The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Deputy Opinion Editor
Every week on The Point, we start things off with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
In the final three weeks of a presidential campaign, candidates usually have one big televised debate left, a last chance to break through to a large audience of voters with a memorable quip, a compelling idea or a defensive strategy that takes opponents down a peg. During those final weeks, candidates also make their closing argument to voters — the best case for why to elect them — which typically gets a full airing in that last debate and then gets amplified during the campaign rallies, events and TV ads through Election Day.
That was the case for Joe Biden in his last debate against Donald Trump, on Oct. 22, 2020, when he conveyed steadiness and maturity in the face of a fusillade of Trump rants. It was the case for Trump against Hillary Clinton in their Oct. 19, 2016, debate, when he hammered away at illegal immigration and portrayed her as corrupt and untrustworthy — conjuring up doubts that James Comey would soon reinforce with some voters.
But there’s no October presidential debate this year, unless Trump changes his mind and takes up Kamala Harris’s offer to have one. As a result, this presidential campaign felt stalled in recent weeks, as both candidates held rallies with friendly audiences and sat down to take questions mostly from friendly interviewers (though Harris had more guts than Trump to do “60 Minutes”).
Now comes this curveball: Harris will do a half-hour interview on Wednesday night with Fox News’s Bret Baier, who’s no Democrat’s idea of a pushover reporter. Now, Harris parries well and knows how to run out the clock, but she’s likely to come in for a grilling, with no guarantees of success.
It’s a savvy move by Harris. The usual strategy of safe closing arguments before friendly audiences in the final weeks isn’t going to cut it in this tight race. Both Harris and Trump know they have more work to do to win this race, and Harris is the one trying to do the work.
The most important goals at this stage — with early and mail-in voting underway — are to energize your base and expand your voter coalition. Harris isn’t going to win over tons of voters who watch Fox News. But I think her appearance could help more than hurt her, especially with undecided voters and those who aren’t hard-core partisans; they may like her grit in taking questions on Fox News. “Fortitude,” “courage” and “confidence” were words of praise for Harris that I heard in our latest focus group, which will be published on Wednesday, from women who backed Trump in 2020. I think she can still poach some of these women and other voters. (She’s also doing an interview with Charlamagne Tha God on Tuesday, in part to help her support among Black men.)
Trump, too, is going on Fox News on Wednesday, and it’s an unusual format: an all-female audience that is expected to ask him questions about abortion and child care. I’ll be watching his performance to see if he doubles down on his protector-of-women messaging, but it’s Harris who I think could catch more voters’ attention by gambling in her final three weeks on a high-risk, high-reward play.
Opinion Culture Editor
Two notable movies open in wide release today: “The Apprentice,” a ”gleefully vulgar” fictional telling of Donald Trump’s early relationship with his mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, and “Saturday Night,” a real-time reimagining of the run-up to the debut of “Saturday Night Live.”
The films share a crucial element: New York City in the 1970s. In fact, the events dramatized are so nearly concurrent — Trump met Cohn in ’73; “S.N.L.” debuted in ’75 — that you can imagine them unfolding simultaneously in different neighborhoods.
Both films present their subjects in part as visionaries: A young Trump eyes the rundown Commodore Hotel as everyone around him argues that Midtown Manhattan is a wasteland, and Lorne Michaels wrests control of NBC’s comedic temperament from an ossified old guard, personified by Milton Berle (played by J.K. Simmons). Both subjects ascend from the scorched earth of a broken and bankrupt city, unleashing forces — for good and ill — that reverberate across the culture and the country today.
Of course, New York is a very different city now from what it was 50 years ago, and the next cultural or political influencer is more likely to rise on TikTok than in NBC’s Studio 8H or a hot spot like Studio 54. But with a mayor under indictment and lingering cracks from pandemic-era pressures, the city may still be a crucible for chaotic invention. Just nine years ago, the subjects of “The Apprentice” and “Saturday Night” dovetailed in a way that suggests a crossover sequel: Michaels invited Trump to host “Saturday Night Live” in the midst of his first successful presidential campaign, a divisive decision even among the show’s cast.
Despite their tonal differences, the two films also converge thematically. In “The Apprentice,” Trump’s drift toward ruthlessness (under Cohn’s tutelage) turns him into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster — a point made literal in a late scene in which is his head is being stitched up during cosmetic scalp-reduction surgery. Near the end of “Saturday Night” the first bellowing of the now-famous catchphrase “Live from New York!” also recalls a Frankensteinian moment. (“It’s alive … it’s alive!”)
No one can deny that the twin forces depicted in these films still loom over the landscape. And the true mad genius that unleashed them both was New York City itself.
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Opinion Writer
It was not two weeks ago that Hurricane Helene made landfall 160 miles from Tampa, Fla., and moved northward from there, killing more than 200 people and producing damages now estimated at $175 billion. That is almost half as much money as the green energy investments the Congressional Budget Office projected would be paid out over a decade by the Inflation Reduction Act, often called the largest and most consequential climate legislation ever passed anywhere in the world. So half of that decade-long estimate, in damages, accrued from one single storm.
As Kate Aronoff writes in The New Republic, the recent technocratic turn toward treating climate change as merely a matter of energy transition has left climate-conscious Democrats without great language to describe — or policy tools to defend against — the devastating impacts that will intensify in the decades ahead.
The damages from Hurricane Milton appear, at the moment, considerably smaller than those generated by Helene, thanks to the slight southward drift of the storm course. Tampa endured merely a thousand-year rain event, with more rainfall in a single hour than the city had ever recorded in any single month before. More than 100 tornadoes swept across the peninsula, too.
Even so, Milton was a kind of success story, in its way, and a testament to Florida’s experience with hurricane hazards. But the longer and more troubling legacy of these particular back-to-back hurricanes might be how quickly the storms themselves have been weaponized, not merely to make familiar partisan points but also as part of much larger and darker information wars.
This phenomenon has already generated valuable commentary and concern. But the most striking illustration of it, for me, was a bulletin issued by Chuck Edwards, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, as he tried to clarify a long list of delusional stories for his constituents:
“Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government,” “Local officials are NOT abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze over Chimney Rock,” “FEMA is NOT stopping trucks or vehicles with donations,” “FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid,” and “FEMA cannot seize your property or land.”
For decades, climate advocates believed that warming itself would ultimately defeat denial — that once a disaster of inarguable intensity arrived, the world would belatedly wake up. In recent years, as I’ve watched unprecedented-seeming event after unprecedented-seeming event, I’ve wondered whether our stronger adaptive reflex wasn’t toward simple normalization, allowing us to navigate ever harsher and more unpredictable climate realities while telling ourselves, on balance, that everything is fine.
But the paranoid flotsam crowding the floodwaters in the wake of Helene suggests a third possibility, that an increasing number of increasingly intense disasters will push at least some of us, and possibly many of us, deeper into cocoons of paranoid delusion. Far from the “return of the real,” climate change now looks as much like a portal offering at least some of us an Infowars-style exit from an ever harsher reality.
Opinion Writer
It was heartening to wake up to the news on Friday that Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.
These men and women serve as living symbols of the horror and unimaginable loss that occurred in August 1945 when the United States ushered in the nuclear age with attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The survivors alive today were just children when they witnessed their homes and neighborhoods transformed into heaps of rubble, corpses and raging fires. Though the damage occurred within a split second, the physical and psychological injuries remain nearly eight decades later.
My colleagues and I spent several days with hibakusha, as the nuclear survivors are called in Japan, listening to their recollections of living through those days and how they wrestle with those memories today for our Opinion series At the Brink, about the modern nuclear threat. (It was the second consecutive year that Times Opinion brought to light the subject of a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s work shortly before the award. Last year’s winner was Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian human-rights activist.)
With an average age of 85, the remaining survivors clearly recognized the importance of communicating their experiences and lingering trauma to future generations. It’s imperative, each one said, that world leaders can never be allowed to unleash such a catastrophe on innocent people again.
“The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its announcement.
The committee went on to applaud Hidankyo and other hibakusha’s efforts to emphasize the nuclear taboo, which hasn’t been broken since 1945. But the committee went on to point out the alarming fact that this taboo is currently under tremendous pressure.
This is a concern Times Opinion shares as the world’s nine nuclear powers expand and enhance their arsenals. Proliferation by new nations is coming closer to reality, and threats to use nuclear weapons are becoming commonplace.
Now, near the end of their lives, many hibakusha wonder whether the world has learned from their pain or whether a similar fate will befall another generation. Keiko Ogura was 8 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
“Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven,” she told us. “I heard many survivors say, ‘What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I’ll meet my daughter I couldn’t save. I’ll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?’
“There is no answer I can tell them.”
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Editorial Board Member
If you think the Supreme Court is out of control now, then the latest batch of polling should concern you.
I’m not talking about polls on the presidential race; I’m talking about the Senate.
According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Republicans are likely to regain control of the Senate after November. The chamber controls the fate of the most important presidential nominees, including Supreme Court justices. How big a deal is this?
Let’s roll back the tape to the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans reclaimed the Senate for the last two years of President Barack Obama’s term. To go by the record-low turnout that year, few Americans seemed to grasp the significance of the outcome. Then, in February 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. Within hours, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, vowed that he would not even hold a hearing on Scalia’s replacement until after a new president took office, nearly a year later. It was unprecedented, outrageous and, I hate to admit, technically legal.
More to the point, it paid off. The vacancy that should have been Obama’s to fill was instead handed to Donald Trump, who put the ultraconservative Neil Gorsuch on the bench. Almost four years later, McConnell and the Republicans played the same trick in reverse, exploiting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett only days before Election Day. Presto: The Supreme Court now has a 6-3 right-wing supermajority in a country where millions more Americans on average have preferred the Democratic presidential nominee in seven of the past eight elections.
No matter how low the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court falls, the post-Scalia rules of the game seem clear: If Republicans hold the Senate, they will never confirm the kind of justices likely to be nominated by a Democratic president. If, on the other hand, Republicans take both the Senate and the White House, they will almost surely get to replace the two oldest justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, with justices who are equally Trumpy but a generation younger, locking in a 6-to-3 court for decades. It would become a 7-to-2 court if one of the three liberals has to step down, possibly Sonia Sotomayor, who will soon be 70 and has battled health problems for years.
This should be a motivating force for those voters who are upset by the court’s hard-right swerve — up to 70 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll. It should be especially motivating to those in states with tight Senate races, like Montana, Texas and Florida, even if voters there have given up their hope of influencing the presidential race.
Whatever happens in those races, a Kamala Harris victory is the best way to ensure that the Supreme Court doesn’t veer even farther to the right in the next four years.
Opinion Writer
Every Friday through the election, Michelle Cottle will highlight outstanding examples of misdeeds, outrageous statements and simply bizarre political behavior.
I know much has been said about it already, but I just cannot stress this enough: Donald Trump’s shameless lies about federal emergency aid while the South has been getting hammered by back-to-back hurricanes are beyond vile. Claiming that FEMA disaster funding had been “stolen” and used to shelter migrants. Suggesting the agency has no funds, no workers. Claiming that Biden administration officials were “going out of their way not to help people in Republican areas.”
A guy who would spread such demoralizing disinformation at a time when people are already scared and suffering is exactly the kind of guy who would — oh, I don’t know — secretly send Covid testing equipment to a bloodthirsty Russian dictator even as Americans were dying in droves at the height of the pandemic.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Department of Health has threatened to prosecute TV stations that run a political ad calling for the repeal of the state’s six-week abortion ban. The department’s general counsel has already sent stations a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the ad violates the state’s “sanitary nuisance” law. As the name suggests, this law is generally deployed in cases involving untreated human waste, diseased animals, dangerous gases, offal …
In this case, the objectionable material is a video featuring a Florida woman warning that the ban would have endangered her life if it had been in effect in 2022, when she terminated her pregnancy after doctors told her that her increased hormone levels were supercharging her newly diagnosed brain tumor — and that she could not start chemo or radiation while pregnant.
The department, claiming that the ad contains false information, gave the stations 24 hours to pull it or else face a misdemeanor charge.
The chairwoman of the F.C.C., Jessica Rosenworcel, has issued a statement objecting to the move on First Amendment grounds, cautioning: “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”
Using the levers of government to try to suppress political speech. Yep, that tracks.
Who coulda predicted this: Remember Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Bibles, more commonly known as Trump Bibles, seeing as they are endorsed by the former president and that he profits from their sale? (Get yours today for the low, low price of $59.99!) Well, it turns out that nearly 120,000 of these beauties were printed in China, according to The Associated Press. Of course they were.
Doesn’t that just make you proud to be proud to be an American?
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday, Trump offered this bit of scaremongering hatefulness: “Your child goes to school and they take your child — it was a he, and comes back a she. And they do this. And often without parental consent. Can you even believe we’re saying this?”
I mean, I can definitely believe he’s saying it.
In political circus terms, Eric Adams’s New York really is the gift that keeps on giving. On Tuesday night, at an official event at Gracie Mansion, two officials from the Department of Correction were caught on video physically scrapping over a cellphone. Uniformed officers eventually stepped in to separate the women. Stay classy, y’all.
And let us close with this late-night Oct. 3 post by the incomparable Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
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Editorial Board Member
Just beneath the layer of cronies and loyalists Mayor Eric Adams has packed into New York’s City Hall is an army of public servants, highly skilled government workers most people have never heard of who are dedicated to making the city run as it should.
It is these New Yorkers who are now running the day-to-day operations of the city, after more than half a dozen senior Adams officials have been pushed out, resigned or announced plans to resign in recent weeks amid criminal investigations into the mayor and his inner circle.
Adams finally showed some awareness of the value of these public servants this week when he announced the promotion of Maria Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor and the nomination of Muriel Goode-Trufant as corporation counsel, the city’s chief lawyer.
The promotions are the first good news out of City Hall in weeks. Goode-Trufant is an experienced municipal lawyer. Torres-Springer is another well-respected public servant who has served under three mayors and led initiatives to build more affordable housing in the city, an uphill battle that might wither altogether in New York without the kind of leadership she is known to provide.
These are encouraging developments for New York. But in recent weeks six senior officials who oversee or run critical city agencies have resigned, some under pressure, or announced plans to step down:
David Banks, the school chancellor
Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor
Philip Banks III, the first deputy mayor for public safety
Edward Caban, the police commissioner
Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner
Lisa Zornberg, chief counsel
And on Thursday, The Daily News reported that Tom Donlon, the interim police commissioner who replaced Caban, was also expected to step down after failing to pass a background check.
Even amid the flurry of new appointments and interim commissioners, questions about how well the city is really running in this extraordinary moment hang heavy in the air.
The most urgent point of concern among many current and former city officials is how much oversight and leadership City Hall is exercising over the uniformed agencies, particularly the Police Department, the Fire Department and the Corrections Department, which runs the city’s jails.
One significant test Torres-Springer will encounter is making sure the critical needs of city priorities, like housing and libraries, are properly represented in the upcoming January budget proposal. Adams’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, is known to be especially tightfisted, leaving it up to Torres-Springer to make sure key line items show up in the budget.
In normal times, managing the nation’s largest municipal government is a challenge, even for the most dedicated public servants. When your boss is an embattled mayor under criminal indictment and leaking political capital, it’s going to be a lot harder.
Opinion Climate Editor
As Florida sizes up the physical damage from Hurricane Milton, which made landfall Wednesday night as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, many are breathing a sigh of relief. The worst-case storm-surge scenario for Tampa Bay did not come to pass, and while some neighborhoods remain flooded, thousands of residents were spared potentially fatal rising waters in their homes and businesses. The direct death count was at least five as of early Thursday afternoon.
But make no mistake: Milton is likely to kill thousands of Floridians in the years to come, in insidious ways that won’t be captured in the images and numbers in the news this week. People may be forced to deplete their retirement savings to repair their homes, diminishing their ability to pay for future health care, for example. Municipalities may have to cut social services to pay for cleanup, and family members who would have cared for older or sicker residents in a future crisis may relocate, unable to tolerate the threat of future storms.
This month, the journal Nature published a study by the researchers Rachel Young, at Princeton, and Solomon Hsiang, at Stanford. They found that the average hurricane in the contiguous United States kills 7,000 to 11,000 people in the 15 years after the event, far more than government statistics on hurricane deaths reflect. Analyzing population data in states hit by hurricanes between 1930 and 2015, the researchers saw a significant spike in excess deaths.
The heightened wave of excess deaths “lasts for so many years, and because there’s so many storms hitting so many states, once you add up, it becomes this enormous number,” Hsiang told Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap.
As the third hurricane to make landfall on Florida this year, and the seventh to hit the state in the last 15 years, Milton is very likely to compound the struggles of many people already facing setbacks. Lower-income residents in places such as Fort Myers, which was badly hit by Hurricane Ian in 2022 and has seen some of the fiercest tornadoes and flooding from Milton, may be compromised in the years to come in ways that may have grave impacts on their health.
It’s the kind of suffering that usually goes unnoticed but must be seen as we try to stop climate change — and the more intense storms it’s fueling — from getting worse and worse.
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Editorial Board Member
Gary Oldman has found the role of a lifetime in Jackson Lamb, the hard-drinking, hygiene-challenged spy who commands a band of MI5 misfits in the Apple TV+ series “Slow Horses,” which presented the finale of its fourth season on Wednesday. The patina of filth that transforms Oldman into Lamb is child’s play to apply compared with the hourslong ordeal he endured for his star turn as Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour.” The flagrantly flatulent Lamb represents a sly renunciation of the button-down George Smiley, the espionage establishment figure that Oldman portrayed so effectively in the movie adaptation of the John le Carré novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
The boozers, misfits and losers who inhabit the fictional MI5 purgatory known as Slough House spring from the mind of the British thriller writer Mick Herron, whose novels proved so hip that Mick Jagger agreed to provide the series theme song. Oldman has described Lamb as an instrument of affliction for failing spies who have been shipped off to his dismal outpost.
Speaking as Lamb of the spies he oversees, he said: “My main objective is to make their time at Slough House so bone-crushingly boring that they leave and remove themselves from the service.” This may be true on some days, but on others, he is the perverse, Rabelaisian father figure who urges his broken-winged charges toward their nobler selves.
It may seem sadistic when he pours himself a drink and also offers one to a longtime aide who is a recovering alcoholic. But as the critic and editor Thomas Jones has pointed out, this could be Lamb’s way of keeping his valued aide on the wagon by serving as a reminder of the catastrophic depravity she has refused to fall back into.
The paradox of the novels — and the series — is that the spymaster at their center is both essential and unknowable. Herron has said that he avoids writing from the inside of his beloved protagonist’s head because he does not want to break him. As the historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has written, this omission stands out glaringly in novels that read like carousels on which the rider switches animals every time around.
“You’re in one person’s head, and then you’re in someone else’s, except, unnervingly, you’re hardly ever in Lamb’s,” Lepore wrote. “He’s a cipher, forever undercover.”
“Slow Horses” has thus far offered only intimations of the trauma that turned Lamb into a personal wreck, while heightening his skill as a spy to extrasensory levels. The show’s producers may have started out thinking that it would be perfectly fine to leave the black box of Jackson Lamb closed. But now that the series is amassing a growing viewership and headed to its fifth season, pressure is mounting to let the viewers into his head.
Opinion Writer and Editor
Each Wednesday in The Point through the election, Katherine Miller highlights a revealing moment from a stump speech on the campaign trail.
Over the last few weeks, the Trump campaign has organized a series of bus tours throughout battleground states, with the lineups of speakers varying slightly day to day, venue to venue. The guests ranged from more reserved types like Joni Ernst, the Iowa senator, to Marjorie Taylor Greene later in the weekend — which kind of represents the full range of pro-Trump voices.
The two events I went to on Saturday, however, were pretty geared toward reminding a strong Trump supporter to vote early and encourage friends to do so; not much was said that wouldn’t be said at a Trump rally itself. On Saturday evening, at an event space inside a gun club northwest of Atlanta, the campaign hosted Kash Patel and Hogan Gidley, who both served in the Trump administration, and Matt Gaetz. One line from Gaetz, the Florida congressman, really brought the house down:
“Trading the Cheneys for Tulsi Gabbard” was one of the best deals during his time in Congress, he said. “R.F.K. was a player to be named later. He was thrown into the deal. You guys know about the transfer portal here; we’ll take a good player in the transfer portal,” he added to laughs. (The transfer portal is how college football players move around between seasons now.)
Though Gabbard is clearly pretty popular with the Republican base, that remark sort of discounts Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s popularity a bit, I think. That morning, at another of the Trump bus tour events, I was standing near a woman holding a sign that read, “Make America Healthy Again,” with “Trump Vance Kennedy” written underneath it. At a merch table someone had set up across the parking lot, a man was selling green “M.A.H.A.” T-shirts.
This was also at the end of the week in which Liz Cheney appeared with Kamala Harris in Wisconsin. There’s a kind of interesting inversion between Kennedy and Cheney and the kinds of voters they represent — and the campaigns’ attempts to win on those slim margins.
Donald Trump is clearly trying to convert people who don’t often vote, described by the journalist David Weigel as people who range from apolitical podcast listeners “to pro-Bitcoin tech reactionaries to Green Party leftists raging against neoliberalism and ‘forever wars.’”
The Harris campaign clearly sees an opening with the kinds of moderate conservatives who voted for Nikki Haley in the winter and spring’s primaries. And for more on that, it’s worth checking out this new survey from Blueprint, a liberal political firm, that released a survey Wednesday on those Haley voters’ preferences and interests.
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Opinion Columnist
Elon Musk has not been at all subtle in his efforts to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Musk hasn’t just endorsed him or donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump PACs or appeared at Trump rallies to jump up and down with joy. Musk is also using the full power of his ownership of X to portray Kamala Harris as an existential threat to America while spreading many falsehoods.
The Republicans’ silence about Musk’s blatant politicking via his social media platform demonstrates their party’s deep hypocrisy when it comes to Big Tech’s power over politics.
A rule to push Musk’s posts to more people was apparently hard-coded into the platform’s software after Musk got upset that President Biden’s posts about the Super Bowl received more views than his. Musk reportedly threatened to fire his own engineers unless they made sure his posts were super amplified. Sure enough, Musk’s posts now get tens of millions of views.
Musk has posted on X, for example, that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” (103 million views). He has described Kamala Harris as “just a puppet” (20 million views) or “the Kamala puppet” (28 million views). He also regularly claims what he describes as the “the Kamala Dem machine” or “the Dems” are out to ensure a “permanent one-party rule in America” (33 million views).
Musk also routinely makes false claims about mass electoral fraud committed to help Democrats. For example Musk posted that Arizona is “refusing to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls” and shared a post claiming that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants had registered to vote there — both of which prompted a correction attempt from the county recorder based in Phoenix, who is a Republican.
But Musk goes on, undeterred.
It’s not hard to imagine what many Republicans would be saying if a Silicon Valley C.E.O. had come out as hard for Kamala Harris as Musk has for Trump. Years ago, Republican legislators raised concerns that tech companies were secretly putting their thumbs on the algorithmic scales in favor of the Democrats. In response, Republican lawmakers held hearings in which they claimed that tech platforms were biased against conservatives, which they suggested was antithetical to free speech.
Where are they now?
If Republican legislators were actually serious about Big Tech’s influence on politics, they’d be dragging Musk to Congress to hold him accountable for shameless partisan favoritism. Instead, they’re reaping the spoils of Musk’s influence while saying nothing.
Opinion Writer
Who says Kamala Harris’s unconventional media tour won’t reveal anything of note? On Tuesday, she did an hourlong sit-down with Howard Stern, the satellite radio host, and among the juicy bits we learned is that the V.P. isn’t a napper; that she digs Doritos and jigsaw puzzles; that her favorite F1 driver is Lewis Hamilton; that she went to see U2 at the Sphere; and that a rare area of musical agreement between her and Doug, her husband, is their love of Prince.
Yes, folks hoping to find serious policy talk on the Stern show were out of luck. But honestly, any voters still undecided at this late date are unlikely to be making their decision based on the nitty-gritty of the candidates’ tax plans.
The goal of these chats is to help voters feel as if they know Harris, so the personal tidbits serve a purpose. And in terms of reaching a range of listeners, I’m guessing Stern’s audience doesn’t overlap excessively with fans of Oprah and “The View.” (I mean, when I tuned into the show a little early, it was just in time to hear Stern make an obscene crack about an octopus.)
Also, who could resist the opportunity to outsource some Trump bashing to a professional trash-talker like Stern, who famously disdains the MAGA king?
Stern got the political talk rolling by noting that he doesn’t even like to watch “Saturday Night Live” make fun of Harris because there’s just too much at stake this election. From there, the softballs he lobbed fell into a couple of big categories:
Talking up her biography, especially her early work as a prosecutor. “Were you a wreck?” he asked about her first cases. “What was that like?” He had her talk about how her decision to become a prosecutor stemmed partly from having had a high school friend who was sexually abused by her stepfather. And he invited her to revisit some of the more brutal cases she dealt with. “To me you’re the law-and-order candidate,” he said, “and yet they try to paint you as a leftist who wants people running through the streets committing crimes.”
Marveling at how horrible Donald Trump is, in so many different ways: Did you ever think you would see a Republican not embracing NATO? What about the revelation in Bob Woodward’s new book that Trump was secretly sending Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin when they were in short supply at the height of the pandemic?
The Stern stop wasn’t the stretch some people might think. For all his shock-jock nastiness, Stern has become a regular political stop, hosting heavy hitters including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
I’ve talked to campaign people about this media strategy, and they make the point that Harris needs to reach people where they are. Fair enough.
In general, Stern was a little too openly butt-smoochy for my taste, but I like a little more spice in my political interviews. So my vote for Harris’s next stop? “Hot Ones.”
An earlier version of this article erroneously included a politician among prominent Democrats who have appeared on Howard Stern’s show. Barack Obama has not been a guest on the program.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
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Opinion Senior Staff Editor
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by three points. She’s made strategic appearances on the podcasts “Call Her Daddy” and “All the Smoke.” Her new direct-to-camera ad is strong.
But she hasn’t made her closing argument yet. And the best way for her to do that is in another debate. To persuade Donald Trump to join her, she should offer to hold that debate on Fox News.
Yes, time is running out, but the final 2020 debate was on Oct. 22 of that year. Yes, Trump would have to agree to do it — and based on his recent approach he probably wouldn’t — but Harris already knows that there’s no way he’ll accept her challenge to debate on CNN on Oct. 23. There’s only one network where Harris would have another opportunity to speak to 67 million people at once, so why not?
The argument against is basically that Fox would be hostile territory, but the upside could outweigh the downside and the degree of difficulty might not be much higher than a debate on another network.
By any objective measure, Harris beat Trump in their Sept. 10 debate. If there were another debate he’d almost certainly be better prepared, but Harris was effective in answering questions the way she wants to and not the way a moderator might expect. You can pretty much guess in advance what topics the candidates would be asked about: the Middle East, immigration, transgender rights, reproductive rights, grocery prices, tariffs.
Would Fox News moderators fact-check Harris more than she was fact-checked in the first debate? Probably. But if the fact-checking were anywhere close to being evenly applied, it would be a net benefit for her. And if her campaign thinks that CNN’s moderators would go a lot easier than Fox News’s, it’s hard to see why. In the June debate, President Biden was asked, among other things, “why should voters trust you” to solve the border crisis? And “what do you say to Black voters who are disappointed that you haven’t made more progress” addressing the racial health and wealth gaps? Whether you think the framing of those questions is useful or fair, the framing of the questions in a Fox News debate would be similar.
And Harris doesn’t need to throw Trump to the proverbial mat. Another solid debate would bolster the impression that she — running in her first, truncated general election — can go toe-to-toe with a former president running in his third election. Plus, there’s a narrow slice of voters who would probably give her credit for going on an unfriendly network.
Harris might prevail in November without another debate, and she might lose if there is one. But if it makes sense to debate on another network, it also makes sense to go on Fox News.
Opinion Columnist
There’s an old joke about papal pronouncements on premarital sex: If you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules. Something similar might be said about France’s foreign policy.
Last week, President Emmanuel Macron told a radio show that “countries should stop shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza.” Though he insists he’s committed to ensuring Israel’s security, what he’s really asking for is an arms embargo: You can’t deny Israel weapons for potential use in one conflict while not also denying it those weapons for use in the others.
There was a time when such a call would have mattered. In the Jewish state’s early years, France supplied it with some of its most significant weaponry, including advanced jets and, according to many accounts, vital support for its nascent nuclear weapons program.
That changed on the eve of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East that mainly hit Israel. He also accused “the Jews” of being “at all times, an elite people, sure of itself and dominating.”
Since then, France’s contribution to Israel’s security has essentially been zero. France reportedly still sells Israel about $20 million worth of components of weapons systems, an insignificant fraction of the country’s overall military procurement budget. But the French government did supply the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with a nuclear reactor, which the Israeli Air Force destroyed in 1981. France has also been notably remiss in trying to enforce the terms of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and keep it away from Lebanon’s border with Israel.
One result of that nonfeasance is the war now raging in Lebanon. Another is that pronouncements on the Middle East conflict by the president of France just don’t matter, other than as feckless virtue-signaling toward segments of the French public and the Francophone world. As for Paris’s once-considerable influence on public opinion in Israel, consider that Macron’s comments came days after Iran tried to hit it with a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles and on the eve of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Whatever else one thinks about Israel, it remains an example of how a small country can make a big difference in world affairs, not least by confronting the threat Iran poses to the entire free world. Under Macron, France has become the opposite: a big country that makes no difference.
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Contributing Opinion Writer, reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C.
Over the past week, many Americans have turned their gazes toward North Carolina to behold gutting scenes of the damage and despair wrought by Hurricane Helene. They should keep looking, but for an additional reason: My state is a cautionary tale of what happens when no corner of our lives is cordoned off from partisan exploitation and we lose our tether to the truth.
I’ve seen politicking off human tragedy before, but seldom on this scale or with this stench. Donald Trump and many of his MAGA minions have used the historic flooding to drown their followers in self-serving lies:
About a profoundly incompetent and wholly uncaring federal government that used up all its disaster-relief money on migrants who entered the country illegally. About emergency vehicles left idling and emergency supplies blocked by Democratic politicians who don’t want to help Republican voters. About unidentified bureaucrats who somehow control the weather and wield it as a weapon.
That last fantasy? Its purveyors include a Republican member of Congress, one Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s not just the likes of Trump and Greene peddling such paranoia. As the fake claims and faked pictures spreading across social media make clear, many thousands if not millions of Americans have chosen fiction over fact — because it serves their political goals, profits them financially or validates their tribal fury.
They seem not to realize or care that they’re complicating honest-to-goodness efforts to assist actual victims, as government officials’ duties expand from assisting people devastated by the storm to battling opportunists whose accusations invite distrust and meddling.
The website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a section devoted to “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response,” and “Hurricane Helene: Fact vs. Rumor” is the title of a similar page on the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s site.
Those agencies are run by Democrats, but a North Carolina Republican, State Senator Kevin Corbin, beseeched his Facebook followers to “help STOP this conspiracy theory junk” about government inaction. He assured them that both federal and state officials were on the scene and on the job. “PLEASE help stop this junk,” he repeated. He seemed desperate.
Aptly so. The need in North Carolina is real. Gaudy falsehoods aren’t going to meet it. And none of our problems will be solved if we forgive or reward merchants of grievance for whom nothing — not even suffering like my state’s — is off-limits.
Deputy Opinion Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we start the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
With four weeks until Election Day, a vivid contrast in the presidential race is how Kamala Harris is trying to grow her vote while Donald Trump is trying to shrink his. Well, if not purposely shrinking it, Trump is going narrow by saying the same kinds of things at the same sorts of rallies with the same types of voters (i.e., his MAGA base), while ceding broader audiences to Harris on “The Howard Stern Show,” “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and “60 Minutes.”
Harris is appearing on all five this week, and these shows have reach: “Call Her Daddy” is one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify, drawing millions of listeners — many of them young women who don’t live and breathe politics.
In the podcast episode released Sunday, Harris was relaxed and engaging, introducing herself as a former prosecutor who fought for women, girls and others who faced injustice, and as a champion of abortion rights. She was by turns tough — calling Trump a liar several times and urging the audience to never accept “no” — and reflective about the challenge ahead. “I’m feeling great, and I’m feeling nervous,” she said about the presidential race. I’ve rarely heard a candidate admit to feeling nervous; it was refreshing.
Harris is mixing these appearances with campaign events later in the week in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states that some Democrats see as less fertile than the other five, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina. But I still think Harris is wise to play out west: Union members, younger voters, Latinas and other women and registered Democrats are helping make the race a dead heat in Nevada and tight in Arizona, according to polls, and abortion rights measures and competitive Senate races are on the ballot in both states in November.
Trump is zeroing in on Pennsylvania: He returned this past weekend to Butler, where the July assassination attempt occurred, and he is scheduled to campaign on Thursday in Scranton, President Biden’s birthplace, and Reading. (Trump lost the Scranton area in 2020 but won Berks County, which includes Reading.) I see Pennsylvania as a must-win state for Harris, but the polls there are tight, and the Trump campaign is surely seeing something in its internals to devote this much time there.
To win, Trump is betting that energizing and turning out his base in the swing states is more important than growing his vote. His base isn’t the “60 Minutes” crowd, but some of them listen to Stern and “The View” — as do some of the undecided and late-breaking voters who are just getting around to sizing up Harris and giving Trump another look. Is Trump trying to blow it? All I can tell you is that Trump said at a Wisconsin rally Sunday that he wants to win a “mandate” from voters in November. A “mandate” usually implies a landslide victory, and I don’t see that happening with just his MAGA base.