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WilmerHale, a prominent U.S. law firm, is close to wrapping up a detailed review of OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, and his ouster from the artificial intelligence start-up late last year, two people with knowledge of the proceedings said.

The investigation, when complete, could give insight into what went on behind the scenes with Mr. Altman and OpenAI’s former board of directors, which fired him on Nov. 17 before reinstating him five days later. OpenAI, which is valued at more than $80 billion, has led a frenzy over A.I. and could help determine the direction of the transformative technology.

Mr. Altman, 38, has told people in recent weeks that the investigation was nearing a close, the two people with knowledge of the matter said. The results could be delivered to OpenAI’s board as soon as early next month, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements.

OpenAI declined to comment. WilmerHale did not respond to a request for comment.

Investigators spent the past three months interviewing OpenAI employees and executives after its former board said it no longer had confidence in Mr. Altman’s ability to run the company, the people said. The board said Mr. Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications,” though it did not provide specifics.

Privately, the board worried that Mr. Altman was not sharing all his plans to raise money from investors in the Middle East for an A.I. chip project, people with knowledge of the matter have said.

After he was ousted, Mr. Altman waged a bare-knuckle fight against some OpenAI directors to get himself reinstated as chief executive. He won but made concessions. He agreed that OpenAI would hire an outside law firm to investigate his ouster, and he did not regain his own board seat at the company. But he succeeded in revamping the board, removing two members and adding two others.

OpenAI nearly imploded during the leadership crisis, endangering a potential windfall for its investors, such as Microsoft, and its employees. In the months since Mr. Altman’s reinstatement, insiders have scrambled to contain the fallout, advising employees to keep potential dissent quiet for fear of jeopardizing the company’s fortunes.

OpenAI is considered a leader in generative A.I., technology that can generate text, sounds and images from short prompts. It is also among the many companies aspiring to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

Meta, Google, Microsoft and others are also racing to develop such technology. Leaders at these companies believe that A.G.I. will revolutionize the computing industry, as well as the global economy and workforces.

President Biden underwent the third physical exam of his presidency on Wednesday amid concerns over his age as he campaigns for a second term.

Mr. Biden, 81, traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for his annual physical, according to the White House. The visit was not announced ahead of time but was on his schedule, according to two people familiar with the plans but who were not advised to speak about them publicly.

Mr. Biden spent about two and a half hours inside Walter Reed. The White House is expected to release a summary of Mr. Biden’s physical later on Wednesday.

Events over the past few weeks have cast a spotlight on Mr. Biden’s age. He was described in a special counsel report over his handling of classified documents as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Polling shows that a majority of Americans have concerns about his age and ability to run for a second term. And Mr. Biden has made unforced errors at events, including recalling interactions with foreign leaders who would have been dead at the time those interactions took place.

As the presidential election heats up, the president has tried in recent days to assuage concerns over his age by reframing the focus on his likely Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, who is four years younger and who makes a number of untrue, exaggerated or outright false claims at each of his public appearances.

“You got to take a look at the other guy,” Mr. Biden said during an appearance this week on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name,” he added, referring to a video in which Mr. Trump, 77, appeared to forget the name of his wife, Melania.

White House officials have been asked for weeks about whether and when Mr. Biden would make the trip to Walter Reed. Last February, Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s longtime physician, gave Mr. Biden a clean bill of health, calling him a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old.”

But Mr. Biden’s advisers have declined to say definitively whether the president — the oldest in the nation’s history — will take any tests to assess his memory and cognitive abilities. (In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has bragged about taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test that can help detect dementia and cognitive decline, but he has distorted the facts about the contents of the test. And the Montreal test, experts say, is neither definitive nor diagnostic.)

Mr. Biden has also become noticeably slower in his movements in recent months, walking stiffly as he makes his way to the podium at appearances and taking the short stairs directly into the belly of Air Force One, rather than the taller stairs to the plane’s upper door.

Last year, Dr. O’Connor said the stiffness in Mr. Biden’s gait was the result of “significant spinal arthritis, mild post-fracture foot arthritis and a mild sensory peripheral neuropathy of the feet,” for which the president undergoes physical therapy to maintain flexibility.

His gait is somewhat halting, a characteristic that multiple people close to the White House say is partly because of his refusal to wear an orthopedic boot after suffering a hairline fracture in his foot before taking office.

When you read — a book, a traffic sign, a billboard, this article — how much do you really notice the letters? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably not at all.

But even if you don’t really notice them, you might sense it if something has subtly changed. That’s a feeling some people have had in recent weeks when they turn on their Microsoft Word programs.

After 17 years of Calibri as Word’s default typeface, many users suddenly found themselves typing in a new typeface called Aptos. The change is also affecting the look of PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel.

Letters are letters, but for designers and typography fans, they matter a lot.

Why the change?

“We wanted to bring something new and fresh that really was designed natively for the sort of modern era of computing,” said Jon Friedman, the company’s corporate vice president for design and research, who led the effort.

(Technically Aptos and Calibri are typefaces, while a “font” refers to a particular face or size, like italics or boldface. But in practice, “font” is often used as a synonym for “typeface,” including by Microsoft employees interviewed for this article.)

The big divide in the world of typeface is between serif, or letters with small lines or tails attached to their edges, and sans serif, letters without those lines that have a smoother look.

Like Calibri, Aptos is a sans serif typeface but with something a little extra, Microsoft says.

Centuries ago, in the early days of printing presses, almost all typefaces had serifs. “Sans serif was meant for billboards,” Mr. Friedman said. “They were big, blocky letters, and they called them ‘grotesque.’ They were bold and easily legible from far.” At the time, a sans serif was rarely used for more than one or two words or a single sentence.

Aptos would be classified as a “neo-grotesque” font.

“Neo-grotesque was when the artistry started,” Mr. Friedman said, referring to an era in the mid-20th century. “Designers started to choose sans serif fonts. That was the birth of Helvetica and Arial that were used more broadly and were sans serif fonts.”

It helped that most people thought sans serifs looked better on a computer, which was rapidly becoming the writing instrument of choice worldwide.

As for Aptos, “we wanted it to be a little more quirky and whimsical” even though it was a sans serif, Mr. Friedman said. “Sans serif fonts are pretty rectilinear, clear, easy for reading, but sometimes they miss some of the whimsy that serif fonts might have.”

The designer, Steve Matteson, “brought a little more — he called it ‘imperfections’: little bits of change that are slightly different from a typical sans serif font,” Mr. Friedman added.

“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” Mr. Matteson said in a Microsoft statement about the change. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g.”

In most sans serif fonts, “the capital ‘I’ is a line, and the lowercase ‘l’ is a line,” Mr. Friedman said. “The weight is slightly different, but most people can’t see it. In Aptos, the lowercase ‘l’ has a tiny curve at the bottom. Illinois. Illustration. It’s very clear what you’re reading, even in a sans serif.”

“It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it,” he added.

In another subtlety, above the lowercase i’s and j’s are circular dots as opposed to squares as in Calibri. You may notice this when you type “je ne sais quoi” in Aptos.

So how exactly do you design a font? The answer is one that creative types everywhere might appreciate: “You’ve got to start somewhere,” Mr. Friedman said.

“One font designer might start by roughly sketching out the entirety of the alphabet,” he said. “Others might start with a particular letter that they think is challenging.”

“You think a font is such a tiny thing,” he added. “It’s just letters. But it requires deep thinking; it’s not a trivial concept.”

The end result, Aptos, is Microsoft’s trademarked intellectual property.

“Even though some people can see the difference and passionately care about it, and others may seem like they don’t care about it, the moment we change it, people notice something changed,” Mr. Friedman said.

Some of those people came forward on social media with a litany of complaints. (Others said they liked the new font.)

Change to a familiar product often brings protest. When The New York Times added color to its print front page in 1997, some people complained that the staid paper had become unnecessarily flashy, though such gripes faded quickly as readers grew used to the change.

As for those who never learn to appreciate the neo-grotesque, there is a solution. Remember what “default” means.

If you’re using a Windows device, navigate to Home and open the Font Dialog Box Launcher. On a Mac, go to Format and click Font. Change the font to one you like better. Set it to Default. Aptos will no longer darken your door.

The New York Times is keeping its color, though.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump won Michigan’s primary elections on Tuesday as the president and his predecessor hurtle toward a rematch in November.

But the results showed some of the fragility of the political coalitions they have constructed in a critical state for the fall. Losing any slice of support is perilous for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by about 150,000 votes, and Mr. Trump carried it in 2016 by about 11,000 votes.

The results of the primaries on Tuesday carried extra weight because Michigan was the first state that is a top general-election battleground to hold its primary in 2024.

Here are four takeaways from the results:

‘Uncommitted’ succeeded in grabbing Biden’s attention.

When the movement to persuade Democrats to vote “uncommitted” began three weeks ago, its public goal was clear: Pile enough pressure on Mr. Biden that he would call for an unconditional cease-fire in Gaza.

Since then, top White House officials told Arab American leaders in Dearborn, Mich., that they had regrets over how the administration had responded to the crisis. Mr. Biden called Israel’s military action “over the top.” And on the eve of the primary, he said he hoped a cease-fire agreement would be in place within a week. (The view from Israel and Gaza suggested Mr. Biden was being a bit optimistic.)

And yet the strength of the “uncommitted” effort surprised the president’s campaign, which until this week didn’t anticipate the strength of anti-Biden sentiment among Michigan Democrats.

In the early hours of Wednesday, roughly 13 percent of primary voters had chosen “uncommitted” — a share that paled next to Mr. Biden’s 81 percent, but represented more than 75,000 people in Michigan who made the effort to lodge their disapproval of the president.

The movement is now likely to spread to other states, many of which have an option for voters to choose “uncommitted” or “no preference” in their primaries. Listen to Michigan, the group that kicked off the state’s protest vote, is holding an organizing call for supporters in Minnesota, which votes next week, and Washington State, which holds its primary on March 12.

“This is the only option we have to enact democracy in this moment,” said Asma Mohammed, a progressive activist who is among the leaders of a new group called Uncommitted Minnesota. “We are against a Trump presidency, and we also want Biden to be better. If that means pushing him to his limit, that is what it will take.”

The challenge for the Biden campaign will be slowing any perceived momentum after Michigan by those protesting his Gaza policy. As long as the war grinds on and the United States keeps sending aid to Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to assuage voters who are angry about the mounting Palestinian death toll.

Both front-runners have clear vulnerabilities.

Mr. Trump has long been the heavy favorite to become the Republican nominee. Mr. Biden left little doubt that he would run again for Democrats.

Yet tens of thousands of Michiganders in both parties voted against their standard-bearers on Tuesday, a stark rejection that suggests they could have problems stitching together a winning coalition in November. The saving grace for each man, as Karl Rove, the former top strategist for George W. Bush, vividly put it recently, is that “only one can lose.”

Part of the reason Michigan’s results appear more damaging to Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump is the matter of expectations.

Ms. Haley has been campaigning against Mr. Trump for months, and her share of the Republican electorate has gone down from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Michigan.

But Mr. Biden cruised through his first two primaries in South Carolina and Nevada before a loosely organized group of Arab American political operatives, with $200,000 and three weeks to spare, won enough support that their effort is likely to clinch delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

“If the White House is listening, if our congressional leaders are listening, if our state leaders are listening, we need a change of course or we risk the complete unraveling of American democracy come November,” said Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn.

Biden needs to keep an eye on college towns.

It was not surprising to see “uncommitted” beat Mr. Biden in Dearborn and Hamtramck, two of the Michigan cities with the highest concentrations of Arab Americans. With nearly all ballots counted, Dearborn gave 56 percent of its Democratic primary vote to “uncommitted.” In Hamtramck, “uncommitted” drew 61 percent of the city’s Democratic vote.

Perhaps more worrisome for Mr. Biden was his performance in Ann Arbor, a college town 30 miles to the west.

There, where most students and faculty members at the University of Michigan live, “uncommitted” earned 19 percent of the vote. In East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, “uncommitted” got 15 percent of the vote.

While no other battleground states have Arab American communities the size of Michigan’s, they all have college towns where young, progressive voters are angry about American support for Israel.

It is in those places — Madison, Wis.; Athens, Ga.; Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz.; and State College, Pa., among others — where Mr. Biden faces a general-election threat if he does not attract overwhelming support and turnout among students in November.

Nikki Haley’s still in it, but she’s not going to win it.

Donald J. Trump won — again. Nikki Haley lost — again.

At one point in the nominating calendar, the Michigan primary had the potential to be a brief but notable way station between the four first states and Super Tuesday.

But the lopsided results offered more of the same, with Mr. Trump dominating everywhere in Michigan and Ms. Haley on track for her weakest showing since the race narrowed to two candidates. She marches on, with planned rallies and fund-raisers in seven states and Washington, D.C., before Super Tuesday on March 5.

The month of February was about momentum, and Mr. Trump has all of it. March is about delegates, and he has most of those, too.

But the race for delegates is about to quicken sharply. California alone on March 5 has more delegates at stake than all of the contests in January and February combined.

Ms. Haley’s campaign called her share of the vote — she was below 30 percent early Wednesday — “a flashing warning sign for Trump in November.” But it was a warning sign for her candidacy now.

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Dearborn, Mich., and Alyce McFadden from New York.

Vice President Kamala Harris went to the U.S.-Mexico border soon after she and President Biden took office, even though she had characterized such visits as empty politics just weeks before. President Barack Obama also toured the border during his time in the White House, though he came to see the trips as little more than photo ops.

Donald J. Trump used the border when he was president to galvanize support for his anti-immigration policies, even signing his name on his “big, beautiful wall” with a Sharpie pen.

As the immigration debate grows increasingly polarized, a trip along the 2,000-mile frontier has become a compulsory bit of political theater for leaders who want to show they care about immigration. The imagery at the border — the wall, the Border Patrol officers, the crowded detention facilities — serves as a potent backdrop for drawing attention to the crisis or, increasingly, for seizing on the issue to attack political opponents.

On Thursday, both of those factors will be at play when President Biden and Mr. Trump make dueling trips to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mr. Trump will travel to Eagle Pass, Texas, where he will speak about crimes committed by migrants and blame Mr. Biden for surging crossings at the border. Mr. Biden, more than 300 miles away in Brownsville, plans to speak with border agents and call out House Republicans who took their cue from Mr. Trump and thwarted a bipartisan border bill that would have cracked down on unlawful migration.

“It’s a relatively new phenomenon, where you go and make a big deal of the border at the border,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian. “As long as this remains an issue, we’re going to have presidents who either go to make a political point or if they don’t go, are pressured to do so.”

Immigration has become one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political liabilities as millions of migrants overwhelm the underfunded and underresourced system, something that Republicans like Mr. Trump are keen to highlight. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday found that Americans are most likely to name immigration as the most important problem in the country.

“This is a Hail Mary by Biden,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the main union for Border Patrol agents. Mr. Judd, who has long supported Mr. Trump, will join the former president in Eagle Pass on Thursday. Still, he said, he was in favor of the border bill in Congress that Mr. Biden supported and Mr. Trump opposed.

Immigration is at the center of Mr. Trump’s candidacy for president and many Republicans, especially in the House, would be reluctant to give an election-year win to Mr. Biden on an issue that has given them a powerful line of criticism toward the White House.

The politics of the border were not always so divisive. In 1971, Pat Nixon, then the first lady, captured headlines when she greeted Mexican children and complained about fencing while visiting a park along the border in San Diego.

Decades later, President George W. Bush traveled to a Border Patrol post in New Mexico to rally support for his attempt to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy. While the Senate at that point supported a bill that included a path to eventual citizenship for many illegal immigrants, the House emphasized the need for border security.

Mr. Obama confronted starker divisions. In 2011, he made a speech in El Paso within sight of the border to push for legalization laws, in a nod to Latino voters who would be crucial in the 2012 election. But in 2014, as a record number of unaccompanied minors crossed the border, Mr. Obama faced relentless calls to visit the border, which he dismissed.

“I’m not interested in photo ops,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Trump was. He visited the border several times during his presidency and might have gone more if not for the pandemic.

Almost as soon as Mr. Biden came into office, he and Ms. Harris faced demands by Republicans who said they should visit the border and see the crisis for themselves. Both of them have made the trip to El Paso; Ms. Harris in June 2021 and Mr. Biden in January 2023.

Both of them have also faced criticism. Republicans took Ms. Harris to task for going to El Paso instead of the lower Rio Grande Valley, considered the epicenter of the surge in migration. Progressive Democrats said Mr. Biden should have spoken directly to migrants.

Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the Obama administration, said presidents and other top officials can show that they prioritize the border by visiting. But he also acknowledged that such visits may be more for political gain.

“It’s so politically sensitive right now,” Mr. Kerlikowske said. “To have them come and view the work and the difficulties that Customs and Border Protection in particular faces on the border tells you that this will be, if not No. 1, then certainly one or two in the topics of this presidential election cycle.”

Just below rows of energy and kombucha drinks at Westside Market, a deli in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, sit a few glass bottles of Vybes. The drink, which comes in flavors like strawberry lavender and blood orange lime, is made with cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD.

But a lack of federal rules and a mishmash of state regulations have made it impossible for Vybes to be distributed by a national retailer, like Target or Walmart. That has hindered the potential growth for the drink, said Jonathan Eppers, who left the technology industry to create Vybes in 2018.

“For the first two years, we were riding a rocket ship,” Mr. Eppers said. “But the patchwork of laws and regulations around the space has made it tough to grow our business.”

A little more than six years ago, CBD, the nonintoxicating component that is derived from cannabis or hemp, was poised to be the next big “it” ingredient, part of a wave of beverages and foods that were promoted as having healthful benefits or providing relaxation. Start-ups flooded the market with products, many promising to soothe stressed-out and anxious consumers.

At its apex around 2018, CBD was everywhere, appearing in water, chocolate bars, tinctures, gummies and skin serums. Consumers could buy athleisure apparel infused with CBD oil and feed their nervous pups CBD chews and snacks. Big corporations even jumped in. Molson Coors teamed up with a Canadian cannabis firm to create a line of CBD-infused drinks. Constellation Brands, the maker of Modelo beer, made a $4 billion investment in a publicly traded cannabis company. Ben & Jerry’s began looking into creating CBD-infused ice cream.

In the last couple of years, however, the industry has stalled out. Molson Coors ended its joint venture, and Constellation has written down more than a $1 billion of its cannabis investments. Large companies have shelved plans for CBD products, and hundreds of start-ups have either shut down, shifted to other ingredients or simply tempered their growth projections.

Hopes for resuscitation of the market through efforts by the industry to put federal regulation of CBD into a new farm bill were dashed when Congress passed an extension of the 2018 version of the bill in the fall.

Also contributing to the precipitous fall of the industry is the simple fact that many people are befuddled by what CBD is, whether it is legal and if it will get them high.

The compound comes from the cannabis plant. Cannabis plants that contain high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, are marijuana and can get users high. Cannabis plants with lower levels of THC are known as hemp.

Five years ago, Congress legalized hemp-based CBD, though CBD made with higher levels of THC remained illegal at the federal level. But the Food and Drug Administration has declined to create rules allowing CBD to be used in dietary supplements or conventional foods. The agency said that a new regulatory pathway for CBD must be created and that there was not enough evidence to determine how much of it could be consumed and for how long. (The F.D.A. has approved one drug that contains CBD and is used to treat some epileptic seizures.)

Like marijuana, which remains illegal at the federal level, CBD has been legalized by many states, creating a morass of varying rules and problems for manufacturers.

“I saw the writing on the wall in late 2019 and 2020. It was going to take a lot longer for federal regulations to be established around CBD,” said Ben Witte, who founded Recess in 2018 as a line of sparkling water containing CBD. Today, those drinks make up less than 10 percent of his revenue. He focuses instead on mocktails and Recess Mood, a line of non-CBD relaxation drinks.

Even before hemp-based CBD was legalized, stores and online retailers were flooded with products containing it. But none of them had been approved by the F.D.A., and some touted outrageous and unsubstantiated claims that the infused products could do everything from treating Alzheimer’s disease to curing cancer.

The F.D.A. began issuing warning letters to manufacturers and retailers for selling unapproved CBD products or making unsupported claims around the products. In 2020, the F.D.A. found in a sampling of products that 18 percent contained significantly less CBD than indicated on the packaging while 37 percent had significantly more.

“I think the bigger question here is why do you need to have it in food at all?” said Dr. Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest. “What is the purpose? What is it that this ingredient is actually doing for you?”

He added, “These companies have managed to create a belief that society needs these products when there’s no evidence that says CBD treats anything more than the rare epileptic syndrome it has been approved for.”

As questions about the compound rose, state regulators began pulling CBD products off store shelves and confiscating products. Companies also ran into obstacles selling or advertising online.

“My account on Meta is forever banned from making any advertising after I posted once under our company’s page about our CBD products and it was flagged,” said Clarice Coppolino, head of branding and product development for Vital Leaf, which makes CBD chocolate, skin care and tinctures.

The Covid-19 pandemic also took a toll on the industry. While sales in the early weeks and months of the pandemic soared as nervous consumers sought relief through CBD-infused products, the interest among large companies and investors fell off.

“Covid clearly shifted consumer packaged goods companies away from the CBD space and what was possible there to focusing on simply meeting food demand,” said Carmen Brace, a consultant who worked with companies that sell consumer packaged goods.

Amid heavy industry lobbying, some states began legalizing hemp in various products. In 2021, for instance, California passed legislation that allowed hemp-derived CBD in any food, beverage and dietary supplement sold in the state. Other states legalized CBD with restrictions on the types of products it could be used in, the amounts and where the hemp had to be grown.

Mr. Eppers started Vybes after trying CBD oil to relieve the stress and anxiety he felt while working in the tech industry. The product drew a following in its first two years, but around 2020 California regulators began to pull the drinks off shelves. So Mr. Eppers banded with other CBD manufacturers to push laws allowing the product in the state.

But the confusing hodgepodge of rules has hindered Vybes’ growth. “We make a drink that a lot of consumers want, but the big chains won’t touch it,” Mr. Eppers said.

For now, Vybes, made with 25 milligrams of hemp CBD, has found a home in smaller regional and independent grocers around the country, Mr. Eppers said.

“When I got into this category in 2018, the sky was the limit,” he said. “Nobody starts a business to hit a low ceiling.”

A simple device that speeds up a semiautomatic weapon’s rate of fire is at the center of a case that could cast a shadow over a government agency’s ability to regulate firearms.

For Michael Cargill, a fierce defender of gun rights who sells firearms in Austin, the accessory, a bump stock, was until 2017 a niche item on the shelves of his store, Central Texas Gun Works. It mainly appealed to people who were injured or disabled, like veterans who needed support firing a gun or by “people who just wanted to have fun,” he said.

But that year, a high-stakes gambler stationed on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel opened fire on a country music festival, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds. In his arsenal were a dozen AR-15-style rifles outfitted with the device.

Government officials swiftly called for a ban, eliciting alarm among gun store owners like Mr. Cargill, 54, a gregarious Army veteran who said that the mugging and assault of his grandmother had shaped his views on gun control.

“I was one of the only people who said, hold on, wait a minute,” said Mr. Cargill, who has challenged the ban and is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal advocacy group that primarily challenges what it views as unlawful uses of administrative power. “This is insane that anyone would go along with this. We need to stop this now.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether the Trump administration acted lawfully in enacting a ban that makes it illegal to buy or possess the part. It is not a case that turns on the Second Amendment. Rather, it is one of a number of challenges aimed at limiting the reach of administrative agencies — in this instance, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“During the Trump administration, the bump stock ban cropped up as a rather glaring example of unlawful administrative power,” Philip Hamburger, a founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said in an email. “This rule turned half a million people into felons overnight. That’s not a power that the Constitution gives to administrative agencies — so it deserved a lawsuit.”

In a brief to the court, the solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, arguing for the government, said that reversing the ban “threatens significant harm to public safety.”

“Bump stocks are machine guns because they allow a shooter to fire ‘automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger,’” Ms. Prelogar wrote.

The case hinges on whether bump stocks convert semiautomatic rifles into machine guns.

The device hooks onto a rifle’s stock, the part of the gun that is held against the shoulder, and harnesses the energy from the gun’s kickback to bump the stock back and forth, allowing the weapon to fire faster.

The bureau enacted the ban in 2018 by clarifying its interpretation of the National Firearms Act of 1934, which makes it a crime to make or own a machine gun, saying it extended to bump stocks. Under federal law, a machine gun is defined as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

At issue is whether the A.T.F. overstepped its bounds in enacting a ban without congressional action. A ruling against the agency could undermine its authority to regulate firearms and accessories.

The day before the ban went into effect, Mr. Cargill strolled into the A.T.F. office in Austin, handed over two bump stocks and announced his lawsuit.

Mr. Cargill said he hoped gun owners would pay close attention, even though the case does not center on the Second Amendment.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-gun or anti-gun,” he said. “An agency can’t do this.”

The president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, Mark Chenoweth, said the case fit in with other legal challenges by the group.

“A.T.F. is completely misinterpreting existing law to reach this far-fetched result,” Mr. Chenoweth said in an email, “and it flip-flopped from the interpretation it maintained for over a decade — including during the entirety of the Obama administration.”

Mr. Chenoweth declined to discuss the organization’s donors, but he said that group receives support from “a wide variety of donors.”

“N.C.L.A. is completely independent and not part of any other organization, umbrella group or donor entity,” Mr. Chenoweth wrote.

Federal tax documents show the group has received at least $1 million from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation. Mr. Chenoweth previously served as counsel for legal reform for Koch Industries.

The lead lawyer in the case is Jonathan F. Mitchell, best known for drafting anti-abortion laws that ultimately led the Supreme Court to abolish the constitutional right to the procedure. Mr. Mitchell, who declined to comment, also recently argued on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump to challenge the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove him from the state’s primary ballot.

The lethal potential of a bump stock, which retailed for less than $200 when it first went on the market in 2010, came into startling view in October 2017.

That month, Stephen Paddock, 64, took aim at thousands of concertgoers, firing more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition over about 11 minutes. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Investigators found about a dozen rifles modified with bump stocks in his hotel suite.

The day after, Mr. Cargill’s store sold out of bump stocks.

“Whenever something happens like a shooting incident or something like that and people think the government is going to ban a particular part, people then want to purchase them,” Mr. Cargill said.

Unusual alliances emerged to back a ban on bump stocks, but there were signs from the start that the politically divisive move could be open to challenges.

Lawmakers, including several leading Republicans, signaled openness to prohibiting the device. Even the National Rifle Association endorsed tighter restrictions.

Spurred in part by the mounting political pressure, Mr. Trump, a vocal supporter of the Second Amendment, vowed to enact a ban.

In response, the Justice Department promised to review the legality of bump stocks, but A.T.F. officials had privately indicated that any ban would likely require action by Congress, where bipartisan action has often stalled.

The A.T.F.’s decision to ban the device amounted to an about-face, raising questions about the extent of its authority to regulate the accessory.

Mr. Cargill was among those outraged by the ban, saying it would open the door to more gun control.

“You give the A.T.F. an inch, they will take a mile,” Mr. Cargill said. “I was shocked that no one was putting up a fight. I said, something has got to be done. You can’t just walk into people’s homes and take something that they legally purchased.”

Federal courts wrestled with the legality of the ban, issuing conflicting rulings. The divisions increased the likelihood that the Supreme Court would weigh in.

After a federal trial judge in Texas sided with the government in Mr. Cargill’s case, he appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Eventually, the full court agreed with Mr. Cargill by vote of 13 to 3, split along ideological lines.

“A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semiautomatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machine gun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote.

Addressing concerns that “bump stocks contribute to firearm deaths,” she added that “it is not our job to determine our nation’s public policy.”

The three dissenting judges, all Democratic appointees, argued that the majority’s reasoning served to “legalize an instrument of mass murder.”

In Tuesday night’s results in Michigan, around one in eight Democrats voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary — a protest of the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel and the war in Gaza.

In some predominantly Arab American precincts in Dearborn, around three in four Democrats cast a protest vote for uncommitted.

Having one in eight Democrats vote uncommitted in an uncontested primary is not wholly unusual. As recently as the last time a Democratic president sought re-election, in 2012, 11 percent of Michigan Democratic caucusgoers voted for “uncommitted” instead of for Barack Obama.

Having three in four Democratic primary voters in Arab American communities do it, on the other hand, is an eye-popping figure. It goes well beyond the norm, and it’s a powerful indication that the war in Gaza poses serious political risks to President Biden.

What does it mean for the general election? That’s not an easy question to answer, but here are four things to consider.

1. A protest vote is hard to interpret

A vote for “uncommitted” was a serious form of protest against Mr. Biden, but it’s just not the same as voting for Donald J. Trump in the general election. That simple fact limits how much we can read into the results for November, especially as there was no exit poll to offer insight into the attitudes of protest voters.

At the same time, it’s also possible that Mr. Biden’s problems go well beyond those who voted uncommitted in a primary. The typical Democratic primary voter is disproportionately old, white and loyal to Democrats. Mr. Biden might be faring even worse among the kinds of Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home.

2. Protest votes have a history

Even though it may be hard to interpret a protest vote in a primary, the risk of defection from this group of voters should be taken seriously. This issue is very personal for them. There are also signs of defection in the polling, including in the last Times/Siena poll in Michigan. And their arguments for defection — complicity in genocide — are plainly enough to switch a vote if taken at face value.

There’s another reason it should be taken seriously: history. Major foreign policy conflicts have often reshaped the electoral map, especially among immigrant communities whose identity have remained tied to their home countries.

• The Cold War. Even today, Cuban Americans tend to vote Republican, as many fled the Communist Castro regime and supported the more fervently anti-Communist Republican Party. There’s a plausible case that the Elian González controversy in Florida was sufficient to decide the 2000 election.

  A similar anti-Communist story helps explain why Vietnamese Americans typically vote Republican, even as other Asian Americans tend to vote Democratic.

• World War II. The outbreak of war in Europe turned the American electoral map into an Axis vs. Allies game board. German, Italian and Irish Americans swung Republican in the 1940 election to oppose the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s opposition to the Axis powers and support for Britain. There were many German Catholic counties in the Midwest that routinely voted Democratic up until the war, and essentially never did so again.

  Mr. Roosevelt, meanwhile, won overwhelming support from Jewish and Polish voters. And he surged nearly 30 points to almost win Maine, one of the two states he lost in 1936 and home to many voters of English and French Canadian ancestry.

• The Arab-Israeli War. In 1948, a sizable share of Jewish voters defected to the third-party candidate Henry Wallace over President Truman’s tepid support for the newly created state of Israel. Many Jewish neighborhoods in New York City gave Mr. Wallace more than 20 percent of the vote. It was enough to cost Mr. Truman the state of New York.

• The War on Terror. Arab and Muslim Americans swung toward Democrats in the wake of 9/11, the war on terror and the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. That was even true in Michigan, where Dearborn voted for George W. Bush in 2000 before voting for John Kerry by a 19-point margin in 2004. Sound familiar?

The relatively recent history of Arab American and Muslim voters being more favorable toward Republican candidates makes it even easier to envision a shift back to Republicans today. This isn’t a liberal voting group.

3. The effect is small

With that history, one could imagine Arab American and Muslim voters lurching decidedly toward Mr. Trump. That would obviously be bad news for Mr. Biden, but there’s one consolation for Democrats: These voters are a small share of the electorate, and it’s hard to see even a huge swing being decisive.

Imagine, for a moment, that in the last election Mr. Biden had lost every single voter in Dearborn, Hamtramck and Dearborn Heights — the three Michigan townships where Arab Americans make up at least 30 percent of the population. He still would have won Michigan — and still would have won it by more than he did Wisconsin, Arizona or Georgia.

For that same reason, Mr. Biden’s deficit in the polling of Michigan can’t mostly be attributed to his weakness among Arab American and Muslim voters. Overall, Arab Americans make up 2 percent of the state’s population and probably an even smaller share of the electorate. There are non-Arab Muslim voters, of course, adding another percentage point or more. In the end, 3 percent of the electorate can only do so much.

4. Still, anything could be decisive

Because the country is so narrowly divided, every vote counts, and right now Mr. Biden appears to need every vote he can get. If Arab American and Muslim voters swing by 30 points toward Mr. Trump, as suggested by our Times/Siena poll in Michigan, that could cost Mr. Biden a percentage point in a critical battleground state where he’s already trailing in the polls. If the race were close enough, it’s possible these voters could decide the 2024 election.