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      Harris, Before CNN Interview Runs, Presses Attack Against Trump in Georgia

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      Vice President Kamala Harris, who has spent the last few weeks trying to define herself and her life story for voters, turned on Thursday to describing the version of former President Donald J. Trump that she wants Americans to see, saying his candidacy represented a “full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.”At a campaign rally in Savannah, Ga., Ms. Harris accused him of wanting to curtail abortion access, cut Social Security and Medicare, and give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires. She said his plan for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods amounted to an unfair tax on working families.“Unlike Donald Trump, I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first,” Ms. Harris said to a crowd of thousands at a basketball arena. She added, “We’ve got some work to do, because we know Donald Trump has a very different plan.”Her audience broke into chants of “We’re not going back,” which has quickly become a favorite slogan at her rallies.Ms. Harris made her appearance hours before her first major interview since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee was set to be broadcast on CNN. She had faced rising pressure to hold an interview with a top journalist, with Republicans accusing her of hiding from tough questions.In early clips of the interview released by CNN on Thursday afternoon, Ms. Harris pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and curtly rejected Mr. Trump’s recent questioning of her racial identity.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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      At Arlington, Trump Returns to the Politics of the ‘Forever Wars’

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      The 2024 presidential race is the first in 24 years without a major American ground war, but Donald J. Trump continues to stoke division over the post-9/11 conflicts that helped give rise to his movement.Follow along with the latest election updates as Harris and Trump hit the campaign trail.The extraordinary altercation on Monday between Trump campaign aides and an Arlington National Cemetery official over political photography on sacred military ground is playing out in a hyperpartisan moment when war records and former President Donald J. Trump’s respect for military service are already up for debate.But the conflict at Arlington Cemetery’s Section 60, reserved for those recently killed in America’s wars abroad, points to a deeper issue for Mr. Trump and his core foreign policy identity: The 2024 presidential campaign between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris is the first in 24 years to unfold without an active American ground war.Mr. Trump’s rise in 2016 signified a major break from the foreign policy orthodoxy of both major parties, which believed in a U.S.-led internationalism and the projection of force abroad, whether it was the wars launched by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq or the conflicts embraced by Democrats to thwart ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia and to end a dictatorship in Libya. That year, it was the Republican, Mr. Trump, who spoke of ending war, and the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, who bore the unpopular mantle of military aggression with her vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq and her muscular diplomacy as secretary of state.Mr. Trump has used the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan during the Biden administration to resurrect his critiques of the “forever wars” that in part powered his movement. Now, he warns of a looming “World War III,” promises to end the war in Ukraine before he is inaugurated and brags that his relationships with authoritarian leaders like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea will restore stability and allow him to focus on securing domestic tranquillity.Mr. Trump is the candidate of peace through strength, said Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, while Ms. Harris is “the candidate of war because as ‘the last person in the room’ with Biden before the Afghanistan debacle, we are closer than ever to a world war than any other time in the last 50 years.”But to Mr. Trump’s political opponents, his arguments are having trouble sticking in part because voters do not believe his warnings of imminent American warfare.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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      Where Does Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan Stand? Here’s What to Know.

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      The Supreme Court refused to allow a key part of President Biden’s student debt plan to move forward. Here’s what’s left of it, and who could still benefit.President Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.Other elements of Mr. Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders.But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:Who was eligible for SAVE?Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than eight million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.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 Campaign Filming at Arlington Cemetery Dismayed Family of Green Beret

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      The family of a Green Beret who died by suicide after serving eight combat tours and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery expressed concern on Wednesday that Donald J. Trump’s campaign had filmed his gravesite without permission as Mr. Trump stood in an area where campaign photography isn’t allowed.Relatives of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano issued their statement two days after Mr. Trump’s visit, which also included a confrontation between members of the Trump campaign and an Arlington employee. The former president’s campaign took video in a heavily restricted section of the cemetery known as Section 60, which is largely reserved for the fallen veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.A woman who works at the cemetery filed an incident report with the military authorities over the altercation. But the official, who has not been identified, later declined to press charges. Military officials said she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.Sergeant Marckesano died on July 7, 2020, after moving to Washington to begin a job at the Pentagon. He had three children, and friends said he had chronic post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in combat. He earned Silver and Bronze Stars during his service. His gravesite is adjacent to that of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, a Marine who was killed in the 2021 bombing at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.The Hoover family granted permission to the Trump team to film and take photographs at the gravesite; the Marckesano family did not, and filming and photographing at the gravesite for political purposes is a violation of federal law, according to cemetery officials. Yet Sergeant Marckesano’s grave was shown in photos from the visit that were published online. A video was posted to Mr. Trump’s TikTok account featuring footage from the Section 60 visit and the gravestones from behind, with narration criticizing the handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.In a statement from Sergeant Marckesano’s relatives after being contacted by The New York Times, his sister, Michele, said, “We fully support Staff Sergeant Darin Hoover’s family and the other families in their quest for answers and accountability regarding the Afghanistan withdrawal and the tragedy at Abbey Gate.”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 Team Clashed With Official at Arlington National Cemetery

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      Members of Donald J. Trump’s campaign team and an official at Arlington National Cemetery confronted each other during the former president’s visit to the cemetery on Monday, the military cemetery said in a statement on Tuesday.The altercation was prompted, according to Trump campaign officials, by the presence of a photographer in a section of the cemetery where American troops who were killed in recent wars are buried. The cemetery released a statement saying that federal law prohibits political campaigning or “election-related” activities within Army cemeteries, including by photographers.An official with the cemetery tried to “physically block” members of Mr. Trump’s team, Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement. Mr. Cheung added that the cemetery official was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and that the campaign was prepared to release footage of the confrontation to support its account of the clash. The campaign did not provide that footage after several requests.Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign adviser, added in a separate statement that the cemetery official was “a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”Cemetery officials did not provide their own account of the encounter, saying instead that “there was an incident, and a report was filed.”The cemetery added that it had “reinforced and widely shared” to the Trump campaign the federal laws prohibiting campaign activities by photographers “or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.”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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      First Jan. 6 Rioter to Enter Capitol Gets More Than 4 Years in Prison

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      Michael Sparks, 47, was the first rioter to breach the Capitol and among the first to be confronted by the U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman.The first rioter to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison, federal prosecutors announced.In March, a federal jury found Michael Sparks, 47, of Elizabethtown, Ky., guilty on felony charges of obstructing an official proceeding and civil disorder and several misdemeanor charges for being on the premises of the Capitol building on Jan. 6.On Tuesday, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced him to 53 months in prison and ordered him to pay a $2,000 fine. Mr. Sparks will be on supervised release for three years after his prison term ends, prosecutors said.Video footage presented in court showed that Mr. Sparks entering the Capitol building at 2:13 p.m. on Jan. 6 through a window near a door leading into the Senate Wing that rioters had smashed with a police shield.Mr. Sparks was among the initial group of rioters who were confronted by Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer, who helped hold off the mob from reaching members of Congress.The rioters chased Mr. Goodman up a flight of stairs as they demanded to know where Congress was certifying the results of the election, prosecutors said.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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      Former Aides to Bush, Romney and McCain Back Harris Over Trump

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      More than 200 people who previously worked for President George W. Bush and Senators Mitt Romney and John McCain have signed a letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.Many of the more prominent signatories, including a chief of staff, a legislative director and a deputy campaign manager for Mr. McCain, had signed a letter supporting President Biden in the 2020 election. Others work for organizations like The Bulwark and the Lincoln Project that oppose former President Donald J. Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party.But the former Republican officials’ renewed support of the Democratic ticket reflects how Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party under his leadership, as well as deep and persistent opposition to his candidacy from those who served Republican presidential candidates.Mr. Romney, Mr. Bush and other high-profile Republicans skipped the Republican nominating convention last month, while the Harris campaign made significant efforts to highlight the support of anti-Trump Republicans — as well as former members of Mr. Trump’s staff who no longer support him — with speaking slots at the Democratic convention last week.“We have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz,” the letter said. “That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”The signatories include Mark Salter, a former chief of staff for Mr. McCain; Joe Donoghue, the senator’s former legislative director; Reed Galen, his deputy campaign manager and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project; Mike Murphy, a former McCain campaign strategist; Jean Becker, a chief of staff for George H.W. Bush; and Jim Swift, a senior editor of The Bulwark. More

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      Kamala Harris and a New Economic Vision

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      Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines.In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting. The question is, what comes next?One influential school of thought, advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, argues for increasing the supply of essentials such as housing, health care and clean energy, in part by using government to break the choke points that make these goods too scarce and costly in the first place. This has truth — the much-criticized million-dollar-toilet problem gets at something real.But it doesn’t fully reflect the realities of how powerful interests hold captive parts of our economy, and then our political system. A second intellectual camp focuses on these forces, and its avatars include Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and the modern antitrust movement, and the U.A.W. leader Shawn Fain and re-energized labor unions. Yet it, too, is incomplete as a governing wisdom, as it lacks affirmative answers for our largest challenges, like how to decarbonize quickly and at scale, and how to contend with a rising geopolitical competitor in China.Ms. Harris’s early proposals suggest she is drawing from both strands in telling a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve. Put differently, her slogan “We’re not going back” might well extend beyond political and social rights to include a different brand of economics.This new story has two themes — call them “build” and “balance.” The first focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims; the second corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes are fairer and need less after-the-fact redistribution.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