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    Harris Hopes a New Playbook Will Neutralize G.O.P. Attacks on Immigration

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

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    Trump Claims He Has Helicopter Trip Records and Threatens to Sue

    Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday afternoon vehemently maintained that he had once been in a dangerous helicopter landing with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, and insisted he had records to prove it, despite Mr. Brown’s denial.In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as he landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, Mont., because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Mr. Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Mr. Brown had made together. Mr. Trump was expected to keep his rally schedule on Friday as planned, boarding a smaller plane to complete the journey.Mr. Brown denied on Thursday that he had ever flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It appeared Mr. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, with whom Mr. Trump traveled by helicopter in 2018 while surveying wildfire damage in the state. But Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”Willie Brown, who was a boyfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 1990s, knew Mr. Trump as a potential business associate during those years, when Mr. Trump, then a New York developer, was working on new projects. A biography of Ms. Harris, “Kamala’s Way: An American Life,” reported that Mr. Trump had sent his private plane for Mr. Brown and Ms. Harris in 1994 to fly them from Boston to New York City. “We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article. When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.He has also told the helicopter story before, in his 2023 book, “Letters to Trump,” in which he published letters to him from a number of people, including Mr. Brown. In the book, Mr. Trump wrote, “We actually had an emergency landing in a helicopter together. It was a little scary for both of us, but thankfully we made it.” More

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    Harris Has a Big Campaign Launch — and Big Tests Ahead

    Fresh challenges in the offing could determine how long the vice president’s honeymoon will last.If you are Vice President Kamala Harris, another Democrat or any other person who happens to want Harris to become president, the last two weeks and five days have probably felt like a dream.There is a tougher reality for Harris, though, belied by the euphoric haze.The contest between Harris and former President Donald Trump remains remarkably close, and she is tied with him in must-win states like Wisconsin and Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling averages. Trump’s allies are sharpening their attacks. And in a candidacy measured in days not months, she has yet to face the scrutiny of an interview or release a detailed vision for her potential presidency.Every presidential campaign is a series of tests. Can you excite voters? Can you raise money? For Harris, the answer to both of those questions so far is yes. Her party coalesced around her instantly. She has smashed fund-raising records and held overflowing rallies, and she seems to be tugging key swing states her way.But as Harris wraps up a battleground campaign tour with her brand-new running mate this weekend and turns her attention toward the Democratic National Convention this month, fresh challenges are in the offing. And the short campaign leaves a candidate who is still introducing herself to voters with little time for do-overs.“She will be tested,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said. “She’ll be tested by the Trump campaign. She’ll be tested by the press, and just by everyday events.”That may be why Harris has been careful to sound a note of caution to supporters who might prefer to luxuriate in the optimism.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 dijo que estuvo a punto de morir en un helicóptero, pero eso no sucedió

    No hubo aterrizaje de emergencia, y los pasajeros del helicóptero nunca corrieron ningún tipo de peligro, según el gobernador Gavin Newsom, quien también estaba en el vuelo.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El expresidente Donald Trump contó una anécdota el jueves que dejó boquiabiertos a todos: era sobre cómo estuvo a punto de morir en un viaje en helicóptero con Willie Brown, el expolítico californiano y exnovio de su rival, la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris.Solo había un problema con el relato. O quizá dos. O quizá tres.En el vuelo en helicóptero no viajaba el famoso exalcalde de San Francisco. Era el gobernador Jerry Brown, exgobernador de California, quien se parece muy poco a Willie Brown.Tampoco hubo aterrizaje de emergencia, y los pasajeros del helicóptero nunca corrieron ningún tipo de peligro, según el gobernador Gavin Newsom, quien también estaba en el vuelo.Jerry Brown, quien dejó el cargo en enero de 2019, dijo a través de un portavoz: “No hubo ningún aterrizaje de emergencia y ninguna conversación sobre Kamala Harris”.“Yo digo que es pura mentira”, dijo Newsom, riendo a carcajadas.El relato erróneo del expresidente, pronunciado durante una rueda de prensa en su club Mar-a-Lago en Florida, se produjo en respuesta a un periodista que le hizo una pregunta tendenciosa sobre la relación de Harris con Willie Brown, y si Trump pensaba que podría haber tenido algo que ver con su trayectoria profesional.

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