Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has tapped a senior State Department official and veteran policy hand under successive Democratic presidents as the Pentagon’s new chief of staff, officials said, as the Biden administration races to lock in key defense priorities ahead of November’s elections. Derek Chollet, who as an aide to Secretary of State Antony Blinken […]Read More

Donald Trump has a history of fiery calls urging supporters to rise up, and his most militant fans often have obliged. So it might seem counterintuitive that now, as Trump faces unprecedented legal problems and a close election in November, the nation is experiencing a lull in political unrest — in fact, one of the […]Read More

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — A volunteer for Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s campaign trailed George Latimer out of a Juneteenth event last week, asking the Westchester County executive, who’s challenging Bowman in a primary Tuesday, whether he was getting his “racist talking points” from “MAGA donors,” or whether he had come up with them himself. Latimer, who […]Read More

For decades, the Social Security Administration has denied thousands of people disability benefits by claiming they could find jobs that have all but vanished from the U.S. economy — such occupations as nut sorter, pneumatic tube operator and microfilm processor. On Monday, the agency will eliminate all but a handful of those unskilled jobs from […]Read More

Donald Trump’s campaign argues that Joe Biden is a feeble incompetent — disconnected from reality as his aides shuttle him around the world, in the words of one Trump adviser, like the cadaver in the 1989 comedy film “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Biden’s campaign describes Trump as an “unhinged” extremist with dictatorial designs who “snapped” when […]Read More

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — Federal prosecutors struggled to present a compelling case Monday for new restrictions on Donald Trump that would bar him from publicly attacking law enforcement officials, even as an attorney working for special counsel Jack Smith argued that the former president’s claims are false, inflammatory, and invite violence against FBI agents. U.S. […]Read More

Americans’ embrace of same-sex rights and acceptance of gay Americans has been one of the steadiest trends in recent political history, with support for same-sex marriage gradually rising from less than 30 percent in the mid-1990s to around 70 percent today. Support has become so strong that pollsters have largely stopped even asking about it. […]Read More

If there is to be a genuine turning point in the presidential campaign, it could come Thursday night in Atlanta, when President Biden and former president Donald Trump meet for the earliest and what could be one of the most consequential political debates in history. Though there have been some predictable attempts to lower expectations, […]Read More