Saturday, February 21, 2026
Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out?
Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out?
“The practice of backing into parking spaces, once uncommon, is gaining popularity in the United States. While some drivers find it safer and more convenient, others, like the author, find it unnecessary and inconvenient. The trend is partly driven by AAA’s updated guidelines, which recommend backing in for better visibility and quicker exits.
An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots.
America, we often hear, is a deeply divided country. To our ideological divisions, allow me to add one of the vehicular kind: people who pull into a parking lot space versus those who back in.
For decades, there were generally agreed-upon standards and norms around parking. You entered a lot, saw an open spot and pulled in, like everyone else. But in the past few years, it seems to me something has changed in our national parking lots.
Listen to this article with reporter commentary
Perhaps you’ve noticed it at the supermarket or CVS. Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in. These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying.
William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA, confirmed my suspicion — and said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.
“We started promoting this around 2020,” he said, in curriculum distributed to driving instructors at public and private driving schools throughout the United States.
“In general,” said Mr. Van Tassel, 59, who lives in Orlando, Fla., and drives a Porsche Cayman that he indeed backs in, “it’s a good idea from a safety perspective.”
My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.
Imminent Threat Solutions, a Texas-based company that teaches people to “prevail against all threats,” as its website says, recommends “tactical parking” — i.e., backing in — for swift evasion. “Next time you park somewhere, start war-gaming it,” the company suggests. “What if I was being chased?” they advise drivers to consider.
But perhaps there are more prosaic reasons, too. Some years ago, Matthew Dicks, a schoolteacher in West Hartford, Conn., noticed that a colleague would back in each morning, despite the extra time it took her to fit between parked cars.
One day, he asked her why.
“She hated her job,” Mr. Dicks, 55, said. “She told me, ‘I just want to get out of here as quickly as possible at the end of the day.’”
Although Mr. Dicks thought backing into a space was “ridiculous,” he kept an open mind, as you might if a friend said they dressed their hot dog with mayonnaise. He decided to try it for a week.
“Right away, I discovered that backing up is always harder than driving forward,” said Mr. Dicks, who wrote a blog post in 2016 laying out his arguments, including that the narrowness of a standard parking space (7.5 to 8.5 feet) relative to the width of a highway lane (12 feet) makes it more dangerous to reverse into a spot.
Mr. Dicks also believes reversing into a spot is discourteous: Other drivers must wait while you position your car, causing congestion in busy parking lots. He concluded his study with a message for his fellow drivers: “Stop backing into parking spots. It makes no sense.” (He has received multiple emails every month for several years from angry backer-inners making their case.)
Lately, I find myself doing the lazy man’s version of backing into a spot — that is, finding two open spots in a line and “pulling through” so I’m facing forward. This way, I don’t have to back up at all.
Still, like Mr. Dicks, I find reversing into a spot awkward, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a demographic profile of backer-inners. My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off — was that true? And it seemed to me that a disproportionate number of them drove big American work trucks, but could you really peg backer-inners by their vehicles?
I recently drove out to the suburbs north of New York City to do a little field work. At the Ardsley Diner, in Ardsley, N.Y., amid all the cars in the lot parked the typical way, I watched Antonio Mateo back his maroon S.U.V. into a space.
Mr. Mateo, 49, who was picking up a breakfast order, said he found it easier to back in. “I get out quickly,” he explained.
Eighteen miles north, at a Home Goods in Mount Kisco, there were 38 spots in the parking lot, which was full. Five cars — or around 13 percent — were backed in. They ran the gamut of make, model and price, from a Chevrolet Trax to a Ford F-150 to a Mercedes-Benz GLK350.
The owner of the Mercedes S.U.V., Mirna Martinez, said that she started backing into spots about 10 years ago, for reasons she couldn’t remember. It has since become habit. When I asked why, she offered the same rationale I heard repeatedly.
“Convenience,” Ms. Martinez, 55, said. “It’s easier to get in and go.”
A profile was emerging, but it didn’t seem to be shaped by gender or car make — it was more of a mind-set. Backer-inners, it seemed, preferred doing the harder maneuver first. They prioritized leaving a little more quickly.
Some people, I discovered upon further investigation, are required to back into a space. Luke MacGregor, 44, is an engineer in New Brunswick, Canada.
“I do a lot of work at industrial sites, like power plants, refineries,” he said. “Our corporate policy is to back in. The idea is if there was any reason to leave quickly, like an evacuation, everyone could get out a little faster.”
Mr. MacGregor’s 81-year-old mother, Sandra Phinney, appears to back in — but she actually pulls through, as I do, because craning her neck is painful, she wrote in an email. “It’s much easier to drive straight out.”
And safer, as Mr. Van Tassel, the AAA instructor, said. He cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people. This was a major factor in the updated AAA recommendation, he said.
So now that backing into a space is doctrine, it seems likely the practice will proliferate.
But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone.
Mr. Dicks is firmly in my camp. Indeed, it has become something of a small crusade to convince the fellow drivers in his life not to back in.
Not long ago, Mr. Dicks rode with a friend to Boston for a night out.
“We arrived and he was pulling into a parking lot, and I saw he was lining up to back in,” he said. “I said, ‘No! What are you doing?’ He tells me, ‘I thought we could save time, get out quicker.’ What are we going to save? One second in a day?”
And, thus, the friend pulled in.“
Friday, February 20, 2026
The 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders, Ranked by Nate Silver
The 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders, Ranked by Nate Silver
“Nate Silver and John Guida discuss the potential Democratic contenders for the 2028 presidential election. They rank the top contenders, including Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pete Buttigieg, based on their likelihood of being chosen by Democratic voters and delegates. The conversation also touches on the different factions within the Democratic Party and how they might influence the nomination process.
By Nate Silver and John Guida
Mr. Silver is the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.” Mr. Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.
Voting has started in the 2026 midterms — in Texas, ahead of a big primary on March 3. But this year isn’t about only the midterms: Looming in the background is 2028, and the presidential “invisible primary,” when potential contenders stump for fellow partisans, form campaign teams, hop around early voting states like New Hampshire and release memoirs.
Who’s in the mix for Democrats? Nate Silver, the author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, recently participated in a fantasy-style draft of potential 2028 Democratic contenders (with two of his former colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, Galen Druke and Clare Malone).
In a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, he assessed the front-runners, the politicians and non-politicians — and what surprised him about the picks.
John Guida: You’re a big sports fan, so you know the great drama and symbolic importance of the first overall pick in a draft. Drum roll, please: The first pick was …
Nate Silver: The first pick, made by Galen Druke, was Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. But I would have taken Newsom, too. Either he or Kamala Harris is ahead in basically every poll. And he’s moved well ahead in prediction markets, which, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, are a convenient enough summary of the conventional wisdom.
But it’s important to articulate a distinction here: These are our picks based on who we think is most likely to be chosen by Democratic voters and delegates, not whom we would necessarily pick. Personally, I think Newsom is cut from the same cloth as some past losing Democratic nominees like Harris. That said, I don’t think you can sort Democrats into clean buckets of winners and losers. The 2024 election was close-ish, and I’m not sure anyone should fear the likes of JD Vance or whomever else the Republicans might nominate.
Guida: Understood. We will get to whom you would pick soon. In the meantime, how much does it matter that Newsom has drawn scathingly critical attention — and not necessarily from G.O.P. partisans. For example: “Newsom’s record as governor of California is a Republican strategist’s perfect foil” — that’s from Bret Stephens, Times columnist. At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait and Marc Novicoff wrote that during Newsom’s tenure, the state has been “a laboratory for some of the Democratic Party’s most politically fraught policies and instincts, which has left it less affordable and more culturally radical than it used to be.”
Silver: Even if you don’t trust the polls, you can look at how people are moving with their feet. California is projected to lose four electoral votes after the next census, which will be a setback for Democrats beginning in 2032. The state’s population has flatlined, even though people are flocking to warm-weather states pretty much everywhere else. My dad grew up in Los Angeles, my grandparents moved across the country from Connecticut to live there — California once symbolized the American dream. Now it comes attached to a lot of political baggage.
Guida: The second pick also comes from a blue coastal state, New York: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was followed by Pete Buttigieg, the former Biden transportation secretary. Maybe we can bring in some broader context here in terms of how you size up the Democratic Party at the moment. You laid out a taxonomy of three factions within the party: Why those three, and how do you see them shaping the invisible primary, if indeed you do?
Silver: Some of this comes from something I was having trouble making sense of at first. If you look at, for instance, The Times’s interview with the podcast host Jennifer Welch, she’s absolutely furious at the Democratic “establishment.” Her show is called “I’ve Had It.” And yet she seems to be a big fan of Newsom, and of Kamala Harris, which is about as establishment as it gets. So I don’t think it’s as simple as there being just a left-versus-right or establishment-versus-outsider axis. You need to work along a few dimensions here.
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The one thing pretty much all Democrats agree upon after 2024 is that the party needs to change course. And there are three different solutions to that. The left-populists think, well, the party needs to be more populist, especially on economic issues and “affordability,” inspired by Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York. Then there’s what I call the “abundance libs.” The name is slightly fraught because it comes from the book written by Ezra Klein of The Times and Derek Thompson, and I think the label has come to be used in ways they wouldn’t necessarily endorse. But it’s become the brand associated with people who think the party ought to move to the center, with “smart” economic policies and perhaps following public opinion more on culture war issues.
That leaves the third faction, the “Resistance libs,” which might actually be the majority faction. They usually attribute Democrats’ problems in 2024 to poor messaging or the failure to take on Donald Trump aggressively enough. They want a fighter. And Newsom plays expertly into that. They actually think the party’s platform is totally fine, though — it’s hard to identify any real differences between Newsom and Harris. Or maybe they think the same message would win if it were articulated by a white man rather than a Black woman; there’s some of that subtext here, too.
Guida: How would you apply that taxonomy to Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg?
Silver: Oh, Ocasio-Cortez is definitely a populist. And she might have that lane to herself. There are two other highly successful politicians from this group, but they’re Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and not eligible to run for president, and Bernie Sanders, who at 84 is even older than Joe Biden. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent international trip suggests that she wants to broaden her profile, but as inequality worsens, especially at the very top of the scale, as affordability remains a perpetual concern, this is arguably a more valuable message than it has been in a long time.
I also wonder, by the way, how A.I. plays into all of this if the timelines are even half as fast as Silicon Valley expects. I’ve argued, as has The Times’s Ross Douthat, that concerns about mass job loss at the same time tech valuations are increasing exponentially could be a very good issue for the left, even if they’ve been unduly dismissive of A.I. up to this point.
Meanwhile, Buttigieg is iconically in the abundance libs faction. He presents himself as a smart technocrat with a little bit of a crossover biography (gay, but married, from Indiana, former naval officer, etc.). However, he also borrows a little bit from the Newsom playbook in being quick on his feet and willing to punch back, albeit in more highbrow ways than with the occasional ALL-CAPS POSTS.
Guida: Here are the full results of the draft, and then we can continue in categories:
(1) Newsom; (2) Ocasio-Cortez; (3) Buttigieg; (4) Gretchen Whitmer; (5) Ruben Gallego; (6) Josh Shapiro; (7) Wes Moore; (8) Harris; (9) Cory Booker; (10) Raphael Warnock; (11) Jon Ossoff; (12) Mark Kelly; (13) Jon Stewart; (14) J.B. Pritzker; (15) Andy Beshear; (16) Ro Khanna; (17) Amy Klobuchar; (18) Chris Murphy.
There were six Democratic governors selected. Two of them — Whitmer of Michigan and Shapiro of Pennsylvania — represent swing states. Only one (Beshear of Kentucky) leads a red state. Did anything surprise you about this group — perhaps that Whitmer was the second one taken, since it is not so clear that she is interested in running?
Silver: There’s been a huge debate in the party about whether moderation or progressivism is the way to electoral success. I’m on the side that says the evidence pretty clearly lines up with moderation — other things being equal, which often they aren’t. But what really ought to be the best demonstration of electability is, well, actually having won elections — ideally by comfortable margins in purple states that will be key in the Electoral College, or even red states, as in the case of Beshear. Whitmer and Shapiro have that. Some of the senators, like Gallego, have it too.
But for whatever reason, I don’t think this definition of electability is selling to the electorate. It’s really been a long time since Democrats nominated someone who was a clear electoral overperformer. You’d have to go back to Bill Clinton, although Barack Obama won by a very large margin in his only Senate race in Illinois.
Guida: What stood out for you among the members of Congress?
Silver: I should also have mentioned Warnock and Ossoff, Georgia’s two senators, above. In 2024, Georgia moved even closer to what we call the electoral tipping point — the state most likely to be decisive in the Electoral College. Ossoff has generated significant buzz since we did the draft a few weeks ago and would probably rank even higher now. He’s the rare case of someone who might be acceptable to all three factions, combative but with some electability credentials, progressive but not “too” progressive.
I’m not sure what to make of the comparative lack of Latino candidates, or for that matter, Asian American candidates. But these are groups that were generally moving away from the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. It’s been in Georgia, where Democrats have relied on a coalition of Black voters and suburban whites, where their numbers have held up among the best.
Guida: Only one nonpolitician was in the mix: Jon Stewart. Did that surprise you, given the success of Donald Trump in the G.O.P.? Other non-politician names have been mentioned elsewhere: Stephen A. Smith, Mark Cuban, Stephen Colbert?
Silver: If we were doing this a year ago, I’d have been more bullish on the non-politicians. But I think we’ve found that Democrats like Newsom, Ossoff and Ocasio-Cortez are pretty good at grabbing attention on their own, in ways that play more organically into political news cycles. And so there isn’t necessarily that much demand for celebrity-type outsiders among the primary electorate.
There’s also the fact that the president to be elected with basically the least government experience in American history is Donald Trump, and I’m not sure how eager Democrats should or will be to emulate that. Plus, some of these guys may be a little out of their depth when it comes to the substance. Stewart recently drew a lot of criticism for his lack of understanding of Economics 101 concepts in his interview with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler.
Guida: So you think Democrats will be picking from a pool of largely conventional political candidates — and yet the party itself is strikingly unpopular. Do you see that as a problem, or do you think adjustments around some cultural issues and the strong counterreaction to a Trumpist G.O.P. will drive the Democratic primary?
Silver: I do want to be clear that, even if I think someone like Newsom is a suboptimal choice, I’d probably give him a 50-50 chance of winning in 2028. Two big things are behind that.
First, incumbents have been in a very bad way in the United States and around the world for several cycles now. It might almost be an advantage to be the party out of power.
And second, I expect Republicans to have a lot of trouble agreeing on a candidate who is not Donald Trump. They’ve done quite badly in the Trump era in nonpresidential elections, from the 2018 midterms (and probably this year’s, too) to off-cycle and special elections. I don’t expect “marginal” voters (people who don’t always vote) to walk over glass for, say, JD Vance, the way they did for Trump. And yet Vance has some of Trump’s liabilities and maybe not as much of his political talent.
Guida: Let’s get to how you, personally, see it. If you were picking for yourself, who would be in your top five?
Silver: I don’t want to be too prescriptive here. But I’d say, from the list of 18 candidates we drafted, here are the ones who have a track record of electoral overperformance: Whitmer, Gallego, Shapiro, Warnock, Ossoff, Kelly, Beshear, Klobuchar. If you want to limit it to five, I’d just take the first five. Kelly has less charisma than the others (subjective, I know), Beshear will probably read as too much of an outright Joe Manchin-y centrist, and Klobuchar seems unlikely to run in 2028 as she’d be just two years into her first gubernatorial term (should she win this November).
Guida: David Axelrod has a theory about how voters choose a president. As he put it, “Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.”
We have one recent model where Trump was the sitting president, which is Joe Biden: a return to normalcy, etc. Do you see anyone in this pool of potential candidates who could be the remedy in 2028?
Silver: I basically agree with that, but I think candidates tend more to follow zigzag patterns. They’re sort of moving at perpendicular, 90-degree angles, not doing a full 180. On the one hand, they want to turn away from the failures of the previous incumbent president. On the other hand, they want to present something new and different and to also escape from the ghosts (or at least the failed nominees) of their own party’s past. Biden was maybe an unusual case in being so “retro,” and also drawing on some nostalgia for Obama. And he wrapped up the nomination very quickly after struggling in the first few states, just as Covid exploded in the United States and Democrats were in a risk-averse mood (and party leaders like James Clyburn weighed in heavily on his behalf).
But I wouldn’t say Biden had a particularly successful presidency. Which means the “return to normal” messaging would be a harder sell this time.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin. He is a part-time adviser for Polymarket. John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.“
Anger as Trump FDA retreats from plan to ban artificial colors in food
Anger as Trump FDA retreats from plan to ban artificial colors in food
“The FDA announced it will allow food companies to label products as “no artificial colors” even if they contain potentially harmful substances like titanium dioxide. This decision, criticized by health experts, is seen as a retreat from a previous pledge to ban artificial dyes and could mislead consumers. While some naturally derived dyes are safer, others, like titanium dioxide, pose health risks and are banned in the EU.
Experts say new labeling could deceive consumers as dangerous substances still allowed under new rules
In a further retreat from its pledge to ban artificial dyes from food, Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would loosen labeling requirements to allow companies to state “no artificial colors”, even though products may contain some dangerous substances such as titanium dioxide.
The FDA in early February announced it would allow food makers to claim “no artificial colors” as long as the dyes are not petroleum-based, but health experts say even some naturally based additives present health risks, and the labeling would deceive consumers.
The move comes after the agency in 2025 began pressuring companies to phase out petroleum-based dyes, but stopped short of putting in place a ban. Removing toxins from food is a cornerstone of the Robert F Kennedy led Maha movement. Kennedy is the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which holds the FDA, and he quickly zeroed in on dye upon taking office last year.
The FDA agreed to what critics label a “handshake” with big food to stop using the dyes, though Kennedy framed it as “an understanding”. Some candy makers still are refusing to fully stop using artificial dyes.
The latest decision around labeling “is going to cause confusion and allow some companies to mislead folks about the colors that are present in their foods”, said Thomas Galligan, principal scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which researches food dyes.
“It’s frustrating, especially when the rhetoric suggests they are solving the problem, but in practice they’re just letting industry do whatever they want,” Galligan continued, adding that the rules were already so loophole-ridden that there were other ways that companies could deceive consumers. The most effective measure to protect consumers is a ban, he said.
Kennedy defended the move in a statement: “This is real progress. We are making it easier for companies to move away from petroleum-based synthetic colors and adopt safer, naturally derived alternatives. This momentum advances our broader effort to help Americans eat real food and Make America Healthy Again.”
Consumer Brands, a trade group for packaged foods, applauded the move, stating that it “is a positive example of the FDA taking the lead on ingredient safety and transparency”.
Kelly Ryerson, Maha advocate and author, praised the FDA for taking the first step to pressure industry to move away from dyes, calling it “enormous”. But she told the Guardian she is concerned about confusion over the labeling, and added: “I would like to see these things banned permanently.”
Synthetic dyes are linked to ADHD and hyperactivity in children, among other health harms. The FDA banned Red Dye 3 in January 2025, before Kennedy took over the agency, because studies found it likely caused cancer in lab rats.
West Virginia has since banned some synthetic dyes, and Texas passed a law to require warning labels. More than 25 states are considering new bans on synthetic food dyes and other food chemical additives.
Among naturally derived dyes are beet juice, beet powder, algae and butterfly pea flower. While most naturally derived dyes are generally safer than petroleum-based, some can be dangerous.
“As a foundational concept, natural doesn’t mean safe,” Galligan said, which contradicts the average consumers’ assumptions.
He noted that lead and arsenic, two of the planet’s most toxic substances, are naturally occurring, though they are not used in food dyes.
Among natural dyes used in foods that advocates find most concerning is titanium dioxide nanoparticles added to brighten whites, or effectively serve as a primer for other colors. The toxic substance is banned in the European Union for use in food because regulators could not conclude that it is safe, and raised concern that it damages genes.
It is a potential carcinogen that accumulates in organs and is linked toneurotoxicity, intestinal inflammation, reproductive damage, birth defects and other health impacts.
Titanium dioxide is widely used across the US food system. The Environmental Working Group nonprofit has found nearly 2,000 products in which the chemical may be used, though some estimates are as high as 11,000. The largest subgroups included candy, cakes, cookies, and desserts or dessert toppings.
The FDA so far has ignored a petition filed in 2023 by five major US public health advocacy groups that asks it to withdraw its approval of titanium dioxide for use in food.
Meanwhile, naturally derived caramel color can contain 4-MEI, an impurity linked to cancer that is produced during processing. Food companies will be able to state that products that contain these ingredients have “no artificial flavors”.
EWG co-founder Ken Cook said the shift ultimately represents “another broken promise” from Kennedy and Trump.
“They pledged outright bans on dangerous food chemical additives to their Make America Healthy Again base,” Cook said.
“Instead, states are doing the hard work to protect families, while Kennedy settles for handshake deals with big food and chemical companies – agreements with no real accountability and no guarantee they’ll be honored.”
Trump Has a Head-Spinning Day, but Republicans Want Him to Focus
Trump Has a Head-Spinning Day, but Republicans Want Him to Focus
“President Trump, despite his advisers’ desire for him to focus on the economy ahead of the midterms, spent much of his speech in Rome, Georgia, on tangents. He celebrated his economic achievements, attributing them to tariffs, despite data showing the opposite. Trump also veered off topic, discussing the Supreme Court case on tariffs and his grievances against the media and former President Biden.
President Trump’s advisers want him to lock down a message on the economy that will resonate ahead of the midterms. But Mr. Trump is never one to stay on message.
By Tyler Pager
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent. He reported from the Coosa Steel Corporation in Rome, Ga.
President Trump started the day on Thursday by celebrating peace in the Middle East while also threatening to launch a new, all-out attack in the region.
Shortly thereafter, he celebrated that his handpicked arts commission had approved his $400 million White House ballroom project.
By the day’s end, Mr. Trump was speaking to a crowd in northwest Georgia, where he was supposed to focus on the economy and jobs but spent much of the time on wild tangents: railing against the Supreme Court, making false claims of voter fraud and calling himself a “schmuck” for donating his presidential salary.
The president’s head-spinning day came as Republicans look to Mr. Trump to lock down a message that will resonate ahead of the midterms, when the party could face big losses. They want him to stay focused on an economic message to help his party keep control of Congress in November’s midterm elections — but Mr. Trump is never one to stay on message.
In fact, he sounded as though he wanted to move on entirely from the one issue they want him to focus on — affordability — as Democrats hammer him on the cost of living and high prices.
“What word have you not heard over the last two weeks? Affordability,” Mr. Trump said at a rally at a steel distributor in Rome, Ga. “Because I’ve won. I’ve won affordability.”
Earlier this week, the president’s top aides and cabinet officials gathered near the U.S. Capitol to discuss their midterm strategy. The takeaway was clear: The economy would be the deciding factor in the midterms, strategists and pollsters said, and Republicans needed to stay laser-focused.
But even if Republican candidates and Mr. Trump’s aides focus on the economy, they can never match the megaphone of their leader, who is not quite so laser-focused on the issue.
Still, Mr. Trump and his allies have been eager to celebrate his economic wins on the heels of two strong economic reports: Employment growth in January came in at more than twice the rate that economists had expected, and inflation was softer than predicted.
In his speech on Thursday, Mr. Trump attributed the country’s economic success to his tariff policies. He has vowed that the levies will reduce U.S. imports and shrink the trade deficit.
“Tariff is my favorite word in the whole dictionary,” he said.
But data released on Thursday showed the opposite of what Mr. Trump has promised has occurred: U.S. imports grew last year, and the trade deficit in goods hit a record high. Mr. Trump’s vision of reviving American manufacturing has so far not borne out either. U.S. manufacturers have cut more than 80,000 jobs in the past year.
Mr. Trump did not mention that data on Thursday. Instead, he regaled the audience with anecdotes of his conversations with business leaders who have told the president of major investments they’re making in the United States because of his tariffs.
He became most animated when discussing the pending Supreme Court case over his ability to institute sweeping tariffs.
“I have to wait for this decision,” he said, raising his voice. “I’ve been waiting forever. Forever. And the language is clear that I have the right to do it as president. I have the right to put tariffs on for national security purposes.”
In November, a majority of Supreme Court justices asked skeptical questions about Mr. Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. A decision in the case could come as soon as Friday.
Even though the speech was billed as part of Mr. Trump’s nationwide economic tour, the president, as he often does, frequently veered off topic. He rehashed some of his longstanding grievances — including not getting enough credit for growing the economy, and the media not recognizing him for eschewing his presidential salary.
Throughout his meandering speech, Mr. Trump often found his way back to his core message: that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. destroyed the country and Mr. Trump has resuscitated it.
But not all of Mr. Trump’s supporters are feeling the economic renaissance the president described on Thursday.
Charles Painter, 47, of Ringgold, Ga., described himself as a longtime supporter of the president, but he is still looking for economic relief. He said his property taxes had tripled.
“It’s going slow, but hopefully it gets there,” Mr. Painter said.
Mr. Trump’s trip took him back to the district that was, until last month, represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch supporter of the president. Ms. Greene said she broke with the president over his handling of the Epstein files, his commitment to “America first” ideals and his efforts to lower health care costs. She abruptly resigned from Congress in the middle of her term, creating a special election for her seat.
As Ms. Greene stepped up her criticism, Mr. Trump branded her a “traitor.” Ms. Greene did not attend Thursday’s event.
In the special election to fill Ms. Greene’s former seat, Mr. Trump has endorsed Clay Fuller, a local prosecutor. Mr. Fuller spoke before Mr. Trump on Thursday, and then the president invited him back to the stage because he “loved what he said.”
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.“
As Trump Weighs Iran Strikes, He Declines to Make Clear Case for Why
As Trump Weighs Iran Strikes, He Declines to Make Clear Case for Why
“President Trump is preparing for a potential military strike on Iran without providing a clear rationale or engaging in public debate. While citing various reasons such as Iran’s nuclear program, missile arsenal, and support for militant groups, Trump has not articulated a consistent strategy or end-state. This lack of transparency and consultation with allies and Congress raises concerns about the wisdom of such an action.
Rarely in modern times has the United States prepared to conduct a major act of war with so little explanation or public debate.
David E. Sanger has covered the Iranian nuclear program and negotiations, sabotage and military action to end it, for more than three decades.
When President George W. Bush began preparing the country for the invasion of Iraq, he traveled the country making the case that Saddam Hussein’s government, and its weapons, posed an unacceptable threat to the United States.
Speaking in Cincinnati’s Union Terminal one October night in 2002, he warned that Iraq could attack the United States “on any given day” with chemical or biological weapons. He compared the urgency of the moment to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, declaring doing nothing was “the riskiest of all options.”
Most of Mr. Bush’s arguments turned out to be fanciful, based on selective intelligence and in some cases outright false claims. The war that followed is now considered by many historians as one of the gravest American strategic errors of modern times.
But if Mr. Bush made a false case, President Trump, facing a decision about whether to unleash a second major military assault on Iran in less than a year, has made almost no case at all.
With two carrier groups and dozens of fighter jets, bombers and refueling aircraft now massing within striking distance of Iran, Mr. Trump is threatening another attack. He is doing so without providing assessments about the urgency of the threat or any explanation of why he needs to strike again after claiming the nuclear sites he targeted had been “obliterated.”
Though Mr. Trump is largely fixated on the nuclear weapons program, at various moments he and his aides have cited a range of other rationales for military action: protecting the protesters that Iranian forces killed by the thousands last month, wiping out the arsenal of missiles that Iran can use to strike Israel, and ending Tehran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.
Then there is the question of whether military force, the hammer Mr. Trump reaches for so quickly, can even accomplish those ends. Most of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium is already buried from the last strike, in June. And it is not clear how airstrikes would immediately aid protesters around the country or persuade Iran to stop funding terror.
Mr. Trump has never consistently described his goals, and when he talks about them it is usually in a haze of brief, offhand comments. The president has given no speeches preparing the American public for a strike on a country of about 90 million people, and sought no approval from Congress. He has not explained why he has chosen this moment to confront Iran instead of, for example, North Korea, which in the years after Mr. Trump’s failed negotiations in the first term has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 60 or more warheads, by U.S. intelligence estimates, and is working to demonstrate they can reach the United States.
Mr. Trump’s national security strategy did not mention North Korea once.
And when pressed on Iran, Mr. Trump regularly deflects questions about whether regime change is his true goal, leaving unclear what kind of end-state he seeks — other than an Iran that can never obtain nuclear weapons.
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, when pressed on the question in testimony in late January, conceded that forcing a leadership change in Iran — something the C.I.A. last accomplished in 1953 — would be “far more complex” than the operation the United States conducted to oust Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president.
“You’re talking about a regime that’s in place for a very long time,” he told senators. “So that’s going to require a lot of careful thinking, if that eventuality ever presents itself.”
Rarely in modern times has the United States prepared to conduct a major act of war with so little explanation and so little public debate. As Mr. Trump gathered the first meeting of the “Board of Peace” at the White House to discuss the rebuilding of Gaza, he veered briefly into the topic of imminent action in Iran, describing only the vaguest of objectives.
“They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region, and they must make a deal,” he said, without describing the scope of that deal. “Bad things will happen if it doesn’t” strike that deal, he said, moving back to the topic of Gaza.
There are, of course, huge differences with the Iraq invasion. As in Venezuela, Mr. Trump envisions no ground invasion. That avoids the often-voiced critique of his MAGA base that Mr. Trump is risking another “forever war.” Mr. Trump’s calculus is clearly that the base will tolerate bombing runs, which demonstrate the unmatched power of American forces to destroy from afar, as long as the risk to American lives is limited.
And, at the outset of the Iraq invasion, Mr. Bush had the support of a large number of Western allies, starting with Britain. The weekend before the Iraq invasion, Mr. Bush met in the Azores with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and the leaders of Spain and Portugal to issue one last ultimatum to Mr. Hussein and plan for an Iraq that would be “whole, free and at peace,” with its oil reserves protected for the Iraqi people.
But in this case, none of the allies appear to be joining with the United States in military planning, except for Israel. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, held a phone conversation with Mr. Trump on Tuesday, and according to The Times of London, Mr. Starmer refused to let Mr. Trump use British airfield facilities at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean or a Royal Air Force station in Gloucestershire to conduct any operations against Iran. British officials did not confirm or deny the report, but the next day, Mr. Trump issued a blast against Britain’s pending deal for a 100-year lease on the Diego Garcia base.
At least the British were aware of Mr. Trump’s plans. Senior officials representing several of the United States’ closest NATO allies said at the Munich Security Conference last weekend that they had gotten almost no details of American plans from Washington. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military issues.
Several of them expressed deep skepticism that the United States could make a compelling case that military action was needed.
In fact, Mr. Trump may well be ignoring one of the first rules of the “Powell Doctrine,” the lessons born of the Vietnam War and developed by Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“The essence of the post-Vietnam consensus on the use of force is that the political objective must be clearly articulated,” said Robert S. Litwak, a political scientist at George Washington University who has written extensively on negotiating with Iran. “With Iran, Trump is again breaking with that consensus by offering multiple rationales for this preventive military action, from nonproliferation to protecting protesters to regime change.”
In the negotiations, which last took place on Tuesday in Geneva, Mr. Trump’s two lead negotiators — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — are pressing the country to permanently give up all ability to enrich uranium. The Iranians, according to officials familiar with the negotiations, say they are willing to suspend the production of nuclear materials, maybe for a decade, but refuse to abandon what they view as a right to enrich nuclear material under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory.
It is also unclear whether the Iranians will allow truly in-depth inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
For Mr. Trump, the bar for a comprehensive agreement is high. He must demonstrate that any deal he wins in the next two weeks is far better than what President Barack Obama got in two and a half years of intense negotiation.
During his first presidential campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump harshly criticized the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the Obama administration, declaring he would have walked out of the room during the negotiations. In 2018, he pulled out of the accord, calling it “the worst deal ever.”
But now he is in something of a diplomatic box. He faces pressure to show that any new agreement he reached goes well beyond the 2015 deal. But the Iranians are resisting, and may well run out of time to find a middle ground.
Then there is the question of whether Mr. Trump will risk war with Iran for its refusal to limit the number and range of its missiles, or ease up on protesters. Mr. Trump has not spoken about either of those issues in recent days, but if he signs an agreement that does not address the missiles, he will appear to have sold out Israel. If he signs a nuclear arrangement that does not stop the Iranian security forces to stop shooting protesters, he will have abandoned a generation of Iranians who see the United States as their last chance to open the country up.
And then there is the influence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has pressed Mr. Trump to finish off the Iranian regime, once and for all.
“Netanyahu is almost certainly telling him that just as he was successful in Venezuela, his name will be revered for decades in the region for bringing down the Iranian regime,” said John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director during the 2015 negotiations.
“Everyone agrees the Iranian regime is a problem,” he continued. “But that doesn’t tell you the solution. And the idea that decapitating the regime will solve the problem is absurd reasoning.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.“
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