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    Trump, in Pitch to Black Voters in Detroit, Casts Biden as Anti-Black

    Former President Donald J. Trump, courting Black voters at a church on the west side of Detroit on Saturday, sought to harness animus toward migrants crossing the border, sanitized his track record on race and sold himself as the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln.As he spoke to roughly 200 people, Mr. Trump largely ignored his history of racist statements and his decades of calls for tougher policing that have fueled his three presidential campaigns.Instead, during short remarks before a panel with Black residents of Detroit at the city’s 180 Church, Mr. Trump tried to cast Mr. Biden as anti-Black, focusing intently on the president’s role in shepherding the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a sweeping bill that criminal justice experts have said laid the groundwork for mass incarceration that disproportionately hurt America’s Black communities.Though Black voters have overwhelmingly favored Democrats since the civil rights era, recent polls have shown the party losing some of their support.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesMr. Trump, at one point, seemed determined to ensure that Mr. Biden’s role in the crime bill would be the event’s main takeaway. He falsely accused Mr. Biden of coining the term “super predators” and then insisted that those in the audience should not forget Mr. Biden’s role, as a U.S. senator, in championing the bill and helping pass it.“He was the one with the super predators,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Biden. “So just please remember that if you’re going to vote Democrat — because you shouldn’t vote Democrat.”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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    J.D. Vance’s Strange Turn to 1876

    The most favorable gloss you could give to Donald Trump’s effort to “Stop the Steal” is that it was an attempt to deal with real discrepancies in the 2020 presidential race as well as to satisfy those voters angry about the conduct of the election.This, in fact, was the argument made by Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio in a recent interview with my colleague Ross Douthat. Vance defended the conduct of the former president and his allies, and condemned the political class for its attempt to “try to take this very legitimate grievance over our most fundamental democratic act as a people, and completely suppress concerns about it.”Vance briefly analogized Trump’s attempt to contest the election to that of the disputed election of 1876, describing the latter as an example of what should have been done in 2020. “Here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people.”Let’s look at what happened in 1876. In that race, the Democrat, Gov. Samuel Tilden of New York, won a majority of the national popular vote but fell one vote short of a majority in the Electoral College. The Republican, Rutherford Hayes, was well behind in both. The trouble was 20 electoral votes in four states: Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina. In the three Southern states, where the elections were marred by fraud, violence and anti-Black intimidation, officials from both parties certified rival slates of electors.Hayes believed, probably correctly, that had there been “a fair election in the South, our electoral vote would reach two hundred and that we should have a large popular majority.” As the historian Michael Fitzgibbon Holt noted in “By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876,” “Had blacks been allowed to vote freely, Hayes easily would have carried all three states in dispute, Mississippi, and perhaps Alabama as well.”In the weeks following the election, Democrats and Republicans in those states would fight fierce legal battles on behalf of their respective candidates. In South Carolina, where an election for governor was in dispute as well, Democrats threatened to seize the statehouse by force. The predominantly Black Republican majority in the state legislature tried to certify the Republican candidate as the winner, and Democrats went as far as convening a separate legislature, where they crowned their candidate, Wade Hampton III, the victor.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 Team Set to Raise Record $28 Million at Hollywood Fund-Raiser

    President Biden flew from a gathering of world leaders in Italy to Los Angeles to appear along with Barack Obama, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jimmy Kimmel and others.President Biden’s campaign expects to collect more than $28 million at a gala Los Angeles fund-raiser packed with celebrities on Saturday night in a Hollywood show of force. Mr. Biden left a meeting of world leaders in Italy on Friday, skipping the final dinner to fly to Los Angeles for the fund-raiser, which will feature former President Barack Obama, the actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts and the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Air Force One touched down in Washington only long enough to refuel for the continuing flight and landed in Los Angeles on Saturday morning.The travel across 10 time zones illustrated the competing presidential and political demands on Mr. Biden’s time as the campaign against former President Donald J. Trump accelerates. Aides said the taxing schedule made clear that even at age 81, he still demonstrates the endurance to manage his many duties.The $28 million haul anticipated from Saturday’s event was set to break a party record, overtaking the $26 million Democrats brought in from a fund-raiser in March in New York featuring Mr. Biden along with Mr. Obama and former President Bill Clinton.While Mr. Biden and the Democrats have outpaced Mr. Trump’s team in donations for much of the campaign, Republicans pulled in $50.5 million at an event in Palm Beach, Fla., in April, and said they raised a total of $141 million in May, matching what Mr. Biden and Democrats raised in March and April combined.Tickets for the Democratic event at the Peacock Theater run from $250 for grass-roots supporters to $500,000 for a four-seat package. The film and television industry has long been a financial bulwark for the Democrats, but organizers hoped to use Saturday’s fund-raiser to bolster Mr. Biden’s coffers and demonstrate his strong support among some of the nation’s most recognized figures.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 Lawyers Argue Barring Attacks on F.B.I. Would Censor ‘Political Speech’

    In a filing, the lawyers in the classified documents case made an aggressive, and at times misleading, argument against prosecutors’ request for the judge to curb his attacks on agents.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump pushed back on Friday night in an aggressive — and at times misleading — way against an effort to curb his public attacks on the F.B.I. agents working on his classified documents case in Florida.In a 20-page court filing, the lawyers assailed prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, for seeking to limit Mr. Trump’s remarks about the F.B.I. on the eve of two consequential political events: the first presidential debate, scheduled for June 27, and the Republican National Convention, set to start on July 15.“The motion is a naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution,” the lawyers wrote.The dispute began last month when Mr. Smith’s team asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case, to revise Mr. Trump’s conditions of release to bar him from making any public remarks that might endanger agents involved in the proceeding.The request came days after Mr. Trump made a series of blatantly false statements, claiming that the F.B.I. had been prepared to shoot him when agents executed a search warrant in August 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. In that search, the agents discovered more than 100 classified documents. Mr. Trump is now charged with illegally retaining classified information and obstructing the government’s attempts to retrieve it.The distortions arose from a gross mischaracterization by the former president of a recently unsealed order for the Mar-a-Lago search that included boilerplate language intended to limit the use of deadly force when agents execute warrants.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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    Fauci Speaks His Mind on Trump’s Rages and Their ‘Complicated’ Relationship

    In a new book, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts a career advising seven presidents. The chapter about Donald J. Trump is titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.”Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cellphone to President Donald J. Trump screaming at him in an expletive-laden rant. He had incurred the president’s wrath by remarking that the vaccines under development might not provide long-lasting immunity.That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the brunt of the president’s rage,” Dr. Fauci writes in his forthcoming autobiography.Dr. Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Mr. Trump. But in the book, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he writes with candor about their relationship, which he describes as “complicated.”In a chapter entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Dr. Fauci described how Mr. Trump repeatedly told him he “loved” him while at the same time excoriating him with tirades flecked with four-letter words.“The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Dr. Fauci wrote. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive.)“I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”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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    ‘Apprentice in Wonderland’ Review: Ramin Setoodeh Dives Into Trump’s Theatrics

    APPRENTICE IN WONDERLAND: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, by Ramin SetoodehIn 2004, when the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh was 22, Newsweek assigned him to cover a new reality show starring Donald Trump. The show’s mix of product-hawking and emotional volatility was a hit; and in the years since “The Apprentice” first aired on NBC, Setoodeh would go on to become the co-editor in chief of Variety and Trump, of course, would go on to become president — arguably in large part because American audiences bought the mirage of the successful, no-nonsense businessman that Trump played on TV.So it isn’t surprising that Setoodeh, like so many others who have done rotations in Trump’s orbit, would eventually add a volume to the ever-expanding shelf of Trump books. Setoodeh concedes that “The Apprentice” has already “been endlessly analyzed, debated, referenced and credited as a major factor” in Trump’s 2016 victory, and he promises that “Apprentice in Wonderland” will do something new: “What’s been lost in most of the conversations about the show is the show itself — not just a symbol, but a seminal moment in the history of popular culture.”This is one of those my-book-will-be-different statements that sounds blandly unobjectionable on the face of it, but then turns out not to make much sense. “The Apprentice” was “a seminal moment in the history of popular culture” precisely because its star became president. The “show itself” was, from Setoodeh’s own recounting of it, just another reality television product: addictive, ultra-processed fare that could be churned out on the cheap. Trump’s stint in reality TV has been squeezed many times over for significance. What can this book tell us that we don’t know already?Setoodeh did what he could to gather material. He interviewed Trump six times between May 2021 and November 2023, and talked to numerous people who worked for or appeared on the show. In other words, he had access. But access — especially when it comes to a 20-year-old reality show built around voluble people who crave attention — can yield only so much.Most of what sources confided to Setoodeh are variations on the many stories about “The Apprentice” that have appeared over the years. We have been repeatedly told that Trump was less decisive and articulate than the show’s editors made him out to be, and that he made vulgar comments about women. (Not to mention that he was recently found liable for sexual abuse and defamation by a jury that ordered him to pay his accuser, the writer E. Jean Carroll, $83.3 million.) One “Apprentice” contestant, Jennifer Murphy, says that Trump kissed her, but that she wasn’t offended. “I think he looked at me in a way like he does his daughter,” she tells Setoodeh. “But also, I did think he had the hots for me a little bit.”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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    A Robert F. Kennedy Jr. le va bien con los latinos en las encuestas

    Los analistas atribuyen la fuerza del candidato independiente al notable reconocimiento de su apellido y a la frustración con los dos principales contendientes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Cuando Joe Biden y Donald Trump se enfrentaron en las elecciones presidenciales de 2020, Alexis Figueroa, trabajador de un hospital de Phoenix, afirmó que habría votado por Biden, porque parecía el menos controversial de los dos candidatos.Pero ahora que esos dos hombres están de nuevo en la papeleta en noviembre, Figueroa está considerando una tercera opción: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Figueroa, que ahora tiene 20 años, dijo sobre Kennedy: “Va a por los que acaban de empezar a votar, la generación más joven a la que no se le escucha”, y añadió que no quería votar por Biden porque no creía que el presidente hubiera cumplido muchas de sus promesas.En una contienda en la que el entusiasmo por los dos principales contendientes es bajo, más votantes latinos como Figueroa se están inclinando hacia candidatos de terceros partidos, según muestran encuestas recientes. Para los encuestadores y los observadores políticos, Kennedy, que está presentando una candidatura presidencial independiente con pocas posibilidades, está obteniendo resultados sorpresivamente positivos entre los votantes hispanos en los estados indecisos, aunque hasta ahora solo está oficialmente en las papeletas de California, Utah, Míchigan, Oklahoma, Hawái y Delaware.Las encuestas muestran que Kennedy está llevándose apoyo que solía ser para Trump y Biden, pero cuando se trata de los latinos, quienes tienden a votar a los demócratas, podría suponer una mayor amenaza para Biden.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 Addresses Inflation in New Ad

    Inflation is one of President Biden’s biggest weaknesses with voters heading into November, and former President Donald J. Trump has hammered him on the issue relentlessly.But Mr. Biden is trying to fight back: His campaign released a new advertisement on Thursday featuring him talking about his working-class roots and expressing sympathy for Americans struggling with high prices.The ad, produced in English and Spanish, is part of a seven-figure June media purchase targeted to Hispanic voters. It will run on television, radio and digital platforms across the battleground states, according to the Biden campaign, and is debuting on a day when Mr. Trump is set to speak in Washington to the Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group.Mr. Biden has built a sizable fund-raising advantage over Mr. Trump and has used his campaign war chest to dominate the airwaves. But the former president still leads in many polls, and he has made significant progress with Hispanic voters since his defeat in 2020. He is also making up ground in fund-raising.What the ad saysThe 30-second ad begins with a voice-over from Mr. Biden recounting his family leaving their hometown so his father could find work, paired with a black-and-white image of people carrying suitcases.“I know what it’s like to struggle,” the president says. “I know many American families are fighting every day to get by.”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