The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.

On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in America’s retreat from democracy—the failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.

Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford’s high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.

After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.

Despite this—and numerous death threats—Cheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.

[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]

Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasn’t alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.)

President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.
(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona)

Yet when the foundation’s executive committee received Cheney’s nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.

To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundation’s executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.

Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundation’s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committee’s decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: “At the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.”

Giving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be “prudent.” Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.

I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America—the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump’s team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.

[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

I see Whitney’s legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasn’t been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. What’s more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to then–Vice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, “We face a very different political environment today than in 2004.” He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasn’t afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).

Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying “MAGA Republicans.” Daniels said he had spent 10 years “ducking” such questions. He allowed that he would “make no objection” to Biden’s statement, but continued: “I think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.” This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.

My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundation’s executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.

Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixon’s actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney—someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.

Joe Biden has an Israel problem. According to recent polls, more than half and as much as two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the conflict in Gaza. In a February primary in Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” after critics urged voters to protest his Israel policies. Democratic donors have warned the president that his support for the Israeli operation could cost him in November’s election.

Will it? Most academics and pollsters tend to be skeptical that foreign policy can swing elections. Americans almost always care more about domestic issues than international ones. Their views on foreign events tend to be weakly held and malleable: Voters will typically align them to match those of their party or favorite candidate. Their opinions may be more solid when American lives are at stake, but that’s not the case in Gaza.

This year, however, may be different. Or maybe Israel is different. Because even the academics and pollsters are saying that the war in Gaza could be electorally significant in 2024, in a way that other international issues—including the conflict in Ukraine—will probably not be.

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless. The conflict is a humanitarian catastrophe that the White House has been unable to stop, leaving millions of American voters frustrated with the president. It compounds perceptions that the United States is losing its international position. A majority of American voters now have a poor estimation of Washington’s global standing under Biden’s leadership.

These electoral hazards are amplified by the fact that the contest is likely to be close. In 2016, Donald Trump’s winning margin was so tight that the combined 77,744 additional voters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who chose him could fit in MetLife Stadium. In 2020, Joe Biden eked out his Electoral College advantage by wins in three swing states that totaled fewer than 45,000 votes. Most national polls now have Biden and Trump effectively tied. In this context, one can easily imagine Gaza moving enough ballots to determine the 2024 election—even if it shifts only a percentage point or two of the vote.

“There’s enough there to cause the White House to be worried,” Andrew Payne, a political scientist at City, University of London, told me.

The conventional wisdom is that voters care more about pocketbook issues at home than about what’s happening overseas, a view largely confirmed by the findings of major pollsters such as Pew and Gallup. According to those who study this field, foreign policy is likely to have even less influence in an era of hyper-partisan polarization because voters tend not to cast ballots for candidates from a different party even if they dislike some of their own candidate’s positions.

“Elections matter much more to foreign policy than foreign policy matters to elections,” Payne said, describing the default.

But the supremacy of domestic issues is not an iron law. A meta-analysis published in the 2006 Annual Review of Political Science concluded that voters held “reasonably sensible and nuanced views” on international topics and that their opinions “help shape their political behaviors.” More recent research supports that conclusion. In 2019, a group of political scientists recruited thousands of Americans and asked them to choose between hypothetical presidential candidates with a mix of international, economic, and religious positions, as well as with different partisan affiliations. The researchers found that participants were just as likely to select the candidate they agreed with most on international policies as they were the candidate they agreed with most on domestic matters. Perhaps more telling, the researchers found as well that “Democrats and Republicans were also willing to cross party lines on the basis of foreign policy.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Gaza is dividing Democrats]

Not all international issues carry equal weight, of course. But when an issue is prominent enough that Americans tune in and have a defined opinion, it can make a difference. The Iran-hostage crisis bedeviled President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection bid, and Ronald Reagan got significant mileage out of casting Carter as soft on communism. Foreign policy can certainly hobble parties if it divides them. In 1968, a split between Democratic progressives and centrists over the Vietnam War harmed their nominee, Herbert Humphrey, in what was a narrowly decided contest for the White House. In 2016, Trump made trade a major campaign issue, driving a wedge between many working-class, anti-free-trade Democrats and the party’s pro-globalization elite.

Candidates can lose despite foreign-policy triumphs. Voters in 1992 did not reward George H. W. Bush with a second term even though he had overseen the resounding defeat of Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led coalition forces in the Gulf War. By the same token, candidates can win despite international blunders. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a morass by the time of his 2004 reelection bid, and he nonetheless prevailed. But the war still exacted an electoral cost. According to a 2007 study by two professors at UC Berkeley, the losses taken by U.S. forces deprived Bush of roughly 2 percent of the vote. Without that bloodshed, the authors wrote, “Bush would have swept to a decisive victory,” instead of a narrow win.

As the 2008 election loomed, about one in three voters told Gallup that they rated the Iraq War as “extremely important”—and the explicitly anti-war Senator Barack Obama won both his party’s nomination and the presidential election in that cycle. His victory helped show that, although very few people vote on international topics alone, foreign problems can acquire a domestic quasi-significance.

Gaza could be another moment when a foreign conflict has major domestic repercussions. Several academics have told me that, in their view, liberals who disapprove of Biden’s approach to the conflict will still ultimately turn out for him: Americans do not typically vote according to a single issue, and stopping Trump is a powerful motivator for even strong critics of Israel. But plenty of more left-leaning Americans were disenchanted with Biden before the war in Gaza broke out. For these voters, the conflict could be a tipping point. “They might not show [up],” Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at MIT and the author of In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq, told me.

Biden might be able to increase his support among such voters by taking a harder line against Israel. The Democratic Party appears to be growing rapidly more pro-Palestine than pro-Israel. According to a Quinnipiac poll last month, 48 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while 21 percent sympathized more with the Israelis. This represents an almost perfect reversal from October 17, shortly after the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, when 48 percent sympathized more with Israelis and 22 percent sympathized more with Palestinians.

The trend suggests a logic for Biden to make such a pivot. “Biden will need to cobble together every vote of the last coalition to win,” Dina Smeltz, a senior fellow on public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council, told me.

But the president’s party is still starkly divided over the war in a way that the Republican Party isn’t. The issue may not have reached the level of divisiveness that Vietnam had for the Democratic Party in 1968, but as the momentum of controversial campus protests picks up, the parallel grows stronger. “It’s a great wedge issue for Republicans,” Tesler told me.

[David Frum: The plot to wreck the Democratic convention]

Party divisions are not the only way that Gaza could undermine Biden. According to research by Jeffrey Friedman, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, presidential candidates benefit from looking muscular on international issues. In 1960, the then-candidate John F. Kennedy proposed an enormous military buildup, even though polls showed that just 22 percent of voters thought defense spending was too low. Afterward, he steadily gained ground with voters concerned with issues of war and peace.

Weaker-seeming candidates can try to shift conversations away from international issues, but unfortunately for Biden, the war in Gaza will make that hard. And as unpopular as Biden’s approach is, he appears reluctant to gamble on a major shift and is unlikely to do so. He might benefit politically if the United States was able to press successfully for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, getting the conflict out of public discourse and showing that the U.S. has some leverage and authority. But if U.S. pressure failed, Biden might come off as even more ineffectual.  

Although Trump has some isolationist instincts, he is adept at projecting strength in a way that voters associate with American power. Meanwhile, poll after poll suggests that voters see Biden as weak—his job approval on foreign policy is some 10 points lower than Trump’s during his presidency—and the specter of wider conflict in the Middle East is unlikely to change that.

“It reinforces perceptions that the world is in crisis,” Friedman told me. “And generally speaking, when voters feel that there is a crisis, they are much more inclined to vote for candidates they see as strong.”