Category: Michael Novakhov’s favorite articles

Not only does the Times denounce Trump as an individual, it places Trump and the Republican Party as one in the same ahead of the upcoming convention. “A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great,” they wrote.

Nearly two weeks ago, the board also wrote that President Joe Biden should step aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee after his startling debate performance, writing that leaving the presidential race would be the “greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform.” Their reasoning for calling on Biden to leave hinged on the same beliefs as the editorial published Thursday: Trump cannot and should not be president, in their eyes.

“The burden rests on the Democratic Party to put the interests of the nation above the ambitions of a single man,” the editorial said. They doubled down on Monday, calling on elected Democrats to “speak forcefully to the president and the public about the need for a new candidate.”

“President Biden clearly understands the stakes. But he seems to have lost track of his own role in this national drama,” the board wrote. “As the situation has become more dire, he has come to regard himself as indispensable. He does not seem to understand that he is now the problem — and that the best hope for Democrats to retain the White House is for him to step aside.”

On Thursday, they called directly on voters to use their power at the ballot box against Trump, regardless of who is ultimately on the ballot opposing him. “We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it.”

“When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don’t give him the most important job in the world,” the board concludes.

Republican presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court and worked with Democrats on bipartisan tax and immigration reforms. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act and decisively defended an ally, Kuwait, against Iraqi aggression. George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept. 11, did not stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.

As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trump’s failings and voting for his removal from office.

These acts of leadership are what it means to put country first, to think beyond oneself.

Mr. Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires autocrats, from Viktor Orban to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un. He believes in the strongman model of power — a leader who makes things happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship, ideas and hope.

During his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to govern the United States as a strongman would, issuing orders or making decrees on Twitter. He announced sudden changes in policy — on who can serve in the military, on trade policy, on how the United States deals with North Korea or Russia — without consulting experts on his staff about how these changes would affect America. Indeed, nowhere did he put his political or personal interests above the national interest more tragically than during the pandemic, when he faked his way through a crisis by touting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience while ignoring the advice of his own experts and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.

He took a similar approach to America’s strategic relationships abroad. Mr. Trump lost the trust of America’s longstanding allies, especially in NATO, leaving Europe less secure and emboldening the far right and authoritarian leaders in Europe, Latin America and Asia. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, leaving that country, already a threat to the world, more dangerous, thanks to a revived program that has achieved near-weapons-grade uranium.

In a second term, his willingness to appease Mr. Putin would leave Ukraine’s future as a democratic and independent country in doubt. Mr. Trump implies that he could single-handedly end the catastrophic war in Gaza but has no real plan. He has suggested that in a second term he’d increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 60 percent or higher and that he would put a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, moves that would raise prices for American consumers and reduce innovation by allowing U.S. industries to rely on protectionism instead.

The worst of the Trump administration’s policies were often blocked by Congress, by court challenges and by the objections of honorable public servants who stepped in to thwart his demands when they were irresponsible or did not follow the law. When Mr. Trump wanted an end to Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it, preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused. Scientists and public health officials called out and corrected his misinformation about climate science and Covid. The Supreme Court sided against the Trump administration more times than any other president since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A second Trump administration would be different. He intends to fill his administration with sycophants, those who have shown themselves willing to obey Mr. Trump’s demands or those who lack the strength to stand up to him. He wants to remove those who would be obstacles to his agenda, by enacting an order to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with those more loyal to him.

This means not only that Americans would lose the benefit of their expertise but also that America would be governed in a climate of fear, in which government employees must serve the interests of the president rather than the public. All cabinet secretaries follow a president’s lead, but Mr. Trump envisions a nation in which public service as Americans understand it would cease to exist — where individual civil servants and departments could no longer make independent decisions and where research by scientists and public health experts and investigations by the Justice Department and others in federal law enforcement would be more malleable to the demands of the White House.

Another term under Mr. Trump’s leadership would risk doing permanent damage to our government. As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay for Times Opinion, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.” Very few who serve under him can avoid this fate “because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,” Mr. Comey wrote. “Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.” America will get nowhere with a strongman. It needs a strong leader.

Not only does the Times denounce Trump as an individual, it places Trump and the Republican Party as one in the same ahead of the upcoming convention. “A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great,” they wrote.

Nearly two weeks ago, the board also wrote that President Joe Biden should step aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee after his startling debate performance, writing that leaving the presidential race would be the “greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform.” Their reasoning for calling on Biden to leave hinged on the same beliefs as the editorial published Thursday: Trump cannot and should not be president, in their eyes.

“The burden rests on the Democratic Party to put the interests of the nation above the ambitions of a single man,” the editorial said. They doubled down on Monday, calling on elected Democrats to “speak forcefully to the president and the public about the need for a new candidate.”

“President Biden clearly understands the stakes. But he seems to have lost track of his own role in this national drama,” the board wrote. “As the situation has become more dire, he has come to regard himself as indispensable. He does not seem to understand that he is now the problem — and that the best hope for Democrats to retain the White House is for him to step aside.”

On Thursday, they called directly on voters to use their power at the ballot box against Trump, regardless of who is ultimately on the ballot opposing him. “We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it.”

“When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don’t give him the most important job in the world,” the board concludes.

Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who this week paid £400m for a 3% stake in BT, has traversed some of life’s highest peaks and lowest ebbs.

He claims that in 1997, aged 57, he was briefly declared dead after suffering a massive haemorrhage on the operating table at the Texas Heart Institute during surgery to replace a faulty heart valve.

Thirteen years later he was named the world’s wealthiest man by the American business magazine Forbes, his fortune estimated at $73bn.

While Slim, the son of Lebanese immigrants, has fallen off the list of the top 10 richest people in the world amid the rise of tech bros such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, his net worth has swollen to $93bn.

What’s more, his investment in BT shows that at the age of 84 he has not lost his renowned appetite for opportunistic investment, swooping on the company’s shares at a time when many analysts are predicting a brighter future under the new chief executive Allison Kirkby.

Investors appeared cheered by Slim’s latest move: BT’s shares rose 4% on Thursday. He’s not the only billionaire on the share register: Altice, the group controlled by Moroccan-born telecoms mogul Patrick Drahi, is its largest shareholder.

BT and Slim seem a good fit. The Slim empire was founded on telecoms, in particular América Móvil, which secured a virtual monopoly on the telephone business in Mexico, a country of more than 100 million people.

But Slim also has interests in a sprawling array of sectors, including manufacturing, retail, energy and aviation.

Many of his investments are housed within Grupo Carso, a holding company whose title is a portmanteau of the first letters of his own name and that of his late wife, Soumaya Domit, with whom he had six children.

Slim cuts a divisive figure in Mexico, according to his biographer, Diego Enrique Osorno, author of Slim: A Political Biography of the Richest Mexican in the World. “There are Mexicans who look at Slim with pride and see him as an aspirational figure … and there are those who consider him to be the symbol of our inequality,” said Osorno.

Slim is known for taking a simple but effective approach to investing, swooping on undervalued assets in times of economic turmoil and picking up bargains amid market panic.

Amid the global financial crisis that began in 2008 he snapped up a $150m stake in the Wall Street bank Citigroup and loaned $250m to the New York Times – saving it from bankruptcy, by some accounts.

He is said to have picked up his shrewdness for a deal from his father, Julián Slim Haddad, who arrived in Mexico in 1902 in order to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army. The Lebanese immigrant is said to have given his children ledgers to help them understand how to interpret financial transactions.

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The young Slim, who was a keen baseball player in Mexico City’s middle class Polanco suburb, would trade baseball cards in the playground, keeping a weather eye on his accounts. By 11 he had already bought his first government savings bonds. By 15 he had invested in Banco Nacional de México. Upon leaving university, he became part of a clique known as “los Casabolseros” – a group of slick young stock market players.

According to Osorno and the political commentator Denise Dresser, the mathematical nous Slim gleaned during his childhood, together with his vision for a deal, have played a part in his success, but so too has an instinct to stay on the right side of political elites at opportune moments. Many of his business interests were picked up at rock-bottom prices during privatisations by a cash-strapped state.

“Slim emerged as a Mexican prototype of the Russian oligarchs, as someone who multiplied their fortunes under the shadow of power,” said Dresser.

Unlike some Russian oligarchs, though, Slim developed a reputation for maintaining a low profile, eschewing flamboyance or showy megamansions, with the possible exception of the Duke Semans mansion, an eight-storey home on New York’s Fifth Avenue which he bought for $44m in 2010.

Slim does spend some of his vast fortune on art, though; his home has sculptures by Rodin, and paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh. In 1999, his wife died. Slim built an art museum and named it in her honour.

This audio is created with AI assistance