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Donald Trump’s allies are hoping to install a different species of legal gatekeeper throughout the federal government. Here are some of the potential prospects.Election Day is a year away, but key allies of former President Donald J. Trump are already thinking about staffing a potential administration, including by filling White House and agency legal positions with aggressive and ideologically like-minded lawyers.Trump allies are preparing to populate a new administration with a different breed of lawyer — a departure from the type that stymied part of his first-term agenda and that despite their mainstream conservative credentials are seen as too cautious by people close to the former president. They are seeking lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to use edgy theories to advance his cause.It is too early to say with any certainty whom Mr. Trump would select were he to win a second term starting in 2025. But several conservative nonprofits, staffed by people who are likely to take on senior White House positions if there is a second Trump administration, have been putting together lists of prospects.At Project 2025, a well-funded effort by the Heritage Foundation to prepare personnel and policy for the next conservative administration, John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, is part of a team searching for potential lawyers.A person familiar with the Heritage 2025 project said it was listing multiple options for every position. Some of the names under early and unofficial consideration are:Joseph E. Schmitz as the Pentagon’s top lawyer. A Bush-era Pentagon inspector general, he argued after the 2020 election that the Supreme Court or the vice president, Mike Pence, should intervene to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss.Joseph E. Schmitz in 2004.Jamie-Andrea Yanak/Associated PressWe 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

Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the president and are likely to serve in a second term.The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.The nonprofit groups they are involved in are barred by law from supporting a candidate, and none of the work they are doing is explicitly tied to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Miller and Mr. McEntee remain close to the former president and are expected to have his ear in any second term.Mr. Trump himself, focused for now on multiple criminal and civil cases against him, appears disengaged from these efforts. But he made clear throughout his term in office that he was infuriated by many of the lawyers who worked for him, ranting about how they were “weak” and “stupid.”By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.People close to the former president say they are seeking out a different type of lawyer committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump. They want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mind-set matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a “final battle” against demonic “enemies” populating a “deep state” within the government that is bent on destroying America.Several of Mr. Trump’s key allies — including Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser — are drawing up lists of lawyers they plan to hire if the former president returns to the White House in 2025.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThere were a few lawyers like that in Mr. Trump’s administration, but they were largely outnumbered, outranked and often blocked by more traditional legal conservatives. For those who went to work for Mr. Trump but grew disillusioned, the push to systematically install Trump loyalists who may see the law as malleable across a second Trump administration has been a cause for alarm.John Mitnick was appointed by Mr. Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2018. But he was fired in 2019 as part of a broad purge of the agency’s leaders — whom Mr. Trump had installed — and was replaced by one of Mr. Miller’s allies.Mr. Mitnick predicted that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term, and that instead it would be “predominantly staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”In many ways, the Federalist Society has become synonymous with the Republican establishment, and its members’ most common interests — including pushing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and federal statutes — can be distinct from the whims and grievances of Mr. Trump himself. Its membership dues are low, and politically ambitious Republican lawyers of various stripes routinely join it or attend its events. Many of the more aggressive lawyers the Trump allies are eyeing have their own links to it.But after both the legal policy fights inside the Trump administration and the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the phrase “Federalist Society” became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.“Trump and his administration learned the hard way in their first term that the Democrats are playing for keeps,” said Mike Davis, a former congressional aide who helped shepherd judicial nominees during the Trump administration and has become a close ally of the 45th president. “And in the Trump 47 administration, they need much stronger attorneys who do not care about elite opinion who will fight these key cultural battles.”The chilling of the relationship between Mr. Trump and Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, embodies a broader rift between Mr. Trump and conservative legal elites.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesA Fraught UnionWhen Mr. Trump wrested the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from the party’s old guard, it was unclear whether social conservatives would turn out in the general election to vote for a thrice-married New Yorker who had cultivated a playboy reputation and once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But Mr. Trump won their support by essentially striking a deal with legal conservatives: He agreed to fill Supreme Court vacancies from a list of prospects compiled by a small number of movement stalwarts.This group helping to shape the judiciary included Leonard A. Leo — arguably the most powerful figure in the conservative legal movement and a leader of the Federalist Society — and Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign general counsel and first White House counsel. With a seat already open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the move worked: Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s narrow victory.Along with the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mr. Leo and Mr. McGahn — and later Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s second White House counsel — created an assembly line for turning Federalist Society-style lawyers into appeals court judges and Supreme Court justices.But the union between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal establishment could be more fraught than it sometimes appeared. As his presidency wore on, Mr. Trump attacked and sidelined many of the lawyers around him. That included Mr. Leo.One episode, described by a person familiar with the incident, illustrates the larger chill.In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I have nothing to say regarding his current efforts, but I’m just grateful that President Trump transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in his first term.”Mr. Mitnick’s experience underscores the style of lawyering that Trump allies saw as too cautious. His role as the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security put him in the path of increasingly aggressive policy proposals from a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller.Mr. Miller, who is not a lawyer, is known for his vehement opposition to immigration. Mr. Mitnick and Mr. Miller are said to have clashed, directly and indirectly, over legal risks raised by regulatory and policy actions emanating from the White House, including separating migrant children from their parents and transporting migrants to so-called sanctuary cities.In 2019, the White House purged the leadership ranks of the Homeland Security Department, firing Mr. Mitnick. Mr. Trump ultimately installed as his replacement Chad Mizelle, who had been out of law school just seven years but was a close Miller ally.Like numerous other positions filled later in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Mizelle was appointed as “acting” general counsel, sidestepping a Senate vetting and confirmation process that would most likely have closely scrutinized whether he was qualified for the job.With Mr. Mizelle acting as the department’s top lawyer when the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the Trump administration seamlessly invoked emergency powers to flatly refuse to consider the petition of any asylum seeker arriving at the southern border.Seeking ‘America First’ LawyersMr. Miller has stayed close to Mr. Trump and is expected to play an even more important role in shaping policy if Mr. Trump returns to power.While out of office, Mr. Miller has been running a foundation focused on suing the Biden administration and recruiting a new generation of “America First” lawyers, with some from attorney general and solicitor general offices in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. “America First” Republicans are often opposed to both legal and illegal immigration, protectionist on trade and skeptical of international alliances and military intervention overseas.One first-term Trump lawyer who would most likely serve in a second term is Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and worked closely with Mr. Vought, the agency’s director. The O.M.B. team saw itself as an island of facilitators within an executive branch they believed was too quick to tell Mr. Trump that his ideas were unachievable or illegal.“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell Vought, a former senior Trump administration official.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTogether, Mr. Vought and Mr. Paoletta came up with the idea of having Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and invoke special powers to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall than Congress was willing to appropriate.Mr. Paoletta also believed that Mr. Trump could have exerted greater personal control over the Justice Department, although Mr. Paoletta said in an interview that he did not advocate using the presidency’s command over federal law enforcement for partisan and personal score-settling. He and other advisers likely to follow Mr. Trump back into power view White House authority to direct the Justice Department as proper under the so-called unitary executive theory. It holds that presidents can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that pockets of independent decision-making authority are unconstitutional.“I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.,” Mr. Paoletta said, adding: “It’s not an independent agency, and he is the head of the executive branch. A president has every right to direct D.O.J. to look at items that are his policy priorities and other matters of national importance.”Mr. Trump is not known for pondering legal philosophy. But he has found common cause with lawyers who have a sweeping view of presidential power.In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.‘Legal Creativity’Mr. Trump has rarely looked closely at a lawyer’s area of specialty. Instead, he has often looked at whether a particular lawyer can help him gain something he wants. He spent much of his first term railing against the lawyers who worked for him and wondering aloud why none of them could live up to the memory of his notoriously ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, who represented Mr. Trump in his early business career in New York.When he sought to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was unsatisfied with his government lawyers, including his second White House counsel, Mr. Cipollone, who largely rejected his efforts to subvert the results. Mr. Trump turned to a different set of outside lawyers.Those lawyers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, John C. Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney K. Powell, all of whom have since been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case that charged the former president and 18 of his allies with conspiring to overturn his election loss there in 2020. Ms. Powell, Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis have pleaded guilty.Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, was criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.Pool photo by Susan WalshIn the same way, Mr. Trump had a falling-out with his attorney general, William P. Barr, who refused to falsely say that the Justice Department had evidence of widespread voter fraud. After Mr. Barr resigned, his deputy and successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also refused to throw the department’s weight behind Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Trump then explored the idea of installing Jeffrey Clark — an official who was willing to raise concerns about purported election fraud — as acting attorney general.Mr. Clark has also been indicted in the Georgia case, but remains in favor with Mr. Trump and has met with the former president at his private clubs. Over the summer, at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Clark attended a fund-raiser for the people who have been imprisoned for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Clark will most likely be in contention for a senior Justice Department position in any second Trump administration, depending on the outcome of his legal travails. He has written a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” that amounts to an intellectual blueprint for direct presidential control of federal law enforcement.He declined to comment. On a conservative podcast last year, Mr. Clark said that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.” More

As president, Donald Trump reportedly floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.” When his defense secretary, Mark Esper, raised various objections, he recalls that Mr. Trump responded by saying the bombing could be done “quietly”: “No one would know it was us.”Well, word got out and the craze caught on. Now many professed rebel Republicans, such as Representatives Mike Waltz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, along with several old G.O.P. war horses, like Senator Lindsey Graham, want to bomb Mexico. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said he would send special forces into Mexico on “Day 1” of his presidency, targeting drug cartels and fentanyl labs. In May, Representative Michael McCaul, another Republican, introduced a bill pushing for fentanyl to be listed as a chemical weapon, like sarin gas, under the Chemical Weapons Convention. This move targeted Mexican cartels and Chinese companies, which are accused of providing the ingredients to the cartels to manufacture fentanyl.Of course, the United States is already fighting, and has been for half a century, a highly militarized drug war — in the Andes, Central America and, yes, Mexico — a war as ineffective as it has been cruel. Hitting fentanyl labs won’t do anything to slow the bootlegged versions of the drug into the United States but could further destabilize northern Mexico and the borderlands, worsening the migrant refugee crisis.Addiction to fentanyl, a drug that is 50 times stronger than heroin, affects red and blue states alike, from West Virginia to Maine, with overdoses annually killing tens of thousands of Americans. It’s a bipartisan crisis. Yet in our topsy-turvy culture wars, there’s a belief that fentanyl is targeting the Republican base. J.D. Vance rose to national fame in 2016 with a book that blamed the white rural poor’s cultural pathologies for their health crises, including drug addiction. In 2022, during his successful run for Ohio’s Senate seat, Mr. Vance, speaking with a right-wing conspiracy theorist, said that “if you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” Mr. Vance’s poll numbers shot up after that, and other Republicans in close House and Senate races took up the issue, linking fentanyl deaths to Democratic policies on border security and crime and calling for military action against Mexico.The Mexican government is in fact cooperating with the United States to limit the export of the drug, recently passing legislation limiting the import of chemicals required for its production and stepping up prosecution of fentanyl producers. And even some of the cartels have reportedly spread the message to their foot soldiers, telling them to stop producing the drug or face the consequences. Still, in a show of Trumpian excess, Mexico is depicted as the root of all our problems. Bombing Sinaloa in 2024 is what building a border wall was in 2016: political theatrics.The United States is no novice when it comes to bombing Mexico. “A little more grape,” or ammunition, Gen. Zachary Taylor supposedly ordered as his men fired their cannons on Mexican troops. That was during America’s 1846-48 war on Mexico, which also included the assault on Veracruz, killing hundreds. Washington took more than half of Mexico’s territory during that conflict.Conservative politicians have used Mexico to gin up fears of an enemy to the south ever since the Mexican American War, which made Zachary Taylor a national hero. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs DivisionReactionaries have fixated on the border for over a century, since before the Civil War, when Mexico provided asylum for runaway slaves. Over the years, newspapers and politicians have regularly demanded that Mexico be punished for any number of sins, from failing to protect property rights to providing refuge for escaped slaves, Indian raiders, cattle rustlers, bootleggers, smugglers, drug fiends, political radicals, draft dodgers and Japanese and German agents. There was a touch of evil about Mexico, as Orson Welles titled his 1958 film set on the borderlands.Long before the Russian Revolution, hostility directed at the Mexican Revolution, which started in 1910, gave rise to a new, more militant, ideological conservatism. U.S. oilmen invested in Mexico blamed Jews for financing the revolution and raised money from U.S. Catholics to fund counterrevolutionaries, some of whom were fascists. From 1910 to 1920, private vigilante groups like the K.K.K., local police departments and the Texas Rangers conducted a reign of terror across the border states that killed several thousand ethnic Mexicans, some of whom were trying to organize a union or trying to vote.Trumpism’s ginned-up racism against Mexicans flows from this history. It remains to be seen whether calls to bomb Mexico’s fentanyl labs will play well in the coming election cycle. Yet the rhetoric itself is a dangerous escalation of an old idea: that international narcotics production, trafficking and consumption can be deterred through military means.Today’s Republican renegades say they represent a break from the “globalist” bipartisan consensus that governed the country through the Cold War and the decades that followed. But aside from some opposition to military aid to Ukraine, Republicans largely toe the line when it comes to the use of military force abroad. Few Republican dissidents dare question the establishment consensus on ongoing military aid to Israel, especially in light of its current siege of Gaza. In this sense, calls to bomb Mexico are a distraction, blowing smoke to hide the fact that the G.O.P. offers nothing new. Republicans certainly aren’t the peace party, as some of Mr. Trump’s isolationist backers would have us believe. All they offer is a shriller war party.(As if to illustrate the point, as Republicans shout about Mexico, the Biden administration has quietly struck a deal with Ecuador that will allow the United States to deploy troops to the country and patrol the waters off its coast, the Washington Examiner recently reported.)Even bombing another country in the name of fighting drugs is hardly innovative. In 1989, George H.W. Bush used the U.S. military to act on the federal indictment of Manuel Noriega, Panama’s ruler, for drug trafficking. In Operation Just Cause, the United States dropped hundreds of bombs on Panama City, including on one of its poorest neighborhoods, El Chorrillo, setting homes ablaze and killing an unknown number of its residents.Bombing another country in the name of fighting drugs is hardly innovative. As early as 1989, the United States was dropping hundreds of bombs on Panama, leaving burned cars and destroyed buildings in their wake.Steve Starr/Corbis, via Getty ImagesFor all their posturing on how they represent a break with the past, today’s bomb-happy Republicans are merely calling for an expansion of policies already in place. Republicans have introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would in effect bind the war on drugs to the war on terrorism and give the president authority to strike deep into Mexico. Mr. Graham also says he wants “a Plan Mexico more lethal than Plan Colombia.”Calls to inflict on Mexico something more lethal than Plan Colombia should chill the soul. Initiated by Bill Clinton in 1999, Plan Colombia and its successor strategies funneled roughly $12 billion into Colombia, mostly to security forces who were charged with eliminating cocaine production at its source. Their campaign included, yes, the aerial bombing of cocaine labs.Conflict in Colombia is a longstanding phenomenon, but Plan Colombia helped kick off a wave of terror that killed tens of thousands of civilians and drove millions from their homes. The Colombian military murdered thousands of civilians and falsely reported them as guerrillas, as a way of boosting its body count to keep the funds flowing. Massacre followed massacre, often committed by the Colombian military working in tandem with paramilitaries. At the end of last year, Colombia had the fourth-largest population that was internally displaced because of conflict and violence, behind only Syria, Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo.For what? More Colombian acreage was planted with coca in 2022 than in 1999, a year before the start of Plan Colombia. Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer.Even after years of attempts to fumigate and destroy cocaine plantations in Colombia, the country remains the world’s largest cocaine producer. Olga Castano/Getty ImagesPlan Colombia did weaken Colombian drug producers and disrupt transportation routes. But it also incentivized Central American and Mexican gangs and cartels to get in the game. Drug-related violence that had largely been confined to the Andes blasted up through the Central American isthmus into Mexico.Then in 2006, with support from the Bush administration, Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, did what today’s Republican would-be bombardiers want Mexico to do: declare war on the cartels. Again, the result was catastrophic. Estimates vary, but by the end of Mr. Calderón’s six-year term, about 60,000 Mexicans had been killed in drug-war-related violence. By 2011, an estimated 230,000 people had been displaced, and about half of them crossed the border into the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans, including social activists, were disappeared, or had gone missing. The cartels, meanwhile, grew more profitable and powerful.In the wake of this failure, the current Mexican government, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has de-escalated the conflict to focus more on policing and prosecution. Other Latin American leaders, across the political spectrum, want to call off the war on drugs altogether and begin advancing decriminalization and treating excess drug use as a social problem.If the drug war is escalated, it would lead to more corruption, more deaths and more refugees desperate to cross into the United States. Jose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersFor now, calls to bomb Mexico are mostly primary-season bluster. But if a Republican were to win the White House in 2024, he or she would be under pressure to make good on the promise to launch military strikes on Mexico. Those efforts are not just bound to fail; they also could even make matters worse. Fentanyl labs are hardly complicated operations — with a couple of plastic drums and a pill press, one cook in a hazmat suit can turn out thousands of doses in a day. Trying to eliminate them with drones and missiles would be as effective as bombing bodegas in the Bronx. Hit one lab and five more pop up, perhaps in more populated areas.Further militarizing Mexico’s drug war would lead to more corruption, more deaths, more refugees desperate to cross the border. And those displaced, if Republicans had their way and Mexican cartels were classified as terrorist organizations, would have a better shot at claiming asylum, since they would be fleeing a formally designated war zone.With each escalation of the drug war, its horrors have inched closer to the United States. Now war mongering threatens to destroy the fragile movement among U.S. policymakers toward a more humane approach to drug use, that possession and use of drugs shouldn’t bring draconian prison sentences and that addiction should be treated as an illness, rooted in class inequality. Republican calls to go hard against narcotics below the border can’t but rebound above it, leading back to a callous public policy that treats addicts as enemies. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said of another war, the bombs we drop there explode here.Greg Grandin (@GregGrandin) is a professor of history at Yale and the author of seven books, most recently, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The party was riding high when it entered the government two years ago. Now it is stumbling, blamed for driving voters to the far right.Germany’s Green Party entered the government in 2021 with the best election showing of its history, establishing itself for the first time as a true mainstream party with the potential of one day even yielding a chancellor.It won five cabinet positions in the three-party coalition, including the powerful economy and foreign ministries. It seemed to have a strong mandate to advance the country’s economic transition toward a greener future.What a difference two years make. And a Russian invasion of Ukraine. And rising energy costs. And a host of missteps that some even within the party concede has stalled the Greens’ momentum.Today the Greens are widely viewed as a drag on the government of the Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, which one poll gave a mere 19 percent approval rating. The Greens have drawn withering attacks from even their own coalition partners. To their opponents, the Greens have overreached on their agenda and become the face of an out-of-touch environmental elitism that has alienated many voters, sending droves to the far right.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

The justices struggled to distinguish private conduct, which is not subject to the First Amendment, from state action, which is.The Supreme Court worked hard in a pair of arguments on Tuesday to find a clear constitutional line separating elected officials’ purely private social media accounts from ones that reflect government actions and are subject to the First Amendment. After three hours, though, it was not clear that a majority of the justices had settled on a clear test.The question in the two cases was when the Constitution limits officials’ ability to block users from their accounts. The answer turned on whether the officials’ use of the accounts amounted to “state action,” which is governed by the First Amendment, or private activity, which is not.That same question had seemed headed to the Supreme Court after the federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2019 that President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account was a public forum from which he was powerless to exclude people based on their viewpoints.Had the account been private, the court said, Mr. Trump could have blocked whomever he wanted. But since he used the account as a government official, he was subject to the First Amendment.After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court’s ruling as moot.Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was in an important sense official and therefore subject to the First Amendment.“I don’t think a citizen would be able to really understand the Trump presidency, if you will, without any access to all the things that the president said on that account,” Justice Kagan said. “It was an important part of how he wielded his authority. And to cut a citizen off from that is to cut a citizen off from part of the way that government works.”Hashim M. Mooppan, a lawyer for two school board officials, said none of that implicated the First Amendment.“President Trump could have done the same thing from Mar-a-Lago or a campaign rally,” Mr. Mooppan said. “If he gave every one of those speeches at his personal residence, it wouldn’t somehow convert his residence into government property.”The cases argued Tuesday were the first of several this term in which the Supreme Court will consider how the First Amendment applies to social media companies. The court will hear arguments next year on both whether states may prohibit large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express and whether Biden administration officials may contact social media platforms to combat what they say is misinformation.The first case argued Tuesday concerned the Facebook and Twitter accounts of two members of the Poway Unified School District in California, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane. They used the accounts, created during their campaigns, to communicate with their constituents about activities of the school board, invite them to public meetings, ask for comments on the board’s activities and discuss safety issues in the schools.Two parents, Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, frequently posted lengthy and repetitive critical comments, and the officials eventually blocked them. The parents sued, and lower courts ruled in their favor.“When state actors enter that virtual world and invoke their government status to create a forum for such expression, the First Amendment enters with them,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.Mr. Mooppan said the accounts were personal and were created and maintained without any involvement by the district.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh pressed Mr. Mooppan on what it would take to make the accounts official and so subject to the First Amendment. “Is announcing rules state action?” the justice asked.Mr. Mooppan said it would be if the announcement was not available elsewhere. He gave a more equivocal answer to a question about notifications of school closures. But he said a general public safety reminder was not state action.Pamela S. Karlan, a lawyer for the parents, said Ms. O’Connor-Ratcliff’s Facebook feed was almost entirely official. “Of the hundreds of posts, I found only three that were truly non-job-related,” Ms. Karlan said, adding, “I defy anyone to look at that and think this wasn’t an official website.”The second case, Lindke v. Freed, No. 22-611, concerned a Facebook account maintained by James R. Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Mich. He used it to comment on a variety of subjects, some personal and some official. Among the latter were descriptions of the city’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic.The posts prompted critical responses from a resident, Kevin Lindke, whom Mr. Freed eventually blocked. Mr. Lindke sued and lost. Judge Amul R. Thapar, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said Mr. Freed’s Facebook account was personal, meaning that the First Amendment had no role to play.“Freed did not operate his page to fulfill any actual or apparent duty of his office,” Judge Thapar wrote. “And he did not use his governmental authority to maintain it. Thus, he was acting in his personal capacity — and there was no state action.”Justice Kagan told Allon Kedem, a lawyer for Mr. Lindke, that Mr. Freed’s page did not look particularly official.“There are a lot of baby pictures and dog pictures and obviously personal stuff,” she said. “And intermingled with that there is, as you say, communication with constituents about important matters. But it’s hard to look at this page as a whole, unlike the one in the last case, and not think that surely this could not be the official communications channel.” More

Loyalists of Poland’s Law and Justice party are questioning the legitimacy of the election won this month by an alliance of opposition parties.After eight years of pumping out vitriol against opponents of Poland’s governing party, state-controlled television has rallied to an unlikely new cause: a free media and fair play.Unsettled by the election this month of a new Parliament controlled by political forces it previously vilified, Poland’s main public broadcaster last week set up a telephone hotline as part of what it described as a “special campaign to defend media pluralism” and counter “increasingly frequent attacks on journalists.”The abrupt about face by a public broadcaster notorious for its often vicious, one-sided coverage reflected Poland’s febrile political atmosphere as loyalists of the defeated Law and Justice party scramble to keep their jobs by presenting themselves as victims of persecution and of a compromised election.That loyalists have much to lose as a result of the Oct. 15 vote was made clear last week when Gazeta Wyborcza, a liberal newspaper, published a long list of journalists and other Law and Justice supporters who “will have to say goodbye to their positions” in media, state corporations and other state-controlled entities. The list has since been expanded as readers send in the names of more people they want gone, too.Pleas for “media pluralism” by a public broadcasting system that for years froze out opposition voices and served as a propaganda bullhorn for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of the nationalist governing party, have mostly been met with guffaws and cries of hypocrisy.But the effort pointed to the obstacles ahead for the election victors as the losing side digs in, fighting to hang on to jobs, and promotes often wild conspiracy theories to explain and, in some cases, deny Law and Justice’s defeat at the polls.The logo of TVP, Polish state television, is seen on the roof of the company’s building, in Warsaw, in September.Kacper Pempel/Reuters“They are trying to create the myth of a stolen victory,” said Jakub Majmurek a prominent commentator on Polish politics and culture. But, he added, “Kaczynski is not Donald Trump” and “I don’t think we are going to see scenes of January 6 in Poland.”Polish politics, he said, “are very unpredictable” and “very polarized” but are still even-tempered enough to make a replay of the storming of the Capitol highly unlikely in Warsaw. “It wouldn’t work. They would have to confront huge crowds on the streets and they don’t know how the police will react,” Mr. Majmurek said.More likely, most observers say, is a long drawn-out struggle by Law and Justice appointees — who are now in control of public broadcasting, the judiciary and other institutions — to resist being replaced by more neutral, or at least less brazenly partisan, figures.TVP Info, the public broadcaster’s news channel, this year gave 66 percent of its airtime to Law and Justice and just 10 percent to the main opposition party. This airtime gap was only 5 percent in favor of Poland’s previous governing party in 2014, the year before Law and Justice rose to power.Law and Justice won more votes than any other single party in the recent election but an alliance of its opponents won a clear majority in Parliament. They have proposed Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, the biggest opposition party, as prime minister at the head of a new coalition government.But, more than two weeks after its victory, the opposition has still not been asked to form a government by Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of Law and Justice.The constitution gives Mr. Duda 30 days to make a decision, a long pause that diehard supporters of the defeated party are now using to try to delay and even derail the consequences of their electoral defeat.Daniel Milewski, a member of Parliament for the governing party, appealed to Mr. Duda “to prevent Donald Tusk from becoming prime minister” and vowed that Law and Justice “will do everything to stop this from happening.”Poland’s main opposition leader, Donald Tusk, is surrounded by journalists and supporters after leaving a voting station in Warsaw, in October.Petr David Josek/Associated PressAs well as veering close to Trump-like pleas to “stop the steal,” Law and Justice has insisted that foreign interference cost them the election, echoing the claims of Democrats in the United States stunned by Hillary Clinton’s upset defeat in 2016.“A question worth asking,” the party’s chairman, Mr. Kaczynski, told Gazeta Polska, a conservative magazine, is “to what extent is our public life autonomous from external forces?” Pointing a finger at Germany and Russia, he complained of “forces at work here all the time” to unfairly influence Polish voters.Antoni Macierewicz, a veteran Law and Justice legislator notorious for promoting apocalyptic conspiracy theories, on Monday accused the leader of Third Way, a centrist grouping allied with Mr. Tusk, of having ties to Russian intelligence and predicted that letting the opposition take power would risk World War III.Another senior Law and Justice legislator, Ryszard Terlecki, warned of dire consequences, including an upsurge in L.G.B.T.Q. activism that he described as a “rainbow flood,” if the opposition was allowed to form a government. But he assured supporters that “all is not lost” and “we still have hope” that right-wing forces might be able to form a coalition government “that will stop the catastrophe.”Particularly shocking to Law and Justice is that it lost the election despite having near total control of public broadcasting, a nationwide network of television and radio stations, and a firm grip on many regional newspapers that were purchased in 2021 by the state oil giant, PKN Orlen, which is itself headed by a former Law and Justice politician.A report on Poland’s election by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the election had been tarnished by “distorted and openly partisan coverage by the public broadcaster.” This, the observers said, “provided a clear advantage to the ruling party, undermining the democratic separation of state and party.”Restoring that separation, however, will be difficult because of the lingering grip of Law and Justice on a raft of bodies it set up after it took power in 2015 and began remaking the system to try to ensure that, no matter the results of future elections, its supporters would remain deeply entrenched.TVP, the Polish state broadcaster, was a target of protesters at a pro-European Union demonstration in Gdansk, in 2021. Mateusz Slodkowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOne such body is the National Media Council, an organization that, controlled by Law and Justice appointees, was given the power to appoint and dismiss public broadcasting executives. In a statement released after the election, the council rejected any attempt by the opposition to break Law and Justice’s hold on public television and radio, vowing to “defend public media and their employees” against what it described as “illegal activities” by the new majority in Parliament.Getting rid of the council — and similar bodies set up by Law and Justice to control judicial appointments — would require new legislation, but any move by Parliament aimed at creating a more level playing field would likely be vetoed by President Duda. The opposition doesn’t have a large enough majority to override his veto.Law and Justice, said Mr. Majmurek, the commentator, “built a lot of traps into the system and did everything to make sure that it still controls many vital state institutions even after losing an election.”The task now faced by the opposition, he added, is “like dismantling a very complicated and potentially deadly bomb.”Anatol Magdziarz More

Donald Trump’s lawsuit was the latest turn in a nationwide battle over his eligibility to hold office again, including a case being heard this week in Colorado.Former President Donald J. Trump sued Michigan’s top elections official, seeking to ensure he would be on the ballot for the 2024 presidential election.In a 64-page filing on Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, had created “uncertainty” by failing to respond to communications from the Trump campaign about his ballot eligibility. Mr. Trump is the dominant front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.His lawyers added that other parties had sued Ms. Benson to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot in 2024, arguing that he was ineligible to hold office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — a section that disqualifies anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.Ms. Benson previously declined to disqualify Mr. Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, saying she did not have the authority to determine who was or was not eligible to run under the 14th Amendment. Plaintiffs in that case then sued in Michigan state court to have the court order Ms. Benson to disqualify Mr. Trump. Ms. Benson has noted that she is watching for the results of that case.Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for Ms. Benson, said on Tuesday that the Michigan Department of State could not comment on pending litigation.The Michigan lawsuit was the latest turn in a nationwide battle over Mr. Trump’s eligibility to run for president. The suit was filed Monday afternoon in Michigan state court as a trial played out in Colorado to determine whether Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election met the disqualification criteria in the 14th Amendment.That trial continued on Tuesday with testimony related to Mr. Trump and far-right extremists and their actions on Jan. 6, 2021.Peter Simi, an expert witness on political extremism and violence called by the plaintiffs, said during questioning that far-right extremists often communicate in ambiguous language, and that many of Mr. Trump’s comments before and on Jan. 6 were a key influence on extremists who rioted at the Capitol.Mr. Simi focused on Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day, where he repeatedly called on his supporters to “fight” to prevent the election from being stolen.“A call to fight for far-right extremists — especially within the context as it’s laid out, that these threats are imminent, that you’re going to lose your country — then fighting would be understood as requiring violent action,” Mr. Simi testified.Lawyers for Mr. Trump argued during cross-examination that Mr. Simi had selectively chosen particular moments that made Mr. Trump look bad, and sought to cast doubt on whether the president had intended for the far right to interpret his remarks the way they did.Other cases on Mr. Trump’s eligibility are soon to follow: A similar lawsuit has been filed in New Hampshire. Oral arguments in a case in Minnesota are scheduled to begin Thursday. Separately, Democratic legislators in California asked their state’s attorney general last month to seek a court opinion on Mr. Trump’s eligibility.Whatever rulings come in these cases will not be final. They will almost certainly be appealed by the losing side, and the Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Mr. Trump — is likely to have the final say. More

La decisión de anular las primarias en las que se eligió a una candidata unitaria para enfrentar al presidente Nicolás Maduro plantea dudas sobre su compromiso con un proceso libre.Luego de años de un gobierno autoritario, parecía que se abría un pequeño resquicio de esperanza para los partidarios de la democracia.La elección de una candidata de la oposición para enfrentarse en las urnas al presidente de Venezuela, que derivó del compromiso del gobierno de celebrar elecciones libres y justas el próximo año, generó un optimismo moderado en los venezolanos y observadores internacionales sobre la posibilidad de un retorno a la democracia.Pero ahora el gobierno del presidente Nicolás Maduro está atacando las primarias de la oposición celebradas este mes, lo que ha suscitado preocupaciones de que Maduro oponga resistencia a cualquier desafío serio a su poder, el cual tiene desde hace 10 años, incluso mientras su país sigue padeciendo las consecuencias de las sanciones internacionales.Las primarias de la oposición en Venezuela, país sudamericano de unos 28 millones de habitantes, se llevaron a cabo sin el apoyo oficial del gobierno. La votación, en cambio, fue organizada por la sociedad civil y se instalaron mesas electorales en viviendas, parques y sedes de partidos de la oposición.Más de 2,4 millones de venezolanos votaron, una cifra considerable que podría indicar el compromiso de los electores rumbo a las elecciones generales previstas para 2024.Pero en los días posteriores a la votación, el presidente de la Asamblea Nacional, organismo controlado por Maduro, afirmó que la participación electoral estaba inflada y calificó a los organizadores de “ladrones” y “estafadores”, y describió las elecciones como una “farsa”.“Las primarias enviaron un claro mensaje de que el pueblo venezolano es, en esencia, profundamente democrático”, dijo Tamara Taraciuk Broner, quien realiza investigaciones sobre Venezuela para Diálogo Interamericano, una organización con sede en Washington. “Y si tienen la opción de votar, se expresarán a través del voto. Y eso es un enorme desafío para los que están en el poder”.La semana pasada, el Ministerio Público venezolano anunció que estaba investigando a 17 miembros de las comisiones nacionales y regionales que supervisaron los comicios bajo cargos de usurpación de funciones electorales, usurpación de identidad, legitimación de capitales y asociación para delinquir.Si el fiscal general presenta cargos penales, los acusados se enfrentarían a un juicio y a una posible sentencia a prisión.Y el lunes, el Tribunal Supremo de Justicia del país emitió una sentencia que deja sin efecto las primarias. Pero dado que el gobierno no desempeñó ningún papel en los comicios, no está claro cuál será el efecto práctico o qué implicaciones tendrá la sentencia de cara al futuro.El gobierno del presidente Nicolás Maduro ha centrado su atención en los organizadores de las primarias de la oposición que María Corina Machado ganó.Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters“Se suspenden todos los efectos de las distintas fases del proceso electoral conducido por la Comisión Nacional de Primarias”, dice la sentencia.Juan Manuel Rafalli, abogado constitucionalista en Venezuela, dijo que es probable que el Ministerio Público solicite a los organizadores de las primarias la entrega de documentos que utilizará para tratar de invalidar los resultados de la votación o para convocar a una nueva.“Han soltado todo el aparato judicial que ellos controlan para tratar de anular lo que ocurrió”, dijo Rafalli. “No le busques explicación jurídica a esto porque no la van a encontrar”.Maduro asumió el poder en 2013, tras la muerte de Hugo Chávez, quien lideró una revolución de inspiración socialista a finales de la década de 1990. Bajo el mandato de Maduro, Venezuela, cuyas enormes reservas de petróleo convirtieron al país en uno de los más ricos de Latinoamérica, ha experimentado un declive económico que ha desencadenado una crisis humanitaria. Unos siete millones de venezolanos —una cuarta parte de la población— han salido del país.El mes pasado, el gobierno de Maduro y la oposición firmaron un acuerdo que buscaba encaminar al país a unas elecciones libres y justas, que incluía permitirle a la oposición elegir un candidato de cara a la elección presidencial del próximo año.María Corina Machado, candidata de centroderecha y exdiputada venezolana, ganó con el 93 por ciento de los votos en una contienda con 10 aspirantes.Pero el gobierno de Maduro la inhabilitó por 15 años para ejercer cargos públicos, alegando que no completó su declaración de bienes e ingresos cuando era diputada. Se trata de una táctica empleada de manera usual por Maduro para mantener alejados de las urnas a los contendientes más fuertes.Machado es una política experimentada, a quien se le ha apodado la “Dama de Hierro” por su relación confrontativa con los gobiernos de Maduro y Chávez. Algunos analistas afirman que, si se le permitiera presentarse, probablemente derrotaría a Maduro.Pero sus posturas de línea dura y su insistencia en responsabilizar penalmente a miembros del gobierno de Maduro por abusos contra los derechos humanos también podrían hacer menos probable que el gobierno le permita llegar al poder.“Es una contradicción que se firme un acuerdo. Y, acto seguido, en los días que siguen, se proceda a violar los primeros puntos del acuerdo”, dijo Machado en un discurso el jueves, refiriéndose a las investigaciones contra los organizadores de las primarias.El gobierno de Maduro inhabilitó a Machado para presentarse en las elecciones. Algunos analistas creen que si se le permitiera contender, vencería con facilidad a Maduro.Adriana Loureiro Fernandez para The New York TimesEl gobierno de Biden ha retirado algunas de las sanciones impuestas a la crucial industria petrolera de Venezuela en respuesta a algunas de las recientes concesiones de Maduro. El gobierno venezolano, entre otras cosas, ha accedido a aceptar a los venezolanos que han sido deportados de Estados Unidos y a liberar a un puñado de presos políticos.Pero el gobierno de Biden también espera que Venezuela restituya los derechos políticos de los candidatos a los que se inhabilitó de participar en las elecciones nacionales o, de lo contrario, que enfrente el restablecimiento de las sanciones.El Departamento de Estado de Estados Unidos declaró estar al tanto de la decisión del tribunal venezolano sobre las primarias de la oposición e instó al gobierno de Maduro a cumplir el acuerdo de celebrar elecciones creíbles el próximo año.“Estados Unidos y la comunidad internacional siguen de cerca la implementación de la hoja de ruta electoral, y el gobierno estadounidense tomará medidas si Maduro y sus representantes no cumplen sus compromisos”, se lee en el comunicado.Otros dos miembros de la comisión nacional que organizó las primarias de la oposición, y que no están bajo investigación, criticaron la legitimidad de la medida del gobierno de Maduro.“Ellos no estaban conscientes del nivel de participación que se iba a producir y creo que los agarró de sorpresa a ellos y a nosotros”, dijo Víctor Márquez, integrante de la comisión. “Ya quedó claro que el gobierno actual no tiene ninguna posibilidad de ganar las elecciones”.Pedro Benítez, un analista político venezolano, dijo que el gobierno de Maduro estaba siguiendo un manual conocido para tratar de aplastar las amenazas a su poder.Lo que están tratando de hacer, “es subir la apuesta para impedir que la hayan elegido como candidata”, dijo Benítez, refiriéndose a Machado. “El objetivo es desanimar a la oposición, dividir a la oposición, crear conflictos en la oposición, desmoralizar a su base”.“Esa es la primera fase”, añadió. “Luego va a venir la siguiente fase que ya la ofensiva directamente contra el proceso”. 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