23: BRICS

22: Donald Trump

Leaked documents show US intelligence on Israel’s plans to attack Iran, sources say
Microsoft Windows Deadline—10 Days To Update Or Stop Using Your PC
The Moment of Truth The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.
Leaked U.S. Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Preparing to Strike Iran American officials are trying to determine the source of the leak, which describes military drills and weapons placement, and how damaging it might be.
Understanding Canada’s Fight With India Over a Murdered Sikh Activist The diplomatic rift has suddenly grown more stark as Canada amplifies its accusations that India is directing lethal operations abroad.
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U.S. Charges Indian Official in New York Assassination Plot The United States and Canada have worked together to investigate what they say is the Indian government’s campaign against Sikh separatists.
World’s $100 Trillion Fiscal Timebomb Keeps Ticking
The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway If Trump overturns the 2024 election, here’s how it could happen.
Who might make up Harris’ Cabinet
For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times.
At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity The G.O.P. nominee repeated crude insults, and his supporters relished each moment. But the display could alienate swing voters.......... added to the impression of the Republican nominee as increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. It comes as some of Mr. Trump’s allies and aides worry that Mr. Trump’s temperament and crass style are alienating undecided voters ......... His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Mr. Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris. ......... “Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.” ........ Many in his audience — which was mostly made up of adults but included some children, infants and teenagers — eagerly filled in the blank, shouting, “Shit!” ........... Minutes later, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Ms. Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president.” ....... “This is a guy that was all man,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Palmer, who died in 2016. “This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my god, that’s unbelievable.’” .......... Mr. Trump has always enjoyed shocking people, and in addition to cursing volubly, he enjoys talking about sex and men’s and women’s looks. .......... has become visibly angrier since Ms. Harris joined the race, there has been a notable uptick in such behavior, especially in the campaign’s final weeks and days. .......... In rallies, in interviews and on social media, he has seemingly relished deploying off-color language that politicians shied away from in another era. He has reposted racially and sexually charged insults of Ms. Harris on his Truth Social website, and he has done little to dissuade or calm crowds that have chanted profanity about the people with whom he has grievances. ............ This week, Mr. Trump was speaking at a Catholic charity event and standing mere feet from the Archbishop of New York when he swore while insulting Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York. “He was a terrible mayor,” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not.” .......... “I won’t say it, because I don’t like using the word ‘bullshit’ in front of these beautiful children,” he said in June at an event at a megachurch in Arizona, where the crowd began chanting it in unison, to Mr. Trump’s glee. ............. Mr. Trump has often told his crowds the story of a letter he received from Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, urging him to clean up his language........... “I wrote him back,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “I said, I’m going to try to do that, but actually, the stories won’t be as good. Because you can’t put the same emphasis on it. So tonight, I broke my rule.” .......... Many of those who attend his rallies reflect his attitude in their apparel, wearing shirts, baseball caps and other clothing with vulgar expressions, many of which are aimed at Ms. Harris. .......... Mostly, Mr. Trump continued to use dark, at times violent, rhetoric to describe the Biden administration, the American economy and illegal immigration, which he once again spoke of as a military invasion.
Donald Trump Gains in Three Swing States He's Looking to Flip: New Polls
Donald Trump Edges Past Kamala Harris in Major Forecast For First Time Polls also have a margin of error, often of at least a few percentage points. Considering the closeness of the scores currently, polls imply a tight race that could swing either way.



Trump Reposts Crude Sexual Remark About Harris on Truth Social Though the former president has a history of making crass insults about opponents, the reposts signal his willingness to continue to shatter longstanding political norms. ......... The post, by another user on Truth Social, was an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent in 2016. The text read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” ......... The remark was a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and a right-wing contention that Ms. Harris’s romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco whom she dated in the mid-1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, fueled her political rise. ......... Mr. Trump reposted the image as part of a series of 30 reposts he made on Truth Social between 8:02 and 8:32 a.m. on Wednesday, including several posts with references to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and its slogan. Mr. Trump also reposted photos that called for the prosecution or imprisoning of top Democrats and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The former president has vowed to direct federal prosecutors to investigate his political enemies if elected. ............. the Dilley Meme Team — a group of right-wing internet content creators that makes pro-Trump videos and memes denigrating his opponents — that parodied the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” to attack Ms. Harris as “moronic.” In the parody song, the singer says Ms. Harris “spent her whole damn life down on her knees,” at which point a photo of Mr. Brown appears onscreen. .............. Mr. Trump has repeatedly been accused of sexual misconduct and was found liable last year for sexual abuse and defamation. He has a history of attacking female opponents and critics in deeply personal terms, often describing them as mentally ill or at times expressing contempt in epithets. ........ Republicans close to Mr. Trump have expressed concern that he and his allies risk alienating women, Black voters and moderate swing-state voters if they continue to use racist and sexist attacks against Ms. Harris, the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to accept a major party’s presidential nomination. Mr. Trump last week acknowledged that some of his advisers have urged him to move away from personal attacks, a shift he said he did not plan to take. ............ Critics pointed to her relationship with Mr. Brown as a way to question her qualifications. And after the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested falsely, quoting from a conservative website, that Ms. Harris had “slept her way up,” T-shirts with the slogan “Joe and the Hoe” were worn by Mr. Trump’s supporters. ......... The slogan remained popular throughout Mr. Trump’s third presidential bid, and T-shirts bearing the phrase were frequently seen at Mr. Trump’s rallies up until Mr. Biden suspended his presidential bid. ........... Throughout his political career, Mr. Trump has made a habit of sharing others’ divisive or offensive social media posts, then dismissing criticism by arguing he was simply reposting. ........ Last year, a jury found that Mr. Trump had sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room in the mid-1990s, then defamed her in a Truth Social post. Earlier this year, Ms. Carroll was awarded an $83.3 million judgment for continued attacks in social media posts.

A More Freewheeling Book Lives Inside Al Pacino’s Memoir From Shakespeare to Strindberg to “Scarface”: The actor remembers all of it and talks about some of it in “Sonny Boy.” ......... Al Pacino was a young actor in 1968, rehearsing for a now-forgotten play called “Huui, Huui” at the Public Theater. One day the Public’s impresario, Joseph Papp, took him aside, told him, “You will be a great star one day,” and fired him. ......... Just a few years later, while making “The Godfather,” his director, Francis Ford Coppola, summoned him to a restaurant where he was having dinner with his family. Without inviting Pacino to sit down, Coppola warned him, “You’re not cutting it.” Soon after, under threat of being fired by the studio, Pacino shot one of the classic scenes in film history, when Michael Corleone enters a restaurant bathroom, retrieves a hidden gun and becomes a killer. The intensity and fear on Michael’s face are still chilling. ............ — “In this business, you’re up, you’re down, and you’re up again,” he says — and they are among the most endearing parts of “Sonny Boy.” They pop up sporadically in an uneven memoir that is sometimes a heartfelt consideration of art, and often a perfunctory cradle-to-age-84 overview of his life and career. Pacino doesn’t dish gossip or give much detail about his personal life, but he is passionate about acting. ........ “Sonny Boy,” titled after his mother’s boyhood nickname for him, begins in the most conventional way, in childhood. Pacino’s parents divorced when he was 2, and he lived in a working-class neighborhood in the South Bronx with his loving but emotionally fragile mother and grandparents. With obvious affection, he remembers running around the neighborhood with his pals Cliffy, Bruce and Petey. All three of those friends later died of drug overdoses, a fate Pacino was spared thanks to his family’s vigilance. This stretch of the memoir is earnest, but not especially revealing. Plenty of boys survive rough childhoods and don’t become one of the greatest actors of their time. ................. More of Pacino’s voice comes through when he talks about acting, and his goal of instinctively embodying a character. He dropped out of the High School of Performing Arts at 16, worked odd jobs and performed in tiny, way-off-Broadway spaces. Onstage in Strindberg’s “Creditors,” he had a life-altering epiphany. “Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine,” he says. “I’m lifting off the ground.” From then on, “I eat, I don’t eat. I make money, I don’t make money. I’m famous, I’m not famous.” ............. He won a Tony early, but movies changed everything. In the 1970s alone he starred as a drug addict in “The Panic in Needle Park,” a breakthrough followed quickly by enduring performances in “Godfather I” and “II,” “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” films largely shaped by his singular conviction and kinetic presence in the lead roles. ............. He was rushed to an E.R. while making “Scarface” because a machine gun fused to his hand when he grabbed the hot barrel. But he is better at analyzing his performances. The drug-fueled crime boss Tony Montana in “Scarface” is deliberately two-dimensional. “The way I played him, the character never has any inner conflict until the moment he kills his best friend.” And Pacino is well aware of his reputation for scenery chewing, never more deserved than in his often parodied performance yelling “Hoooooo-ah!” in “Scent of a Woman.” With great understatement he says, “I did go overboard sometimes in that part.” ......... Midcareer, he had a string of 1980s flops, like “Cruising,” in which he plays an undercover detective investigating murders of gay men, a film he now flat out calls “exploitative.” He ended up, as he puts it, broke. He says he would have been fine quitting movies, just reading books and doing theater, but Diane Keaton, with whom he was living at the time, knew that was impossible. She gave him one of the memoir’s best, most bracing lines. “There’s no going back,” she told him. “You’ve been rich too long.” .............. He has glowing but vague things to say about Keaton and other romantic partners. Jill Clayburgh, his partner in the early days, was one of the great loves of his life. But the memoir barely mentions many of the most significant personal moments. He refers to becoming a father in 1989 but doesn’t mention his daughter’s mother, and does the same when he talks about his youngest child, a son born just last year. In between, he had twins with the actress Beverly D’Angelo, and writes mostly about adjusting to life in Los Angeles to be near them. He is more comfortable talking about himself, acknowledging that he drank heavily in the early part of his career. ................ he recalls that his sudden fame in the ’70s meant dealing with “a changed life, one that leads to desperate solitude and a strange way of being set apart from the world.”

Harris and Democrats Lose Their Reluctance to Call Trump a Fascist Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is “fascist to the core,” a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is suddenly everywhere. .......... the vice president contrasted her vision with her rival’s. “The other is about fascism,” he said of Mr. Trump’s vision. “Why can’t we just say it?” .............. The quotation of Mr. Milley may have opened the floodgates for Democrats, granting new permission with the authority of his uniform and his unique closeness to the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s administration. But an element of political risk remains, even as Mr. Trump freely uses the word himself against Ms. Harris. ........... Even President Biden, who has made Mr. Trump’s threat to democracy central to his case against the former president for years, only inched up to the term when in 2022 he spoke of “the entire philosophy” of Mr. Trump’s movement: “I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.” ............ “You have people like General Milley, who are telling voters that Donald Trump will usher in an era of fascist America,” said Paul D. Eaton, a retired major general and leader of the liberal veterans group VoteVets. “In so many countries throughout history, we have seen fascism take hold only because the voters enabled it to take hold.” ......... defined fascism as political behavior “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood,” with “cults” of nationalist purity. “In uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,” he said, fascism “abandons democratic liberties.” ............. “The most important thing one can say about Trump and fascism is that Trump is a fascist,” Mr. Snyder, the Yale professor, said. ......... Peter Hayes, a historian at Northwestern University who has studied the rise of Nazism extensively, pointed to commonalities in regimes and movements typically described as “fascist” — a militarization of politics, through violent militias, misogyny, hyper-masculinity, intense nationalism, calls for economic self-sufficiency, and a scapegoating of groups separate from an aggrieved core of followers. ............... Mr. Trump’s calls for mass deportations and internment camps, his promise to use force against a pernicious “enemy from within,” his leveraging of a cult of personality, his refusal to distance himself from groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, and his persistent evocation and even glorification of violence ...............

“I don’t think we’re hyperventilating here,” he said. “This is a guy very much telling us what he wants to do.”

........... Snyder ticked off his own touchstones of fascism, all of which he says are present in Mr. Trump’s movement: a government framed around the choosing of its enemies more than the helping of its citizens; the honoring not of an office but of a “capital-L leader,” and the building of a cult around him; and the creation of a Big Lie. ........... “If you are tattooing the face of a politician on your body, that is not a normal relationship with a political leader,” she said.

Let's be absolutely clear so that no one is confused.

Trump's rhetoric has become blatantly fascist.

All the warning lights for our democracy are flashing red.

We must take him seriously and defeat him soundly at the ballot box. https://t.co/zb8gXSIZ2t pic.twitter.com/6yD7nkGmYf

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 14, 2024

Kamala Harris Has an Unexpected Ally I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage. I fear she will be tested early by a foreign adversary and stumble badly, whether it’s in stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon or China from blockading Taiwan or Russia from seizing a portion of a Baltic country. I fear she will capitulate too easily to her party’s left flank, especially when it comes to identity politics, economic policy or polarizing cultural issues. I fear she’ll have no domestic policy ideas that don’t involve mindlessly expanding the role of government. I fear she’ll surround herself with mediocre advisers, like her embarrassingly bad veep pick. I fear she won’t muster the political will to curb mass migration. And I fear that a failed Harris presidency will do more to turbocharge the far right in this country than to diminish it. .................. I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest. ........ This is a smart, experienced woman who’s come up through the ladder of government and politics, always making stuff work. ........... I think this election may be the last chance for Reaganite conservatives like me — the ones who are for lower taxes, free trade, deregulation, free speech (including for those who don’t agree with me), a strong military and the defense of embattled allies like Ukraine — to drive a stake into the heart of Trumpism. If he wins, we’re going to be saddled with an isolationist and nativist conservative movement for generations to come. .............. my vote for Harris also means I’d like to see the Senate switch to Republican control. Divided government is one that can’t do too much harm. ............ Assuming a Trump victory? I’d want Cruz to lose by 20 points. ......... She can’t seem to go beyond a lame and limited set of talking points. .............

So much depends on about 100,000 or so voters spread out over roughly 22 counties.

There Is No Precedent for Something Like This in American History News of the general’s 2023 assessment broke last Friday. That afternoon, and as if to prove the point, Trump dived even deeper into the rhetorical abyss, telling his followers that he would deploy an 18th-century law to “liberate” the country from immigrants once and for all. “I make you this vow: November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America,” Trump wrote on X. .......... And “to expedite removals of this savage gang,” he continued, “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil.” ......... the Alien Enemies Act — one of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts signed by President John Adams — does not distinguish between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants and foreign nationals, a distinction that did not exist at the time of passage. This means that any immigrant deemed an “enemy alien” by the Trump administration could be subject to arrest and removal by the federal government. ........... this crusade wouldn’t stop with immigrants. “I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said, adding, “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” ............ are inclined to treat his words and statements as something other than actual speech — utterances that convey feeling, not meaning. (Why anyone would want this kind of person in the White House is a separate question.) .............. Presidential rhetoric corresponds to presidential action; it precedes and defines it. What a candidate says on the campaign trail connects to what he (or she) will do in office. And if Trump has had a single consistent message, it is that he’ll use the violent arm of the state to cleanse the nation of “scum” and “vermin,” whether immigrants and refugees or dissenters and political opponents like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. ......... There is no reason to act as if the former president is issuing idle threats, especially given his efforts as president to wield violence against protesters, migrants and other perceived enemies of the state. ........ This dynamic is the reason soldiers and pilots and first responders and anyone tasked to work in an emergency are trained to act without thinking: reprogrammed so that the mind defaults to a well-defined set of actions when subjected to extreme, mind-altering stress. .......... Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. ............ If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.

Trump’s Bro Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men Take one young Pittsburgh man I met in a recent focus group. A college graduate working part time as a bartender, he felt weighed down by hopelessness, adrift in a country where rising costs, stagnant wages and lack of affordable housing have made even the modest ambitions of other generations feel out of reach for him. “Hope is great,” he told me, “but I see nothing for the future.” ............. The young man’s experience reflects a broader crisis of confidence and purpose, rooted in economic insecurity and social disconnection. The Covid pandemic exacerbated the alienation, with many first-time voters spending thousands of hours isolated and online in their formative years. .......... Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z men report feeling regularly stressed by an uncertain future, stirring painful memories of the Great Recession they witnessed as children. These feelings erode self-esteem and diminish their interest in personal relationships and long-term planning, leading many to describe their future as “bleak,” “unclear” and “scary.” ............ Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. ........... Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges. ........... Mr. Trump has tapped these anxieties by weaving a hypermasculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions. And it’s working. Aware that boasting about “killing” Roe v. Wade drove away young women, Mr. Trump zeroed in on capturing a larger share of the young male vote. In four years, he cut what was once a 19-percentage-point Democratic margin among registered young male voters (50 percent Mr. Biden, 31 percent Mr. Trump) roughly in half (48 percent Ms. Harris, 38 percent Mr. Trump) in our poll. .......... His playbook? A master class in bro whispering: championing crypto, securing the endorsement of Dave Portnoy — the unapologetically offensive founder of Barstool Sports — and giving the U.F.C. president, Dana White, who embodies the alpha-male archetype that appeals to many young men, a prime spot at the Republican National Convention. Mr. Trump has also cultivated relationships with simpatico comedians, pranksters, influencers and Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk — all while his team bombards podcasts and social media with misinformation and memes to rally his troops. .................. This shift in support for Mr. Trump among men is neither organic nor unexpected. It’s what happens when a well-coordinated political operation invests tens of millions of dollars to amplify Mr. Trump’s narrative and weaken confidence in the party in power. ........... To reignite the hope of the emerging generation, Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service — name it the Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America. Such a plan would offer a sense of identity, community and patriotism, while providing economic stability and skill building — things many young men feel they are missing. ........... 71 percent of adults under 25 were open to participating in a service program ......... about 75 percent of young people backed mandatory national service. These numbers tell a clear story: Our youth’s appetite for civic engagement is strong and growing. ............ From President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 to President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps in 1961 to President Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps in 1993, national service has been a cornerstone of American resilience, transformation and progress. ....... Donald Trump has gained ground with Gen Z by systematically exploiting the fears and insecurities of young men, making them feel that their masculinity and future are under siege. Kamala Harris can counter that narrative by listening and recognizing their fears but also by offering something more profound: a vision of hope, strength and shared purpose.

Parachutes Made of Mucus Change How Some Scientists See the Ocean With a new kind of microscope, researchers got a different view of how marine snow falls to the seafloor. ....... The ocean is filled with microscopic creatures that thrive in the sunshine. These bacteria and plankton periodically clump up with detritus, like waste produced by fish, and then drift softly downward, transforming into what scientists call marine snow. ........ In the inky depths of the ocean that the sun can’t reach, other creatures depend on the relentless fall of marine snow for food. Those of us living on land depend on it, too: Marine snow is thought to store vast amounts of carbon in the ocean rather than letting it heat Earth’s atmosphere. Once those particles of marine snow arrive at the ocean bottom, their carbon stays down there for untold eons.

I Grew Up in Bucks County, Pa. I Went Back to Try to Make Sense of the Election. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the town’s electricity for about a week in 2012, residents gathered at the firehouse, which was powered by a generator, and cooked their meals communally. ........ “We don’t even have a police department. We call the state police if there’s a problem, but there almost never is.” ......... a nearly dead-even town, in a closely divided county, in the biggest and most important of the electorally deadlocked battleground states. ........... Of the voters I met, not a single one — zero, just to be clear — planned to switch sides from how they voted in 2020. ........ Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion.

They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

........... and only about 10 miles closer to Philadelphia than to New York City. “You see it’s so nice here,” he said. “It’s an amazing town. But politics has kept people a little separated. It has broken up some friendships.” ......... in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying, his misogyny, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality. ............. Like most of the Trump supporters I talked with, he gets his information from Fox News. ........ He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said. .......... Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?” .......... “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.” ........ I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.” .......... “These guys I meet up with every morning, they’re brilliant, each of them in their own way. That’s why I just don’t understand their attraction to Trump.” .......... On one issue — women’s reproductive rights — there was agreement at the table that Mr. Trump’s positions were hurting him and might cost him the election. ......... “Trump puts his foot in his mouth just about every time he speaks, but on abortion it’s the worst,” the man said, adding that “the abortion thing is going to kill him.” .................. Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them. ......... But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either.

They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.

........... The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control. Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act of Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit. ........ Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want. Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself. ................ What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric? Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare. ............ He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.” ......... It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. future generations will note that the choice boiled down to this: the certainty of division versus the possibility of unity. ......... Thanksgiving dinners you stopped going to — because of Trump. Friends and neighbors you stopped speaking to — because of Trump. Topics you wouldn’t broach — because of Trump. .......... Trump is a human jackhammer pounding outside your window at 6:30 a.m. The noise is incessant. It’s in the ad hominem tweets, the nasty nicknames, the disparagement of anyone who disagrees with him as an idiot, a weakling, an enemy of the people. ......... Trump brought out the worst in everyone, not just his most ardent fans but also — yes — his most acerbic critics. In the four years of his presidency, he turned us into a nation of haters. He’ll do it again if you elect him next month. ......... Democrats, Republicans and independents must be able to recognize one another as fellow patriots. The party in power should not abuse its temporary majority to change the rules of the game ......... When consensus reached through compromise is possible, we should prefer it to divisive, and reversible, partisan victories. That’s how progress isn’t just achieved but also secured. ..........

Can we be disunited over stopping the billion-plus doses of fentanyl that crossed our border last year?

What China’s Leaders Grasp About Another Trump Term The 2020s would be what we called the “decisive decade” in U.S. competition with China. ........ Beijing seeks to displace the United States from its global leadership position and is a formidable challenger. It is America’s first geopolitical rival to surpass 70 percent of U.S. G.D.P., exceed American industrial capacity and pull ahead in multiple technology sectors, such as electric vehicles, hypersonic weapons and nuclear energy technology. .......... On China, he is often at odds with his former staff members, current advisers, the nationalist wing of his party and even his own vice-presidential pick — all of whom see the challenge posed by Beijing more clearly than he does. Left to his own unpredictable impulses, Mr. Trump could very well lose this decisive decade for America. ........... As a result, Mr. Trump was widely mocked by Chinese citizens, who nicknamed him “Chuan Jianguo” (“Build-the-Nation Trump” — the “nation” being China). His administration led President Xi Jinping of China to declare that the world was undergoing “great changes unseen in a century” as America fell from pre-eminence. ............ Today Mr. Trump opposes overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok unless the app’s China-based owners sell it. The goal is to prevent Beijing from being able to shape U.S. public opinion by manipulating the news feeds of TikTok’s 170 million American users or from having access to sensitive user data. He previously supported this approach but appears to have reversed himself after meeting with a top donor who has a roughly $30 billion stake in the app.