Trump Hush Money Trial Week IV: A New Hope

Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his new Broadway musical, "The Heart of Rock and Roll," and working through hearing loss.

The academic worker strikes at UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz merge union accusations alleging workplace mistreatment with a pro-Palestinian campus movement.

The news service's host claimed that federal authorities were going to shut down his studios in Austin, Texas, on Friday night.

"He'll never be a replacement of Penny, but I definitely think she sent him to us as a little gift to fill our hearts again," said the owner.

When the "Jurassic Park" writer died in 2008, he left behind an unfinished novel about a volcanic eruption that imperils all life on Earth. Enter bestselling author James Patterson, tasked with completing Crichton's thriller.

He's also got more than 1.1 million followers as of Sunday morning.

Writer Michael Crichton, whose blockbuster novels, films and TV series included "Jurassic Park" and "ER," died in 2008, leaving behind an unfinished thriller about a volcanic eruption that imperils all life on Earth. Bestselling author James Patterson was tasked with completing Crichton's book, and now, 16 years later, "Eruption" is finally being unleashed in bookstores. Correspondent Tracy Smith talks with Patterson, and with Michael's widow, Sherri Alexander Crichton, about bringing back the voice of a master storyteller.

"Sunday Morning" looks back at historical events on this date.

The new Broadway show "Illinoise" is a choreographed indie-rock musical with no dialogue, based on Sufjan Stevens' 2005 concept album. It's received four Tony Award nominations, including best musical. "Sunday Morning" contributor Kelefa Sanneh talks with choreographer Justin Peck, playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, and musician Shara Nova about the show, an ode to the origins of storytelling and theatre-making.

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Forty-seven percent say they think the charges against Trump were politically motivated. At the same time, 51% think Trump intentionally did something illegal.

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We can be a powerful, unstoppable force for good in protecting women’s sport, ensuring that the next generation of female athletes can compete with dignity and equal chances of opportunity and success.

Half the country says Trump is not fit to be president; Republicans call the trial unfair, according to CBS News poll.

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Toby Melville/Reuters“Andrew cuts an increasingly tragic figure”The standoff between King Charles and Prince Andrew over the latter finally being forced to leave his beloved Royal Lodge home is becoming increasingly bitter, with insiders dubbing it “the siege of Royal Lodge.”As The Daily Beast previously reported, multiple sources told the Times of London that Charles has threatened to cut funding to his disgraced brother if Andrew doesn’t vacate his home soon. A friend of Charles told the paper, “It can be done tidily or untidily. It can be done with grace and dignity or it can be forced upon him. It’s all rather sad. But as things stand, life at Royal Lodge is set to become increasingly cold and uncomfortable for the duke. The only question now is when he will realize that he has become a prisoner of his own pride—and that handing back the keys will afford him far greater comfort, and the continued support of his family.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

The "Sunday Morning" book reviewer offers his picks from this month's new fiction and non-fiction titles, including "Eruption," a thriller started by Michael Crichton and finished, more than 15 years after Crichton's death, by James Patterson.

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The 31-year-old victim was shot in his left hand while on a the train train at East 86th Street and Lexington Avenue around 2:30 a.m. Sunday, police told The Post.

This month's fiction and non-fiction titles include an unfinished thriller by "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton, completed more than 15 years after Crichton's death by bestselling writer James Patterson.

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A wild boar and its piglet rest in a pile of dirt. It’s an awful feeling: Damp with sweat, your skin sticks to the sheets as you lie awake, seemingly for hours, in a bedroom that’s just too hot.  Excessive heat is indeed bad for sleep. It disrupts our body’s natural cool-down process that helps us sleep. But luckily for many of us, we can crank up the AC or turn on a fan.  Wild animals don’t have those luxuries.  A pair of new studies on mammals in Europe shows that extreme heat impairs their sleep, too, often significantly so. Wild boars in the Czech Republic, for example, slept 17 percent less during hot, summer days, compared to colder months, one of the papers found, “potentially leading to sleep deprivation.” The other showed that deer fawns in Ireland similarly had shorter and worse quality sleep on scorching days.  Among the only studies of sleep in wild animals, the research points to yet another way that climate change will likely reshape the natural world. As summers heat up, animals might find it harder to sleep in the habitats they call home, potentially weakening their immune systems and chances of survival. It may also push these creatures to new places, where they might spread disease and disrupt carefully balanced ecosystems.  “These studies point to a novel and potentially ecosphere-spanning way that climate change can impact animals,” Sean O’Donnell, a biology professor at Drexel University, who was not involved in either study, told Vox by email. What scientists learn when they observe snoozing animals Euan Mortlock spends a lot of time watching animals sleep. He’s not some sort of animal creep but a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, where he studies napping in animals, from large mammals to fruit flies. “People think of sleep as something animals do in between periods of other interesting things, but I think it’s one of the most interesting behaviors to observe,” said Mortlock, lead author of the two new studies, both of which were published this spring.  One thing that makes sleep so fascinating, Mortlock said, is that nearly all animals do it (other than perhaps marine sponges). Seals nap while diving down as deep as 300 meters, one study found. Jellyfish sleep, too, even though they have no brains; research shows they pulse less often when they’re dozing off.  Fruit flies in the lab also nap, Mortlock said. Rather adorably, they tilt their heads slightly down, he said, and drop their little antennae when they’re nodding off. Mortlock is interested in how these tiny insects perceive threats while they’re asleep. His current research aims to figure out how their brains decide whether to wake up or continue sleeping in response to, say, the scent of a predator. Sleep is incredibly important to human and animal health; it strengthens our immune systems and brains, and provides a range of other benefits. To that end, changes in the environment that impair sleep can have serious consequences for survival, and for ecosystems. Sleep “is essential for physical recovery and memory consolidation,” Daniel Blumstein, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who was not involved in Mortlock’s research, told Vox. “Thus, we should document those things that interfere with it.” Hogs don’t like heat Humans have phones and Fitbits and Apple Watches that are constantly tracking sleep. How, though, do you measure this behavior in wild animals?  One way is to strap these sorts of technologies onto them.  For the study on wild boars, Mortlock’s colleagues captured a bunch of pigs in Europe and put collars around their necks fitted with devices called accelerometers. Accelerometers pick up subtle movements. Critically, some of those movements correspond precisely to an animal’s specific posture when it’s asleep. Every mammal species has a specific sleep posture, he said. Boars, for example, will either lie on their stomach with their chin resting on the dirt or on their sides with their heads touching the ground. Accelerometers can pick up these sleep signatures. Beginning in 2019, the researchers monitored the boars for a few years, measuring the duration and quality of their sleep. They then compared those measurements to weather data including temperature and humidity.  Ultimately, they found that sleep is “shorter, more fragmented, and of lower quality at higher temperature,” as they wrote in the study. Snow and rainfall, meanwhile, produced higher-quality sleep, presumably because it cooled the animals down (and didn’t bother them much because boars typically sleep under bushes or trees).  A slightly earlier study — of baby fallow deer in a park near Dublin — found similar results. Also led by Mortlock, that paper, published in April and based on more than 300 days of data, found that total sleep time and quality among fawns declined on hotter days. (The team similarly used accelerometers to study these mammals.) While Mortlock’s work is among the most comprehensive analyses of sleep in wild animals, a handful of previous studies show how heat impairs sleep. One particularly bleak 2015 article, for example, found that fruit bats in South Africa sleep less on hot days because they spend so much time licking their fur, spreading their wings, and panting to cool off.  Will climate change turn animals into insomniacs?  One clear concern is that extraordinarily hot days are becoming more common. A recent report by the nonprofit Climate Central found that climate change added an average of 26 days of extreme heat globally in the last year.  That could, to an extent, fuel insomnia among some creatures, like these hogs. “Given the major role sleep plays in overall health, our results signal that global warming, and the associated increase in extreme climatic events are likely to negatively impact sleep, and consequently health, in wildlife,” Isabella Capellini, a co-author on the wild boar paper and researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, said in a press release.  A lack of sleep, in turn, could mean boars are more likely to get sick or spend less time caring for their young, the authors write.  “We know that climate change creates a variety of different stressors on animals, and this study reveals a new axis of stress that animals may experience as a result,” Briana Abrahms, an expert in animal behavior and ecology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in Mortlock’s research, told Vox by email. “Animals (and people) need sleep to recover from other stressors, so this study suggests that the impacts of warmer temperatures on sleep may compound other negative effects of climate change on wildlife.” It’s also important to keep in mind that many species are highly adaptable, especially wild boars. They won’t just stop sleeping as the planet warms. More likely, they’ll change their behavior — they’ll spend more time bathing to cool off, for example, or migrate to colder regions. That could bring these animals closer to human communities, Mortlock said, where they’re known to root through trash, damage crops, and tear up golf courses. When wild animals migrate, they can also trigger a cascade of changes in the ecosystem, by adding or subtracting key parts of a region’s food web. Extreme heat undoubtedly presents all kinds of challenges for wild animals, many of which are already under siege from other threats like deforestation and poaching. It’s wreaking havoc, for example, on coral reefs. Yet the specific problems linked to sleeping under hot conditions are still poorly studied and largely unknown. “There is an enormous gap in our understanding of sleep in the wild,” Mortlock said. “But with new methods, we can start to peek behind the curtain.”

Among prominent economists, no one was more explicit than former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in warning that President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve Board risked igniting inflation by overstimulating the economy in 2021. Soaring prices over the next few years proved Summers correct.Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump. “There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump,” Summers told me in an interview this week. “I have little doubt that with the Trump program, we will see a substantial acceleration in inflation, unless somehow we get a major recession first.”Summers is far from alone in raising that alarm. Trump’s greatest asset in the 2024 campaign may be the widespread belief among voters that the cost of living was more affordable when he was president and would be so again if he’s reelected to a second term. But a growing number of economists and policy analysts are warning that Trump’s second-term agenda of sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and enormous tax cuts would accelerate, rather than alleviate, inflation.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]In an upcoming analysis shared exclusively with The Atlantic, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, forecasts that compared with current policies, Trump’s economic plans would increase the inflation rate and force the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates higher than they would be otherwise. “If he got what he wanted,” Zandi told me, “you add it all up and it feels highly inflationary to me.”In a study released last month, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the tariffs Trump says he will impose on imports would dramatically raise costs for consumers. “Trump is promising a no-holds-barred, all-out protectionist spree that will affect every single thing that people buy that is either an import or in competition with imports,” Kimberly Clausing, a co-author of the study and a professor of tax policy at the UCLA Law School, told me.Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, is sympathetic to many elements of Trump’s agenda and critical of Biden’s. But Holtz-Eakin agrees that Trump’s economic plan “doesn’t bode well” for “the cost of living,” as he told me.Summers, who served as Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and the top White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, took substantial flak from fellow Democrats when he repeatedly warned that Biden was risking high inflation by pushing through Congress another massive COVID-relief package in 2021, while the Federal Reserve Board was still maintaining interest rates at historically low levels. “The Biden administration and the Fed both did make … consequential errors of failing to do macroeconomic arithmetic for which the economy is still paying,” he told me.Summers told me he remains unsure that the policies Biden and the Fed are pursuing will push inflation all the way down to the Fed’s 2 percent target. But he said he is confident that Trump’s blueprint would make inflation worse.Summers identified multiple pillars of Trump’s economic agenda that could accelerate inflation. These included compromising the independence of the Federal Reserve Board, enlarging the federal budget deficit by extending his 2017 tax cuts, raising tariffs, rescinding Biden policies designed to promote competition and reduce “junk fees,” and squeezing the labor supply by restricting new immigration and deporting undocumented migrants already here. Others note that top Trump advisers have also hinted that in a second term, he would seek to devalue the dollar, which would boost exports but further raise the cost of imported goods.For many economists, Trump’s plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported products from all countries and 60 percent tariffs on imports from China are the most concerning entries on that list.These new levies go far beyond any of the tariffs Trump raised while in office, several of which Biden maintained, said Clausing, who served as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis for Biden’s first two years. Trump’s proposed tariffs also dwarf the levies Biden recently imposed on electric vehicles and assorted other products from China: Biden’s new measures affect about $18 billion in Chinese imports, she said, whereas Trump proposes to raise tariffs on $3.1 trillion in imported goods, more than 150 times as much. Trump “has been quite clear that he is envisioning something quite a bit larger than he did last time,” Clausing told me.In the Peterson study, Clausing and her co-author, Mary Lovely, calculated that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices for consumers on the goods they purchase by at least $500 billion a year, or about $1,700 annually for a middle-income family. The cost for consumers, she told me, could be about twice as high if domestic manufacturers increase their own prices on the goods that compete with imports.“When you make foreign wine more expensive, domestic manufacturers can sell their wine at a higher price,” Clausing told me. “The same with washing machines and solar panels and chairs. Anything that is in competition with an import will also get more expensive.”While Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services. Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once “would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries,” Zandi told me. That would force employers to either raise wages to find replacements or, more likely, disrupt production and distribution; both options would raise the prices consumers pay. “If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices,” David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me.Removing so many workers simultaneously would be disruptive under any circumstances, many economists agree. But it could be especially tumultuous for the U.S. now because the native-born population has grown so slowly in recent years. Bier pointed out that immigrants and their children already account for almost all the growth in the population of working-age adults ages 18 to 64. If Trump in fact extracts millions of undocumented migrants from the workforce, “there is no replacement [available] even at a theoretical level,” Bier said.More difficult to quantify but potentially equally significant are the frequent indications from Trump that, as with all other federal agencies, he wants to tighten his personal control over the Federal Reserve Board. During his first term, Trump complained that the Fed was slowing economic growth by keeping interest rates too high, and any second-term move to erode the Fed’s independence—for instance, by seeking to fire or demote the board’s chair, Jay Powell—would be aimed at pressuring the board into prematurely cutting interest rates, predicts Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair who is advising Biden’s reelection campaign. That would become another source of inflationary pressure, he says, likely spooking financial markets. In the upcoming Moody’s analysis, Zandi estimates the cumulative impact of all these possible changes. He compares a scenario in which Trump can implement his entire agenda with one in which power remains divided between Biden in the White House and Republicans controlling at least one congressional chamber. Inflation, Zandi projects, would be nearly a full percentage point higher (0.8 percent, to be exact) under the scenario of Trump and Republicans in control than in the alternative of Biden presiding over a divided government. Inflation would be about that much higher under Trump even compared with the less likely scenario of Democrats winning the White House and both congressional chambers, Zandi projects.Zandi said the only reason he does not anticipate prices rising even faster under Trump is that the Federal Reserve Board would inevitably raise interest rates to offset the inflationary impact of Trump’s proposals.But those higher interest rates would come with their own cost: Zandi projects they would depress the growth in total economic output and personal income below current policy, and raise the unemployment rate over the next few years by as much as a full percentage point—even as inflation rises. Raising the specter of the slow-growth, high-inflation pattern that hobbled the American economy through much of the 1970s, Zandi told me, “It is really a stagflation scenario.”Summers sees the same danger. “It is difficult to predict the timing and the precise dynamics,” he told me, “but it is hard to imagine a policy package more likely to create stagflation” than measures that directly raise prices (through tariffs), undermine competition, enlarge deficits, and excessively expand the money supply. “There is a real risk during a Trump presidency that we would again see mortgage rates above 10 percent as inflation expectations rose and long-term interest rates increased,” he predicted.Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director, also worries that Trump’s agenda would make it much tougher for the Federal Reserve Board to moderate prices without precipitating a recession. Unlike Zandi and Summers, though, Holtz-Eakin believes that a second-term Biden agenda would also increase upward pressure on prices. That’s partly because of the cost of environmental and other regulations that the administration would impose, but also because he believes a reelected Biden would face enormous pressure to restore new spending programs that the Senate blocked from his Build Back Better agenda in 2021. He also believes that Trump’s plans to increase domestic energy production could eventually offset some of the inflationary impact of his other agenda elements.Kevin Hassett, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, has argued that any inflationary impact from Trump’s tariff and immigration agenda would be offset by other elements of his plan—including cutting government spending and taxes, increasing energy production, and slashing regulation. “Those four effects would dwarf the effects of any other policy proposals,” Hassett maintained in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.Holtz-Eakin isn’t convinced. He told me that any moderating impact from Trump’s energy and deregulatory agenda would take time to develop, while the inflationary effect of his tariffs and deportation plans would be felt immediately. “Tariffs happen fast,” Holtz-Eakin said. “Deportations happen fast.”[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]Zandi is even more skeptical. He told me that with domestic oil and gas production already at record levels, Trump has little room to open the spigot even further, or to affect prices much if he does. On regulation, Zandi said he is “hard-pressed” to see how Trump’s plans “would translate through to less inflation, at least in a meaningful way.”As with many issues, the potential impact of Trump’s second-term plans for inflation has drawn little attention in the presidential race. Instead, the former president so far is benefiting from voters’ awareness that prices increased much faster under Biden, as the American and global economies emerged from the pandemic’s disruptions, than they did while Trump was in office.Apart from concerns about Biden’s age, that discontent over inflation appears to be the greatest threat to his reelection. In a recent survey across the seven most closely contested swing states published by the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, a majority of voters said they considered their cost of living the most important measure of the economy’s performance. But a daunting three-fifths of voters in the poll, conducted by a bipartisan team of Republican and Democratic pollsters, said inflation is unlikely to be brought under control if Biden is reelected. In contrast, nearly three-fifths of voters said they believed that the cost of living would improve under Trump.Even though experts such as Summers and Zandi are warning that Trump’s economic agenda would have precisely the opposite effect, it won’t be easy for Biden to convince voters to weigh those prospective risks more heavily than their retrospective judgments about prices under each man’s tenure. But Biden may have no choice but to try. Raising awareness of the inflationary dangers in Trump’s agenda may be Biden’s best chance of winning a second look from the voters who are now moving toward the former president primarily because they remember gas, groceries, and other necessities costing less while he sat in the Oval Office.

Until Thursday’s verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, whose effect on the presidential campaign remains to be seen, virtually nothing had changed in the race for months: Poll after poll has shown President Joe Biden behind—down slightly in the “blue wall” states of the industrial Midwest, and more substantially in the Sun Belt. His approval rating has been stuck not at just under 50 percent—the historic marker of whether incumbents get reelected—but at about 40 percent, occasionally even less. It’s been that way for nearly a year and a half. And the age issue is still very real.Trump is not meaningfully more popular, nor are Americans unaware of his failings. But believing that Trump’s problems alone will bail out Biden is a fantasy. “Voters clearly recognize the huge steps backward a Trump presidency might bring—they are pessimistic about what he could do to abortion rights, progress on climate change, and even failing to protect Medicare and Social Security,” Lindsay Vermeyen, a pollster involved in the independent polling-research Swing State Project, told the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter. “And yet, their economic frustrations are enough to override all that.”Voters’ negativity is overwhelmingly about high costs: about the price of gas and groceries, but also about house payments, car payments, the ability to save for the future and provide a nest egg for their kids.Until the conclusion of the Manhattan trial, the only material movement in May was Biden’s decision to do a June debate, the earliest general-election face-off in American history. This is a gamble for Biden—but absolutely the right choice. He must try to redefine the race and encourage voters to take a second look. His age isn’t changing, but he can change some of the arguments he makes. And to influence voters who are still persuadable, he will have no better platform.[David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump]Ever since televised presidential debates began, they have had the capacity to move voters like few other events. Nothing comes close to the audience and attention these 90-minute matchups receive. They not only are watched by astounding numbers of viewers—even in this fragmented media landscape, the lower-rated 2020 debate drew 63 million viewers—but also dominate headlines for days after, influencing even more voters.In 1960, Richard Nixon narrowly led John F. Kennedy until Nixon withered under the studio lights—appearing sweaty and tentative compared with the cool, confident Democrat. In 1976, Gerald Ford’s momentum stalled after he insisted in a debate with Jimmy Carter that there was “no Soviet domination” of manifestly Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.Ronald Reagan used his mastery of the medium to lay to rest voter concerns about his conservatism in 1980, and about his age in 1984. In 1988, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic challenger to George H. W. Bush, buried his chances by bloodlessly responding to a hypothetical about his wife being raped and murdered. And in 1992, Bush himself fell short when he reinforced the idea that he was out of touch by repeatedly checking his watch.In 2000, Al Gore’s lead in the polls melted away after a debate performance that his opponent, George W. Bush, sold to the press as “sighs and lies.” In 2012, Barack Obama, then the incumbent president, blew his first debate, throwing his challenger a lifeline. In 2020, Trump’s overheated, COVID-infected performance expanded Biden’s lead—which he held throughout that campaign.This time is different: Biden is now the incumbent who’s behind. And to turn things around onstage, he has to address the economy as voters experience it. Barely more than one-fifth of those surveyed in a recent New York Times poll rated the economy as excellent or good; a majority said it is poor. In a Guardian/Harris poll, more than half (56 percent) believed we are in a recession, and nearly three in five (58 percent) said Biden is responsible. The economic data may show that they’re mistaken—but good luck winning votes by telling Americans that they’re wrong.In this context, Biden’s current message is a disaster. When he was asked in a TV interview last month about voters’ greater trust in Trump on the economy, Biden responded by saying, “We’ve already turned it around.” He cited a survey about people’s personal finances and went on to claim, as he typically does, “We have the strongest economy in the world.” That may be technically true, but for a politician whose superpower is supposed to be empathy, Biden didn’t show much understanding of the gap between the official statistics and people’s day-to-day experience. He failed to provide a compelling story about his administration’s efforts that would resonate with middle-class families struggling to afford the basics.“It is concerning to me when I keep seeing press come out of the White House where they keep saying the economy is good,” one former Biden voter told the Times. “That’s really weird because I’m paying more on taxes and more on groceries and more on housing and more on fuel. So that doesn’t feel good.”[David A. Graham: The most irresponsible thing ever said in a presidential debate]Biden’s first move at the debate podium should be to deliver his economic message with empathy—and a frank admission that inflation is still too high and prices on everyday goods are hurting millions of Americans. He should talk about his own family’s past hard times. That would give him more credibility to offer a narrative about the economic mess he inherited from Trump, the millions of good jobs he’s helped create, and the programs he’s put in place—such as the CHIPS Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law—to create an even better economy in the years ahead.That brings us to the second debate imperative for Biden: He needs to talk about the future more than the past. As Gore has said, elections are “not an award for past performance.” This campaign has to be about the next four years. Currently, only one of dozens of Biden campaign ads outlines a second-term agenda. The platform it laid out is popular and compelling—making child care and elder care affordable, protecting Social Security and Medicare, passing a “minimum tax for billionaires,” establishing Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, banning assault weapons, and preserving the right to vote—but that ad is more than a year old, and I haven’t seen anything comparable since.At a time when high costs are squeezing Americans’ budgets, Biden’s budget seems to get it. When it was released earlier this year, the accompanying White House report said “lowering costs” for consumers—reducing prices for health care, housing, groceries—is the president’s “top domestic priority.” But few Americans have received that message. Much of the president’s first-term accomplishments, and second-term agenda, should be framed as a fight to lower costs against Republicans who oppose both what he’s done and what he hopes to do.The third piece of Biden’s message that must change is his attack on Trump. Sounding the alarm against authoritarian threats to be a “dictator on day one,” cancel the Constitution, and take revenge on his “deep state” enemies is a vital, valid mission. Those hits are one reason Biden’s support among college-educated white voters is still about where it was four years ago. But the democracy agenda is either insufficient or ineffective to stanch Biden’s bleeding among working-class voters, including Latinos and Blacks.Part of that failure goes back to the economy. These voters are simply more sensitive to higher prices than upscale suburbanites. Crucially, they are also overrepresented in swing states. This Republican advantage in the Electoral College is a relatively new phenomenon: As recently as 2012, Obama polled about two points better in the swing states than he did nationally. A dozen years later, the reverse is true: Biden is underperforming his national numbers by about two points in the seven states that will decide the election.To win working-class Americans back to his coalition, Biden cannot simply tout his administration’s achievements in reducing crime and bringing down prices. That will just make him seem out of touch, as the longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has argued. The metaphorical sign behind Biden should say A Good Beginning, not Mission Accomplished. He should explicitly acknowledge that he isn’t satisfied and has more work to do—but then Biden should go on the offensive against Trump.In attack mode, Biden will look more vigorous. And he can win arguments about the way Trump’s budgets defund the police as well as environmental protection; how Trump’s policies undo gun-safety laws, caps on insulin prices, and protections for preexisting conditions; and why a Trump presidency would reward big companies and billionaires at the expense of working families.Biden should remind the debate audience that the only major legislation Trump passed was a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy—a measure that remains highly unpopular. And Biden can warn viewers that Trump is proposing more of those benefits for his buddies—tax cuts that will raise prices still higher. The threat isn’t just Trump’s vindictive personality or his antidemocratic instincts; it is his actual policies.[Ronald Brownstein: Can Biden begin a reset tonight?]This election will be a fundamental test of American democracy. It will also be the greatest electoral challenge the Democratic Party has faced this century. Four years ago, Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but if some 45,000 votes in three swing states had gone in the other direction, Trump would have tied him the Electoral College—and then won the election in the House of Representatives. And that election took place after the economy had crashed, the pandemic had been mismanaged, and Biden—whose favorability rating never fell below 50 percent—had heavily outspent Trump.In the same interview in which Biden argued that he’d turned the economy around, he said something equally perilous: “The polling data has been wrong all along.” Loyal Democrats who want to wishcast a better electoral environment, and who dismiss the scale of Biden’s challenge, should know that today’s grim polling cannot be excused or dismissed. The truth is, as 538 has reported, polls were “more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.” Ominously, in 2016 and 2020, Trump actually overperformed his polling.Biden’s challenge is real. His campaign clearly sees it—why else take the risk on such an early debate? But if the first step in dealing with a problem is acknowledging it, his next step must be directly addressing it. Biden should use this extraordinary platform to make new arguments to voters: that he gets what they’re going through, that his plans will produce a better future, and that Trump isn’t just a risk for American institutions—he’s a threat to American families.

June 6 marks 80 years since Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, as part of Operation Overlord, the campaign to defeat the Nazis and liberate Western Europe.  Now, a pair of new books — one charting the story of the Allied invasion, a second examining another key moment in World War II...

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officials said the Israel Day parade will have heightened security this year amid the Israel-Hamas war.