Good morning. Negotiators from the U.S. and Iran are meeting in Geneva today, scrambling to stop a looming war in Iran. And we’re trying to figure out why 10 Cubans in a 45-year-old, 24-foot-long motorboat registered in Florida engaged in a deadly gun battle with Cuban border troops yesterday. Four of them are dead. There’s more news below. I’m going to start, though, with the economy.
Affordability bitesPresident Trump says the economy is going gangbusters. “Inflation is plummeting,” he said during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “Incomes are rising fast.” If that language sounds familiar, it’s because Joe Biden used it, too. “Wages keep going up,” he said in his final State of the Union address. “Inflation keeps coming down.” In both cases, there are risks to trying to tell voters that the economy is better than they think it is, write Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein, who cover politics for The Times. Biden spent months during his cut-short re-election campaign trying to sell the idea that “Bidenomics” had made American lives better. He had the data to show it, and he showed it often. But still, they write, “voters felt squeezed.” The phenomenon is bipartisan. This week, Trump argued that by many markers — the price of gas, the stock market, the fall in mortgage rates, the extent of job growth — the economy is “roaring.” But polls show that a majority of Americans think that his policies have made life less affordable.
Where does this disconnect come from? A former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Biden told The Times that both presidents had plenty of strong data to show the American people. Productivity growth has picked up, he said. But economic metrics don’t accompany you to the supermarket: “People don’t eat productivity or pay their rent with G.D.P.” Lived experienceOne of the numbers Trump trotted out during the State of the Union address had to do with the falling price of gas. He’d seen it in Iowa recently, he said, at $1.85 a gallon. That’s cheap! But I thought about the price of skirt steak at my local supermarket: $26.99 a pound. Not cheap. (I went with flap steak at $14.99 a pound.) I kept looking at prices. Gas at my Brooklyn filling station yesterday: $2.95 a gallon. Skirt steak at the Hy-Vee market in suburban Des Moines: $13.99 a pound. How you experience our economy depends entirely on where you’re living, what you’re doing, what you want and how badly you need it.
Look at prescription drugs. This week, Trump pledged to bring the cost of them down, as Biden had before him. “Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere in the world,” Biden said in 2024. “It’s wrong, and I’m ending it.” Trump on Tuesday: “Americans who have for decades paid by far the highest prices of any nation anywhere in the world for prescription drugs will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world.” It’s the same pitch. But whoever you vote for, folks need their Lipitor. And if the cost of it bites into their bottom line, they’ll feel that the economy is hurting, even if the new family down the street landed a sweet mortgage. It’s easy to get freaked. In the United States, for a long time now, a key economic indicator has been anxiety. At the pollsTo understand how that reality could play out in the coming midterm elections, and perhaps in the general election that will follow in 2028, I turned to Michael Cooper, who runs our politics coverage. “It’s a bit of a dilemma for incumbents,” he told me. “Can you express empathy for people’s economic anxieties without seeming to concede that all is not rosy on your watch?” It’s one of the biggest stories we’ll see as we head into the midterms. “Majorities of voters said they did not feel confident in their ability to pay for retirement and health care, and more than half said housing and education had become unaffordable,” Michael said. “A middle-class lifestyle was seen as increasingly out of reach for most people.” The questions to answer: Can Democrats capitalize on those anxieties, as they have in several smaller races recently — or will Trump’s tax cuts and other policies help Republicans stave off a blue wave in November? Watch: Biden and Trump delivered very similar messages — two years apart.
How should artificial intelligence guide the military? Commanders use Anthropic’s model, Claude, to analyze classified information. But now the Pentagon and the A.I. company are in a standoff, and the government says it may end Anthropic’s contracts. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, says his company won’t help the United States surveil unwitting civilians or deploy killer drones. He worries about what will happen when artificial intelligence becomes too powerful — and says the decision to kill people must remain a human one. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, says contractors don’t get to tell the government how to do its job; they just need to comply with the law, which he says his department already follows. If Anthropic doesn’t unlock its model for the Pentagon, Hegseth says, he could label it a risk. “Hard Fork,” our tech podcast, covered the impasse here.
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Texas will hold its Republican Senate primary on Tuesday. Times Opinion assembled a panel of experts to help guide voters through the complex issues in this election. We need to be better at math to have healthier politics, Aubrey Clayton writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
Winners: In Afghanistan, a victory in indoor soccer has turned members of the marginalized Hazara minority into national heroes. Super-agers: Some people’s brains remain almost perfectly intact into their 80s. A study suggests their longevity may come from an ability to grow new neurons. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about fitness trends experts hate. An “author’s publisher”: Ann Godoff cultivated the careers of dozens of novelists and nonfiction authors as the head of Random House and then of Penguin Press. She died at 76.
25— That is how many people are in the line of succession for the British throne. William, the Prince of Wales, is first. His uncle, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, is eighth. The British government is considering taking Mountbatten-Windsor off the list, given his ties to Epstein.
Olympic hockey: Members of the U.S. women’s team said they wanted to focus on their gold-medal win, not on laughs by the men’s team at Trump’s “distasteful” comments about them. |
