Elections

Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts take apart why Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis can’t seem to form competitive coalitions against Donald Trump, and whether Haley, DeSantis, the Supreme Court “or God himself” can keep the former president from becoming the Republican nominee.Plus, Michelle Cottle reveals her Plan B if her political reporting career doesn’t work out.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:Suffolk University-Boston Globe poll of likely New Hampshire Republican primary votersHot dog car sketch on “I Think You Should Leave”Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Derek Arthur, Phoebe Lett and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It is edited by Alison Bruzek and Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Our fact-checking team is Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

The debate over immigration in the United States is spilling over into other parts of President Biden’s agenda, particularly the war in Ukraine.The soaring number of people crossing into the United States from Mexico has been a political vulnerability for President Biden for the past three years, chipping away at his approval rating and opening him up to political attacks.But now, the crisis is threatening to upend America’s support for the war in Ukraine, throwing the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy into jeopardy.After a meeting with Mr. Biden at the White House on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that the Republican-led House would not pass legislation to send aid to Ukraine unless Democrats agreed to sweeping new restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.And even if the two sides do come to some sort of agreement, many Republicans, especially in the House, would be loath 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 issue is also at the center of the candidacy of Mr. Biden’s likely opponent this fall, former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

Mr. Navarro would be the second Trump official to be sentenced for stonewalling Congress in its Jan. 6 investigation.Federal prosecutors asked on Thursday night for a sentence of six months in prison for Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump, for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence at the top end of the guidelines because of his “bad-faith strategy” of “sustained, deliberate contempt of Congress.”“The defendant, like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation,” they wrote in their sentencing memo. “The defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”The memo echoed the sentence recommendation for Stephen K. Bannon, who was ultimately given four months in prison for defying his own subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. The sentencing would make Mr. Navarro the second Trump official to be sentenced for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas.Sentencing is set for Jan. 25 in Federal District Court in Washington.Mr. Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in September, and this week the judge presiding over the case, Amit P. Mehta, turned down a request from his lawyers to dismiss the verdict and convene a new trial. Mr. Navarro had argued that jurors were exposed to political bias while lunching outside the courthouse where demonstrators were protesting.“The evidence establishes that the jurors only interacted with each other” and a court security officer, Judge Mehta wrote in a ruling on Tuesday.Mr. Navarro’s lawyers argued that the subpoena flew in the face of the notion that a president could direct his subordinates to refuse to testify before Congress, citing executive immunity.In their own memo, they wrote that “history is replete” with people who “have refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a vocal critic of China, helped devise some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies and played a role in the U.S. pandemic response. But after the 2020 presidential election, he became more focused on efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro frequently made television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud. He also documented those assertions in a report, as well as in a memoir he published after leaving the White House in which he described a strategy known as the Green Bay Sweep aimed at overturning the election results.When the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify, he repeatedly asserted executive privilege, insisting that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. But Judge Mehta ruled that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense at trial, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee. More

When the Fox News host Laura Ingraham urged Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “to step aside and endorse Trump” on Tuesday night, it was the latest sign of a sharp deterioration of relations between the Republican presidential hopeful and the network that made him a star.Ms. Ingraham’s exhortation, in the wake of Mr. DeSantis’s second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, was met with mockery and derision by two of the governor’s most prominent aides.“Why would DeSantis take advice from the opposing campaign?” Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, wrote on X, to which Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman in the governor’s office, Jeremy Redfern, chimed in.“The Fox News PAC,” he wrote.It was the latest broadside from Mr. DeSantis’s inner circle against the cable network that until recently had been among the loudest advocates of his candidacy.But Mr. DeSantis lashed out last week, accusing Fox News of bias toward his rival, former President Donald J. Trump. Speaking to reporters in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis said that conservative media outlets, including Fox, had acted as “a Praetorian Guard” for Mr. Trump. “They just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” Mr. DeSantis said, “and they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”The governor’s campaign manager denounced Fox as “full blown Trump TV, honesty thrown to the wind.” On caucus night, Ms. Pushaw assailed Fox News for projecting a victory for Mr. Trump only a half-hour after Iowans began to caucus. “Corporate media election interference,” she wrote on X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

No Labels, the centrist group that could field a third-party presidential bid, has asked the Justice Department to investigate what it calls unlawful intimidation by groups that oppose it.The group filed a complaint on Jan. 11, accusing a number of political figures and other critics of engaging in voter suppression and violating federal law, including the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which is often used to combat organized crime.Leaders of No Labels who described the complaint during a news conference on Thursday pointed largely to previously reported details of efforts to oppose the group, as well as incendiary statements that some of its critics had made on political podcasts.The group compared the efforts of its opponents to those of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and ’60s and the fictional mob boss Tony Soprano. A montage of clips shown by the group included Rick Wilson, a founder of the anti-Trump Republican group the Lincoln Project, saying last spring that the group had to “be burned to the ground,” using an expletive — although the clip had been cut off before Mr. Wilson adds the word “politically.” (After being asked about the shortened clip, the group uploaded a version of the video with the full statement.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The forceful brief was the former president’s main submission in his appeal of a ruling barring him from the Colorado primary ballot on the ground that he had engaged in insurrection.Former President Donald J. Trump urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to reverse a ruling barring him from the primary ballot in Colorado and to declare him eligible to seek and hold the office of the presidency.Mr. Trump’s brief, his main submission in an extraordinary case with the potential to alter the course of the presidential election, was a forceful recitation of more than half a dozen arguments about why the Colorado Supreme Court had gone astray in ruling him an insurrectionist barred from office by the Constitution.“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” the brief said.The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly, perhaps by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.The case turns on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

Nikki Haley, battling attacks from Donald J. Trump that she is too liberal and accusations from Ron DeSantis that she has been hiding from voters and reporters, hit back on Thursday, taking questions and defending her conservative credentials.“This is the problem with the Republican Party now — they want to go and push everybody away that doesn’t fit their narrative,” she told reporters in Hollis, N.H, when asked about messaging from her opponents painting her as in the pocket of Democratic donors. “I have said it to the Republican Party over and over again — we have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president because you keep pushing people away.”Asked about Mr. Trump’s plans to argue that nominating her for the White House would cost Republicans all the way down the ballot, Ms. Haley told reporters that “Americans aren’t stupid.”“The reality is, who lost the House for us? Who lost the Senate? Who lost the White House? Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Donald Trump,” she said.The back-and-forth appeared to be a dry run for her CNN town hall Thursday night, days before the New Hampshire primary next week. It was also a rare moment for Ms. Haley on the trail.Ms. Haley, 51, the former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, has run a tightly controlled campaign. Though she has held hundreds of events in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, she has held roughly a half-dozen news conferences since August, including “gaggles,” where the reporters following her on the trail are able to ask questions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The federal judge overseeing the criminal case against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results indicated on Thursday that the scheduled trial date would not hold as a result of the case being frozen while the former US president appeals to have the charges dismissed.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan last summer scheduled the trial in Washington DC to start on 4 March – allowing Trump and his team seven months to prepare his defense – and has taken pains to ensure that date would not be delayed.But when Trump appealed her decision in December to reject his motion to toss the charges on grounds he could not be prosecuted for actions he took as president related to his duties, the case became automatically frozen while the US court of appeals for the DC circuit considered the matter.In her six-page order prohibiting the special counsel Jack Smith from filing motions pending the appeal, Chutkan affirmed that Trump would get the full seven-month period and that any time that elapsed between December and the end of the appeals process would not count against him.“Contrary to Defendant’s assertion, the court has not and will not set deadlines in this case based on the assumption that he has undertaken preparation when not required to do so,” the judge wrote.The line marked the first time that Chutkan has acknowledged that the March trial date may no longer be viable. While the DC circuit is expected to issue a decision on the immunity appeal expeditiously after oral arguments last week, it could be weeks until a decision is handed down.Trump can also continue his appeal efforts – and continue to have the case stayed – by asking the full appeals court to rehear the case “en banc” should the three-judge panel at oral arguments uphold Chutkan’s ruling. En banc means a hearing before an entire bench of judges. Trump could also ultimately appeal to the US supreme court.The situation reflects the success Trump has had to date with executing his strategy of seeking to delay the case, ideally beyond the 2024 election in the hope that he wins re-election to potentially pardon himself or direct his attorney general to drop the charges.Chutkan’s order was a win for Trump insofar as she affirmed that prosecutors should not be filing motions related to the substance of the case in order to comply with the stay order that has frozen the case, even if she declined to hold them in contempt as Trump had wanted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump had complained that the filings from prosecutors, submitted to the trial court while they litigated the immunity issue, diverted their attention and created an unfair burden because his lawyers needed to review them to make sure it included things “involved in the appeal”.“While that is not a major burden, it is a cognizable one,” Chutkan wrote of Trump’s complaint. She added that Trump could make further objections to prosecutors’ findings, and he could do so when the appeals process is resolved and “the court sets a new schedule”. More