It was bad enough that the Omicron variant shattered hopes of a normal holiday season, or at least what passes for normal in year two of the pandemic. Now it feels like we’re fated to live with COVID-19 in perpetuity, forever worried that when one variant fades, another will quickly take its place, that we’ll never, once and for all, throw out our face masks.Anthony Fauci is more upbeat.
If Donald Trump tries to run for president again, one of his former campaign advisers has a plan to dissuade him. Anticipating that Trump may not know who Adlai Stevenson was or that he lost two straight presidential elections in the 1950s, this ex-adviser figures he or someone else might need to explain the man’s unhappy fate. They’ll remind Trump that if he were beaten in 2024, he would join Stevenson as one of history’s serial losers.
As Air Force One flew home over the Atlantic on Election Night, the televisions scattered throughout the plane were showing a miserable scenario for Joe Biden’s party. No White House staffers ventured back to the press cabin, a fairly routine practice on long flights. The president’s aides appeared grim. A weary Biden returned to the White House close to 2 a.m. and ignored shouted questions from reporters about the early results.
As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the early 2000s, I once received a call from a couple of Republican campaign operatives who said they had something to show me. We met at their office in Washington, D.C., a few days later. They presented printouts of recent election records and pointed to a few cases of what they suspected were people voting illegally. One after another, their examples of voter fraud turned out to be nothing.
A faint but discernible note of alarm has been slipping into Democrats’ chatter about the 2022 and 2024 elections. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have slumped to their lowest levels since his inauguration. His governing coalition is splintering over the Haitian migrant crisis. Many Democrats view the legislation moving through Congress this week as a defining test of whether they can marshal their congressional majority and pass something that most Americans want.
When President Joe Biden rolled out his plan requiring vaccinations on a mass scale, he sounded a bit like a gambler at a point of desperation. Biden’s presidency, and much of his legacy, hinges on defeating the prolonged pandemic. During a dismal summer of rising infections and deaths due to vaccine holdouts and the Delta variant, the pandemic seemed to have defeated him. Under the new rules, Biden hopes to pressure about 80 million more Americans to get their shots.
No one overran the U.S. Capitol this time or tried to subvert American democracy. What the people who came to the rally on a stretch of grass near the Capitol Reflecting Pool on Saturday afternoon really wanted to do was talk. Talk and argue. And then talk and argue some more.The “Justice for J6” rally was supposed to highlight the plight of those charged with nonviolent crimes in the January 6 insurrection who, the organizers claim, have been denied fast and fair trials.
Updated at 1:40 p.m. on September 8, 2021.Joe Biden’s “mission accomplished” moment came on the Fourth of July.Standing behind a lectern adorned with the presidential seal, he peered out at the hundreds of maskless guests drinking beer and eating pulled pork on the South Lawn of the White House. “Thanks to our heroic vaccine effort, we’ve gained the upper hand against this virus,” Biden said.
Who, exactly, is responsible for today’s calamity in Afghanistan? ISIS appears to be the author of this tragedy, but are American officials at fault as well? At least 12 U.S. soldiers and dozens of Afghan civilians are dead after attacks by a pair of suicide bombers just outside the Kabul airport. The number of casualties is sure to rise.
Call it the White House’s dream scenario: In the end, the voters don’t blame Joe Biden. The president’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan simply aligns him with everyone else who has given up on the notion that the military could mold a fractious country into a stable democratic ally.
Joe Biden spent the bulk of his adult life running for president or auditioning to be president. Now he is president, and yet the notion that he might walk away from the job while he still has a choice in the matter remains a source of undimmed speculation rare in the postwar era. No one seriously believed that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or any president over the past half century would forgo a second term as long as there was the faintest hope of winning one.
“When you ask individual senators whether they want to see expanded infrastructure, the answer is nearly always yes.” — Senator Elizabeth Warren“This is an area that is ripe with opportunity for bipartisan compromise.” — Senator Ted Cruz“There’s an opportunity to do something really good for the American public here.
Midway through his speech at the Pentagon last Wednesday, President Joe Biden veered from global threats to a personal promise. The visit was Biden’s first to the building as commander in chief, and he was surrounded by symbols of power and position. He stood in front of four American flags, behind a lectern adorned with the presidential seal. He would never “dishonor” or “disrespect” the military, he vowed, nor would he ever “politicize the work you do.
You couldn’t have blamed Anthony Fauci if at any point over the past year he’d told Donald Trump he’d had enough, thank you, and quit. Everyone has a breaking point. There was the time the former president called him “a disaster” on a call with Trump-campaign staff. Or the day a White House official gave reporters an oppo-research-style memo claiming that Fauci had been “wrong on things” related to COVID-19.
At dawn this morning, workers loaded couches and tables into a moving truck parked outside the West Wing. Men wearing white coveralls and carrying roller brushes and paint cans walked across the north driveway. Inside the White House, pictures of the 45th president had been removed from the walls. Only the hooks remained, ready for a new set of portraits of the 46th.
Walk toward the White House during the final days of the Trump presidency, and you’ll get an unmistakable feel of a government under siege. Buildings near Pennsylvania Avenue are boarded up in anticipation of street violence. Monuments are choked with fencing.
On the White House grounds this morning, senior West Wing aides walked around without masks. They spoke with the press without masks. They huddled privately with one another and didn’t wear masks.When I visited the White House in August, no one checked to see if I was running a fever or suppressing a hacking cough as I passed through the security booth.
President Donald Trump demands loyalty, but isn’t so quick to return it. Republican members of Congress have passed his bills, rationalized his behavior, kept him in power. Now, with a new Supreme Court vacancy, some of the GOP senators who risked the most in tethering themselves to Trump sorely need his help keeping them in power. He isn’t guaranteed to deliver.
LATROBE, Pennsylvania—President Donald Trump has long signaled that if he loses reelection, it would surely be illegitimate. With his base primed to believe that victory is the only acceptable outcome, the post-election period could be the most combustible in memory.
LATROBE, Pennsylvania—President Donald Trump has long signaled that if he loses reelection, it would surely be illegitimate. With his base primed to believe that victory is the only acceptable outcome, the post-election period could be the most combustible in memory.
During a reporting trip to the White House in late May, I passed through a magnetometer and met a government agent who pointed an infrared thermometer at my forehead. At that point, the United States was seeing about 21,000 new coronavirus cases a day. Had I been coughing or experienced any recent headaches? the agent asked. No, I said, and was allowed into the building. Today, the country is experiencing about twice as many new positive cases each day.
So many simple pleasures are gone, casualties of the pandemic. Baseball games. Live concerts. Summertime parades. One civic ritual that’s neither simple nor necessarily pleasurable is also withering under the virus’s spread: the presidential nominating convention as we know it. Starting next week, the parties will hold stripped-down versions of the quadrennial gatherings to formalize the Donald Trump–Joe Biden matchup, creating, perhaps, a template for the future.
Say Joe Biden wins the presidential election in November. On the morning of January 20, Donald Trump will enter the Oval Office and leave a handwritten letter to Biden on the Resolute desk. Later, Trump and his wife, Melania, will stand in the White House’s North Portico to await a visit from the president-elect and his wife, Jill. After the armored limousine glides up the driveway, the couples will exchange pleasantries and maybe gifts before heading inside for coffee.