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Former President Donald Trump launched a racially insensitive attack against presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Wednesday, falsely questioning her racial background in a contentious appearance in Chicago. During a panel discussion at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, the Republican nominee for president said his opponent for the White House "happened to turn Black" a number of years ago. Asked about some Republicans labeling Harris as a "DEI hire," Trump, after bickering with ABC's Rachel Scott over the definition of DEI, responded: "I've known [Harris] a long time indirectly, not directly, very much. And she was...

An insult uttered in schools and boardrooms about many marginalized people has a new high-profile target: Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “I think she’s one of the weakest candidates I’ve ever seen in the history of our country. I mean intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. ... I think that she was a DEI hire,” Rep. Harriett Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, said of Harris. For Black diversity, equity and inclusion professionals, the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” or a “DEI candidate” show the ways racial tropes can be used against Black people...

When the polls closed on election night in 2020, President Donald Trump appeared to be winning Pennsylvania. But over the next several days, as officials counted mail-in ballots, his lead shrunk and then disappeared. By Saturday, Joe Biden was the clear winner of Pennsylvania — and with it, the presidency. --SNIP-- If the electoral college comes down to Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, we might still face a long period where we don’t know the winner,” said Rachel Orey, an elections expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

For Justice Department employees who had spent weeks contemplating the possibility of two-time federal criminal defendant Donald Trump returning to the presidency, Joe Biden’s decision to drop out and endorse Kamala Harris offered a sense of relief. Former and current Justice Department employees believe that a future president Harris, a former prosecutor, unlike Trump, would respect the norms that have been in place to ensure DOJ independence in the half-century since Watergate. Those fears of another Trump term are central to a new letter endorsing Harris, signed by more than 40 former Justice Department officials who served under presidents of...

Anumber of conservative women have criticized Donald Trump's running mate, Senator JD Vance, after his "childless cat ladies" comment reemerged.

It’s always a good idea to pay attention to Nancy Pelosi and to judge where things are going by which direction she’s nudging them in, but that was especially true over the past few weeks. When she started sending President Biden signals that he should reconsider his candidacy, I felt almost certain that he’d eventually do so, because she was both giving other Democrats permission to break ranks with him and letting him and his allies know the extent and inevitability of the rebellion.And I realized that Vice President Kamala Harris wouldn’t face any competition for the Democratic nomination when...

There was 6 January 2021, and a violent coup attempt by a president desperately trying to cling to power. Then there was 24 July 2024, and a president explaining why he was giving up the most powerful job in the world. Joe Biden’s address on Wednesday night was a moving piece of political theatre, the start of a farewell tour by “a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings” who entered politics in 1972 and made it all the way to the Oval Office. For diehard Democrats it was a case of: if you have tears, prepare to shed them...

Late on Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris summoned a small clutch of her closest advisers and allies to the Naval Observatory, where she lives and works, with little notice and even less information. President Biden had informed Ms. Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Mr. Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go. Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important...

Before last week’s Republican convention, Donald Trump seemed to be moving away from the populism that characterized his 2016 campaign. “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power,” Rogé Karma observed in The Atlantic. “He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing C.E.O.s.”When Mr. Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, though, pundits quickly concluded that he was doubling down on populism. Mr. Vance has been a leading critic of Reagan-Bush policy orthodoxy in the G.O.P., has expressed skepticism of further corporate tax cuts and has even...

Donald J. Trump and his political team spent nearly two years tailoring a campaign to defeat an old white male president who is conspicuously frail and who most Americans had told pollsters they doubted could handle another four-year term.Suddenly, Mr. Trump faces a starkly different opponent: a vice president who is a Black woman, nearly 20 years younger, and who brings her own strengths and weaknesses but who adds new uncertainty into what had been a remarkably static race.Allies of Ms. Harris have already telegraphed that she will run a campaign framed around a “prosecutor versus felon” theme, highlighting her...

… U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the White House race may well turn 2024 into the Year of the Woman — namely, that of Vice President Kamala Harris who, armed with the outgoing president’s endorsement, can now be considered the front-runner to replace him atop the Democratic ticket. Truth is, if Harris is successful in getting the nod from the Democratic Party, much of the subsequent election campaign is likely to domestically focus on abortion and women’s rights. Trump already has a problem with women voters — polls have consistently shown that the proportion of women planning...

WASHINGTON — In his first memoir, President Joe Biden reflected on what at the time was the most searing moment of his political career. He had withdrawn from his first presidential campaign in disgrace, driven out by charges of plagiarism. Now, some 37 years after that flameout, Biden’s epitaph weighed heavily as he made surely the hardest political decision of his long career in Washington to give up the presidency after just one term and end his bid for reelection. As he sat in isolation with COVID at his Delaware beach house these past few days, hacking and hacked off,...

...Her career path from prosecutor to politician has been defined by many firsts: She was the nation’s first Indian American senator and California’s first female and South Asian attorney general. Harris is the first... ...she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest Black sorority, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics. She would later become the first HBCU graduate to be elected vice president. After college, Harris returned to California and attended law school at the University of California Hastings. When she decided to pursue a career as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s...

Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has posted a rumor that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency in Las Vegas last week and may be in hospice care. This claim contradicted the official account of the president's COVID-19 diagnosis, and has sparked widespread speculation, but what are the facts? Kirk, who has a history of promoting questionable theories, shared the rumor Monday on X, formerly Twitter. He wrote: "Got a weird lead on a story that people should look into. I got a call from a source close to Las Vegas Metro. The official story was that Joe Biden's trip was...

After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate in history — and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent. Trump, a 78-year-old with a history of heart disease and obesity, according to experts, has not shared any updated bloodwork results or other specific information during this campaign to help experts assess his ongoing medical risks. Instead, he has released a vague, three-paragraph letter from his primary...

— Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an animated President Joe Biden described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.The United States had endured a life-altering pandemic. There was a jarring burst of inflation and now global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, as well as the persistent threat to democracy he felt Donald Trump posed. How could Biden possibly heal that collective trauma?

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For 23 days, President Joe Biden insisted on pushing forward with his reelection bid in the face of calls from Democratic lawmakers and donors for him to step aside. And then, almost on a dime, things changed. Early Saturday, Biden told senior aides it was “full steam ahead” for the campaign. But by later that evening, he had changed his mind following a long discussion with his two closest aides. Steve Ricchetti, who’s been with Biden since his days in the Senate, drove to see the president at his house on the Delaware shore on Friday. Mike Donilon arrived on...

As my wife and son and I awaited the start of the debate, before Biden tottered up to the podium to his mumblecore destiny, I said to my son: “I’m telling you my suspicion now, rather than after. I think the date of this debate is the most important thing about it.” My son asked why. OK, how’s this? ... Think outside the box, Joe.-Why wait till October, with everything on the line? Cut it back to just two debates. And here’s the beauty part, Joe: Do the first debate six weeks before the convention! It’ll be radical, three months...

WASHINGTON — “I need you and Mike at the house,” President Joe Biden said late Saturday afternoon. Biden was on the phone from his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with Steve Ricchetti, a counselor to the president and one of his closest advisers. He was referring to Mike Donilon, his chief strategist and longtime speechwriter. Soon, both men were in Rehoboth Beach, socially distanced from the president, who was recovering from COVID. From that afternoon and far into the night, the three worked on one of the most important and historic letters of Biden’s presidency — the announcement of...