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      Putin, Citing Trump ‘Persecution,’ Wades Back Into U.S. Politics

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      The Russian leader, whose government meddled in the American presidential election won by Donald J. Trump, also offered words of praise for Elon Musk.The setting was an economic conference in far eastern Russia, with discussion of the ruble and domestic investment, but that didn’t stop President Vladimir V. Putin from wading into American politics on Tuesday, branding the criminal cases against Donald J. Trump political persecution and praising the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.For years, the Russian leader has demonstrated an ability to exploit political divisions within Western nations, often by signaling to conservatives abroad that he is aligned with them in a global fight against liberal values.Mr. Putin’s remarks on Tuesday, made at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, appeared aimed at lending firepower to the Republican outcry over the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, who has long expressed public admiration for the Russian leader and has helped encourage a sizable Moscow-friendly contingent within his party.The cases against Mr. Trump — who faces 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions — represent the “persecution of one’s political rival for political motives,” Mr. Putin said. He predicted that the entire affair would help Russia by exposing American domestic problems for the world to see and revealing the hypocrisy of American democracy.“Given today’s conditions, what is happening is good for us, in my opinion, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach democracy to others,” Mr. Putin said, prompting the hall to erupt in applause.Mr. Putin, whose political adversaries have a way of ending up in prison or worse, said the criminal cases against Mr. Trump also demonstrated who Russia is really fighting against as it prosecutes its invasion of Ukraine. “As they said back in Soviet times, ‘the bestial visage of American imperialism, the bestial grin’” he said.Donald J. Trump at a rally this month in Rapid City, S.D.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Trump offered no public response to Mr. Putin’s remarks, and his aides did not respond to requests for comment.Unlike in the past, Mr. Putin expressed a measure of resignation about the American posture toward Russia, saying the United States would likely remain anti-Russian, even if Mr. Trump were to return to the White House.“Though they accused him of special ties to Russia, it was complete nonsense, total bullshit, and he more than anything imposed sanctions on Russia,” Mr. Putin said. “So what to expect in the future, regardless of who is president, is difficult to say. But it’s unlikely anything will change definitively, because the current government has configured American society in such an anti-Russian manner and spirit.”In the United States, where Republicans are competing for their party’s presidential nomination — with Mr. Trump considered to be far ahead — several leading G.O.P. figures rejected Mr. Putin’s criticism.“America’s founding principles will always stand the test of time, and Vladimir Putin’s opinion of our constitutional republic holds no value in the United States,” former Vice President Mike Pence said in a statement. “Putin should be more concerned about how quickly his military went from being the second most powerful in the world to the second most powerful in Ukraine.”Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a strong supporter of both Mr. Trump and of American aid to Ukraine, said in an interview that the prosecutions taking place against Mr. Trump were “part of democracy.” He said that some parts of the American system were being “run off the rails,” but that the people in charge would have to answer to voters.“No one in Russia is able to speak against Putin,’’ Mr. Graham said, “because he’ll kill them.”Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is running against Mr. Trump for the nomination, said Mr. Putin’s comments were in effect a vote of support for his opponent. “It’s good to see Vladimir Putin has made his endorsement official — and no surprise, he’s endorsed another autocrat,” Mr. Christie said. Senator Lindsey Graham said that the prosecutions taking place against Mr. Trump were “part of democracy.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Putin’s comments amounted to the latest chapter in a political drama that began when Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, spreading disinformation online and hacking and releasing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the campaign manager of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.The controversy over Mr. Trump’s seeming sympathies for the Kremlin continued well after he took office in early 2017. Throughout his term, Mr. Trump heaped praise on Mr. Putin, and at one point, during a 2018 summit in Helsinki, professed to trust the Russian leader more than his own intelligence services.Even after he was defeated for re-election, Mr. Trump clung to that stance. In January, in a post on his Truth Social website, he again suggested that he had been right to trust the Russian president more than U.S. intelligence and F.B.I. “lowlifes.”Mr. Trump’s assertions at the Helsinki meeting — where, in an unusual breach of protocol, he met with Mr. Putin without any aides present — were roundly criticized by his opponents as unseemly pandering to the Russian leader.Still, even as Mr. Trump expressed sympathy with Moscow from the White House, he packed his administration with officials who were hawkish on Russia and, in tandem with lawmakers in Congress, continued to promote a foreign policy that punished Moscow for the 2016 interference, pushed through sanctions, and labeled Russia a “great power” competitor.Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin during a news conference at their meeting in Helsinki in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt his economic forum on Tuesday, Mr. Putin also offered praise for Mr. Musk, calling him a “talented businessman,” when asked about the possibility of private space companies similar to Mr. Musk’s SpaceX arising in Russia.“When it comes to private business, Elon Musk, he is, without a doubt, an outstanding person, one has to admit,” Mr. Putin said. “But I think everyone would admit that all around the world. He is an active, talented businessman. A lot works out for him, including with the support of the American government.”That description was reminiscent of the way the Russian leader once described Mr. Trump — “brilliant and talented” — in the early days of the New York real estate mogul’s first presidential campaign.Mr. Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, and his purchase of Twitter, recently rebranded to X, has led to a rise in the sort of misinformation and bot activity on a platform that Russia has turned to often to achieve its geopolitical aims.Mr. Putin offered praise for Elon Musk on Tuesday, calling him a “talented businessman.”Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersThe billionaire has also involved himself directly in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, at one point proposing a peace solution on Twitter that drew condemnation for echoing Kremlin talking points.And last week, Mr. Musk attracted renewed scrutiny when a new biography asserted that he had thwarted an attack on Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet in 2022 by refusing to let the Ukrainian military use his satellite network, Starlink, to guide its drones. He said he had disabled Starlink in Crimea long before the Ukrainian attack was planned, and had declined a request to enable it to avoid being complicit in what he said would be a “major act of war.’’ More

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      Second G.O.P Debate: Who Has Qualified So Far?

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      At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not […] More

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      Trump Moves to Quash Most Charges Against Him in Georgia

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      The motion essentially piggybacked off another filed by one of the former president’s co-defendants, which gave a detailed critique of the sprawling indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Monday to throw out most of the 13 charges against him in the wide-ranging election interference indictment handed up by a grand jury last month in Georgia.The one-page motion from Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, refers to a more expansive motion also filed on Monday by one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, the lawyer Ray Smith III. That motion gives a detailed critique of the 98-page indictment, arguing that its “defects” are “voluminous,” and that it is legally unsound.Among other things, Mr. Smith’s motion says that the charge of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — which all 19 defendants face — seeks to “punish protected First Amendment activity” and fails to “sufficiently allege the existence” of a racketeering enterprise whose goal was to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow 2020 election loss in the state.The Smith filing argues that the racketeering conspiracy laid out by the prosecution was actually “comprised of millions of people throughout the country” who believed election fraud had taken place and were working toward the same goal as the defendants.To illustrate the point, the motion stated that there were probably thousands of bank robbers in the United States, “but the mere fact that they all rob banks and have the same goal and many of the same methods of operation, does not mean that all American bank robbers constitute one RICO enterprise, despite the fact that they are people who commit the same crime, for the same reason.”Mr. Smith’s legal team includes Donald F. Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer.The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who is leading the prosecution, declined to comment on Monday evening ahead of an official response to the motion in court. Mr. Sadow also declined to comment.The filing was the latest legal volley in the case, which Mr. Trump sought to quash even before his indictment in mid-August. It came as little surprise to legal analysts watching the case, who had expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive defense long before the start of a trial.The former president’s lawyers have already moved to sever his case from two co-defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who have demanded a speedy trial. Their joint trial is set to start on Oct. 23.Mr. Smith, a lawyer based in Atlanta who helped Mr. Trump’s team challenge his loss in Georgia after the election, faces a dozen charges in the case. He advanced false claims about the election at a legislative hearing, according to the indictment. And, prosecutors charge, he took part in the efforts to get fake Trump electors to cast votes and sign documents that falsely claimed that he had won the election. Mr. Smith has pleaded not guilty.“He never advocated violence; he never cried ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” his lawyers argued in the motion. “If advocacy in court or the legislature is a crime — if it merits being branded a ‘racketeer’ — there are very few people who will have the courage to risk engaging in such advocacy. ”Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in the Atlanta area, said on Monday that the motion was unlikely to succeed in court, describing the racketeering enterprise defined in the indictment as “pretty tightly drawn.” But he noted that defense lawyers sometimes filed motions directed more at the court of public opinion, with an eye toward influencing a potential jury pool.Notably, the Smith motion does not excuse all the activity that took place.“If, as the Fulton prosecutors claim, somebody threatened physical harm to an election worker, that might (or should) be prosecuted as a crime,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers write. “The same for stealing computers or information from a computer.”Some defendants in the case were charged with conspiracy to commit computer theft in a breach of a rural Georgia county’s voting system, while others were accused of threatening a poll worker.Mr. Trump may soon follow the lead of several other defendants and ask to have his case moved to federal court, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of him. But on Friday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected such a request from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, dimming the prospects that others would succeed with the strategy. More

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      The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans

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      One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.Liberals — myself very much included — have been preoccupied by minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.It’s worth remembering that in 2000, when many thought George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, Republicans did not intend to quietly accept the results. “I think there would be outrage,” Representative Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Bush camp planned to stoke a “popular uprising,” in the words of The Daily News, quoting a Bush aide: “The one thing we don’t do is roll over. We fight.”Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its countermajoritarian qualities.Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Manhattan Judge May Be Open to Moving Trump Trial Date as Cases Mount

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      The judge, Juan M. Merchan, said in a letter that while he was not yet ready to discuss potential changes to the March 25, 2024, trial date, he would be willing to have the conversation in February.The judge presiding over the criminal case against Donald J. Trump in Manhattan signaled that he could be open to changing the date of the trial — now set for March 2024 — in light of the handful of other potential trials the former president now faces.But in a letter sent to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said he would wait until February to have that discussion, given Mr. Trump’s “rapidly evolving trial schedule.”In March, the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against Mr. Trump stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star. The trial was soon scheduled for next March. But in the months that followed, Mr. Trump was indicted three more times. The cases, taken together, have created a legal logjam that coincides with the former president’s third run for the White House.In his letter to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, Justice Merchan wrote that he did not believe it would be fruitful to discuss a potential change this month, “in light of the many recent developments involving Mr. Trump.”Justice Merchan said that such a conversation would be more productive in February, when prosecutors and defense lawyers are scheduled to meet for a decision on motions.“We will have a much better sense at that time whether there are any actual conflicts and if so, what the best adjourn date might be for trial,” the judge wrote in the letter, which was dated Sept. 1, 2023, but only recently became public.The letter provides a look behind the scenes at the complications that have ensued after Mr. Trump was charged with felonies by three different prosecutors in four different states. He is scheduled to be put on trial four times next year, though many experts believe that only one or two of the trials will actually take place, given the complexity of the scheduling and the fact that Mr. Trump is again running for president.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, has said that he would not insist on being the first to try Mr. Trump, though he added that scheduling decisions ultimately fell to Justice Merchan.The judge’s letter was a response to Mr. Blanche, who on Aug. 30 asked for a status conference at which to discuss the trial date. Because Justice Merchan declined the request, lawyers will be expected to keep to the schedule the court already set, and the pretrial process will remain on track, regardless of whether the trial itself takes place as scheduled.Justice Merchan has also spoken to Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge presiding over the case in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and that is scheduled to go to trial on March 4, 2024. It is not clear what they discussed, but prosecutors have said that in that case, the government could take between four and six weeks to present its case to the judge.Mr. Trump’s other federal trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024 — in that case, Mr. Trump is charged with illegally retaining dozens of classified documents. His fourth trial — in Georgia, and also related to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — has yet to be scheduled.Kate Christobek More

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      ‘Virginia Is the Test Case’: Youngkin Pushes for G.O.P. Takeover This Fall

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      Glenn Youngkin, a popular Republican governor with national ambitions, is trying to help his party take full control of state government in crucial legislative races this year. Virginia, whose off-year elections are usually closely watched as an indicator of the national mood, has been mostly out of the spotlight this year, overshadowed by the Republican presidential primary and the looming general election clash.But with every seat in the Legislature up in eight weeks, the stakes are unusually high, with Republicans in position to swing the entire state, just four years after Democrats did the same. The effort, led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a popular Republican with national ambitions, is likely to serve as an early read on the politics of 2024, spinning out lessons for both parties, especially on abortion.Democrats have made abortion rights their top issue, warning that if Republicans win full control of the General Assembly, then Virginia will join other Southern states by sharply restricting abortion access.A winning night for Democrats on Nov. 7, however, will show that abortion remains just as potent a get-out-the-vote issue for the party as it has been in a string of state elections since the reversal of Roe v. Wade.With Mr. Youngkin overseeing his party’s message, the Republican pitch to turn out voters is less conservative red meat than roast chicken — a Republican comfort menu of tax cuts, job creation and parental influence over schools, which the governor labels “common-sense conservative policies.”On abortion, Mr. Youngkin, who is not on the ballot, wants to ban the procedure after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. If Republicans take majorities in both legislative chambers — and both are in play — the takeaway is likely to be that the party cracked the code with suburban swing voters on abortion by offering a more middle-of-the-road position than the near total bans passed in deep-red states.“This election is going to matter, it’s going to set things up for 2024,” said Don Scott, the Democratic leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, who is one his party’s lead strategists. “If Virginia goes the wrong way, the narrative is going to be the Republicans have figured out the right election combination to overcome their extremism on abortion.”And it could be a road map for Republicans in other states who are looking to defuse the issue after election losses following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.All 40 seats in the Virginia Senate and all 100 in the House are on the ballot. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and Democrats narrowly control the Senate. Strategists on both sides agree that each chamber is up for grabs.Supporters signed the campaign bus to commit to voting early.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“Folks, hold our House and flip our Senate, we know how to do this,” Mr. Youngkin urged a crowd on Saturday in a swing House district south of Richmond. He added: “Virginia is the test case.”He did not mention that another upshot of Republicans’ taking full control of state government is that Mr. Youngkin would further ascend as a national figure. Although he earlier teased a presidential run for 2024 — encouraged by many wealthy out-of-state donors and conservative media outlets who still yearn for him to get in the race — he has batted away the calls for months, saying his sole focus is turning the state.Although he has not ruled out a late entry into the primary, the political calendar and the polls argue strongly against such a move. Filing deadlines for the ballot in the early primary states of South Carolina and Nevada will have passed by November. In a recent Roanoke College Poll, 51 percent of Virginians approved of Mr. Youngkin’s job as governor, but only 9 percent of Republicans in his home state want him to be the 2024 nominee, versus 47 percent who favor Donald J. Trump.Mr. Youngkin, a wealthy former financial executive, has raised record sums for the Spirit of Virginia, his political committee supporting legislative candidates. The group says it pulled in $3.3 million in August and has raised $12 million since March. It is underwriting a tour of swing districts with Mr. Youngkin urging supporters to sign the side of a bus to show their commitment to voting early starting Sept. 22 — a practice that Mr. Trump had made toxic with the G.O.P. base, but has recently embraced.With Democrats lacking a comparable state leader this year, Virginia’s Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, have raised alarms in recent weeks that the party was falling behind in fund-raising and mobilization.The White House heard the pleas, and President Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to funnel $1.2 million to the Majority Project, the Democratic group in Virginia coordinating door-knockers and other voter outreach in key districts.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Virginia Democrats won full control of state government in elections in 2017 and 2019. In 2021, Mr. Youngkin and down-ballot Republicans profited from a backlash over pandemic-era school closures as well as rising inflation under Mr. Biden.“I’d love to have said that Virginia is solidly blue; that’s clearly not the case,” Mr. Warner said in an interview. Control of each chamber is likely to come down to a handful of races: four seats in the Senate and seven in the House that are considered tossups, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.Many of the seats are in the exurbs of Virginia’s metropolitan areas — greater Washington, Richmond and Hampton Roads — a frontier of swing voters, many college-educated, the kind of voters who have had starring roles in elections across the U.S. in recent years.Democratic strategists said they needed to win only one of the four tossup Senate seats to hold their current majority. They are encouraged that Democratic congressional candidates carried all of the districts in the 2022 midterms. Republicans counter that Mr. Youngkin won the same districts in his 2021 election, and that he remains popular.Mr. Youngkin branded himself the “parents’ rights” candidate, and is aiming to bring his success on education issues to the state races.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesOne of the most closely watched races is between two first-time Senate candidates in Loudoun County, a Washington exurb that became a national flashpoint in 2021 after conservative attacks on its public school policies on diversity and transgender students.Mr. Youngkin seized on those cultural issues to brand himself the “parents’ rights” candidate, which helped power his victory. In office, he banned critical race theory in K-12 schools (although educators said C.R.T. had no influence on curriculums), set up a tip line for parents to report about teachers and gave parents control of the names and pronouns their children used in school.Whether these issues still motivate voters is one of the unknowns in this year’s election. Mr. Youngkin is betting that they do and is holding a “Parents Matter” town hall-style event in Loudon County on Tuesday. Over the weekend, the governor went on “Fox News Sunday” to announce he had pardoned a father arrested in a 2021 incident at a Loudoun County School Board meeting where the father had criticized officials after his daughter was sexually assaulted in school.Russet Perry, the Democrat running for the open Senate seat in the county, said that when she knocks on the doors of swing voters, the top education issue she hears is concerns over school shootings, not culture-war matters.“Parents are a little tired of the politics intentionally injected into the schools by people who do not live here, including Glenn Youngkin,” said Ms. Perry, a former prosecutor with a daughter who is a high school freshman in public school.Across the state, the Democratic message is that Republicans are “extremists” and if they win full control in Richmond, they will seek strict abortion limits.But Mr. Youngkin has mostly focused his message elsewhere. In his 18-minute speech to rally Republicans on Saturday in Prince George, Va., he did not utter the words “abortion” or “pro-life,” instead stressing “common sense” policies.After a half-hour of greeting supporters, as aides hustled him to his car, he responded to a reporter’s shouted question about whether he would sign a six-week abortion ban.“Virginians elected a pro-life governor,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think we can ask all kinds of hypothetical questions. What I’ve been very clear on — and I’d appreciate you writing it clearly — is that I support a bill to protect life at 15 weeks.” More

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      Why We Are So Obsessed With Biden’s Age

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      To our intensifying discussion about whether President Biden has grown mentally fuzzy and too old for a second term, I’d like to add this question: How would we even notice Donald Trump’s lapse into incoherence, when derangement is essentially his brand?Pretty much any interview he gives is a babble bonanza, and his recent lovefest with Tucker Carlson was no exception. He went on wacky tangents, including one about the wages of building the Panama Canal: “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito. Malaria. We lost 35,000 people. We lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world.”“One of the nine wonders,” he added, then corrected himself. “No, no, it was one of the seven.” Seven, nine – he seemed unable to decide, unwilling to commit. “You could make nine wonders,” he ventured. I guess that’s some limit. Once you hit 10, they’re just curiosities. Wonder-ettes.But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?Most certainly not. And that’s both noteworthy and troubling, because we can’t know — really know — that Biden’s occasionally prolonged, futile search for the right word or name is firmer evidence of cognitive fade than Trump’s hallucinatory musings are.I’m not claiming that Biden, 80, and Trump project the same degree of vigor. I have eyes and ears. Trump talks louder and faster than Biden does and moves with a thudding force. He’s like a freight train to Biden’s cable car, or a big, bulbous tuba to Biden’s tremulous piccolo. Listening to Biden, I want a volume knob I can turn up. Listening to Trump, I crave nonsense-canceling headphones.I’m also aware and suspicious of the paucity of Biden’s interactions with journalists, his avoidance of unscripted public appearances and a schedule that can seem strangely light. I’ve heard from influential Democrats who have crossed paths with him and were alarmed by how slowly he was moving and how disoriented he seemed.But the situation is more complicated than that, and the conversation about it omits dynamics that it shouldn’t. Trump is a mere three years younger than Biden, and he’s overweight. His diet is garbage. His cardio is golf putts. Biden, on the other hand, is a trim tribute to regular exercise.And Trump diverts attention from his age by going to significant lengths to conceal it.A thought exercise: Imagine Biden with more hair — or at least some swooping, swirling, painstakingly contrived facsimile of more hair. Color it a shade of orange-gold that’s less a sneaky evasion of gray than a desperate pummeling of it. Now get to work on his face. Cloak his age spots under a fake tan. Spackle his wrinkles with makeup. Then dress him in suits so dark and baggy that they veil time’s toll on the body they’re tenting.You’ve turned Biden at least partway into Donald Trump. Does he seem a little less ancient?In several recent surveys, roughly three in four Americans, including a majority of Democrats, deemed Biden too old to be effective through a second term. In a recent Associated Press/NORC poll, a much smaller fraction — just over half — expressed reservations about Trump’s age.At least a bit of that discrepancy surely reflects right-wing media organizations’ obsessive focus on Biden’s stumbles and mumbles and such. Their left-wing counterparts don’t home in on Trump’s dubious physical fitness in the same way –— they have so much else on their radar. After all, a candid image of Trump in flab-revealing golf wear or a shot of the wind exposing the truth about his tresses matters little next to candid audio of him hectoring a state official in Georgia to steal the 2020 election.With Trump, it is always thus: The frequency of his outrages and volume of his vices guarantee that no single flaw stands out as it should. It’s just another ingredient in a gumbo of God-help-us.We should also bear in mind that all the hints of Biden’s feebleness are amplified by a larger narrative of older politicians clinging to power despite their obvious physical deterioration. Every image of Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, being wheeled through the Capitol hurts Biden. So does every second that Senator Mitch McConnell, 81, stands frozen and speechless before a group of journalists.“I see people lumping every old person together and using the term ‘gerontocracy’,” Rosanne M. Leipzig, who specializes in geriatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, told me. But Biden isn’t McConnell, no more than McConnell is Feinstein. “There’s no group of people who are more different than older adults,” Leipzig said. “We even have a term for it — the heterogeneity of aging.”Biden is also hurt, in a different way, by Representative Nancy Pelosi, 83, who seems amply vigorous but surrendered her position of House Democratic leadership last year with the proclamation that “the hour has come for a new generation.” If that’s true in the House, why not in the White House?Bob Kerrey, a former senator and onetime governor who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, told me: “I would rather Joe did what Nancy did.” Kerrey turned 80 himself just two weeks ago, and he said that he’d never pursue the presidency at his age.“It’s an offensive act if I were to do it,” he said. “I had my chance.” He added that there are “plenty of 40- and 60-year-olds who can step up and run.” But he’s cognitively up to the task, he said, and so is Biden. Believing in generational change doesn’t mean disbelieving Biden’s competence.And judging competence can be a guessing game, given the partial and selective information that most older political candidates and their physicians divulge. To determine aging’s impact “through superficial means is not an accurate measure,” Bob Blancato, the national coordinator of the Elder Justice Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group, cautioned. “Aging is a profoundly personal journey.”Similarly, our takes on it are subjective — and can be colored by irrelevant details. Leipzig noted that to some people, Biden’s cultural frame of reference, embrace of tradition and old-fashioned vocabulary (“God love ya’,” “c’mon man,” “malarkey”) read old, while Trump’s rebel pose reads young.I happen to think that Democrats would be safer with a nominee who’s younger than Biden is and radiates more energy than he does. But I believe at least as strongly that if the unideal choice before Americans winds up being Biden, with his imperfections, or Trump, with his, rejecting Biden because of how old he has grown isn’t a grown-up decision.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More