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      Biden Says He Dropped Out to Avoid Becoming a ‘Distraction’ for Democrats

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      President Biden said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he had abandoned his bid for a second term because he did not want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats, but he expressed no second thoughts about whether he could still do the job, despite concerns about his age and capacity.In his first interview since ending his re-election campaign on July 21, Mr. Biden said that he had “no serious problem” with his health, but added that the highest priority had to be defeating former President Donald J. Trump. “We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he told Robert Costa on “CBS Sunday Morning.”The president attributed his decision to step aside to pressure from his own party but did not offer new details about the dramatic days leading up to his stunning announcement. “A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” he said. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about, Why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”He said that he initially intended to be a bridge to the next generation in running for president in 2020. “When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”Even though he would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won again, Mr. Biden suggested that he had originally resolved to seek re-election because he saw Mr. Trump as a singular threat who had to be stopped. He cited the former president’s support from white supremacists and referred to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that he has said inspired him to run in 2020.“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified,” Mr. Biden said. “Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”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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      Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller.

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      Kamala Harris has a very different theory of this election than Joe Biden did.In 2020, and then again in 2024, Biden ceded the battle for attention to Donald Trump. Whether as a matter of strategy or as a result of Biden’s own limitations, Biden adopted a low-key campaigning style, letting Trump dominate news cycle after news cycle. Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump, and Joe Biden wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. On that much, they agreed.In 2020, when Trump was the unpopular incumbent, that strategy worked for Biden. In 2024, when Biden was the unpopular incumbent, it was failing him. It was failing in part because Biden no longer had the communication skills to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.Then came the debate, and Biden’s decision to step aside, and Harris’s ascent as the Democratic nominee. Harris has been able to do what Biden could or would not: fight — and win — the battle for attention. She had help, to be sure. Online meme-makers who found viral gold in an anecdote about coconuts. Charli XCX’s “kamala IS brat.”But much of it is strategy and talent. Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama. And while Harris’s campaign is largely composed of Biden’s staffers, the tenor has changed. Gone is the grave, stentorian tone of Biden’s news releases. Harris’s communications are playful, mocking, confident, even mean. Trump is “old” and “feeble”; JD Vance is “creepy.” Her campaign wants to be talked about and knows how to get people talking. It is trying to do something Democrats have treated as beneath them for years: win news cycles.Biden’s communications strategy was designed to make Trump bigger. Harris’s strategy is to make him smaller. “These guys are just weird,” Tim Walz said on “Morning Joe,” and it stuck. Walz inverted the way Democrats talked about Trump. Don’t make a strongman look stronger. Make him look weaker. Biden’s argument was that Trump might end American democracy. Walz’s argument is that Trump might ruin Thanksgiving.There are many reasons Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate, not least the chemistry between the candidates. But he was on the shortlist in the first place because he proved himself able to do what Harris wanted done: Get people talking about the thing he wanted them talking about.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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      To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

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      I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.Here’s what I mean.Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods during Trump’s effort to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their conduct while counting votes. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of Dinesh D’Souza’s fantastical “documentary” of election fraud, “2,000 Mules.”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 Hopes a New Playbook Will Neutralize G.O.P. Attacks on Immigration

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      For weeks, Republicans have pummeled Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, blaming her for President Biden’s policies at the border.Now, Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, is seeking to neutralize that line of attack, one of her biggest weaknesses with voters, running a playbook that Democrats say has worked for them in recent elections and staking out her clearest position yet as a tough-on-crime prosecutor focused on securing the border.This week, she has hit back by promising to heighten border security if elected and slamming her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, for helping kill a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has walked back some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her stance that migrants crossing the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.“I was attorney general of a border state,” Ms. Harris, who was once California’s top prosecutor, said on Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a top concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”A day earlier, the Harris campaign released a television advertisement highlighting her pivot. The ad, targeted to voters in the battleground states, promised that Ms. Harris would “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” It made no mention of undocumented immigrants already in the United States — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — although in her Arizona speech Ms. Harris stressed the importance of “comprehensive reform” that includes “an earned pathway to citizenship.”No other Democratic nominee has taken a position this tough on border security since Bill Clinton. Her stance reflects a change in public opinion since Mr. Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have expressed support for hard-line immigration measures.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Has Right-Wing Friends in High Places

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      The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”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, by the Numbers

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      As long as I’ve covered Republican campaigns, there has been racial fearmongering: Dark-skinned people are coming to hurt you. Be very afraid.With Reagan, it was “welfare queens” glomming onto tax-free cash income.With George H.W. Bush, it was Willie Horton. Liberals would give more criminals like Horton furloughs, so they could break into your house and rape your girlfriend.With George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it was Arab terrorists. Democrats would let them invade America and kill us.With Donald Trump, it was migrants swarming over the border from Central and South America with the intent to rape and kill, as well as the racist “birther” conspiracy about “Barack HUSSEIN Obama.”Trump, who adopted his father’s view that some bloodlines are “superior” to others, has slipped into the usual Republican race-baiting by purposely fumbling Kamala Harris’s name, mispronouncing it different ways and christening her “Kamabla.”Speaking to a group of Black journalists recently, Trump stunningly questioned Harris’s racial identity, saying, “She was always of Indian heritage,” and adding, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”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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      There Is Still a Biden Scandal

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      One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for re-election.For a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years. And concerns about the capacities of Donald Trump, the aging candidate actually running for the White House, are naturally going to claim more attention now that they’re contrasted with a younger rival.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 Rides Momentum to Arizona, for What Campaign Says Is Largest Rally Yet

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      Vice President Kamala Harris rolled into Arizona on Friday evening with the same political momentum that has infused her first swing across the country this week, drawing a crowd that her campaign estimated at more than 15,000 — her largest yet — in a Western state that not long ago appeared to be falling off the battleground map.Along with her newly minted running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris delivered a stump speech that is barely a week old, and yet familiar enough to an impassioned new following that some shouted her lines before she did.The rally was her fourth in four days with an arena-filling crowd that demonstrated the degree to which her candidacy replacing President Biden’s had remade the 2024 race.Mr. Walz relished the crowd that filed into the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., in 100-degree heat as he poked fun at Mr. Trump’s obsession with rally crowds.“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Mr. Walz said to knowing cheers.Despite her momentum, Ms. Harris faces an uphill battle in Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold that flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020 but, according to polling, had been drifting back to former President Donald J. Trump this year.To win, she will need to reunite the diverse coalition of voters who delivered the state four years ago, and she made an explicit appeal to one part of that group on Friday: Native American voters.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