The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Columnist
A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time.
But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea.
What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea?
First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent. But high tariffs would reduce imports, so tariff rates would have to go even higher to realize the same amount of revenue, which would reduce imports even more, and so on. How high would tariffs have to go in the end? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using highly Trump-favorable assumptions and came up with a tariff rate of 133 percent; in reality, there’s probably no tariff rate high enough to replace the income tax.
And to the extent that we did replace income taxes with tariffs, we’d in effect sharply raise taxes on working-class Americans while giving the rich a big tax cut — because the income tax is fairly progressive, falling most heavily on affluent taxpayers, while tariffs are de facto a kind of sales tax that falls most heavily on the working class.
So this is a really bad idea that would be highly unpopular if voters knew about it.
But here’s the kicker: How did the Republican National Committee respond when asked about it? By having its representative declare, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Now, economists have been saying that tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers for the past two centuries or so; I guess they’ve been working for China all along. Yes, there are exceptions and qualifications, but if you imagine that Trump is thinking about optimal tariff theory, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.
Anyway, look at how the R.N.C. responded to a substantive policy question: by insisting not just that Dear Leader’s nonsense is true, but that anyone who disagrees is part of a sinister conspiracy.
Don’t brush this off. It’s one more piece of evidence that MAGA has become a dangerous cult.
Editorial Board Member
By all accounts, the real reason Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dissolved his “war cabinet” — the small decision-making body he established soon after the Hamas attacks that led Israel to go to war in Gaza — was to prevent the far-right hawks in his government from getting close to strategic military decisions.
Keeping Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as far away from military operations as possible is good. They are dangerous nationalists and would do what they could to make the war even more horrific. How things came to this is a sad reflection of the way political maneuvering has played into this extraordinarily cruel war.
The war cabinet was effectively finished before Netanyahu announced its formal dissolution on Monday. The two centrist opposition leaders he brought in to broaden support for the war effort, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot — both former military chiefs of staff with solid security credentials — had quit a week earlier, angry that crucial decisions were being blocked by “political considerations.” That brought the extremists knocking at the door, compelling Netanyahu to close down the war cabinet rather than let them in, and to rely on a clutch of close advisers in handling the war.
The problem is that Netanyahu’s idea of handling the war is to juggle pressures for a cease-fire from Israeli centrists and the Biden administration against threats from the far-right zealots to quit his government if he calls a cease-fire. Without the right his government would fall, probably pushing Netanyahu out of office — a development that would satisfy a majority of Israelis but leave Netanyahu exposed to the corruption charges that have been dogging him for years.
The specific issue that drove Gantz and Eisenkot to quit the war cabinet was procrastination on the cease-fire proposal that President Biden announced on May 31. Biden had presented the three-stage plan, which included release of all remaining Israeli hostages, as an Israeli proposal, which required only agreement from Hamas to go into effect. But Netanyahu never publicly acknowledged ownership or agreement, and Hamas came back with conditions that Israel rejected. The Biden administration then upped the ante by taking the plan to the U.N. Security Council, where it passed with only Russia abstaining.
The administration remains outwardly sanguine about the cease-fire. But aside from the political hurdles on the Israeli side, predicting or obtaining a response from Hamas has been onerous. Negotiations for the movement are handled by Hamas political operatives in Doha, Qatar, but the final word is with the Hamas chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the author of the murderous raid on Israel on Oct. 7. Communications with Sinwar are painfully slow, as he takes huge precautions not to give away his whereabouts in Gaza. He also knows that the remaining Israeli hostages are his only bargaining chip, and he is in no rush to cash them in.
That is the maddening reality of this war: Leaders on both sides keep it going even when the best interests of their people so clearly demand its immediate end.
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Deputy Opinion Editor
I first saw the director Maria Friedman’s production of “Merrily We Roll Along” in London in 2013 and felt I was witnessing some kind of miracle. Here was a revival of an unusual kind of Broadway legend — a musical regarded as brilliant and ambitious but, ultimately, perhaps fatally flawed because of an unsympathetic central character and a plot whose reverse chronology kept you from being swept up and away by the heart of the show (the friendship of the three core characters).
What Friedman pulled off was extraordinary. Nothing a director does is more important than choosing the right cast, and Friedman’s work with the actor Mark Umbers turned the selfish, shallow Franklin Shepard Jr. into a man who craved connection but ended in heartbreak — an achievement that owed much to her casting of Damian Humbley and Jenna Russell as Frank’s friends Charley and Mary and the intimacy and chemistry among the three performers.
Friedman, who is an acclaimed actress in her own right, stayed with “Merrily” for years, mounting a version in Boston and then, to enormous acclaim, an Off Broadway production in 2023 that moved to Broadway last fall, 42 years after the initial Broadway production closed after only 16 regular performances. Her “Merrily” won the Tony Award for best musical revival on Sunday night, as well as Tonys for two of its sensational stars, Jonathan Groff as Frank and Daniel Radcliffe as Charley.
Groff, Radcliffe and their co-star Lindsay Mendez created a bond of such affection and understanding that their trio of performances will stay in my memory for a long time.
In a surprise, Friedman didn’t win the Tony for best director of a musical on Sunday; that honor went to Danya Taymor, who did excellent work on “The Outsiders.”
Yet later in the Tony ceremony, when “Merrily” won for best musical revival, one of the show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman — who is the director’s sister and a legend in her own right — heaped praise on her sibling and tried to hand her Tony to her. Maria Friedman gently pushed the Tony away and then gave a loving tribute to the show and its creators, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.
“Well, Steve and George, ‘Merrily’s’ popular,” she said.
It was a class-act performance. If I could come up with a new Tony category and give the award, it would be to an artist who kept working and working on a puzzle of a show and its casting until she created a version for the ages, and that award would go to Maria Friedman for “Merrily.”
Opinion Columnist
You’re in the middle of a public health emergency involving a dangerously addictive substance — let’s say an epidemic of fentanyl or vaping among teens. Which of the following is the best response?
1. Issue a warning. Tell everyone, “Hey, watch out — this stuff isn’t good for you.”
2. Regulate the dangerous substance so that it causes the least amount of harm.
3. Ban the substance and penalize anyone who distributes it.
In the midst of a well-documented mental health crisis among children and teenagers, with social media use a clear contributing factor, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recommends choice one. As he wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay on Monday, “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
It’s an excellent first step, but it’s a mere Band-Aid on a suppurating wound. Telling teenagers something is bad for them may work for some kids, but for others it’s practically an open invitation to abuse. To add muscle to a mere label, we need to prohibit its sale to people under 18 and enforce the law on sellers. We need to strongly regulate social media, as Europe has begun to do, and ban it for kids under 16. Murthy urges Congress to take similar steps.
Free-speech absolutists (or those who play the role when a law restricts something that earns them lots of money) will say that requiring age verification systems is an unconstitutional limit on free speech. Nonsense. We don’t allow children to freely attend PG-13 or R-rated movies. We don’t allow hard liquor to be advertised during children’s programming.
Other objections to regulation are that it’s difficult to carry out (so are many things) and that there’s only a correlative link between social media and adverse mental health rather than one of causation.
Complacency is easy. The hard truth is that many people are too addicted to social media themselves to fight for laws that would unstick their kids. Big Tech, with Congress in its pocket, is only too happy for everyone to keep their heads in the sand and reap the benefits. But a combination of Options 2 and 3 are the only ones that will bring real results.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the surgeon general. He is Dr. Vivek Murthy, not Murphy.
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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
The spring campaign season ends this week, and the political landscape is tough for President Biden: He isn’t winning over enough voters in the battleground states. In the springtime of re-election years, many voters decide whether they’re open or closed to another term for the guy in office. Call it the incumbent threshold decision. In previous cycles, many voters gave up on Donald Trump, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter by this time during re-election — those incumbents never held sustained leads in the polls after that.
When this spring began, on March 19, Trump had a polling average lead of 2 percentage points over Biden nationally, according to Real Clear Politics. As spring ends, Trump leads by about 1 percent. I think a successful spring for Biden would have had him ahead. Even more worrisome for Biden: Trump began the spring with leads in the six key swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. After months of Democratic campaigning in those states, Biden hasn’t taken the lead in any of them. Trump’s lead has held pretty steady in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. Biden has made up enough ground in Michigan and Wisconsin to be razor-close to Trump. There hasn’t been polling recently in Pennsylvania; the late-May polling average had Trump ahead by 2.3 points.
Some important context: The race is clearly tight, Biden has solid fund-raising, and he would win if he prevails in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But I think the spring is ending as a missed opportunity for Biden to gain more ground on Trump, especially with Trump’s felony conviction. Based on Times polling and Times Opinion focus groups, many undecided and independent voters see Biden as ineffective on the economy, immigration and foreign wars, and too old for a second term.
That’s why, this week, Biden plans to spend a lot of time in debate prep. The reason he agreed to this unusually early debate against Trump, on June 27, is because he needs it: Look at his springtime performance and the swing state polls, and the election is slipping away from Biden right now. He needs to start persuading more people to want him for another four years — and that he’s up to the job. He has a lot to lose in this debate, but I think he was smart to take the gamble.
As for Trump, he’ll be campaigning in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania this week. Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the whole ballgame this fall: If Trump holds his lead in the Sun Belt states, all he needs is Pennsylvania to win. Trump isn’t doing much debate prep, according to my colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, but the expectations for him are lower than for Biden. Many voters expect Trump to be the same unhinged guy he was in the 2020 debates, ranting and talking over Biden. Trump can afford to spend time in must-win Pennsylvania while Biden tries to ensure his summer is better than his spring.
Opinion Columnist
In yet another airliner scandal, Boeing and Airbus jets have been manufactured using titanium sold with forged documentation. The problem was uncovered after a parts supplier found small holes in the material from corrosion. Whether the parts are usable despite the faked paperwork is being investigated by the F.A.A.
Why did this happen? The companies outsourced their manufacturing to China, and what manufacturing remains in the United States has been subject to intense cost cutting. Outsourcing and cost cutting often mean lower quality, more errors and more cover-ups.
The parts in question are handled by Spirit AeroSystems, which was a division of Boeing until 2005, when it was sold to investors as a separate company. Right before that move, an internal report by John Hart-Smith, a Boeing engineer, questioned “whether or not a company can continue to operate if it relies primarily on outsourcing the majority of the work that it once did in-house,” according to The Seattle Times.
Problems caused by outsourcing aren’t exclusive to the airline industry.
In 2008, Ward Stone, a wildlife pathologist, and his daughter, Montana Stone, used over-the-counter tests and discovered hazardous levels of lead in children’s necklaces and bracelets. This led to a recall of half a million pieces of children’s jewelry made in China and an agreement between the companies and the State of New York that allows the state to fine the companies if it finds lead in their products again.
In 2010 an investigation by The Associated Press found that children’s jewelry from China contained cadmium, a highly toxic and carcinogenic anti-corrosive material that is similar to lead but less regulated. In response, California and other states outlawed the use of the metal in children’s jewelry, and testing found that by 2012, cadmium was no longer present in trinkets for children. There were no laws about it for adult jewelry and little testing.
In 2018, the Center for Environmental Health, a nonprofit, decided to check adult products. It quickly found that many items for adults contained cadmium, some at very high levels. Oops.
Because the airline industry is so heavily regulated, it tends to discover problems. And because planes have multiple safety mechanisms backing up one another, the problems rarely lead to major loss of life (although two Boeing Max crashes in recent years are reminders that there are no guarantees).
But what else is lurking out there in other industries and products not subject to strict standards, certification requirements and intensive testing and verification?
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Opinion Writer
Tuesday was doubly sweet for South Carolina’s Nancy Mace. Winning big in her House primary was the cake. But sticking it to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who championed her challenger as part of his petty revenge tour against the Republican members who voted to depose him? That was the double-fudge frosting on top.
Mace told The Times early on Election Day that she wanted to “embarrass” McCarthy.
“I want to send him back to the rock he’s living under right now,” she said. “He’s not part of America. He doesn’t know what hard-working Americans go through every single day. I hope I drive Kevin McCarthy crazy.”
I mean, you gotta respect the impulse.
Even so, as is clear from her warlike tone, Mace can be a handful, and she has had a year of high drama apart from her McCarthy feud. Starting last November, her congressional office melted down, with basically her entire Washington staff quitting or getting fired over the course of three months. Public trash talk ensued, with decamping staff members slagging Mace as “abusive” and “delusional.” Mace claimed the former staff members had “sabotaged” her in a variety of wild ways.
But wait, there’s more! Some Republicans complain that Mace is a media hog. Some have been put off by her flip-flopping on issues and her support for Donald Trump. And just this week we learned the House Ethics Committee is doing some preliminary poking around into whether Mace misused taxpayer dollars on her Washington townhouse.
Bottom line: She can be a lot. Which raised questions about whether South Carolina Republican voters would go in a slightly less erratic direction this time. McCarthy certainly hoped so.
Nope. With an abundance of attitude and an endorsement from Trump — a tribute to her recent sucking up to the MAGA king, seeing as how he declared her “crazy” and “a terrible person” just two years ago — Mace easily cleared the bar for what Republican voters are looking for today, winning by solid double digits. Plus, you know, Southerners have always had a soft spot for colorful politicians.
Poor Kev. The hits just keep on coming.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
There was nothing abstract about the 6-to-3 decision issued Friday morning by the Supreme Court to permit bump stocks to be used on semiautomatic rifles. It is one of the most astonishingly dangerous decisions ever issued by the court, and it will almost surely result in a loss of American lives in another mass shooting.
Bump stocks attach to the back of a rifle and use the gun’s recoil to enable shooting hundreds of bullets at a very rapid pace, far faster than anyone could shoot by pressing the trigger multiple times. The device is the reason the Las Vegas shooter in 2017 was able to kill 60 people and wound more than 400 others so quickly in the nation’s worst mass shooting in modern history.
Bump stock devices were banned the next year, just as all fully automatic machine guns are banned for public use, but the six conservative members of the court seemed entirely unbothered by their deadly potential. The opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, parses in a ridiculous level of detail whether bump stocks truly fit the precise mechanical definition of a machine gun. Because the court feels the need to give the greatest possible deference to the ownership of guns, however they might be used, the court concluded that they are not really machine guns, as they do not allow firing multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger.”
The opinion, full of lovingly detailed close-up drawings of a gun’s innards (provided by the Firearms Policy Foundation, a pro-gun nonprofit group), says nothing about the purpose of a bump stock. Why would someone buy the device and use it? Only to fire a lightning burst of rounds. In the hands of an angry shooter — and there are so many of them — it would produce far more carnage, which is why even the Trump administration banned it.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent laced with astonishment at what her colleagues had done, didn’t hesitate to explain what was really happening. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote, and in this case, the duck is an illegal machine gun. (Which, by the way, is not typically used for killing ducks.) Skilled shooters using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle can fire 180 rounds per minute, she wrote, but a bump stock allows them to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute, which is the ordinary understanding of a fully automatic machine gun.
“Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” And when the next Las Vegas happens, it will not be enough to blame it on the madness of a single deranged individual. There are so many others.
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Opinion Writer
For over a year now, I have been talking to Americans who moved away from organized religion. Many of them did not leave their houses of worship because they stopped believing; they left because they felt betrayed — abandoned by their leaders and community when they needed support the most.
As one woman who said she became pregnant at 17 wrote to me, “I was a practicing Catholic, and the church response to me consisted solely of condemnation,” even though she married her boyfriend and they have now been married for over 50 years, “When I think back to that scared 17-year-old, my heart breaks for the added burden the church imposed.” A man told me that he lost faith because “when my mother was very ill just before she died, the church was unresponsive, even though she had a deep faith and had been very involved.”
I was thinking of these responses when I heard the news yesterday that the Southern Baptist Convention voted at its annual meeting to oppose in vitro fertilization. My newsroom colleague Ruth Graham explained that “the resolution does not explicitly oppose the creation of embryos ‘in vitro’ (in glass), but it does criticize the destruction of embryos, condemning the I.V.F. process as commonly practiced.”
I have watched several friends and family members experience the emotional pain of infertility and go through I.V.F. and other assisted reproductive technologies. Struggling to have children is not rare. A National Health Statistics Report published in April found that impaired fecundity, or the physical ability to have children, affects around 13 percent of women and 11 percent of men.
The idea that any faith community — particularly one that puts so much emphasis on motherhood — would place additional stress or judgment on someone going through this already difficult process makes me tremendously sad. Condemning I.V.F. is also out of step with many religious Americans. “Clear majorities of white evangelicals (63 percent), Black Protestants (69 percent) and Catholics (65 percent)” said I.V.F. is a good thing, according to polling published in May from the Pew Research Center.
During the most difficult times of their lives, people desire a community that will rally around them. Many find particular comfort in religious ritual when they are hurting. If modern churches want to stem the tide of disaffiliation, they should be opening their arms wider, not closing themselves off.
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Opinion Columnist
When history looks back on our current first lady, Jill Biden, what will people talk about most?
Will they remember that she was the first presidential wife to hold down an outside job while she lived in the White House? (Biden teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College.) Her work on issues like cancer prevention? Her long and apparently happy marriage to the president?
Well, the Bidens’ 46 years still has a way to go to match Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77.
Or will we remember her loyal appearances in court while Hunter Biden’s trial was underway? She’s certainly trying to fulfill both maternal and political duties — last week she was commuting back and forth between the courthouse in Delaware and diplomatic appearances in France.
“She’s his mother and he’s on trial, so of course she wants to be there as much as humanly possible,” said a spokesperson for her office.
Jill Biden is Hunter’s stepmother — Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, was killed in a car crash that also took the life of their daughter, Naomi, and injured Hunter and his brother, Beau. But it’s a tribute to her performance in the role that the public doesn’t generally make a distinction.
First lady history tends to not dip back very far in the popular memory. Everybody knows Martha Washington was first and remembers successors like Jackie Kennedy. A lot of people know that Eleanor Roosevelt became an international activist whose career soared long after her husband died. But someone like Ida McKinley doesn’t maintain much name recognition. (Ida has lived on in my memory ever since I read the story of her insistence on attending White House dinners even when she was suffering from epileptic seizures. William McKinley made it a point to sit next to his wife, so he could cover her face with his handkerchief whenever the need arose.)
The last half-dozen or so presidential wives have run the gamut. Hillary Clinton created a rather stupendous career of her own after Bill Clinton’s term ended; Melania Trump, um, kept a low profile.
Jill Biden has been a strong presence in the White House, when it comes to both matters of policy and politics. If I had to give her a bad mark, it’d be in what was probably a strong role in persuading Joe to run for another term at 81.
But boy, she’s been good at combining the roles of loyal wife-mother, first lady and dedicated educator. I hope history pictures her both in front of a classroom and sitting behind her boy in court. Meanwhile, kudos, Jill.
Patrick Healy, Deputy Opinion Editor: Bret, your column on President Biden’s theory of victory, at home politically and abroad in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, has drawn huge interest from readers and debate in the comments section. What inspired you to write the column now?
Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist: To quote Hendrix quoting Dylan, “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” If the president and his team don’t do something dramatic to turn around the dynamics of this election, Donald Trump will again be president next year. Scoring a couple of major foreign policy victories would help — and they are achievable, if only Biden doesn’t let his instinctive caution get in the way of the opportunities.
Patrick: You’ve generally been supportive of Biden’s approach to the war in Ukraine, Putin and Israel and to his overall posture on the offensive in Gaza. But in your column, you argue that he doesn’t have a theory of victory on these fronts. Did anything shift or change in Biden’s leadership — or in how you see it — that prompted your argument in the column?
Bret: Biden seems determined to ensure that Ukraine and Israel don’t lose to their enemies, while being much more reluctant to help them win. It’s why the administration consistently refused to deliver certain types of weapons — M-1 tanks, F-16 jets, ATACM missiles — until Ukrainian battlefield reversals forced the president’s hand. And it’s why the president is now pushing a cease-fire for Gaza that effectively guarantees Hamas’s survival. Both policies are strategic and political mistakes. The world will be a better place if Russia and Hamas suffer conclusive defeats. And Biden will be in better shape, politically, if he can be the co-author of those victories.
Patrick: You end the column with the striking argument that the most courageous thing Biden can do is to step aside in the 2024 race and let another Democrat run for president. It’s a big deal when a columnist makes a call like that. How much did you wrestle over it?
Bret: I’ve been pressing the case since 2021, when I argued that Biden would better serve his country, party and legacy by being the transitional president he all but promised to be as a candidate. Democrats could defeat Trump in a landslide if they coalesced around a younger, centrist governor like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear.
Final point: Any reader who thinks Biden is fit to go the distance in a second term should watch this video clip of him at a Juneteenth event on Monday. Be honest about what you see. As I said, the hour is getting late.
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Editorial Board Member
The most stinging condemnation of Israel’s slaughter of Gazan civilians as it fights to destroy Hamas is that Israelis devalue Palestinian lives, as others had devalued theirs.
It’s becoming clearer that for many who make that denunciation, the reverse is true.
On Monday, anti-Israel demonstrators in Manhattan protested the Nova Music Festival Exhibition with a sign that said, “Long Live Oct. 7,” the day Hamas and its supporters massacred 1,200 Israelis.
This wasn’t the first time protesters who professed a concern for human life showed little regard for Jewish lives.
On Oct. 8, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Times Square callously joked about how the hundreds of young Israelis Hamas butchered at that festival “were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”
A day later, as the dead were still being counted, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace announced that Hamas’s butchery was “an unprecedented historic moment” and “a counteroffensive” against oppression.
Soon after, Israel’s foes were tearing down fliers commemorating the more than 200 Israelis, including babies, women and the elderly, whom Hamas was holding captive.
Most American protesters horrified by Israel’s devastation of Gaza simply want an end to the carnage and think slogans like “from the river to the sea” are just expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. But from the beginning there has been a significant segment of demonstrators who mask their Jew-hatred with intimidating rhetoric.
The person who rallied a Columbia University encampment in April to clasp hands and keep out “Zionists” had previously said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
On Monday, a mob with kaffiyehs covering many of their faces stood in a New York City subway car and chanted, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist; this is your chance to get out,” using the English translation of Juden Raus.
Anti-Israel vandals who defaced the homes of the director and trustees of the Brooklyn Museum early Wednesday painted inverted red triangles, which Hamas’s military wing has used to denote targets.
Many good people want Israel’s attack on Gaza to end and for there to be real peace with Palestinian sovereignty. But they should have nothing to do with those who think that will be achieved by shunning Jews and shedding Jewish blood.
Opinion Columnist
For inflation nerds, Wednesday was a double-whammy day: a new inflation report in the morning, a Federal Reserve interest rate announcement in the afternoon. And there was a weird dissonance between those two data points.
First, that inflation report was extremely encouraging, almost too good to be true. Actually, it probably was too good to be true: monthly numbers are noisy. But while this report was too good to be true, it helped make the case that the discouraging numbers early this year were too bad to be true.
The real story, I’d argue, is that inflation is yesterday’s problem. In fact, it has been under control for months. But that reality has been hard to see, given the noisiness of the data.
Consider core inflation — prices excluding volatile food and energy prices — excluding shelter inflation, which we know is still being driven by rapid rent increases that ended a year or more ago. Here’s core inflation minus the figures for shelter at an annual rate month by month, and over the previous year:
Nobody thinks prices actually fell last month, but the negative number highlighted how erratic the monthly data is. We should discount those big numbers early this year, which probably reflected start-of-year price resets rather than underlying inflation.
Meanwhile, the annual rate of inflation has been around 2 percent, the Fed’s target, since last fall. Basically, we’ve been where we want to be for around eight months.
But the Fed — burned by its failure to foresee the inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 — isn’t ready to say that yet. Its economic projections, mostly made before Wednesday morning’s numbers, show only gradual progress against inflation. Of course, it didn’t cut rates (nobody thought it would), and its statement about that decision was only slightly more dovish than the last one.
The rest of us, however, don’t have to be that cautious. Inflation has basically been defeated, and interest rates will be coming down — not now, and maybe not at the next meeting, but soon and for the rest of this year and much of next.
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Opinion Columnist
In Normandy last week, President Biden gave a speech defending democracy that was designed to evoke Ronald Reagan’s famed “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” address in the same spot 40 years ago.
But if Biden wants to make sure democracy is defended from tyrants, he should emulate Reagan in another way: the Gipper’s leisurely travel style.
Nancy Reagan was always on guard, making sure her husband wasn’t being overstuffed with facts or overbooked with travel.
When I accompanied the couple in 1986 to Tokyo for the Group of 7 summit, we wended our way there blissfully slowly. A stop in L.A., a couple of nights in Honolulu, a look-see in Guam, three nights in the paradise of Bali. Nearly a week later, when we finally reached Japan, Reagan was tanned, rested and ready. (By contrast, when Bush 41 — known in Asia for having a frenetic “ants on a hot pan” personality — dashed around the Pacific Rim in 1992, he threw up on the Japanese prime minister and fainted in his lap at a banquet.)
Reagan was 75 when we went on that dream trip, but he never acted as if there was a problem with his age (even though it would seem later that there was, given his subsequent Alzheimer’s diagnosis). He played the ancient king, gliding along at his own pace.
Reagan wasn’t immune from criticism about his age, but he wore his years better than Biden, who seems in denial. And no one is stepping in to schedule him any breathing room; Jill Biden, the Nancy to Biden’s Ronnie, has a schedule that’s even more frenetic than Joe’s.
Biden and his staff always seem to be frantically trying to prove he’s energetic enough to govern. The 81-year-old sometimes jogs to the podium. And he’s trying to exhibit, through a strenuous travel schedule, that he’s up to the job. He arrived back in the United States on Sunday and went to Wilmington, Del. He came back to Washington the next day to host an early Juneteenth concert at the White House. On Tuesday, he gave a gun safety speech at the Washington Hilton — awkward, after Hunter’s guilty verdict on gun charges. He went straight from the Hilton to Andrews Air Force Base, and flew to Delaware where he gave his beleaguered son a hug on the tarmac.
On Wednesday, three days after he left Europe, the president schlepped back to Europe, this time for a G7 summit in Italy, and meetings with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the pope, and a joint news conference with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. On Friday, he flies through cascading time zones to L.A. for a glittering George Clooney-Julia Roberts-Jimmy Kimmel fund-raiser with Barack Obama as a guest star.
Nancy Reagan would be appalled. Sometimes for an older president, it’s better to glide than jog.
Opinion Columnist
What will happen in November’s election? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. But I thought it might be worth flagging a development that probably isn’t getting enough notice: Americans seem to be quietly getting more optimistic about the economy.
We’ve come to take it as a given that no amount of good news will change Americans’ negative view of the economy; they were shocked by the inflation of 2021 and ’22, and the story goes, it will be years before they acknowledge that inflation is down and jobs are abundant. But there are at least hints that views may be changing, and faster than many observers realize.
One source of evidence is the New York Fed’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations. I usually follow that survey to track expected inflation, which remains fairly subdued. But the survey also asks consumers whether they expect their financial situation to be better or worse a year from now. Here’s the difference between the percentage who said better off and those who said worse off:
There has been a huge improvement not just since the worst of the inflation surge but even since late last year. We’re almost back to the optimism that prevailed in President Biden’s early months, before inflation took off.
Another source of evidence, albeit with less of a track record, is a survey conducted by The Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which asks voters whether Biden or Donald Trump would do a better job of managing the economy. Earlier this year Trump had a double-digit lead; now it’s down to four points.
It’s still unlikely that the economy will be a net plus for Biden. But it may be much less of a drag than many expect (especially given falling gas prices). Which in turn means that the election may turn on other issues, like the Republican threat to birth control.
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Opinion Staff Editor
Martha-Ann Alito, who is married to Justice Samuel Alito, has admitted that she flies politicized flags outside her homes because she can’t stand the colors of the rainbow.
“I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag,” she told a woman posing as a Catholic conservative, “because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Tellingly, in the surreptitiously recorded conversation, she even fantasized about creating her own fiery flag with the word “vergogna” (“shame” in Italian) so she could say to her neighbors, “Shame, shame, shame, on you.”
Apparently, for Ms. Alito, the second great commandment, to love thy neighbor, applies only until the neighbor is proud enough to sport rainbows. Then vergogna!
To be honest, these comments aren’t particularly surprising. Ms. Alito is the wife of a justice who agreed that the country needs to return to “a place of godliness” and has argued that the court’s ruling on marriage equality restricts the free speech rights of religious conservatives. (If that’s really true, somebody should tell her to zip it before she’s jailed for her words.)
They are also emblematic of a broader campaign by the religious right to erase or shame queer culture from public view, often in the form of attempted — and successful — bans on books, flags, drag performances and curriculums. The only thing mildly revealing about Ms. Alito’s comments is that they signal it is still socially acceptable for religious conservatives to demean the queer community in supposedly polite company.
While it is undeniably exhausting that anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiments continue to infect members of America’s most powerful institutions, queer people should take heart that even the most benign of our symbols, the rainbow flag, still so bothers those who hate us.
In 1978, Gilbert Baker — an activist who was, as he put it, the “gay Betsy Ross” — and a group of volunteers dyed and stitched the first rainbow Pride flag in the attic of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco. While the flag has undergone many transformations since, the rainbow has endured as a welcome, if sometimes clichéd, Pride symbol.
As the rainbow has frequently been deployed by corporations or “allies” that take little interest in L.G.B.T.Q. equality outside of a boozy June weekend, some queer people may think it has become too watered down to stand as a powerful symbol. But predictable outrage, from the Phyllises and Anitas and Martha-Anns, should remind even the most cynical of us that our symbols often speak far louder than we could alone.
In the face of a rise in attempts to restrict cultural expressions of queer identity, the rainbow is still one of the best tools we have to collectively repudiate those who wish we were ashamed to be alive. We must wave it proudly.
As for you, Martha-Ann, I say happy Pride Month! I’ll be praying for you.
Editorial Board Member
As a rule, it is not a good thing for your son to be convicted of a crime, and particularly not when you are the sitting president in the heat of a brutal re-election campaign.
But Hunter Biden’s conviction in federal court on Tuesday, on charges of lying on a firearms application six years ago, is a net positive — not for himself, of course, or his long-suffering family, but ultimately for his father, the American justice system and the rule of law.
After all, isn’t this how it’s supposed to work? You break the law, you face the consequences. Even if you’re the president’s son. Even if you’re the former president.
It was only two weeks ago that Republicans were thundering about the outrageous injustice of a different guilty verdict. Funny, I haven’t heard much complaining about this one, even though it involves a “paperwork” offense (boo!) that relates to gun regulations (extra boo!). The only complaints I recall were that Hunter was getting off too easy with a plea deal … until that fell through at the last minute.
On Tuesday, the right-wing naysayers got an actual guilty verdict, and still they tied themselves in knots trying to dismiss its significance. (I’ll save you the trouble: To them, Hunter’s conviction is a coverup for his and his dad’s real crimes. Also, any Biden conviction is de facto legitimate while any Trump conviction is de facto fraudulent.) What the hacks couldn’t erase were the unanimous verdicts of two juries in two jurisdictions. (Not to mention the Justice Department’s upcoming and more serious prosecution of Hunter on tax charges.)
Sure, the system is far from perfect. Rich and powerful people get off all the time; poor people more often don’t. And yet the past two weeks have provided an object lesson in the fair administration of justice, and the seriousness that characterizes criminal trials and jury deliberations. We talk a lot about the presumption of innocence, but that foundational principle derives its meaning only within the context of a society that actually holds its wrongdoers to account.
If the Hunter Biden prosecutions illustrate anything, it is that his father’s administration respects equal justice and the rule of law, so much so that the president stood down even as his own flesh and blood was facing a potential prison term. Can you imagine, for even a fraction of a second, Donald Trump allowing the Justice Department — his Justice Department — to prosecute any of his children? Or that he wouldn’t pre-emptively pardon them, just to be doubly safe?
Of course you can’t, and that is as important a difference as exists between the two candidates for president in 2024.
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Today’s Supreme Court may bear Chief Justice John Roberts’s name, but it is not his court, nor has it been for many years.
This was demonstrated once again this week — not in a formal public opinion but in a recording released by a woman who had infiltrated a private court event last week and surreptitiously taped her conversations with the justices.
Posing as a conservative Catholic, the woman, Lauren Windsor, asserted that America is a Christian nation and it is the court’s role to lead it on a “moral path.”
Roberts refused to take the bait. “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” he responded. “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” He also disagreed that America is a Christian nation.
This was, of course, the easy and correct answer. Roberts knows that the court’s legitimacy relies entirely on the trust of the American people. You don’t have to wonder if he’s a closet liberal (and he’s far from it) to expect him and his colleagues to approach the nation’s most fraught legal disputes with fairness or at least with respect for the separation of church and state.
Justice Samuel Alito can’t be bothered with such earthly concerns. In response to Windsor’s claim that religious Americans have to keep fighting “to return our country to a place of godliness,” he said, “I agree with you. I agree with you.”
“One side or the other is going to win,” he added.
In one sense, this is no surprise coming from the court’s leading culture warrior. Alito has long made clear his special solicitude for religious claims, whether before the court or on the flagpole outside his house. Still, it should shock us to hear him lay out his worldview so bluntly. It shows an utter lack of regard for the court’s delicate posture of neutrality in the constitutional system and American society.
For a long time, Alito seemed like an outlier on the court, lobbing his sour, grievance-filled dissents from the sidelines. He is now ascendant, writing the lead opinion in the decision striking down the right to abortion and many other precedent-breaking rulings. He is also in good company in the upper reaches of government. Recall that House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told an interviewer after he got the job, “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
Perhaps we should be grateful that these aspiring theocrats have fully ripped off the mask. Why submit to the sinful compromises demanded by a pluralistic society when you can just impose your (and God’s) will by fiat? In that regard, this is really the Alito court.
An earlier version of this article misstated Justice Samuel Alito’s history with Lauren Windsor. It is not the case that they never met before.
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Editorial Board Member
That far-right parties made gains in the just-concluded elections to the European Parliament somehow doesn’t seem too shocking, though President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold snap elections to the French Parliament as a result was quite the coup de théâtre. Maybe it’s that the threatening cloud of the far right has become familiar over Western democracies, including the United States, as they cope with immigration, climate change, social change, culture wars, real wars and other sources of popular disquiet.
The European elections have their own dynamics, and a few reasons for the lack of panic over its results come to mind. One is that many of the 373 million voters in 27 member countries of the European Union don’t take the European elections as seriously as they do national elections and often use them to sound off on domestic issues. That’s not to say they’re right to do so; the European Parliament does have considerable clout in setting Pan-European policy. But postelection analyses focused far more on the message for national leaders — terrible for Macron or Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and great for Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni — than any potential impact on the European Union.
Second, while the far right made major gains, they were less impressive than many analysts had feared. The European Parliament’s center easily held, and Ursula von der Leyen, a German Christian Democrat (a conservative), will probably retain her powerful position as president of the European Commission. Not much is likely to change in the European Union.
So why did Macron panic? Maybe he didn’t. According to French press reports, his decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call for immediate elections was quietly plotted before the European elections as it became evident that Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, a perennial nationalist thorn in the side of French politics, was likely to make big gains under its new star, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.
It seems curious that Macron would saddle France with fateful parliamentary elections as it prepares for the Summer Olympics. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, called it “extremely unsettling.” But to dismiss the move as panic, a desperate gamble, is to underestimate Macron, whose sweep to power in 2014 as a 36-year-old wunderkind was deemed a stunning feat.
His Renaissance Party has not been doing well of late, and he apparently concluded that quick elections over the tangible threat of a resurgent right may be the boost he needs. French elections are held in two rounds — these will be on June 30 and July 7 — and Macron hopes that French voters will do what they have often done, which is to vote their gripes in the first round and their reason in the second. He, in any case, will remain president for three more years.
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Normally the “messaging bills” that each party regularly brings to a vote in Congress seem like huge wastes of time. The bills are meant only to put members of the opposite party in an uncomfortable position on a wedge issue when it comes time to run negative campaign ads. These days, it’s often what Congress does instead of actually working for the public.
But the latest Democratic effort on contraception may actually serve a useful purpose. Many people may not fully grasp the growing Republican effort to limit access to birth control. The bills in the House and Senate might at least help make it clear how serious that threat is.
Last week, Senate Democrats tried to pass the Right to Contraception Act, which would prohibit any restrictions to birth control access at the federal, state and local level. It predictably failed to overcome a Republican filibuster, but it got 38 Republicans to go on the record as voting against it. In the House, Democrats are circulating a petition to force a vote on a similar bill, which will also fail, but the names of Republicans who don’t sign will be publicized in ads across the country by a group called Americans for Contraception.
Republicans claim there’s no need for these bills because contraception access is already protected by the 1965 Supreme Court decision known as Griswold v. Connecticut.
“Nobody’s going to overturn Griswold,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “No way.”
But that’s exactly what many Republicans said about Roe v. Wade before it was tossed aside, and when that happened Justice Clarence Thomas openly called for Griswold to be reconsidered, too. In Hawley’s home state, where abortion is now banned, a bipartisan group of women in the legislature have tried to expand access to birth control by requiring insurance policies to cover a year’s supply. That effort has been blocked by Republicans who say that the contraceptives will cause abortions.
The false connection between abortion and contraception is behind most of the Republican opposition, and as The Washington Post recently reported, surveys show that most Americans don’t understand that emergency contraception agents like Plan B don’t cause abortions. Many right-wing groups like the Idaho Family Policy Center falsely claim that they do. Seventeen states have now blocked efforts to assure a right to birth control, and Donald Trump said last month that he was open to those kinds of state restrictions. (Later, after realizing that was a bad look, he backtracked.)
More voters need to know that Republicans, from the top down, are willing to let states deprive residents of their birth control.
Opinion Writer and Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
In terms of where everyone is: President Biden will be in Italy later this week for the Group of 7 meeting. Donald Trump will be in Washington on Thursday for an event with the Business Roundtable. The Supreme Court will also release opinions that morning.
During the N.B.A. finals that began on Thursday, the Biden campaign ran a TV ad titled, “Flag,” which really mirrors a strategy that senior officials described to The New Yorker earlier this year. It’s highly focused on “freedom” conceptually, through the prism of abortion, voting rights and a few other issues. While the issues are definitely longstanding Democratic priorities, if you watch it, the solemn patriotic tone of the ad feels a little old school Republican to me — it’s an interesting artifact of how things have changed. Biden is running to preserve rights and freedoms, or, through another lens, conserve the old ways.
Late last week, Fox News released a poll showing Biden and Trump even in Virginia (which Biden won 54-44 in 2020) and with Trump only up 4 points in Florida (which isn’t far off 2020, but still seems a little surprisingly close). A very tight result in Virginia in November would most likely reflect big problems elsewhere for Biden. I’m a little skeptical it’s that close, but The Washington Post took a good look at Virginia, and presented a wide range of expert opinions about what might be going on there.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to get on the ballot in many states, which might account for a somewhat unusual schedule. (He’s been in Colorado and Tennessee recently.) He will be in New Mexico over the weekend, at an event focused on addiction.
This is fairly tangential to the presidential race, but Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman, faces a primary challenge on Tuesday from a few candidates with the possibility of a runoff if nobody reaches 50 percent. Mace has had a sort of unusual congressional career, veering between criticizing Trump after Jan. 6 to endorsing him (and vice versa); Kevin McCarthy, still incensed that she voted to oust him, has helped her opponent.
If you’re interested in thinking about affordability and inflation, and then, secondarily, how people are processing these concepts politically, definitely check out Ezra Klein’s latest episode of his Opinion podcast with Annie Lowrey. The two, who are married, go really deep on all of it, including thinking about the economic politics of 2012 and today.
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Boy, Republicans can’t get enough of Hunter Biden and his drug-gun thing, right?
Well, it is a pretty juicy story. The son of the president, with a long history of substance abuse, is being prosecuted for denying he was using drugs when he bought a revolver.
But don’t you think the focus is kind of … narrow? Endless talk about how Hunter lied. Not much comment at all on the fact that just being asked whether you’re on drugs is a pretty modest approach to firearm safety.
All state laws are different. Delaware, where Hunter got his revolver, recently made some big changes. It will require anyone who buys a gun to first complete a firearm safety training program.
Don’t imagine Hunter would have made it through that one in his addict era. Yet many, many of the people doing the loudest howling about the president’s son are connected with the people who have challenged the reform law in court, arguing that it’s a violation of their civil rights.
As Jonathan Weisman pointed out in The Times, it’s “hard to make much of allegations that Hunter Biden lied about his drug use to purchase a handgun when your party is sponsoring legislation to ease gun-purchasing restrictions for veterans struggling with mental illness, not to mention the case before the Supreme Court that could allow domestic abusers to buy firearms.”
Just saying.
Opinion Writer
Pope Francis told entertainers at the Vatican last week that he has been saying the Prayer for Good Humor for the past 40 years. He highly recommended it, which he attributed to St. Thomas More, a martyr of the Roman Catholic Church.
The prayer is very nice, but it seems to have been written not by More but by a young Englishman — a Protestant, as far as I can tell — in the early 20th century.
This is not a big deal. No one is harmed if the pope misattributes a prayer. It is odd, though. Surely some of the scholars surrounding the pope must know about this. Did they not tell him? If not, what does that say about the culture of the Vatican?
I emailed Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See press office, but he did not reply. I followed up with multiple emails over several days, along with a couple of voice mail messages. Niente.
The Prayer for Good Humor begins with a mild joke:
Give me a good digestion, Lord,
And also something to digest.
It ends like this:
Give me a sense of humor, Lord.
Give me the power to see a joke,
To get some happiness from life
And pass it on to other folk.
This light, pleasing language doesn’t feel as though it came from the pen of More, who was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England. A real More prayer sounds more like this: “O glorious blessed Trinity, whose justice has damned to perpetual pain many proud rebellious angels.”
Abbé Germain Marc’hadour, a French Catholic priest who was a leading authority on More and founded a journal about him, Moreana, included the Prayer for Good Humor in a 1972 piece titled “Most Famous of More’s Spurious Prayers.”
Marc’hadour investigated a legend that the prayer appeared on a tablet at Chester Cathedral, an Anglican church, in England. The dean of the cathedral wrote back to him that there was no such tablet. He enclosed a card with the prayer and this: “The above lines were written by Thomas Henry Basil Webb, only son of Lt. Col. Sir Henry Webb, Bt., born on Aug. 12, 1898, educated at Winchester College — he was killed on the Somme, Dec. 1, 1917, aged 19.” According to another source I found, Webb might have written the prayer when he was just 12 years old.
I’m hoping Francis keeps saying the prayer, even if word gets to him that it’s no More. We all should have the power to see a joke.