Politics

“It’s going to be hard to defeat an incumbent based on normal red and blue teams,” he said. That may be good news for vulnerable Republican senators and Democrats in the House, who have shifted from traditional campaigning to Zooming town halls with health experts and intense constituent service around small-business loans and unemployment benefits. […]

WASHINGTON — The White House lobbed a bizarre broadside against Voice of America this week, using one of its popular communications channels to accuse the United States-funded foreign news broadcaster of amplifying Chinese propaganda. The post appeared Thursday on “1600 Daily,” an events summary produced by the White House digital team. The charges hurled at

The president cited the 60,000 estimated death toll as evidence of progress. “I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” he said of the earlier 100,000 forecast. “Hard to believe that if you have 60,000, you can never be happy, but that’s a lot fewer than we were originally told.” But his public health advisers

Did Mr. Atkinson ignore the Justice Department’s view? No. While Mr. Atkinson disagreed with it, he considered himself bound by it. After Mr. Atkinson gave the complaint to Mr. Maguire, Steven E. Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, opined that the whistle-blower law did not apply because the complaint was

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, under fire for pushing food stamp cuts in the middle of a pandemic, has decided to hold off on stricter work requirements for adults without children during the national emergency. “People need food and that’s what U.S.D.A. does,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said this week in a statement to The

Even before the coronavirus pandemic emerged, Washington had made a series of aggressive moves in its competition with Beijing. But the severity of the virus has in recent weeks forced government officials worldwide to grapple with their approach to China across many fronts. Like lawmakers, some Trump administration officials have used the crisis to fuel

But this year’s presidential race may be an anomaly. With the response to the pandemic taking center stage, issues like health care, the economy and voting rights are likely to be viewed through the lens of the virus. So how the president handles the response — and how his presumptive opponent, former Vice President Joseph

President Trump said that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” The G.O.P. speaker of the House in Georgia said an all-mail election would be “extremely devastating to Republicans.” Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said universal mail voting would be “the end of

WASHINGTON — A new attack ad by President Trump’s re-election campaign portraying former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as soft on China includes an image of an Asian-American former governor of Washington State that appears to falsely suggest he is Chinese. The image, which appears briefly, was pulled from a 2013 event in Beijing,

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr said on Thursday that President Trump was right to fire the inspector general who disclosed the whistle-blower complaint about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and that the president’s political enemies could face criminal prosecution. In coming to the president’s defense, Mr. Barr also praised Mr. Trump’s response to