Of the seven Republicans who found former President Donald J. Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, the Alaska senator is the only one facing re-election this year.WASHINGTON — Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, announced on Friday that she would seek re-election, formally entering what is expected to be the most expensive and challenging race of her political career after voting to impeach former President Donald J. Trump.Of the seven Republicans who found Mr. Trump guilty of incitement of an insurrection after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Ms. Murkowski is the only one facing re-election in the 2022 midterms. A moderate who has never won a majority of the general election vote in her Republican-leaning state, she is seen as the G.O.P.’s most vulnerable Senate incumbent at a time when there is little tolerance among the party’s core supporters for criticism of the former president or cooperation with President Biden.The race sets up a proxy battle between Mr. Trump, who has endorsed a Republican challenger, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other Republican leaders, who are backing Ms. Murkowski in her bid for a fourth full term.In a campaign video announcing her re-election bid, Ms. Murkowski made no mention of Mr. Trump, instead highlighting her work on behalf of the state and offering a pointed warning that “lower-48 outsiders are going to try to grab Alaska’s Senate seat for their partisan agendas.”“I’m running for re-election to continue the important work of growing our economy, strengthening our Alaska-based military and protecting our people and the natural beauty of our state,” Ms. Murkowski, a third-generation Alaskan, said. “I will work with anyone from either party to advance Alaska’s priorities.”Ms. Murkowski, first appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father after he became governor and resigned from the seat, is the second-most-senior Republican woman, after Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who won her own costly re-election bid last year. Ms. Murkowski has established herself as a crucial swing vote with strong relationships in both political parties, most recently helping negotiate the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden is expected to sign into law next week.It is unclear, however, whether Ms. Murkowski’s record of directing aid and support to her state will be enough to overcome the grip of the former president on her party. Alaska’s Republican Party censured her in March for voting to convict Mr. Trump. The former president endorsed a primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, the former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, who has promoted false theories of voter fraud in the 2020 election and hired a number of former Trump campaign staffers.“Lisa Murkowski is bad for Alaska,” Mr. Trump said in a June statement, after Ms. Murkowski voted to confirm Deb Haaland as Interior secretary. “Murkowski has got to go!”The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, has backed Ms. Murkowski, who also has support of her party leadership. Ms. Murkowski has a long record of bucking her party, having helped to shut down the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, opposed the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and voted for a number of Mr. Biden’s nominees during the first year of his administration.“We support all of our incumbents, and fortunately for us, we’ve got great candidates running in our primaries,” said Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the organization, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. But in the same interview, he acknowledged “you’d be foolish not to want and accept Donald Trump’s endorsement.”In 2010, Ms. Murkowski lost a primary race to Joe Miller, a Tea Party candidate, but mounted a successful write-in campaign, becoming the first write-in candidate in more than 50 years to win an election. In January, she told reporters that she would not switch parties, even as she questioned whether she belonged in a Republican Party that was influenced so heavily by Mr. Trump.“As kind of disjointed as things may be on the Republican side, there is no way you could talk to me into going over to the other side,” Ms. Murkowski said at the time. “That’s not who I am; that’s not who I will ever be.”Under a new election system approved a year ago, Ms. Murkowski will first compete in an open primary where the top four candidates will then advance to a ranked-choice general election. More

Israel’s new right-wing government is moving quickly to transform the country.Israel’s government, the most right-wing in its history, is barely three weeks old and already leaving its mark, quickly pressing ahead with legislation that critics fear will erode Israeli democracy. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned as prime minister, this time leading a coalition of conservative, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.I spoke with Isabel Kershner, a correspondent in The Times’s Jerusalem bureau, about the right’s push to transform Israel.Ian: What is the new government trying to accomplish?Isabel: The right-wing parties in the coalition are all extremely ideological, and Netanyahu has made a lot of concessions to them. The new minister of national security is an ultranationalist who has been convicted of inciting anti-Arab racism. He got more authority over the police. The new hard-right finance minister is claiming more authority over Jewish settlements and civilian affairs in the occupied West Bank. Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers want more autonomy and more funding for religious students and schools.The government is also moving to radically overhaul the judiciary. There’s a perception on the right that the Supreme Court is overly activist and sides with liberals on issues like settlements. Now the coalition wants to give parliament more power to select judges and override Supreme Court rulings. Critics say the coalition’s proposed changes would completely change the nature of Israel’s liberal democracy, which is dynamic but also fragile. Israel doesn’t have a formal constitution; it has basic laws that can be changed with 61 out of 120 votes in the parliament. Netanyahu’s coalition has 64.Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. Has that made him more reliant on the far right?Israel’s whole political morass — the deadlock that’s produced five elections in four years — is basically because Netanyahu has been indicted on corruption charges but won’t step aside. In the past, Netanyahu preferred to form governments with more centrist or even center-left parties. This time, the centrists refused to align with a prime minister on trial, so Netanyahu was at the mercy of far-right parties after the election. They were the only partners he could form a government with, and they knew that.How has the country reacted?What’s taken many Israelis by surprise is the dizzying speed and determination with which the new government has moved ahead. That’s really galvanized the opposition. Before the election, the liberal and centrist parties in parliament basically failed to cooperate with each other. Suddenly you’re seeing them sitting together, planning the next demonstration and making radical statements of their own. Yair Lapid, the centrist opposition leader, said the judicial overhaul constituted “extreme regime change” and could eliminate Israeli democracy.Israeli soldiers close off the entrance to a Palestinian neighborhood in the West Bank.Samar Hazboun for The New York TimesIt reminds me of the mood in the U.S. after Donald Trump got elected.There was a pro-L.G.B.T.Q. protest on the day the new government was sworn in, because Netanyahu’s coalition includes some extremely anti-gay lawmakers. There have since been protests, including a big one last night, in Tel Aviv, a more secular, liberal city about an hour from Jerusalem.Israel has seen big protests before. In recent years anti-Netanyahu demonstrators protested outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. But that was a much more grass-roots, bottom-up movement. What we’re seeing now is the leaders of the opposition parties calling on people to come out into the streets.What does the new government mean for relations with the Palestinians?The levels of confidence are below zero. One of the main concerns for the Palestinian Arabs who make up one-fifth of Israel’s citizens is a surge in crime, murders and criminal gang warfare. The previous Israeli government, which for the first time included a small Islamic Arab party in the governing coalition, prioritized fighting crime in conjunction with Arab local authorities. Now the minister overseeing the police has a history of being an anti-Arab activist and provocateur. Meanwhile, the situation regarding the Palestinians in the occupied territories was already tense, and things have quickly become confrontational.How has all this left Israelis feeling about the state of their politics?Things here feel more polarized than ever, and there’s a lot at stake. The country is split over what kind of democracy Israel should be and how it’s going to relate to Palestinians. Even among the half of the country that did vote for a right-wing party, not all of them are happy. It’s gone a bit further than some of them wanted. Some are throwing their hands up or switching off the news. Anecdotally, I’m hearing about more people applying for foreign passports. Among those who oppose the government, there’s a kind of doomsday feel.More about Isabel: She grew up in the United Kingdom, speaks Hebrew and studied Arabic at Oxford University. She spent a gap year in Israel, then another year in Egypt. An early obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led her to journalism.Related: Will the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem be built on confiscated Palestinian land?, Rashid Khalidi asks in Times Opinion.NEWSInternationalPatients arrive at the emergency room of a Shanghai hospital.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesChina reported nearly 60,000 deaths linked to Covid in the month since it lifted its strict pandemic restrictions.A plane crash in Nepal killed at least 68 people.Ecuador’s failure to curb some Amazon drilling shows how global financial forces drive biodiversity loss.War in UkraineA Russian strike destroyed an apartment building in Dnipro, Ukraine, killing at least 21 people in one of the largest losses of civilian lives away from the frontline.Britain said that it would give battle tanks to Ukrainian forces, breaching a Western taboo against sending such powerful weapons.Russia has looted Ukraine’s museums in what experts say is the biggest art heist since World War II.PoliticsPresident Biden’s aides found more classified documents at his Delaware home than previously revealed.The special counsel investigating the documents will have to reconstruct the frenetic last days of Biden’s vice presidency, The Times’s Peter Baker writes.Representative George Santos spoke under an alternate identity and encouraged transgender people to vote Republican at an L.G.B.T.Q. event in 2019.Other Big StoriesMore storms are soaking California, putting nearly 26 million people under flood watch.Someone in Maine won an estimated $1.35 billion in the Mega Millions lottery, its second-largest jackpot ever.Auburn University banned TikTok on campus Wi-Fi networks, but students are still using the platform on their phones.FROM OPINIONJoe Biden has a path back to political popularity — and to winning re-election, says Ross Douthat.Prince Harry’s memoir is about hunting and being hunted, Maureen Dowd writes.Sexual violence remains a global scourge we haven’t done enough to fight, Nicholas Kristof writes.The Sunday question: What do Biden’s classified document revelations mean for Donald Trump?Prosecutors are now less likely to charge Trump for keeping government records at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes. Good, says The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle: Indicting Trump would reinvigorate his support in a moment of weakness.MORNING READSA dog at Pitti Uomo, the men’s clothing trade fair in Italy.Clara Vannucci for The New York TimesDesigner pet apparel: A multibillion-dollar market includes dog accessories.Based on a true story? Historical dramas are flourishing — but are taking liberties with the facts.Vows: The universe brought them together twice.Sunday routine: Rachael Price, the singer of Lake Street Dive, combs old journals for lyric ideas.Advice from Wirecutter: Get ready for usernames and passwords to disappear.BOOKSPeople place offerings in the Ganges River in Varanasi, the Indian “city of the dead.”Rebecca Conway for The New York TimesSecular seeker: Pico Iyer studied the supernatural in cultures around the world.By the Book: The novelist Patrick Modiano says good books make good people.Our editors’ picks: “A Heart That Works,” a deeply moving and darkly funny memoir by the comedian Rob Delaney, and eight other books.Times best sellers: Danielle Steel’s “Without a Trace” is one of four new thrillers, all written by women, on the latest hardcover fiction list.THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEPhoto illustration by Andrew B. MyersOn the cover: The Fed may finally be winning the war on inflation. But if it leads to a recession, those on the margins will feel the most pain.Ethicist: An ex-husband sexually abused his sister as a child. Should his partner have been warned?Eat: Add miso and pecans to your banana bread.Read the full issue.THE WEEK AHEADWhat to Watch ForThe N.F.L. playoffs continue with wild-card games today and Monday.The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, convenes Monday.Monday is Martin Luther King’s Birthday, a federal holiday. Financial markets will be closed.Tennis’ Australian Open begins Monday.Jury selection begins Tuesday in a lawsuit by Tesla shareholders against Elon Musk, accusing him of costing them billions with his tweets.The Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday.What to Cook This WeekDavid Malosh for The New York TimesAfter the holiday break, you might feel ready to try new things. Emily Weinstein felt that way, too, so she chose five weeknight meal recipes that excited her. Melissa Clark’s new Green Curry Salmon gets even better when you cook it in a pot with coconut rice. Crispy pepperoni chicken uses crushed pizza crust, inspired by the chefs at Don Angie in New York. And Yewande Komolafe recommends serving roasted mushrooms in ata din din, a Nigerian red-pepper sauce.NOW TIME TO PLAYThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were cardigan and carding. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Worked for the C.I.A., maybe (five letters).Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.Here’s today’s Wordle.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

Thomas Fuller
June 8, 2022 More

An order signed by President Trump last month was aimed at stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers.A federal judge in Washington blocked President Trump from ending collective bargaining with unions representing federal workers, stymying a component of Mr. Trump’s sweeping effort to strip civil servants of job protections and assert more control over the federal bureaucracy.Judge Paul L. Friedman of the Federal District Court in Washington ruled in favor of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents tens of thousands of federal workers across the government. Without including an opinion explaining his decision, Judge Friedman ruled that the executive order from Mr. Trump was unlawful, and he granted a temporary injunction blocking its implementation while the case proceeded.“An opinion explaining the court’s reasoning will be issued within the next few days,” Judge Friedman wrote in the two-page order.The order, if implemented, would strip collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers, effectively banning them from joining unions.Those unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government. With every stroke of the pen from Mr. Trump enacting new orders aimed at tightening control over the federal bureaucracy, federal worker unions have responded with lawsuits, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.Mr. Trump had framed his order stripping workers of labor protections as critical to protect national security. But the union noted that it targeted agencies across the government, some of which had no obvious national security portfolio, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.“The administration’s own issuances show that the president’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns,” the suit said, “but, instead, a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions.” More

Declining trust in institutions is fostering mistrust about voting, leading many Americans to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.A recent exchange between David Becker, a nonpartisan elections expert, and a Twitter user named “@catturd2” — an account with nearly a million followers that sometimes exchanges posts with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter — offered a telling example of why misinformation is such an intractable problem.“Funny how we could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago,” the account tweeted. The false claim racked up 67,000 likes.“With all due respect to catturd,” Becker clarified to his much smaller list of 15,000 followers, “we have never, in the history of our nation, come close to counting all the votes on election night. Every state takes weeks to count all the ballots (incl military) and officially certify the results. Every state. Always.”Why does this matter? Because false information about the mechanics of voting fosters mistrust and is leading many Americans — overwhelmingly on the right — to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.And by the way, Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including members of the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation.“It’s an egregiously irresponsible thing to do just days before midterms that are likely to be mired by voter intimidation, false claims of election rigging and potential political violence,” said Jesse Lehrich, a co-founder of the nonprofit watchdog group Accountable Tech.First: Lest there be any doubt, the notion that America ever counts every vote on election night is both flatly untrue and easily checkable. California, for instance, has never come anywhere within shouting distance of that goal. Close races there can take weeks to call. New York State is notoriously slow at counting votes; in 2020, local election boards did not start counting absentee ballots until seven days after Election Day. Some waited even longer.There’s no conspiracy here. It takes a long time to count votes in a country as big as the United States. This is why states have processes in place to certify the results over the course of weeks. Alaska, for instance, isn’t planning to tabulate and release unofficial results of its election until Nov. 23. That’s entirely normal.But with Twitter in turmoil, Lehrich is worried about how misinformation about voting might spread unchecked over the next few days and weeks. “Things are going to fall through the cracks, even if Elon doesn’t do anything intentional to sabotage stuff,” he said.Tweeting alonePart of what’s going on here is declining levels of trust in the pillars of American civic life — a decades-long trend captured vividly in “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s famous book from 2000.The numbers are even worse now. Jeffrey Jones, an analyst at Gallup, noted in July that Americans had reached “record-low confidence across all institutions.”News organizations polled near the bottom of Gallup’s list. Just 16 percent of the public said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent said the same for TV news.The differences by party were stark. Just 5 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of independents said they had high confidence in newspapers, and only 35 percent of Democrats said the same. All of these numbers had declined from a year earlier.Coming in the middle of a midterm election in which journalists are trying to inform millions of voters about what’s happening and to help them assess the ideas and personal characteristics of the candidates, Gallup’s finding was alarming.And that’s just one data point. A recent poll by Bright Line Watch, a project run by a group of political scientists, found that 91 percent of Democrats were confident that their vote would be counted, versus just 68 percent of Republicans. That lack of trust is the starter fuel of election denialism.Organized groups on the right have been going after the press for decades, and conservative politicians often take up the chorus. Richard Nixon’s ill-fated vice president, Spiro Agnew, called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism”; Donald Trump attacked the news media as the “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ripped the “corporate media” despite being a frequent guest on Fox News — which, yes, is a corporation. If Walter Cronkite walked among us today, he’d be pilloried as a liberal shill.The left has its own beef with the news media. This week, Dan Froomkin, a reliably acerbic liberal critic of political coverage, wrote a post asking, “Why aren’t mainstream journalists sounding the alarm about the threat to democracy?” He lamented how, in his view, political reporters were “just covering it like another partisan fight.”Political reporters do cover partisan fights; there’s an election going on, and readers care about who is winning, who is losing and why.But mainstream news outlets also invested heavily this year in coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, election denialism, political violence, dangers to election workers, plots to disrupt the midterms, misinformation and threats to democracy more generally. There’s been a lot of tough, critical coverage of election denialism.Local news is often another story. Here’s a tweet from KTNV, a television station in Nevada: “Democrat Cisco Aguilar and Republican Jim Marchant are running to be the next Secretary of State in Nevada. And both have the same focus: election integrity.”The text of the article implies that Marchant, the leader of a far-right slate of candidates for top election posts in several states who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, is spreading “unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.” But it doesn’t say so explicitly.In an interview, Aguilar pointed to the KTNV article as an example of how news coverage had treated the candidates too evenhandedly and was giving Marchant a platform he didn’t deserve. (Marchant did not respond to an email sent to three of his known addresses.)When I asked Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, how he planned to combat misinformation if he wins his race against Mark Finchem, a far-right Republican who has stoked conspiracy theories about elections, he made a similar argument.“Actually, it’s not a hard problem,” Fontes said, urging journalists to stop “chasing shiny objects” and “crazy conspiracy theories” and focus instead on what election workers do.“As secretary of state,” he said, “I plan on celebrating them, elevating them and making sure that guys like you, respectfully, don’t ignore them in favor of the weirdos.”Facts are stubborn things, except when they’re not.Increasingly, though, millions of Americans aren’t getting their information from people like me. They’re following sources that have none of the checks and balances — however imperfect — that most mainstream outlets have in place.Over the last few decades, as it has stoked mistrust in the mainstream media, the right has built up a closed-off alternate ecosystem that includes Fox News, but also fringier outlets like Newsmax or One America News Network. But even those places put their names behind their stories, and viewers have a good sense of the perspective and slant they represent.This morning, I asked @catturd2 on Twitter if the user behind the account planned to issue a correction or delete the incorrect information. No response yet, but the account wrote in another tweet: “LOL – Look what Twitter did to my tweet – trying to fact check it with the fake news commie NYT,” followed by five laugh-cry smiley face emojis.Surveys show that younger people increasingly trust what they see on social media about as much as they trust traditional news sources. Data also shows that readers often can’t tell the difference between news reporting and opinion, even when they are labeled explicitly. Social media timelines jumble them all up together.And, as the Pew Research Center has noted, people don’t even agree on what a “fact” is: “Members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side,” Pew wrote in 2018.Those people staking out drop boxes in Arizona to intimidate voters based on false information, or demanding the hand-counting of ballots in Nevada? They aren’t getting their information from mainstream sources.How do honest and fair reporters reach them with accurate news? That’s a much deeper societal challenge, and nobody seems to have any good answers.What to read tonightDonald Trump is expected to announce a third White House campaign soon after the midterms, possibly as soon as Nov. 14, Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman write.In Wisconsin, one the nation’s most evenly divided swing states, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant, even if he wins re-election, Reid Epstein reports.San Luis, Ariz., a small farming outpost on the border, played a critical role in the making of “2,000 Mules,” a conspiratorial movie about supposed election fraud in 2020. Now some residents are scared to vote, Jack Healy and Alexandra Berzon write.Sheera Frenkel looks at the phenomenon of “participatory misinformation” on the internet, where hunting for voter fraud has became a game.viewfinderDon Bolduc arriving on Wednesday at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., for his debate against Senator Maggie Hassan.John Tully for The New York TimesFist-pumping in a classic political battlegroundAt 5:30 p.m., there was an all-out sprint from campaign workers, volunteers and supporters.The goal: to find the best view of a parking lot where Senator Maggie Hassan and her Republican challenger, Don Bolduc, would arrive for their final debate. Each candidate’s supporters fought for position so their signs would be visible.Inside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, the stage was being set for Hassan, a Democrat, and Bolduc, whose Senate race has tightened in recent weeks, giving Republicans hope for an upset victory.Hassan was the first to arrive, working the line for about a minute before heading inside. Within 30 seconds or so, Bolduc arrived, to cheers and jeers.He pumped his fists in front of supporters, and I captured this image — a look at grass-roots political theater in New Hampshire.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More