The defining trait of a 2020 presidential election otherwise defined by disruption, disease and unease has been the uncanny stability of its core metrics: Joseph R. Biden Jr. has held a substantial and steady, if not insurmountable, lead over President Trump for months.
The first face-to-face debate between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump ushers in the Black Swan season of American politics, a time when the unpredictable becomes the commonplace.
The president did not perform especially well in his first debate against Hillary Clinton four years ago, but he won the election anyway, and in shocking fashion. Mr. Biden has (thus far) proven himself to be a more elusive target but he is a shakier, less limber debater than Mrs. Clinton, unnerving even his loyal supporters.
Yet there is no guarantee that Mr. Trump’s trusty wingmen — uncertainty and chaos — will not turn on him this time around. In 2016, Mr. Trump faced Mrs. Clinton’s searing questioning of his fitness to serve, but in 2020 he is facing his own tax returns. Complexity often dilutes the impact of big scoops, but the complex accounting The New York Times released of his humbling financial history can also be reduced to a single, tweet-able nugget: $750, as in the total amount the billionaire paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
Mr. Biden pounced on that report hours before the debate, releasing his family’s 2019 tax returns voluntarily to mark the contrast. They revealed that Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, paid about $300,000, which had reporters pulling up their iPhone calculators to determine how much bigger his payment was (it was roughly 400 times as large).
What makes the tax story especially dangerous for Mr. Trump is that it feeds the larger narrative hammered out metronomically by the Biden campaign: that of a “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” race between a middle-class regular guy and a selfish oligarch who failed to address a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans.
In that sense, the terms of Tuesday’s debate are very clear, if the outcome is anything but.
Mr. Biden is likely to bring every discussion (if he maintains message discipline) back to the coronavirus — and Mr. Trump will try to answer for himself, and counterattack by raising the specter of urban unrest, questions about Hunter Biden, and his baseless accusation that Mr. Biden is either a) taking drugs or b) suffering from a mental disability that could use some medication: Covid-19 vs. non compos mentis.
It is likely to get ugly, if Tuesday’s pregame sparring was any indication.
Mr. Trump’s supporters, in a storm of unfounded accusations against Mr. Biden, accused him of trying to rig the rules of the debate to compensate for his mental shortcomings. Some spread rumors he would be wearing a hidden earpiece to receive secret help during the debate. At one point early Tuesday, a Fox News host had to cut off Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been helping prepare Mr. Trump for the debate, for offering a medical diagnosis of Mr. Biden.
About 90 minutes before the debate, Mr. Biden poked fun at the earpiece flap and Mr. Trump’s demands for drug testing, posting on Twitter a photo of a pair of earbuds and a container of ice cream. “It’s debate night,” Mr. Biden wrote, “so I’ve got my earpiece and performance enhancers ready.”
Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” anchor who is moderating tonight’s debate, declared over the weekend that his job “is to be as invisible as possible.” But his well-received turn as a moderator in 2016 hinged on the opposite.
It was Mr. Wallace’s subtle but firm presence that guided Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton to what was widely viewed as the candidates’ most substantive encounter of the 2016 campaign. Mixing humor with scolding, Mr. Wallace posed some sharp queries while taking pains to defuse chaotic moments.
“I’m not a potted plant here,” Mr. Wallace said at one point when the candidates’ bickering threatened to drown him out. “I do get to ask some questions.”
His most memorable moment came on a subject that is almost certain to crop up again on Tuesday: election integrity. Mr. Wallace repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump on whether he would accept the election results, a pledge that the Republican candidate refused to make. “I will keep you in suspense,” was Mr. Trump’s defiant reply.
The first Fox News anchor to take charge of a general election debate, Mr. Wallace faced skepticism from some Democrats, who were unimpressed with his questions about Mrs. Clinton’s lucrative paid speeches to banking firms. Republicans balked when Mr. Wallace bluntly asked Mr. Trump why “so many different women, from so many different circumstances,” had accused him of sexual misconduct.
Those who know Mr. Wallace say they expect him to be an equal-opportunity interrogator on Tuesday. One thing he is unlikely to do, however, is fact-check Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden in real-time. “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad,” Mr. Wallace said while preparing for his first debate go-round in 2016. “It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.”
Joseph R. Biden Jr. released his 2019 tax returns on Tuesday, which show that he and his wife, Jill, had an adjusted gross income of $985,000 last year and paid federal income taxes of nearly $288,000.
Mr. Biden released his latest tax returns hours before the first general election debate, and two days after The New York Times reported that President Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and in 2017.
That was a tiny fraction of what the Bidens paid those years, according to tax returns they had previously made public. They paid $91,000 in federal income taxes in 2016, when they had an adjusted gross income of $396,000, and they paid $3.7 million in 2017, when their adjusted gross income was $11 million.
The following year, in 2018, they paid $1.5 million in federal income taxes and had an adjusted gross income of $4.6 million.
Mr. Biden’s release of his most recent tax return seemed timed to place even more focus on Mr. Trump’s taxes and keep him on the defensive about them going into the debate, which is being held Tuesday night in Cleveland. Mr. Biden’s plane landed at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland at 4:45 p.m., and, after a wave to the press he left the airport in a black Chevrolet Suburban.
In addition to nearly $288,000 in federal income taxes, the Bidens paid nearly $12,000 in other federal taxes, for a total of just under $300,000.
Mr. Biden has now released returns covering the past 22 years. His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, also released her 2019 tax returns on Tuesday, which come in addition to 15 years of returns she released last year.
“This is a historic level of transparency meant to give the American people faith, once again, that their leaders will look out for them and not their own bottom line,” Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said on a call with reporters.
Mr. Trump did not release his tax returns when he ran for president as the Republican nominee in 2016, breaking with modern tradition, and has refused to do so since then.
Mr. Biden had previously criticized Mr. Trump for not releasing his tax returns. And this week, the Biden campaign quickly sought to capitalize on the revelations about Mr. Trump’s taxes, releasing a video showing the federal income taxes paid by workers like teachers and firefighters and launching a “Trump tax calculator” where people can determine how much more they paid in federal income taxes than the president.
The first presidential debate was still hours away, but the quadrennial debate about debate rules was already raging in full force, or perhaps full farce.
President Trump’s re-election campaign sought to cast doubt on the integrity of the debate even before it began, putting out a statement on Tuesday claiming that the Biden campaign had reversed its decision to allow a “pre-debate inspection for electronic earpieces” and that his campaign had asked for “multiple breaks during the debate.”
The Biden campaign denied the accusations.
Mr. Trump’s staff “seems concerned that he will not do well tonight, and they’re already laying the groundwork for how they’re going to lie about why,” Kate Bedingfield, a Biden deputy campaign manager, said during a pre-debate call with reporters. “It is completely absurd. Of course he is not wearing an earpiece, and we never asked for breaks.”
Pressed on whether the campaign had ever agreed to a pre-debate inspection, Symone Sanders, a senior adviser, said the question was “absolutely ridiculous” and characterized the assertions by the Trump campaign as “false, crazy, random, ridiculous” but did not answer the question.
Ms. Bedingfield, seemingly trying to make a point about spreading disinformation, declared, “If we’re playing that game, then you know, the Trump team asked that Chris Wallace never mention the number of Covid deaths once during the debate.” She added, “You can consider that confirmed from the Biden campaign. See how easy that was to try to throw up a distraction? It is pathetic, it’s weak.” The Biden campaign declined to say if she was serious; the Trump campaign said the claim was untrue.
Allies of Joseph R. Biden Jr. are bracing for ugly personal attacks from Mr. Trump on the debate stage — and they know that Mr. Biden has a temper and is deeply protective of his family.
Their hope: that Mr. Biden can channel any fury at Mr. Trump’s provocations into righteous anger on behalf of American voters.
Mr. Biden — who once called a voter who questioned his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings a “damn liar” — has been known to lash out when under attack. Whether he can do so productively will be among his most important tests on Tuesday.
Ms. Sanders said that Mr. Biden would “be focused on speaking directly to the American people,” including about his plan to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
And she said Mr. Biden would not be fact-checking Mr. Trump during the debate.
“It is not Joe Biden’s job in this debate to fact-check Donald Trump. That’s the moderator’s job. That’s the independent press’s job,” she said.
The Biden campaign also announced that his guests at the debate would include Kristin Urquiza, whose Trump-supporting father died of the coronavirus; Gurneé Green, a small-business owner from Ohio; and James Evanoff Jr., a member of the United Steel Workers union.
President Trump is planning to bring a woman he pardoned right after she spoke in support of him at the Republican National Convention and an Ultimate Fighting Champion performer as guests to the first debate, officials said.
Alice Johnson was pardoned by the president in late August. Colby Covington, the fighter, has been a strong Trump supporter for some time.
Mr. Trump’s adviser Jason Miller had teased an “intriguing” guest list on Twitter on Monday night, but the other guests are said to be a range of Trump advisers and family members. (In 2016, Mr. Trump’s “surprise guests” for the second debate against Hillary Clinton were women who had accused her husband of sexual misconduct.)
Mr. Trump traveled to the debate site with aides including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien; his political adviser, Mr. Miller; his White House adviser, Stephen Miller; the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows; and the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, will also join the group at the debate.
Over the last few weeks, some of those advisers have worked with Mr. Trump in private sessions at the White House and at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., to engage in some level of debate preparation.
Mr. Trump often has trouble focusing on the task at hand, and aides have privately said they don’t think he’s heading into the debate having internalized what advisers have coached him to do.
Aides have tried to drill down on ways in which he can be on offense during the debate, as opposed to simply parrying things that Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic opponent, says. Two people familiar with the briefings said that aides had tried to impress upon the president that Mr. Biden was likely to call him a “liar” at the outset of the debate, and that they had urged him not to react.
Mr. Trump has made clear to advisers he plans to bring up Mr. Biden’s son Hunter repeatedly and to raise questions about his overseas work.
One issue that advisers have grappled with in the last two days is how Mr. Trump will handle questions about his taxes, after The New York Times reported that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. Aides expect Mr. Biden to highlight the issue during the debate, and the Bidens released their 2019 tax returns on Tuesday, showing that they had paid $288,000 in federal income tax.
Some Trump aides have suggested that Mr. Trump highlight the number of jobs provided by his company, as well as revisit a line he’s used in the past, that he’s simply taking advantage of a lax tax code.
But senior campaign officials said Mr. Trump was in an upbeat mood and was not participating in any last-minute debate prep en route to Cleveland, because he was “ready to go.”
daily distortions
The false claim that Joseph R. Biden Jr. received questions to Tuesday night’s presidential debate in advance has been circulating on right-wing media sites.
A post on Twitter by the radio personality Todd Starnes was shared over 18,000 times and was used as the basis for stories on a number of right-wing sites, including Infowars and Gateway Pundit.
The debate, moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News, will be the first time that President Trump and Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, face off.
A representative for Fox News said the claim was “entirely false, and any assertion otherwise is patently absurd.”
Asked whether it had access to the questions before the debate, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, Andrew Bates, said, “No.”
On Tuesday, right-wing sites also shared the false claim that Mr. Biden was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece before the debate.
In a typical presidential year, anyone near the vicinity of a general election debate site would know it.
But in Cleveland on Tuesday, the sidewalks leading up to the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion — where Joseph R. Biden Jr. and President Trump were to debate for the first time — were desolate in the hours leading up to the contest, save for members of law enforcement, a smattering of reporters and the occasional intrigued local.
There was no snaking security line. No packs of journalists roaming or high-profile surrogates holding court, at least in the late afternoon when this reporter finally found the debate location after searching for signs of the event along a traffic-clogged street near Case Western Reserve University, a debate sponsor along with the Cleveland Clinic.
The security barrier and heavy police presence signaled that something was going on, but the typical festive trappings of a debate or other major political event were hard to spot.
Certainly, there were pockets of protesters along several sidewalks: people wearing pro-Trump hats or carrying anti-abortion signs; conservatives who — according to their sign — had abandoned Trump; Black Lives Matter activists. A truck drove by bearing the images of Mr. Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, his running mate, and other drivers honked in support of a small group carrying Trump signs.
But most of the passers-by appeared to be medical professionals at the Cleveland Clinic, who went about their business just down the street from the debate site, their face masks a constant reminder of the extraordinary public health challenges the nation faces as the debate unfolds.
Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey helped lead President Trump’s preparations for Tuesday’s debate, advising the president in the Oval Office and appearing at a White House news conference over the weekend.
On Tuesday, Mr. Christie will be offering his thoughts on the debate — as an on-air analyst for ABC News.
Mr. Christie, a paid contributor at ABC since 2018, will be a featured pundit in the network’s prime-time coverage. He will be joined by Rahm Emanuel, who served as White House chief of staff when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was vice president.
ABC plans to disclose Mr. Christie’s role in Mr. Trump’s debate prep during its telecast.
Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Christie appeared on “Good Morning America,” the ABC morning show, to preview Mr. Trump’s chances. The lead anchor, George Stephanopoulos, noted that the former governor had helped Mr. Trump prepare this year and in 2016.
Mr. Christie offered viewers a rosy view of Mr. Trump’s debate prospects. “The president hasn’t debated in four years,” he said, “but I don’t think he’ll have any problem when he gets on the stage tonight.”
The first debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes place Tuesday from 9 to 10:30 p.m. Eastern time. Here are some of the many ways you can watch it:
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The Times will livestream the debate, and our reporters will provide commentary and analysis.
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The debate will be televised on channels including PBS, CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN, NBC and MSNBC.
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Many of the same outlets, including ABC, CBS and C-SPAN, will stream the debate on YouTube.
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Chris Wallace, the anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” will moderate the debate. He played that role in one of the 2016 debates between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.
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The moderator chooses the debate topics. For Tuesday night, Mr. Wallace chose Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, race and violence in cities and the integrity of the election. There will be 15 minutes to discuss each topic.
It edged out the last episode of “Seinfeld,” but fell short of recent Super Bowls and the “M.A.S.H.” finale.
Still, the opening bout in September 2016 between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton notched the biggest audience for a presidential debate since televised debates began in 1960. Roughly 84 million viewers tuned in live, and that was not counting online, mobile and C-SPAN viewers.
Network executives are expecting a giant audience for tonight’s meeting between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., in part because it’s the first time the two candidates will meet face-to-face. But a record may not be in the cards. Nielsen ratings, which measure live TV viewers, are likely to dip from four years ago because so many Americans now watch events on the internet or via streaming services.
Before 2016, the previous record-holder for a presidential debate was the sole 1980 matchup of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, which drew 80.6 million viewers.
Mr. Trump is a proven TV draw: his three meetings with Mrs. Clinton in 2016 had a higher average viewership (74 million) than the debates in 2012 (64 million) and 2008 (57.4 million). In an age where the highest-rated shows on TV barely break the 10-million-viewer mark, presidential debates remain one of the last genuine mass-media events.
Chris Wallace, the Fox News anchor moderating tonight’s debate, will center the debate around six topics: the Supreme Court, the coronavirus outbreak, the integrity of the election, the economy, “race and violence in our cities” and the two candidates’ political records.
Here’s a look at what polling tells us about where the public stands on some of those issues — and how President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. might be able to score points with undecided voters.
The Supreme Court vacancy and Roe v. Wade
Just before Mr. Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Saturday, polls showed that most voters preferred that the winner of the November election choose the next justice. But now that she has been chosen, the public’s attention turns to the high-stakes confirmation fight.
If Judge Barrett were to help overturn Roe v. Wade, as Mr. Trump said on Sunday she “certainly” could, that would go against the will of most Americans, who support keeping abortion legal. In a recent Times/Siena poll, voters said by more than two to one that they would be less likely to back Trump if he appointed a justice who would overturn Roe.
The coronavirus pandemic
Since May, the pandemic has been a political weak point for Mr. Trump — in part because most Americans have consistently disagreed with his focus on a speedy reopening. By a 15-point margin, respondents to the Times/Siena poll said they disapproved of how he had handled the virus.
At the debates, look for Mr. Biden to return to the virus often, hammering the president on what he sees as his greatest vulnerability.
The economy
If there is one area in which Mr. Trump retains some advantage, it is the economy. By a 12-point margin, respondents to the Times/Siena poll gave him positive marks on that front.
But where the economy intersects with the virus, things grow dicier for the president. Fifty-five percent of likely voters said he was at least partly responsible for the economic downturn, according to the Times/Siena poll
By almost any standard, the race to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is playing out hastily. But a new account by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee, suggests it has been moving even faster than was publicly known.
Judge Barrett told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that the White House contacted her the day after Justice Ginsburg’s death about the vacancy, and that Mr. Trump offered her the nomination just two days later, on Sept. 21, after they met at the White House.
“The president offered me the nomination on that day, and I accepted, subject to finalizing the vetting process,” she wrote.
Judge Barrett was always identified as the president’s most likely pick, but she was not formally announced until five days after the offer was evidently made. In the meantime, Mr. Trump continued to say he was still considering other candidates.
The lag allowed Judge Barrett and the White House to get a head start on a process that in recent decades has usually taken more than two months. Senate Republicans are aiming to have it done in about half that time.
Judge Barrett laid out her account in a 69-page questionnaire that the Judiciary Committee asks each Supreme Court nominee to fill out, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Her responses largely consist of biographical information, a catalog of public speeches, academic writings and opinions she has written as an appeals court judge.
The document shows that as a corporate lawyer, law professor and then as a judge, she has amassed $2.75 million in assets. Judge Barrett has $157,000 in liabilities, mostly related to a mortgage on a personal residence valued at $518,787 and tuition payments. She has continued to earn thousands of dollars a year teaching during her time as an appeals court judge.
Nearly 100,000 New York City voters received defective absentee ballots, election officials acknowledged on Tuesday, a massive glitch that raised doubts about the city’s ability to handle a pandemic-era presidential election with millions of mail-in ballots expected.
The problems were mostly confined to Brooklyn, where voters registered outrage and confusion after seeing that their ballots had mismatched names and addresses on the outer and inner mail-back envelopes.
The mislabeled ballots may further undermine confidence in the New York City Board of Elections, which mishandled the state’s primary election in June, and could buttress President Trump’s assertions that absentee voting is plagued with troubles.
Michael Ryan, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, blamed the problem on the board’s vendor, Phoenix Graphics, a commercial printing company based in Rochester, N.Y., which was hired to mail out ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.
The foul-up was briefly addressed on Tuesday at a Board of Elections meeting, as Mr. Ryan, a Democrat, said the error was limited to “one print run.” He said the vendor would bear the cost of sending out new ballots to all potentially affected voters.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who does not control the board, called its most recent failure “appalling.”
“I don’t know how many times we’re going to see the same thing happen at the Board of Elections and be surprised,” he said.
On Monday, the Mr. Trump retweeted several articles about the problems in the city, including a New York Post report that some voters had received mail-in ballots marked for military use despite never having served in the armed forces.
City Board of Elections officials are encouraging voters to call a hotline to receive a new ballot. But phone lines already appear to be jammed: Two voters who called on Monday reported being 65th, and “80-something” in line.
Sal DeBiase, the president and chief executive at Phoenix Graphics, did not reply to multiple requests for comment. The company, which was also hired to print and send ballots in June’s primary elections, has worked with the city’s Board of Elections for years.
Election officials in New York City have already processed nearly 500,000 absentee ballot applications and began mailing ballots to voters last week.
President Trump’s top intelligence official on Tuesday released unverified information about the 2016 campaign that appeared to be a bid to help Mr. Trump politically and was said to be disclosed over the objections of career intelligence officials who were concerned that the material could be Russian disinformation.
The disclosures were the latest by John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and previously an outspoken congressional ally of the president, that highlighted information that helped Mr. Trump but that critics have called distortions.
Mr. Ratcliffe sought to shore up the credibility of the material, which centered on claims about Hillary Clinton, saying that it was not a product of Russian disinformation after initially acknowledging that it could be. But his initial disclosure, coming hours before the first presidential debate, offered fresh ammunition for Mr. Trump to attack his political enemies.
In a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Ratcliffe laid out snippets of previously classified reports suggesting that Russian intelligence had acquired information that Mrs. Clinton had approved a plan for her 2016 campaign to “stir up a scandal” against Mr. Trump by tying him to the Russian hackers who had broken into Democratic servers.
Democrats called the releases one of the starkest examples of politicization of the intelligence agencies under Mr. Trump. While Mr. Ratcliffe — a former congressman from Texas with little intelligence experience — promised during his Senate confirmation hearing to be nonpartisan, since taking the job he has highlighted Chinese election interference over what career officials say is a greater threat from Russia and made other declassifications similarly beneficial to the president.
A deceptive video released on Sunday by the conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University.
Mr. O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned after The New York Times published a sweeping investigation of President Trump’s taxes, the researchers said. They also noted that the timing and metadata of a Twitter post in which one of Mr. Trump’s sons shared the video suggested that he might have known about it in advance.
Project Veritas had hyped the video on social media for several days before publishing it. In posts amplified by other prominent conservative accounts, Mr. O’Keefe teased what he said was evidence of voter fraud, and urged people to sign up at “ballot-harvesting.com” to receive the supposed evidence when it came out. (None of the material in the video actually proved voter fraud.)
Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. The Stanford researchers concluded that this timing was unlikely to be a coincidence.
“It’s a great example of what a coordinated disinformation campaign looks like: pre-seeding the ground and then simultaneously hitting from a bunch of different accounts at once,” said Alex Stamos, who led the research team at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Scott Reed, the top political adviser at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said on Monday that he had resigned his post, citing what he described as a drift to the political left by the group in the wake of a string of endorsements of Democrats.
Mr. Reed, who was the campaign manager for former Senator Bob Dole when he was the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, also said there was a lack of commitment by the group to spend money to defend the Republican Senate majority ahead of the election on Nov. 3.
In an email, Michelle Russo, a spokeswoman for the group, insisted the chamber had taken action against Mr. Reed “for cause.”
“An internal review has revealed that Reed repeatedly breached confidentiality, distorted facts for his own benefit, withheld information from chamber leadership and leaked internal information to the press,” she said. “We have the documentation of his actions and it is irrefutable. Our decision is not based on a disagreement over political strategy but rather it is the result of Reed’s actions.”
She would not elaborate when asked. Mr. Reed responded that the group’s executive committee should conduct oversight of the organization, and that “a good place to start would be term limits for senior executives.”
Mr. Reed’s departure from the business-minded group, after spending eight years advising it on political decisions, is something of a seismic shift in the Washington establishment.
In recent weeks, the group endorsed nearly two dozen House Democrats, a move that perturbed President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Chamber officials said that the endorsements were among a slate that included just over 190 endorsements of Republican House candidates.
David Kochel, a former top adviser to Senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said on Twitter that Mr. Reed had “built that place.” Mr. Reed has been described as crucial to ousting former Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who had been criticized as racist for his hard-line views on immigration and who had been a source of discomfort for Washington Republicans for years. The chamber endorsed Mr. King’s G.O.P. primary opponent, Randy Feenstra, who defeated Mr. King in June.
Mr. Reed’s departure comes as Mr. Trump’s own positions on immigration and trade have become sources of discomfort for its member organizations, which generally like free trade and would like to see comprehensive immigration reform.
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