Elections

Joe Biden will on Friday mark the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, delivering his first presidential election campaign speech of 2024 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania – a site replete with historical meaning.A day before the anniversary, due to forecast bad weather, Biden will speak where George Washington’s army endured another dark moment: the bitter winter of 1777-78, an ordeal key to winning American independence from Britain.Biden will also speak about January 6 on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in June 2015 a gunman shot dead nine Black people in an attempt to start a race war.Donald Trump’s nearest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, was governor of South Carolina at the time and subsequently oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds.Haley has since struggled to define her position on the flag and the interests it represented, last week in New Hampshire failing to say slavery caused the civil war.But the Biden campaign is focusing on Trump, who refused to accept his conclusive defeat in 2020, spreading the lie that he was denied by electoral fraud and ultimately encouraging supporters to attempt to stop certification of Biden’s win by Congress.The attack on the Capitol delayed certification but the process was completed in the early hours of 7 January. Biden was inaugurated two weeks later.On Thursday, the Biden campaign previewed his Valley Forge speech and released Cause, an ad one adviser said would “set the stakes” for this year’s election.“I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency,” Biden says in the ad, over footage of Americans voting.But, he adds, over shots of white supremacists marching in Virginia in 2017 and the attack on Congress, “There’s something dangerous happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy.”Wes Moore, the first Black governor of Maryland, widely seen as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 but now a Biden campaign adviser, told MSNBC: “The president is really setting the stakes and really hoping to set the platform for what people are going to hear.“From him, it is a vision for their future. From Donald Trump, they’re going to hear a vision about his future. That’s the difference.”Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses, Trump dominates Republican polling, regardless of 91 criminal charges – 17 concerning election subversion – in four cases, civil trials over his business affairs and a rape allegation and attempts to bar him from the ballot in Colorado and Maine under the 14th amendment, introduced after the civil war to stop insurrectionists running for office.Trump has called January 6 “a beautiful day” and supporters imprisoned because of it “great, great patriots” and “hostages”. At rallies he has played Justice for All, The Star-Spangled Banner sung by jailed rioters, interspersed with his own recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. On Saturday, he will stage a rally in Iowa, less than five days before caucuses in the midwestern state kick off the 2024 election.Republicans in Congress continue to range themselves behind Trump, the majority whip Tom Emmer’s endorsement this week completing the set of GOP House leaders. Among the rank and file, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right representative from Georgia who has touted herself as Trump’s running mate, was due to host a January 6 commemoration in Florida, until the venue canceled it.Many observers see winning the White House as Trump’s best hope of staying out of prison. Some polling suggests a criminal conviction (also possible over retention of classified information and hush-money payments) would reduce support but for now he is competitive with Biden or leads him in surveys regarding a notional general election.Furthermore, polling shows more Americans accepting Trump’s stolen election lie.This week, the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that only 62% of respondents said Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate, down from 69% two years ago. On the question of blame for January 6, meanwhile, the same pollsters found that 25% of Americans (and 34% of Republicans) thought it was probably or definitely true that the FBI, not Trump, was responsible for inciting the riot.Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, referred to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan when she said: “Led by Donald Trump, Maga Republicans are running on an extreme platform of undermining the will of the American people who vote in free and fair elections, weaponising the government against their political opponents, and parroting the rhetoric of dictators.”Biden’s new ad and January 6 speeches, Chavez Rodriguez said, would “serve as a very real reminder that this election could very well determine the very fate of American democracy”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is expected to roll to a fourth consecutive term as the gutted opposition boycotts what it calls an unfair election.There is little doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will seize a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The bigger question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and left with little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments or are in hiding with the police on their tail. Ms. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, has cleared the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own contestants to prop up dummy candidates so it does not look as if they won unchallenged.The B.N.P. has boycotted the vote, after Ms. Hasina rejected its demand that she step aside during the campaign period so the election could be held under a neutral administration. Even as Bangladesh has appeared to be finding a path to prosperity and shedding a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested election shows how politics in this country of 170 million remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two major parties.The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s effort to protest the vote, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, has been met with an intensified crackdown. More than 20,000 B.N.P. members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally, in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of appalling conditions inside overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have died in jail since the Oct. 28 crackdown, according to human rights organizations and reports in local news media.As the B.N.P. has issued another call for a national strike, this one on the eve of the election, security has been increased, with the army deployed in the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.Bangladeshi soldiers were deployed on streets as part of enhanced security measures ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections.Mahmud Hossain Opu/Associated Press“There is a risk of increased violence after the polls, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, the Asia director for the International Crisis Group. “If the B.N.P. feels the largely nonviolent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 election has failed, leaders could come under pressure to revert to the more overt violence of the past.”And if the B.N.P. does resort to widespread violence, Mr. Prakash said, it will be walking right into a trap. Ms. Hasina’s party has been laying the groundwork for an even wider crackdown as it pushes a narrative that the opposition is filled with “terrorists” and “killers.”During Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule, her second stint in power, the country has been a paradox of sorts.As investments in the garment export industry began paying off, the economy experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed India’s. Bangladesh has also shown major strides in other development areas, from education and health to female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters.But all along, critics say, Ms. Hasina, 76, has tried to turn the country into a one-party state. From the security agencies to the courts, she has captured government institutions and unleashed them onto anyone who does not fall in line.In the latest example, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was given a six-month jail sentence in what he has described as a political vendetta. Mr. Yunus is out on bail and appealing the verdict in a case that government officials say is not political and involves violations of labor laws.Ms. Hasina’s drive to dismantle the B.N.P. often appears to be a personal campaign of vengeance.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressing a campaign rally in December.-/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor most of the time since Bangladesh’s creation in 1971 — when it separated from Pakistan after a bloody campaign of cultural oppression against Bengalis — the country has been ruled by the two parties.The Awami League was the party of Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader and founding president. After he set out on a campaign to centralize power, he was killed in a military coup that also left much of his young family dead.The B.N.P. was formed by Gen. Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who rose to power after a bloody phase of coups and counter-coups in the wake of Sheikh Mujib’s assassination. Mr. Zia, as he was known, was also later killed in a military coup.While Ms. Hasina sees the B.N.P. as the creation of the same military cadre that protected her father’s killers, her drive to destroy the party is even more personal, her aides say. When the B.N.P., led by Mr. Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, was in power in the early 2000s, one of Ms. Hasina’s rallies as an opposition leader was attacked by dozens of grenades. She survived a close call, but more than 20 of her party’s leaders and supporters were killed.Over the past couple of years, Ms. Hasina’s crackdown has become particularly severe as the sheen from the story of economic progress has worn off.The successive blows of the pandemic and the Ukraine war, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have shrunk Bangladesh’s foreign reserves to dangerous lows. The crisis has exposed not only Bangladesh’s overreliance on the garment industry, but also what Western diplomats in Dhaka say are kleptocratic practices hidden beneath the country’s economic growth.The ruling elite, diplomats say, tap into banks and the nation’s riches with little accountability. With about 60 percent of Parliament made up of businesspeople, economic interests and political power have become deeply intertwined, impeding economic reform, analysts say.The opposition tried to capitalize on public anger over rising prices, holding its first large rallies in years. But its momentum was short-lived, as the government’s crackdown deepened.Supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party in Dhaka in July.Atul Loke for The New York TimesThe B.N.P. says its demand for an election under a neutral caretaker was nothing new — Ms. Hasina called for the same when she was in the opposition, and she came to power in an election administered by a caretaker government. Bangladesh’s institutions are so vulnerable to abuse by the ruling party that no opposition has won election when the vote was not held under a caretaker.But Ms. Hasina considers the B.N.P.’s demand to be a violation of the constitution — because, after she came to power, she amended the charter to declare the practice illegal and a disruption to the democratic cycle.Seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2014 vote, in which Ms. Hasina’s party won more than half of the seats uncontested, the Awami League has been pointing to the smaller parties that are still contesting this year’s election. But analysts say the party has engineered a new token opposition. Some of these candidates made clear on campaign posters where they stood: “Supported by the Awami League.”The B.N.P.’s leader, Ms. Zia, a former prime minister, remains under house arrest. Her son, the party’s acting chairman, is in exile in London. Much of the party’s leadership is in jail.In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the party’s visibility was largely reduced to virtual news conferences by Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, one of the few senior B.N.P. leaders not in jail.Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, the senior joint secretary general of the B.N.P., in his party office in June. Atul Loke for The New York TimesMr. Rizvi himself faces 180 court cases, and for months at a time he remained locked up in his office, sleeping in a small corner bed, as he risked arrest if he ventured out. He walks with a cane because of a bullet wound he received while protesting a military dictator in the late 1980s.“We and other like-minded parties have boycotted this election,” Mr. Rizvi said in a virtual news conference on Thursday, announcing a new strike to begin on Saturday. “The political parties and the people of the country have already understood that this election is going to be a rehearsal of the anarchy of Awami League. It’s going to be a one-sided election.”Obaidul Quader, general secretary of the Awami League, said it regretted the main opposition’s absence.“Had B.N.P. been there,” he added, “the election would have been more competitive.” More

Harry Dunn, who endured racist slurs as he fought off a pro-Trump mob and gained fame with his emotional testimony before the Jan. 6 committee, is joining a crowded Democratic primary.Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer who rose to prominence for his defense of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and for his emotional public testimony describing the attack, announced on Friday that he was running for Congress in Maryland’s third district.“On Jan. 6, 2021, I did my duty as a police officer and as an American and defended our nation’s Capitol from violent insurrectionists,” Mr. Dunn said in a statement. “Today, I’m running for Congress because the forces that spurred that violent attack are still at work, and as a patriotic American, it is my duty to defend our democracy.”Mr. Dunn, 40, will enter a crowded Democratic primary field to replace Representative John Sarbanes, the retiring 17-year incumbent. Five state lawmakers have already announced their campaigns to represent the central Maryland district, which snakes between Washington and Baltimore. Whoever emerges from the primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic district is almost certain to win the general election.Mr. Dunn, a member of the Capitol Police for 15 years, was one of four officers who testified at the first public hearing of the House committee that investigated the attack by the pro-Trump mob on the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. He described how fellow officers bloodied in the battle and how rioters used racist slurs against him.“I sat down on a bench with a friend of mine who is also a Black Capitol Police officer and told him about the racial slurs I had endured,” Mr. Dunn recalled during a memorable portion of the testimony. He added that he “became very emotional,” asking how such a thing could happen and yelling, “‘Is this America?’”“I began sobbing, and officers came over to console me,” he said.In 2023, President Biden awarded Mr. Dunn the Presidential Citizens Medal in recognition for his role in protecting the Capitol.Mr. Dunn grew up in the Washington suburbs of Prince George’s County, Md., and graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, where he played football and helped lead the team to its first national title.He has written a book called “Standing My Ground.” More

The attempted US coup of 6 January 2021, never ended, according to a watchdog report, since the same Donald Trump allies behind that insurrection are now leading a sham impeachment effort against Joe Biden.The report, marking three years since a mob of Trump supporters ransacked the US Capitol in a bid to overturn his election defeat, was produced by the Congressional Integrity Project and obtained by the Guardian.It argues that scores of Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives have continued to push the former president’s election lies and are ready to go further in a bid to put him back in the White House.“In fact, the key players involved in Trump’s scheme to overturn the election in 2020 are the very same Republicans leading the bogus impeachment effort against President Biden,” it says.These include Mike Johnson, the House speaker; Jim Jordan, the chair of the House judiciary committee; and James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, all of whom continue to push Trump’s debunked conspiracy theories and wage a crusade to impeach Biden.Last month, the House voted along party lines to officially authorise an impeachment inquiry into Biden after months of claiming that he and his son, Hunter, engaged in an influence-peddling scheme. Even some Republicans, such as Utah senator Mitt Romney, pointed out that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden himself.The project’s report describes the Biden impeachment inquiry as “a partisan political stunt” designed to hurt Biden and help Trump return to the White House in 2024, and says it is “an extension of, not separate from, the events of January 6, 2021”.It quotes Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, as saying: “They still want to overturn the election. What they couldn’t do on January 6th they’re trying to do with this process.”The report highlights the role of Johnson, who was elected speaker in October to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy and has supported an impeachment inquiry for months. After the 2020 election, he said the outcome had been “rigged” and amplified Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines.Johnson stayed in close contact with Trump and publicly encouraged him to “stay strong and keep fighting”. He pressured Republican colleagues to support a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the election on the unconstitutional premise that the expansion of vote by mail during the pandemic had been illegal, and he managed to collect signatures from more than 60% of House Republicans.On the morning of 6 January 2021, Johnson tweeted: “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic!” Later that day he voted to overturn the 2020 election, refusing to certify the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. In all, eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives voted to overturn the result.Johnson also voted against bipartisan legislation that would create a September 11-style commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol. He refused to hold people accountable for the violence that day, voting against holding Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.He has attacked investigations into January 6 as a “third impeachment” and “pure political theatre”. More recently, Johnson alleged that the FBI director Christopher Wray was “hiding something” about the FBI’s presence in the Capitol on 6 January 2021, echoing a conspiracy theory spread by rightwing extremists implying that federal agents had a role in orchestrating the insurrection.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen asked in October whether he believed the 2020 election was stolen, Johnson refused to comment: “We’re not talking about any issues today … My position is very well-known.”Jordan, meanwhile, was a key figure in the attempt to subvert US democracy who pushed the Trump administration to “unilaterally reject certain states’ electors” the day before January 6. He opposed the creation of a January 6 committee and has refused to cooperate with any investigative efforts into the violence of that day.Before the 2022 midterm elections, Jordan stated that his investigations into Biden “will help frame up the 2024 race … We need to make sure that [Donald Trump] wins.” Last month he boasted that the impeachment inquiry against Biden was influencing polling numbers for the 2024 presidential election: “I think all that together is why you see the [polling] numbers where they are at.”The report names other key “election deniers and insurrection apologists” in Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Pete Sessions of Texas, Byron Donalds of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Troy Nehls of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Greg Steube of Florida, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin and Cliff Bentz of Oregon.Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, said: “The attempted impeachment of President Biden isn’t merely a political stunt: it’s an attempt to finish the job Jordan, Trump, Greene and Johnson started long before January 6, 2021, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol.“They are willing to trash the institution of the House, its role in legitimate oversight, the constitution and our democracy. At the Congressional Integrity Project, the gloves are off, and protection of our democracy is on.” More

President Biden is returning to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to try to define the 2024 presidential election as an urgent and intensifying fight for American democracy.Mr. Biden is expected to use a location near the famous Revolutionary War encampment of Valley Forge and the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to cast preserving democracy as a foundational issue to the 2024 campaign, according to a senior Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the remarks.The address, which builds on previous speeches about safeguarding American institutions and combating political violence, represents a bet that many Americans remain shaken by the Jan. 6 attack and Donald J. Trump’s role in it.Leaning on a phrase used by America’s first president, George Washington, around the time he commanded troops at Valley Forge, Mr. Biden is expected to suggest that the 2024 election is a test of whether democracy is still a “sacred cause” in the nation, the aide said.Mr. Biden is fond of using sites of historical significance to underscore speeches that he and his team see as important moments. He traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia before the midterm elections and to Gettysburg, Pa., during the 2020 presidential campaign.His campaign views the events of Jan. 6 — when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent culmination of his election denialism — as critical to understanding how the 2024 campaign will unfold. His team notes that Mr. Trump and Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of that day but argues that images of the Capitol riot remain seared in the minds of voters.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

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is finally taking the fight to the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.After months of being pressed by voters to go harder, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump of not being “pro-life” during a nationally broadcast CNN town hall in Des Moines Thursday night. He pointed out that Mr. Trump had deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Barack Obama did in his presidency. And Mr. DeSantis suggested that Iowans, who will conduct the first voting in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating contest on Jan. 15, would do well to contrast his behavior with that of Mr. Trump.“You’re not going to have to worry about my conduct,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience. “I’ll conduct myself in a way you can be proud of. I’ll conduct myself in a way you can tell your kids: ‘That’s somebody you should emulate.’”Immediately after Mr. DeSantis’s hourlong town hall finished, another began for former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, also broadcast on CNN. For her, the evening seemed to go less smoothly. She was consistently placed on her back foot, defending herself over a string of recent gaffes and even receiving boos because of a joke she made a day earlier about the Iowa caucuses. At one point, she used an oft-derided cliché when talking about race, saying that she had “Black friends growing up.”The dueling town halls signaled the start of a sprint to the finish for the Republican candidates still standing in Iowa. For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, however, that sprint means a race for second place. Polls show they are both trailing Mr. Trump in the state by roughly 30 points. They are set to meet next week in a one-on-one debate — Mr. Trump, confident in his lead, has skipped the debates — and will also appear in separate Fox News town halls.Behind Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is in a distant fourth, despite campaigning vigorously. And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the field’s anti-Trump standard-bearer, is not even campaigning in Iowa, preferring to focus on New Hampshire, which votes on Jan. 23.DeSantis speaking during a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, on Wednesday.Scott Morgan/ReutersMr. DeSantis was seen for much of the year as the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s more moderate image has appealed to wealthy donors and independent voters, lifting her standing in the race. She is now virtually tied with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, where he had been favored, and beating him badly in New Hampshire.Although they and their allies have attacked one another for weeks, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley barely mentioned each other on Thursday. Instead, Mr. DeSantis trained most of his fire on Mr. Trump, particularly on abortion, an issue Mr. DeSantis is hoping to use to woo Iowa’s influential evangelical voters.“I mean, when you’re saying that pro-life protections are a terrible thing, by definition you are not pro-life,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to criticisms Mr. Trump had made of six-week abortion bans. He added: “How do you flip-flop on something like the sanctity of life?”Ms. Haley continued to characterize the former president as a force of chaos, criticizing him for raising the national debt, and asserting that, although some of the cases against him are “political in nature” and without basis, “he’s going to have to answer.”“I used to tell him he’s his own worst enemy,” said Ms. Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.For Mr. DeSantis, a confident performance in front of a national audience was a welcome change. He has largely underwhelmed in the G.O.P. debates. Mr. Trump has mocked him mercilessly, including over his sometimes awkward mannerisms and choice of footwear. Chaos in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and an allied super PAC have often overshadowed his attempts to catch up to Mr. Trump and to fend off Ms. Haley.But Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has argued for weeks that Ms. Haley would stumble as the news media and her rivals focused more attention on her.Indeed, from the moment she took the stage on Thursday, Ms. Haley appeared slightly uncomfortable and on the defensive. Her anecdotes were at times difficult to follow, and she largely relied on canned remarks from her stump speeches, which hardly seemed to make for TV-ready answers.Haley greets people at a Lady Hawkeyes tailgate campaign event in Coralville, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey/ReutersMs. Haley has had a series of recent missteps on the campaign trail. Just hours before her CNN town hall, she drew fire from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign surrogates in Iowa for her comments at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she suggested that the state’s voters would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses. Last month, she flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark and failed to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War.“I should have said slavery right off the bat,” Ms. Haley said on Thursday when asked to respond to criticism of her Civil War response, before contending that she had “Black friends growing up” and that slavery was “a very talked about thing” in her state. “I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward — I shouldn’t have done that.”She seemed to regain some footing as she spoke about her foreign policy stances, her experiences as a mother and her brushes with racism and prejudice in South Carolina as the daughter of the only Indian immigrant family in a small rural town.“We weren’t white enough to be considered white,” she said, deploying a line she often uses. “We weren’t Black enough to be considered Black. They didn’t know who we were, what we were and why we were there.”For once, both candidates largely stuck to their contention that they were running to beat Mr. Trump, not each other.Mr. DeSantis mentioned Ms. Haley most directly in a line that was fast becoming his campaign’s catchphrase: “Donald Trump is running for his issues. Nikki Haley is running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues.”Ms. Haley hardly mentioned Mr. DeSantis by name, even after being directly asked about his policies. When the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked if Ms. Haley supported the efforts of Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to transport migrants from the Southern border to more liberal areas of the country, she demurred.“Well, I’ll talk about Governor Abbott,” Ms. Haley said. “Because I think he was courageous. He was the first one to do it.” More

Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIs Donald Trump an insurrectionist who should be barred from the ballot? On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss who should get to decide if the former president can try to return to the White House. Plus, the hosts lay out what other stories are on their 2024 political bingo cards.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Hill Street Studios/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:“The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump,” by Ross Douthat in The New York TimesDecember 2023 Times/Siena poll“The 2023 High School Yearbook of American Politics,” by Michelle Cottle in The Times“Trump’s 2024 Playbook,” episode of “The Daily” from The Times“The World Should Fear 2024,” by Aris Roussinos in UnHerdThoughts? 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 Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?Apparently, yes.If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network.If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. And it looks even more desperate after Haley’s recent Civil War misadventures — first failing to name slavery as a reason the war happened, then clumsily trying to walk back her omission.But there is a logic behind this drama. What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.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