Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
September 15, 2019
Previously Unknown Sources Come Forward in a New Book About Harvey Weinstein
Two years before the allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against Harvey Weinstein became public, his own brother and business partner, Bob Weinstein, confronted him, pleading with him to get medical treatment for what he described as many years of “misbehavior.”
“You have brought shame to the family and your company through your misbehavior,” Bob Weinstein wrote. “Your reaction was once more to blame the victims, or to minimize the misbehavior in various ways. If you think nothing is wrong with your misbehavior so in this area then announce it to your wife and family.”
The previously unreported letter is reprinted in full in “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement,” a new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two reporters at The New York Times who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged misdeeds, helping to spark the global #MeToo reckoning. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Penguin Press, sheds new light on the roles that several figures played in enabling Mr. Weinstein and covering up his misdeeds, and names key sources who helped reporters break the story — including company officials, Hollywood stars and other victims of the producer’s alleged abuse.
Drawing on new reporting and previously undisclosed corporate records, emails and text messages, “She Said” uncovers more on the extent of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged transgressions, and the labyrinth of secret settlements and restrictive nondisclosure agreements that allowed Mr. Weinstein and other men in positions of power to conceal their behavior and thrive in their careers, in some cases finding new victims.
One of the central figures of “She Said” is a former top executive at the Weinstein Company: Irwin Reiter. Mr. Reiter, an accountant who worked for Mr. Weinstein for decades, was increasingly alarmed by his behavior toward women and had raised concerns within the company, to no avail. The book discloses that it was Mr. Reiter who provided the reporters with an explosive internal memo from an employee who described Weinstein’s routine harassment of junior female employees and actresses. Mr. Reiter also alerted Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey, who were investigating financial settlements for sexual harassment from decades ago, to other recent accusations against Mr. Weinstein, bringing new urgency to the investigation.
“She Said” similarly discloses the identity of a Weinstein accuser who has put off inquiries from journalists for 15 years, Rowena Chiu, a former assistant at Miramax who received a settlement in 1998 after Mr. Weinstein allegedly assaulted her in a hotel room. In Ms. Chiu’s account, which she shares in detail for the first time, she describes being silenced by a restrictive nondisclosure agreement and lured back to a job at Miramax in an apparent effort by Mr. Weinstein to keep her close. She struggled with depression and attempted suicide. She stayed silent for nearly 20 years, even declining to tell her husband about the predation or the settlement. (Mr. Weinstein has disputed her story.)
In his first extensive comments since the Weinstein story broke, Bob Weinstein explains that he mistakenly saw his brother’s problem as sex addiction, a rationale rooted in his own previously unreported recovery from substance abuse, and how he abandoned his attempts to intervene. “I got worn out,” he told the journalists. “I said, ‘I surrender,’ see?”
“She Said,” one of several forthcoming books about Mr. Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, is also an exploration of investigative journalism and how The Times executed a sensitive investigation. The book chronicles how the reporting came together behind the scenes, with accounts of the journalists’ first calls to actresses who they suspected had stories about Mr. Weinstein, and their efforts to identify recipients of confidential settlements. Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Mr. Weinstein’s biggest stars over the years, was scared to go on the record but became an early, crucial source, sharing her account of sexual harassment and trying to recruit other actresses to speak.
“She Said” shows how some figures who have presented themselves as allies of victims have profited from financial settlements that silence them.
The attorney Gloria Allred is one of the most vocal crusaders against sexual harassment and assault. Privately, her firm helped negotiate a settlement that muffled one of Mr. Weinstein’s victims in 2004, taking a 40 percent cut. (The firm has also worked on settlements that silenced victims of Larry Nassar and Bill O’Reilly.) In an interview for “She Said,” Allred defends her use of confidential settlements, arguing that clients are not forced to sign them and often prefer them for reasons of privacy.
Allred’s daughter, the lawyer Lisa Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Mr. Weinstein — at a rate of $895 an hour — to quash the journalists’ investigation and thwart his accusers. In a confidential memo to Mr. Weinstein that Ms. Bloom wrote in December 2016, which is reproduced in “She Said,” she offered to help him damage the reputation of one of his accusers, Rose McGowan, and portrayed her background as a victims’s rights advocate as an asset.
“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them,” Ms. Bloom wrote, before laying out a multistep playbook for how to intimidate accusers or paint them as liars. One of Ms. Bloom’s suggested tactics for undermining Ms. McGowan: “We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”
Ms. Bloom accompanied Mr. Weinstein on a surprise visit to the Times the day before the initial article was published, to present the journalists with information intended to portray several accusers — including Ashley Judd, the first actress to go on the record — as unreliable and mentally unstable.
Ms. Bloom has said she was crossing sides to work for Weinstein to encourage him to apologize for his behavior. She later told the reporters that she “deeply regretted” representing him, which she said was a “colossal mistake.”
In an interview for the book, Mr. Boies said he was unaware of the underhanded tactics that Black Cube used against journalists and regretted not paying closer attention to that firm’s work. But he defended the assistance he provided to Mr. Weinstein as the producer sought to conceal allegations and said he didn’t have “any regret that I represented him the way I did.”
“She Said” is among the first in a wave of new books about Mr. Weinstein and other powerful men accused of sexual misconduct. Earlier this year, Penguin Press acquired another Weinstein book by the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. Little, Brown and Company plans to release Mr. Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” an account of his own investigation into Mr. Weinstein, scheduled for publication in October.
Other recent and forthcoming books that grew out of the #MeToo movement and its aftermath include the journalist Abigail Pesta’s account of serial sexual abuse of young gymnasts by Larry Nassar; a book by the Times reporters Rachel Abrams and James B. Stewart about the former CBS chief executive Les Moonves, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women; and a book by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown about the serial sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein. There are also new books that grew out of reporting about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court, including the forthcoming “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,” by the Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.
Dr. Ford receives attention in “She Said,” providing for the first time an extensive account of her experience as an ambivalent figure at the center of a polarizing national scandal. She told her lawyers she did not want to testify — even as they spoke publicly about her willingness to do so in order to keep her options open.
Dr. Ford’s story is often held up as a cautionary tale about the limitations of the #MeToo movement in a politically divided nation, and the cost for victims whose stories are often met with disbelief, scorn and threats. But “She Said” shows how Dr. Ford has motivated other women to open up about sexual assault.
Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey write about a group interview they conducted that included Dr. Ford and women who had made accusations against President Donald Trump and Mr. Weinstein, including Ms. Judd, Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Chiu, the former Miramax employee. As the women spoke, Ms. Chiu felt inspired by Dr. Ford and, soon afterward, decided she would go on the record for the first time.
‘She Said’ Recounts How Two Times Reporters Broke the Harvey Weinstein Story
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Jodi Kantor and Megan TwoheyCreditCreditMartin Schoeller
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By Susan Faludi
SHE SAID Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
By Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Tell the truth: Do you really need to hear more about Harvey Weinstein? The open bathrobe, the hotel hot tubs, the syringes of erectile-dysfunction drugs delivered by cowed assistants, the transparent requests for “a massage,” the ejaculatory exhibitions — it’s not just indictable, it’s … ick, simultaneously pathological and pathetic.
Which explains the reluctance I felt sitting down to read “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement,” wherein the New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revisit at book length their investigative reporting on Weinstein, promising a “substantial amount” of new information. New information? More than 80 women have come forward to recount their encounters with the Oscar-award-monopolizer-and-patron-of-progressive-causes-turned-Tinseltown’s-über-ogre, the beast whose fleshy unshaven headshot every famous Hollywood beauty knows to hate, and whose trial has now been rescheduled for January to allow for additional testimony against him. What new gruesome details do we need?
But “She Said” isn’t retailing extra helpings of warmed-over salacity. The authors’ new information is less about the man and more about his surround-sound “complicity machine” of board members and lawyers, human resource officers and P.R. flaks, tabloid publishers and entertainment reporters who kept him rampaging with impunity years after his behavior had become an open secret. Kantor and Twohey instinctively understand the dangers of the Harvey-as-Monster story line — and the importance of refocusing our attention on structures of power. When they at last confront Weinstein, in a Times conference room and later on speakerphone, he’s the mouse that roared, the Great and Powerful Oz turned puny humbug, swerving from incoherent rants to self-pitying whimpers (“I’m already dead”) to sycophantic claims of just being one of them. (“If I wasn’t making movies, I would’ve been a journalist.”) He’s loathsome and self-serving, but his psychology is not the story they want to tell. The drama they chronicle instead is more complex and subtle, a narrative in which they are ultimately not mere observers but, essential to its moral message, protagonists themselves.
Kantor and Twohey broke the Weinstein story. Their 3,300-word Times article on Oct. 5, 2017, aired allegations against him that had been piling up as whispers and rumors for 30 years. That report, and the ones to follow, were grounded in scores of interviews with actresses and current and former employees, supplemented by legal filings, corporate records and internal company communications that documented a thick web of cover-ups, bullying tactics and confidential settlements. It was bravura journalism.
“We watched with astonishment as a dam wall broke,” Kantor and Twohey write of the response to that first article. A day after it was published, so many women phoned The Times to report allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Weinstein that the paper had to assign additional reporters to handle the calls. On Oct. 10, another round of women, including marquee names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Rosanna Arquette, went public in a second article in The Times. Three weeks later, a third article detailed still more accounts of sexual abuse by Weinstein, spanning the globe and dating back to the 1970s. “This has haunted me my entire life,” said 62-year-old Hope Exiner d’Amore, who recounted being raped by Weinstein when she was in her early 20s.
This series of articles in many ways ignited the #MeToo movement, already smoldering in the atmosphere of frustration after reports of Donald Trump’s alleged sexual predations (a story that Twohey broke with another reporter) and the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape failed to slow the reality star’s march to the White House. Their reporting, Kantor and Twohey recall in “She Said,” seemed to operate as a “solvent for secrecy, pushing women all over the world to speak up about similar experiences.”
And a solvent for the structures that enforced that secrecy. A day after the first story came out, a third of the (all-male) board of the Weinstein Company resigned and the remaining members put Weinstein on leave. Two days later, he was fired. Within a year, his corporation declared bankruptcy — and, as part of the Chapter 11 filing, released employees from nondisclosure agreements.
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What explains the company’s decades of inaction? Answering that question, and parsing the ways that such entities and their centurions functioned as Weinstein’s shield, is the prime focus of “She Said.” The guardians the authors unmask aren’t only the obvious ones. Yes, Weinstein’s board members looked the other way long after they knew; yes, The National Enquirer and Black Cube security snoops deep-sixed damaging accounts and shut down whistle-blowers. Yes, Weinstein’s brother, Bob, the company’s co-founder, kept mum beyond all reason — even after Harvey had punched him in the face. But there was also the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which often kept its settlements secret. And David Boies, the lawyer admired for championing gay marriage before the Supreme Court, who served as Weinstein’s personal consigliere and tried to squash every threat of bad press. And Linda Fairstein, the celebrated Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor, who, after an Italian model reported to the New York City police that Weinstein had groped her, brokered connections between Weinstein’s legal team and the lead prosecutor and tried to discredit the woman’s allegation to Twohey.
And then there was Gloria Allred, the crusading feminist lawyer, whose law firm, in 2004, negotiated a nondisclosure agreement for one of Weinstein’s victims; the firm pocketed 40 percent of the settlement. “While the attorney cultivated a reputation for giving female victims a voice,” Kantor and Twohey write, “some of her work and revenue was in negotiating secret settlements that silenced them and buried allegations of sexual harassment and assault.” Allred went on to do the same with women who had been abused by the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and the Olympics gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. In 2017, after a group of lawyers in California persuaded a state legislator to consider a bill that would ban confidentiality clauses muzzling sexual harassment victims, Allred denounced the move and threatened to go on the attack. The legislator, Connie Leyva, quickly shelved the idea. (A year later, Leyva introduced such a bill and it was signed into law.)
Maybe the most appalling figure in this constellation of collaborators and enablers is Lisa Bloom, Allred’s daughter. A lawyer likewise known for winning sexual-harassment settlements with nondisclosure agreements, Bloom was retained by Weinstein (who had also bought the movie rights to her book). In a jaw-dropping memo to Weinstein, Bloom itemized her game plan: Initiate “counterops online campaigns,” place articles in the press painting one of his accusers as a “pathological liar,” start a Weinstein Foundation “on gender equality” and hire a “reputation management company” to suppress negative articles on Google. Oh, and this gem: “You and I come out publicly in a pre-emptive interview where you talk about evolving on women’s issues, prompted by death of your mother, Trump pussy grab tape and, maybe, nasty unfounded hurtful rumors about you. … You should be the hero of the story, not the villain. This is very doable.”
“She Said” contains a second story of what’s doable against great odds: how two reporters with no connections in Hollywood and with almost no one willing to go on the record were able to penetrate this omertà and expose what lay behind it to public scrutiny. This is the book’s deeper level, the story of getting a story, signaled in the choice of chapter titles like “The First Phone Call” and “‘Who Else Is on the Record?’” Kantor and Twohey have crafted their news dispatches into a seamless and suspenseful account of their reportorial journey, a gripping blow-by-blow of how they managed, “working in the blank spaces between the words,” to corroborate allegations that had been chased and abandoned by multiple journalists before them. “She Said” reads a bit like a feminist “All the President’s Men.”
Kantor and Twohey take us through the time-consuming, meticulous and often go-nowhere grunt work that’s intrinsic to gathering evidence, winning the trust of gun-shy victims and maneuvering past barricades that block the path to a publishable article. Along the way, we witness how much institutional support such a protracted effort requires. Kantor and Twohey make a point throughout the book of stressing their reliance on a multilayered editorial team, from rigorous young research assistants like Grace Ashford, who combs through government employment data and tracks down a key former assistant from the late 1980s at Miramax, Weinstein’s film production company, to seasoned elder hands like the Times investigative editor Rebecca Corbett. “Sixtysomething, skeptical, scrupulous and allergic to flashiness or exaggeration,” Kantor and Twohey write of her, “but so low profile that she barely surfaced in Google search results. Her ambition was journalistic, not personal.” The night before the first article ran, Corbett remained in the newsroom until dawn, weighing and reweighing every word.
In this way, “She Said” is a dead-on description of what makes so-called “legacy” journalism so powerful. Ironically, the #MeToo movement that Kantor and Twohey’s articles about Weinstein helped launch promulgates an opposite message: that the best way to bring injustice to light is to get rid of the “gatekeepers” and let rip on Twitter, that we’ll only get to the “truth” when the Establishment is brought down and no one is in charge.
It may be, as the political writer Lee Smith argued in The Weekly Standard, that some journalists had protected Weinstein partly out of a craven illusion that the Hollywood rainmaker would someday make rain for them, buying their articles for high-grossing films. And no doubt the #MeToo movement has prompted the mainstream media to take these stories more seriously. Would Vanity Fair’s editor today omit allegations of sexual assault from a profile of Jeffrey Epstein, as happened in 2003? Nonetheless, the big-league sexual predators who have been brought to justice in the #MeToo era have been brought there not by internet whisper campaigns but by good old-fashioned reporting: O’Reilly by The Times, Nassar by The Indianapolis Star, Epstein by The Miami Herald, Roy Moore by The Washington Post, Weinstein by The Times and The New Yorker. “The Weinstein story had impact,” the authors note, “in part because it had achieved something that, in 2018, seemed rare and precious: broad consensus on the facts.”
There’s an implication here: The answer to institutionally protected predation isn’t the anti-institutionalism of social media and viral tweets, but a powerful counter-institution capable of mounting a rigorous investigation, run by, yes, gatekeepers. Not spelled out but amply evident in Kantor and Twohey’s reckoning is the importance that those gatekeepers be female as well as male. In 2013, Jill Abramson, then The Times’s executive editor, promoted Corbett and another woman to the paper’s senior editorial staff, making the masthead 50 percent female for the first time in history. What happens when you get that kind of sisterhood is familiar to any spectator of the Women’s World Cup. Watching Kantor and Twohey pursue their goal while guarding each other’s back is as exhilarating as watching Megan Rapinoe and Crystal Dunn on the pitch.
Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This, and the book’s finale, “The Gathering,” seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In “The Gathering,” the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald’s worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast-food franchise’s failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they’ve endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal “growth” and getting “some sense of myself back.” At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson’s friend (a McDonald’s labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues.
These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power. At the least, though, the contrast throws into relief how un-pat, instructive and necessary “She Said” is. It turns out we did need to hear more about Weinstein — and the “more” that Kantor and Twohey give us draws an important distinction between the trendy ethic of hashtag justice and the disciplined professionalism and institutional heft that actually got the job done.
Susan Faludi is the author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” and, most recently, “In the Darkroom.”
SHE SAIDBreaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a MovementBy Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
310 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
September 14, 2019
Trump trails numerous Democratic challengers in 2020 poll
Trump overcame formidable odds and discouraging poll numbers to win the White House in 2016. More than a year out from the 2020 election, it appears he might have to repeat that performance to win a second term, according to a Washington Post-ABC News survey.
The new poll tested Trump against five potential general election challengers, and in four of those cases, the president trails, significantly or modestly. He does worst against former vice president Joe Biden, but also runs well behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and slightly behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). Against South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Trump is numerically behind but the gap is within the range of sampling error.
Among all adults, whether registered to vote or not, the president never tops 41 percent support. Among registered voters, he does better, but his highest level of support against any candidate is 44 percent. In 2016, he won 46 percent of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton’s 48 percent, but nonetheless won an electoral college majority by narrowly winning three northern states that had gone to the Democrats in the previous six elections.
Of all the Democrats tested against Trump, Biden currently does the best, aided by significant support from women. He is ahead of the president by 15 points, 55 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, he is at 54 percent and Trump is at 38 percent.
The pattern continues with the other candidates. Sanders runs ahead of Trump by nine points among registered voters and 12 points among all adults. Warren has a seven-point edge among registered voters and an 11-point lead among all adults. Trump also trails Harris by seven points among registered voters and is 10 percentage points back among all adults. The Buttigieg-Trump margin is the closest, with registered voters splitting 47 percent for the South Bend mayor to Trump’s 43 percent, and adults overall tilting 47-41 in Buttigieg’s direction.
The margins in these hypothetical tests have moved at least slightly in favor of all five Democrats matched against the president since a July survey. At that time, only Biden was running ahead of Trump by double digits among registered voters, while the others were within two points of the president.
The shifts coincide with a drop in the president’s approval rating. Currently, 38 percent of Americans say they approve of the job he is doing while 56 percent disapprove. His approval has declined by six points since July.
Other public polls have tracked a smaller dip in Trump’s approval rating. A Washington Post average of seven other nationally representative polls in August found Trump’s approval rating at 41 percent, down slightly from a June average of 43 percent in those same polls.
For Trump, the current standings represent a troubling threat: No president in modern times has been reelected with approval ratings as low as Trump’s are today. For the sake of comparisons, however, Barack Obama’s approval rating at this point in 2011 was just 43 percent. Obama rebounded over the course of the campaign, reaching about 50 percent in the late fall of 2012 on his way to a reelection victory over Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Impressions of the president’s performance are strongly held, especially among those who think he is not doing a good job. The poll finds that 48 percent of the public strongly disapproves of his performance in office while 27 percent strongly approve.
By another measure — favorability — the president’s rating in the new poll stands at 40 percent positive and 57 percent negative. Those kinds of results also often foreshadow major problems for an incumbent seeking reelection, but Trump proved impervious to such barriers when he was elected in 2016.
At the time of that election, his unfavorable rating stood at 59 percent among registered voters. He was helped by the fact that Clinton’s unfavorable rating was identical to his, as they were the two least popular nominees in modern history.
At this early point, none of the potential Democratic nominees tested suffer from similar scorn. In the Post-ABC survey, Biden enjoys a net positive favorable rating of 16 points (53 percent favorable, 37 percent unfavorable). Sanders has a net positive rating of 12 points (51 percent favorable, 39 percent unfavorable).
Both are rated favorably by at least slim majorities of Americans though neither has taken the kind of incoming attacks that the eventual Democratic nominee can expect during what may be a long nomination battle and later with Trump as a general election opponent.
Warren, Harris and Buttigieg are less well known nationally and have favorable ratings that are either modestly positive or roughly even statistically. No Democrat tested currently has an unfavorable rating of more than 39 percent, and none is as high as Clinton was at this point in 2015.
The general election matchups reveal a significant gender gap in 2020 choices. Trump runs statistically even with men when matched against Biden and at least slightly ahead against Sanders, Warren, Harris and Buttigieg. Among women, the president is trailing by significant margins — by 30 points against Biden and by over 20 points against Sanders, Harris and Warren. Against Buttigieg he trails by double digits.
One trouble spot for the president in the new survey is a sudden drop off in support, compared with 2016, among white women without college degrees. In post-election analyses of exit polling and voter surveys, Trump won among these voters by margins of 23 to 27 points.
In this Post-ABC poll, Trump is at best running about even with his potential Democratic challengers among the group. Each Democratic challenger pulls at least 45 percent support among white women voters without college degrees and over half of them support Biden against Trump (54 percent).
Just over half of white voting-age women without college degrees disapprove of Trump — 53 percent — while 42 percent approve of his handing of the presidency. That marks a change from poll results in April and July, when the margins were almost the reverse in Trump’s favor. Already, the attitudes of these white non-college women are being closely monitored as a sign of the president’s standing ahead of the election.
The poll also points to suburban voters as the most important battleground in 2020. Democrats won control of the House in last year’s midterm elections with the help of support from suburban voters; the Trump campaign recognizes the importance of not letting that pattern repeat in November 2020 and has sought to appeal to that group, as have potential Democratic nominees.
The potential Democratic nominees tested against Trump enjoy significant margins among urban voters while the president has big leads in rural and small-town parts of the country. All five Democrats currently are attracting at least somewhat more support in the suburbs than Trump although only Biden has a substantial lead among suburban voters, at 18 points.
The poll shows signs that, while Americans rate the overall economy positively, and the president has regularly pointed to the economy as one of the reasons voters should support him for reelection, perceptions of the economy alone are not driving as many votes to the president as he might hope.
Among the 59 percent of registered voters who rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” Trump has 63 percent support in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, who is favored by 34 percent of this group. Biden also receives 86 percent support among voters who rate the economy negatively.
A similar dynamic hurt Republicans in last year’s midterm elections. Despite two-thirds of voters saying then that the economy was in good condition, Republicans received nine percentage points less support than Democrats in the overall House vote.
The Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone from Sept. 2 to Sept. 5 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, 65 percent of whom were reached on cellphones and 35 percent on landlines. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is four points among the sample of 877 registered voters and is larger for other subgroups.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. walked into the debate at No. 1 in the polls — and squared off against Nos. 2 through 10 for the first time.
To protect himself from incoming attacks, he brought a trusty shield: the legacy of former President Barack Obama.
As our colleagues Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns wrote in our debate overview, Mr. Biden “clung tightly to the legacy of the Obama administration” at the debate in Houston on Thursday, “as an array of progressive challengers, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, brandished more daring policy promises and questioned Mr. Biden’s political strength.” But Mr. Biden also seemed steadier and better prepared than in previous debates.
The nearly three-hour debate (really, it didn’t feel like a minute over two and a half hours!) had its share of memorable moments: Andrew Yang promised to give 10 families $1,000 a month for a year; Beto O’Rourke declared that, “Hell yes,” his administration would “take your AR-15, your AK-47”; Julián Castro questioned Mr. Biden’s ability to remember; Mr. Biden made reference to a record player; and Mayor Pete Buttigieg described his experience with coming out as gay.
Supreme Court Lets Trump Bar Asylum Seekers Temporarily.
The policy requires many Central American migrants to be denied asylum in another country before applying in the United States.
It was the second time in recent months that the Supreme Court backed a major Trump administration immigration initiative.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the Trump administration to bar most Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States, while the legal fight plays out in the courts.
The Supreme Court, in a brief, unsigned order, said the administration may enforce new rules that generally forbid asylum applications from migrants who have traveled through another country on their way to the United States without being denied asylum in that country.
The court’s order was a major victory for the administration, allowing it to enforce a policy that will achieve one of its central goals: effectively barring most migration across the nation’s southwestern border by Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and others. Mexican migrants, who need not travel through another country to reach the United States, are not affected by the new policy.
It was the second time in recent months that the Supreme Court has allowed a major Trump administration immigration initiative to go forward. In July, the court allowed the administration to begin using $2.5 billion in Pentagon money for the construction of a barrier along the Mexican border. Last year, the court upheld President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented, saying the court’s action will “upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution.”
The rules reversed longstanding asylum policies that allowed people to seek haven no matter how they got to the United States. A federal appeals court had largely blocked the policy.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the challengers in the new case, stressed that the Supreme Court’s action was provisional. “This is just a temporary step,” he said, “and we’re hopeful we’ll prevail at the end of the day. The lives of thousands of families are at stake.”
The case will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court, but that will take many months.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, pledged on Wednesday night to “commence implementing the asylum rule ASAP.”
