Opinion | Three Questions on Biden’s Theory of Victory (2024)

For over a year now, I have been talking to Americans who moved away from organized religion. Many of them did not leave their houses of worship because they stopped believing; they left because they felt betrayed — abandoned by their leaders and community when they needed support the most.

As one woman who said she became pregnant at 17 wrote to me, “I was a practicing Catholic, and the church response to me consisted solely of condemnation,” even though she married her boyfriend and they have now been married for over 50 years, “When I think back to that scared 17-year-old, my heart breaks for the added burden the church imposed.” A man told me that he lost faith because “when my mother was very ill just before she died, the church was unresponsive, even though she had a deep faith and had been very involved.”

I was thinking of these responses when I heard the news yesterday that the Southern Baptist Convention voted at its annual meeting to oppose in vitro fertilization. My newsroom colleague Ruth Graham explained that “the resolution does not explicitly oppose the creation of embryos ‘in vitro’ (in glass), but it does criticize the destruction of embryos, condemning the I.V.F. process as commonly practiced.”

I have watched several friends and family members experience the emotional pain of infertility and go through I.V.F. and other assisted reproductive technologies. Struggling to have children is not rare. A National Health Statistics Report published in April found that impaired fecundity, or the physical ability to have children, affects around 13 percent of women and 11 percent of men.

The idea that any faith community — particularly one that puts so much emphasis on motherhood — would place additional stress or judgment on someone going through this already difficult process makes me tremendously sad. Condemning I.V.F. is also out of step with many religious Americans. “Clear majorities of white evangelicals (63 percent), Black Protestants (69 percent) and Catholics (65 percent)” said I.V.F. is a good thing, according to polling published in May from the Pew Research Center.

During the most difficult times of their lives, people desire a community that will rally around them. Many find particular comfort in religious ritual when they are hurting. If modern churches want to stem the tide of disaffiliation, they should be opening their arms wider, not closing themselves off.

When history looks back on our current first lady, Jill Biden, what will people talk about most?

Will they remember that she was the first presidential wife to hold down an outside job while she lived in the White House? (Biden teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College.) Her work on issues like cancer prevention? Her long and apparently happy marriage to the president?

Well, the Bidens’ 46 years still has a way to go to match Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77.

Or will we remember her loyal appearances in court while Hunter Biden’s trial was underway? She’s certainly trying to fulfill both maternal and political duties — last week she was commuting back and forth between the courthouse in Delaware and diplomatic appearances in France.

“She’s his mother and he’s on trial, so of course she wants to be there as much as humanly possible,” said a spokesperson for her office.

Jill Biden is Hunter’s stepmother — Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, was killed in a car crash that also took the life of their daughter, Naomi, and injured Hunter and his brother, Beau. But it’s a tribute to her performance in the role that the public doesn’t generally make a distinction.

First lady history tends to not dip back very far in the popular memory. Everybody knows Martha Washington was first and remembers successors like Jackie Kennedy. A lot of people know that Eleanor Roosevelt became an international activist whose career soared long after her husband died. But someone like Ida McKinley doesn’t maintain much name recognition. (Ida has lived on in my memory ever since I read the story of her insistence on attending White House dinners even when she was suffering from epileptic seizures. William McKinley made it a point to sit next to his wife, so he could cover her face with his handkerchief whenever the need arose.)

The last half-dozen or so presidential wives have run the gamut. Hillary Clinton created a rather stupendous career of her own after Bill Clinton’s term ended; Melania Trump, um, kept a low profile.

Jill Biden has been a strong presence in the White House, when it comes to both matters of policy and politics. If I had to give her a bad mark, it’d be in what was probably a strong role in persuading Joe to run for another term at 81.

But boy, she’s been good at combining the roles of loyal wife-mother, first lady and dedicated educator. I hope history pictures her both in front of a classroom and sitting behind her boy in court. Meanwhile, kudos, Jill.

Patrick Healy, Deputy Opinion Editor: Bret, your column on President Biden’s theory of victory, at home politically and abroad in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, has drawn huge interest from readers and debate in the comments section. What inspired you to write the column now?

Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist: To quote Hendrix quoting Dylan, “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” If the president and his team don’t do something dramatic to turn around the dynamics of this election, Donald Trump will again be president next year. Scoring a couple of major foreign policy victories would help — and they are achievable, if only Biden doesn’t let his instinctive caution get in the way of the opportunities.

Patrick: You’ve generally been supportive of Biden’s approach to the war in Ukraine, Putin and Israel and to his overall posture on the offensive in Gaza. But in your column, you argue that he doesn’t have a theory of victory on these fronts. Did anything shift or change in Biden’s leadership — or in how you see it — that prompted your argument in the column?

Bret: Biden seems determined to ensure that Ukraine and Israel don’t lose to their enemies, while being much more reluctant to help them win. It’s why the administration consistently refused to deliver certain types of weapons — M-1 tanks, F-16 jets, ATACM missiles — until Ukrainian battlefield reversals forced the president’s hand. And it’s why the president is now pushing a cease-fire for Gaza that effectively guarantees Hamas’s survival. Both policies are strategic and political mistakes. The world will be a better place if Russia and Hamas suffer conclusive defeats. And Biden will be in better shape, politically, if he can be the co-author of those victories.

Patrick: You end the column with the striking argument that the most courageous thing Biden can do is to step aside in the 2024 race and let another Democrat run for president. It’s a big deal when a columnist makes a call like that. How much did you wrestle over it?

Bret: I’ve been pressing the case since 2021, when I argued that Biden would better serve his country, party and legacy by being the transitional president he all but promised to be as a candidate. Democrats could defeat Trump in a landslide if they coalesced around a younger, centrist governor like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear.

Final point: Any reader who thinks Biden is fit to go the distance in a second term should watch this video clip of him at a Juneteenth event on Monday. Be honest about what you see. As I said, the hour is getting late.

The most stinging condemnation of Israel’s slaughter of Gazan civilians as it fights to destroy Hamas is that Israelis devalue Palestinian lives, as others had devalued theirs.

It’s becoming clearer that for many who make that denunciation, the reverse is true.

On Monday, anti-Israel demonstrators in Manhattan protested the Nova Music Festival Exhibition with a sign that said, “Long Live Oct. 7,” the day Hamas and its supporters massacred 1,200 Israelis.

This wasn’t the first time protesters who professed a concern for human life showed little regard for Jewish lives.

On Oct. 8, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Times Square callously joked about how the hundreds of young Israelis Hamas butchered at that festival “were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

A day later, as the dead were still being counted, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace announced that Hamas’s butchery was “an unprecedented historic moment” and “a counteroffensive” against oppression.

Soon after, Israel’s foes were tearing down fliers commemorating the more than 200 Israelis, including babies, women and the elderly, whom Hamas was holding captive.

Most American protesters horrified by Israel’s devastation of Gaza simply want an end to the carnage and think slogans like “from the river to the sea” are just expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. But from the beginning there has been a significant segment of demonstrators who mask their Jew-hatred with intimidating rhetoric.

The person who rallied a Columbia University encampment in April to clasp hands and keep out “Zionists” had previously said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

On Monday, a mob with kaffiyehs covering many of their faces stood in a New York City subway car and chanted, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist; this is your chance to get out,” using the English translation of Juden Raus.

Anti-Israel vandals who defaced the homes of the director and trustees of the Brooklyn Museum early Wednesday painted inverted red triangles, which Hamas’s military wing has used to denote targets.

Many good people want Israel’s attack on Gaza to end and for there to be real peace with Palestinian sovereignty. But they should have nothing to do with those who think that will be achieved by shunning Jews and shedding Jewish blood.

For inflation nerds, Wednesday was a double-whammy day: a new inflation report in the morning, a Federal Reserve interest rate announcement in the afternoon. And there was a weird dissonance between those two data points.

First, that inflation report was extremely encouraging, almost too good to be true. Actually, it probably was too good to be true: monthly numbers are noisy. But while this report was too good to be true, it helped make the case that the discouraging numbers early this year were too bad to be true.

The real story, I’d argue, is that inflation is yesterday’s problem. In fact, it has been under control for months. But that reality has been hard to see, given the noisiness of the data.

Consider core inflation — prices excluding volatile food and energy prices — excluding shelter inflation, which we know is still being driven by rapid rent increases that ended a year or more ago. Here’s core inflation minus the figures for shelter at an annual rate month by month, and over the previous year:

Nobody thinks prices actually fell last month, but the negative number highlighted how erratic the monthly data is. We should discount those big numbers early this year, which probably reflected start-of-year price resets rather than underlying inflation.

Meanwhile, the annual rate of inflation has been around 2 percent, the Fed’s target, since last fall. Basically, we’ve been where we want to be for around eight months.

But the Fed — burned by its failure to foresee the inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 — isn’t ready to say that yet. Its economic projections, mostly made before Wednesday morning’s numbers, show only gradual progress against inflation. Of course, it didn’t cut rates (nobody thought it would), and its statement about that decision was only slightly more dovish than the last one.

The rest of us, however, don’t have to be that cautious. Inflation has basically been defeated, and interest rates will be coming down — not now, and maybe not at the next meeting, but soon and for the rest of this year and much of next.

In Normandy last week, President Biden gave a speech defending democracy that was designed to evoke Ronald Reagan’s famed “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” address in the same spot 40 years ago.

But if Biden wants to make sure democracy is defended from tyrants, he should emulate Reagan in another way: the Gipper’s leisurely travel style.

Nancy Reagan was always on guard, making sure her husband wasn’t being overstuffed with facts or overbooked with travel.

When I accompanied the couple in 1986 to Tokyo for the Group of 7 summit, we wended our way there blissfully slowly. A stop in L.A., a couple of nights in Honolulu, a look-see in Guam, three nights in the paradise of Bali. Nearly a week later, when we finally reached Japan, Reagan was tanned, rested and ready. (By contrast, when Bush 41 — known in Asia for having a frenetic “ants on a hot pan” personality — dashed around the Pacific Rim in 1992, he threw up on the Japanese prime minister and fainted in his lap at a banquet.)

Reagan was 75 when we went on that dream trip, but he never acted as if there was a problem with his age (even though it would seem later that there was, given his subsequent Alzheimer’s diagnosis). He played the ancient king, gliding along at his own pace.

Reagan wasn’t immune from criticism about his age, but he wore his years better than Biden, who seems in denial. And no one is stepping in to schedule him any breathing room; Jill Biden, the Nancy to Biden’s Ronnie, has a schedule that’s even more frenetic than Joe’s.

Biden and his staff always seem to be frantically trying to prove he’s energetic enough to govern. The 81-year-old sometimes jogs to the podium. And he’s trying to exhibit, through a strenuous travel schedule, that he’s up to the job. He arrived back in the United States on Sunday and went to Wilmington, Del. He came back to Washington the next day to host an early Juneteenth concert at the White House. On Tuesday, he gave a gun safety speech at the Washington Hilton — awkward, after Hunter’s guilty verdict on gun charges. He went straight from the Hilton to Andrews Air Force Base, and flew to Delaware where he gave his beleaguered son a hug on the tarmac.

On Wednesday, three days after he left Europe, the president schlepped back to Europe, this time for a G7 summit in Italy, and meetings with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the pope, and a joint news conference with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. On Friday, he flies through cascading time zones to L.A. for a glittering George Clooney-Julia Roberts-Jimmy Kimmel fund-raiser with Barack Obama as a guest star.

Nancy Reagan would be appalled. Sometimes for an older president, it’s better to glide than jog.

What will happen in November’s election? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. But I thought it might be worth flagging a development that probably isn’t getting enough notice: Americans seem to be quietly getting more optimistic about the economy.

We’ve come to take it as a given that no amount of good news will change Americans’ negative view of the economy; they were shocked by the inflation of 2021 and ’22, and the story goes, it will be years before they acknowledge that inflation is down and jobs are abundant. But there are at least hints that views may be changing, and faster than many observers realize.

One source of evidence is the New York Fed’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations. I usually follow that survey to track expected inflation, which remains fairly subdued. But the survey also asks consumers whether they expect their financial situation to be better or worse a year from now. Here’s the difference between the percentage who said better off and those who said worse off:

There has been a huge improvement not just since the worst of the inflation surge but even since late last year. We’re almost back to the optimism that prevailed in President Biden’s early months, before inflation took off.

Another source of evidence, albeit with less of a track record, is a survey conducted by The Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which asks voters whether Biden or Donald Trump would do a better job of managing the economy. Earlier this year Trump had a double-digit lead; now it’s down to four points.

It’s still unlikely that the economy will be a net plus for Biden. But it may be much less of a drag than many expect (especially given falling gas prices). Which in turn means that the election may turn on other issues, like the Republican threat to birth control.

Martha-Ann Alito, who is married to Justice Samuel Alito, has admitted that she flies politicized flags outside her homes because she can’t stand the colors of the rainbow.

“I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag,” she told a woman posing as a Catholic conservative, “because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Tellingly, in the surreptitiously recorded conversation, she even fantasized about creating her own fiery flag with the word “vergogna” (“shame” in Italian) so she could say to her neighbors, “Shame, shame, shame, on you.”

Apparently, for Ms. Alito, the second great commandment, to love thy neighbor, applies only until the neighbor is proud enough to sport rainbows. Then vergogna!

To be honest, these comments aren’t particularly surprising. Ms. Alito is the wife of a justice who agreed that the country needs to return to “a place of godliness” and has argued that the court’s ruling on marriage equality restricts the free speech rights of religious conservatives. (If that’s really true, somebody should tell her to zip it before she’s jailed for her words.)

They are also emblematic of a broader campaign by the religious right to erase or shame queer culture from public view, often in the form of attempted — and successful — bans on books, flags, drag performances and curriculums. The only thing mildly revealing about Ms. Alito’s comments is that they signal it is still socially acceptable for religious conservatives to demean the queer community in supposedly polite company.

While it is undeniably exhausting that anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiments continue to infect members of America’s most powerful institutions, queer people should take heart that even the most benign of our symbols, the rainbow flag, still so bothers those who hate us.

In 1978, Gilbert Baker — an activist who was, as he put it, the “gay Betsy Ross” — and a group of volunteers dyed and stitched the first rainbow Pride flag in the attic of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco. While the flag has undergone many transformations since, the rainbow has endured as a welcome, if sometimes clichéd, Pride symbol.

As the rainbow has frequently been deployed by corporations or “allies” that take little interest in L.G.B.T.Q. equality outside of a boozy June weekend, some queer people may think it has become too watered down to stand as a powerful symbol. But predictable outrage, from the Phyllises and Anitas and Martha-Anns, should remind even the most cynical of us that our symbols often speak far louder than we could alone.

In the face of a rise in attempts to restrict cultural expressions of queer identity, the rainbow is still one of the best tools we have to collectively repudiate those who wish we were ashamed to be alive. We must wave it proudly.

As for you, Martha-Ann, I say happy Pride Month! I’ll be praying for you.

As a rule, it is not a good thing for your son to be convicted of a crime, and particularly not when you are the sitting president in the heat of a brutal re-election campaign.

But Hunter Biden’s conviction in federal court on Tuesday, on charges of lying on a firearms application six years ago, is a net positive — not for himself, of course, or his long-suffering family, but ultimately for his father, the American justice system and the rule of law.

After all, isn’t this how it’s supposed to work? You break the law, you face the consequences. Even if you’re the president’s son. Even if you’re the former president.

It was only two weeks ago that Republicans were thundering about the outrageous injustice of a different guilty verdict. Funny, I haven’t heard much complaining about this one, even though it involves a “paperwork” offense (boo!) that relates to gun regulations (extra boo!). The only complaints I recall were that Hunter was getting off too easy with a plea deal … until that fell through at the last minute.

On Tuesday, the right-wing naysayers got an actual guilty verdict, and still they tied themselves in knots trying to dismiss its significance. (I’ll save you the trouble: To them, Hunter’s conviction is a coverup for his and his dad’s real crimes. Also, any Biden conviction is de facto legitimate while any Trump conviction is de facto fraudulent.) What the hacks couldn’t erase were the unanimous verdicts of two juries in two jurisdictions. (Not to mention the Justice Department’s upcoming and more serious prosecution of Hunter on tax charges.)

Sure, the system is far from perfect. Rich and powerful people get off all the time; poor people more often don’t. And yet the past two weeks have provided an object lesson in the fair administration of justice, and the seriousness that characterizes criminal trials and jury deliberations. We talk a lot about the presumption of innocence, but that foundational principle derives its meaning only within the context of a society that actually holds its wrongdoers to account.

If the Hunter Biden prosecutions illustrate anything, it is that his father’s administration respects equal justice and the rule of law, so much so that the president stood down even as his own flesh and blood was facing a potential prison term. Can you imagine, for even a fraction of a second, Donald Trump allowing the Justice Department — his Justice Department — to prosecute any of his children? Or that he wouldn’t pre-emptively pardon them, just to be doubly safe?

Of course you can’t, and that is as important a difference as exists between the two candidates for president in 2024.

Today’s Supreme Court may bear Chief Justice John Roberts’s name, but it is not his court, nor has it been for many years.

This was demonstrated once again this week — not in a formal public opinion but in a recording released by a woman who had infiltrated a private court event last week and surreptitiously taped her conversations with the justices.

Posing as a conservative Catholic, the woman, Lauren Windsor, asserted that America is a Christian nation and it is the court’s role to lead it on a “moral path.”

Roberts refused to take the bait. “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” he responded. “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” He also disagreed that America is a Christian nation.

This was, of course, the easy and correct answer. Roberts knows that the court’s legitimacy relies entirely on the trust of the American people. You don’t have to wonder if he’s a closet liberal (and he’s far from it) to expect him and his colleagues to approach the nation’s most fraught legal disputes with fairness or at least with respect for the separation of church and state.

Justice Samuel Alito can’t be bothered with such earthly concerns. In response to Windsor’s claim that religious Americans have to keep fighting “to return our country to a place of godliness,” he said, “I agree with you. I agree with you.”

“One side or the other is going to win,” he added.

In one sense, this is no surprise coming from the court’s leading culture warrior. Alito has long made clear his special solicitude for religious claims, whether before the court or on the flagpole outside his house. Still, it should shock us to hear him lay out his worldview so bluntly. It shows an utter lack of regard for the court’s delicate posture of neutrality in the constitutional system and American society.

For a long time, Alito seemed like an outlier on the court, lobbing his sour, grievance-filled dissents from the sidelines. He is now ascendant, writing the lead opinion in the decision striking down the right to abortion and many other precedent-breaking rulings. He is also in good company in the upper reaches of government. Recall that House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told an interviewer after he got the job, “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

Perhaps we should be grateful that these aspiring theocrats have fully ripped off the mask. Why submit to the sinful compromises demanded by a pluralistic society when you can just impose your (and God’s) will by fiat? In that regard, this is really the Alito court.

That far-right parties made gains in the just-concluded elections to the European Parliament somehow doesn’t seem too shocking, though President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold snap elections to the French Parliament as a result was quite the coup de théâtre. Maybe it’s that the threatening cloud of the far right has become familiar over Western democracies, including the United States, as they cope with immigration, climate change, social change, culture wars, real wars and other sources of popular disquiet.

The European elections have their own dynamics, and a few reasons for the lack of panic over its results come to mind. One is that many of the 373 million voters in 27 member countries of the European Union don’t take the European elections as seriously as they do national elections and often use them to sound off on domestic issues. That’s not to say they’re right to do so; the European Parliament does have considerable clout in setting Pan-European policy. But postelection analyses focused far more on the message for national leaders — terrible for Macron or Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and great for Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni — than any potential impact on the European Union.

Second, while the far right made major gains, they were less impressive than many analysts had feared. The European Parliament’s center easily held, and Ursula von der Leyen, a German Christian Democrat (a conservative), will probably retain her powerful position as president of the European Commission. Not much is likely to change in the European Union.

So why did Macron panic? Maybe he didn’t. According to French press reports, his decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call for immediate elections was quietly plotted before the European elections as it became evident that Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, a perennial nationalist thorn in the side of French politics, was likely to make big gains under its new star, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.

It seems curious that Macron would saddle France with fateful parliamentary elections as it prepares for the Summer Olympics. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, called it “extremely unsettling.” But to dismiss the move as panic, a desperate gamble, is to underestimate Macron, whose sweep to power in 2014 as a 36-year-old wunderkind was deemed a stunning feat.

His Renaissance Party has not been doing well of late, and he apparently concluded that quick elections over the tangible threat of a resurgent right may be the boost he needs. French elections are held in two rounds — these will be on June 30 and July 7 — and Macron hopes that French voters will do what they have often done, which is to vote their gripes in the first round and their reason in the second. He, in any case, will remain president for three more years.

Normally the “messaging bills” that each party regularly brings to a vote in Congress seem like huge wastes of time. The bills are meant only to put members of the opposite party in an uncomfortable position on a wedge issue when it comes time to run negative campaign ads. These days, it’s often what Congress does instead of actually working for the public.

But the latest Democratic effort on contraception may actually serve a useful purpose. Many people may not fully grasp the growing Republican effort to limit access to birth control. The bills in the House and Senate might at least help make it clear how serious that threat is.

Last week, Senate Democrats tried to pass the Right to Contraception Act, which would prohibit any restrictions to birth control access at the federal, state and local level. It predictably failed to overcome a Republican filibuster, but it got 38 Republicans to go on the record as voting against it. In the House, Democrats are circulating a petition to force a vote on a similar bill, which will also fail, but the names of Republicans who don’t sign will be publicized in ads across the country by a group called Americans for Contraception.

Republicans claim there’s no need for these bills because contraception access is already protected by the 1965 Supreme Court decision known as Griswold v. Connecticut.

“Nobody’s going to overturn Griswold,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “No way.”

But that’s exactly what many Republicans said about Roe v. Wade before it was tossed aside, and when that happened Justice Clarence Thomas openly called for Griswold to be reconsidered, too. In Hawley’s home state, where abortion is now banned, a bipartisan group of women in the legislature have tried to expand access to birth control by requiring insurance policies to cover a year’s supply. That effort has been blocked by Republicans who say that the contraceptives will cause abortions.

The false connection between abortion and contraception is behind most of the Republican opposition, and as The Washington Post recently reported, surveys show that most Americans don’t understand that emergency contraception agents like Plan B don’t cause abortions. Many right-wing groups like the Idaho Family Policy Center falsely claim that they do. Seventeen states have now blocked efforts to assure a right to birth control, and Donald Trump said last month that he was open to those kinds of state restrictions. (Later, after realizing that was a bad look, he backtracked.)

More voters need to know that Republicans, from the top down, are willing to let states deprive residents of their birth control.

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:

• In terms of where everyone is: President Biden will be in Italy later this week for the Group of 7 meeting. Donald Trump will be in Washington on Thursday for an event with the Business Roundtable. The Supreme Court will also release opinions that morning.

• During the N.B.A. finals that began on Thursday, the Biden campaign ran a TV ad titled, “Flag,” which really mirrors a strategy that senior officials described to The New Yorker earlier this year. It’s highly focused on “freedom” conceptually, through the prism of abortion, voting rights and a few other issues. While the issues are definitely longstanding Democratic priorities, if you watch it, the solemn patriotic tone of the ad feels a little old school Republican to me — it’s an interesting artifact of how things have changed. Biden is running to preserve rights and freedoms, or, through another lens, conserve the old ways.

• Late last week, Fox News released a poll showing Biden and Trump even in Virginia (which Biden won 54-44 in 2020) and with Trump only up 4 points in Florida (which isn’t far off 2020, but still seems a little surprisingly close). A very tight result in Virginia in November would most likely reflect big problems elsewhere for Biden. I’m a little skeptical it’s that close, but The Washington Post took a good look at Virginia, and presented a wide range of expert opinions about what might be going on there.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to get on the ballot in many states, which might account for a somewhat unusual schedule. (He’s been in Colorado and Tennessee recently.) He will be in New Mexico over the weekend, at an event focused on addiction.

• This is fairly tangential to the presidential race, but Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman, faces a primary challenge on Tuesday from a few candidates with the possibility of a runoff if nobody reaches 50 percent. Mace has had a sort of unusual congressional career, veering between criticizing Trump after Jan. 6 to endorsing him (and vice versa); Kevin McCarthy, still incensed that she voted to oust him, has helped her opponent.

• If you’re interested in thinking about affordability and inflation, and then, secondarily, how people are processing these concepts politically, definitely check out Ezra Klein’s latest episode of his Opinion podcast with Annie Lowrey. The two, who are married, go really deep on all of it, including thinking about the economic politics of 2012 and today.

Boy, Republicans can’t get enough of Hunter Biden and his drug-gun thing, right?

Well, it is a pretty juicy story. The son of the president, with a long history of substance abuse, is being prosecuted for denying he was using drugs when he bought a revolver.

But don’t you think the focus is kind of … narrow? Endless talk about how Hunter lied. Not much comment at all on the fact that just being asked whether you’re on drugs is a pretty modest approach to firearm safety.

All state laws are different. Delaware, where Hunter got his revolver, recently made some big changes. It will require anyone who buys a gun to first complete a firearm safety training program.

Don’t imagine Hunter would have made it through that one in his addict era. Yet many, many of the people doing the loudest howling about the president’s son are connected with the people who have challenged the reform law in court, arguing that it’s a violation of their civil rights.

As Jonathan Weisman pointed out in The Times, it’s “hard to make much of allegations that Hunter Biden lied about his drug use to purchase a handgun when your party is sponsoring legislation to ease gun-purchasing restrictions for veterans struggling with mental illness, not to mention the case before the Supreme Court that could allow domestic abusers to buy firearms.”

Just saying.