Vance, J D

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares106 Views

    Reluctant at First, Trump Officials Intervened in South Asia as Nuclear Fears Grew

    by

    After Vice President JD Vance suggested that the conflict between India and Pakistan was not America’s problem, the Trump administration grew concerned that it could spiral out of control.As a conflict between India and Pakistan escalated, Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Thursday that it was “fundamentally none of our business.” The United States could counsel both sides to back away, he suggested, but this was not America’s fight.Yet within 24 hours, Mr. Vance and Marco Rubio, in his first week in the dual role of national security adviser and secretary of state, found themselves plunged into the details. The reason was the same one that prompted Bill Clinton in 1999 to deal with another major conflict between the two longtime enemies: fear that it might quickly go nuclear.What drove Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio into action was evidence that the Pakistani and Indian Air Forces had begun to engage in serious dogfights, and that Pakistan had sent 300 to 400 drones into Indian territory to probe its air defenses. But the most significant causes for concern came late Friday, when explosions hit the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad.The base is a key installation, one of the central transport hubs for Pakistan’s military and the home to the air refueling capability that would keep Pakistani fighters aloft. But it is also just a short distance from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal, now believed to include about 170 or more warheads. The warheads themselves are presumed to be spread around the country.The intense fighting broke out between India and Pakistan after 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, were killed in a terrorist attack on April 22 in Kashmir, a border region claimed by both nations. On Saturday morning, President Trump announced that the two countries had agreed to a cease-fire.One former American official long familiar with Pakistan’s nuclear program noted on Saturday that Pakistan’s deepest fear is of its nuclear command authority being decapitated. The missile strike on Nur Khan could have been interpreted, the former official said, as a warning that India could do just that.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

    More stories

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      JD Vance’s Half Brother Advances in Race for Cincinnati Mayor

      by

      Cory Bowman will next face Aftab Pureval, the Democratic incumbent, who outperformed him in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary.A half brother of Vice President JD Vance who is running for mayor of Cincinnati advanced on Tuesday to compete in the general election.The candidate, Cory Bowman, a Republican coffee shop owner, won a small share of the votes in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, according to The Associated Press. He came in second to the current mayor, Aftab Pureval, a Democrat.They will now face each other again in November. The results pushed a third candidate, Brian Frank, also a Republican, out of the race.Cincinnati mayoral elections are technically nonpartisan, but it has been decades since the city elected a Republican to the office. Vice President Kamala Harris won 77 percent of the city’s voters last fall, even as President Trump and Mr. Vance, Ohio’s junior senator, took the state.David Niven, a professor of politics at the University of Cincinnati, said Mr. Bowman’s family connections were unlikely to change that dynamic. “You can’t get that far as a Trump-Vance Republican in the city of Cincinnati.” But anywhere else in the state of Ohio, Dr. Niven said, “He’d be in better shape as a candidate.”Mr. Pureval won both the primary and the general mayoral elections four years ago by wide margins. Until a few months ago, he had seemed poised to run unopposed for a second term. Both Republicans said that possibility spurred them to enter the race, which has focused on local matters like affordable housing, potholes and public safety.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

    • 125 Shares188 Views

      in Elections

      Ukrainian Peace Plan Hints at Concessions, but Major Obstacles Remain

      by

      Officials in Kyiv plan to deliver their proposal to President Trump’s team, after rejecting a White House plan that would have given the Kremlin much of what it wants.Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counterproposal to a Trump administration plan that has drawn criticism for conceding too much to Russia. While the counteroffer digs in on some of Kyiv’s earlier demands, it hints at possible concessions on issues that have long been seen as intractable.Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for common ground. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.Mr. Trump flew to Rome on Friday to attend the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday; Mr. Zelensky had planned to as well, but his spokesman said on Friday that this would depend on the situation in Ukraine, where Russian attacks this week on the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere have left dozens dead and wounded.In a social media post after landing in Rome, Mr. Trump said Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” and urged the two sides to meet directly to “finish it off.” Earlier in the day, he said it was possible he and Mr. Zelensky could meet on the sidelines of the funeral. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if Mr. Zelensky goes to Rome, he might try to present Mr. Trump with Ukraine’s counterproposal personally.“In the coming days, very significant meetings may take place — meetings that should bring us closer to silence for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday in remarks that were uncharacteristically optimistic when compared with the tone of previous statements this week.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

    • 113 Shares148 Views

      in Elections

      Elon Musk Could Make Mars His Next Business Venture

      by

      Even as Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency appeared to consume him, his top adviser created a set of companies named Red Planet I, II and III.Elon Musk is leaving his full-time Washington assignment next month to try to save Tesla (which has seen its stock battered), to keep up with SpaceX (which is positioned to do big business with the Trump administration) and to chart a new course for xAI, which he just combined with X itself.He’s a busy guy. So what’s another company — or three?Two months ago, even as Musk appeared consumed by his work at yet another job, at the Department of Government Efficiency, his top adviser, Jared Birchall, quietly created an intriguing-sounding set of limited-liability companies in Texas, whose existence has not been previously reported.Their names: Red Planet I, II and III.For the world’s richest man, who is pursuing an elaborate, decades-long plan to colonize Mars, this seemed no idle corporate filing.When Musk bought Twitter, after all, he formed three holding companies (X Holdings I, II and III) to execute the transaction.So, is he planning to buy Mars?Birchall hasn’t returned my requests for comment since I learned of the LLCs a few weeks ago. But he doesn’t typically take actions like this without his boss’s direction. He registered them on Feb. 25, listing himself as the manager of each and using an Austin address that other Musk entities have used.Still, it is surprising to see Musk take this step now, when he has so much on his plate and is already facing pressure to do less, not more. On a Tesla earnings call last week, he said he would substantially reduce the amount of time he spent on DOGE to spend more time on the car company, whose quarterly revenue is way down from a year ago.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

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      MAGA Pronatalism Is Doomed to Fail

      by

      Long before Donald Trump said he wanted to be known as the “fertilization president,” Hungary was trying mightily to promote traditional families and raise its lagging birthrate. “We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe,” its prime minister, Viktor Orban, said in 2019. Immigration, he argued, was no answer to this demographic shortfall. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”He then announced a seven-point “family protection action plan” meant to encourage marriage and baby-making. It included government loans of 10 million Hungarian forints (at the time almost $35,000) to women under 40 when they married, which would be forgiven if they had at least three children. Large families would receive help buying cars and houses, and women who had at least four children would be exempt from personal income taxes for life.Hungary became the intellectual center of the global pronatalist movement, hosting right-wing thinkers from around the world at biannual “demographic summits” in Budapest. In 2021, giving a speech in Virginia about the “civilizational crisis” of low birthrates, JD Vance lauded Orban’s family policies and asked, “Why can’t we do that here?”Now that Vance is vice president, the administration might be about to try. “The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children,” The New York Times reported on Monday. Proposals include baby bonuses for American mothers and a new affirmative-action program that would set aside almost a third of Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have kids. Malcolm and Simone Collins, oft-profiled pronatalists hoping to seed the future with their elite genes, reportedly sent the White House a draft executive order establishing a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with at least six children. (Similar prizes existed in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.)But if Trump really wanted to arrest the decline in America’s fertility rate — which reached a historic low of 1.62 births per woman in 2023 — the best thing he could do is resign in concert with his entire administration. The crude chauvinism his presidency represents is a major impediment to the creation of healthy families.There are plenty of people on the left who find fear of falling birthrates unseemly. I don’t blame them; the pronatalist milieu is rife with misogyny, white supremacy and eugenics. But rapidly declining fertility really is a problem. It’s likely to lead to stagnant, geriatric societies without enough young working people to maintain, let alone expand, the social safety net.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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Pope Meets With JD Vance After Criticism of Trump Administration

      by

      Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis at the pontiff’s residence in Rome on Sunday, the Vatican said, in a previously unannounced visit during Easter celebrations.The Vatican said the meeting was a “brief” exchange of Easter wishes that lasted “a few minutes.” In a photograph released by the Vatican, the pope is seated in a wheelchair opposite Mr. Vance as the pair talk.The meeting came after the pope criticized the Trump administration’s deportation policies and urged Catholics to reject anti-immigrant narratives, in an unusually direct attack on the American government.The rebuke came in the form of an open letter to American bishops in February, with some of the pope’s criticisms apparently leveled directly at statements made by Mr. Vance.Mr. Vance, who was baptized as a Catholic six years ago, has been spending Holy Week in Rome with his family. He attended the Good Friday service in St. Peter’s Basilica. On Saturday, Mr. Vance met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, and with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister.Mr. Vance had not been expected to meet the pope, who only recently left the hospital after spending five weeks there in serious condition. The pope has made unannounced appearances since his hospital stay, but his health tightly restricts his planned engagements.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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Gives Conflicting Signals and Mixed Messages on Iran Nuclear Talks

      by

      Just a few weeks ago, President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, a longtime hawk on Iran, cast the administration’s goal in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program in crystal clear terms.“Full dismantlement,” he said. He went on to list what that meant: Iran had to give up facilities for enriching nuclear fuel, for “weaponization” and even its long-range missiles.But what sounded like a simple, tough-sounding goal on a Sunday talk show has started to unravel. In the past 24 hours, officials have left a contradictory and confusing set of messages, suggesting the administration might settle for caps on Iran’s activities — much as President Barack Obama did a decade ago — before backtracking on Tuesday.Some of this may simply reflect inexperience in dealing with nuclear weapons programs. Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator is Steve Witkoff, a friend of the president’s who, as a New York developer like him, has spent a lifetime dealing with skyscrapers but only began delving into Iran’s underground nuclear centrifuges and suspected weapons labs a few weeks ago.But the inconsistency also appears rooted in the splits inside Mr. Trump’s national security team as it grapples anew with one of the longest-lasting and most vexing problems in American foreign policy: How to stop Iran’s nuclear program without going to war over it. So far, the result is a blitz of mixed messages, conflicting signals and blustering threats, not unlike the way Mr. Trump and his aides talk about their ever-evolving tariff strategy.The issue came to the fore on Monday night when Mr. Witkoff began talking about his first encounter with Iran’s foreign minister last Saturday in Oman. The meeting went well, he said, plunging into the complex world of Iran’s nuclear program, which has taken it to the very threshold of building a weapon.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

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      JD Vance Drops Ohio State’s Championship Trophy During White House Celebration

      by

      Vice President JD Vance dropped the College Football Playoff national championship trophy during an event on the White House South Lawn on Monday, an ill-timed fumble that he laughed about later after it had spread across social media.As the ceremony honoring the champion Ohio State Buckeyes came to an end, Mr. Vance — a former senator from Ohio who graduated from Ohio State — tried to lift the trophy, which was on a table onstage.TreVeyon Henderson, a Buckeyes running back, stepped in to help, grabbing the top of the trophy as Mr. Vance lifted the base. As the men hoisted it off the table, the trophy split in two and Mr. Vance dropped the base, which fell to the ground. Mr. Henderson and another player managed to hold onto the top of the trophy.According to the College Football Playoff website, the trophy consists of separate components — a 12-inch bronze base, and a 26-and-a-half-inch trophy made from 24-karat gold, bronze and stainless steel. Together, the pieces weigh 50 pounds, the Ohio State Athletic Department said on social media in January, three days after the Buckeyes defeated Notre Dame to win the title.After the base fell, some in the crowd gasped, while others laughed or clapped. Mr. Vance joked about the incident on social media.“I didn’t want anyone after Ohio State to get the trophy so I decided to break it,” Mr. Vance said.It was hardly the first championship trophy calamity.In 2006, after the tennis star Maria Sharapova won the U.S. Open, the top of the trophy popped off when she hoisted it above her head. (The announcer Dick Enberg called it her first unforced error of the night.)In 2011, as the soccer club Real Madrid celebrated its Copa del Rey victory over Barcelona, a player dropped the trophy from the upper level of an open double-decker bus, which ran over the cup and smashed it into pieces.And two years ago, at a ceremony after the Hungarian Grand Prix, the British racing driver Lando Norris slammed a bottle of sparkling wine on a table onstage, sending the trophy of the race winner, Max Verstappen, tumbling to the ground. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      China Condemns JD Vance’s ‘Chinese Peasants’ Comment

      by

      Beijing has denounced Vice President JD Vance’s rhetoric as “ignorant” after he said the United States was borrowing money from “Chinese peasants” in a television interview last week.“China’s position on Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations has been made very clear,” said Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, during a news conference on Tuesday. “It is surprising and sad to hear the vice president say such ignorant and impolite words.”China has remained defiant in the face of the Trump administration’s tariffs and the latest threat from President Trump of an additional 50 percent tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing reverses its retaliatory levies on U.S. imports. China’s Ministry of Commerce on Tuesday accused the United States of “blackmail,” and said that Beijing would “fight to the end.”In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Vance defended the Trump administration’s sweeping global tariffs, asking what the “globalist economy” has given the United States.Answering his own question, Mr. Vance said America was “incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make” for its market. “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,” he said.Mr. Trump’s new policies, condemned by many international leaders, have wrought havoc on financial markets and spurred experts to issue warnings about inflation.The spiraling trade war between the two countries is poised to be costly to Americans, who last year purchased $440 billion of goods from China, making the country the second-largest source of imports after Mexico.Gillian Wong More