Fauci fights back while staying above the fray, and Trump strikes a blow at the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. It’s Thursday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- Dr. Anthony Fauci has been both an emissary of despair and an almost Buddha-like presence throughout the coronavirus outbreak. With a poise that has served him well during more than 35 years as the United States’ top infectious disease expert, Fauci has declined to criticize White House officials, even as they question, or simply ignore, his advice on containing the pandemic.
- But with President Trump’s team stepping up its attacks on Fauci, he decided it was time to push back. Over the weekend, White House aides sent reporters a list of statements Fauci had made that they considered regrettable, and Dan Scavino, a top Trump adviser, posted a political cartoon on his personal Facebook page ridiculing Fauci.
- Yesterday, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, published an op-ed article in USA Today claiming that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”
- Fauci responded in an interview published yesterday afternoon in The Atlantic, calling the White House’s criticisms “bizarre.” He maintained an above-the-fray attitude even as he expressed dismay. “I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” he said. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”
- At least one presidential candidate’s Twitter account (two, if we’re counting Kanye West) was hit by a cyberattack targeting celebrities yesterday afternoon. The hacked accounts posted a series of similar messages asking people to send money to cryptocurrency accounts and promising to reimburse all donors two times over.
- Joe Biden’s account was among those targeted. Around 4 p.m., a message appeared on his profile stating: “All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled!” The Bitcoin address posted on Biden’s account and other famous users’ profiles received over $100,000 in donations, according to Blockchain.com, a cryptocurrency exchange.
- “Twitter locked down the account immediately following the breach and removed the related tweet,” Biden’s campaign said in a statement. “We remain in touch with Twitter on the matter.”
- In addition to Biden and West, other users whose accounts were compromised included Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
- Yesterday we told you about Biden’s newly unveiled $2 trillion plan to fight climate change. Today let’s talk about the Trump administration’s approach. Trump issued a new rule yesterday that undercuts the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act by limiting the amount of time allowed for government reviews before infrastructure projects can proceed.
- Trump called the change “something very dramatic,” and pledged that it would save hundreds of millions of dollars and cut through “mountains and mountains of red tape.”
- The administration has taken steps to curtail 100 rules and regulations protecting clean air and water, and others aimed at fighting climate change — but the move to weaken NEPA, known to conservationists as the Magna Carta of environmental policy, is one of the boldest yet.
- “This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years,” said Brett Hartl of the Center for Biological Diversity.
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- Trump announced last night that he was replacing his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, as polls continue to show the president’s approval rating down and his re-election prospects darkening. Parscale was named to the role in 2018, relatively early as these things go, and he was a chief architect of the campaign’s digital strategy.
- The deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien, who unlike Parscale is a longtime political operative, will take over the role.
- The change in leadership invites the question of whether Trump’s strategy will meaningfully change in the weeks ahead. So far, his campaign has focused heavily on driving up enthusiasm among his base — perhaps reflecting the fact that nearly half of Americans report in polls that they are certain they won’t be voting for Trump.
- Case in point: A Trump campaign ad released yesterday paints a bleak and distressing picture of life in America under a Biden presidency, suggesting that Biden’s support for reallocating some police funding to social programs was part of a “radical left wing mob’s agenda,” and concluding with the words, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” emblazoned across the screen.
- And with new polls showing the public losing faith in Trump’s handling of the economy — which has long been a cornerstone of his political identity — the White House on Tuesday unveiled a new jobs initiative encouraging unemployed Americans to “find something new.”
- The effort, which features its own website and digital advertising campaign, aims to help workers find career paths that don’t require a college degree. “Jobs are changing — and the Covid-19 has accelerated the pace,” Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and policy adviser, said in a tweet announcing the program.
- Critics derided the campaign as tone deaf, saying it appeared to place too much burden on workers to adjust under the weight of the pandemic. “Somewhere Marie Antoinette is relieved that Ivanka’s Find Something New! has replaced Let Them Eat Cake,” Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Obama, wrote on Twitter.
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 | | Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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President Trump delivered remarks yesterday in Atlanta about infrastructure. |
Could the ‘shy Trump’ effect in polling actually help Biden? |
Biden now leads Trump by double digits in some of the most reputable nationwide polls, and even in surveys of some crucial swing states where Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. |
But after the polling and forecasting debacles of 2016, when many state polls underestimated Trump’s strength — particularly in the Midwest — some Americans remain doubtful that polling is really telling the full story. |
One of the biggest questions on many observers’ minds has to do with what is known as the “shy Trump” phenomenon: the idea that some people who support Trump will refuse to tell pollsters that they plan to vote for him, out of fear that they will be judged negatively for it. |
One of those pollsters is Patrick Murray, who runs the polling institute at Monmouth University. Yesterday, Monmouth released a survey showing Biden with a towering, 13-percentage-point lead over Trump in Pennsylvania. The survey also found that, when asked, most Pennsylvania voters said they thought the “shy Trump” effect was real. |
Fifty-seven percent of voters in the state said they thought there were “secret voters” in their communities who were going to vote for Trump but wouldn’t admit it publicly. |
And no wonder: Polls in 2016 consistently overestimated Clinton’s strength there; as a result, so did the election forecasters reliant on state polls. Many people assumed some Trump supporters had simply lied to pollsters. |
But Murray and his team conducted a post-mortem in the state, seeking to understand why their own 2016 polls had been overly kind to Clinton. After Trump emerged victorious, they called back voters to check whether people who previously said they wouldn’t support him had come around to voting for him. |
“There weren’t many out there, certainly not enough to affect the overall results by more than a point,” Murray said in an interview. “In fact what we saw was that the unenthusiastic Hillary Clinton voters who decided to stay home were significantly more of a factor,” he added. “It was the Clinton voter who didn’t like her that much, and didn’t think their vote was needed based on what the media was saying was going to happen.” |
Now, Murray said, he has evidence that the “shy Trump” effect isn’t real — but also that people tend to think it is. So where does that leave us? |
“The likely impact seems to be that the kind of voter who was not that enthusiastic last time but was against Trump, and stayed home, is not going to stay home this time around,” Murray said. “It’s feeding into their anxiety that you can’t take the polls for granted right now, and so I think that the more that this idea of a ‘shy Trump’ vote persists, the more it’s probably going to end up helping Joe Biden.” |
Trump’s coronavirus calculus, and the unconventional conventions |
Join us today for two separate New York Times events: |
At 11 a.m. Eastern, our White House correspondent Maggie Haberman will join Andrew Ross Sorkin and the DealBook team for a behind-the-scenes look at what to expect in the months ahead from the Trump administration as the pandemic continues. R.S.V.P. here to attend virtually. |
And at 5 p.m. Eastern, the Times political reporters Katie Glueck, Annie Karni, Lisa Lerer and Jennifer Medina will gather (virtually) to dive deep into the world of conventions — how they’re changing, why they matter and the latest on this unusual political summer. Rachel Dry, deputy politics editor, will host. You can R.S.V.P. here. |
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| Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
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