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      A Female President? Big Deal.

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      In her concession speech to President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016, Hillary Clinton declared, “We have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will — and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”There was lots of talk about gender in politics then. Many of us thought that Clinton lost in part because of both hard-core misogyny and a softer unconscious bias that led just enough voters to think of presidents only as guys in suits.I’ve been thinking lately of that glass ceiling because of a conversation we’re not having — one about the gender of the Democratic nominee if Joe Biden takes advice from so many of us to drop out of the presidential race.If Biden withdraws, his most likely successor is a Black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls a bit better than Biden against Trump. Some of us have urged instead that Democrats nominate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, believing that she would be the nominee most likely to defeat Trump. And a few of us have mentioned the talented Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a former governor and a star of the Biden cabinet.Our argument isn’t a feminist one about the significance of elevating women. It’s not even an argument that these politicians would perform better than Biden as president. Astonishingly given our history, it’s that they would also be more electable.Perhaps even more intriguing, gender has largely gone unmentioned. I’ve had people push back at my recommendation of Whitmer on the basis that she’s untested nationally, that choosing her over Harris would antagonize Black voters, that her name recognition is weak. All fair objections. But I haven’t heard anyone scoff: But Whitmer is a woman. We tried that in 2016, and it got us Trump.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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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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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      Kennedy Sent Apologetic Text to Woman Who Accused Him of Sexual Assault

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      The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. privately apologized last week to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a recent magazine article, The Washington Post reported on Friday.The woman, Eliza Cooney, now 48, had worked for Mr. Kennedy’s family as a weekend babysitter in her early 20s, the year she graduated from college, and at the same time was an intern at his environmental legal clinic at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y. In an article in Vanity Fair last week, she said Mr. Kennedy made unwanted sexual advances toward her while she was at his family home in the late 1990s, including by groping her in a pantry.Ms. Cooney told The Post that Mr. Kennedy had called her twice on July 3 of this year, after the Vanity Fair article had run, and then sent her two text messages, which she also showed to The New York Times.“I hope you are well,” he wrote in the first message. “Please call me if you have a moment.”In the second, sent shortly after midnight, he wrote: “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.”He said he hoped she would be willing to speak to him over the phone or in person.Mr. Kennedy declined to comment on the messages or on Ms. Cooney’s allegations. In a podcast interview last week, after the Vanity Fair article came out, he declined to address her allegations but said he was not a “church boy.” He added, “I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”Ms. Cooney did not respond to his outreach, and did not welcome it, she told The Times. “Sending a text at 12:33 a.m. is not considering his actions’ effects on someone else — me,” she said. “At that time, on Fourth of July weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to him.”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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      ‘Touch Me, Poke Me, Ask Me Questions,’ Biden Says of Voters Who Doubt Him

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      President Biden’s remarks were in response to a Democratic lawmaker who told him on a Zoom call that he should withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign.President Biden on Friday told a Democratic lawmaker who called for him to step aside that voters should “touch me, poke me, ask me questions” if they have doubts about his ability to serve in the Oval Office or defeat former President Donald J. Trump in November.Mr. Biden made the remarks during a virtual meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, according to a partial transcript of the exchange obtained by The New York Times. He was responding to Representative Mike Levin of California, who told Mr. Biden during the meeting that he believed the president should not continue his bid for another term, according to two people familiar with the call. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.Mr. Levin is the 19th member of Congress to call for him to step aside in the two weeks since Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance, but he is the first one known to have done so directly to the president — even virtually.“That’s why I’m going out and letting people touch me, poke me, ask me questions,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Levin. “I think I know what I’m doing, because the truth of the matter is — I’m going to say something outrageous — no president in three years has done what we have in three years other than Franklin Roosevelt.”In a statement after the meeting ended, Mr. Levin said he appreciated Mr. Biden’s “five-plus decades” of service, “but I believe the time has come for President Biden to pass the torch.”Mr. Levin said Friday that he had no comment beyond his statement, but it was clear from the fact that he didn’t back away from his comments that nothing in Mr. Biden’s response had changed his mind.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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      Donors Tell Pro-Biden Super PAC Roughly $90 Million in Pledges Is Frozen

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      Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that roughly $90 million in pledged donations is now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket, according to two people who have been briefed on the conversations.The frozen contributions include multiple eight-figure commitments, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. The decision to withhold such enormous sums of money is one of the most concrete examples of the fallout from Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance at the end of June.Future Forward declined to comment on any conversations with donors or the amounts of any pledged money being withheld. A Future Forward adviser would say only that the group expected contributors who had paused donations to return once the current uncertainty about the ticket was resolved.Separately, one donor to the group described being approached multiple times by Future Forward since the debate for a contribution, but said he and his friends had been “holding off.”The two people briefed on the frozen pledges declined to say which individual donors were pulling back promised checks, which were estimated to total around or above $90 million. It was not clear how much of the pledged money was earmarked for Future Forward’s super PAC versus its nonprofit arm, which has also been running advertising in key battleground states.The cash freeze comes as some advisers around Mr. Biden are discussing how to persuade the president to exit the race, and as his campaign has begun to test Vice President Kamala Harris in head-to-head surveys of voters against former President Donald J. Trump. The number of congressional Democrats calling for Mr. Biden to step aside is growing by the day.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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      Democrats Fear Safe Blue States Turning Purple as Biden Stays the Course

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      Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe.As President Biden insists he will stay in the presidential race, Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed that his presence on the ticket is transforming the political map, turning light-blue states into contested battlegrounds.Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month.Some polls in these states suggest a tightening race between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, with one showing a virtual tie in Virginia, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004, and another showing Mr. Trump squeaking ahead in New Hampshire, which has been in the Democratic column since 2000.On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report, a prominent elections forecaster, downgraded New Hampshire and Minnesota from “likely” wins for Mr. Biden to only leaning in his direction. And in a meeting at the White House last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state, according to two people briefed on her comments.The shakiness in the fringe battleground states is an alarming sign for Mr. Biden’s hopes in must-win contests that were already expected to be close, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An expanding battleground map could force his campaign to divert resources away from the traditional swing states, where he has been falling further and further behind.But Mr. Biden has given no indication he is going anywhere, telling reporters at a high-profile news conference on Thursday that “I’m determined I’m running” and pushing back on his poor polling numbers.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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      Fact-Checking Biden’s News Conference at the NATO Summit

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      The president omitted context or exaggerated in making claims about polling, migration at the border and attacks on his opponent.President Biden fielded questions about foreign policy and his age and fitness for office during a high-stakes news conference on Thursday in which he made clear that he had no intention of leaving the race.The nearly hourlong appearance, coming at the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington, was his first solo news conference in eight months. Under a dozen reporters pressed him on his candidacy, China and the conflict in Gaza, among other topics.Here’s a fact check of some of his remarks.What Was Said“He’s already told Putin — and I quote — do whatever the hell you want.”This needs context. Mr. Biden leaves out a crucial caveat in characterizing the remarks of his Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump, in a campaign rally in February, repeated his misleading claim that some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “owed” money to the alliance, referring to informal commitments made by member nations to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on their own militaries.In Mr. Trump’s telling, after he had delivered a speech urging members to “pay out,” the president of “one of the big countries” asked whether the United States would come to its defense if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded, but it had failed to meet that 2 percent target.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