Elections

Carlos Prieto, Rachelle Bonja and M.J. Davis Lin and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWarning: this episode contains strong language.With Argentina again in the midst of an economic crisis, Argentine voters turned to Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who has drawn comparisons to Donald J. Trump.Jack Nicas, who covers South America for The New York Times, discusses Argentina’s incoming president, and his radical plan to remake the country’s economy.On today’s episodeJack Nicas, the Brazil bureau chief for The New York Times.In his first decree as president of Argentina, Javier Milei cut the number of government ministries from 18 to nine.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesBackground readingArgentina’s incoming president is a libertarian economist whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories has parallels with those of Donald J. Trump.Argentina braces itself for an “anarcho-capitalist” in charge.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jack Nicas More

The special counsel Jack Smith told the judge she should keep the trial’s start date in March and continue making decisions as the former president appeals one of her rulings.Federal prosecutors on Sunday asked the judge handling former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election to reject his request to freeze the case in its entirety as Mr. Trump appeals her recent ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.The prosecutors told the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, that even as the former president’s appeal of the immunity decision moved forward, she should continue working on several of the unresolved legal issues in the case and not postpone the trial’s current start date of March 4.“During the pendency of the appeal, any number of matters could arise in this case that are not involved in the appeal,” wrote Molly Gaston, a top deputy to Jack Smith, the special counsel who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s federal prosecutions. “The court should not enter an order preventing it from handling them.”“For its part,” Ms. Gaston went on, “in light of the public’s strong interest in a prompt trial, the government will seek to ensure that trial proceeds as scheduled.”The three-page filing by Ms. Gaston came just days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to pause all of the dates and deadlines associated with the proceeding until the appeal of her decision denying their immunity claims is resolved.The expansive stay Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for would in essence stop the case in its tracks. The appeal is the centerpiece of a long-planned strategy by the former president’s legal team to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington until after the 2024 election.This month, Judge Chutkan turned down Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while he was in office.In her ruling, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history upholding the idea that a former president should not be bound by the federal penal code.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have already moved to challenge that decision in front of a federal appeals court in Washington and plan to keep appealing it all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed. But winning the argument is only one of their goals. They are also hoping to eat up time and postpone the case from going to trial for as long as they can.If the trial were to be put off until after the election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race was over would also mean that voters would never get to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to elect him again in 2024.Mr. Smith’s team has suggested in court papers that it knew Mr. Trump would seek to use the immunity appeal to delay the case. Last month, the prosecutors specifically asked Judge Chutkan to make her decision on the question quickly so that the appellate process could get underway.But in her filing on Sunday evening, Ms. Gaston suggested there was no reason Judge Chutkan could not make rulings on other outstanding issues in the case as the appeal went forward. Among those issues is an unresolved motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have the election charges dismissed because they represent what they have described as a partisan attack against him by President Biden.While the defense and the prosecution have been sparring for months over the timing of the election interference trial, they have more recently been fighting over something else: a number of “speculative and conspiratorial” theories, as the government has called them, that Mr. Trump has indicated he may raise during the trial.On Saturday night, in a separate set of court papers, prosecutors pushed back against those theories, which could serve as the basis for one of Mr. Trump’s lines of defense at trial: suggesting, that in reassuring the public that the 2020 election was conducted fairly, the so-called deep state was in fact misleading the nation, an assertion that lacks any credible basis.In the papers filed on Saturday, Thomas P. Windom, another one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, dismissed the notion — first brought up last month by Mr. Trump’s lawyers — that the SolarWinds computer hack engineered by Russia might have affected the results of the election.Mr. Windom also rejected as “bewildering” Mr. Trump’s claim that a statement issued by the country’s top cybersecurity official saying that the 2020 election had been safe was “part of a partisan effort to provide false assurances to the public.”Mr. Windom had little patience for yet another conspiratorial claim raised by Mr. Trump: that a cabal of politically motivated intelligence and national security officials had worked together after the election to convince him that no voting machines had been compromised and that the vote count had in fact been accurate.Calling the idea “theatrical,” Mr. Windom said prosecutors never found a shred of evidence during their long investigation that “a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine.”He also revealed how deeply the inquiry delved into the country’s national security community, noting that investigators interviewed the former director of national intelligence, the former national security adviser and his deputy, the former secretary of defense and the former leadership of the Justice Department. Asked if they were aware of any evidence of meddling in the election results, “the answer from every single official was no,” Mr. Windom’s filing said. More

The president was back on the fund-raising trail in Los Angeles this weekend after a hiatus because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes.President Biden is facing multiple wars, economic anxieties, the indictment of his son and flagging poll numbers. But he was received in California this weekend like a superstar, headlining the hottest events in Los Angeles.In sprawling Southern California homes, celebrities flocked — and opened their wallets — to hear the president and the first lady, Jill Biden, make the case for why Mr. Biden should be re-elected. The campaign swing was the first since the end of the monthslong actors’ and writers’ strikes, during which the president stayed away from the fund-raising hub to show support for those on the picket lines.“It was like a desert out here in L.A.,” said James Costos, a former ambassador under the Obama administration, who hosted one of the events. “There was a lot of people who were idly sitting by, wanting to know what was going on, who hadn’t seen the president in a while.”The weekend’s activities — which included two larger fund-raisers and two “campaign meetings,” as described by the White House — came as recent polls indicated Mr. Biden could lose in an expected rematch with former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden has struggled to assuage anxieties around an improved economy, and his steadfast support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza has earned the ire of young, diverse voters who threaten not to support him in 2024.But in Hollywood, as they say, anything is possible.At a party held by Mr. Costos and his partner, Michael Smith, many of those in attendance were household names: Steven Spielberg, Shonda Rhimes and Rob Reiner were co-hosts; Barbra Streisand and Jon Hamm attended; and Lenny Kravitz was the musical performer. Tickets started at $1,000 and went up to $500,000, and the event was expected to raise more than $7 million, according to a person familiar with the president’s fund-raising.And while Mr. Biden was the star, Mr. Trump took center stage in his remarks. Mr. Biden cast his predecessor as a danger to democracy — taking care to mention him by name in saying “You’re the reason why Donald Trump is a former president,” which was met with cheers.“The other day, he said that he’d be a dictator only on the first day — thank God, only one day,” Mr. Biden quipped. He later added that Mr. Trump “embraces political violence instead of rejecting it. We can’t let this happen.”The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But Mr. Trump on Saturday in New York City called the allegation that he would pose a threat to democracy part of Democrats’ “newest hoax,” and again flipped the attacks, saying “the threat is Crooked Joe Biden.”Democrats have long counted on the liberal Los Angeles area as a financial power source. In 2019, Mr. Biden raised more than $700,000 at the home of Mr. Costos and Mr. Smith for the primary campaign that he went on to win. The reliance on the region is a frequent subject of attack for Republican opponents, who decry Democrats nationwide as funded by Hollywood elites and California liberals.At a second fund-raiser, held Saturday at the home of the investors José Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, Mr. Biden tailored his remarks toward his administration’s successes for Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. constituencies. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden said: “He talks about the blood of our country being poisoned. He’s talking about — you know what he’s talking about,” a slight addition to his comments from the night before.While in town, Mr. Biden also paid his respects at the shiva for Norman Lear, the acclaimed television writer who died on Tuesday.In attendance at both fund-raisers was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the longtime Hollywood executive who is a co-chair of the Biden Victory Fund. Mr. Katzenberg said the 36 hours of events represented a preview of fund-raising efforts in the region next year. On Sunday, he put the weekend’s fund-raising totals at “over $15 million.”“This is a group of people that are pretty well-read, and they understand that all of the signals today are headed in the right direction and the wind is beginning to come into the sails of the president’s campaign,” Mr. Katzenberg said in an interview. He explained away Mr. Biden’s troubling poll numbers as evidence that “sentiment has not caught up with the facts.”The soirees that reporters got a glimpse of had it all: At one, a couple hundred attendees gathered around heat lamps, conversing over live jazz in the background and eating organic hot dogs. On Saturday, dozens of stars lined the path into a multimillion-dollar home whose entryway displayed a larger-than-life Christmas tree, and Mr. Biden joked it “looked like walking into the White House.”The events also drew a wide array of politicians and others, who congregated to demonstrate their support for him — and their distaste for Mr. Biden’s likely opponent. Two of the state’s best-known elected officials, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Representative Nancy Pelosi, attended Friday’s event, and a third, Senator Alex Padilla, was present at the fund-raiser on Saturday.One surprising co-sponsor of Friday’s fund-raiser was Rick Caruso, a billionaire and recent Democratic convert who lost his bid for mayor of Los Angeles last year. (Mr. Biden endorsed his opponent, Karen Bass, who won the election. She also attended on Friday.)Mr. Caruso, who said he had a “very meaningful” private conversation with the president on Friday, said he planned to financially support moderate Democrats in California House races next year — and did not rule out another run for public office himself.“I don’t agree with everything that Joe Biden does,” Mr. Caruso acknowledged in an interview. But, he added, “what I do feel strongly about is that he has a deep care and concern for our country, and he’s got a commitment to the democracy that we all enjoy. And I don’t believe that Trump does.”But even while insulated in friendly territory, Mr. Biden couldn’t quite escape his woes. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” could be heard from the spacious backyard in Western Los Angeles on Friday. More than 1,000 people gathered at a nearby park to criticize his approach in Israel and Gaza, the Los Angeles Times reported.Mr. Biden did not mention the conflict in either of his fund-raiser addresses. But Dr. Biden didn’t skip a beat when faint echoes of the protesters could be heard over her speech on Friday. At one point, she remarked, “I’m so grateful Joe is our president during these uncertain times,” prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. More

A federal jury will be selected to decide how much Rudolph Giuliani should pay for spreading lies about two Georgia election workers as he fought to keep Donald Trump in office.There will be no good news — only shades of bad — for Rudolph W. Giuliani when he appears in court on Monday for a trial to determine how much he will have to pay two Georgia election workers he lied about after the 2020 presidential race.Nearly two years ago, the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, sued Mr. Giuliani for defamation, accusing him of some of the most pernicious falsehoods to have emerged from his attempts to keep his friend and client, Donald J. Trump, in office. Over and over, the women claimed, Mr. Giuliani dishonestly asserted that they had tried to cheat Mr. Trump out of a victory by manipulating ballots they were counting at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.After fighting the case for months, Mr. Giuliani reversed himself this summer and, seeking to avoid crippling legal fees, abruptly acknowledged that his serial attacks against the women were false. Weeks later, a federal judge agreed with him and entered a judgment holding him liable for defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.Now Mr. Giuliani will have to endure a trial on the single question of whether he should have to pay what could be more than $40 million in damages. The proceeding, in Federal District Court in Washington, is scheduled to start with jury selection on Monday morning and is expected to continue through the week with testimony from both the plaintiffs and Mr. Giuliani.The trial could not have come at a poorer moment for Mr. Giuliani, who is near the edge of financial ruin. He is being hounded for money, including by his onetime lawyer, and cannot currently work as a lawyer himself because of disciplinary actions against him.Mr. Giuliani is confronting disbarment for what a Washington legal ethics panel has called his “unparalleled” efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat to President Biden. And he has been sued by Dominion Voting Systems for outlandish claims that the company helped to rig the presidential race against Mr. Trump.Moreover, he has been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case with the former president on charges of tampering with that state’s election.But even in this flood of trouble, the Washington defamation trial will be a landmark moment: the first time that a jury will consider not if, but how, to punish Mr. Giuliani for the role he played in helping Mr. Trump spread lies about his loss in the election.It will also offer the spectacle — perhaps to be repeated at other times and places — of the former white-knight lawman and celebrity mayor of New York being hauled into a courtroom to be held accountable for seeking to subvert the democratic process.At the heart of the trial will be the testimony of Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, who are mother and daughter. When they take the stand, they are expected to discuss the expansive threats they experienced after Mr. Giuliani appeared on several podcasts and television shows falsely asserting, among other things, that they had brought illegal ballots into the counting center in a suitcase and had used a flash drive to alter votes in digital tabulation machines.Shaye Moss was comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, as she testified last year in a House committee hearing about the election lies Mr. Giuliani spread.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesEven though these claims were quickly debunked, some of them were echoed by Mr. Trump, whose campaign promoted them on its Twitter account. Mr. Trump also mentioned Ms. Freeman in particular — calling her a “professional voter scammer” — when he spoke by phone in early 2021 with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and asked him to help find sufficient votes for him to win the election in the state.Last year, she testified at a public hearing held by the House select committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Ms. Freeman, who is Black, described the torrent of racist abuse that she and her daughter suffered after Mr. Trump began repeating Mr. Giuliani’s lies.“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” she said. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Mr. Giuliani is scheduled to testify in his own defense for about an hour, court papers say, and is expected to discuss “the circumstances” surrounding the remarks he made about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss. Presumably, his time on the stand will be spent attempting to persuade the jury that his statements about the women were only minimally damaging.A representative for Mr. Giuliani said the trial was an example of the “weaponization of our justice system,” adding that Mr. Giuliani had had a long career of “public service and accomplishments.”“The Rudy Giuliani you see today is the same man who took down the mafia, cleaned up New York City and comforted the nation following Sept. 11,” the representative, Ted Goodman, said.Lawyers for Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have said they intend to ask for between $15.5 million and $43 million in compensatory damages related to Mr. Giuliani’s defamatory statements. And that request does not include any punitive damages the jury might decide to award, or damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress.Presiding over the trial will be Judge Beryl A. Howell, who oversaw the grand jury investigations resulting in the federal indictments Mr. Trump now faces. One of those indictments, filed in Washington, accuses Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election and identifies Mr. Giuliani, albeit not by name, as a co-conspirator.Judge Howell, who has also overseen scores of criminal cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, has shown little patience for defendants who took part in the pro-Trump riot. She has taken a similar stance toward Mr. Giuliani, repeatedly pointing out the ways in which his efforts to defend himself in the defamation case have been lacking.In August, for example, after Mr. Giuliani ignored some of her orders, Judge Howell sanctioned him by skipping past the fact-finding phase of the trial and summarily finding him liable of the charges. She appeared annoyed when Mr. Giuliani conceded he had lied about the women, but still maintained that his attacks against them were protected by the First Amendment, telling him his reasoning had “more holes than Swiss cheese.”Last week, she rebuked Mr. Giuliani for suddenly asking her, not a jury, to hear the trial. The arguments he offered to justify the 11th-hour switch were “simply nonsense,” she wrote.To cap it off, Mr. Giuliani skipped one of the final court hearings in the case despite Judge Howell’s explicit orders that he be there. When she saw he was not in court, she gave an ominous warning to his lawyer.“It sets the tone, doesn’t it, for the whole case,” she said. More

Mr. Whitmire, a state senator, prevailed over U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to lead the nation’s fourth-largest city.John Whitmire, a moderate Democrat who has served in the Texas State Senate since 1983, won a runoff election on Saturday to become mayor of Houston, according to The Associated Press, defeating Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a prominent congressional Democrat, in the nonpartisan race.Mr. Whitmire had been considered a front-runner from the moment he entered the race last year, prevailing in a city known for its diversity by creating a coalition that included Republicans and moderate white Democrats as well as Hispanic and Asian voters.He made public safety the focus of his messaging, following a strategy that has proved successful for moderate Democrats in recent big city mayoral races around the country.Ms. Jackson Lee, 73, a veteran legislator first elected to Congress in the 1990s, entered the race in March with strong backing from many Democrats and Black voters but struggled to establish a message and expand her base of support.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 Iowa Republican Party reminded supporters that only residents can vote in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15.Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, drew criticism on Saturday from the rival campaign of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to recruit out-of-state supporters to participate in the nation’s first Republican nominating contest.The backlash came a day after Ms. DeSantis, during a Fox News appearance with her husband, urged supporters from elsewhere to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” said Ms. DeSantis, who has been a key player in her husband’s campaign and was specifically addressing mothers and grandmothers who support him.But the call to action is at odds with caucus rules, according to the Republican Party of Iowa, which hours later said that nonresidents were barred from caucusing.“Remember: you must be a legal resident of Iowa and the precinct you live in and bring photo ID with you to participate in the #iacaucus!” the party wrote on the social media platform X.Mr. Trump’s campaign on Saturday accused the DeSantis campaign of spreading misinformation about the caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15. It suggested that the move was part of a broader scheme to change the outcome in the state, where polls show that Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has a significant lead.“The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the caucus through fraud,” the campaign said in a statement.In an email on Saturday, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, drew attention to comments made later on Friday by Ms. DeSantis on X, attempting to clarify her earlier remarks.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” Ms. DeSantis wrote.Mr. DeSantis also addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters on Friday in Iowa.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”The Trump campaign continued to seize upon Ms. DeSantis’s remarks on Saturday, calling on Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and snubbed Mr. Trump, to clarify the caucus eligibility rules. It also demanded that Ms. Reynolds disavow the tactics promoted by Ms. DeSantis as “flagrantly wrong that could further disenfranchise caucusgoers.”A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Kellen Browning More

The rivals for the Republican presidential nomination — minus Donald Trump — appeared at a “faith and family” event and talked in more personal terms.Casey DeSantis recounted a few humorous interactions between her husband, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and their children. Then she spoke in more sober tones about her fight against cancer.Vivek Ramaswamy brought his 3-year-old son, Karthik, onstage and discussed his Hindu faith.And Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, sitting beside her daughter, Rena, who recently married, said she still remembered her as a little girl “in pigtails.”The Republican presidential candidates who spoke at a “faith and family” event on Saturday at Dordt University, an evangelical Christian school in Sioux Center, Iowa, sought to present a kinder, gentler side of themselves, just days after an acrimonious debate and little more than a month before the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest.The candidates came to this town of just over 8,000 people on a snow-dusted plain in rural northwestern Iowa, fewer than 40 miles from South Dakota, to pitch themselves to the area’s conservative voters and to seek the endorsement of Representative Randy Feenstra, the region’s popular Republican congressman. Mr. Feenstra and his wife interviewed each candidate in front of about 400 community members and college students at the B.J. Haan Auditorium, where banners read “Glory to God Alone.”Mr. Feenstra said the more uplifting tone of the event was purposeful.“We didn’t want bickering,” he said. “People just wanted to hear an honest answer to some of these questions, without people interrupting, without having a 90-second little segment.”Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and author, traded in his barbs for a kinder tone — until after the event.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThen, away from the crowd and the religious symbols, the candidates went right back to attacking each other — at least mildly.The switch in rhetoric underscored the tenuous position of any candidate not named Donald J. Trump. The former president, who was not at the event, has maintained a commanding lead over his rivals, and even Ms. Haley, who has gained ground as Mr. DeSantis has slipped, trails far behind.Mr. Ramaswamy, who is even further behind in most national polls, made a bold forecast for a come-from-behind upset victory.“Our strategy is to shock the expectations on Jan. 15,” Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters outside the auditorium, moments after doing 30 push-ups on the cold concrete with a member of Dordt’s football team, which had come out to support him.Addressing the contentious debate in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday, where he accused Ms. Haley of being “corrupt” and a “fascist,” Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that Ms. Haley had stooped even lower.“She called me ‘scum’ and ‘dumb’ in the two debates. I didn’t call her dumb. I did reveal that neither she nor Chris Christie know the first thing about the countries that they supposedly want to send our resources to go fight for,” he said, referring to the former governor of New Jersey who is also running for the Republican nomination.And while Mr. DeSantis struck a bipartisan tone onstage, saying that he would seek common ground with his political opponents, he also went on the offensive in a conversation after the event, criticizing the donation Ms. Haley recently received from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor who co-founded LinkedIn.Linda Kreykes, 63, said that she was leaning toward supporting Mr. DeSantis but that she appreciated the comments that Mr. Ramaswamy, who is of Indian descent, made onstage about the shared teachings of Christianity and Hinduism.“He shared similarities between the two faiths,” she said. “We’re ultimately not so different from each other.”When it was her turn, Ms. Haley discussed the shooting at a historic Black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, when a white gunman killed nine Black worshipers. Ms. Haley talked about her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse after the shooter was seen in photos posing proudly with the flag and a racist manifesto he had written was uncovered.Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina discussed her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse. Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressBut Ms. Haley, in recounting her decision to call for the flag’s removal, criticized the national news media, asserting that they had “wanted to make it about race.”“Half of South Carolinians saw the Confederate flag as tradition and heritage,” Ms. Haley said. “The other half of South Carolinians saw slavery and hate. This wasn’t about me judging either side.”A majority of Iowa’s statewide politicians have stayed neutral in the Republican primary, though Gov. Kim Reynolds has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. Mr. Feenstra has indicated that he is considering making an endorsement as well, though he declined to do so on Saturday.Still, the congeniality of the event left an impression on voters, who said they were sick of the rancor of the debates.Rather than allowing them to squabble onstage, said Steve Rehder, 59, who is deciding between Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis, “tell the candidates to answer the question and move on.” More

Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions.When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to “come after” the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “vermin” echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new Trump administration.Mr. Trump himself did little to assuage Americans when his friend Sean Hannity tried to help him out on Fox News this past week. During a town hall-style meeting, Mr. Hannity tossed a seeming softball by asking Mr. Trump to reaffirm that of course he did not intend to abuse his power and use the government to punish enemies. Instead of simply agreeing, Mr. Trump said he would only be a dictator on “Day 1” of a new term.“Trump has made it crystal clear through all his actions and rhetoric that he admires leaders who have forms of authoritarian power, from Putin to Orban to Xi, and that he wants to exercise that kind of power at home,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” referring to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Xi Jinping of China. “History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do,” she added. “We just don’t listen until it is too late.”Despite his public sparring with China’s leaders, President Trump has praised President Xi Jinping for his strongman policies.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTalk about the possible authoritarian quality of a new Trump presidency has suffused the political conversation in the nation’s capital in recent days. A series of reports in The New York Times outlined various plans developed by Mr. Trump’s allies to assert vast power in a new term and detailed how he would be less constrained by constitutional guardrails. The Atlantic published a special issue with 24 contributors forecasting what a second Trump presidency would look like, many of them depicting an autocratic regime.Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who was vice chairwoman of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, published a new book warning that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy. And of course, there was the essay by the historian, Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post that prompted Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, to press the Justice Department to investigate.To be sure, American presidents have stretched their power and been called dictators going back to the early days of the republic. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, were all accused of despotism. Richard M. Nixon was said to have consolidated power in the “imperial presidency.” George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both compared to Hitler.But there is something different about the debate now, more than overheated rhetoric or legitimate disagreements over the boundaries of executive power, something that suggests a fundamental moment of decision in the American experiment. Perhaps it is a manifestation of popular disenchantment with American institutions; only 10 percent of Americans think democracy is working very well, according to a poll in June by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.Perhaps it is a reflection of the extremism and demagoguery that has grown more prevalent in politics in many places around the world. And perhaps it stems from a former president seeking to reclaim his old office who evinces such perplexing affinity for and even envy of autocrats.Mr. Trump once expressed no regret that a quote he shared on social media came from Mussolini and adopted the language of Stalin in calling journalists the “enemies of the people.” He told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things” and later said he wished American generals were like Hitler’s generals.Last December, shortly after opening his comeback campaign, Mr. Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution to remove Mr. Biden immediately and reinstall himself in the White House without waiting for another election. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as whining by liberals who do not like him or his policies and are disingenuously trying to scare voters. They argue that President Biden is the real dictator because his Justice Department is prosecuting his likeliest challenger next year for various alleged crimes, although there is no evidence that Mr. Biden has been personally involved in those decisions and even some former Trump advisers call the indictments legitimate.“The dictator talk by Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans not just to distract them from the failures and weakness of the Biden administration but because of something they are even more afraid of: that a second Trump administration will be far more successful in implementing its agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first,” Fred Fleitz, who served briefly in Mr. Trump’s White House, wrote on the American Greatness website on Friday.Mr. Kagan, a widely respected Brookings Institution scholar and author of numerous books of history, has a long record of support for a muscular foreign policy that hardly strikes many on the left as liberal. But he has been a strong and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump for years. In May 2016, when other Republicans were reconciling themselves to Mr. Trump’s first nomination for president, Mr. Kagan warned that “this is how fascism comes to America.”His essay on Nov. 30 sounded the alarm again. Mr. Trump may have been thwarted in his first term from enacting some of his more radical ideas by more conventional Republican advisers and military officers, Mr. Kagan argued, but he will not surround himself with such figures again and will encounter fewer of the checks and balances that constrained him last time. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as complaints by liberals who are trying to scare voters.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAmong other things, Mr. Kagan cited Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn an election that he had lost, disregarding the will of the voters. And he noted Mr. Trump’s overt discussion of prosecuting opponents and sending the military into the streets to quell protests. “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship,” Mr. Kagan wrote.Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who has courted Mr. Trump’s support and was listed by Axios this past week as a possible vice-presidential running mate next year, took umbrage on behalf of the former president. He dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open rebellion,” seizing on a point in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that Democratic-run states might defy a President Trump.Mr. Vance wrote that “according to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is terrible enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would invariably follow.”Mr. Kagan’s piece did not actually advocate rebellion, but simply forecast the possibility that Democratic governors would stand against Mr. Trump “through a form of nullification” of federal authority. Indeed, he went on to suggest that Republican governors might do the same with Mr. Biden, which he was not advocating either.But Mr. Vance was trying to draw a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. By the Justice Department’s logic in pursuing Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article could be interpreted as “an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.” To make his point clear, he insisted on answers by Jan. 6.Mr. Kagan, who followed his essay with another on Thursday about how to stop the slide to dictatorship that he sees, said the intervention by the senator validated his point. “It is revealing that their first instinct when attacked by a journalist is to suggest that they be locked up,” Mr. Kagan noted in an interview.Aides to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance did not respond to requests for comment. David Shipley, the opinion editor of The Post, defended Mr. Kagan’s work. “We are proud to publish Robert Kagan’s thoughtful essays and we encourage audiences to read both his Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 pieces together — and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “These essays are part of a long Kagan tradition of starting important conversations.”It is a conversation that has months to go with an uncertain ending. In the meantime, no one expects Mr. Garland to take Mr. Vance seriously, including almost certainly Mr. Vance. His letter was a political statement. But it says something about the era that proposing the prosecution of a critic would be seen as a political winner. More