Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      A Disappearing President Steps Back Into the Limelight

      by

      At a rally today, if it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world, he kept the focus on Trump.For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, President Biden stood silently onstage in Maryland, his hands folded and his body swaying ever so softly. On one side of him was Vice President Kamala Harris, heaping praise on him; hovering on the other side was Harris’s face again, emblazoned on a shirt worn by a member of the crowd.It was the pair’s first time onstage together since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. The appearance, three and a half weeks in the making, had great potential for awkwardness: an event for the Biden White House with the vibe of a Harris campaign rally.If it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world now, he kept the focus on Trump.“Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is,” Biden said, evoking a set of conservative policy plans drawn up by allies of former President Donald Trump, once he stepped to the microphone. “Beat the hell out of ’em.”Unburdened by the weight of defending democracy in an embattled presidential campaign, Biden joked repeatedly about his age — “I served in the Senate for 270 years!” — referred to former President Trump as “Donald Dump,” and delivered a line that had bedeviled him at the debate where his candidacy unraveled.“This time,” he said, “we finally beat big pharma.”It was a flash of a Biden who has not been seen much since he dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. He is no longer his party’s standard-bearer. He has not appeared on the campaign trail. He seems in many ways to have shrunk from public view.It all got me curious about what these past weeks have meant for Biden — a man who is, of course, very much still president. My colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, has watched Biden and Harris up close, and he spoke with me this afternoon from the event in Maryland. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.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

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      RFK Jr. Sought a Meeting With Kamala Harris to Discuss a Cabinet Post

      by

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate whose standing has dropped in the polls, sought a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss endorsing her in exchange for a promise of a cabinet post, according to two people briefed on the outreach who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.His effort has been unsuccessful. The news was first reported by The Washington Post.“We’ve reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in a text message on Wednesday night. “We’ve been told that they have no interest in talking with me.”There was little chance the Harris campaign would engage with Mr. Kennedy. Public and private polling has found that as he spent the summer attacking President Biden, he began to draw more support from voters otherwise predisposed to back former President Donald J. Trump. Now Ms. Harris does better in some surveys when Mr. Kennedy is included than when she is tested in a head-to-head matchup with Mr. Trump.Mr. Kennedy, long seen as a potential spoiler in the race, has slipped in polls and struggled to raise money, and he has appeared to consider potential off ramps as speculation has grown about whether he might drop out and, if so, whether he would endorse Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.On Wednesday night, Mr. Kennedy wrote: “I’ve always argued that we should be willing to talk with each other across party lines. I’m willing to meet with leaders of both parties to discuss the possibility of a unity government.”The Post reported last month that Mr. Kennedy had held talks with Mr. Trump about a possible cabinet job, proposing a role in public health leadership, in exchange for his support. And in a leaked video of a phone call between the two men, Mr. Trump tried to cajole Mr. Kennedy to exit the race and endorse him.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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Inflation Progress Cheers Biden and Democrats

      by

      After more than two years of being politically battered over soaring prices, Wednesday’s inflation report left many Democrats feeling victorious.Consumer prices rose 2.9 percent in the year through July, falling below 3 percent for the first time since 2021. The report keeps the Federal Reserve on track to cut interest rates next month, a move that could lift economic sentiment in the United States ahead of the November election.“We’ve won the battle against inflation,” Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, wrote on X. “It’s time for the Fed to begin cutting rates.”Congressional Democrats were also using the report to push the Fed to cut aggressively.“Inflation is down,” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said in a news release. “The price of gas or a new car have fallen over the last year. And many families can now breathe a bit easier. Now, we need to make sure that this relief is reaching all Americans.”Republicans have been hammering Democrats over inflation and are unlikely to let them off the hook. They continue to note that prices are up nearly 20 percent since President Biden took office and note that the labor market is showing signs of slowing.“Despite a small improvement in the rate of price increases, the damage from the Biden-Harris administration’s philosophy of ‘tax it, regulate it, and spend it’ is done and continues to plague the economy,” said Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the House Budget Committee. “It’s hard to fathom how hardworking American families can survive another four years of the Biden-Harris failed economic agenda.”Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to crack down on corporate price gouging and is expected to lay out additional plans for lowering costs in a speech this week.Former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, will hold a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend with a focus on inflation, according to his campaign. He has claimed that the Biden administration’s spending policies have fueled record levels of inflation.“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies.”While Mr. Biden cheered the inflation figures, he cautioned that the cost of living remained too expensive. He said large corporations had been sitting on record profits and failing to do enough to help.“We have more work to do to lower costs for hardworking Americans, but we are making real progress,” Mr. Biden said, while noting that wages have outpaced price increases for 17 months running. “Prices are still too high.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Christian Conservatives Are Planning for the Next Battle, on I.V.F.

      by

      Republicans may be backing away from abortion, but these activists have a strategy, with or without Trump.The pivot seems clear. The Republican Party of the post-Roe era is sidelining anti-abortion activists. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint with innovative abortion bans, has been disavowed by Donald Trump. And the new G.O.P. party platform even promises to advance access to in vitro fertilization.But as Mr. Trump distances himself from the anti-abortion revolution his own administration ushered in, a powerful battalion of conservative Christians has pushed ahead. In recent months, they have quietly laid the groundwork for their fight to restrict not only access to abortion but also to I.V.F.They are planting seeds for their ultimate goal of ending abortion from conception, both within the Republican Party and beyond it. They face a tough political battle since their positions are largely unpopular and do not reflect majority opinion, particularly on I.V.F.As they see it, their challenge spans generations, not simply a single political cycle. And their approach — including controlling regulatory language, state party platforms and the definition of when life begins — reflects an incremental strategy similar to the one activists used for decades to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade.“I expect there will be steps backwards as well as what we are working toward, which are long strikes forward,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., who has been newly mobilizing evangelicals against I.V.F.The fall of Roe itself was far from linear, he noted. “It was nearly a half century of work, a half century of frustration, a half century of setbacks as well as advances,” Mr. Mohler said. “It will be a hard uphill climb, but that’s what we are called to.”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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Teamsters’ Black Caucus Endorses Harris While Parent Union Stays Silent

      by

      The National Black Caucus of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency on Tuesday, setting it apart from its parent union, which has declined to make an endorsement and whose president spoke at the Republican National Convention.“Their records reflect a deep dedication to advancing labor rights and supporting working-class Americans,” the caucus said of Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in a statement announcing its endorsement. “As a key partner in leading the most pro-labor administration in our lifetimes, Vice President Harris has proven to be a tough and principled fighter for workers’ rights and a leader who delivers on her promises.”The statement praised the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed, as well as steps his administration has taken to lower prescription drug costs and increase wages. It also credited Ms. Harris with pushing to expand the child tax credit — which the pandemic relief bill Mr. Biden signed in 2021 did temporarily, but Congress declined to do permanently — and with helping to preserve union members’ pensions.It said that former President Donald J. Trump’s administration “was one of the most antilabor in modern history,” citing among other things his loosening of workplace safety regulations and his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage. And it criticized Mr. Trump as “contributing to a hostile environment for Black Americans.”“Trump showed us for over 40 years who he really is: someone who is not for us,” James Curbeam, the chairman of the caucus, said in the statement. “Endorsing a candidate with his history would be a betrayal of the values that we have fought to uphold.”The decision to endorse Ms. Harris aligns the Teamsters’ National Black Caucus with other major organized-labor institutions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the United Automobile Workers and the American Federation of Teachers. But the overall Teamsters union has not endorsed either party’s ticket.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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Fact-Checking Trump’s Talk With Elon Musk on X

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump repeated a number of inaccurate claims that have become campaign staples in a conversation on Monday night with the billionaire Elon Musk on X, his social media platform.After describing at length the attempted assassination against him at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, Mr. Trump ran through familiar complaints about immigration — echoed by Mr. Musk — and attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.Here’s a fact check:He inaccurately claimed that a chart he showed at the Pennsylvania rally, which he has repeatedly credited with saving his life, showed that “my last week, we had the best illegal immigration numbers.” (The chart was highly misleading, and unauthorized border crossings were not the lowest when he left office.)He misleadingly described Ms. Harris as “the border czar.” (She was responsible for addressing the root causes of migration in Central America, not border security.)He said that 20 million people had illegally crossed the southern border under President Biden. (The number is overstated.)He claimed, with no evidence, that other countries take unauthorized immigrants “out of jails, prisons” and “bring them to the United States.” (Prison populations are increasing across the world.)He claimed that crime in Venezuela had declined 72 percent because of an exodus of criminals into the United States. (The decrease is overstated, and there is no evidence that Venezuela had “gotten rid” of criminals.)He asserted that Mr. Biden “shut down Keystone XL pipeline, which is our pipeline that would have employed 48,000 people.” (Mr. Biden did rescind a permit for the pipeline, which had a projected employment of 35 permanent jobs.)He falsely described climate change as “where the ocean is going to rise one eight of eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” (Under a worst-case scenario, sea levels could rise by as much as 10 meters by 2300, or nearly 33 feet, more than 3,100 times what Mr. Trump said.)He exaggerated grocery price inflation as high as “50, 60, even 100 percent in some cases.” (The index that tracks grocery prices is up by about 20 percent since early 2021.)He falsely claimed that inflation was the “worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years.” (Inflation reached 8 percent in 2022, the highest since 1981.)He falsely claimed that bacon now cost “four or five times more than it did a few years ago.” (The average price of sliced bacon was $5.83 per pound in January 2021 and $6.83 per pound in June 2024.)He falsely claimed that the 2017 tax cut was the “largest” in history. (At least half a dozen others are bigger.)He claimed, with no evidence, that the Biden administration orchestrated the criminal cases against him because it “went after their political opponent.” (At least two were brought by state or local prosecutors, meaning the Justice Department has no connection to the cases. Two others are overseen by a special counsel, specifically to avoid the perception of politicization.) More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Former Pro-Trump County Clerk Is Found Guilty of Tampering With Voting Machines

      by

      Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Ms. Peters is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison.The conviction of Ms. Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Mr. Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Mr. Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.After 2020, pro-Trump activists in cities across the country sought to gain access to Dominion voting machines, hoping to prove that they had been used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. All of those efforts failed, and local officials have in many cases opened investigations.More recently, concerns have been raised that officials loyal to Mr. Trump could seek to tamper with the results of the 2024 election. Other allies of the former president have sought to give local election officials discretionary power over the certification of elections, raising fears that partisan officials could short-circuit the certification process.Almost from the start, the tale of Ms. Peters, 68, read like a political thriller, with allegations that she had secretly hatched plans to employ computer hackers to obtain data from voting machines, and had used disguises and false identities in an effort that allowed election deniers to infiltrate the office in Mesa County that was responsible for tallying official vote counts.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Así es la estrategia de Kamala Harris en materia de migración

      by

      La candidata demócrata ha sido vapuleada por Trump y otros por su historial en materia migratoria. Ahora está probando un enfoque que, según los demócratas, ya ha funcionado antes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Durante semanas, los republicanos se han dedicado a atacar a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris por el tema migratorio, culpándola de las políticas del presidente Joe Biden en la frontera.Ahora, Harris, la candidata presidencial demócrata, está tratando de neutralizar esa línea de ataque, una de sus mayores debilidades ante los votantes, con una serie de estrategias que los demócratas aseguran que les han funcionado en las últimas elecciones y con la postura más contundente que ha mostrado hasta ahora como una fiscala estricta con la delincuencia y dedicada a proteger la frontera.Esta semana, contraatacó con la promesa de aumentar la seguridad fronteriza de resultar elegida y criticó a su oponente republicano, el expresidente Donald Trump, por ayudar a acabar con un acuerdo fronterizo bipartidista en el Congreso. Además, su campaña ha dado marcha atrás en algunas de las posturas más progresistas que adoptó durante su candidatura a la nominación demócrata en 2019, entre ellas su postura de que los migrantes que cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos sin autorización no deberían enfrentar sanciones penales.“Fui fiscala general de un estado fronterizo”, dijo el viernes Harris, quien fue fiscala superior de California, en un mitin en Arizona, un estado pendular donde la inmigración es una de las principales preocupaciones de los votantes.“Perseguí a las bandas transnacionales, a los cárteles de la droga y a los traficantes de personas. Los procesé, caso por caso, y gané”, dijo.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