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    McCarthy Claimed Trump Was ‘Not Eating’ After Leaving Office, Cheney Says

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    In a new memoir, Liz Cheney wrote that Kevin McCarthy justified his trip to Mar-a-Lago by saying the former president was depressed after losing re-election.Former President Donald J. Trump was “really depressed” in the days after losing re-election and leaving office in January 2021, so much so that he was “not eating.”At least that is what Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney in trying to explain why he had traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, an act of solidarity that many have identified as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability.Mr. McCarthy, the California congressman who was then the House Republican leader, had condemned Mr. Trump for fueling the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol and even suggested that he resign, only to turn around and effectively absolve the former president by embracing him again. In her new book, Ms. Cheney, perhaps the country’s most vocal anti-Trump Republican, reports that Mr. McCarthy justified the Jan. 28 visit as an act of compassion for a beaten ally.Ms. Cheney wrote that she was so shocked when she first saw the photograph of Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump standing side by side with grins on their faces that she thought it was a fake. “Not even Kevin McCarthy could be this craven, I thought,” she wrote. “I was wrong.” She went to see Mr. McCarthy to confront him about rehabilitating the twice-impeached former president who had just tried to overturn an election he lost.“Mar-a-Lago?” she asked Mr. McCarthy, according to the book. “What the hell?”He tried to downplay the meeting, saying he had already been in Florida when Mr. Trump’s staff called. “They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy said by her account. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”“What?” she recalled replying. “You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?”“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” Mr. McCarthy said.Ms. Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, offers a scathing assessment of not only Mr. McCarthy but an array of Republicans who in her view subordinated their integrity to curry favor with Mr. Trump. Her account of his subjugation of the party presents a tapestry of hypocrisy, with inside-the-room scenes of Republicans privately scorning “the Orange Jesus,” as one wryly called him, while publicly doing his bidding.Ms. Cheney with Kevin McCarthy a few weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe much-anticipated memoir arrives on bookshelves even as Mr. Trump is in a commanding position to win next year’s Republican presidential nomination. Ms. Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress and led the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking member of her party, has assailed him as a budding autocrat in more visceral terms than most of his challengers for the nomination.The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a conservative star in her own right who was once on track to become House speaker, Ms. Cheney ultimately paid a price for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her service as vice chair of the House committee that investigated his role in instigating the Jan. 6 attack. She lost her leadership position and eventually her seat in a Republican primary last year. But she has vowed to do whatever she can to keep Mr. Trump from returning to the Oval Office.Indeed, she subtitled her book “A Memoir and a Warning” to make the point that Mr. Trump represents a clear and present danger to America if he is on the ballot next November. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she wrote. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”A re-elected Mr. Trump, she said, would face few checks on his power. “Step by step, Donald Trump would tear down the other structures that restrain an American president,” she wrote. “The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves,” she added, “is purely wishful thinking by people who prefer to look the other way.”Asked for comment on Wednesday, Mr. Trump, who has openly called for “termination” of the Constitution to immediately remove President Biden from office and reinstall himself without waiting for another election, did not directly address any of Ms. Cheney’s specific assertions but simply dismissed her as a disgruntled critic.“Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said by email. “These are nothing more than completely fabricated stories because President Trump is the clear front-runner to be the Republican nominee and the strongest candidate to beat Crooked Joe Biden.”Likewise, Mr. McCarthy did not deny anything in the book, copies of which have also been obtained by CNN and The Guardian. His office released a statement saying, “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now apparently it’s also McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”In Ms. Cheney’s telling, Mr. Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election even as he told the public that he had not — and she cited no less than Mr. McCarthy as a witness. Just two days after the November election, she said, Mr. McCarthy told her he had spoken to Mr. Trump. “He knows it’s over,” she quoted him saying. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.”That could in theory make Mr. McCarthy an important witness in the federal or state criminal cases against Mr. Trump, refuting any defense by the former president’s lawyers that he was acting on good-faith belief that fraud had stolen the election from him.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership after Mr. McCarthy’s support for Mr. Trump failed to save him from a right-wing rebellion.Mr. Johnson took the lead in trying to corral support for Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He sent an email to all House Republicans telling them that he had spoken with the president, who expected them to sign onto a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Mr. Johnson wrote.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMs. Cheney took that as a veiled threat and said she was surprised about Mr. Johnson, whom she had thought of as a friend. “He appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit,” she wrote. “When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal argument, Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”At first, Mr. McCarthy agreed with her that the pro-Trump brief went too far and told her he would not sign it because it would interfere with the power of states to run their own elections. “It federalizes too much,” he told her. But a day later, his name was added to the brief after all.Mr. Johnson did not back down even after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the case, sending Ms. Cheney a Fox News poll showing that 77 percent of Trump voters and 68 percent of Republicans believed the election had been stolen. “These numbers are big,” Mr. Johnson said, “and something we have to contend with as we thread the needle on messaging.”Ms. Cheney noted that Mr. Trump’s supporters believed the election was stolen because Republicans like Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Johnson were echoing his lies.Other Republicans were willing to toss aside traditions, norms and constitutional processes in the name of satisfying Mr. Trump’s desire to stay in power. When one Republican said during a meeting that they should not claim the election was rigged when there was no evidence, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies, said, “The only thing that matters is winning.”Likewise, she assailed Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, for seeking to set aside the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 while a commission investigated election results that had already been recounted and certified. “It was one of the worst cases of abandonment of duty for personal ambition I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Ms. Cheney wrote.In some cases, she found that Republicans stayed loyal to Mr. Trump out of outright fear. One colleague told her he was worried about the safety of his wife and baby if he spoke out.Behind the scenes, though, other Republicans cheered her on. After she was one of only 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, former President George W. Bush sent her a note. “Liz, Courage is in short supply these days,” he wrote. “Thank you for yours. You showed strong leadership and I’m not surprised. Lead on. 43.”Her vocal criticism of Mr. Trump grated on other Republicans, highlighting what she called their “cowardice” in the face of the former president. When she contradicted Mr. McCarthy on Mr. Trump’s future role in the party during a joint news conference, Mr. McCarthy complained to her privately afterward.“You’re killing me, Liz,” he said.“Kevin, this is about the Constitution,” she replied. “Think of what Trump did. Think how appalled any of our previous Republican leaders would be about this. How would Reagan have reacted to this? How would Bush have reacted? Think of my dad.”Mr. McCarthy dismissed that line of thinking. “This isn’t their party anymore,” he said.On that, she wrote, she had to agree. More

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      The Electoral College Is ‘the Exploding Cigar of American Politics’

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      Hey, it’s election season! Think about it: A year from now, we should know who the next president is going to be and …Stop beating your head against the wall. Before we start obsessing over the candidates, let’s spend just a few minutes mulling the big picture. Really big. Today, we’re going to moan about the Electoral College.Yes! That … system we have for actually choosing a president. The one that makes who got the most votes more or less irrelevant. “The exploding cigar of American politics,” as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice called it over the phone.Whoever gets the most electoral votes wins the White House. And the electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators each state has in Washington. Right now that means — as I never tire of saying — around 193,000 people in Wyoming get the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.It’s possible the system was quietly hatched as a canny plot by the plantation-owning Southerners to cut back on the power of the cities. Or it’s possible the founders just had a lot on their minds and threw the system together at the last minute. At the time, Waldman noted, everybody was mainly concerned with making sure George Washington was the first president.Confession: I was hoping to blame the whole Electoral College thing on Thomas Jefferson, who’s possibly my least favorite founding father. You know — states’ rights and Sally Hemings. Not to mention a letter he once wrote to his daughter, reminding her to wear a bonnet when she went outside because any hint of the sun on her face would “make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” But Jefferson was someplace in France while all this Electoral College stuff was going on, so I’m afraid it’s not his fault.Anyway, no matter how it originally came together, we’ve now put the loser of the popular vote in office five times. Three of those elections were more than a century ago. One involved the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who won in 1876 even though the electoral vote was virtually tied and Samuel Tilden easily won the popular vote. But the Republicans made a deal with Southern Democrats to throw the election Hayes’s way in return for a withdrawal of federal troops from the South, which meant an end to Reconstruction and another century of disenfranchisement for Black voters in the South.Really, every time I get ticked off about the way things are going in our country, I keep reminding myself that Samuel Tilden had it worse. Not to mention the Black voters, of course.Here’s the real, immediate worry: Our current century is not even a quarter over and we’ve already had the wrong person in the White House twice. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 — many of you will remember the manic counting and recounting in Florida, which was the tipping point state. (Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, in part thanks to Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot. If you happen to see Robert Kennedy Jr. anytime soon, remind him of what hopeless third-party contenders can do to screw up an election.)And then Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump decisively in the popular vote — by about 2.8 million votes, coming out ahead by 30 percentage points in California and 22.5 percentage points in New York. But none of that mattered when Trump managed to eke out wins by 0.7-point margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, not to mention his 0.3-point victory in Michigan.By the way, does anybody remember what Clinton did when she got this horrible news? Expressed her dismay, then obeyed the rules and conceded. Try to imagine how Trump would behave under similar circumstances.OK, don’t. Spare yourselves.Sure, every vote counts. But it’s hard not to notice that every vote seems to count a whole lot more if you happen to be registered in someplace like Michigan, where the margin between the two parties is pretty narrow. After her loss, Clinton did wonder how much difference it might have made if she’d taken “a few more trips to Saginaw.”On the other side of the equation, Wyoming is the most Republican state, with nearly 60 percent of residents identifying with the G.O.P. and just about a quarter saying they’re Democrats. Nobody is holding their breath to see which way Wyoming goes on election night.But if you’re feeling wounded, Wyoming, remember that presidential-election-wise, every citizen of Wyoming is worth almost four times as much as a Californian.We are not even going to stop to discuss representation in the U.S. Senate, but gee whiz, Wyoming. You could at least show a little gratitude.Nothing is going to happen to fix the Electoral College. Can you imagine trying to get a change in the Constitution that enormous? It was a long haul just to pass an amendment to prohibit members of Congress from raising their own pay between elections.But we do at least deserve a chance to groan about it once in a while.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

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      Top Ramaswamy Aide Resigns to Join the Trump Campaign

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      The aide, Brian Swensen, had been focused on building Vivek Ramaswamy’s New Hampshire operation.Vivek Ramaswamy’s national political director is switching Republican teams and heading to former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.The political director, Brian Swensen, has resigned and plans to join Mr. Trump’s re-election effort, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy said on Wednesday. The news was first reported by The Messenger.The move came as Mr. Ramaswamy, whose campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination has plateaued in the polls, is barnstorming the early primary states in the final weeks before the start of the primary season in Iowa and New Hampshire in January. Mr. Swensen was with Mr. Ramaswamy in New Hampshire over the weekend. In the coming weeks, he will assist with the Trump campaign’s operation in Nevada ahead of the state’s caucuses in February. Tricia McLaughlin, the Ramaswamy campaign’s spokeswoman, said that Mr. Swensen had left on good terms and that the move had been “in the process for a while.” Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly praised Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, whom he trails by double digits, often calling him the “best president of the 21st century.”“We love Brian, and we just want him to be happy in life and in his career,” Ms. McLaughlin said, adding, “Everyone saw it very much as not a surprise and also as a positive move for Brian to take a different path.”Mr. Swensen did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Swensen is a longtime Republican consultant. He worked on Ron DeSantis’s campaign for Florida governor in 2018 and served as deputy campaign manager for Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 re-election campaign. He had moved to New Hampshire to focus on the Ramaswamy campaign’s operation there several months ago, long before Mr. Ramaswamy moved his campaign headquarters and full-time staff members from Ohio to Iowa and New Hampshire this month.His previous duties will be taken over by Mike Biundo, who was a former senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and who previously ran Rick Santorum’s 2012 presidential campaign. Mr. Biundo joined the Ramaswamy campaign a month and a half ago and has overseen much of the campaign’s New Hampshire operation since he came on board, Ms. McLaughlin said. More

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      An Electorate in Revolt Threatens Biden’s Chances

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      I know all the warnings and caveats about polls taken a year before an election. But much of the recent polling on the 2024 election is still frightening and disconcerting.We shouldn’t be here. We have a president who, on the whole, has had a successful first term and has capably performed the principal function for which he was elected: to return the country to normalcy and prevent more damage being done to it by his predecessor.That president, Joe Biden, will almost certainly be running again against Donald Trump, a former president facing a mound of legal troubles born of his own deceptions and anti-democratic impulses.So the choice next year should be clear, but the electorate keeps telling anyone listening that it’s not. The results of a New York Times/Siena College poll released this month showed Biden trailing Trump in five of six important battleground states. A recent NBC News national poll found that Trump was narrowly ahead of Biden. Pretty clearly, voters aren’t satisfied with their choices, but they’re also not rewarding Biden or punishing Trump in the ways that one might expect.Rather, multiple things appear to be at play at the same time.Some voters exalt in a revisionist history in which destroyers are viewed as disrupters, in which our own past anxieties are downplayed.In the view of many of these voters, even with his evident faults, Trump “isn’t so bad” and what he did in office is increasingly remembered as positive, including shaking up the Washington establishment and the political status quo. For those losing faith in government in general, this may be attractive — the nightmarish Trump days somehow converted into halcyon ones.In that same scenario, some seem to be experiencing a false sense of invincibility, the kind that you might experience after surviving a car wreck, in which you come to see your escape from the worst as proof that the danger was less potent than it once seemed, and that you’re more resilient than you might have thought.But the threat Trump poses hasn’t diminished. It has increased. He’s more open about his plans to alter the country and our form of government if he is returned to the White House. And yet, some Americans simply aren’t registering that threat as having the potential to harm in the way that it obviously can.It seems, in their minds, that if the country survived one Trump term, it can survive another. And that all the Chicken Littles claiming that the sky is falling, or could fall, are addicted to worry and prone to hyperbole.There are also people who’ve bought into the narrative that Biden is too old for a second term. And while I think the age issue is overblown, it clearly has settled in among many voters and will be very hard to shake.And then there are those who just don’t feel the positive impacts of the Biden presidency, whether it’s on the economy or on foreign policy. This isn’t because the administration hasn’t had successes, but because individual citizens sometimes don’t recognize the source of those successes or experience them in ways that they can immediately feel.This has been, among other things, a massive failure of messaging. It’s not enough to inundate voters by repeating, over and over, lists of bills passed, steps taken and amounts allocated or spent. Campaigning by spreadsheet is mind-numbing. How do people feel? What do they feel? That has to be the basis of any successful electoral appeal.But the Biden team hasn’t taken that tack. Instead, it engages in disastrous branding like “Bidenomics,” trying and failing to convince people that they should feel better than they do because some of the top-line economic indicators are positive, even when the bottom line, for many households — the cost of groceries, how far a paycheck stretches, whether buying a house is possible — is still precarious, and efforts to numb that feeling with numbers can come off as callous and aloof.In presidential races, the successful candidates are generally those aligned with the electorate at that moment. That was Biden in 2020, but it is not at all clear that it will be him in 2024 — not so much because he has changed, but because the appetite of many voters has.Yes, a year is an eternity in politics and Biden has time to turn things around and adjust his messaging. But it’s still something of an outrage that we’re even in a position where we have to gamble on Biden’s ability to pull himself up and out of a significant hole. It is certainly an outrage that the survival of our democracy may depend on it.It doesn’t matter if I or anyone else believes that Biden deserves of a second term — Americans keep signaling that they aren’t sold on one. And at some point, we all have to listen more than we lecture. We have to understand that Biden’s insistence on seeking a second term — rather than making way for someone from the next generation of Democratic leaders — comes at high risk, and that what’s at stake is greater than the aspirations of any individual candidate.At the moment, the electorate is drifting away from its safest option. It is courting the country’s demise. Maybe something or someone will be able to jolt voters out of this self-destructive impulse. We have to hope so. The price of that not happening is far too steep.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Kamala Harris Defends Biden Policies, but Says ‘More Work’ Needed to Reach Voters

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      Vice President Kamala Harris said on Wednesday that the Biden administration had done more in the past two years to wrangle rising inflation “than most advanced economies,” but admitted that more needed to be done to convince a deeply pessimistic public that the president’s policies had been beneficial to Americans.Ms. Harris, speaking at the DealBook Summit in New York, said that a strong economy bolstered by record-low unemployment and stable wages was not enough to “connect with the heart and the experience and the feelings of the American people.”She also noted that prices remained too high for many. “We still have work to do to address that,” Ms. Harris added.The vice president echoed comments by President Biden in recent days, as a slate of polls show him trailing former President Donald J. Trump in battleground states ahead of the 2024 election. Ms. Harris also took a swipe at focusing on polls to determine what will happen next year.“If I listened to polls, I would have never run for my first office or my second one, and here I am as vice president,” she said.But she also used her appearance at the economy-focused gathering of business leaders and politicians, operated by The New York Times, to make a case for herself and hit back at political criticism.Ms. Harris, who has faced questions about her ability to govern and her potential as Mr. Biden’s heir apparent, seemed slightly exasperated when asked if a vote for Mr. Biden was a vote for President Harris.“A vote for President Biden is a vote for President Biden and Vice President Harris,” she said. “We are a ticket. It’s called Biden-Harris. That’s the administration that is on the ticket. Yes, I was elected. And I intend to be re-elected, as does the president.”Ms. Harris also downplayed concerns about Mr. Biden’s age raised by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the former House speaker, during an interview earlier in the day. Mr. McCarthy, discussing talks he had with Mr. Biden over the federal debt limit this spring, said that the president, 81, “talked from cards” during negotiations. (Mr. McCarthy previously said that Mr. Biden had been “very professional, very smart, very tough” during their talks.)Ms. Harris, referring to Mr. McCarthy being ousted from the speakership, said that “when anyone who has had the experience that he has most recently had, I don’t think he’s a judge of negotiations.”The vice president was less definitive when asked about other hot-button issues, including the war in the Middle East, Elon Musk and antisemitism, and how social media platforms could undermine national security.She sidestepped a question about Mr. Musk’s sharing of antisemitic tropes on X, even though the White House has condemned his actions. And she dodged another about whether TikTok should be regulated.The vice president also did not directly answer questions about whether Israel had abided by international law in its war against Hamas, and did not venture from other senior officials’ responses in recent weeks.“When you are in the midst of attempting to leverage whatever influence or authority you have in a relationship, in a way that it will impact decisions, it is counterproductive to do that publicly,” Ms. Harris said. “It doesn’t mean it’s not being done.” More

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      Arizona Officials Charged With Conspiring to Delay Election Results

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      An indictment accuses two Cochise County supervisors of interfering with the state canvass of votes. The county has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories.Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results.Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, criticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment Wednesday.Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby sought to order a hand count of the ballots that had been cast in Cochise, a heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories that had been raised by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay certification of the election before eventually relenting under pressure of a court order.The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw in the supervisors’ machinations a worrying precedent. As Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became widely accepted in the Republican Party, local Republican officials in several closely contested states used suspicion of the election system on the right to justify delaying the certification of 2022 election results.In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Judd said she did not actually suspect there were any irregularities in the vote in Cochise County. She characterized the move as a protest against the election certification in Maricopa, the large urban county that includes Phoenix, where right-wing activists had made an array of unproven claims of malfeasance.“Our small counties, we’re just sick and tired of getting kicked around and not being respected,” Ms. Judd said.Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the supervisors last November, arguing that their protest, which threatened to delay the statewide canvass, would disenfranchise the county’s voters. (The county’s third supervisor, Ann English, a Democrat, has opposed the others’ actions.) Republican candidates lost their races for most of the top statewide races in Arizona’s election, in which Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was elected governor.In October, the local Herald/Review newspaper and Votebeat reported that Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby were subpoenaed by Ms. Mayes, a Democrat elected last year, to appear before a state grand jury in the attorney general’s investigation.Although local Republican officials interfering with election systems in other states since 2020 have faced criminal indictments on other grounds, the Cochise indictments are the first criminal charges filed over a refusal to certify an election.Jared Davidson, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a watchdog group, argued that the prosecution could set an important precedent.“Pushing for potential criminal accountability is an important message, not just to election deniers in Arizona but across the country that if they indulge conspiracy theories and ignore the law and try to disenfranchise voters, there are real consequences,” he said. More

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      Jamie Dimon Urges Donors, Even Democrats, to ‘Help Nikki Haley’

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      The JPMorgan Chase C.E.O.’s show of support for Ms. Haley came on the same day that a new super PAC set out to try to draw independent voters to her candidacy.The chief executive of Wall Street’s largest bank threw his support behind Nikki Haley on Wednesday, just as a group of entrepreneurs confirmed that they were forming a super PAC to try to draw independent voters to her.The two developments provided new signs that opponents of former President Donald J. Trump in the business world are coalescing around Ms. Haley as their favored alternative.“Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley, too,” Jamie Dimon, the chief of JPMorgan Chase, said at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit, a conference of global business leaders, addressing Wall Street executives in the room who might donate to candidates. “Get a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump.”Mr. Dimon had called Ms. Haley late last month to praise her campaign, but his comments on Wednesday were a far more public endorsement. He did not take the position that the nominee should be anyone but Mr. Trump, adding: “He might be the president. I have to deal with that, too.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Fearful of Trump’s Autocratic Ambitions

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      More from our inbox:Pro-Palestinian Students on CampusMideast MythsWhen a Case Is Closed, Let the Target KnowCharles Peters and NeoliberalismFormer President Donald J. Trump has framed his campaign as the “final battle” against political adversaries, and he and his allies are devising plans for a second term that would upend some of the long-held norms of American democracy.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Autocratic Tone Intensifies Fears of Trump’s Plans” (front page, Nov. 21):I applaud former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and former Gov. John Kasich, both Republicans, for denouncing Donald Trump’s authoritarian language and ambitions.It is incumbent on other prominent Republicans to renounce Mr. Trump and state that he is not fit to serve as president.As stated in the article, a recent survey “found that 38 percent of Americans supported having a president ‘willing to break some rules’ to ‘set things right’ with the country. Among Republicans surveyed, 48 percent backed that view.”This view is shocking. Republican leaders have a responsibility to educate voters and help change this perspective.It is imperative that all Americans actively promote and support democracy against threats both foreign and domestic.James H. MillsCumberland Center, MaineTo the Editor:As frightening as it is to think of this man being elected again, we must also address this issue: Should Donald Trump not win, would he again try to overturn the results of the election and call on his supporters to storm the Capitol?Can the country afford to go through this again? I think not.Donald Trump is so unhinged and delusional that nothing would stop him from denying the election results once again and trying to stop Congress from certifying the results. This issue should be front and center as one of too-many-to-count reasons that this man should be stopped!Robin KroopnickBranford, Conn.To the Editor:Re “The Roots of Trump’s Rage,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 22):What’s the point of analyzing Donald Trump’s psyche to find out why he seethes with hate? It’s far more important to understand just why that hate finds ready purchase among such a large swath of the electorate.According to a CNN poll taken in July, nearly 70 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe the blatant lie that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election. We have no reason to suspect that this figure has diminished significantly since then.But why is that? We do not live in a totalitarian state — at least, not yet. No one is forcing these voters to accept that lie or watch it amplified on Fox News. They freely choose to do so.Like all cunning demagogues, Mr. Trump mirrors and mobilizes the latent hatred in his die-hard supporters, who view his many character defects as virtues. Without them, he would be nothing. There lie the real roots of his rage.Bryan L. TuckerBostonPro-Palestinian Students on CampusColumbia University suspended its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.Bing Guan for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Inside the Group Protesting for Palestine Across College Campuses” (news article, Nov. 22):Brandeis, Columbia and George Washington University are missing a valuable teaching opportunity by banning or suspending Students for Justice in Palestine.They would be better served by inviting representatives from the organization to meet with representatives from pro-Israel and other student groups to work together brainstorming solutions. The forums would include professors and other professionals with valuable expertise. It would be guided by mediators.The goal would be to work on solutions instead of demands. Although the forums would have little immediate influence, they would teach and publicize alternatives to the extreme partisanship so prevalent today.Fox News and extremist Republicans are using pro-Palestinian student demonstrations to slant popular opinion against protesting students and liberal institutions while setting examples themselves in vitriol and extreme partisanship.As a counterweight, universities need to reaffirm their role of preparing students to be honest, open-minded and thoughtful leaders. It’s time to elevate the teaching of mediation both in our colleges and our high schools.Compromise and working together despite differences are key to successful democracies, and vesting students with responsibilities tends to make them more responsible.John PappenheimerHadley, Mass.To the Editor:Of course, the tactics of Students for Justice in Palestine “can provoke discomfort” on college campuses. So what? Although some S.J.P. tactics, such as impeding student access to classes, are unacceptable, discomfort is inevitable in institutions dedicated to the free exchange of ideas.Felicia Nimue AckermanProvidence, R.I.The writer is a professor of philosophy at Brown University.Mideast Myths William Keo/Magnum PhotosTo the Editor:Re “Three Myths of the Middle East,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Nov. 16):It is ironic that in his attempt to dispel myths of the Middle East, Mr. Kristof addresses the lack of a Palestinian state without mentioning that the Palestinians have rebuffed generous offers of statehood and refused to enter negotiations with Israel on even more occasions.In his omission, he propels the myth that Palestinians are mere victims who never had any opportunities to have a state. They cannot continue to refuse to negotiate and accept these offers and still complain about being stateless.Mark MisenerNew YorkWhen a Case Is Closed, Let the Target Know Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Legal Double Standard That’s Rarely Discussed,” by Preet Bharara (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 19):Mr. Bharara is correct that prosecutors should provide notice to the subjects or targets of a criminal investigation that the government has decided not to file charges. The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards for Prosecutorial Investigations state that “to the extent practicable, the prosecutor should, upon request, provide notice of termination of the investigation to subjects who became aware of the investigation.”As the former head of a criminal litigating section at the Justice Department, and in private practice, I have given and received such “declination letters.”The A.B.A. standards could become part of the Justice Manual that guides all federal prosecutors. As Mr. Bharara observes, all those involved in the justice system, “prosecutors, the public and those being investigated,” would benefit from this small bit of grace by the government.Steven P. SolowWashingtonCharles Peters and NeoliberalismCharles Peters in 2017 at his home in Washington. He was often called the “godfather of neoliberalism,” the core policy doctrine of his magazine.Al Drago/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Charles Peters, Founder of The Washington Monthly, Is Dead at 96” (obituary, Nov. 25):Though the obituary was generous and informative, it should have explained to readers that Mr. Peters’s use of the term “neoliberalism” to describe the magazine’s political philosophy in the early 1980s was nearly the opposite of what that word would later come to mean.Neoliberalism today connotes market fundamentalism — the belief that government intervention in the economy is largely counterproductive and antithetical to growth and prosperity. Mr. Peters, by contrast, vigorously defended tough regulation of corporate behavior and other actions by government aimed at giving average Americans a leg up economically.While he was certainly — indeed famously — critical of some aspects of traditional liberalism, he was no libertarian but, rather, a die-hard F.D.R. Democrat.Paul GlastrisWashingtonThe writer is editor in chief of The Washington Monthly. More