden have a shift of priorities, and your races, your state is no longer on the map.” That was far truer a year ago, when Biden’s position in the party was unchallenged.These actions, decisions and calculations by Democratic Party elites were neither unusual nor conspiratorial. This is simply how parties work. But it meant that Democratic voters were given neither a real choice of candidates nor a demonstration of Biden’s fitness for the campaign. What they were given instead was signal after signal that every power broker in the party was behind Biden and confident in his ability to win re-election. Who were they to argue? Biden won the primary contest in a landslide.In February, after Biden skipped the Super Bowl interview and flubbed the news conference intended to defend his memory, I published a series of columns and interviews arguing that he should step aside and Democrats should choose a new ticket at the convention. My argument was that his age had become an insuperable problem — visible in every poll and appearance, omnipresent when you spoke to ordinary voters — and the way his team was insulating him from unscripted interviews reflected a recognition of his diminishment. Biden was trailing Donald Trump even then. He was not showing himself capable of the kind of campaign needed to close the gap. And the risk of frailty or illness causing a catastrophe across the long months of the campaign seemed unbearably high.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

  • in

    One of the Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies

    I watched hour upon hour of the Republican National Convention, something I’ve done every four years since I was a young political nerd in 1984. I was even a Mitt Romney delegate at the Republican convention in 2012, and this was the first that was centered entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.If past performance is any indicator of future results, Americans should brace themselves for more chaos if Trump wins.The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”That’s a human catastrophe, and it’s one that occurred on Trump’s watch. Republicans want to erase 2020 from the American mind, but we judge presidents on how they handle crises. Trump shouldn’t escape accountability for the collapse in public safety at the height of the pandemic. And while we can’t blame Trump for the riots that erupted in American cities over the summer of 2020, it’s hard to claim he’s the candidate of calm when he instigated a riot of his own on Jan. 6.It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.”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