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      JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target

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      If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”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 Vile Lie About Haitians Is the Latest in a Long and Grim Tradition

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      When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.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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      Elizabeth Warren: Don’t Be Fooled. Donald Trump Has a Plan.

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      During the presidential debate on Tuesday, Donald Trump was pressed on the details of his plan to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “better.” The question should’ve been a softball. After all, Mr. Trump has been promising the American people a plan for nine years, so he’s had time to prepare. His answer? After ducking and weaving, he came up with: “I have concepts of a plan.” Uh, that’s not a plan.Plans translate values into action. They test the quality of the ideas and the seriousness of the people advancing them. Plans reveal for whom candidates will fight and how effective they are likely to be. And in a presidential race, if either party’s nominee is asked about his or her plans for something as fundamental as health care, voters should get a straight answer.The problem is not that Mr. Trump can’t think up a way to put his values into action. The problem is that when he and other Republican leaders produce plans with actual details, they horrify the American people.Mr. Trump’s health care values have been on full display for years. In 2017, Republicans controlled Congress, and their first major legislative undertaking was a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time they drafted something, independent experts would point out that their plan would toss tens of millions of people off their health insurance, jack up premium costs and slash benefits for those with ongoing health problems.After months of wrangling, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers voted a bill through the House to repeal the A.C.A. That night, Mr. Trump hosted a party at the White House to celebrate their big step toward taking away health care from millions of people.A.C.A. repeal then moved to the Senate. Republicans had the majority, so if they all stuck with Mr. Trump, the A.C.A. would die. As senators gathered to vote, nearly all of the Democrats — including Kamala Harris, then a senator from California — remained standing, too anxious even to sit down. We murmured stories about who would be affected by this vote: the uncle who had cancer and would lose coverage, the kid diagnosed with a heart anomaly whose parents wouldn’t be able to find new insurance, the college students who would just go without coverage and hope they didn’t fall on ice or get in a car accident. We felt the weight of people’s lives on the line.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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      What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking

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      Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate — an inconclusive struggle between a credentialed elite that keeps failing at basic tasks of governing and a populist rebellion that’s too chaotic and paranoid to be trusted with authority instead.The 2024 campaign in its waning days is a grim illustration of this deadlock. We just watched Kamala Harris, the avatar of the liberal establishment, smoothly out-debate Trump by goading him into expressing populism at its worst — grievance-obsessed, demagogic, nakedly unfit.But her smoothness was itself an evasion of the actual record of the administration in which she serves. Harris offered herself as the turn-the-page candidate while sidestepping almost every question about what the supposed adults in the room have wrought across the last four years.A historic surge in migration that happened without any kind of legislation or debate. A historic surge in inflation that was caused by the pandemic, but almost certainly goosed by Biden administration deficits. A mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. A stalemated proxy war in Eastern Europe with a looming threat of escalation. An elite lurch into woke radicalism that had real-world as well as ivory-tower consequences, in the form of bad progressive policymaking on crime and drugs and schools.All of this and more the Harris campaign hopes that voters forgive or just forget, while it claims the mantle of change and insists that “we’re not going back.”Undecided voters in a polarized America generate a lot of exasperated criticism from both sides of the partisan divide. And no doubt it will exasperate many readers when I suggest that the choices presented in this election make indecision entirely understandable.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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      How Democrats Treat Trumpites

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      Readers discuss Nicholas Kristof’s column urging Democrats not to demean Trump supporters.To the Editor:Re “Here’s Why Democrats Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Sept. 1):I take exception to Mr. Kristof patronizing Democrats and instructing them how to address Donald Trump’s supporters. Yes, there are those supporters who have suffered addiction and hardship, but that this might logically lead them to support a criminal and potential dictator who gives no reason for a rational person to believe he would serve their interests is simply a bridge too far.Besides, many Trump supporters can’t even plead hardship as an excuse. They include the wealthy, the angry and the just plain ignorant.Robert MillsapWoodland, Calif.To the Editor:I appreciated Nicholas Kristof’s measured view in this column, though I know many people did not.It is far easier to diminish Trump supporters, to view them as morally degraded and backward, than it is to focus on the very real issues that animate them. Like those on the political left, they are troubled by the state of our country, by the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and by the growing sense that most of us are getting shafted for the benefit of a few. They see the American system as wildly off course and in desperate need of fixing.These views are familiar to Democrats. Indeed, I suspect that there is quite a lot more common ground than we realize.These are not fundamentally bad people. Most are not bigots. Most are not xenophobes. So why on earth do we call them these things? All it does is ensure that they remain in the arms of a man who has already shown his greatest concern is power — and holding onto 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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      Who Is Laura Loomer, the Far-Right Activist Who Traveled With Trump?

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      After fellow Republicans criticized her appearance on the trail, noting her history of offensive remarks, former President Donald J. Trump praised her but later said he disagreed with some of her statements.Five years ago Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with a history of expressing bigoted views and a knack for generating publicity, filed an application for a trademark to protect her work in “the field of political activism.”Ms. Loomer, 31, part of a generation of web-savvy right-wing influencers, decided to trademark the term she had coined for her signature move of ambushing people with unexpected, often embarrassing questions. She called it getting “Loomered.”Already a well-known figure among internet obsessives thanks to her anti-Muslim activism, undercover sting operations and web-savvy political stunts, Ms. Loomer found herself at the center of the presidential campaign this week when she traveled with former President Donald J. Trump. She went with him to Philadelphia for the presidential debate, and then accompanied him to Sept. 11 memorial events in New York City and Shanksville, Pa., which drew pointed criticism from Democrats and Republicans because she had previously called Sept. 11 “an inside job.”Here’s more about Laura Loomer.Why are politicians from both parties criticizing her?Ms. Loomer has made a number of racist, sexist, homophobic and Islamophobic comments in the past. She has described Islam as a “cancer,” used the hashtag “#proudislamophobe” and once seemed to celebrate the deaths of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. In 2018, after Twitter banned her for frequent anti-Muslim content, she handcuffed herself to the company’s headquarters in New York and wore a yellow Star of David similar to those Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust (Ms. Loomer is Jewish).After the billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, her account was reinstated, and she has since built up a following of more than 1.2 million people on the site (which Mr. Musk later renamed X) and has a web show. She often blasts out content praising Mr. Trump and viciously attacking anyone she might perceive as a rival.Two days before she traveled with Mr. Trump to the debate, she wrote in a post on X that if Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian American, won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”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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      Starmer, Meeting Biden, Hints at Ukraine Weapons Decision Soon

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      As the president deliberated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the question of whether to let Ukraine use long-range weapons in Russia was a rare point of contention between allied nations.President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict.But the decision now facing Mr. Biden after Friday’s closed-door meeting at the White House — whether to sign off on the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France — could be far more consequential than previous concessions by the president that delivered largely defensive weapons to Ukraine during the past two and a half years.In remarks at the start of his meeting with Mr. Starmer, the president underscored his support for helping Ukraine defend itself but did not say whether he was willing to do more to allow for long-range strikes deep into Russia.“We’re going to discuss that now,” the president told reporters.For his part, the prime minister noted that “the next few weeks and months could be crucial — very, very important that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom.”European officials said earlier in the week that Mr. Biden appeared ready to approve the use of British and French long-range missiles, a move that Mr. Starmer and officials in France have said they want to provide a united front in the conflict with Russia. But Mr. Biden has hesitated to allow Ukraine to use arms provided by the United States in the same way over fears that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would see it as a major escalation.On Thursday, Mr. Putin responded to reports that America and its allies were considering such a move by declaring that it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” according to a report by the Kremlin.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 Threatens to Cut California Wildfire Aid Unless Newsom Delivers More Water

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      Donald J. Trump on Friday threatened to withhold federal wildfire aid from California, if elected as president, unless Gov. Gavin Newsom agrees to divert more water to farmers rather than allowing it to flow to the ocean.Mr. Trump, during a news conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., claimed that the state’s devastating wildfires could be prevented by shifts in how California manages its limited water supply. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Newsom authorizing water diversions to farmers. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.” In his remarks, Mr. Trump, the former Republican president, repeatedly called the Democratic governor “Newscum.”Soon after, Governor Newsom posted a clip of Trump’s comments on X and said that every American voter should pay attention.Mr. Trump “just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas,” Governor Newsom said. “Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself.” 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