Author: Lance Garrison
Donald Trump is expected to win decisively in New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday. For Republican voters who don’t want Trump as their nominee, what alternatives exist?In this audio interview, the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, talks with Opinion columnist David French about how a probable Trump nomination will “cement a significant change in two directions with the G.O.P.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are…
We’re kind of obsessed with this graph. It shows the percentage of Americans who say immigrants strengthen the United States. We’re all familiar with this end. Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on anything. But what was happening down at this end? How did we start so close and get to: “Build that wall. Build that wall.” Well, that’s what this video is about: the path to political polarization. This dramatic split has left the American immigration system in disarray. And understanding how we got into this mess might just help us find a way out. To start, let’s go back…
Despite the early enthusiasm for his policies and political persona in various corners of the conservative media, it was easy to see from the start that Ron DeSantis would not — and clearly does not — have the juice to defeat or supplant Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary.Part of this was the Florida governor’s soft skills or rather lack thereof. He is not a people person. He does not excel at the task of retail politics. He is not, to put it gently, strong on the stump, and he has a bad habit of speaking in the esoteric…
In 2022, Republicans seemed to have an easy path to regaining the White House, no actual policy proposals required. All they had to do was contrast Donald Trump’s economic record — which they portrayed as stellar — with the lousy economy under President Biden.That rosy view of the Trump economy involved a lot of selective forgetting — more about that in a minute. But the Biden economy was indeed troubled for much of 2022, with the highest inflation in 40 years. Jobs were plentiful, with unemployment near a 50-year low, but many economists were predicting an imminent recession.Since then, however,…
Making banks safer would seem like an easy thing for Americans to agree on, especially after the wipeouts of the global financial crisis in 2007-09, followed by the failure last year of three big ones: Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank.But no. A wide-ranging lobbying campaign by the nation’s biggest banks and their allies seems to be succeeding in beating back a proposal put forward last year by three federal agencies (the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) to require shareholders of big banks to put more of their own…
Jan. 22, 2024 – In the 1979 comedy Manhattan, Mary (played by Diane Keaton) tells Isaac (Woody Allen) to vent his frustrations so they can finally get their feelings out in the open. “I don’t get angry,” Isaac replies. “I grow a tumor instead.”Allen’s characters are often neurotic, prone to excessive worry, anxiety, and stress. Hollywood has a history of playing this for laughs, but in real life, neuroticism has long been linked to poor health, and today, more science supports that link.“There’s a lot of evidence now that personality traits are related to a whole host of health outcomes,” said psychologist Daniel Mroczek,…
To the Editor:Re “DeSantis Decides to End Campaign for White House” (front page, Jan. 22):When I saw the news that Ron DeSantis was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not that I’m a fan of Mr. DeSantis; hardly, I’m not even a Republican. But, for the sake of our democracy, a part of me had hoped that Mr. DeSantis or Nikki Haley, or the two of them together, might have waged a distinct and spirited enough campaign to overcome the angry, populist, cultlike sway…
Last summer, I learned that I needed major oral surgery, including having some teeth removed, bone grafts and implants. I’d dreaded the prospect for years, but it could no longer be postponed. Beyond fear of pain and temporary disfigurement from missing teeth, I had another major concern: I was addicted to heroin in my 20s. If the pain after the two scheduled procedures was severe enough, I might need to take opioids.During my active addiction, although I used plenty of cocaine, heroin was my true love. It made me feel safe, warm, nurtured — the opposite of the undeserving person…
But how much of that was a party thing? How much of that is that campaigns no longer buy into physical organizational infrastructure the way they did with the advent of social media and so forth? How much of it was simply that in the shadow of Trump it was difficult to grow anything?I do think that’s one clear difference we see now versus then, is in bygone years I would hear is you start building a campaign with house parties, and then you gradually build so that your campaign can fill bigger and bigger rooms until you’re filling, let’s…
What happens when you stress-test America’s system for electing a president? How well does it hold up?After the assault on the nation’s Capitol three years ago, we worked through every strategy we could imagine for subverting the popular will by manipulating the law. What we found surprised us. We determined that the most commonly discussed strategies — such as a state legislature picking a new slate of electors to the Electoral College — wouldn’t work because of impediments built into the Constitution. We also concluded that the most blatantly extreme strategies, such as a state canceling its election and selecting…