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      How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

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      Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Frank Moore, a Top Aide to Jimmy Carter, Is Dead at 89

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      After serving as chief of staff when Carter was governor of Georgia, he followed him to Washington, where both men encountered a hostile political establishment.Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter’s congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89.His son Brian confirmed the death.Mr. Carter was known for having a “Georgia Mafia” around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter’s death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency.In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate.Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi.These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation’s capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s.In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter’s presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter’s Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Is Immensely Vulnerable

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      How can Americans best defend their democracy from their president?In my last column, I recounted three lessons from other countries where popular movements have made headway challenging authoritarian rulers. Critics of President Trump have frankly been fairly ineffective — witness his election and the way his approval ratings have risen in some polls lately — but Trump does give us a great deal to work with. He is immensely vulnerable.Drawing upon these lessons from my last column, here are what I see as the most promising lines of attack for his critics:Trump is deeply corrupt. All presidents are accused of shady practices: Remember that President Barack Obama was said to have diminished the presidency by wearing a tan suit. But Trump is a felon who is using his office to enrich himself as no president has in history.The Times reported that more than $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just a month, and some of his ventures look alarmingly like opportunities for influence-peddling. How else do we explain his announcement that the biggest investors in his new cryptocurrency memecoin, $TRUMP, would get dinner with him? Some guests flew in from overseas for the dinner, held Thursday, and acknowledged earlier that they hoped to influence Trump and his administration’s policy on financial regulation.The Trump family started a different cryptocurrency outfit, World Liberty Financial, that received a $2 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates. Don Jr. is also starting a members club in Washington, with a $500,000 charge to join. And Saudi Arabia and Qatar are investing in Trump businesses, putting money in family bank accounts.Meanwhile, Trump is using the government to help his pal Elon Musk (who even knew that the world’s richest man was needy?). The White House South Lawn was turned into a temporary showroom for Tesla vehicles in March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged people to “buy Tesla” stock, and American embassies reportedly have pushed impoverished countries to grant regulatory approvals for Musk’s Starlink system.Trump is hurting you in the pocketbook. One reason Trump won the presidency was voter resentment at inflation and economic weakness under Joe Biden. Now it’s Trump who is badly damaging the economy and hitting voters in the wallet.

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      in Elections

      Dance$ With Emolument$

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      When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him.Trump didn’t know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his “Wall of Shame” with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested. His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cutout of him giving a thumbs up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne.As we were leaving, Hulse warned Trump dryly: “If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you’ll know you’re in trouble.”“Eric Lipton?” Trump murmured.The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning Times investigative reporter is tracking Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.Lipton and The Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump’s Virginia golf club Thursday night as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the memecoin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania debuted hers two days later.)Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time he isn’t grandstanding as a flamboyant New York businessman. He’s selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Army Report Links Pentagon Equipment Glitch to Aborted Landings at D.C. Airport

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      The diversion of two commercial flights on May 1 has raised new questions about equipment and safety in some of Washington’s busiest airspace.Two commercial flights were diverted from Ronald Reagan National Airport on May 1 in part because of a communications glitch between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and Pentagon air traffic controllers, according to an Army official who was briefed on an internal review of the matter.The Black Hawk helicopter had tried to land on the helipad near the Pentagon but was asked to fly around and land a short while later, according to an Army statement issued Friday. That request, which came from air traffic controllers at the Pentagon, arose from a short period in which the controllers lost audio and visual contact with the helicopter just moments before it was set to land, the official said.The helicopter “initiated a go-around due to a delay in clearance from the Pentagon Tower,” the Army wrote in its statement. The Associated Press earlier reported details of the Army review.The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are also investigating the event and declined to comment.The May 1 episode, which included the aborted landings of a Delta Air Lines flight and a Republic Airways flight, has been under unusual scrutiny because of the recent spate of problems in U.S. aviation.In January, a midair collision near National Airport between a different Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial flight from Wichita, Kan., killed 67 people. And in recent weeks, air traffic control centers from Philadelphia to the Denver area have been affected by equipment outages that have frightened controllers, raising concerns about air safety.The F.A.A. oversees the National Airport air traffic control tower and has been working to address the equipment and staffing troubles. At a Senate hearing last week, Franklin McIntosh, then the deputy chief operating officer of the F.A.A., said that his agency had not known until the May 1 episode that a hotline linking the Pentagon’s controllers to their counterparts at the National Airport tower had been inoperable for three years. In the meantime, the two entities were communicating over a landline, officials have said.“We were extremely troubled by the incident that occurred,” Mr. McIntosh said, adding that the Defense Department had suspended certain operations in the National Airport airspace afterward. A repaired hotline would be necessary in order for the flights to resume, the F.A.A. official added.The aviation agency recently restricted a particularly treacherous helicopter flight route in the National Airport vicinity and mandated that Army flights operate with a location broadcasting system called ADS-B Out. The Army said on Friday that the Black Hawk in the May 1 episode was using ADS-B Out at the time and that it was also flying on an approved route.The Army also said in its statement that one of the commercial flights was diverted because of a problem with National Airport controllers’ “sequencing” of air traffic. The second diversion request stemmed from conflicting aircraft location data, the statement added, without providing details. More

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      National Security Council Staff Will Be Cut by Half

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      The drastic restructuring, revealed by Marco Rubio, the acting national security adviser, is likely to encourage the president’s preferred style of top-down decision-making in foreign affairs.Marco Rubio, the secretary of state who is also serving as the national security adviser, on Friday revealed a significant restructuring of the National Security Council, reducing the size of its staff by at least half, according to a person with knowledge of the move.The dramatic downsizing of the council, a coordinating body across departments that guides the president and his top aides on key policy decisions, comes as Mr. Trump has built his national security and foreign policy teams with officials who largely share his skepticism of foreign interventions, and who will not work aggressively to oppose that perspective.Rather than build decisions from the ground up incorporating an array of sources and offering a significant menu of different viewpoints, the changes are likely to help Mr. Trump conduct foreign policy debates in his preferred style, with advisers taking the president’s desired outcomes and finding a way to comply with them.Some National Security Council officials from other agencies are returning to their original offices, and others are being placed on administrative leave, effective immediately, said the person with knowledge of the move, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Some of the teams on the council that focus on specific regions or issues will be gutted, while others will be collapsed and folded into others. Still other teams will cease to exist.Andy Baker, Vice President JD Vance’s national security adviser, will serve as the deputy for the reconfigured council, alongside Robert Gabriel, whose current title is assistant to the president for policy.The changes were reported earlier by Axios. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The council has a core staff of presidential appointees supported by dozens of specialists who are detailed — or essentially on loan — from other departments and agencies across the government. Presidents have used the council in different ways, but it has had a central role in foreign policy events since its creation in 1947.Mr. Trump’s allies have long argued that the council had grown too large over time.Mr. Trump has also held a deep distrust for and suspicion of the council since the earliest days of his first term, in 2017. People who have worked for him over time say he believes it was the source of significant undermining of his policy views.Mr. Trump’s first impeachment involved testimony before Congress from Alexander S. Vindman, the council’s director of European affairs, who said the president pressed the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family. At the time, Mr. Biden was one of Mr. Trump’s chief potential rivals in the 2020 election.In early April, Mr. Trump fired several N.S.C. aides after a meeting with the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who presented him with a list of people she suspected of disloyalty. More

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      These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students

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      The Trump administration’s threat to block Harvard from enrolling international students would remove more than a quarter of the university’s student body, a share large enough to rock its campus and, potentially, its tuition revenue.The move, frozen within 24 hours on Friday by a federal judge, also highlights the risk other universities face from an administration that has shown deep hostility toward higher education. N.Y.U., Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon have even larger international student shares than Harvard does.This metric that once reflected their international renown — and financial strength — now looks like a vulnerability. More

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      in Elections

      Gloves Lincoln Wore to Ford’s Theater Sell for $1.5 Million at Auction

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      More than 100 relics connected to President Abraham Lincoln brought in $7.9 million, auctioneers said. The proceeds will help a presidential foundation repay a loan.A pair of leather gloves worn by President Abraham Lincoln to Ford’s Theater on the night of his assassination fetched $1.5 million at auction this week, part of a trove of relics from his life and death that a debt-saddled presidential foundation had put on the block.One of two handkerchiefs that Lincoln had with him on that fateful date in American history, April 14, 1865, sold for $826,000, according to Freeman’s | Hindman in Chicago, the auction house that handled Wednesday’s sale.Like the gloves, which a friend of the Lincolns had framed for display on his dining room wall, the handkerchief was described in an auction catalog as having been potentially stained with the president’s blood.And a cufflink-style gold and onyx button with the letter “L” on it, which a doctor removed to check for Lincoln’s pulse as he lay on his deathbed, went for $445,000.The auction of the items from the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, which was conducted in person, online and by phone, raised nearly $7.9 million, the auctioneers said.The total included a 28 percent buyer’s premium, which auction houses tack onto the hammer price to help cover expenses from sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More