The former President Donald Trump is firing back at the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly after she claimed that he has lost “multiple steps,” and that he is not as “mentally sharp” as he was back in 2016.
Donald Trump must have just seen Megyn Kelly call him old and her saying he hasn’t just lost a step but has lost many steps 😂
“There’s no question Trump has lost a step or multiple steps,” Kelly told Glenn Beck on Friday. “He is confusing Joe Biden for [Barack] Obama … I know he’s now saying he intentionally did that — go back and look at the clips, it wasn’t intentional. The reference about how somebody is going to get us into World War II, confusing countries, confusing cities where he is, and it’s happening more and more.”
“This is what happens when you’re 77-years-old. Trump seems inhuman, but he’s not inhuman. He’s a human. He’s a man,” Kelly continued. “DeSantis’ line about ‘Father Time spares no one,’ was a good one. So, look, if it’s between Trump and Biden, I don’t think there’s any question who’s more fit and more capable. But are we really going to pretend that Donald Trump is just as vibrant and mentally sharp as he was in ’16?”
I completely agree with Megyn Kelly when she says that if they throw Trump in jail prior to the election The country will burn. The left is waking a sleeping giant. It’s only time before they actually wake it up if they continue down this path. pic.twitter.com/ffKTOBXyH7
Trump fired back at Kelly on social media, saying, “What the hell happened to her? She has lost whatever she once had, which wasn’t very much.”
“Some things never change!” he continued, according to The New York Post.
While Trump has confused Biden and Obama man times as of late, he has claimed that this is actually intentional on his part.
“Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left ‘Disinformation Machine,’ go wild saying that ‘Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden. He must be cognitively impaired,” Trump said on social media last month.
There has long been no love lost between Trump and Kelly. After Trump sat down with Kelly for an interview earlier this year, he blasted her as “nasty” during a speech in Iowa in September.
“I sat down for an hour, and then I did a Megyn Kelly one,” Trump said at the time, according to The Hill. He was seemingly referring to his previous interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I, she was, you know, boy, she became nastier all of a sudden,” Trump continued of Kelly. “She was pretty nasty, didn’t you think, anyone that watched it.”
Trump and Kelly infamously clashed after she moderated a Republican presidential debate back in 2015. At the time, Trump said of Kelly that “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
As for Kelly, she’s claimed that she no longer has an issue with Trump.
“You know, all that nonsense between us is under the bridge, and he could not have been more magnanimous,” she recently said.
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Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.
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But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obama—only to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.
Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.
Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties’ center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterday’s most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issues—even as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.
These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a “racial reckoning”—a revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.
For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixon’s “silent majority”; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-“woke” rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.
This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls “democratic capitalism”—not a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesn’t fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas—“a form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.”
All three—power, culture, and investment—combined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americans—progress, Leonhardt writes, that “reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes.” In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economy’s growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the country’s top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.
This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early ’70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the ’60s, “the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards.”
Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? “In the standard progressive telling,” Leonhardt writes, “the explanation for this political shift is race.” Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats’ embrace of the Black freedom movement in the ’60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their “southern strategy”) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. It’s morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; it’s politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?
Leonhardt’s subtler account is rooted in the working class’s growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the country’s upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.
That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievance—I didn’t see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?
Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: “Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody.” As Democrats were reminded in 2022’s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants “will destroy New York.”
These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between “universal” values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and “communal” values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracy—built-in advantage at the top, underfunding below—has created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Americans of all colors.
A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier book’s thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: “What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. That’s something that we really didn’t anticipate.” Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Deal–style “economic liberalism” (but not Green New Deal–style socialism) and to reject “today’s post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism.” In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats’ “shadow party” of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.
The authors want a return to the party’s cultural centrism of the ’90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and others—the pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sex—remain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather that’s indifferent to such messaging.
Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.
Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.
Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the party’s struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump “reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency.” In the face of Trump’s bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the “maximalist” positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with “the groups on the receiving end of Trump’s ugliest barbs,” such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the party’s working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Green’s answer is to double down on economic populism: “Rather than fear the Republicans’ culture wars—or respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyone—Democrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.”
None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, it’s the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignment—for Republicans. Ruffini can’t resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a “cosmopolitan trap,” losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.
Ruffini’s most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesn’t think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. “Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base,” but they’re wrong, he writes. “When voters’ economic views and social views are in conflict, one’s social stances more often drive voting behavior … Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians don’t talk about them.” Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a “hard pivot against the cultural left”—he seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah moment—to neutralize Republican attacks.
Though Ruffini doesn’t spend much time on economic policy, it’s worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesn’t seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Party’s descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.
Ruffini’s formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasn’t kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffini’s desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, “pro-capitalist” families and low taxes. His “commonsense majority” would combine white people who didn’t graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because “the education divide makes a much bigger difference in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites.” It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.
Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.
These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, I’m an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats’ working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we can’t go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars aren’t easily put aside. “Guns and religion,” in Obama’s unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they aren’t inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues aren’t manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matter—that’s why they’re so polarizing.
The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sake—none more so than Trump.
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “What Does the Working Class Really Want?”
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If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.
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But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.
In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.
Publicly, Trump presentshimself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.
Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.
On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway.
These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”
If reelected, Trumpwould attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him.
The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.
In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces.
This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.
The problems of ideological polarization and extremism in the armed forces are not as extensive as some critics of the military imagine, but they are more worrisome than the military leadership would like to admit. Military officers tend to be more conservative than the public, and as far back as the Clinton and Obama administrations, I occasionally heard senior officers speak of these liberal presidents in deeply contemptuous terms (potentially a crime under military regulations). Today, military bases are subjected to a constant barrage of Fox News in almost every area with a television, and toward the end of my teaching career (I retired in 2022), I often heard senior officers repeating almost verbatim some of the most overheated and paranoid talking points about politics and national affairs from the network’s prime-time hosts. Some of these officers would be tempted to answer Trump’s call.
The rest of the members of the professional military, despite their concerns, would likely follow their instincts and default to the orders of their chain of command. The American political system was never intended to cope with someone like Trump; the military is trained and organized to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.
Trump’s plans would likely use this obedience to the chain of command to exploit an unfortunate vulnerability in the modern American armed forces: The military, in my experience, has a political-literacy problem. Too many people in uniform no longer have a basic grounding in the constitutional foundation of American government and the civil-military relationship. (Some of my colleagues who teach in senior-military educational institutions share this concern, and over the years, some of us have tried, often in vain, to push more study of the Constitution into the curricula.) These men and women are neither unintelligent nor disloyal. Rather, like many Americans, they are no longer taught basic civics, and they may struggle with the line between executing the orders of the president as the commander in chief and obeying the Constitution.
Trump’s appointees also would be able to influence the future of the armed forces through assignments and promotions (and non-promotions) within each branch—and through their behavior as examples to the rest of the military. With top cover from the White House, Trump’s functionaries in the Pentagon, working with his supporters in the ranks, could poison the military for years to come by ignoring laws, regulations, and traditions as they see fit. (Recall, for example, that Trump is an admirer of the disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and intervened to make sure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident after he was charged with war crimes and found guilty of posing for photos with a captive’s dead body.) America’s military is built on virtues such as honor and duty, but abusing and discarding the norms that support those virtues would change the military’s culture—and faster than we may realize.
Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons.
At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.
Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Military Loyal to Trump.”
Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, national security advisor, and lover of carpet bombing innocent civilians, passed away at the age of 100. The Onion asked Americans how they felt about his death, and this is what they said.
James Kessler, Psychologist
James Kessler, Psychologist
“Look, being nice in life won’t get you a Nobel Peace Prize.”
Sharon Thatcher, Teacher
“He wasn’t just a war criminal, he was our war criminal.”
Whitney Plainfield, Administrative Assistant
Whitney Plainfield, Administrative Assistant
“He would have hated to see anyone die painlessly and peacefully like this.”
Lisa Johnson, Dietician
“I don’t want to diminish his legacy by citing the Cambodian government’s official death toll because I know the real number was much, much worse.”
Gina Garroni, Delivery Driver
Gina Garroni, Delivery Driver
“Is that what I ran over last night?”
Christa Deacon, Guidance Counselor
Christa Deacon, Guidance Counselor
“May he be as bloodthirsty in death as he was in life.”
Melissa Stevens, Mortgage Banker
Melissa Stevens, Mortgage Banker
“Love him or hate him, he’ll always be remembered as the best goddamn contestant Rock Of Love ever saw.”
Dan Potter, Fireman
“I sprayed some agent orange on my kids today in his honor.”
Brook Pratt, Pest Control Worker
Brook Pratt, Pest Control Worker
“But he still had so many war crimes left in him.”
George W. Bush, Former President
George W. Bush, Former President
“I remember the first day of my presidency, he was nice enough to send me an unexploded IED.”
Greg Bentley, Graphic Artist
Greg Bentley, Graphic Artist
“But he looked so young in ‘Oppenheimer’?”
Al Preston, Copywriter
“If we all close our eyes and say a racial slur at the same time, maybe he’ll come back to life.”
Carter Jacobs, Electrician
Carter Jacobs, Electrician
“Say what you will about the guy.”
Barack Obama, Former President
Barack Obama, Former President
“He taught me that war didn’t have to be fair. The most important part was that it was pointless and bloody.”
Tom Buchner, Woodworker
“That’s what he gets for breaking into a house in a state with stand-your-ground laws.”
Alejandro Sotolongo, Art Director
Alejandro Sotolongo, Art Director
“Let he who has not carpet bombed Cambodia throw the first stone.”
Paul Flannery, Line Cook
“This is just like Paul Walker all over again.”
Lisa Hitchens, File Clerk
Lisa Hitchens, File Clerk
“He put Cambodia on the map and almost took it off.”
Dick Cheney, Retired
“Nobody’s perfect, but he came pretty close.”
Dean Verecci, Software Engineer
Dean Verecci, Software Engineer
“Oh thank god, the last war criminal in the American government is finally dead.”
Kevin Spell, Physical Trainer
Kevin Spell, Physical Trainer
“It brings a tear to my eye thinking of all the innocent people that will never get to die by his hand.”
Gene Schaefer, Bus Driver
Gene Schaefer, Bus Driver
“If you think that man was impressive, you should taste my wife Beth’s homemade potato salad. It’s out of this world!”
Irene Stobbs, Accountant
“Oh no, Paula and Louis’s kid?”
Nick Farrington, Dentist
“I just hope we don’t start tearing down all the Henry Kissinger monuments.”
Jessie Untermeyer, Music Teacher
Jessie Untermeyer, Music Teacher
“I hope he had just as much fun killing all those people as we had watching him kill them.”
George Huntington, Retired
George Huntington, Retired
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it—Henry had the mind of a supervillain, the heart of a serial killer, and the elegant gams of a va-va-voom showgirl.”
DUBAI — The vast, global efforts to arrest rising temperatures are imperiled and must accelerate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told the world climate summit on Saturday.
“We must do more,” she implored an audience of world leaders at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. And the headwinds are only growing, she warned.
“Continued progress will not be possible without a fight,” she told the gathering, which has drawn more than 100,000 people to this Gulf oil metropolis. “Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation. Corporations that greenwash their climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies.”
Her remarks — less than a year before an election that could return Donald Trump to the White House — challenged leaders to cooperate and spend more to keep the goal of containing global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach. So far, the planet has warmed about 1.3 degrees since preindustrial times.
“Our action collectively, or worse, our inaction will impact billions of people for decades to come,” Harris said.
The vice president, who frequently warns about climate change threats in speeches and interviews, is the highest-ranking face of the Biden White House at the Dubai negotiations.
She used her conference platform to push that image, announcing several new U.S. climate initiatives, including a record-setting $3 billion pledge for the so-called Green Climate Fund, which aims to help countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. The commitment echoes an identical pledge Barack Obama made in 2014 — of which only $1 billion was delivered. The U.S. Treasury Department later specified that the updated commitment was “subject to the availability of funds.”
Meanwhile, back in D.C., the Biden administration strategically timed the release of new rules to crack down on planet-warming methane emissions from the oil and gas sector — a significant milestone in its plan to prevent climate catastrophe.
The trip allows Harris to bolster her credentials on a policy issue critical to the young voters key to President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign — and potentially to a future Harris White House run.
“Given her knowledge base with the issue, her passion for the issue, it strikes me as a smart move for her to broaden that message out to the international audience,” said Roger Salazar, a California political strategist and former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore, a lifetime climate campaigner.
Yet sending Harris also presents political peril.
Biden has taken flak from critics for not attending the talks himself after representing the United States at the last two U.N. climate summits since taking office. And climate advocates have questioned the Biden administration’s embrace of the summit’s leader, Sultan al-Jaber, given he also runs the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil giant. John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, has argued the partnership can help bring fossil fuel megaliths to the table.
Harris has been on a climate policy roadshow in recent months, discussing the issue during a series of interviews at universities and other venues packed with young people and environmental advocates. The administration said it views Harris — a former California senator and attorney general — as an effective spokesperson on climate.
“The vice president’s leadership on climate goes back to when she was the district attorney of San Francisco, as she established one of the first environmental justice units in the nation,” a senior administration official told reporters on a call previewing her trip.
Joining Harris in Dubai are Kerry, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who’s leading the White House effort to implement Biden’s signature climate law.
Biden officials are leaning on that climate law — dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — to prove the U.S. is doing its part to slash global emissions. Yet climate activists remain skeptical, chiding Biden for separately approving a series of fossil fuel projects, including an oil drilling initiative in Alaska and an Appalachian natural gas pipeline.
Similarly, the Biden administration’s opening COP28 pledge of $17.5 million for a new international climate aid fund frustrated advocates for developing nations combating climate threats. The figure lagged well behind other allies, several of whom committed $100 million or more.
Nonetheless, Harris called for aggressive action in her speech, which was followed by a session with other officials on renewable energy. The vice president committed the U.S. to doubling its energy efficiency and tripling its renewable energy capacity by 2030, joining a growing list of countries. The U.S. also said Saturday it was joining a global alliance dedicated to divorcing the world from coal-based energy.
Like other world leaders, Harris also used her trip to conduct a whirlwind of diplomacy over the war between Israel and Hamas, which has flared back up after a brief truce.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Harris would be meeting with “regional leaders” to discuss “our desire to see this pause restored, our desire to see aid getting back in, our desire to see hostages get out.”
The war has intruded into the proceedings at the climate summit, with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas both skipping their scheduled speaking slots on Friday. Iran’s delegation also walked out of the summit, objecting to Israel’s presence.
Kirby said Harris will convey “that we believe the Palestinian people need a vote and a voice in their future, and then they need governance in Gaza that will look after their aspirations and their needs.”
Although Biden won’t be going to Dubai, the administration said these climate talks are “especially” vital, given countries will decide how to respond to a U.N. assessment that found the world’s climate efforts are falling short.
“This is why the president has made climate a keystone of his administration’s foreign policy agenda,” the senior administration official said.
Robin Bravender reported from Washington, D.C. Zia Weise and Charlie Cooper reported from Dubai.
Sara Schonhardt contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
A press release that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign issued last week offered a revealing window into his advisers’ thinking about how he might overcome widespread discontent with his performance to win a second term next year.
While the release focused mostly on portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to legal abortion, the most telling passage came when the Biden campaign urged the political press corps “to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.”
That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term, especially if the president faces a rematch with Trump. With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.
It’s common for presidents facing public disappointment in their performance to attempt to shift the public’s attention toward their rival. All embattled modern first-term presidents have insisted that voters will treat their reelection campaign as a choice, not a referendum. Biden is no exception. He routinely implores voters to compare him not “to the Almighty” but “to the alternative.”
But it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less. The other recent presidents with approval ratings around Election Day as low as Biden’s are now were Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Both lost their bids for a second term. Continued cooling of inflation might allow Biden to improve his approval rating, which stands around 40 percent in most surveys (Gallup’s latest put it at only 37 percent). But if Biden can’t make big gains, he will secure a second term only if he wins more voters who are unhappy with his performance than any president in modern times.
The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.
If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.
“I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”
Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice. Buffeted by disappointment in their tenure, both Carter and Bush decisively lost their reelection bids despite their enormous efforts to convince voters that their opponent could not be trusted with power.
In this century, it’s become somewhat easier for presidents to overcome doubts about their performance by inflaming fears about their rival. Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004 had more success than Carter and the elder Bush at both mobilizing their core supporters and attracting swing voters by raising doubts about their opponent.
Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.
While more voters than in the past appear willing to treat presidential reelections as a choice rather than a referendum, Biden may need to push this dynamic to a new extreme. Obama and Bush both had approval ratings right around 50 percent in polling just before they won reelection; that meant they needed to convince only a slice of voters ambivalent about them that they would be even more unhappy with their opponent.
Biden’s approval rating is much lower, and he is even further behind the majority approval enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 before they won decisive reelections.
Those comparisons make clear that one crucial question confronting Biden is how much he can improve his own standing over the next year. The president has economic achievements he can tout to try to rebuild his support, particularly an investment boom in clean energy, semiconductors, and electric vehicles tied to the trio of major bills he passed. Unemployment is at historic lows, and in recent months wages have begun rising faster than prices. The latest economic reports show that inflation, which most analysts consider the primary reason for the public discontent with his tenure, is continuing to moderate.
All of these factors may lift Biden, but probably only modestly. Even if prices for gas, groceries, and rent stop rising, that doesn’t mean they will fall back to the levels they were at when Biden took office. Voters appear unhappy not only about inflation, but about the Federal Reserve Board’s cure of higher interest rates, which has made it harder to purchase homes and cars and to finance credit-card debt. Biden also faces the challenge that some portion of his high disapproval rating is grounded not in dissatisfaction over current conditions, but in a belief that he’s too old to handle the job for another term. Better economic news won’t dispel that doubt.
For all of these reasons, while Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.
Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”
For Biden, the key group could be voters who say they disapprove of his performance in office, but only “somewhat,” rather than “strongly.” The Democrats’ unusually good showing among those “somewhat” disapproving voters was a central reason the party performed unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterm election. But in an NBC national survey released earlier this week, Trump narrowly led Biden among those disenchanted voters, a result more in line with historic patterns.
Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.
Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)
But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.
In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.
Poll results such as those scare Democratic strategists perhaps more than any other; they indicate that some voters may be growing more willing to accept what they didn’t like about Trump (chaos, vitriol, threats to democracy) because they think he’s an antidote for what they don’t like about Biden (his results on inflation, immigration, and crime.) Jim McLaughlin, a Trump-campaign pollster, told me earlier this year that because of their discouragement with Biden’s record, even some voters who say “I may not love the guy” are growing newly receptive to Trump. “The example I had people use is that he is like your annoying brother-in-law that you can’t stand but you know at the end of the day he’s a good husband, he’s a good father,” McLaughlin said.
The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.
Trump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.
A former State Department official who worked in the Obama administration was arrested on hate crime and harassment charges after police say he was caught on video making Islamophobic remarks to a halal food cart worker in New York City. Roxana Saberi reports.
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This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
Last week’s surprise deal between China and the United States may provide a boost to the climate talks in Dubai — but the two powers remain at odds on tough questions such as how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations.
The world’s top two drivers of climate change are also divided by a thicket of disagreements on trade, security, human rights and economic competition.
The good news is that Washington and Beijing are talking to each other again and restarting some of their technical cooperation on climate issues, after a yearlong freeze. That may still not be enough to get nearly 200 nations to commit to far greater climate action at the talks that begin Nov. 30.
The two superpowers’ latest detente creates the right “mood music” for the summit, said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate think tank E3G. “But it still is not saying that the world’s two largest economies and two largest emitters are fully committed to the scale and pace of reductions that are needed.”
The deal, announced after a meeting this month between U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, produced an agreement to commit to a series of actions to limit climate pollution. Those include accelerating the shift to renewable energy and widening the variety of heat-trapping gases they will address in their next round of climate targets.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping endorsed that type of cooperation after a meeting in California on Wednesday, saying they “welcomed” positive discussions on actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during this decade, as well as “common approaches” toward a successful climate summit. Biden said he would work with China to address climate finance in developing countries, a major source of friction for the U.S.
“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” said Xi ahead of his bilateral with Biden.
But the deal leaves some big issues unaddressed, including specific measures for ending their reliance on fossil fuels, the main contributor to global warming. Andthe two countries are a long way from the days when a surprise U.S.-Chinese agreement to cooperate on climate change had the power to land a landmark global pact.
That puts the nations in a dramatically different place than in 2014, when Xi and then-President Barack Obama made a historic pledge to jointly cut their planet-warming pollution, paving the way for the landmark Paris Agreement to land in 2015.
Even a surprise joint deal between the two nations in 2021 failed to ease friction, with China emerging at the last minute to oppose language calling for a phase-out of coal power. The summit ended with a less ambitious “phase-down.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwan’s highest civilian honour | Handout/Getty Image
The two countries’ struggles to find comity have come at the worst possible moment — at a time when rapid action is crucial to preventing climate catastrophe. A growing number of factors has threatened to widen the U.S.-Chinese wedge further, including their competition for supremacy in the market for clean energy.
Two nations at odds
While the U.S. has contributed more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other nation during the past 150 years, China is now the world’s largest climate polluter — though not on a per capita basis — and it will need to stop building new coal-fired power for the world to stand a chance of limiting rising temperatures.
The recent agreement hints at that possibility by stating that more renewables would enable reductions in the generation of oil, gas and coal, helping China peak its emissions ahead of its current targets.
The challenge will be bridging the countries’ diverging approaches to climate issues.
The Biden administration is urging a rapid end to coal-fired power, which is waning in the U.S., even as it permits more oil drilling and ramps up exports of natural gas — much of it destined for Asia.
At the same time, it wants the United States to claim a larger role in the clean energy manufacturing industry that China now dominates, and is seeking to loosen China’s stranglehold on supply chains for products such as solar panels, electric cars and the minerals that go into them. It’s also pressuring Beijing to contribute to U.N. climate funds, saying China’s historic status as a developing country no longer shields it from its responsibility to pay.
China sees the U.S. position as a direct challenge to its economic growth and energy security.
Beijing wants to protect the use of coal and defend developing countries’ access to fossil fuels. It has also backed emerging economies’ demands that rich countries pay more to help them deploy clean energy and adapt to the effects of a warmer world. China says it already helps developing countries through South-South cooperation and points to a clause in the 2015 Paris Agreement that says developed countries should lead on climate finance.
Hanging over the talks is also the prospect of a change of administration in the U.S., and continued efforts by Republicans to vilify Beijing and accuse the Biden administration of supporting Chinese companies through its climate policies and investments. And as China’s response to Pelosi’s trip underscored, climate cooperation remains hostage to other tensions in the two countries’ relationship, a dynamic likely to heighten in the coming year as both Taiwan and the U.S. hold presidential elections.
One challenge is that China doesn’t seem to see much to gain from offering more ambitious climate actions amid worsening relations with other countries, said Kevin Tu, a non-resident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and an adjunct professor at the School of Environment at Beijing Normal University.
“In the past several years, China has voluntarily upgraded its climate ambitions a few times amid rising geopolitical tensions,” Tu said, pointing to its 2020 pledge to peak and then zero out its emissions. “So China does not necessarily have very strong incentive to further upgrade its climate ambition.”
The divide between the two nations has created a dilemma for some small island nations that often walk a fine line between negotiating alongside China at climate talks while pushing for more action to scale back fossil fuels.
The U.S. and China remain at odds on how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
“The U.S. is trying to drag everyone to talk about an immediate coal phase-out,” Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, said during a recent call with reporters, calling the effort a “U.S.-versus-China thing.”
“But we also need to talk about no more oil or gas as well,” he added.
Operating on its own terms
The dynamic between China and the U.S. will either drag down or bolster the ambitions of countries updating their national climate pledges, a process that begins at the close of COP28. Nations are already woefully behind cuts needed to hit the goals they laid out in Paris.
China’s new 10-year targets will be crucial for meeting those marks, given that China accounts for close to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and that it plans to build dozens of coal-fired power plants in the coming years. The U.S., and many other countries, will be looking for greater commitments from China — whether that’s modifying what it means by phasing down coal or setting more stringent targets.
China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and zero them out before 2060,a decadelater than the United States has promised to reach net-zero. Beijing is unlikely to accelerate that timeline, in part because — analysts say — its philosophy is fundamentally different from that of the U.S.: underpromise and overdeliver.
Even without committing to more action, China’s massive investments in low-carbon energy installations — twice that of the United States — may inadvertently help the country achieve its peaking target early, some analysts say.
A complicated picture
If the Trump years drove China further from America, the global pandemic and resulting economic slowdown that started during his final year didn’t bring it closer. And the energy crunch stemming from Russia’s war with Ukraine cemented China’s drive for reliable energy to meet the rising needs of its 1.4 billion people. That created a coal boom.
Meanwhile, China heavily subsidized the expansion of wind, solar and electric vehicle production. Its clean energy supply chain dominance has lowered the global costs for those technologies but drawn scorn from the U.S. as it tries to rebuild its own domestic manufacturing base.
China has turned more combative in response. Rather than work with the U.S. to make joint announcements on climate action, Xi has made clear that China’s climate policy won’t be dictated by others. At G20 meetings, China has aligned with Saudi Arabia and Russia in opposing language aimed at phasing out fossil fuels.
“At the end of the day, it’s harder to make a claim that China needs the U.S. and it’s harder to make the claim that the U.S. can rely on China,” said Cory Combs, a senior analyst at policy consulting firm Trivium China.
Wealthy countries’ inability to deliver promised climate aid to vulnerable countries hasn’t helped. While China remains among the bloc of developing nations in calling for more action on climate finance, it also points to the investments it’s making in the Global South through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and bilateral aid.
A foreign diplomat who asked for anonymity to speak openly said China has resisted pressure to contribute money to a climate fund that would help developing countries rebuild after climate disasters and would likely push back against a focus on its continued build out of coal-fired power plants.
US climate envoy John Kerry sits next to China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
“Anything that would signal that they would need to do more is something that gets blocked,” the person said.
China did release a plan earlier this month to cut emissions of the potent greenhouse methane, delivering on a promise it had made in a joint declaration with the U.S. at climate talks in 2021. But it has still not signed onto a global methane pledge led by the U.S. and the European Union.
All that amounts to a complicated picture for the U.S.-Chinese relationship and its broader impact on global climate outcomes.
“The U.S.-China talks will help stabilize the politics when countries meet in the UAE, but critical issues such as a fossil fuel phase-out still require much [further] political efforts,” said Li Shuo, incoming director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It’s very much about setting a floor,” and the talks in Dubai still need to build out from there, Shuo added.
He argues in a recent paper that China will subscribe to targets it sees as achievable and will continue toside with developing countries on climate finance. Chinese government officials are cautious about what they’re willing to commit to internationally, which sometimes serves as a disincentive for them to be more ambitious, he said.
The calculation is likely to be different for Biden’s team, who “want a headline that the world agrees to push China,” said David Waskow, who leads the World Resources Institute’s international climate initiative.
Not impossible
The power of engagement can’t be completely written off, and in the past it has proven to have a positive effect on the U.S.-China relationship.
“[Climate] sort of was a positive pillar in the relationship,” said Todd Stern, Obama’s former chief climate negotiator. “And it came to be a thing where when the two sides have come to get together, it was like, ‘What can we get done on climate?’”
Engagement with Chinaat the state and local level and among academics and research institutes has potential — in large part because it’s less political, said Joanna Lewis, a professor at Georgetown University who closely tracks China’s climate change approach.
There could also be opportunities to separate climate from broader bilateral tensions.
“I do feel like there’s that willingness to say, ‘We recognize our roles, we recognize our ability to have that catalytic effect on the international community’s actions,’” said Nate Hultman, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability and a former senior adviser to Kerry. “It doesn’t solve all the world’s issues going into the COP, but it gives a really strong boost to international discussions around what we know we need to do.”
Sara Schonhardt and Zack Colman reported, and Phelim Kine contributed reporting, from Washington, D.C.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it.
Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada.
The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by about 2.5 points in the previous two presidential cycles. But Nevada is going to be competitive, perhaps more so than ever.
Some of the Times/Siena poll’s internal numbers gave me pause. Among registered voters in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located and where 70 percent of the electorate resides, the poll found Trump ahead of Biden 50–45. But Democrats make up 34 percent of active voters in the county, compared with Republicans’ 25 percent, and Biden won Clark by nine percentage points in 2020.
Other recent polls, not quite as highly rated as Times/Siena’s, have found the presidential race here to be much closer than the Times did. Last month, a CNN poll of registered Nevada voters found Biden and Trump virtually tied. Recent surveys from Emerson College, which has been unreliable in the state in the past, and Morning Consult/Bloomberg both had Trump up three points among likely voters. The Times/Siena polling outfit has a good reputation, but shortly before the 2020 election, it found Biden ahead of Trump in Nevada by six percentage points, more than double Biden’s eventual margin of victory.
Nevada is difficult to poll for a variety of reasons. Here as much as anywhere else, pollsters tend to underestimate the number of people they need to survey by cellphone to get a representative sample, and they generally don’t do enough bilingual polling in Nevada, where nearly a third of the population is Hispanic. Nevada also has a transient population, lots of residents working 24/7 shifts, and an electorate that’s less educated than most other states’. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses in 2016.) The polling challenge has become only more acute, because nonpartisan voters now outnumber Democrats and Republicans in Nevada, making it harder for pollsters to accurately capture the Democratic or Republican vote. (Since 2020, a state law has allowed voters to register at the DMV, and if they fail to do so, their party affiliation is defaulted to independent.)
Nevada matters in presidential elections, but we are also, let’s face it, a tad weird.
Still, Democrats have reasons to worry. Nevada was clobbered by COVID disproportionately to the rest of the country, because our economy is so narrowly focused on the casino industry. The aftereffects—unemployment, inflation—are still very much being felt here. Nevada’s jobless rate is the highest in the country, at 5.4 percent. That’s down dramatically from an astonishing 28.2 percent in April 2020, when the governor closed casinos for a few months. Although the situation has clearly improved, many casino workers still haven’t been rehired.
Democrat Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in his party to lose in 2022, and his defeat was due at least partly to the fallout from COVID. Fairly or not, President Biden wears a lot of that too, as all presidents do when voters are unhappy with the economy. The Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll illuminated the bleak pessimism of Nevada voters, 76 percent of whom think the U.S. economy is going in the wrong direction.
Here, as elsewhere, voters are also concerned about Biden’s age, and that informs their broader views of him. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans disapprove of Biden’s performance, according to the Times, and only 40 percent have a favorable impression of him. Trump’s numbers, although awful—44 percent see him favorably—are better than Biden’s here, as well as in some blue or bluish states.
In Nevada, and in general, Biden is losing support among key groups—young and nonwhite voters. The Times/Siena poll found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanics in the state, despite the fact that Latinos have been a bedrock of the Democratic base here for a decade and a half. In the 2022 midterms, polls taken early in the race showed Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, losing Hispanic support, though her campaign managed to reverse that trend enough to win by a very slim margin.
Democratic presidential nominees have won Nevada in every election since 2008. Democrats also hold the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and three of the four House seats, and the party dominates both houses of the legislature. But the state has been slowly shifting to the right—not just in polling but in Election Day results. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state that saw worse Democratic performance compared with 2016, unless you include the more solidly red Florida. Nevada’s new Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, is building a formidable political machine. Republicans have made inroads with working-class white voters here, leaving Democrats with an ever-diminishing margin of error.
Abortion, an issue that was crucial to Cortez Masto’s narrow victory, could help Biden in Nevada. The Times/Siena poll showed that only a quarter of Nevadans think abortion should be always or mostly illegal. A 1990 referendum made abortion up to 24 weeks legal here, and the law can be changed only by another popular vote. Democrats in Nevada, though, want to take those protections a step further next year and are trying to qualify a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion. As the off-year elections last week showed, that issue, more than the choice between Biden and Trump, could be what saves the president a year from now. Nevada also has a nationally watched Senate race in 2024, in which the incumbent Democrat, Jacky Rosen, has already signaled that she will mimic her colleague Cortez Masto and put abortion front and center in her campaign.
So many events could intervene between now and next November, foreign and/or domestic, and we have yet to see how effective the Trump and Biden campaigns will be, assuming that each man is his party’s nominee. Democratic Senator Harry Reid was deeply unpopular here in 2009, then got reelected by almost six percentage points; Barack Obama was thought to be in trouble in 2011, then won Nevada and reelection.
Democrats clearly hope that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, many voters will see the election as a binary choice and will back Biden. But if the election instead becomes a referendum on Biden’s tenure, including the economy he has presided over, Trump could plausibly win Nevada—and the Electoral College.
Social media users, including two of his political rivals, mocked former President Donald Trump after videos circulated of him mixing up President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.
Trump, the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination, gave a speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday where his comments sparked criticism for appearing to be “confused” about who was currently in the White House. The Saturday gaffe comes just days after he was ridiculed online due to his remarks about North Korea in which he got the country’s population size wrong, by some margin.
While Trump did correctly identify Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, whom he previously called the “leader of Turkey,” he then told the crowd of supporters that the Hungarian leader had pushed for Obama’s resignation a few weeks ago.
After praising Orbán as “very powerful,” Trump said, “They were interviewing him [Orbán] two weeks ago and they said, ‘What would you advise President Obama? The whole world seems to be exploding and imploding?’ And he said, ‘It’s very simple. He should immediately resign, and they should replace him with President Trump, who kept the world safe.'”
Former President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a campaign event on November 11, 2023 in Claremont, New Hampshire. Video shared on social media shows Trump say during the event that former president Barack Obama is in the White House rather than current President Joe Biden. Scott Eisen/Getty
Newsweek reached out via email on Saturday to representatives for Trump and Biden for comment.
Biden, the current president and Trump’s Democratic rival, is campaigning for a second term with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Biden-Harris campaign has been highlighting Trump’s recent fumbles, which include misidentifying countries, not knowing what town he’s in and mispronouncing words, and pushing for the media to cover the MAGA leader’s gaffes like they do concerns about Biden’s age.
The issue of age has become a frequent talking point in the 2024 presidential race, whose likely contenders are 80-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump.
Both Biden and Trump have faced mounting mockery over a series of gaffes in recent months.
Trump faced online scrutiny in September after branding Biden “cognitively impaired” before saying the president could lead America into “World War II.”
Meanwhile, Biden was also criticized that same month after appearing to confuse the Congressional Black Caucus with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at a gala dinner.
Shortly after Trump’s mix-up in New Hampshire, the Biden-Harris campaign team quickly mocked the former president on X, formerly Twitter.
BidenHQ, a Biden-Harris 2024 campaign account, posted a clip of Trump’s remarks while calling him “confused.”
“A confused Trump forgets who is currently president,” BidenHQ posted.
The campaign team of one of Trump’s GOP rivals for the White House, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, also ridiculed the former president for the slip-up in a social media post.
DeSantisWarRoom, the X campaign account for DeSantis, mocked Trump for telling the crowd that he was “going off teleprompter” shortly before the gaffe.
“Trump announces he’s ‘going off teleprompter,’ then says Hungarian leader Viktor Orban is calling on Barack Obama to step down as President of the United States,” DeSantisWarRoom posted. “How many times has Trump forgotten who is in the White House this week?”
Trump announces he’s “going off teleprompter,” then says Hungarian leader Viktor Orban is calling on Barack Obama to step down as President of the United States.
While it’s common knowledge that citizens have very little influence on elected officials, The Onion asked U.S. politicians how their constituents feel about a ceasefire in Gaza, and this is what they said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
“A cease what? I’ve never heard that word in my life.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA)
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA)
“My constituents routinely vote in favor of having blood on our hands.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
“Does AIPAC count as a constituent?”
Vice President Kamala Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris
“Am I a politician? Gee, that’s flattering.”
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
“One more word about a ceasefire, and I’m ordering Israel to bomb south Brooklyn.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT)
“Oh, while I’m at work the nanny is the one who looks after the constituents.”
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
“My constituents know I have been calling for a cease-ceasefire since day one.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
“Representatives are public servants. That means it’s my job to listen to what my constituents have to say, internalize it, and then do whatever I want.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
“I have genuinely not thought about another human being since 1998.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC)
“When I got elected in 2014, my campaign pitch was ‘You wanna see a dead body?’”
Gov. Gavin Newsom Of California
Gov. Gavin Newsom Of California
“Constituents…constituents… Oh, you mean the blurred shapes I sometimes see before meetups with donors?”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
“Hmm… What is this ‘feel’?”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
“My Illinois colleague Dick Durbin, who called for a ceasefire, obviously has different constituents than I do.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
“I don’t know. I can’t hear frequencies coming out of the mouths of people who make below $400k.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)
“They elected me to kill people, so that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
“I have but one constituent, and their name is Lockheed Martin.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul Of New York
Gov. Kathy Hochul Of New York
“I know what they want. I just think they are stupid and don’t respect them. Make sense?”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)
“A ceasefire is a sacred bond between one man and one woman. Anything else is a sin.”
Former President Barack Obama
Former President Barack Obama
“No constituents anymore, motherfuckers! You people can’t goddamn touch me! I can say whatever the hell I want. Fuck all of you!”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
“My term doesn’t expire until 2068.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO)
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO)
“Constituents? Oh, do you mean money? The money says to burn it to the ground.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH)
“I assume all my constituents were also given a full ride by the Federalist Society.”
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)
“We often think about others so much that we forget to think about our own feelings. The question is, do I want a ceasefire?”
Gov. Greg Abbott Of Texas
Gov. Greg Abbott Of Texas
“Most of my constituents are guns, and they love firing. It’s the equivalent of orgasm to them.”
David Axelrod, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s two victorious presidential campaigns, says President Joe Biden should reconsider running for reelection in the wake of a dismal new poll that shows Donald Trump leading in five swing states.
Axelrod, who in 2019 called Biden “perhaps the strongest candidate” against Trump in what at the time was a still-emerging Democratic field, wrote on X that there is “legitimate concern” this time around as he shared some of the poll’s findings:
It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm. He’s defied CW before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party–not “bed-wetting,” but legitimate concern. https://t.co/g6zeWF0T87
However, Axelrod noted that Biden’s “biggest liability” among voters “is the one thing he can’t change,” and that’s his age.
Biden turns 81 later this month, and Axelrod said, “The age arrow only points in one direction.”
Axelrod said Biden should be proud of what he has achieved, but warned of the consequences of miscalculating against Trump, who he called “a dangerous, unhinged demagogue.”
He said only Biden can make the call on continuing his campaign.
“What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?” he wrote, then added:
Yes, there also is risk associated with changing course now, as there is little time left for a primary campaign–and campaigns are how we test candidates. (Re @RonDeSantis.) But there is a lot of leadership talent in the Democratic Party, poised to emerge.
In 1953, the Swiss novelist Max Frisch published a play called The Arsonists. It’s a pitch dark comedy about a small town ravaged by a group of maniacs disguised as traveling salesmen, who sweet-talk their way into people’s homes and then set them on fire. Its protagonist is a dolt called Biedermann—bieder being German for honest, respectable, and upright. He’s aware of the danger, and yet, when the arsonists knock, he lets them in. The tragedy, Frisch argues, is that he almost has no other choice: The arsonists are such smooth talkers that it’s easy, when listening to them, to ignore the large drums of kerosene and the matches they’re holding in their hands.
I thought of The Arsonists this week when I heard snippets of a podcast interview featuring former president Barack Obama on the Middle East. “Nobody’s hands are clean,” Obama said. “All of us are complicit.”
Nah, man. Not all of us are complicit. It’s just you.
It’s you, because you’re the one who gave that stentorian speech about red lines in Syria and then sat by and did nothing as those red lines were crossed and Assad continued to slaughter his own people, allowing the Iranians and the Russians to creep in and fill the vacuum left by your devastating lack of leadership.
It’s you, because you’re the one who came up with the idea of empowering Iran, the world’s premiere exporter of terrorism, Holocaust denial, and chaos, all the while telling the American people you were merely trying to stop Teheran from getting a nuclear bomb. Billions of dollars and thousands of dead later, we can all see how well this idea—which you, with the eloquence only a professor could muster, called “regional integration”—is working.
It’s you, because you’re the one who delivered a parting gift to the region, ending your final term as president by reversing four decades of American bipartisan support of Israel and abstaining from a U.N. vote condemning Israeli settlements, while funneling $400 million in annual payments to the despotic Palestinian Authority, which then promptly used this money to fund its pay-for-slay program, doling out large cash payments to any Palestinian who murdered Jews.
So, please, Mr. President: Spare us your opinions.
Former President Barack Obama speaks to attendees at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum on November 03, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. Obama spoke about economic inclusion is fundamental to safeguarding and expanding democracies in countries around the world. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Lest anyone is tempted to think that Obama’s words and actions as president are somehow par for the course, just the muddled messaging that American presidents are forced to deliver when speaking about very complicated questions like Middle East politics, consider his successors and predecessors alike.
Calling Hamas “cold-blooded killers,” former president George W. Bush left little room for ambiguity in a recent interview. “My view is: One side is guilty,” he said. “And it’s not Israel.”
Bill Clinton? Just as clear: “Now is a time for the world to rally against terrorism and support Israeli democracy,” he said on social media two days after Hamas’s horrific attacks. “I stand with the government of Israel and all Israelis.”
President Joe Biden—once Obama’s vice president—delivered both a rousing speech in defense of Israel and, more importantly, the military might that may be needed to fight what is very clearly a much larger conflict than merely a skirmish between Israel and a small terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.
Which pretty much makes Obama an outlier, the lone voice making very different arguments than those advanced by his Democrat or Republican peers.
It hardly takes a political scientist—or a good therapist—to understand why. Study the 44th president’s record, to say nothing of his extensive writing and speeches, and a clear ideology emerges, the sort of gauzy anti-Imperialist fantasy so trendy in graduate seminar rooms that eschews American power and dreams that the wretched of the earth will rise up to the full measure of their native glory.
Only a mind gripped by the erotic pull of theory would look at the 2009 demonstrations in Iran—the so-called Green Revolution—and decide that America ought to side not with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free but with their jailers, the murderous mullahs who beat women to death for not wearing proper head coverings, execute gays, and kidnap Americans for ransom like common criminals.
It would be so tempting to tune Obama out, to argue that there’s no reason to listen to yet another actor who’d played his part and then stepped down from history’s brightly-lit stage. But Obama, alas, cannot be ignored, because the Democrat Party he’d left behind is still very much his creation and his machinery to control.
It’s no coincidence that Obama is the first person since Woodrow Wilson to remain in Washington, D.C., and the 28th president didn’t leave only because he had suffered a stroke and wasn’t mobile. And it’s a very loosely guarded secret that most of the people in the current administration are much more attuned to Obama’s wishes than to those of the Octogenarian Commander-in-Chief.
But the Obama interview isn’t all bad. Now that college campuses have spiraled into orgies of Jew-hatred; now that Hamas supporters set fire to Brooklyn blocks, turning our neighborhoods into American banlieues; and now that the same Palestinian leaders Obama so fiercely championed appear uninterested in anything but shedding the blood of innocent Israelis, the former president’s twaddle strikes a very different chord.
Maybe we can finally see Obama for what he truly is: The man who set the world on fire.
When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced in September that the nation’s largest swing state would implement automatic voter registration, Donald Trump threw a conniption. “Pennsylvania is at it again!” the former president posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform. The switch, Trump said, would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”
Trump’s panic is consistent with his (baseless) view that any reforms designed to increase voter turnout, such as expanding mail balloting and early voting, are part of a Democratic conspiracy to rig elections in their favor. But he may be wrong to fear automatic voter registration: Although Shapiro is a Democrat, if either party stands to gain from his move, it’s likely to be the GOP. In Pennsylvania, the reform “really has a potential to lean more Republican,” Seo-young Silvia Kim, an elections expert who has studied the system, told me. It’s “not great news for Democrats.”
First implemented in Oregon in 2016, automatic voter registration is now used in 23 states, including three—Alaska, Georgia, and West Virginia—that are governed by Republicans. Rather than requiring citizens to proactively register to vote, some states that use the system automatically enroll people who meet eligibility requirements and then give them the option to decline or opt out. The shift is subtler in Pennsylvania; the state has simply started prompting people to register to vote when they obtain a new or renewed driver’s license or state ID.
The seemingly minor change, which voting-rights advocates still place under the umbrella of “automatic” registration, is based on behavioral research showing that people are less likely to opt out of a choice than to opt in. By including voter registration as part of a commonly used process such as obtaining a driver’s license—and by presenting it as the default option rather than a form that citizens have to request—states have found that they can increase both registration and turnout in elections. “Even though the process isn’t that big of a shift, the effects are great,” Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told me.
Democrats have led the move toward automatic voter registration, and their 2021 comprehensive voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act included a requirement that state-elections chiefs implement the policy. (The bill died in the Senate.) But automatic registration does not inherently favor one party or the other, and it has appealed to Republicans in some states because it helps officials clean up voter rolls and safeguard elections. “I don’t know who it will help, and that’s kind of the point,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting-rights program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.
A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress found that the voters who enrolled through Oregon’s automatic-registration system were more likely to be younger, more rural, lower income, and more ethnically diverse than the electorate as a whole—a demographic mix that suggests that Republicans might have benefited as much as Democrats.
Other research shows a more partisan advantage. While an assistant professor at American University in 2018, Kim, the elections expert, studied the effects of automatic registration in Orange County, California, the site of several hard-fought congressional races that year. She found that among residents who needed to update their registration because they had moved within the county, automatic registration resulted in no meaningful shift for Democrats. But it substantially boosted turnout among Republicans and independents—by 8.1 points and 7.4 points, respectively. “I was actually very surprised,” Kim said, adding that she’d expected that if any party gained, it would be Democrats. She suspects that Democrats may have been unaffected by the change because in 2018, they were already motivated to vote by Trump’s recent election.
The impact of automatic registration on any one election is likely to be marginal, but even small shifts could be significant in a state such as Pennsylvania, where less than one percentage point separated Trump from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just more than one point separated Joe Biden from Trump four years later. Several factors suggest that the new system could benefit the GOP in Pennsylvania. Although Democrats have more registered voters in the state, Republicans have been closing the gap during the Trump era as more white working-class and rural voters who stopped voting for Democrats years ago have chosen to join the GOP. Democrats have countered that drift by capturing wealthier suburban voters, a group that helped Shapiro and first-term Democratic Senator John Fetterman win their races during last year’s midterm elections. Because this demographic already goes to the polls pretty reliably, though, automatic registration is more likely to boost turnout among the right-leaning rural working class.
An early-2020 study also suggested that the GOP stood to gain from higher voter turnout in Pennsylvania. The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 “chronic non-voters” nationwide before Democrats had settled on Biden as their nominee. Across the country, nonvoters said that if they cast a ballot, they would support the Democratic candidate over Trump by a slim margin, 33 percent to 30 percent. But in Pennsylvania, nonvoters went strongly in the other direction: By a 36–28 percent margin, they said they’d prefer Trump over the Democrat. The eight-point gap was the second largest (after Arizona) in favor of Trump in any of the 10 swing states that the organization polled.
“Democrats sometimes have the mistaken opinion that anybody that doesn’t show up is going to vote Democrat,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s been one of the myths in Democratic circles for years. Quite frankly, given the changing of the respective party bases, it makes sense that [automatic registration] may somewhat benefit Republicans.” Other recent polls have suggested that the political realignment of the Trump era has made the GOP more reliant on infrequent voters.
The place where Democrats could most use stronger turnout—particularly among the party’s base of Black voters—is Philadelphia, which provided about one-sixth of Biden’s statewide vote in 2020. The city had higher turnout than Pennsylvania as a whole in both 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket, but it has lagged further and further behind in each election since. Last year, turnout in Philadelphia was just 43 percent, compared with 54 percent statewide.
Yet automatic voter registration might have less impact in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. Studies have found that the switch drives higher turnout outside urban areas, where Democratic voters are most concentrated. That’s partly because automatic voter registration is operated through the state Department of Motor Vehicles—an agency with which people who rely on public transit are less likely to interact. For that reason, when New York implemented automatic registration in 2020, voting-rights advocates lobbied aggressively for the state to enroll voters through other agencies in addition to the DMV; as of 2018, a majority of the more than 3 million households in New York City did not own a car.
Pennsylvania has no plans to implement automatic voter registration beyond the state DMV. Democrats have been adamant that in enacting the new system, Shapiro was not trying to benefit his party but merely trying to reach the 1.6 million Keystone State residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Although Republicans argued that the change should have gone through the state legislature, they have not formally challenged automatic registration in court. Few of them seemed to agree with Trump that the reform would doom the GOP. “Its impact will be somewhere between inconsequential and a nothingburger,” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, told me.
Democrats say it’s too early to assess the electoral impact of automatic voter registration, but they acknowledged that Republicans might gain more voters as a result. More than 13,500 Pennsylvanians registered to vote through the new system during its first six weeks of implementation, according to numbers provided by the Shapiro administration. Of that total, Republicans added about 100 more voters than Democrats. “Our former president is almost always wrong,” Joanna McClinton, who leads a narrow Democratic majority as the speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, told me. The fact that Trump is so opposed to the reform, she said, “reveals something we’ve always known, which is Republicans want to keep the electorate small, selective, and they don’t want to expand access to voting even if they could be the beneficiaries of it.”
Whether Trump regains the presidency next year could hinge on the tightest of margins in Pennsylvania. I asked McClinton if she worried that by implementing automatic voter registration, Shapiro had unintentionally bestowed an electoral gift on Republicans ahead of an enormously significant election. McClinton didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” she replied quickly. “I look forward to seeing the full data, but I definitely am not looking at this from a political perspective but from a big-D democracy perspective.”
U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday vowed to “hold Iran accountable” for its alliance with Russia and its support of anti-Israeli militants such as Hamas, appearing to draw a line under efforts to engage Tehran.
The president has frequently drawn fire for his Iran policy, which continues some of the attempts at rapprochement started by the administration of former President Barack Obama, in which Biden served as vice president.
Biden tried to lure Iran back into an Obama-era nuclear nonproliferation deal scuppered by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, and even released funds from a sanctions-bound bank account in a deal to free Americans prisoners.
Biden’s Iran policy, always controversial, became untenable after militants from Hamas—which has reportedly been funded and armed by Iran—slaughtered 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 in the worst Palestinian attack ever on the Jewish state.
Biden used perhaps his toughest language yet on Iran during a Thursday night address to the nation, tying Tehran to the Hamas attack as well as the 20-month-old war in Ukraine waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
U.S. President Joe Biden, left, on Thursday addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. On the right, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is pictured on April 22, 2023, in Tehran. During Biden’s address, he said the United States would hold Iran “accountable” for supporting Russia and anti-Israel militants. Photos by Jonathan Ernst Sadegh Nikgostar/ATPImages/Getty Images
“Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, and it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region. And we’ll continue to hold them accountable, I might add,” he said.
Hours before Biden spoke, the U.S. Navy shot down missiles and drones from Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. A Pentagon spokesperson said Israel was potentially the target of the thwarted attack.
During the final weeks of his presidential campaign in 2020, Biden wrote an opinion article for CNN.com. In it, he criticized Trump’s Iran policy as a “dangerous failure” while touting the work done under Obama.
The op-ed also offered Tehran “a credible path back to diplomacy” if the nation’s leaders agreed to comply with a strict nuclear deal.
“If Iran chooses confrontation, I am prepared to defend our vital interests and our troops,” Biden wrote. “But, I am ready to walk the path of diplomacy if Iran takes steps to show it is ready too.”
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment late Thursday night.
Iran had already been scrutinized for its ties to anti-Israel militants before the Red Sea incident on Thursday. U.S. and Israeli officials have not identified any clear connection between Tehran and the October 7 attack, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has dismissed reports of Tehran’s involvement. However, Iran has long been accused of providing Hamas with military and financial support.
Exactly a week after the Hamas attack on Israel, Iran made a symbolic show of solidarity when Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian met with Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Doha, Qatar.
The Iranian official was captured on video by the Iranian-state media outlet Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) hugging and kissing Haniyeh during the meeting.
Iran has also been one Putin’s closest allies throughout his war on Ukraine, supplying Russia’s armed forces with combat drones. This summer, the White House said U.S. intelligence had found Iran had provided Russia with materials needed to build a drone manufacturing plant near Moscow.
President Joe Biden’s core foreign-policy argument has been that his steady engagement with international allies can produce better results for America than the impulsive unilateralism of his predecessor Donald Trump. The eruption of violence in Israel is testing that proposition under the most difficult circumstances.
The initial reactions of Biden and Trump to the attack have produced exactly the kind of personal contrast Biden supporters want to project. On Tuesday, Biden delivered a powerful speech that was impassioned but measured in denouncing the Hamas terror attacks and declaring unshakable U.S. support for Israel. Last night, in a rambling address in Florida, Trump praised the skill of Israel’s enemies, criticized Israel’s intelligence and defense capabilities, and complained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to claim credit for a U.S. operation that killed a top Iranian general while Trump was president.
At this somber moment, Trump delivered exactly the sort of erratic, self-absorbed performance that his critics have said make him unreliable in a crisis. Trump’s remarks seemed designed to validate what Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that focuses on the Middle East, had told me in an interview a few hours before the former president’s speech. “This is the most delicate moment in the Middle East in decades,” Murphy said. “The path forward to negotiate this hostage crisis, while also preventing other fronts from opening up against Israel, necessitates A-plus-level diplomacy. And you obviously never saw C-plus-level diplomacy from Trump.”
The crisis is highlighting more than the distance in personal demeanor between the two men. Two lines in Biden’s speech on Tuesday point toward the policy debate that could be ahead in a potential 2024 rematch over how to best promote international stability and advance America’s interests in the world.
Biden emphasized his efforts to coordinate support for Israel from U.S. allies within and beyond the region. And although Biden did not directly urge Israel to exercise “restraint” in its ongoing military operations against Hamas, he did call for caution. Referring to his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden said, “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” White House officials acknowledged this as a subtle warning that the U.S. was not giving Israel carte blanche to ignore civilian casualties as it pursues its military objectives in Gaza.
Both of Biden’s comments point to crucial distinctions between his view and Trump’s of the U.S. role in the world. Whereas Trump relentlessly disparaged U.S. alliances, Biden has viewed them as an important mechanism for multiplying America’s influence and impact—by organizing the broad international assistance to Ukraine, for instance. And whereas Trump repeatedly moved to withdraw the U.S. from international institutions and agreements, Biden continues to assert that preserving a rules-based international order will enhance security for America and its allies.
Even more than in 2016, Trump in his 2024 campaign is putting forward a vision of a fortress America. In almost all of his foreign-policy proposals, he promises to reduce American reliance on the outside world. He has promised to make the U.S. energy independent and to “implement a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods and gain total independence from China.” Like several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump has threatened to launch military operations against drug cartels in Mexico without approval from the Mexican government. John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the White House, has said he believes that the former president would seek to withdraw from NATO in a second term. Walls, literal and metaphorical, remain central to Trump’s vision: He says that, if reelected, he’ll finish his wall across the Southwest border, and last weekend he suggested that the Hamas attack was justification to restore his ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority nations.
Biden, by contrast, maintains that America can best protect its interests by building bridges. He’s focused on reviving traditional alliances, including extending them into new priorities such as “friend-shoring.” He has also sought to engage diplomatically even with rival or adversarial regimes, for instance, by attempting to find common ground with China over climate change.
These differences in approach likely will be muted in the early stages of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Striking at Islamic terrorists is one form of international engagement that still attracts broad support from Republican leaders. And in the Middle East, Biden has not diverged from Trump’s strategy as dramatically as in other parts of the world. After Trump severely limited contact with the Palestinian Authority, Biden has restored some U.S. engagement, but the president hasn’t pushed Israel to engage in full-fledged peace negotiations, as did his two most recent Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Instead, Biden has continued Trump’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and surrounding Sunni nations around their common interest in countering Shiite Iran. (Hamas’s brutal attack may have been intended partly to derail the ongoing negotiations among the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia that represent the crucial next stage of that project.) Since the attack last weekend, Trump has claimed that Hamas would not have dared to launch the incursion if he were still president, but he has not offered any substantive alternative to Biden’s response.
Yet the difference between how Biden and Trump approach international challenges is likely to resurface before this crisis ends. Even while trying to construct alliances to constrain Iran, Biden has also sought to engage the regime through negotiations on both its nuclear program and the release of American prisoners. Republicans have denounced each of those efforts; Trump and other GOP leaders have argued, without evidence, that Biden’s agreement to allow Iran to access $6 billion in its oil revenue held abroad provided the mullahs with more leeway to fund terrorist groups like Hamas. And although both parties are now stressing Israel’s right to defend itself, if Israel does invade Gaza, Biden will likely eventually pressure Netanyahu to stop the fighting and limit civilian losses well before Trump or any other influential Republican does.
Murphy points toward another distinction: Biden has put more emphasis than Trump on fostering dialogue with a broad range of nations across the region. Trump’s style “was to pick sides, and that meant making enemies and adversaries unnecessarily; that is very different from Biden’s” approach, Murphy told me. “We don’t know whether anyone in the region right now can talk sense into Hamas,” Murphy said, “but this president has been very careful to keep lines of communication open in the region, and that’s because he knows through experience that moments can come, like this, where you need all hands on deck and where you need open lines to all the major players.”
In multiple national polls, Republican and Democratic voters now express almost mirror-image views on whether and how the U.S. should interact with the world. For the first time in its annual polling since 1974, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs this year found that a majority of Republicans said the U.S. would be best served “if we stay out of world affairs,” according to upcoming results shared exclusively with The Atlantic. By contrast, seven in 10 Democrats said that the U.S. “should take an active part in world affairs.”
Not only do fewer Republicans than Democrats support an active role for the U.S. in world affairs, but less of the GOP wants the U.S. to compromise with allies when it does engage. In national polling earlier this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about eight in 10 Democrats said America should take its allies’ interests into account when dealing with major international issues. Again in sharp contrast, nearly three-fifths of GOP partisans said the U.S. instead “should follow its own interests.”
As president, Trump both reflected and reinforced these views among Republican voters. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris climate accord, and the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama negotiated, while also terminating Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks. Biden effectively reversed all of those decisions. He rejoined both the Paris Agreement and the WHO on his first days in office, and he brought the U.S. back into the Human Rights Council later in 2021. Although Biden did not resuscitate the TPP specifically, he has advanced a successor agreement among nations across the region called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Biden has also sought to restart negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, though with little success.
Peter Feaver, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University, told me he believes that Trump wasn’t alone among U.S. presidents in complaining that allies were not fully pulling their weight. What makes Trump unique, Feaver said, is that he didn’t see the other side of the ledger. “Most other presidents recognized, notwithstanding our [frustrations], it is still better to work with allies and that the U.S. capacity to mobilize a stronger, more action-focused coalition of allies than our adversaries could was a central part of our strength,” said Feaver, who served as a special adviser on the National Security Council for George W. Bush. “That’s the thing that Trump never really understood: He got the downsides of allies, but not the upsides. And he did not realize you do not get any benefits from allies if you approach them in the hyper-transactional style that he would do.”
Biden, Feaver believes, was assured an enthusiastic reception from U.S. allies because he followed the belligerent Trump. But Biden’s commitment to restoring alliances, Feaver maintains, has delivered results. “There’s no question in my mind that Biden got better results from the NATO alliance [on Ukraine] in the first six months than the Trump team would have done,” Feaver said.
As the Middle East erupts again, the biggest diplomatic hurdle for Biden won’t be marshaling international support for Israel while it begins military operations; it will be sustaining focus on what happens when they end, James Steinberg, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “The challenge here is how do you both reassure Israel and send an unmistakably tough message to Hamas and Iran without leading to an escalation in this crisis,” said Steinberg, who served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and deputy national security adviser for Clinton. “That’s where the real skill will come: Without undercutting the strong message of deterrence and support for Israel, can they figure out a way to defuse the crisis? Because it could just get worse, and it could widen.”
In a 2024 rematch, the challenge for Biden would be convincing most Americans that his bridges can keep them safer than Trump’s walls. In a recent Gallup Poll, Americans gave Republicans a 22-percentage-point advantage when asked which party could keep the nation safe from “international terrorism and military threats.” Republicans usually lead on that measure, but the current advantage was one of the GOP’s widest since Gallup began asking the question, in 2002.
This new crisis will test Biden on exceedingly arduous terrain. Like Clinton and Obama, Biden has had a contentious relationship with Netanyahu, who has grounded his governing coalition in the far-right extremes of Israeli politics and openly identified over the years with the GOP in American politics. In this uneasy partnership with Netanyahu, Biden must now juggle many goals: supporting the Israeli prime minister, but also potentially restraining him, while avoiding a wider war and preserving his long-term goal of a Saudi-Israeli détente that would reshape the region. It is exactly the sort of complex international puzzle that Biden has promised he can manage better than Trump. This terrible crucible is providing the president with another opportunity to prove it.
Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.
Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate. Given Kennedy’s rhetoric, his positions, and his support from conservative operatives, was he really running as a Democrat? A couple thousand people—supporters, journalists, campaign volunteers, people with nothing to do—trekked to Philly to find out.
The candidate was nothing if not on message. Standing in front of a backdrop that read DECLARE YOUR INDEPENDENCE, Kennedy looked out at Independence Hall as he spoke of “a new declaration of independence for our entire nation.” He rattled off a list of everything we’d soon be independent from: cynical elites, the mainstream media, wealthy donors. (Though, presumably, not the same wealthy donors who recently raised more than $2 million for him and his super PAC at a private estate in Brentwood, California, with help from his friend Eric Clapton). Onstage, Kennedy formally declared his independence “from the Democratic Party and all other political parties”—perhaps an unsubtle way to shoot down speculation that he might change his mind and run as a Libertarian, or even a Republican. As his wife, Cheryl Hines, said a bit cryptically before her husband took the stage: “Are you really ready for Bobby Kennedy?”
Kennedy, whom many came to know as a Boomer environmentalist, was the star of this mellow show with a distinct ’60s campus vibe. At one table, attendees were invited to literally sketch their vision of the future on blank sheets of paper with colored pens. Throngs gathered on the grass in front of the National Constitution Center and were led in a Native American tribal dance, followed by the inoffensive piano stylings of Tim Hockenberry, who covered “Jersey Girl” in a Springsteen growl. Outside the entrance, enterprising vendors sold an array of Kennedy memorabilia: buttons that read RESIST INSANITY, RAGE AGAINST THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE, and FIT TO BE PRESIDENT, featuring a photo of a buff, shirtless Kennedy. One attendee waved a giant black-and-white flag with a message for their fellow Kennedy-heads: WE ARE THE CONTROL GROUP. Many people wore fedoras.
They came from all over. Michael Schroth, 69, and his wife, Luz, had taken a 4:30 a.m. bus down from Boston. Schroth told me he voted for Barack Obama twice, but also voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader twice, as well as Jill Stein in 2016. “I look for the best candidate, and I don’t care if they’re going to win or not. It’s getting the idea out,” he said. Chris Devol, 56, from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles hoodie and smiling ear to ear as he awaited Kennedy’s arrival. Devol told me he had voted for the third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, and that although he wasn’t sure whether he’d support Kennedy next November, he “100 percent” supported the idea of him competing in the Democratic primary. An elderly woman named Barbara (last name withheld), a retired teacher from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, told me she believed that President Joe Biden wasn’t doing anything to address the nation’s drug problem. She said a bag of fentanyl was recently found on the steps of her local church, then asked me if I was familiar with the Boxer Rebellion.
Prior to Kennedy’s address, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of the opening speakers, asked for a moment of silence to honor the violence of this past weekend. Someone in the crowd yelled out “Warmonger!” Another screamed, “Free the Palestinians!” Boteach acknowledged neither individual, and said he greatly respects Kennedy, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, as a man of faith. Later, Kennedy said he had arrived at a place where he was serving only his conscience, his creator, and “you”—the voters.
This afternoon marked the culmination of what he described as a “very painful” decision. He noted his long-standing ties to the Democrats, the party of his family, which he casually referred to as a dynasty, before tearing into the tyranny of the two-party system. For weeks, Kennedy had been attacking the Democratic National Committee for “rigging” the primary process. (The DNC has refused to hold primary debates, as is custom when a party’s incumbents are running for reelection.) Kennedy has been polling in the double digits against Biden, but his support hasn’t grown meaningfully since he launched his campaign. As of last Friday, according to the FiveThirtyEight average, Kennedy was polling at 16.4 percent compared with Biden’s 61.2 percent. Four of his siblings—Kerry Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—issued a statement today denouncing their brother’s newly independent candidacy, calling his decision “perilous for our country.” Kennedy acknowledged the challenge ahead of him. “There have been independent candidates in this country before,” he said. “But this time it’s going to be different.”
Kennedy is the second candidate in as many weeks to go rogue. Cornel West dropped his Green Party affiliation in favor of an independent bid, telling The New York Times, “I am a jazz man in politics and the life of the mind who refuses to play only in a party band!” Though neither Democrats nor Republicans seem particularly worried about the candidacies of West or Marianne Williamson, Kennedy is different. “The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Trump,” Kennedy said. He waited for a strategic beat. “The truth is, they’re both right.”
All year long, mainstream Democrats have tried to pretend that Kennedy simply doesn’t exist, with mixed results. Both the Biden campaign and the DNC declined to comment today on Kennedy’s switch. The RNC, for its part, blasted out a list of “23 Reasons to Oppose RFK Jr.,” and reports have been circulating that Trump’s allies are preparing to pummel Kennedy with opposition research. Last week, the election analyst Nate Silver argued that Kennedy’s independent run won’t necessarily hurt Biden, and it might even help him. David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s campaigns, took a different view. “I think anything that lowers the threshold for winning helps Trump, who has a high floor and low ceiling [of support,]” Axelrod told me.
Kennedy tantalized the crowd with nuggets that purport to make the case for his electability: “I have seen the polls that they won’t show you.” He pointed out that 63 percent of Americans want an independent to run for president. Though he didn’t cite the origin of this statistic, it aligns with recent Gallup polling, which also showed that 58 percent of Republicans endorse a third U.S. political party, up from 45 percent last year.
Kennedy has built his candidacy, and his career as a lawyer and writer more broadly, on the idea that there are lots of things “they won’t show you.” As I wrote in a profile of Kennedy this summer, he has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”
“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Steve Bannon told me as I was reporting the profile. “Populist left, populist right, and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.”
The reality is that Kennedy will have an extremely hard time even getting his name on the ballot. The GOP “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who earlier this year was accused of being among those propping up Kennedy’s candidacy (something he has repeatedly denied), told me in a text message that Kennedy faces a “Herculean task” with “50 different state laws written by Republicans and Democrats working together to make ballot access as difficult as possible.” Even if Kennedy is right and voters are looking for a true alternative to Trump and Biden, mathematically, Kennedy’s path to 270 electoral votes is almost incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, he said he believes that he is at the start of a new American moment. “Something is stirring in us that says, It doesn’t have to be this way,” Kennedy said onstage. He nodded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech from the eve of his assassination and quoted Abraham Lincoln quoting Jesus Christ: “A house divided cannot stand.” He said that the left and the right had become “all mixed up.” He said that he was proud to count those on both sides of the abortion debate among his supporters, in addition to “climate activists” and “climate skeptics,” and, of course, the “vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated.” Perhaps saying the quiet part out loud, Kennedy said it would be very hard for people to tell “whether my administration is left or right.” He had no shortage of curious metaphors. He promised not just to “take the wheel,” but to “reboot the GPS.” The nation’s two-party system? “A two-headed monster that leads us over a cliff.” And, in case it wasn’t clear: “At the bottom of that cliff is the destruction of our country.”
When I interviewed Kennedy for the profile, I asked him what he thought would be more dangerous for the country: four more years of Biden, or another Trump term. “I can’t answer that,” he said.
Around that time, I asked his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, if Kennedy was committed to running solely as a Democratic candidate.
“He’s running in the Democratic primary,” Kucinich responded.
“So, no chance of a third party?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
“Gotcha. And nothing could change that?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
Today, after Kennedy finished speaking, Kucinich briefly seized the mic and led the crowd in a building, dramatic chant:
Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.
“How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”
Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75. I will miss covering this man, the two-term Democratic governor, seven-term congressman, United Nations ambassador, energy secretary, crisis diplomat, occasional mischief magnet, and freelance hostage negotiator who even holds the Guinness World Record for the politician who’s shaken the most hands—13,392—in an eight-hour period.
“Make sure you mention that Guinness World Record thing,” Richardson urged me the first time I wrote about him, in 2003. “The handshake record is important to me.”
Why? I asked. “Because it shows that I love politics,” he replied. “And I do love politics. I love to campaign. I love parades. I don’t believe I’m pretentious. I’m very earthy.”
But why was the fact that he loved politics important?
“Because I’m sick of all these politicians these days who are always trying to convince you that they are not really politicians,” Richardson went on. I had noticed this phenomenon as well, and it holds up: that the slickest and most unctuous people you encounter in politics are often the ones who spend the most energy trying to convince you they hate politics and are in fact “not professional politicians.”
“I don’t mind being called a ‘professional politician,’” Richardson added. “It’s better than being an amateur, right?”
Richardson was an original. Born to a Mexican mother and an American businessman, he spent much of his childhood in Mexico City and identified strongly as Latino. He served as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the 1980s and was the only Latino governor in America during his two terms in Santa Fe. Richardson spoke often about how his dual ethnic and cultural identities placed him in advantageous and sometimes awkward positions—“between worlds” (which he’d use as the title of his 2005 memoir).
His identities also placed Richardson in big demand as probably the most prominent Latino elected official in the country at the time. He absolutely loved being in big demand, and was milking his coveted status as much as possible when I first encountered him. That September, all of the 2004 Democratic candidates for president—John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, etc.—were straining to pay respects to Richardson after a debate in Albuquerque.
I was working for the WashingtonPost Style section at the time, and I found Richardson’s full-frontal “love of the game” quite winning. He was over-the-top and unabashed about the enjoyment he derived from the parade of candidates coming before him. “It’s fun to get your ring kissed,” Richardson told me that night, though he might not have said ring.
We were walking into a post-debate reception for another candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman. Like most of the Democratic VIPs in Albuquerque that night, Lieberman was an old friend of Richardson’s; they’d worked together on the 1992 Democratic Party platform committee.
“I wore this to curry favor with you,” Lieberman told Richardson, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his jacket. “You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate].”
“I thought that was Yiddish,” Richardson said. Lieberman then got everyone’s attention and offered a toast to El Jefe.
Richardson let me ride around with him in the back of his SUV while he tried to hit post-debate receptions for all of the candidates. I noted that he’d instructed the state police driver to keep going faster and faster on Interstate 40—the vehicle hit 110 miles an hour at one point. When I mentioned the triple-digit speed in my story, it caused a bit of a controversy in New Mexico. Ralph Nader made a stink. (“If he will do this with a reporter in the car,” Nader said, according to the Associated Press, “what will they do when there’s no reporter in the car?”)
The next time I saw Richardson, a few months later, he shook his head at me and tried to deny that the vehicle was going 110. I held my ground.
Richardson ran for president in 2008, but he quit after finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I had since moved on to The New York Times and used to run into him on the campaign circuit. A few weeks after he dropped out, I went down to Santa Fe to interview him about the lengths that the two remaining Democratic candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—were going to in an attempt to win his endorsement. Another Bill Richardson primary! What could be more fun?
“Oh, the full-court press is on like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me. The “political anthropology” of this was quite interesting too, he added. “Barack is very precise,” like a “surgical bomb,” Richardson said. “The Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.” He relished my interest in the pursuit of him.
“I want to make it clear that I’m not annoyed by any of this,” Richardson said of the repeated overtures he was getting from the candidates and their various emissaries. I quoted him saying this in the Times, but not what I said in response to him in the moment: “No shit, governor.”
I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today. People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated. Fun? Not so much.
But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette. Presidency or prison? Suspend the Constitution or preserve it? Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.
Richardson made it clear to me that he’d loved running for president—it was one of the best times of his life, he said—and he missed the experience of it almost as soon as he got out. But what he really wanted was, you know, the job. “I would have been a good president,” he said in Santa Fe in 2008. “I still believe that. Please put that in there, okay?”
If nothing else, the Clinton-Obama courtship was a nice cushion for Richardson as he tried to ease back into life in the relative quiet of his governor’s office. It also, he said, might get him a gig in the next administration. Richardson was 60 at the time and said he envisioned “a few more chapters” for himself in public life. Richardson told me he would have loved to be someone’s running mate or secretary of state.
“I’m not pining for it, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ve had a great life,” he told me. “I’m at peace with myself.”
He wound up endorsing Obama, who, after he was elected, nominated Richardson to be his secretary of commerce—only to have Richardson withdraw over allegations of improper business dealings as governor (no charges were filed).
Richardson devoted the last stage of his career to his work as a troubleshooting diplomat and crisis negotiator. He would speak to thugs or warlords, drop into the most treacherous sectors of the globe—North Korea, Myanmar—if he thought it might help secure the release of a hostage. Among the many tributes to Richardson this past weekend from the highest levels (Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons), I was struck most by the ones from some of the people who knew directly the ordeals he worked to end: the basketball star Brittney Griner and the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who called Richardson “a giant—the first giant—in American hostage diplomacy.”
The last time I saw Richardson was a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic Donald Trump years—maybe 2018 or 2019. We had breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, near the White House. I remember asking him what he called himself those days, what he considered his current job title to be.
Richardson shrugged. “‘Humanitarian,’ maybe?” he said. But he worried that it sounded pretentious.
“Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy said as his opening at the GOP presidential debate on Fox News.
Obama called himself “a skinny kid with a funny name” during the 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech ― when he was a relative unknown nationally, a state senator in Illinois running for the U.S. Senate.
The Recount posted the two clips side-by-side:
Christie quickly noticed the stolen line and called Ramaswamy out on it.
“I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” Christie fired back. “The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama. And I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.”
“Come over and give me a hug!” Ramaswamy said, but the line was largely drowned out as the audience cheered Christie’s attack.
Kathy Ruemmler, former White House Counsel, appears on “Meet the Press” in Washington, D.C., June 29, 2014.
William B. Plowman | NBCUniversal | Getty Images
Sex predator Jeffrey Epstein was involved in establishing a client relationship between Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and JPMorgan Chase in February 2019, four months before he was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges, a bombshell court filing revealed Tuesday.
Ruemmler, who is now general counsel for Goldman Sachs, was touted by Epstein’s personal assistant to JPMorgan as an ideal customer, the filing shows.
The suggestion that JPMorgan take Ruemmler on as a client — which the bank warmly embraced — came almost six years after JPMorgan said it had effectively fired Epstein as a client after internal controls repeatedly raised red flags about him.
And it came five months before Epstein killed himself in August 2019 in a Manhattan federal jail, where he was being held without bail pending trial.
Ruemmler declined to comment through a Goldman Sachs spokesman.
CNBC separately emailed her to ask how she knew Epstein, and what knowledge she had of his history of being convicted in 2008 of a sex crime in Florida.
The Manhattan federal court filing detailing her connection to Epstein was filed by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which is suing JPMorgan.
The American territory alleges that JPMorgan enabled and benefited from Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women to the Virgin Islands, where he had a home, during the years he maintained accounts at the bank, from 1998 through 2013.
JPMorgan denies any wrongdoing in the case, where the territory is seeking at least $190 million in damages.
The bank last month agreed to settle a similar lawsuit in the same court by an Epstein accuser, paying $290 million to her and other Epstein victims.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in late October.
“Even after his exit right up until his arrest in 2019, JPMorgan continued to work with Epstein,” the Virgin Islands said in its filing.
The filing says that JPMorgan admits “Epstein was involved in the establishment of a customer relationship with Kathryn Ruemmler,” who was the longest-serving White House general counsel under former President Barack Obama
The filing says that in February 2019 Epstein’s assistant, Leslie Groff, offered to introduce Mary Erdoes, a top JPMorgan executive, to Ruemmler, because she wanted to open an account with JPMorgan and Epstein thought the two of them “would bond.”
“Erdoes escalated the referral to Stacey Friedman, JPMorgan’s General Counsel, who responded ‘she is a rock star litigator at Latham. . . . I would think she would be a great client,'” the Virgin Islands said in its filing.
Ruemmler at the time worked at the law firm Latham & Watkins.
In 2020 she joined Goldman Sachs as a partner, and now is Goldman’s chief legal officer and general counsel.
The filing also said that Epstein at one time referred as a potential JPMorgan client Nicholas Ribis, a gaming advisor who for decades ran casinos for former President Donald Trump.
Ribis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
JPMorgan claims in court filings that the Virgin Islands was itself “complicit in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein,” arguing that he gave high-ranking government officials money, advice and favors in exchange for looking the other way when he trafficked young women.
JPMorgan also argues that its former executive Jes Staley, who was friends with Epstein when he was a client of the bank, is responsible for any civil liability of the bank due to its business relationship with the sex offender.
On Tuesday, newly unsealed court filings by the bank show that Epstein was asked by former U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. John de Jongh Jr. for a loan of $215,000 after de Jongh was arrested on embezzlement charges that were later dismissed.
Epstein’s company also paid de Jongh’s wife, Cecile, a $300,000 lump sum severance payment after Epstein killed himself in a federal jail while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges in August 2019, JPMorgan’s documents say. She had worked for Epstein at his Southern Trust Company.
The documents also say that another Epstein employee who worked for him in the Virgin Islands was granted a U.S. Customs and Border Protection security seal, which allowed that worker to “escort passengers through” customs screening areas.
The bank in other court filings has said that Epstein paid for the school tuitions of the children of the de Jonghs, and that Cecile had made efforts to obtain student visas and a work license for young women connected to Epstein.
A spokesman for the Virgin Islands’ Attorney General’s Office told CNBC that Epstein’s loan to former Gov. de Jongh occurred after he left office in 2015. The charges against de Jongh were dropped in early 2016 by the Virgin Islands Department of Justice after he agreed to a separate monetary settlement.
CNBC has reached out to comment from John de Jongh via an asset management company where he is a director.
The Virgin Islands spokesman also said that “it was the federal government and not the Virgin Islands government that granted the ‘U.S. Customs and Border Protection security seal.’ “
The Virgin Islands has said that JPMorgan’s leadership kept Epstein as a client for years despite multiple warnings about him being raised internally at the bank, which included payments to young women, and a 2008 sex crime conviction in Florida which led to a jail term.
In its new court filing on Tuesday, the Virgin Islands cited a July 2011 email between Epstein and Erdoes, after JPMorgan’s rapid response team decided that Epstein should be off-boarded as a client, and after JPMorgan’s general counsel told Erdoes that Epstein was “not a person we should do business with — period.”
Erdoes and Epstein emailed after he and the bank agreed to settle his lawsuit against JPMorgan related to money he said he was owed by Bear Stearns, the investment bank taken over by JPMorgan.
“On July 26, 2011, Epstein wrote to Erdoes, ‘lets [sic] move on , [sic] and make some real money,’ ” the filing said.
“Erdoes responded, ‘Onwards and upwards, on so many fronts,’ ” the filing said.
Epstein was not severed as a JPMorgan client for another two years.
The new Virgin Islands filing said that Staley, in his deposition for the lawsuit, disclosed the names of people and companies that Epstein had referred to the bank as potential clients. An unsealed portion of Staley’s deposition was made public Tuesday.
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Among the high-powered names listed in the court filing are Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem of Dubai, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, former Treasury Department Secretary Larry Summers and television journalist Katie Couric.
Staley, who had been head of the bank’s asset and wealth management division, testified that he met all those people at Epstein’s townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The deposition also shows that Staley said he had spoken to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in 2006 when Epstein was arrested on Florida state charges of procuring a minor for prostitution, and solicitation of a prostitute.
JPMorgan has denied that claim. “Staley admits that in 2006 Jamie Dimon communicated with him regarding Epstein’s arrest,” the Virgin Islands said in the court filing.
“Staley also testified that on or about July 26, 2006, he spoke to Dimon about Epstein’s indictment because Dimon was his boss and the indictment of Epstein, a client of the bank, ‘was a very public event.'”
Elsewhere in the deposition, Staley answered questions about going to see Epstein after an article was published in 2006 that said, “Jeffrey Epstein craved big homes, elite friends — and, investigators say, underage girls.”
The article also stated that two of “Epstein’s former employees told investigators that young looking girls showed up to perform massages two or three times a day when Epstein was in town.”
The Virgin Islands filing said, “On July 25, 2006, Staley met with Epstein in person at Epstein’s home. In that visit, Epstein admitted to the alleged “conduct of engaging in sex for money with young women” — only denying the ‘ages.'”
Staley afterward wrote Erdoes: “I went and saw him last night. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He also adamantly denies the ages,” Staley wrote Erdoes, the filing notes.
In his deposition, Staley was asked: “The conduct that he was being accused of, he was admitting that he did it. He was just denying that he knew the ages of the victims, right?”
Staley replied, “Correct.”
“And you were reporting that back to the bank, that what was being denied is the ages, right?” a lawyer for the Virgin Islands said.
Staley said, “Right.”
He then conceded that the bank knew that Epstein had admitted to engaging in sex for money with young women, while denying they were underage.
The lawyer then asked, “And so when the bank is receiving that information, they now know what you know, which is, this is the type of conduct that our client is engaging in, and the only dispute that he has about the allegations are the ages of the victims, right?”
