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US vice president urges Congress to pass legislation as Nichols's death renews push to end violence.

No equivalence exists in the ways that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have respectively handled the classified documents found in their possession. Yet panicky Democrats—ruled either by a thirst for TV airtime or by a knee-jerk defensive reflex—are suggesting that one does.

Biden’s enemies might be expected to use an argument of false equivalence to attack him, but surely not people who are supposed to be his allies. I’m talking to you, Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jim Himes.

Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation,” Durbin told CNN, adding that the president had “lost the high ground on this notion of classified information being where it shouldn’t be.”

“Anytime there are classified documents outside of a secure space, I am profoundly troubled, whether that space is owned by a Republican president or a Democratic president,” Himes said, also to CNN. “It’s a big problem.”

If anything should embarrass or trouble these Democrats, it is their failure to examine the facts and grasp the utter difference in the Biden and Trump cases. What in tarnation are they doing?

In their flap, they have forgotten the first principle of politics: What matters above all is public opinion and preventing a distorted narrative from becoming entrenched.

[David Axelrod: Yes, Mr. President, there is some there there]

According to a recent NBC poll, about two-thirds of Americans are now as concerned about Biden’s handling of classified documents as they are about Trump’s, despite the gulf of difference between the president’s actions and those of the habitual scofflaw Trump. What’s most worrying is Biden’s standing among Democratic voters: A majority of Democrats surveyed, 52 percent, said they’re concerned about Biden’s documents, just one point less than the percentage of Republicans who are concerned about Trump’s.

In other words, these Democratic chin-scratchers on TV are giving license to Trump and smearing Biden. Halt! If not in the name of the law, then of common sense.

The law is actually on their side, if they bothered to find out about it. In recent weeks, I have spoken with a number of highly regarded attorneys on the issue, and begged them, please, to find me a non-laughable defense of Trump’s handling of the Mar-a-Lago documents. They simply could not.

So the false equivalence that these Democrats are promoting is this: On the one hand, Biden made an error about which he was apparently unaware and that he promptly sought to correct, acting properly in tandem with the authorities in every respect; on the other hand, Trump as usual used the law as a roll of heavy-duty Charmin, repeatedly obstructing the National Archives, the FBI, and the Department of Justice, and persisting in the concealment of secret documents in his possession. It shouldn’t need saying, but apparently it does for some Democrats: These are not the same.

Telling the truth about the differences is not only the right thing to do; it’s the politically smart thing to do. In politics, offense is the best defense.

[Donald Ayer], Mark S. Zaid, and Dennis Aftergut: Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy

Democrats are coming off the most impressive midterm cycle led by a Democratic president in generations. In large part because of the president’s historic accomplishments during his first term, voters turned back the Republican fear campaign.

So Democrats are on a roll. And if Trump is the GOP’s nominee in 2024, they have every opportunity to run up the score on a wounded candidate who has led his party to nothing but losses since his election in 2016. Even if Trump does not win the Republican nomination, his base will continue to be a liability for the GOP: A Bulwark poll this week found that a full 28 percent of Republican voters would support Trump if he stood for a third party.

Yet all of this can be drowned out by just one narrative. Republicans love nothing better than to turn something baseless into something pervasive. And Democrats too often act as mindless accomplices, giving credence to the false equivalences that bubble up when the media cover Trump-related partisan issues. A recent report from Media Matters outlines the underlying pathology: Although Biden freely handed over the few documents in his possession to the Department of Justice and opened up his home to searches, parts of the news media are now discounting the significance of Trump’s document mishandling.

The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel prepared the way. Trump “clearly wanted to keep those things as souvenirs or for whatever and fought giving them back,” said Gangel on CNN, but the Biden documents story “may help him legally.” Legally? Let’s just say that I would have flunked my first year of law school if I’d said that.

Through this sort of speculation, some pundits are suggesting that the special prosecutors appointed in each case, Jack Smith and Robert Hur, will somehow end up paying more attention to each other than to the facts of the matter before them. I doubt that Smith or Hur needs CNN to explain the centrality of intent in criminal law. But the CNN analyst Margaret Talev recently said, “I think, Pence revelations aside, the drip, drip of the Biden discoveries does defuse this issue, takes it off the table as a real weapon to use against Trump.”

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

In the absence of robust counterarguments from Democratic leaders, such statements are being served up to a nightly audience that largely comprises Democratic voters. And by going along with the false premise, Democrats are filling their own supporters with despair.

Let’s revisit the nightmare of 2016 to understand what could lie ahead. Thanks to a similar dynamic of media herd mentality and Democratic defensiveness over Hillary Clinton’s emails, a 2016 poll found that nearly half of Americans saw the issue as “very concerning.” The narrative about Biden’s documents is in danger of taking root in much the same way—that’s what the polling today is showing. All these years later, does anyone know that Clinton mishandled zero classified documents among her emails? I’ll say it again: zero.

If the DOJ-appointed Hur goes about his business like a straight shooter, Biden will be exonerated. But if the media smear continues, it will be with the unbidden assistance of pearl-clutching Democrats. Next year could be the same as 2016, if they don’t correct the course now.

Stephen B. Thomas, the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, considers himself an eternal optimist. When he reflects on the devastating pandemic that has been raging for the past three years, he chooses to focus less on what the world has lost and more on what it has gained: potent antiviral drugs, powerful vaccines, and, most important, unprecedented collaborations among clinicians, academics, and community leaders that helped get those lifesaving resources to many of the people who needed them most. But when Thomas, whose efforts during the pandemic helped transform more than 1,000 Black barbershops and salons into COVID-vaccine clinics, looks ahead to the next few months, he worries that momentum will start to fizzle out—or, even worse, that it will go into reverse.

This week, the Biden administration announced that it would allow the public-health-emergency declaration over COVID-19 to expire in May—a transition that’s expected to put shots, treatments, tests, and other types of care more out of reach of millions of Americans, especially those who are uninsured. The move has been a long time coming, but for community leaders such as Thomas, whose vaccine-outreach project, Shots at the Shop, has depended on emergency funds and White House support, the transition could mean the imperilment of a local infrastructure that he and his colleagues have been building for years. It shouldn’t have been inevitable, he told me, that community vaccination efforts would end up on the chopping block. “A silver lining of the pandemic was the realization that hyperlocal strategies work,” he said. “Now we’re seeing the erosion of that.”

I called Thomas this week to discuss how the emergency declaration allowed his team to mobilize resources for outreach efforts—and what may happen in the coming months as the nation attempts to pivot back to normalcy.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Katherine J. Wu: Tell me about the genesis of Shots at the Shop.

Stephen B. Thomas: We started our work with barbershops and beauty salons in 2014. It’s called HAIR: Health Advocates In-Reach and Research. Our focus was on colorectal-cancer screening. We brought medical professionals—gastroenterologists and others—into the shop, recognizing that Black people in particular were dying from colon cancer at rates that were just unacceptable but were potentially preventable with early diagnosis and appropriate screening.

Now, if I can talk to you about colonoscopy, I could probably talk to you about anything. In 2019, we held a national health conference for barbers and stylists. They all came from around the country to talk about different areas of health and chronic disease: prostate cancer, breast cancer, others. We brought them all together to talk about how we can address health disparities and get more agency and visibility to this new frontline workforce.

When the pandemic hit, all the plans that came out of the national conference were on hold. But we continued our efforts in the barbershops. We started a Zoom town hall. And we started seeing misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic being disseminated in our shops, and there were no countermeasures.

We got picked up on the national media, and then we got the endorsement of the White House. And that’s when we launched Shots at the Shop. We had 1,000 shops signed up in I’d say less than 90 days.

Wu: Why do you think Shots at the Shop was so successful? What was the network doing differently from other vaccine-outreach efforts that spoke directly to Black and brown communities?

Thomas: If you came to any of our clinics, it didn’t feel like you were coming into a clinic or a hospital. It felt like you were coming to a family reunion. We had a DJ spinning music. We had catered food. We had a festive environment. Some people showed up hesitant, and some of them left hesitant but fascinated. We didn’t have to change their worldview. But we treated them with dignity and respect. We weren’t telling them they’re stupid and don’t understand science.

And the model worked. It worked so well that even the health professionals were extremely pleased, because now all they had to do was show up with the vaccine, and the arms were ready for needles.

[Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete]

The barbers and stylists saw themselves as doing health-related things anyway. They had always seen themselves as doing more than just cutting hair. No self-respecting Black barber is going to say, “We’ll get you in and out in 10 minutes.” It doesn’t matter how much hair you have: You’re gonna be in there for half a day.

Wu: How big of a difference do you think your network’s outreach efforts made in narrowing the racial gaps in COVID vaccination?

Thomas: Attribution is always difficult, and success has many mothers. So I will say this to you: I have no doubt that we made a huge difference. With a disease like COVID, you can’t afford to have any pocket unprotected, and we were vaccinating people who would otherwise have never been vaccinated. We were dealing with people at the “hell no” wall.

We were also vaccinating people who were homeless. They were treated with dignity and respect. At some of our shops, we did a coat drive and a shoe drive. And we had dentists providing us with oral-health supplies: toothbrush, floss, paste, and other things. It made a huge difference. When you meet people where they are, you’ve got to meet all their needs.

Wu: How big of a difference did the emergency declaration, and the freeing-up of resources, tools, and funds, make for your team’s outreach efforts?

Thomas: Even with all the work I’ve been doing in the barber shop since 2014, the pandemic got us our first grant from the state. Money flowed. We had resources to go beyond the typical mechanisms. I was able to secure thousands of KN95 masks and distribute them to shops. Same thing with rapid tests. We even sent them Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, a DIY filtration system to clean up indoor air.

Without the emergency declaration, we would still be in the desert screaming for help. The emergency declaration made it possible to get resources through nontraditional channels, and we were doing things that the other systems—the hospital system, the local health department—couldn’t do. We extended their reach to populations that have historically been underserved and distrustful.

Wu: The public-health-emergency declaration hasn’t yet expired. What signs of trouble are you seeing right now?

Thomas: The bridge between the barbershops and the clinical side has been shut down in almost all places, including here in Maryland. I go to the shop and they say to me, “Dr. T, when are we going to have the boosters here?” Then I call my clinical partners, who deliver the shots. Some won’t even answer my phone calls. And when they do, they say, “Oh, we don’t do pop-ups anymore. We don’t do community-outreach clinics anymore, because the grant money’s gone. The staff we hired during the pandemic, they use the pandemic funding—they’re gone.” But people are here; they want the booster. And my clinical partners say, “Send them down to a pharmacy.” Nobody wants to go to a pharmacy.

[Read: The COVID strategy America hasn’t really tried]

You can’t see me, so you can’t see the smoke still coming out of my ears. But it hurts. We got them to trust. If you abandon the community now, it will simply reinforce the idea that they don’t matter.

Wu: What is the response to this from the communities you’re talking to?

Thomas: It’s “I told you so, they didn’t care about us. I told you, they would leave us with all these other underlying conditions.” You know, it shouldn’t take a pandemic to build trust. But if we lose it now, it will be very, very difficult to build back.

We built a bridge. It worked. Why would you dismantle it? Because that’s exactly what's happening right now. The very infrastructure we created to close the racial gaps in vaccine acceptance is being dismantled. It’s totally unacceptable.

Wu: The emergency declaration was always going to end at some point. Did it have to play out like this?

Thomas: I don’t think so. If you talk to the hospital administrators, they’ll tell you the emergency declaration and the money allowed them to add outreach. And when the money went away, they went back to business as usual. Even though the outreach proved you could actually do a better job. And the misinformation and the disinformation campaign hasn’t stopped. Why would you go back to what doesn’t work?

Wu: What is your team planning for the short and long term, with limited resources?

Thomas: As long as Shots at the Shop can connect clinical partners to access vaccines, we will definitely keep that going.

Nobody wants to go back to normal. So many of our barbers and stylists feel like they’re on their own. I’m doing my best to supply them with KN95 masks and rapid tests. We have kept the conversation going on our every-other-week Zoom town hall. We just launched a podcast. We put out some of our stories in the form of a graphic novel, The Barbershop Storybook. And we’re trying to launch a national association for barbers and stylists, called Barbers and Stylists United for Health.

The pandemic resulted in a mobilization of innovation, a recognition of the intelligence at the community level, the recognition that you need to culturally tailor your strategy. We need to keep those relationships intact. Because this is not the last time we’re going to see a pandemic even in our lifetime. I’m doing my best to knock on doors to continue to put our proposals out there. Hopefully, people will realize that reaching Black and Hispanic communities is worth sustaining.

President Joe Biden announced Thursday that his National Economic Council Director Brian Deese plans to step down from his role, a long-awaited confirmation of an expected departure.

The State of the Union speech is not a magic elixir or cure-all for political ills. Generally, presidents get a slight bump in polling following the speech, but that fades over time.

President Joe Biden offered an olive branch to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday as he gave an interfaith and bipartisan address to the National Prayer Breakfast, remarks on Capitol Hill that come amid pressing issues including the debt limit, a national conversation on justice and policing and congressional investigations into his administration.

Washington (CNN) -- President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence are all facing scrutiny regarding their potential mishandling of classified documents.

House Republicans are preparing for a big confrontation with the Biden White House over the debt ceiling—a confrontation that could, if played wrong, collapse the U.S. financial system and drag down the world economy. President Joe Biden has been preparing for this fight since 2011, the last time Republicans tried a similar trick. That year, the doomsday device was switched off seconds before it detonated by an agreement on a sequester that automatically cut spending on defense and domestic programs with little regard to merits. Even so, the S&P rating agency downgraded U.S. debt below triple A for the first time, and the stock markets spasmed. The sequester was ultimately jettisoned by Republicans during the Trump years.

Have the House Republicans planned more carefully this time? Have they figured all the angles? In particular, have they taken into account the near-infinite capacity for treachery and backstabbing of the once and maybe future leader of their party, Donald Trump?

Trump announced his 2024 candidacy back in November. For weeks, he’s done nothing much about it, but in the past few days, Trump has emerged again. Last week, he made speeches in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He hit familiar notes of racial and cultural resentment. He denounced critical race theory and “left-wing gender ideology.” He proposed that parents should elect school principals. You know what he did not talk about? Cutting the federal budget.

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

Trump’s never been a fiscal-discipline guy. In 2016, he repeatedly promised never to tamper with Social Security or Medicare. That was one promise he kept while in office. Now his party is rushing to create a crisis over exactly the issues from which he distanced himself. If all goes well for Republicans, Trump may be happy to scoop up the credit. But if things begin to go badly …

Recall the Republicans who campaigned in 2022 on Trump’s grievances over the 2020 election. After so many of them lost, what did Trump do? He turned on some of the very people he himself had endorsed. On his social-media platform, he said of a Trump loyalist who had lost a Senate race in New Hampshire: “Don Bolduc was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed, after his big primary win, his longstanding stance on Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Primary. Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won, easily. Lessons Learned!!!”

Trump even more triumphantly heaped scorn on candidates who had expressed a preference for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over him, such as Joe O’Dea, who lost a Senate race in Ohio. Trump ridiculed O’Dea, but the real target of his derision was DeSantis. “Will they ever learn their lesson? You can’t win without MAGA!”

Republican Party elites have drifted toward DeSantis. Yet Trump remains the clear favorite among the Republican rank and file, maintaining a 15-to-20-point lead on DeSantis in the latest Morning Consult polling. While DeSantis avoids tangling with Trump, Trump cheerfully insults “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

Trump’s going to be on the prowl for ways to elevate himself and disqualify alternatives. If the polls go negative for Kevin McCarthy & Co. in the impending drama, they should brace themselves for Trump to demean and disparage them. He will show no party loyalty. He will want to say that he alone is smart, that everybody else is stupid, and that no issue—not the budget, not anything—should take priority over Trump, Trump, Trump.

[Read: The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling]

In November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained his party’s disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms. Voters felt, he said, that Republicans “were not dealing with issues in a responsible way and we were spending too much time on negativity and attacks and chaos. They were frightened and so they pulled back.” His House colleagues have responded to that astute critique with even less responsibility, even harsher negativity, and even more frightening chaos. Maybe that’ll work better for them this time. If not, watch for Trump to head the blame parade, to aggrandize himself by betraying them.

They should see it coming. They never do.

CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash weighs in on Hunter Biden's team changing course in its legal and political strategy as his attorneys call for investigation into right-wing political figures involved in disseminating his personal data purported to have come from Biden's laptop.