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      Facts About Tim Walz: Teacher, Veteran and Harris’s VP Pick

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      Until recently, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was a virtual unknown outside of the Midwest, even among Democrats. But his stock rose fast in the days after President Biden withdrew from the race, clearing a path for Ms. Harris to replace him and pick Mr. Walz as her No. 2.Here’s a closer look at the Democrats’ new choice for vice president.1. He is a (very recent) social media darling. Mr. Walz has enjoyed a groundswell of support online from users commenting on his Midwestern “dad vibes” and appealing ordinariness.2. He started the whole “weird” thing. It was Mr. Walz who labeled former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “weird” on cable television just a couple of weeks ago. The description soon became a Democratic talking point.3. He reminds you of your high school history teacher for a reason. Mr. Walz taught high school social studies and geography — first in Alliance, Neb., and then in Mankato, Minn. — before entering politics.4. He is a decorated veteran. Mr. Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard as a teenager and retired 24 years later in 2005, having served primarily in responses to natural disasters. He received honors including the Army Commendation Medal for heroism or meritorious service.5. He was a rare breed in Congress: a Democrat from the rural Midwest. For more than a decade, Mr. Walz represented Minnesota’s First District, in the southern part of the state. He was the top Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, supported funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, voted for the Affordable Care Act and voted against restricting federal funding for abortion.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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      Six images that tell the story of Trump’s wild summer

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      Six images that tell the story of Trump’s wild summer.Good evening! Look, before you ask — I don’t know who Vice President Kamala Harris is going to choose as her running mate, but we are all going to find out soon. Tonight, we’re looking at former President Donald Trump’s topsy-turvy summer with someone who has literally seen it all: my colleague the photographer Doug Mills.Over the last month, former President Donald Trump has been shot at and crowned for the third time as the Republican presidential nominee. He has watched his opponent, President Biden, get forced out of the race, and has struggled to find his footing as he sizes up his new competition, Vice President Kamala Harris.And let’s not forget that he was convicted of 34 felonies this year.My colleague Doug Mills has been there for all of it. In recent weeks, the drama of the Biden campaign may have been the biggest story in politics. But Doug, a photographer who has been taking pictures of presidents since the 1980s, says that what he is witnessing is a campaign unlike anything he has covered before.So today, while the political world waits for the final, veep-shaped puzzle piece in the newly reset race between Trump and Harris, we’re going to do something a little different. I called Doug, who was spending a rare day off the trail painting a bedroom in his house, and asked him to tell us about the images he thinks will define Trump’s roller coaster of a summer. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.Doug! You have been there for every huge moment that has shaped the Trump campaign in the past few months, from his criminal trial, through the assassination attempt, to today. How does he change when your camera comes out?Every politician — everybody who is very image-conscious, like he is — is aware of every camera whenever they’re around. He’s looking at camera angles and what the light is like, and he’s very particular about light.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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      JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

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      In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.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 Says Georgia’s Governor Is Hampering His Efforts to Win There

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      Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might not have ended up in legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.Representatives for Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, and Mr. Raffensperger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.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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      If ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is a Cautionary Tale, It Was Lost on JD Vance

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      It is just my luck that the week I was on vacation also happened to be one of the most consequential weeks in recent American political history. In addition to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and the subsequent Republican National Convention, there was also President Biden’s decision to stand down from the presidential race and hand the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris.I have a lot of thoughts about all this, but for now I want to talk about one of the minor characters in this saga — JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president.That Vance, more than two weeks after the convention, is still in the public eye as a subject of controversy over his remarks condemning childless women is evidence enough that he is, so far, a burden to the Trump campaign and not an asset. But at the moment I am less interested in the ways that Vance has adopted the tropes of online “manosphere” influencers than I am in the stories he tells about himself and his ideology.A few days after he received the nomination, Politico published a story on his deep affinity for “The Lord of the Rings,” the series of fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien that were adapted, about 20 years ago, into blockbuster fantasy epics. Vance has, according to Politico, “pointed to Tolkien’s high fantasy epics as a window into understanding his worldview.”Although Vance does not seem to specify the precise manner in which “The Lord of the Rings” has influenced his conservatism, his allies have taken it upon themselves to offer some explanation. “Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019,” Luke Burgis, a professor at the Catholic University of America, said to Politico. “Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.”Vance, he continued, very likely took away from Tolkien “an apocalyptic frame of mind” reflecting the story’s concern with the battle between good and evil.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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      How JD Vance Thinks About Power

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      Follow live updates on the 2024 election here.In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast.He continued.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”In his U-turning path from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Mr. Vance has developed a reputation for being ideologically pliable — open-minded, supporters say; core-less, critics counter.But he has been unswerving in recent years in his assessment of how Republicans should carry themselves when they win: Use every available lever of state, even if that means testing the bounds of the constitutional system.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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      JD Vance queda bajo el foco por críticas a los ‘momentos más débiles’ de Simone Biles

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      Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.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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      Vance’s Links to the Project 2025 Leader Complicate Trump’s Attempts at Distance

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      Donald Trump disavowed the set of conservative plans after it became a popular target for Democrats, but his running mate, JD Vance, wrote a foreword for a forthcoming book by its principal architect.Even as Donald J. Trump is trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, his running mate’s contribution to a new book by the project’s principal architect is complicating his efforts.“Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book by the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, calling for a “second American Revolution,” features a foreword by Senator JD Vance, the Ohio Republican whom Mr. Trump tapped as his running mate in July.“In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Mr. Vance writes in his introduction, which was obtained and published online by The New Republic on Tuesday. The book is set for publication in September.Mr. Vance announced in June that he had written the foreword for Mr. Roberts, whose think tank became an influential bastion of conservative policymaking during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and enjoyed exceptional influence during Mr. Trump’s time in office, providing a staffing pipeline for his administration.But Mr. Vance’s endorsement of the book became more politically fraught after Mr. Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025, a set of sweeping policy proposals for a hoped-for Republican presidency that the think tank began preparing more than two years ago under Mr. Roberts’s direction. The project, which has been billed by Heritage as an attack on the “deep state” and proposes disbanding multiple federal agencies, excluding abortion from health care and ending an array of climate change programs, has become a popular target for Democrats.Will Martin, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, wrote in an email Wednesday that “the foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025.” Mr. Vance “has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for,” Mr. Martin wrote, adding: “Only President Trump will set the policy agenda for the next administration.”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