The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Graphics Editor
Americans will predictably celebrate this Independence Day by watching fireworks crackle against the night sky. Like anyone, I appreciate a colorful spectacle. But our country needs to acknowledge that by setting off our own fireworks, we’re harming the very land and people that we are celebrating.
Year after year, there has been an unsettling peak of wildfires during the days surrounding the Fourth of July. The often illegal firework displays people set off at home cause of over one-fourth of those fires — and that’s probably an underestimate based on inconsistent data.
Human-caused fires peak on July 4
Wildfires reported from 1992 to 2020
From 1992 to 2020, there have been well over one million human-caused wildfires, a majority begun by people burning their yard waste. However, the days surrounding the Fourth of July are consistently the most common days for human-started fires, twice as many as on other summer days, all thanks to firework celebrations.
This data doesn’t even include building or household fires. One such fire last week, caused by kids setting off illegal Roman candles, destroyed a 76-person apartment building in Washington, D.C. Luckily, no one was killed or seriously injured.
And fireworks cause not just wildfires. In 2023 eight people died, and an estimated 9,700 people were treated in emergency rooms with firework-related injuries. Kids under the age of 19 — predominantly teenage boys — made up almost half of those injuries.
In many fire-prone states and cities, selling fireworks is already illegal. Municipal or state fireworks displays are still the best solution for a safe and exciting way to celebrate the holiday with your community. Since these professional displays still produce quite a bit of noise, pollution and trash on top of the fire risk, some places such as Napa Valley and Lake Tahoe in California have even opted to replace their fireworks celebrations with spectacular drone displays. Other communities should follow their lead.
Fireworks are fun. But leave them to the professionals — for all our sakes.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll is a coldly numerical embodiment of Democrats’ worst fears since President Biden walked haltingly off the debate stage last Thursday night. Campaign staff members have intimated to reporters for days that they have seen their internal polls drop, and there have been signs in public post-debate polls that Biden was hemorrhaging supporters.
But the Times/Siena poll is a significant jolt, showing that Donald Trump now leads Biden by nine points among registered voters, and six points among likely voters. That’s a three-point shift in Trump’s favor since the last survey, just before the debate. In the words of Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst of The Times, “Biden is not a broadly popular candidate anymore.”
His favorability rating fell four points after the debate, and is now nearly 10 points lower than it was in 2022. The share of voters who say Biden is now too old to be an effective president is now 74 percent, up five points since the debate. One prominent forecasting group that rated Michigan as “leans Democratic” in the presidential race now says the state is a tossup.
By every measure, the evidence is now unmistakable. If Biden’s candidacy was shaky before, it is virtually untenable now. Remaining in the race leaves the White House door unlocked for Trump and his destructive crew.
A number of other Democrats have already reached this conclusion, and some are saying it out loud. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a centrist Democrat who represents a mostly red, rural district in Washington State — the kind of district her party will need to retain to win back the House — said flatly that Biden will lose to Trump. Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, whose influence helped make Biden a viable candidate four years ago, said he still backed Biden but would support Vice President Kamala Harris if Biden stepped aside. Coming from a man who is officially a co-chair of the Biden/Harris campaign, that sounded almost like a shove.
Biden and his team still sound as if they’re blindly forging ahead with their campaign. But fortunately, there was a sign Wednesday morning that reality has begun to penetrate their bubble. Katie Rogers of The Times reported that Biden told a close ally he knows he now has to persuade the public that he is up to the job if he is to salvage his candidacy. (The White House, predictably, denied the report). Rogers also reported that Biden told at least one person that he’s open to the possibility his post-debate strategy won’t work.
If true, that’s the kind of cleareyed thinking that could still give another candidate the chance to hold off Trump.
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Opinion Writer
Political observers crave a narrative — the more global, the better. And as the U.S. election descends into a state of chaos, American liberals looking across the Atlantic for some sense of context will see alarms flashing red. In France, a snap National Assembly election has delivered a distressing first-round victory for Marine Le Pen, long the bête noire of European liberalism, and a humiliating defeat for President Emmanuel Macron, almost a caricature of the continental elite.
But in Britain, another surprise snap election, to be held Thursday, is likely to produce a very different outcome, complicating efforts to divine a single meaning for this “year of democracy,” in which more than half the world’s population will, by December, have gone to the polls.
At present, the British elections appear set to deliver for Labour the most thumping victory any party has achieved in any mature democracy for at least a generation. The latest forecasts say a 3-to-1 parliamentary majority is not just possible, but likely. Some suggest a 4-to-1 margin is plausible, and Conservative efforts to warn voters of a coming left-wing supermajority appear to have backfired, making them instead much more likely to support Labour.
Keir Starmer, the presumptive prime minister, has run a conspicuously anti-populist campaign — those assessing each party’s manifestoes have noted Labour is promising less spending than the Tories — which means that a Labour victory may still be more an indictment of British conservatives than an endorsement of its progressives. (And the party is expected to only win about 40 percent of the national vote in a low-turnout election.) But after 14 years of Tory government, a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 Labour Parliament would still be a truly historic shift.
These look like contradictory outcomes, and a reminder that any country’s elections are complex, idiosyncratic and contingent. But together, the two elections seem also to affirm that the great meme of global politics at the moment is not exactly right or left but something more like crude anti-incumbency.
For now, all worried eyes are on France. But that election, whose second round will be held this weekend, may not be a simple referendum on Le Pen’s 21st-century blood nationalism. It also says a lot about the strategic dysfunction embedded in French party politics and the weakness of old-fashioned establishment power, visible in many places beyond France.
Le Pen’s National Rally is in a stronger position than it has ever enjoyed before, but in previous elections, its candidates have been outflanked in the second round after opponents consolidated into an alliance to defeat them. This time, the frictions between Macron’s third-place party and the progressive New Popular Front (which finished second in the first round) have made forming an alliance more difficult — a troubling sign that the French establishment may now functionally prefer a hard-right victory to an alliance with the left, and another mark of the fringe-ward drift of the continent’s bourgeois center-right.
Opinion Staff Editor
NASA has sent hundreds of people into space since 1961. Doing that is hard, but for an agency like NASA, it is supposed to be as routine as one can expect.
That makes the Starliner saga of the last several weeks all the more troubling. On June 5, Boeing sent two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the International Space Station aboard its new Starliner spacecraft. It was the first time the vehicle had ever ferried humans into space — after years of developmental delays caused by design and testing problems. This mission was supposed to be a moment of redemption for the company’s space program as well as its larger reputation.
But Boeing can’t catch a break. Helium leaks were detected soon after Starliner made it to orbit. Upon approach to the space station, five of its thrusters started to behave aberrantly. While the crew made it to the space station safely, a planned eight-day stay has stretched to 26 days and counting. NASA and Boeing say they are still trying to discern what caused the thruster issues — and, more important, ensure Starliner can safely bring back the astronauts.
That is, of course, the prudent move. The Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters could have been prevented by more thorough checks. But it’s one that leaves Williams and Wilmore stuck in space.
Now, NASA and Boeing object to that kind of characterization; they have emphasized that in an emergency, the astronauts can take the spacecraft home. But if the pair can’t come home yet, because of circumstances outside their control, and there’s no timetable for when they could return, that seems to fit the very definition of being stuck.
This isn’t how NASA’s new era of human spaceflight was billed when Starliner was first announced. NASA wanted to elevate the private sector: For its new partners, it picked a newcomer, SpaceX, and a seemingly dependable veteran, Boeing. But the veteran is the reason Williams and Wilmore are having to adapt to new routines hundreds of miles above their homes on Earth.
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Opinion Columnist
The decline and fall of Rudy Giuliani hit a lower-than-ever level this week when he was disbarred in New York for lying about the 2020 election results. It probably wasn’t much of a life change. He’s selling his New York City apartment and has been puttering around in Florida, where his occupations have included selling autographed 9/11 T-shirts and sending birthday greetings to the dwindling number of people who are happy to receive them.
His identity, such as it is, has been as defender of Donald Trump’s fabrications about 2020. Giuliani was found liable in a defamation case, in which the jury ordered him to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers whose lives were upended by the lies he told about their performance.
The only bad thing about the verdict was that those two beleaguered women — who said they lived in fear for their lives from the Trumpian wrath Giuliani worked up — are about as likely to get $148 million out of him as Giuliani is to ever be welcomed back to Manhattan.
OK, his career is over, and his main occupation on many public occasions seems to be alcohol consumption. Is there anything we can learn from the saga of the guy who went from being celebrated as a Sept. 11 hero to the guy who keeps showing up looking half in the bag in the middle of the day?
It’s amazing how fast a guy can go from hero to horrible in the public eye. Looking back on Giuliani’s New York years, we’re reminded of his sudden announcement, as mayor, that he was asking for a separation from his wife Donna Hanover. Much to the surprise of the local press corps and, um, Hanover. Giuliani had decided he was in love with somebody else, the prelude of a personal life that kept getting messier and messier as the years rolled on.
Obviously, Florida can have him. Those of us in his old hometown were hardly expecting him to show up again trying to practice law here; the guy, you know, had so much trouble trying to obey the law here.
But it’s always nice to have a chance to remind the world that while New York is great at churning out celebrities, this is a city that knows what it doesn’t like.
Opinion Columnist
The most obvious takeaway from last week’s presidential debate was that Donald Trump is still a lying, rambling, unhinged old man whose authoritarian mobster instincts would once again put our democracy at risk. The second most obvious is that voters must do everything to prevent him from regaining power. And the third is that President Biden is no longer the man to do that.
Monday brought a development that only enhanced those regrettable takeaways: The Supreme Court’s decision to significantly expand presidential latitude for illegal but official acts during his time in office. Trump not only claimed this as a victory but then gave us a sneak preview of how he might use those powers during a second term, amplifying calls to prosecute Biden, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Chuck Schumer and others in a military tribunal.
Give Trump power, and he will take it. Take power away from Trump, and he will refuse to let go.
In the thrall of MAGA, the Republican Party has embraced denialism, blind loyalty and the cult of Trump. Democrats and Never Trumpers have rightly condemned it for that.
But now Democrats are guilty of the same. Here we have Biden and his circle denying the president’s demonstrable unfitness for office, shutting itself off from anyone who points out the obvious and insisting that no one but Biden can manage the job of beating Trump in November.
None of this is true. It’s time to distinguish between resoluteness and obstinacy, between confidence and hubris, between being the right man to beat Trump in 2020 and the wrong man to beat him in 2024.
Almost everyone agrees that, above all, Biden is a good man. But in refusing to do the right thing and drop out of this race in favor of an open contest, he is not being a good man right now.
President Biden, when you ran for election in 2020, you said you would be the bridge. You have been that bridge, and for that, America should be grateful. But we’re on the other side of that bridge now. If you continue on this path, you could well replace gratitude with resentment and consternation. Give us the opportunity to thank you for your service and bid you goodbye while you still stand on high ground.
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Editorial Board Member
Update: Trump’s sentencing has been delayed until at least Sept. 18.
It took less than 24 hours for the Supreme Court’s radical, law-free decision on Monday inventing broad presidential immunity to start having real-world effects.
On Tuesday morning, Manhattan prosecutors agreed to delay Donald Trump’s sentencing in the porn-star-affair-hush-money-business-records-falsification-election-interference case that resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in May. Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the case, said the sentencing would be delayed until at least Sept. 18.
The sentence, which could include anything from probation to monetary fines or prison time, was scheduled to be imposed July 11, days before the Republican National Convention, at which Trump will become the first ever convicted felon nominated by a major party for president.
But within hours of the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 ruling, which held — contrary to the Constitution, two centuries of history and the court’s own precedent — that a president cannot be criminally prosecuted for almost any “official” action he takes, Trump’s lawyers asked for a delay. They also sought to have his conviction overturned in light of his newfound immunity.
Even by the vague, inscrutable terms of the court’s opinion, Trump should have no case. Most of the facts the jury found in convicting him occurred when he was not president. And yet some, like his signing of the checks to reimburse his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, happened in the Oval Office itself. That gives Trump a lifeline, because the right-wing justices in the majority held that prosecutors may not rely on evidence of a president’s official actions, not even to help prove accusations that involve indisputably unofficial behavior. (Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who voted with the majority, did not join that part of the opinion.)
It is hard to imagine that Trump signing hush-money checks to his personal lawyer would count as an official action, but the court’s immunity decision was so sweeping that it’s anyone’s guess now.
Sentences are, of course, the essence of any criminal conviction; they are where the rubber of the jury’s verdict meets the road of accountability. The public often sees them as validating the conviction. And seeing Trump punished by the legal system will have special symbolic importance: He is asking the American people to return him to the White House, where he would be tasked above all with upholding the law.
But as he has demonstrated time and again, he has no regard for the law, and the imposition of a concrete consequence would have provided a powerful frame for his lawbreaking, mocking the Republican Party’s celebration of it. Now it won’t take place until days or weeks after the nation focuses its attention on his coronation at the convention, if it takes place at all.
This is only a small taste of the chaos and nonsense that the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has unleashed with its immunity decision. “We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said during oral arguments in the case in April. The ages began Tuesday morning.
Opinion Columnist
It’s wise to be skeptical of the polls that have followed Thursday’s presidential debate. The people who watched the debate tend to be partisans whose minds were already made up. It takes longer for clips and impressions to filter out to voters who pay less attention to politics.
Still, a few things stand out from the early numbers. First is that no matter which snap poll you look at, the race looks stable. That’s not because voters think President Biden performed well or even because they think he’s fit for the job. Poll after poll shows they think he lost the debate, and badly, and he’s too old to serve a second term. But so far it’s not leading to a significant swing toward Donald Trump. For Biden voters, a candidate whose fitness seems uncertain is better than a candidate whose malignancy is known.
A new Data for Progress poll is particularly interesting. It, too, found that voters thought Trump had won the debate. It, too, found that most voters believe Biden is too old to serve another term as president. It found that voters were more concerned by Biden’s age and health than by Trump’s criminal cases and potential threat to democracy. And it found a mostly unchanged race; Trump led Biden by three points.
The poll went further, though. It tested other Democrats against Trump: Vice President Kamala Harris performed identically to Biden. Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer all performed about the same, trailing Trump by two to three points. But the similar margins obscure how lesser-known Democrats would change the race: 7 percent of voters were undecided about a Biden-Trump or Harris-Trump race, but between 9 percent and 12 percent of voters were undecided in the other matchups. More voters are up for grabs.
Democrats could read these results in two ways. The line from the Biden camp has been that Biden’s bad night won’t lead anyone to vote for Trump. The other way to read these results is that the base support for the Democratic alternative to Trump is pretty sturdy. Perhaps Democrats should be less worried about the possible fractures of an open convention and more interested in its possibilities.
For Democrats, fear of Trump is a powerful motivator. It generates a unity and energy completely separate from the Democratic nominee. But it’s not enough. Biden trails in most polls, as do other Democrats. There’s a crucial group of 7 percent to 12 percent of voters who do not fear Trump enough to vote for the Democratic nominee simply by default. They need to be won over.
The question Democrats need to be asking themselves is: Which candidate stands the best chance of winning those voters over?
Thursday’s debate was the Biden campaign’s high-risk gamble to show he was up to the job. It proved he isn’t. Even so, Democrats have feared that their base is fragile enough that an unpredictable process to replace Biden might fracture their support. But what the polls seem to show is that anti-Trump voters will stick by a Democrat, and a larger share of voters are open to Democrats if the party picks a more compelling candidate.
The polls may change sharply in the coming days, and I’ve heard rumors of internal Democratic polls that show significantly worse post-debate numbers for Biden. It’ll take some time yet to know where the race will settle. And it’s not as if Trump is standing still: He’s near to finalizing his V.P. pick.
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Opinion Columnist
I’m still sorting through the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, and while it’s way too early for a definitive interpretation (scholars will be arguing about it for years), it’s not too early for three broad conclusions.
First, and most important, the Supreme Court granted a dangerous amount of discretion to presidents. The court might say that presidents aren’t above the law, but in reality, it established an extraordinarily broad zone of absolute immunity for presidents (one broad enough, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor notes in a dissent, to potentially protect presidents from prosecution for bribes and assassinations) and a tough test for prosecuting those acts that aren’t immune.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the president must be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the executive branch.” This is a high bar to clear.
To understand the most dangerous potential implications of this action, consider that a president has the extraordinary authority to order troops into American streets under the Insurrection Act. Then, once deployed, those troops would be under the command of a person who would almost certainly enjoy absolute immunity for the orders he gives them.
Second, forget any thought that the special counsel Jack Smith can try Donald Trump before the election. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower courts for additional proceedings to determine whether Trump can be prosecuted for any of his official acts during the scheme to overturn the election. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where the remaining legal questions can be resolved before November.
Third, Trump is still in grave legal jeopardy — but only if he loses the election. Even if Trump is ultimately held to be immune for all his official acts, he still can be prosecuted for private acts. During oral arguments, Trump’s counsel admitted that several of the acts Trump is criminally charged with committing should be considered private and not in furtherance of his official duties.
Trump’s lawyer agreed it would have been a private act when Trump, as one justice characterized the special counsel’s allegations, “turned to a private attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud to spearhead his challenges to the election results.” It would also have been a private act when Trump “conspired with another private attorney who caused the filing in court of a verification signed by Petitioner that contained false allegations to support a challenge.”
This means Smith still has a case against Trump — unless Trump wins the election. Then he could use his power over the Department of Justice to end the case against him, and potentially even pardon himself from both the Jan. 6 prosecution and the classified documents prosecution in Florida.
The bottom line is clear: Trump’s fate (and potentially even the rule of law) is entirely in the hands of the American people. They alone will decide if he can be held accountable.
Contributing Opinion Writer
Jill Biden should have prevented this. Jill Biden should prevent this.
I’ve been hearing or reading versions of that since President Biden’s alarming performance during Thursday night’s debate, as if it had been the first lady’s job to decide and tell him that he wasn’t up to running for a second term, as if it fell on her to persuade him to step aside. I briefly had the same thought myself.
But it’s a presumptuous, unfair and even meanspirited one. Jill Biden doesn’t hold an actual job whose description includes advising the president on the most sensitive matters and painful choices. She wasn’t elected to do that. She wasn’t elected, period. So how is it her obligation — and not the task of one of his many paid aides or one of the political operatives who have been counseling him for decades — to make everything right? She’s a spouse, not a sorcerer.
I understand the impulse to look to her and to Valerie Biden, his sister, who has also been mentioned frequently in recent days as a rescue worker and possible savior. The president is known to trust them in a special way. They’re family. And people who believe that Biden is unintentionally setting the country up for the disaster of another Trump administration are desperate for some — for any — intervention.
But it’s noteworthy and arguably sexist that the women in his life are supposed to clean house here. And the belief that Jill Biden does and can speak harsh truths to her husband violates the sturdy truism that nobody on the outside of a marriage has any real sense of the dynamics inside it. Maybe that’s not how she understands or plays her role. Maybe she offers him comfort and lends him support once he has chosen his course. That’s indeed something that she, as opposed to one of his political counselors, is in a unique position to do.
Focusing on Jill Biden lets Joe Biden off the hook. It falls on him to summon the self-awareness and the character to make the right decision. I’d love it if she assisted that with tough questions and brutally candid observations. But she’s not accountable for those.
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Opinion Writer and Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
President Biden and Donald Trump have very light schedules so far for the week, probably in part because of the July 4 holiday, and perhaps in part because of the real suspense in the debate’s aftermath.
There continues to be widespread friction and noise about what Democrats will do, though Biden is in until something changes, which it may not. On Sunday, our colleagues in the newsroom reported that the Biden family wants the president to remain in the race, and a variety of Democratic politicians came out in support of Biden over the weekend. There is also a lot of reporting about what went wrong with the debate and what other Democrats are thinking about the prospect of a Kamala Harris candidacy or an open convention. Initial polling in the aftermath of the debate didn’t show much movement in the close head-to-head result; there will most likely be a lot more polling as the week continues. A lot of information keeps coming out — that could mean things change in some way, or it could just mean there’s deep conflict.
This week, the Supreme Court is extremely likely to rule on the presidential immunity issue in the federal Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump, probably on Monday morning. The case is very unlikely to go to trial this year, regardless of how the court rules. But because of the novel questions raised by Trump’s lawyers and the importance of Jan. 6 itself, how the court rules could have enormous consequences for the presidency and the campaign.
Steve Bannon is going to prison Monday for a few months, after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee. David Brooks interviewed him ahead of his incarceration.
This isn’t, you know, American politics, but it is relevant to our presidential politics, particularly looking ahead toward the future of European alliances: The U.K. has an election on Thursday (Labour is expected to return to power). The French are now headed toward their July 7 runoff election, which Emmanuel Macron called and which may majorly diminish his power.
Opinion Columnist
Wishful thinking, to adapt a phrase, is a helluva drug.
In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, his well-wishers are claiming that it was just an off night. “Bad debate nights happen,” wrote Barack Obama in a social media post that’s garnered more than 100 million views. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and a major Democratic donor, wrote that when Biden “does poorly, he tends to bounce back — and then win.” Biden himself told a gathering of East Hampton donors that “I didn’t have a great night, but neither did Trump.”
Pure nonsense.
It’s true that Obama had a bad first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, just as Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 — and both men went on to win resounding re-elections. It’s also true that Donald Trump’s performance — by turns bombastic, evasive, mendacious and meandering — would have been seen as embarrassing against nearly any other opponent.
But Biden was his opponent, and the transparent problem with the president’s performance wasn’t that he debated poorly. It’s that he is suffering from serious cognitive decline, something from which there is no coming back. I don’t say this as a medical expert, only as one of many millions of people who have witnessed, in elderly people we love, the same symptoms we saw in Biden on Thursday: the garbled thoughts and slurred words and unfinished sentences; the vacant stare; the confusion.
As a human matter, this is heartbreaking. As a political one, it’s disqualifying. Biden is asking voters for four more years to “finish the job.” Given recent reports in The Wall Street Journal about the speed of his deterioration, that’s a promise he’d be unlikely to keep even if he somehow wins the election.
All this has been increasingly obvious for years — and some of us have repeatedly said so. But this is also a time to ask questions of those who saw the president and insisted there was nothing seriously amiss, or that his verbal stumbles were just a function of his stutter, or that his voice may be soft but his thoughts are clear. Were they clueless? Dishonest? Choosing to not see?
Whichever way, they bear some of the blame for trying to prop up a mentally unwell incumbent in order to stop a morally unfit challenger. To those who love the president, starting with his wife, it’s time to tell him: for God’s sake, and the country’s, and his own — don’t run.