Police intelligence documents show that Washington’s Trump Hotel raised its rates “as a security tactic”, in the hope of deterring Trump-supporting QAnon supporters from staying there in early March, on a day which some believed would see Trump restored to office.The information, which police gleaned from a Business Insider version of a story published in Forbes on 6 February, was confirmed in an 8 February intelligence briefing stolen by ransomware hackers from Washington’s Metropolitan police department (MPD).The hackers from the Babuk group subsequently published those documents online, and transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets redistributed them to news outlets including the Guardian.As Forbes reported in February, Trump International hotel in Washington raised its rates to 180% of the normal seasonal charge for 3 and 4 March this year.That was a date upon which some adherents to the QAnon conspiracy movement believed would see Trump once again sworn in as president, based on an interpretation of the US constitution influenced by a belief held by many “sovereign citizens” that the US government was secretly usurped by a foreign corporation in 1871, and all legal and constitutional changes since that date are illegitimate.The swearing-in date of US presidents was 4 March until the passage of the 20th amendment in 1933, and believers thought that Trump would restore his presidency and constitutional government on that date in Washington.While Forbes suggested that the rate hike might be “price gouging or simply opportunistic marketing”, the internal police document said “MPD’s intelligence division confirmed with Trump Hotel management that they raised their rates as a security tactic to prevent protesters from booking rooms at their hotel should anyone travel to DC”.However, the document also noted that the hotel was “not aware of any credible information regarding an event actually taking place on that date”, and that “none of the hotels in [Washington] are showing any noticeable increase in hotel reservations for this timeframe”.Trump International was one of a number of hotels in the region whose occupancy was closely monitored by the MPD and other agencies as they looked for signs of an attack on Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s impeachment hearings, and other hot button events, according to other intelligence documents made public in the ransomware hack.The hotel, along with the Trump Organization and Trump’s inauguration committee are co-defendants in a case brought by the District of Columbia attorney general, which alleges that the hotel was used to funnel money spent on the inauguration to the former president and his family.The use of Trump International to house government employees has also been a focus of scrutiny from congressional committees and the Government Oversight Office. More

The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will ebb and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear.Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least one major political realignment: educational attainment is the new fault line in American politics.Educational attainment has not replaced race in that respect, but it is increasingly the best predictor of how Americans will vote, and for whom. It has shaped the political landscape and where the 2024 presidential election almost certainly will be decided. To understand American politics, candidates and voters alike will need to understand this new fundamental.Americans have always viewed education as a key to opportunity, but few predicted the critical role it has come to play in our politics. What makes the “diploma divide,” as it is often called, so fundamental to our politics is how it has been sorting Americans into the Democratic and Republican Parties by educational attainment. College-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees — especially white Americans, but increasingly others as well — are now more likely to support Republicans.It’s both economics and cultureThe impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.The road to political realignmentThe diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.In 2024, Democrats are likely to enter the general election with 222 electoral votes, compared with 219 for Republicans. That leaves only eight states, with 97 electoral votes — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — up for grabs. And for these states, education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.The 2024 mapA presidential candidate will need a three-track strategy to carry these states in 2024. The first goal is to further exploit the trend of education levels driving how people vote. Democrats have been making significant inroads with disaffected Republicans, given much of the party base’s continued embrace of Mr. Trump and his backward-looking grievances, as well as a shift to the hard right on social issues — foremost on abortion. This is particularly true with college-educated Republican women.In this era of straight-party voting, it is notable that Democrats racked up double-digit percentages from Republicans in the 2022 Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania governors’ races. They also made significant inroads with these voters in the Senate races in Arizona (13 percent), Pennsylvania (8 percent), Nevada (7 percent) and Georgia (6 percent).This represents a large and growing pool of voters. In a recent NBC poll, over 30 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they were not supporters of MAGA.At the same time, Republicans have continued to increase their support with non-college-educated voters of color. Between 2012 and 2020, support for Democrats from nonwhite-working-class voters dropped 18 points. The 2022 Associated Press VoteCast exit polls indicated that support for Democrats dropped an additional 14 points compared with the 2020 results.However, since these battleground states largely fall in the middle of education levels in our country, they haven’t followed the same trends as the other 42 states. So there are limits to relying on the education profile of voters to carry these states.This is where the second group of voters comes in: political independents, who were carried by the winning party in the last four election cycles. Following Mr. Trump’s narrow victory with independent voters in 2016, Mr. Biden carried them by nine points in 2020. In 2018, when Democrats took back the House, they carried them by 15 points, and their narrow two-point margin in 2022 enabled them to hold the Senate.The importance of the independent voting bloc continues to rise. This is particularly significant since the margin of victory in these battleground states has been very narrow in recent elections. The 2022 exit polls showed that over 30 percent of voters were independents, the highest percentage since 1980. In Arizona, 40 percent of voters in 2022 considered themselves political independents.These independent voters tend to live disproportionately in suburbs, which are now the most diverse socioeconomic areas in our country. These suburban voters are the third component of a winning strategy. With cities increasingly controlled by Democrats — because of the high level of educated voters there — and Republicans maintaining their dominance in rural areas with large numbers of non-college voters, the suburbs are the last battleground in American politics.Voting in the suburbs has been decisive in determining the outcome of the last two presidential elections: Voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Phoenix determined the winner in the last two presidential elections and are likely to play the same pivotal role in 2024.These voters moved to the suburbs for a higher quality of life: affordable housing, safe streets and good schools. These are the issues that animate these voters, who have a negative view of both parties. They do not embrace a MAGA-driven Republican Party, but they also do not trust Mr. Biden and Democrats, and consider them to be culturally extreme big spenders who aren’t focused enough on issues like immigration and crime.So in addition to education levels, these other factors will have a big impact on the election. The party that can capture the pivotal group of voters in the suburbs of battleground states is likely to prevail. Democrats’ success in the suburbs in recent elections suggests an advantage, but it is not necessarily enduring. Based on post-midterm exit polls from these areas, voters have often voted against a party or candidate — especially Mr. Trump — rather than for one.But in part because of the emergence of the diploma divide, there is an opening for both political parties in 2024 if they are willing to gear their agenda and policies beyond their political base. The party that does that is likely to win the White House.Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and is a senior adviser to the Brunswick Group.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Digging into the aftermath of the 2020 election, members of the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday focused on a meeting between former President Donald J. Trump and outside advisers that devolved into what they described as a chaotic confrontation over a desperate attempt to overturn the election.Drawing from testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr and others, the committee described in detail a hastily organized meeting in which advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.“On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal, and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”According to the panel, in the weeks before the meeting in December, several of Mr. Trump’s advisers including Mr. Barr and Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel, had publicly and privately dismissed the possibility of wide-scale voter fraud, and urged Mr. Trump to concede. Mr. Barr made a public announcement on Dec. 1 to affirm that he had not found significant evidence of fraud.Just four days before the meeting, on Dec. 14, the Electoral College met to certify the election results, which in a taped interview Mr. Barr told the committee “should have been the end of the matter.”But on the evening of Dec. 18, several of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, came to Mr. Trump to urge him to consider the plan to seize voting machines.As the meeting grew heated, Mr. Cipollone told the committee that other plans were discussed, including to grant Ms. Powell a security clearance and name her special counsel, putting her in charge of Mr. Trump’s legal effort to contest the election results.The meeting lasted hours, moving from the Oval Office to other areas of the West Wing before ending in the presidential residence, according to the committee. And arguments broke out throughout the evening, including “challenges to physically fight,” Mr. Raskin said.In a taped interview presented on Tuesday, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary, said, “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other — it wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chit-chatting.”The panel showed evidence suggesting that the meeting ended around midnight, without agreement among participants on how to proceed.But committee members used the hearing on Tuesday to suggest that as Mr. Trump apparently grew frustrated with the lack of options to contest the election results during the meeting in December, it was in that moment that he turned to his supporters, encouraging them to come to Washington on Jan 6.Just over an hour after the meeting was said to have ended, Mr. Trump tweeted at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19 that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost the election. In the tweet, he also urged supporters to gather in Washington to demonstrate, drawing dozens of responses from people sharing plans to occupy the Capitol building and photos of weapons they said they planned to bring.“Be there, will be wild,” the tweet said. More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Jonathan Groff, a gregarious performer who loves and is loved by Broadway, finally won his first Tony Award on Sunday night, picking up a trophy for best leading actor in a musical for his star turn in a transformational revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.”The award bestows industry recognition on a musical theater star who has also found success onscreen: He voices the characters Kristoff and Sven in Disney’s “Frozen” films, had a recurring role on the television series “Glee” and played King George in “Hamilton,” a performance that reached a wide audience through the live-capture film (as well as the popular cast album).The Tony recognizes Groff’s empathetic portrayal of Franklin Shepard, a Juilliard-trained composer who jettisons his youthful idealism, his stage career and his co-writer to become a successful film producer. Groff uses his considerable charm to give the character, who can seem like a sellout, more depth, and in the process has helped make the musical, which was a notorious flop in 1981, into a huge hit this time around. (Another key factor: One of Groff’s co-stars is Daniel Radcliffe, of “Harry Potter” fame.)Groff’s performance, which is the scaffolding on which the production is constructed, was widely praised by critics. Jesse Green, writing in The New York Times, described Groff as “thrillingly fierce,” and said “Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one.” And Charles McNulty, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said, “The key to making this work — which is to say making us care — is the performance of Groff, who humanizes Frank’s choices without sentimentalizing his arc.”Groff, 39, arrived on Broadway as a swing in a short-lived 2005 flop, “In My Life.” He has been nominated for a Tony Award each time he has returned to Broadway since — in 2007 for his starring role as a rebellious adolescent in the original production of “Spring Awakening,” in 2016 for his peacockish performance in “Hamilton” and this year for “Merrily.”The stretches between Broadway roles have been filled with screen work — he starred in the streaming series “Looking” and “Mindhunter,” as well as the “Frozen” films. He has also periodically worked Off Broadway, including as the first star of a 2019 “Little Shop of Horrors” revival that is still running, with a variety of well-known performers in leading roles, at the Westside Theater.The “Merrily” revival, directed by Maria Friedman, began its New York life (there were earlier chapters, with different performers, in Britain and Boston) with a 2022 Off Broadway production at New York Theater Workshop. The Broadway run opened last October; the final performance is scheduled to be July 7. More