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      Biden to Travel to Minnesota to Highlight Rural Investments

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      The president’s push to focus attention on the domestic economy comes as his administration has been dealing with events overseas after the terrorist attacks in Israel.The White House on Wednesday will announce more than $5 billion in funding for agriculture, broadband and clean energy needs in sparsely populated parts of the country as President Biden travels to Minnesota to kick off an administration-wide tour of rural communities.The president’s efforts to focus attention on the domestic economy ahead of next year’s campaign come after three weeks in which his administration has been seized by events overseas following the terrorist attacks in Israel and the state’s subsequent military action in Gaza.The trip will take place as Mr. Biden is urging Congress to quickly pass a $105 billion funding package that includes emergency aid to Israel and Ukraine, two conflicts he has described as threats to democracy around the globe.But the president and his aides are well aware that his hopes for a second term are likely to be determined closer to home. Rural voters like the ones he will address at a corn, soybean and hog farm south of Minneapolis are increasingly voting Republican. A recent poll showed that most voters had heard little or nothing about a health care and clean energy law that is the cornerstone of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda. And the president even faces a challenge within his own party, from Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who announced his long-shot presidential bid last week.Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, declined on Tuesday to speak about campaign issues, citing the Hatch Act, which limits political activity by federal officials, but said that Mr. Biden “loves Minnesota.” Administration officials have said Mr. Biden’s trip was planned before Mr. Phillips announced his candidacy.The White House has called the next two weeks of events the “Investing in Rural America Event Series.” It includes more than a dozen trips by Mr. Biden as well as cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials. The White House said in a statement that the tour would highlight federal investments that “are bringing new revenue to farms, increased economic development in rural towns and communities, and more opportunity throughout the country.”Mr. Biden will be joined on Wednesday by Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary. Against the backdrop of a family farm that uses techniques to make crops more resilient to climate change, they will announce $1.7 billion for farmers nationwide to adopt so-called climate-smart agriculture practices.Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will join President Biden in Minnesota and later travel to Indiana, Wyoming and Colorado.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesOther funding announcements include $1.1 billion in loans and grants to upgrade infrastructure in rural communities; $2 billion in investments as part of a program that helps rural governments work more closely with federal agencies on economic development projects; $274 million to expand high-speed internet infrastructure; and $145 million to expand access to wind, solar and other renewable energy, according to a White House fact sheet.“Young people in rural communities shouldn’t have to leave home to find opportunity,” Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said Tuesday on a call with reporters.She said federal investments were creating “a pathway for the next generation to keep their roots in rural America.”Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, said he expected Mr. Biden to face serious headwinds in rural communities, in large part because of inflation levels.“It is a little challenging, there’s no denying, when prices go up,” Mr. Walz said. “The politics have gotten a little angrier. I think folks are feeling a little behind.”But Mr. Walz also praised Mr. Biden for spending time in rural communities. “Democrats need to show up,” he said.Kenan Fikri, the director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank, said the Biden administration had made sizable investments over the past two and a half years in agriculture, broadband and other rural priorities.“The administration has a lot to show for its economic development efforts in rural communities,” he said, but “whether voters will credit Biden for a strong economic performance is another question.”Later in the week Mr. Vilsack will travel to Indiana, Wyoming and Colorado to speak with agricultural leaders and discuss land conservation. Deb Haaland, the interior secretary, will go to her home state of New Mexico to highlight water infrastructure investments.Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm will be in Arizona to talk about the electricity grid and renewable energy investment in the rural Southwest.The veterans affairs secretary, Denis McDonough, plans to visit Iowa to discuss improving access to medical care for veterans in rural areas. Isabel Guzman, who leads the Small Business Administration, will travel to Georgia to talk about loans for rural small businesses.Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, will go to New Hampshire to promote how community colleges help students from rural areas. Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, will be in North Carolina to talk about health care access in rural areas. More

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      Some of the Lawyers Who May Fill a Second Trump Administration

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      Donald Trump’s allies are hoping to install a different species of legal gatekeeper throughout the federal government. Here are some of the potential prospects.Election Day is a year away, but key allies of former President Donald J. Trump are already thinking about staffing a potential administration, including by filling White House and agency legal positions with aggressive and ideologically like-minded lawyers.Trump allies are preparing to populate a new administration with a different breed of lawyer — a departure from the type that stymied part of his first-term agenda and that despite their mainstream conservative credentials are seen as too cautious by people close to the former president. They are seeking lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to use edgy theories to advance his cause.It is too early to say with any certainty whom Mr. Trump would select were he to win a second term starting in 2025. But several conservative nonprofits, staffed by people who are likely to take on senior White House positions if there is a second Trump administration, have been putting together lists of prospects.At Project 2025, a well-funded effort by the Heritage Foundation to prepare personnel and policy for the next conservative administration, John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, is part of a team searching for potential lawyers.A person familiar with the Heritage 2025 project said it was listing multiple options for every position. Some of the names under early and unofficial consideration are:Joseph E. Schmitz as the Pentagon’s top lawyer. A Bush-era Pentagon inspector general, he argued after the 2020 election that the Supreme Court or the vice president, Mike Pence, should intervene to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss.Joseph E. Schmitz in 2004.Jamie-Andrea Yanak/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Could the Next Republican President Take Us to War With Mexico?

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      As president, Donald Trump reportedly floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.” When his defense secretary, Mark Esper, raised various objections, he recalls that Mr. Trump responded by saying the bombing could be done “quietly”: “No one would know it was us.”Well, word got out and the craze caught on. Now many professed rebel Republicans, such as Representatives Mike Waltz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, along with several old G.O.P. war horses, like Senator Lindsey Graham, want to bomb Mexico. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said he would send special forces into Mexico on “Day 1” of his presidency, targeting drug cartels and fentanyl labs. In May, Representative Michael McCaul, another Republican, introduced a bill pushing for fentanyl to be listed as a chemical weapon, like sarin gas, under the Chemical Weapons Convention. This move targeted Mexican cartels and Chinese companies, which are accused of providing the ingredients to the cartels to manufacture fentanyl.Of course, the United States is already fighting, and has been for half a century, a highly militarized drug war — in the Andes, Central America and, yes, Mexico — a war as ineffective as it has been cruel. Hitting fentanyl labs won’t do anything to slow the bootlegged versions of the drug into the United States but could further destabilize northern Mexico and the borderlands, worsening the migrant refugee crisis.Addiction to fentanyl, a drug that is 50 times stronger than heroin, affects red and blue states alike, from West Virginia to Maine, with overdoses annually killing tens of thousands of Americans. It’s a bipartisan crisis. Yet in our topsy-turvy culture wars, there’s a belief that fentanyl is targeting the Republican base. J.D. Vance rose to national fame in 2016 with a book that blamed the white rural poor’s cultural pathologies for their health crises, including drug addiction. In 2022, during his successful run for Ohio’s Senate seat, Mr. Vance, speaking with a right-wing conspiracy theorist, said that “if you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” Mr. Vance’s poll numbers shot up after that, and other Republicans in close House and Senate races took up the issue, linking fentanyl deaths to Democratic policies on border security and crime and calling for military action against Mexico.The Mexican government is in fact cooperating with the United States to limit the export of the drug, recently passing legislation limiting the import of chemicals required for its production and stepping up prosecution of fentanyl producers. And even some of the cartels have reportedly spread the message to their foot soldiers, telling them to stop producing the drug or face the consequences. Still, in a show of Trumpian excess, Mexico is depicted as the root of all our problems. Bombing Sinaloa in 2024 is what building a border wall was in 2016: political theatrics.The United States is no novice when it comes to bombing Mexico. “A little more grape,” or ammunition, Gen. Zachary Taylor supposedly ordered as his men fired their cannons on Mexican troops. That was during America’s 1846-48 war on Mexico, which also included the assault on Veracruz, killing hundreds. Washington took more than half of Mexico’s territory during that conflict.Conservative politicians have used Mexico to gin up fears of an enemy to the south ever since the Mexican American War, which made Zachary Taylor a national hero. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs DivisionReactionaries have fixated on the border for over a century, since before the Civil War, when Mexico provided asylum for runaway slaves. Over the years, newspapers and politicians have regularly demanded that Mexico be punished for any number of sins, from failing to protect property rights to providing refuge for escaped slaves, Indian raiders, cattle rustlers, bootleggers, smugglers, drug fiends, political radicals, draft dodgers and Japanese and German agents. There was a touch of evil about Mexico, as Orson Welles titled his 1958 film set on the borderlands.Long before the Russian Revolution, hostility directed at the Mexican Revolution, which started in 1910, gave rise to a new, more militant, ideological conservatism. U.S. oilmen invested in Mexico blamed Jews for financing the revolution and raised money from U.S. Catholics to fund counterrevolutionaries, some of whom were fascists. From 1910 to 1920, private vigilante groups like the K.K.K., local police departments and the Texas Rangers conducted a reign of terror across the border states that killed several thousand ethnic Mexicans, some of whom were trying to organize a union or trying to vote.Trumpism’s ginned-up racism against Mexicans flows from this history. It remains to be seen whether calls to bomb Mexico’s fentanyl labs will play well in the coming election cycle. Yet the rhetoric itself is a dangerous escalation of an old idea: that international narcotics production, trafficking and consumption can be deterred through military means.Today’s Republican renegades say they represent a break from the “globalist” bipartisan consensus that governed the country through the Cold War and the decades that followed. But aside from some opposition to military aid to Ukraine, Republicans largely toe the line when it comes to the use of military force abroad. Few Republican dissidents dare question the establishment consensus on ongoing military aid to Israel, especially in light of its current siege of Gaza. In this sense, calls to bomb Mexico are a distraction, blowing smoke to hide the fact that the G.O.P. offers nothing new. Republicans certainly aren’t the peace party, as some of Mr. Trump’s isolationist backers would have us believe. All they offer is a shriller war party.(As if to illustrate the point, as Republicans shout about Mexico, the Biden administration has quietly struck a deal with Ecuador that will allow the United States to deploy troops to the country and patrol the waters off its coast, the Washington Examiner recently reported.)Even bombing another country in the name of fighting drugs is hardly innovative. In 1989, George H.W. Bush used the U.S. military to act on the federal indictment of Manuel Noriega, Panama’s ruler, for drug trafficking. In Operation Just Cause, the United States dropped hundreds of bombs on Panama City, including on one of its poorest neighborhoods, El Chorrillo, setting homes ablaze and killing an unknown number of its residents.Bombing another country in the name of fighting drugs is hardly innovative. As early as 1989, the United States was dropping hundreds of bombs on Panama, leaving burned cars and destroyed buildings in their wake.Steve Starr/Corbis, via Getty ImagesFor all their posturing on how they represent a break with the past, today’s bomb-happy Republicans are merely calling for an expansion of policies already in place. Republicans have introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would in effect bind the war on drugs to the war on terrorism and give the president authority to strike deep into Mexico. Mr. Graham also says he wants “a Plan Mexico more lethal than Plan Colombia.”Calls to inflict on Mexico something more lethal than Plan Colombia should chill the soul. Initiated by Bill Clinton in 1999, Plan Colombia and its successor strategies funneled roughly $12 billion into Colombia, mostly to security forces who were charged with eliminating cocaine production at its source. Their campaign included, yes, the aerial bombing of cocaine labs.Conflict in Colombia is a longstanding phenomenon, but Plan Colombia helped kick off a wave of terror that killed tens of thousands of civilians and drove millions from their homes. The Colombian military murdered thousands of civilians and falsely reported them as guerrillas, as a way of boosting its body count to keep the funds flowing. Massacre followed massacre, often committed by the Colombian military working in tandem with paramilitaries. At the end of last year, Colombia had the fourth-largest population that was internally displaced because of conflict and violence, behind only Syria, Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo.For what? More Colombian acreage was planted with coca in 2022 than in 1999, a year before the start of Plan Colombia. Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer.Even after years of attempts to fumigate and destroy cocaine plantations in Colombia, the country remains the world’s largest cocaine producer. Olga Castano/Getty ImagesPlan Colombia did weaken Colombian drug producers and disrupt transportation routes. But it also incentivized Central American and Mexican gangs and cartels to get in the game. Drug-related violence that had largely been confined to the Andes blasted up through the Central American isthmus into Mexico.Then in 2006, with support from the Bush administration, Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, did what today’s Republican would-be bombardiers want Mexico to do: declare war on the cartels. Again, the result was catastrophic. Estimates vary, but by the end of Mr. Calderón’s six-year term, about 60,000 Mexicans had been killed in drug-war-related violence. By 2011, an estimated 230,000 people had been displaced, and about half of them crossed the border into the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans, including social activists, were disappeared, or had gone missing. The cartels, meanwhile, grew more profitable and powerful.In the wake of this failure, the current Mexican government, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has de-escalated the conflict to focus more on policing and prosecution. Other Latin American leaders, across the political spectrum, want to call off the war on drugs altogether and begin advancing decriminalization and treating excess drug use as a social problem.If the drug war is escalated, it would lead to more corruption, more deaths and more refugees desperate to cross into the United States. Jose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersFor now, calls to bomb Mexico are mostly primary-season bluster. But if a Republican were to win the White House in 2024, he or she would be under pressure to make good on the promise to launch military strikes on Mexico. Those efforts are not just bound to fail; they also could even make matters worse. Fentanyl labs are hardly complicated operations — with a couple of plastic drums and a pill press, one cook in a hazmat suit can turn out thousands of doses in a day. Trying to eliminate them with drones and missiles would be as effective as bombing bodegas in the Bronx. Hit one lab and five more pop up, perhaps in more populated areas.Further militarizing Mexico’s drug war would lead to more corruption, more deaths, more refugees desperate to cross the border. And those displaced, if Republicans had their way and Mexican cartels were classified as terrorist organizations, would have a better shot at claiming asylum, since they would be fleeing a formally designated war zone.With each escalation of the drug war, its horrors have inched closer to the United States. Now war mongering threatens to destroy the fragile movement among U.S. policymakers toward a more humane approach to drug use, that possession and use of drugs shouldn’t bring draconian prison sentences and that addiction should be treated as an illness, rooted in class inequality. Republican calls to go hard against narcotics below the border can’t but rebound above it, leading back to a callous public policy that treats addicts as enemies. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said of another war, the bombs we drop there explode here.Greg Grandin (@GregGrandin) is a professor of history at Yale and the author of seven books, most recently, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A Primary Fight Brews Over Jamaal Bowman’s Stance on Israel

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      Representative Jamaal Bowman’s calls for Israel to stand down on Gaza may fuel a perilous primary challenge for one of the left’s brightest stars.Representative Jamaal Bowman was already facing blowback from Jewish leaders in his district and a growing primary threat for bucking his party’s stance on Israel.But on Friday, he did not show any hesitation as he grabbed the megaphone at a cease-fire rally back home in the New York City suburbs to demand what only a dozen other members of Congress have: that both Israel and Hamas lay down their arms.He condemned Hamas’s brutal murder of 1,400 Israelis. He condemned the governments of the United States and Israel for facilitating what he called the “erasure” of Palestinian lives. And with Palestinian flags waving, Mr. Bowman said, “I am ashamed, quite ashamed to be a member of Congress at times when Congress doesn’t value every single life.”Forget about retreating to safer political ground. In the weeks since Hamas’s assault, Mr. Bowman, an iconoclastic former middle-school principal with scant foreign policy experience, has repeatedly inserted himself into the center of a major fight fracturing his party’s left between uncompromising pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions.Mr. Bowman frames his actions as a moral imperative, but they are already courting political peril. Local Jewish leaders have denounced his approach as blaming both sides for the gravest attack against their people since the Holocaust. A potentially formidable primary challenger, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, has begun taking steps toward entering the race.Even some Jewish supporters publicly defending Mr. Bowman have grown wary. When a group of constituents who call themselves “Jews for Jamaal” held a private call with the congressman last week, they warned him he should be prepared to pay a political price if he does not support a multibillion-dollar military aid package for Israel now pending before Congress, according to three people on the call.Similar coalitions are lining up primary fights across the country against other members of Democrats’ left-wing “Squad” over their views on Israel, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.But perhaps no race promises to be so explosive, expensive or symbolically charged a test of the Democratic Party’s direction as a potential matchup between Mr. Bowman and Mr. Latimer.Mr. Bowman won his seat three years ago by defeating the staunchly pro-Israel chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot L. Engel, in a primary. And the district he represents is home both to one of the best-organized Jewish communities in the country and a nonwhite majority who sees him as a paragon of progressive Black leadership.The anger toward Mr. Bowman could scarcely have come at a worse time for him. Just last Thursday, he pleaded guilty to setting off a false fire alarm in a House office building as he raced to a vote last month. To avoid jail time, he agreed to pay a $1,000 fine and apologize.Mr. Bowman’s allies — including many Jewish ones — insist his position on the Israel-Hamas war will be vindicated. They argue that he is speaking for many of the district’s Black and Latino voters who identify with the plight of Palestinians, and that he is voicing the conflicting views of many American Jews.“He is not ‘anti-Israel,’ and to refer to him that way is to deliberately distort his record, which includes many votes in favor of military and economic aid to Israel,” 40 members of the Jews for Jamaal group wrote in a recent letter warning Mr. Latimer that a primary would be “needlessly wasteful and terribly divisive.”On the call with the group earlier this month, Mr. Bowman framed his position as a matter of personal conviction. He said he would never be Representative Ritchie Torres, a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat who represents a neighboring district. But he also said it was unfair to lump him together with lawmakers like Ms. Tlaib or Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who have taken far more antagonistic stances toward Israel.Unlike them, Mr. Bowman has voted in the past to help fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. In late 2021, he traveled to Israel on a trip organized by J Street, a mainstream liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that still backs him. Both actions drew sharp blowback from allies on the left and prompted Mr. Bowman to quit the Democratic Socialists of America.In a statement, Mr. Bowman said that he would “always stand with the Jewish community” but also would work to bridge differences among his constituents, the majority of whom remain more focused on issues like health care and gun safety.The district, which includes more than half of Westchester County, is about 50 percent Black and Latino, according to census data; studies suggest around 10 percent of residents are Jewish, though Jews probably make up two to three times that share of the Democratic primary electorate.“True security for everyone in the region begins with the de-escalation of violence, which means the immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas, a cease-fire, humanitarian aid to Israel and Gaza,” and avoiding military escalation, Mr. Bowman said.Since Hamas’s attack, though, some Jewish leaders in Westchester said Mr. Bowman has been too quick to move past the carnage overseas and growing fears about antisemitism closer to home. They took particular offense last week when he was one of just 10 House lawmakers to vote against a bipartisan resolution standing with Israel.The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby that has spent millions of dollars targeting Mr. Bowman’s left-leaning allies in recent cycles, has privately offered its support to Mr. Latimer. So have local business leaders who detest Mr. Bowman’s critiques of capitalism and his vote against President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.And two dozen local rabbis have condemned his calls for a cease-fire as “a position of appeasement toward Hamas’s terror regime.”“Since being elected, Bowman has led the effort to erode support for Israel on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic Party,” they wrote in a recent letter urging Mr. Latimer to run.George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, has been encouraged by a pro-Israel group to challenge Mr. Bowman.Jonah Markowitz for The New York TimesIn an interview, Mr. Latimer, 69, said he would wait until mid November to announce his plans. But he described watching with growing alarm as protesters shaking college campuses cleave his party and, in his view, abandon Jewish Americans.“There are people in my county who are solid progressive Democrats,” said Mr. Latimer, who is Catholic. “But they also support the State of Israel, and they are frustrated that there is an element of the left that doesn’t see the historic oppression of the Jewish people in the same light as we’ve seen oppression of other groups.”Hours after Mr. Bowman spoke on Friday at the rally — organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist group — Mr. Latimer stood at the bimah of Kol Ami in White Plains to offer his unequivocal support to the Jewish congregation. He did not mention Mr. Bowman but drew subtle distinctions.“It was not some event that happened because of years of something else,” he said of Hamas’s attack. “It was the express hatred of Hamas toward Jewish people because they do not want Jewish people to live.”Mr. Bowman, for his part, has yet to visit a synagogue since the attack. His office indicated it is planning a series of meetings focused on strategies to combat hate.Mr. Latimer appears to have picked up at least one influential Democratic supporter even before entering the race.In an interview, Mr. Engel said he had resisted publicly criticizing Mr. Bowman since his defeat so as not to look bitter. But he said his successor had been an “embarrassment” who was “particularly awful” on Israel.“George is a class act; he works hard and he would really attempt to represent the people,” he said. “Whereas Bowman is more comfortable demonstrating, picketing and pulling fire alarms.” More

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      Why Doug Burgum Is Staying in a Race He Can Afford to Lose

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      With a substantial personal fortune, the North Dakota governor is insistent on spreading his message despite calls to drop out.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota knows that many people, including powerful voices in his own party, think he should quit the Republican presidential primary, abandoning his quixotic bid so that momentum can gather behind a challenger to Donald J. Trump, and ultimately President Biden.“This seems like they’re trying to do the job of the voters,” he said in an interview on Saturday. But Mr. Burgum is committed to staying on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he says he regularly meets people who are eager to vote for him. “They are the ones that are going to decide how the field gets narrowed, not some other group,” he said.Mr. Burgum, 67, was sitting in a stately conference room, somewhere in the carpeted labyrinth of a convention center in Las Vegas, which was hosting a major gathering of Jewish donors. Less than an hour earlier, in a ballroom upstairs, former Vice President Mike Pence had dropped out of the race, yielding to the reality that he was short on votes and running out of money.Mr. Burgum’s reality is different in at least one critical respect: Though he is barely cracking 1 percent in Iowa polls, his net worth is in the hundreds of millions. He has largely self-financed his campaign, lending it more than $12 million — a further $3 million has come in from donations, according to the campaign’s most recent filing.He can afford to be quixotic. As of the end of September, his campaign had spent $12.9 million — more than the campaigns of Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and Mr. Pence combined. About a third of that was spent on television advertising time.He is a testament to the power of private wealth to sustain a campaign, and to elevate a largely unknown, business-minded conservative from a largely rural U.S. state to the national stage — or, at least, the edge of the stage.“I think he does bring perspective and experience that resonate with a lot of voters,” said Miles D. White, the former chairman and chief executive of Abbott Laboratories and a longtime friend of Mr. Burgum. “I think the early process doesn’t give a lot of opportunity to demonstrate that.”Mr. White, who gave $2 million to a super PAC backing Mr. Burgum, said Mr. Burgum’s financial resources meant he could stay in and raise awareness of himself as a potential alternative to Mr. Trump, outside the confines of the debate stage.“His biggest challenge is being known, nationwide, and getting known, which takes a lot of time, a lot of ads, which in turn takes a lot of funding,” Mr. White said.Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist, said that most candidates, at this point, were merely helping Mr. Trump. On Monday, in an editorial in The Bulwark, he called for all of them except Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, to drop out.“I like Burgum,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “He is in a desperate battle with the margin of error in the polling. Because the stakes with Trump are so high, he’s got to step back.”He added, “When your argument is, ‘Let me flame out in Iowa, where I’ll do collateral damage to others,’ you don’t have an argument.”Mr. Burgum said he first sought the governor’s seat in 2015 because he felt he could have more of an impact on North Dakota from Bismarck than he could from his perch of private enterprise. The same thing motivated him to seek the presidency — but first he had to persuade his 25-year-old son, he said, who was concerned about the attention it might bring to his family.Finally, his son told him, “You should run, because my friends would have somebody they can vote for, instead of voting against.” Telling the story, Mr. Burgum began to cry.Friends from the business community have also jumped in with support. The super PAC backing him, called Best of America, had taken in more than $11 million as of the end of June from about two dozen wealthy supporters, including people with links to his business world.“Anybody who’s donated significantly so far is someone who’s known us for a long time,” Mr. Burgum said. “Because they’re like, OK, this is the real deal.”Mr. Burgum entered the race in June on a platform that focused on his economic acumen and business record as a software executive, as well as his conservative record as governor.“People are yearning for leadership, and leadership to them does not mean a life spent as a career politician in North Dakota,” he said. “It means someone who’s got the characteristics of integrity and honesty. Someone you can trust and someone who’s willing to take risks, someone who can take a leap and not know where they’re going to land.”He added, of his competitors, “Just factually, I’ve created more jobs than everybody else on that stage combined, in the private sector.”Since entering the race, Mr. Burgum has spent heavily to introduce himself to voters and to draw support.In the early nominating states, Mr. Burgum’s business bona fides, horseback skills and distinctive eyebrows have been fixtures on television, set against the scenic backdrop of North Dakota — he said he saw his campaign in part as an opportunity to introduce his state to the rest of the country.(As for the eyebrows, Mr. Burgum credits them to his mother’s side of the family, and acknowledges the uncanny likeness to the comedian Eugene Levy. Along with his flowing mane of hair, they get a lot of attention on the campaign trail: “If the only people voting were women over 75 or 80 years old, then we’d have a lock on it,” he said.)Mr. Burgum’s campaign has bought $4.3 million of local and national advertising time, according to an analysis by AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Since July, the super PAC backing him has bought nearly $13 million in ad time.The PAC’s ads describe him as “the only conservative business leader running for president,” promising that he can bring “small-town common sense back in Washington, D.C.”Advertising spending by the super PAC is the fifth-highest in the race, according to the AdImpact analysis, which also includes outlays for ads in the coming weeks. Never Back Down, a super PAC backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has spent $35.6 million. A super PAC for Mr. Trump has spent $27.6 million; one for Ms. Haley, $22.8 million; and one for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, $19.8 million.Before the first debate, in late August, Mr. Burgum’s campaign offered $20 gift cards to anyone who donated a dollar to his campaign so that he could meet the threshold of 40,000 individual donors to earn a spot onstage.The gambit worked. Then, the day of the debate, he ruptured his Achilles’ tendon in a game of pickup basketball with his aides. He showed up anyway. Two months later, he still uses a knee scooter to move around.A major hurdle lies ahead: While Mr. Burgum’s campaign has the requisite number of donors, it has not yet met the Republican National Committee’s polling threshold for the third G.O.P. debate, next week in Miami.He described the threshold as an arbitrary bar set by the party leadership. “It might achieve a winnowing, but it may not produce what Iowa or New Hampshire would produce, where people are actually investing time,” he said. More

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      Union Victories May Lift Biden, as U.A.W. Targets Tesla and Others

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      President Biden’s support for autoworkers helped them make big wage gains, and labor organizers are looking to bring about similar gains elsewhere as carmakers transition to electric vehicles.The United Automobile Workers’ big wins with Detroit’s Big Three automakers could also prove to be a significant political victory for President Biden, who openly sided with striking workers to pressure the companies, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, to produce generous concessions.But the U.A.W.’s turn now toward nonunionized automakers like Tesla, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes will test whether Mr. Biden’s support, as well as measures that he signed into law, will produce the expansion of organized labor that he has long promised.For unionized autoworkers, many of them in the swing state of Michigan, the tentative contracts, which are awaiting rank-and-file ratification, would bring substantial wage gains, “another piece of good economic news,” Mr. Biden said on Monday. The tentative contracts would lift the top U.A.W. wage to more than $40 per hour over four and a half years, from $32 an hour. Stellantis, maker of Chryslers, Jeeps and Ram trucks, agreed to reopen its assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., near the border of Wisconsin, another crucial swing state.“The impact of Biden’s public support can’t be overstated,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the umbrella A.F.L.-C.I.O., which includes the autoworkers’ union. “There’s a lot of upside here for Biden. The contracts set a new standard for the industry that clearly show the benefit of collective bargaining.”Beyond that, G.M. agreed to bring its electric vehicle battery joint venture, Ultium, under the national contract, a boon for Ultium workers but also a pressure point for unions as they seek to organize battery plants sprouting up around the country. Such plants are using generous subsidies from Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievements — especially the climate change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act — as the administration pushes to speed the country’s transition to electric vehicles.“This historic contract is a testament to the power of unions and collective bargaining to build strong middle-class jobs while helping our most iconic American companies thrive,” Mr. Biden said Monday evening.Jason Walsh, the executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which has brought together labor and environmental groups to marshal support for the clean energy transition, said the contracts, if ratified by U.A.W. workers, would be a watershed moment for the economy — and possibly the planet.“The legislative intent behind the industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act was an implicit deal: We as a nation are going to invest in the sectors of the economy that are important to the country and the planet in the long run, but in return we want the companies that receive those benefits to maximize returns to workers, communities and the environment,” Mr. Walsh said. To that end, the contract settlement is “huge,” he added. “It highlights the lie peddled by Donald Trump and at times the Big Three that the E.V. transition means lower-quality jobs in a nonunion work force.”The U.A.W. actions took on strikingly political meaning. In May, the autoworkers’ union opted to withhold an endorsement of Mr. Biden’s re-election, openly expressing “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president was pushing through legislation and regulation.Last month, Mr. Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, castigated striking workers, saying “they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.”Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, visited a nonunion parts plant in Michigan to rail against electric vehicles and to demand that Shawn Fain, the new and aggressive U.A.W. president, endorse him for another term in the White House.Mr. Fain said he would never do that, and supporters of the president pointed to provisions in federal laws championed by Mr. Biden that may have helped secure the deals. Subsidies for electric vehicle production will go only to domestic manufacturing plants, meaning Detroit management could not credibly threaten to move new auto plants overseas in search of cheaper labor.But union officials did not say on Monday what their intentions were for a presidential endorsement. Mr. Fain did make clear over the weekend that he was not resting on his laurels with the gains achieved with its escalating wave of strikes against the Big Three. The union plans to target Tesla, the nonunion automaker that dominates the domestic electric vehicle market, as well as foreign automakers with factories in the Southeast, where unions have struggled to gain a foothold. Some of the biggest new plants are under construction in Georgia, a critical swing state for 2024, including a Hyundai electric vehicle plant that will be the state’s biggest economic development project ever.Organizers will be able to lean on provisions of the three big laws that Mr. Biden signed — a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change — to push their case.Tucked into all of those laws were measures to give unions the power to effectively tell employers that accept rich federal tax incentives this: You must pay union-scale wages and use union apprenticeship and training programs, so you might as well hire union workers.How electric vehicle and battery makers respond to the U.A.W.’s next push will go a long way toward determining whether Mr. Biden can make good on his promise that his effort to curtail climate change and wean the nation off fossil fuels will indeed produce “good union jobs.” More

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      14th Amendment Trump Disqualification Trial Begins in Colorado

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      While some prominent constitutional experts argue that a clause in the amendment applies to former President Donald J. Trump after Jan. 6, that view is far from universal among legal scholars.A courtroom in Denver will host, starting Monday morning, something the nation has never seen: a trial to determine whether a major party’s likely presidential nominee is eligible to be president at all.The lawsuit, filed in September by six Colorado voters with the help of a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues that former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to hold office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That section disqualifies anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.The plaintiffs say that Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — including his actions before and while his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — meet the disqualification criteria.Sarah B. Wallace, the state district court judge presiding over the case, rejected multiple requests from Mr. Trump and from the Colorado Republican State Central Committee in recent weeks to dismiss the case without a trial.Judge Wallace has laid out nine topics to be addressed at the trial, which is scheduled to last all week. They include whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to presidents; what “engaged” and “insurrection” mean under that section; whether Mr. Trump’s actions fit those definitions; and whether the amendment is “self-executing” — in other words, whether it can be applied without specific action by Congress identifying whom to apply it to.These questions have been debated since the Jan. 6 attack, especially since Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president again, but there is little precedent to help answer them. The 14th Amendment was ratified shortly after the Civil War, and the disqualification clause was originally applied to people who had fought for the Confederacy. The courts have rarely had occasion to assess its modern application, and never in a case of this magnitude.Some prominent constitutional experts — including the conservative law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in an academic article, and the conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic — have argued that the clause applies to Mr. Trump.But that view is far from universal among legal scholars, and several have told The New York Times over the past few months that the questions are complicated.The court’s list of topics also calls for discussion of Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, which governs what happens if a new president and vice president have not “qualified” by the time they are supposed to take office.The section says, in part, that “Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers say this means that only Congress can enforce constitutional qualifications for the presidency. Lawyers for the plaintiffs rejected that argument in a brief last week, saying the “plain language” of the amendment — which refers to the “president-elect” — applies only to a person whom has already been elected and has nothing to do with states’ ability to adjudicate candidates’ qualifications.The Colorado lawsuit is one of several efforts around the country to remove Mr. Trump from ballots under the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments in a case in Minnesota are scheduled to begin Thursday, and lawsuits have also been filed in New Hampshire and Michigan. Separately, Democratic legislators in California asked their state’s attorney general last month to seek a court opinion on Mr. Trump’s eligibility.Whatever verdicts come in these cases will not be final. They will almost certainly be appealed by the losing side, and the Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Mr. Trump — is likely to have the final say. More

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      Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age

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      Donald Trump, 77, has relentlessly attacked President Biden, 80, as too old for office. But the former president himself has had a series of gaffes that go beyond his usual freewheeling style.One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.Even though only a few years separate the two men in their golden years, voters view their vigor differently. Recent polls have found that roughly two out of three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term, while only about half say the same about Mr. Trump.If that gap starts to narrow, it’s Mr. Trump who has far more to lose in a general-election matchup.Mr. Trump and President Biden are the front-runners for each party’s nomination, setting up the likelihood of a 2020 rematch. Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesAccording to a previously unreported finding in an August survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 43 percent of U.S. voters said both men were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.Last week, similar findings emerged in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched 2024 battlegrounds.According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader. “The age issue is one that if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him,” Mr. Yost said.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noted that the former president maintained a commanding lead in Republican primary polls and that in the general election, several recent polls had shown Mr. Trump with slight leads over Mr. Biden.“None of these false narratives has changed the dynamics of the race at all — President Trump still dominates, because people know he’s the strongest candidate,” Mr. Cheung said. “The contrast is that Biden is falling onstage, mumbling his way through a speech, being confused on where to walk, and tripping on the steps of Air Force One. There’s no correcting that, and that will be seared into voter’s minds.”Mr. Trump’s rhetorical skills have long relied on a mix of brute force and a seemingly preternatural instinct for the imprecise. That beguiling combination — honed from a lifetime of real estate negotiations, New York tabloid backbiting and prime-time reality TV stardom — often means that voters hear what they want to hear from him.Mr. Trump’s speaking style has often meant that his supporters, or voters who are open to backing him, hear what they want to hear from him. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesTrump supporters leave his speeches energized. Undecided voters who are open to his message can find what they’re looking for in his pitch. Opponents are riled, and when they furiously accuse him of something they heard but that he didn’t quite precisely say, Mr. Trump turns the criticism into a data point that he’s unfairly persecuted — and the entire cycle begins anew.But Mr. Trump’s latest missteps aren’t easily classified as calculated vagueness.During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party has been dealt a series of electoral defeats since 2016. Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former governor of South Carolina, opened her presidential bid this year by calling for candidates 75 or older to pass mental competency tests, a push she has renewed in recent weeks.On Saturday, Ms. Haley attacked Mr. Trump over his comments about Mr. Netanyahu and Hezbollah, suggesting in a speech to Jewish donors in Las Vegas that the former president did not have the faculties to return to the White House.“Let me remind you,” she added with a small smile. “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”Jazmine Ulloa More