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      Putin, Citing Trump ‘Persecution,’ Wades Back Into U.S. Politics

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      The Russian leader, whose government meddled in the American presidential election won by Donald J. Trump, also offered words of praise for Elon Musk.The setting was an economic conference in far eastern Russia, with discussion of the ruble and domestic investment, but that didn’t stop President Vladimir V. Putin from wading into American politics on Tuesday, branding the criminal cases against Donald J. Trump political persecution and praising the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.For years, the Russian leader has demonstrated an ability to exploit political divisions within Western nations, often by signaling to conservatives abroad that he is aligned with them in a global fight against liberal values.Mr. Putin’s remarks on Tuesday, made at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, appeared aimed at lending firepower to the Republican outcry over the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, who has long expressed public admiration for the Russian leader and has helped encourage a sizable Moscow-friendly contingent within his party.The cases against Mr. Trump — who faces 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions — represent the “persecution of one’s political rival for political motives,” Mr. Putin said. He predicted that the entire affair would help Russia by exposing American domestic problems for the world to see and revealing the hypocrisy of American democracy.“Given today’s conditions, what is happening is good for us, in my opinion, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach democracy to others,” Mr. Putin said, prompting the hall to erupt in applause.Mr. Putin, whose political adversaries have a way of ending up in prison or worse, said the criminal cases against Mr. Trump also demonstrated who Russia is really fighting against as it prosecutes its invasion of Ukraine. “As they said back in Soviet times, ‘the bestial visage of American imperialism, the bestial grin’” he said.Donald J. Trump at a rally this month in Rapid City, S.D.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Trump offered no public response to Mr. Putin’s remarks, and his aides did not respond to requests for comment.Unlike in the past, Mr. Putin expressed a measure of resignation about the American posture toward Russia, saying the United States would likely remain anti-Russian, even if Mr. Trump were to return to the White House.“Though they accused him of special ties to Russia, it was complete nonsense, total bullshit, and he more than anything imposed sanctions on Russia,” Mr. Putin said. “So what to expect in the future, regardless of who is president, is difficult to say. But it’s unlikely anything will change definitively, because the current government has configured American society in such an anti-Russian manner and spirit.”In the United States, where Republicans are competing for their party’s presidential nomination — with Mr. Trump considered to be far ahead — several leading G.O.P. figures rejected Mr. Putin’s criticism.“America’s founding principles will always stand the test of time, and Vladimir Putin’s opinion of our constitutional republic holds no value in the United States,” former Vice President Mike Pence said in a statement. “Putin should be more concerned about how quickly his military went from being the second most powerful in the world to the second most powerful in Ukraine.”Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a strong supporter of both Mr. Trump and of American aid to Ukraine, said in an interview that the prosecutions taking place against Mr. Trump were “part of democracy.” He said that some parts of the American system were being “run off the rails,” but that the people in charge would have to answer to voters.“No one in Russia is able to speak against Putin,’’ Mr. Graham said, “because he’ll kill them.”Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is running against Mr. Trump for the nomination, said Mr. Putin’s comments were in effect a vote of support for his opponent. “It’s good to see Vladimir Putin has made his endorsement official — and no surprise, he’s endorsed another autocrat,” Mr. Christie said. Senator Lindsey Graham said that the prosecutions taking place against Mr. Trump were “part of democracy.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Putin’s comments amounted to the latest chapter in a political drama that began when Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, spreading disinformation online and hacking and releasing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the campaign manager of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.The controversy over Mr. Trump’s seeming sympathies for the Kremlin continued well after he took office in early 2017. Throughout his term, Mr. Trump heaped praise on Mr. Putin, and at one point, during a 2018 summit in Helsinki, professed to trust the Russian leader more than his own intelligence services.Even after he was defeated for re-election, Mr. Trump clung to that stance. In January, in a post on his Truth Social website, he again suggested that he had been right to trust the Russian president more than U.S. intelligence and F.B.I. “lowlifes.”Mr. Trump’s assertions at the Helsinki meeting — where, in an unusual breach of protocol, he met with Mr. Putin without any aides present — were roundly criticized by his opponents as unseemly pandering to the Russian leader.Still, even as Mr. Trump expressed sympathy with Moscow from the White House, he packed his administration with officials who were hawkish on Russia and, in tandem with lawmakers in Congress, continued to promote a foreign policy that punished Moscow for the 2016 interference, pushed through sanctions, and labeled Russia a “great power” competitor.Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin during a news conference at their meeting in Helsinki in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt his economic forum on Tuesday, Mr. Putin also offered praise for Mr. Musk, calling him a “talented businessman,” when asked about the possibility of private space companies similar to Mr. Musk’s SpaceX arising in Russia.“When it comes to private business, Elon Musk, he is, without a doubt, an outstanding person, one has to admit,” Mr. Putin said. “But I think everyone would admit that all around the world. He is an active, talented businessman. A lot works out for him, including with the support of the American government.”That description was reminiscent of the way the Russian leader once described Mr. Trump — “brilliant and talented” — in the early days of the New York real estate mogul’s first presidential campaign.Mr. Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, and his purchase of Twitter, recently rebranded to X, has led to a rise in the sort of misinformation and bot activity on a platform that Russia has turned to often to achieve its geopolitical aims.Mr. Putin offered praise for Elon Musk on Tuesday, calling him a “talented businessman.”Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersThe billionaire has also involved himself directly in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, at one point proposing a peace solution on Twitter that drew condemnation for echoing Kremlin talking points.And last week, Mr. Musk attracted renewed scrutiny when a new biography asserted that he had thwarted an attack on Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet in 2022 by refusing to let the Ukrainian military use his satellite network, Starlink, to guide its drones. He said he had disabled Starlink in Crimea long before the Ukrainian attack was planned, and had declined a request to enable it to avoid being complicit in what he said would be a “major act of war.’’ More

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      Is the Electoral College Becoming Fairer?

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      The Republican Party’s advantage is shrinking in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has been very kind to Republicans in the 21st century. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, and Donald Trump did the same in 2016.But over the past few years the Republican advantage in the Electoral College seems to have shrunk, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out in his newsletter. Republicans are no longer faring significantly better in the states likely to decide the presidential election — like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — than they are nationwide. Instead, a 2024 race between Biden and Trump looks extremely close, with a tiny lead for Biden both nationally and in the swing states.A Shrinking Electoral Advance More

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      Second G.O.P Debate: Who Has Qualified So Far?

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      At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not […] More

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      The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans

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      One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.Liberals — myself very much included — have been preoccupied by minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.It’s worth remembering that in 2000, when many thought George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, Republicans did not intend to quietly accept the results. “I think there would be outrage,” Representative Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Bush camp planned to stoke a “popular uprising,” in the words of The Daily News, quoting a Bush aide: “The one thing we don’t do is roll over. We fight.”Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its countermajoritarian qualities.Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.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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      Biden Campaign Aims to Calm Worries About His Age

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      With low approval ratings and shaky public performances, the president and his team are planning an ad blitz and trying to reassure voters about his age.With stubbornly subterranean approval numbers, President Biden is taking early steps to shore up his re-election candidacy with a multipronged strategy that includes a costly advertising campaign and leveraging the powers of the bully pulpit.During his recent trip to India and Vietnam, Mr. Biden’s aides aggressively pushed back on suggestions that he has lost a step, highlighting his busy schedule as a sign of his vigor. Back home, his campaign broadcast a television ad depicting a previous overseas trip — a secret journey to Ukraine in February that the White House has trumpeted as a triumph of daring and a foreign policy tour de force.That ad comes three weeks into a $25 million battleground state campaign to promote Mr. Biden’s economic record to a public that remains skeptical of the so-called Bidenomics pitch he began making this summer.Such an ad blitz is notably early for an incumbent, in the face of concerns that Mr. Biden is struggling to maintain support among young, Black and Latino voters — key parts of the coalition that lifted him to office in 2020. While Mr. Biden’s TV ads do not frontally address a central concern raised by Democratic voters — his age — they showcase his vitality and stamina.The Ukraine ad features footage of Mr. Biden striding confidently alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky during a surprise visit to Kyiv to support the war effort. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” a narrator says. It ends bluntly, “Biden. President.”Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement: “As Republicans fight each other in their divisive primary, we are building a campaign that is working to break through in a fragmented media environment, and speaking to the general-election audience in the battleground states that will decide next year’s election.”Democratic strategists say that many of the worries are overblown and that Mr. Biden has plenty of time to improve his numbers. Last week, Jim Messina, the campaign manager of President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, who has become a leading voice of the don’t-panic-about-Biden chorus, circulated a 24-page presentation suggesting that the political environment was good for Democrats and calling for “bedwetters” in their ranks to relax.“Polling 15 months out is notoriously ridiculous,” Mr. Messina said in an interview. “If you were just playing poker, you would rather have Joe Biden’s cards than Donald Trump’s.”But Mr. Biden gave his Republican critics some fresh ammunition to question his physical and mental competence at a news conference in Vietnam, telling reporters at one point he was ready to go to bed. He also made a meandering and culturally awkward reference to John Wayne, who last acted in a film in 1976, nearly a half-century ago.Mr. Biden is operating in a bit of a political vacuum, as Republicans go through their primary process. Once a challenger emerges, party strategists say, Democrats will see Mr. Biden as the stronger choice and rally behind the president.Joe Trippi, a Democrat who has worked on presidential campaigns over five election cycles, said all incumbent presidents over the past decade were nearly tied with their rivals in September of the year before the election.“I’ve seen this movie over and over and over,” he said. “Every sitting president has been sitting exactly in the same place — in a dead heat.”The $25 million the campaign is spending on new ads amounts to a small fraction of what is expected to be the total cost of Mr. Biden’s campaign. In 2020, he made history by raising $1 billion for his run. This time, Mr. Biden’s initial fund-raising has been slower, impeded in part by an across-the-board decline in online contributions and the absence of liberal outrage about Mr. Trump’s presidency.Still, Mr. Biden is jumping into the political fray far earlier than his predecessors did. President Barack Obama did not begin running re-election TV ads until after Thanksgiving in 2011. His first spot was a straight-to-camera invitation to supporters to “let me know you’re in,” rather than an effort to reassure supporters about his record in office.While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings were, like Mr. Biden’s, quite low, he did not face widespread doubts within his party about whether he should seek re-election.In a different era of politics and television, the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign did not begin advertising until March of the election year — after John Kerry had effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.Mr. Biden’s campaign says it began advertising earlier than in previous cycles because it is harder to reach broad audiences in an era of cord-cutting. TV networks are not inclined to carry prime-time presidential speeches about policy developments that are often months old, and Mr. Biden is an unsteady performer in front of a microphone. Advertisements can both be seen by a target audience and prompt coverage about them in the news media, and are one of the luxuries of being the incumbent.“Trump could easily define a narrative that kind of rewrites his own history as well as Biden’s history, and that needs to be countered,” said Teddy Goff, the digital director for Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign.Even Mr. Biden’s public in-person events don’t always show the president in the most favorable light. He often speaks softly or holds a microphone too far from his mouth, making it difficult for the audience to follow what he is saying — and making images of fired-up supporters tougher to come by.“It was tough to hear,” Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, Wis., said after seeing Mr. Biden speak in Milwaukee last month. “The acoustics were bad. Having a rally in a factory is tough.”Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, aggressively pushed back on social media after a headline said Mr. Biden was running “a bunker campaign.” “Presidents shall never sleep,” he wrote in one sarcastic post.Unlike the 2020 race, which was largely conducted remotely because of the pandemic, Mr. Biden’s 2024 effort will have to look more like a traditional campaign, with speeches and events that might make the president show his age.The latest chatter about Mr. Biden’s political standing followed a poll from CNN that was full of grim numbers for the president. The findings suggested that Democratic and independent voters had concerns about Mr. Biden himself, not his legislative record. Two-thirds of Democrats surveyed said they would prefer that the party nominate someone else as president. And 63 percent of Democrats said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden’s candidacy was his age, mental acuity or health.Just 4 percent of Democrats polled by CNN said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden was his handling of the economy — the subject that has been the focus of most of the campaign’s advertising so far.Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks to strengthen the party’s bench by recruiting Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said that expanding the Democratic argument beyond Mr. Biden to convey the broader stakes of the election for issues like abortion rights and climate change would be crucial.“He really has to make the campaign beyond just Joe Biden,” she says. “If it’s bigger than him, it will energize younger voters and voters of color and women.” More

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      China Sows Disinformation About Hawaii Fires Using New Techniques

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      Beijing’s influence campaign using artificial intelligence is a rapid change in tactics, researchers from Microsoft and other organizations say.When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States.The move also comes as the Biden administration and Congress are grappling with how to push back on China without tipping the two countries into open conflict, and with how to reduce the risk that A.I. is used to magnify disinformation.The impact of the Chinese campaign — identified by researchers from Microsoft, Recorded Future, the RAND Corporation, NewsGuard and the University of Maryland — is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories.Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, whose researchers analyzed the covert campaign, sharply criticized China for exploiting a natural disaster for political gain.“I just don’t think that’s worthy of any country, much less any country that aspires to be a great country,” Mr. Smith said in an interview on Monday.China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the United States was spending on the war in Ukraine and that suggested the cash would be better spent at home for disaster relief.The researchers suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election. That is the pattern that Russia set in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election.“This is going into a new direction, which is sort of amplifying conspiracy theories that are not directly related to some of their interests, like Taiwan,” said Brian Liston, a researcher at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company based in Massachusetts.A destroyed neighborhood in Lahaina, Hawaii, last month. China has made the wildfires a target of disinformation.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIf China does engage in influence operations for the election next year, U.S. intelligence officials have assessed in recent months, it is likely to try to diminish President Biden and raise the profile of former President Donald J. Trump. While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans who remember Mr. Trump’s effort to blame Beijing for what he called the “China virus,” the intelligence officials have concluded that Chinese leaders prefer Mr. Trump. He has called for pulling Americans out of Japan, South Korea and other parts of Asia, while Mr. Biden has cut off China’s access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them.China’s promotion of a conspiracy theory about the fires comes after Mr. Biden vented in Bali last fall to Xi Jinping, China’s president, about Beijing’s role in the spread of such disinformation. According to administration officials, Mr. Biden angrily criticized Mr. Xi for the spread of false accusations that the United States operated biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.There is no indication that Russia and China are working together on information operations, according to the researchers and administration officials, but they often echo each other’s messages, particularly when it comes to criticizing U.S. policies. Their combined efforts suggest a new phase of the disinformation wars is about to begin, one bolstered by the use of A.I. tools.“We don’t have direct evidence of coordination between China and Russia in these campaigns, but we’re certainly finding alignment and a sort of synchronization,” said William Marcellino, a researcher at RAND and an author of a new report warning that artificial intelligence will enable a “critical jump forward” in global influence operations.The wildfires in Hawaii — like many natural disasters these days — spawned numerous rumors, false reports and conspiracy theories almost from the start.Caroline Amy Orr Bueno, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security, reported that a coordinated Russian campaign began on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, on Aug. 9, a day after the fires started.It spread the phrase, “Hawaii, not Ukraine,” from one obscure account with few followers through a series of conservative or right-wing accounts like Breitbart and ultimately Russian state media, reaching thousands of users with a message intended to undercut U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.President Biden has criticized President Xi Jinping of China for the spread of false accusations about the United States and Ukraine.Florence Lo/ReutersChina’s state media apparatus often echoes Russian themes, especially animosity toward the United States. But in this case, it also pursued a distinct disinformation campaign.Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a “weather weapon” for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed “the amazing truth behind the wildfire.” Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists.Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile. According to Recorded Future, the Chinese content often echoed — and amplified — posts by conspiracy theorists and extremists in the United States, including white supremacists.The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani.The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft’s researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. “These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used” by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. “They do not appear to be present elsewhere online.”Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, said that China appeared to have adopted Russia’s playbook for influence operations, laying the groundwork to influence politics in the United States and other countries.“This would be Russia in 2015,” he said, referring to the bots and inauthentic accounts Russia created before its extensive online influence operation during the 2016 election. “If we look at how other actors have done this, they are building capacity. Now they’re building accounts that are covert.”Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.“We’ve always been able to come together in the wake of humanitarian disasters and provide relief in the wake of earthquakes or hurricanes or fires,” said Mr. Smith, who is presenting some of Microsoft’s findings to Congress on Tuesday. “And to see this kind of pursuit instead is both, I think deeply disturbing and something that the global community should draw a red line around and put off-limits.” More

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      Which Crisis Should We Talk About First?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Democratic mayors and governors are warning the Biden administration that the migrants crossing our southern border are straining their cities and states to the breaking point. New York City alone is sheltering and feeding an average of 59,000 migrants a day. What’s your advice to the White House?Gail Collins: Easy stuff first, Bret. There are job openings many newcomers could fill in areas like food service, if they’re given the ability to work. And the federal government needs to give stressed-out regions — particularly New York City — a whole lot more help when it comes to housing.Bret: I’m definitely in favor of handing out work permits, if that’s what you mean. Please go on.Gail: Making more housing available has to include building new accommodations and transforming existing city buildings, both residential and those with unneeded office space. Over the long run, we absolutely have to open up options for multifamily housing in suburban areas that have long resisted it.As to the border itself, Biden is trying to tighten up the whole immigration process, but a lot of his initiatives have been challenged in court. The administration has expanded federal border resources in an effort to make processing families faster. Although of course there’s still more that should be done.OK, your turn.Bret: Assuming the president wants to get re-elected, while preserving the possibility of immigration reform sometime in the next, oh, 100 years, he has to get control of the border. Right now. Jobs can take months to fill and housing takes years to build — not to mention that there are plenty of U.S. citizens who ought to be the administration’s first priority when it comes to affordable housing.In the meantime, we’ve had a 30-month crisis that too many Democrats downplayed until it became a blue-state problem. Millions of people have entered the country illegally and tens of thousands in New York are now living off government assistance. Working-class people are afraid they are going to be priced out of low-paying jobs by desperate migrants.My advice to the president: Ask for the resignation of Alejandro Mayorkas, his failed homeland security secretary. Put a highly respected former military officer, like retired Adm. William McRaven, in the job. Call up 10,000 active duty troops to help police the border. Work with Mexico to further strengthen its border with Guatemala. And invest infrastructure funds to build that damned wall. Because if Biden doesn’t get control of the border, it will become Donald Trump’s signature — and possibly winning — issue in next year’s campaign.Gail: Ah, Bret, once again you lose me at the wall. Which isn’t very useful at stopping migrants but is great as a symbol of our worst impulses — the evolution from our image as welcoming land of liberty to cranky neighbor warning the kids to stay out of his backyard.Bret: It’s one thing when several kids come into the cranky neighbor’s backyard. It’s quite another when several million do, then raid his fridge and medicine cabinet and never want to go home.Gail: Speaking of kids — I know this is not a terrific segue — I guess we should discuss the Hunter Biden situation.Bret: I think of it as two situations: the first about Hunter, the second about Joe.Regarding the first, I don’t see why the son of any president — but particularly a Democratic president who favors gun control and believes the rich should pay their taxes — should not face stiff penalties for blowing off paying his taxes and also for buying a gun while addicted to drugs.As for the second, at a minimum I’d like to know how the president’s story went from “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” to the White House’s tacit admission that Hunter would put his dad on the line when speaking to business associates, ostensibly just to make small talk but very likely as a way of selling the Biden “brand.” I’d also like to know why Biden used email aliases during his vice presidency to communicate with Hunter. The answers might well turn out to be innocent. But that’s all the more reason to respond to the questions rather than evade them.Gail: We definitely have two different Hunter Biden issues: what punishment he deserves and how much of an impact his messy saga should have on our opinion of his father.Bret: The father who, I should underscore, I will probably find myself voting for next year barring the miracle of a Nikki Haley or Chris Christie candidacy on the Republican line. Go on.Gail: As to the first, we have a guy who lied, when filling out the paperwork to buy a gun, about whether he was a drug addict. And who failed to pay all his 2017 and 2018 taxes. Hunter was going to get 24 months probation, until his plea deal collapsed.This is a combo for which low-income folks with no friends in high places would probably get a stiffer punishment. But I am also sure that any Republican senator’s son who got in similar trouble would not in a billion years go to jail.Do you disagree?Bret: I’m sure you’re right — and that’s wrong in itself. But Hunter definitely deserved stiffer punishment than the wrist-slap he seemed on his way to getting before his plea bargain fell apart this summer.Gail: On the second count, it is pretty clear that Joe Biden helped Hunter get some business cred by reminding potential clients that Dad was vice president.Bret: Meaning that Joe could have been turning himself into a willing participant in some pretty shady business dealings in places like Ukraine, where he was supposed to be the Obama administration’s point man for fighting corruption.Gail: Even if that’s the version of the saga voters buy, I find it extremely hard to imagine this is going to have any impact on the president’s re-election prospects. You have here a guy who lost his first wife and a daughter in a terrible car crash and his beloved older son after a long cancer battle. Don’t think most Americans will hold his attempts to aid the surviving son against him. While he’s running against a man whose family profited shamelessly from foreign business ties during the presidency.Bret: I truly feel for the president when it comes to the tragedies in his life. And I have zero sympathy for Trump or his sleazy family. But that doesn’t change the fact that Hunter is also sleazy and that, at a minimum, Joe shouldn’t make a habit of having Hunter constantly by his side.Gail: I know the Republicans can’t let a day go by without howling about Hunter, but I truly don’t think the country cares.Bret: Not sure you’re right about that. Democrats are really underestimating the impact this could have on the election. A CNN poll published last week found that 61 percent of Americans think Joe was involved in Hunter’s business dealings and that 55 percent think he acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter. What that does is to diminish Biden’s claim to represent honesty and decency in the White House. A similar thing happened in 2016 when Democrats went after Trump on his sexual ethics, and Trump struck back by bringing Juanita Broaddrick to his second debate with Hillary Clinton, to remind the country about Bill’s sexual ethics. The risk is that undecided voters conclude that both sides are morally tainted so they may as well vote their pocketbook interests.Gail: I just feel the only people who are going to vote against Biden because of Hunter are people who were going to vote against Biden for something anyway.Bret: Different subject, Gail. Nancy Pelosi just announced she intends to run for re-election, when she’ll be 84. I realize she’s no longer in a leadership position, but given Mitch McConnell’s and Dianne Feinstein’s and, well, Joe Biden’s diminished capacities, wouldn’t it be better for her to retire in good health and make way for someone a little younger?Gail: The super-important fact about Nancy Pelosi’s career decision is that she opted to give up one of the nation’s most powerful posts because she felt a younger leader could do it better.Bret: True, and she deserves credit for that. I’d still suggest she take a look at some of her generational peers in politics, including McConnell and Feinstein, and ask herself if that’s the best way to walk off the political stage.Gail: The nation is growing older and people need to believe that they can step aside for the next generation of leaders without totally retiring from public life. So, hey, I’m a Pelosi rooter on this front.Bret: I’ll defer to you on this subject. And speaking of immortality, I need to put in a word for Rebecca Chace’s wonderful obituary of Edith Grossman, the great translator of Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel de Cervantes. I started reading García Márquez in Spanish as a kid — he lived just a few blocks from us on the south side of Mexico City — and then I read some of the same books in her English translations when I was a bit older. Grossman’s translations somehow managed to make him a more vivid, lucid, enchanting writer.She wasn’t just a translator. She was an artist.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