Good evening. Tonight we’ll guide you through Gov. Josh Shapiro’s conversation-starting new book. We’ll start with the headlines.
5 takeaways from Josh Shapiro’s memoir
I first interviewed Josh Shapiro four years ago, during his run for governor of Pennsylvania. Back then, he was a relatively little-known state attorney general. Now, he is seen as one of his party’s top potential presidential candidates, a popular governor of a major battleground state who is following a time-honored tradition for ambitious politicians: releasing an introductory memoir. (Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has one coming out next month, too.) In his new book, “Where We Keep the Light: Stories From a Life of Service,” Shapiro blends discussion of faith, fatherhood and marriage with political talk, stories from his career and accounts of how he experienced major recent events. That includes discussion of the arson attack on the governor’s residence, how he built a relationship with Barack Obama, the collapse of the Biden campaign and the grueling process of being on Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential shortlist. Here are some takeaways from a book that has already gotten Democrats talking, even as Shapiro insists he’s focused on re-election and the midterms. The vice-presidential vetting process got ugly.Digs at his wife’s wardrobe. A sharp focus on Israel. A strange interlude spent waiting at an apartment after speaking with Harris. Vice-presidential vetting is notoriously challenging and invasive — but Shapiro describes a remarkably contentious ordeal. As we scooped last week, Shapiro wrote that he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government, a question he found deeply off-putting. “I said, ‘Of course not,’” Shapiro, who is Jewish, later said on “CBS Sunday Morning.” “I love this country. And for someone to question that, for someone to question my loyalty, particularly as someone who is as open about his faith as he is, was offensive to me.” At the time, Shapiro was drawing public scrutiny over his past remarks on Israel and his ties to the country, including the time he spent there as a young man. His interpretation of the episode has drawn pushback from some Democrats who say that asking about foreign ties is a matter of due diligence, not double standards. Ultimately, he said, he decided to withdraw from the process himself. He asked to be connected with Harris to share the decision, he wrote, but said he was told “the VP would not handle bad news well and that I shouldn’t push.” “These sessions were completely professional and businesslike,” he wrote. “But I just had a knot in my stomach through all of it.” His Jewish identity is front and center.At times, Shapiro wrote, he has struggled with “what my responsibility is as a person so public about my faith, at a time when it is more tenuous than ever to be Jewish in America.” He has plainly decided to lean in — especially, he wrote, after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. His book is full of details about life in an observant Jewish family, and he discusses his prayer practice openly, a relative rarity for Jewish politicians in America. He also wrote about how this has helped him connect with people of other religious backgrounds. I was reminded of that when I saw a video of Shapiro getting into (Old Testament) Bible-thumper mode as he laced into Vice President JD Vance over threats to food stamps, a fascinating possible 2028 preview. Before that, though, Shapiro is likely to face questions within his party about his views on Israel, at a time when Democratic support for the country has sharply fallen. Shapiro was an outspoken critic of what he saw as antisemitism on college campuses during the Gaza war. When Harris asked if he “would be willing to apologize for the statements I had made, particularly over what I saw happening at the University of Pennsylvania,” he replied that he would not, he wrote. Shapiro breaks with his party on Biden and Covid.When I talked to working-class voters last year about how they lost trust in the Democratic Party, I often heard complaints about pandemic-era lockdowns — and about the party’s support for an obviously frail Joe Biden as he ran for re-election. On both counts, Shapiro tried to create a little distance. He wrote that shortly before Biden dropped out, Shapiro told him directly about his significant challenges in Pennsylvania, and relayed that “there were a lot of people who thought it was best for him to get out of the race.” As for the pandemic, he said that while his state attorney general’s office had defended the policies of then-Gov. Tom Wolf, he disagreed with the extent of shutdowns for schools and businesses. He emphasizes his battleground state bona fides.In the book, Shapiro cast himself as a pragmatist and a relative centrist, a pro-public-safety official with a finger on the pulse of voters in what is perhaps the nation’s most important swing state. The Harris team, he suggested, didn’t have the same grasp. Aides’ questioning during the vice-presidential vetting process, he wrote, “suggested to me that they really didn’t understand where the people who would decide this presidential election really were.” The father of four knows working-parent guilt.Shapiro is a careful, buttoned-up politician. It’s striking to see him reveal more details of his upbringing and personal life, including how his mother’s private mental health struggles shaped him. “I never wanted Lori or my kids to experience one second of what I sometimes lived through — the chaos, the yelling, the tiptoeing around,” he wrote, referring to his wife. Other discussions of family life are much more lighthearted, like his failed attempt in college to win back Lori, then his high school girlfriend, who, along with her dorm-mates, found his earnest love letter hilarious. It worked out eventually — they got married — and he makes clear in the book that she is his most essential adviser. And some scenes are relatable to any working parent: the exhausting nature of bedtime chaos, trying to take important calls on a family vacation while kids clamor for snacks, meeting work demands while not missing the most important things at home. After the arson attack, though, which happened as his family slept, Shapiro grappled with a different kind of parental worry: “Was this my fault,” he wrote, “for putting our family in the spotlight?” Got a tip?
How Trump realized he had a problem in MinneapolisPresident Trump is famous for his ability to barrel past criticism and survive scandals. But in some cases, when he faces a particularly intense — and politically damaging — public outcry, he has responded to news coverage and adjusted his approach, even if it is merely temporary. Several of my colleagues who cover the White House and immigration captured how the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis created one of those moments. ONE NUMBER 57 percentThat’s the share of Americans who say President Trump is exceeding the powers available to him, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll. Ruth Igielnik, our polling editor, explains. That’s a slight increase since September, when 54 percent of voters said Trump had gone beyond his powers as president. The rise in that view is primarily being driven by a small but growing share of Republicans. Twenty-five percent of Republicans now say this, up from 17 percent in September. These Republicans, however, mostly say that Trump’s actions don’t go much further than other presidents. Still, a small share of Republicans — 12 percent — say his actions go so far that they are a unique threat to our system of government.
QUOTE OF THE DAY “Corey’s a character.”That was President Trump in a 2024 interview, talking about Corey Lewandowski, a longtime loyalist. Now one of Kristi Noem’s top advisers at the Department of Homeland Security, he is caught at the center of the Minneapolis uproar, my colleagues Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz write.
ONE LAST THING The ‘Melania’ documentary’s huge marketing budgetTo market “Melania,” which follows the first lady in the days before President Trump’s second inauguration, Amazon spent an estimated $35 million on things like billboards, ads on buses and national commercials during N.F.L. playoff games. That’s 10 times as high as some comparable high-profile documentaries, my colleagues Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes found. With the movie set to hold its domestic premiere this weekend, many in Hollywood are questioning whether Amazon’s expensive promotion of “Melania” is meant to curry favor with the president. Amazon, for its part, says only that “we think customers are going to love it.” Taylor Robinson contributed reporting. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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