Elections

The gerrymandered congressional map, made possible by a new G.O.P. majority on the state Supreme Court, ensures Republican dominance in a closely divided state.Republicans in North Carolina approved a heavily gerrymandered congressional map on Wednesday that is likely to knock out about half of the Democrats representing the state in the House of Representatives. It could result in as much as an 11-3 advantage for Republicans.The State House, controlled by a Republican supermajority, voted for the new lines a day after the State Senate approved them. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, cannot veto redistricting legislation.The map creates 10 solidly Republican districts, three solidly Democratic districts and one competitive district. Currently, under the lines drawn by a court for the 2022 election, each party holds seven seats.The new lines ensure Republican dominance in a state that, while leaning red, is closely divided. President Donald J. Trump won it by just over a percentage point in 2020, and Republicans won the last two Senate elections by two and three points.The Democratic incumbents who have been essentially drawn off the map are Representatives Jeff Jackson in the Charlotte area, Kathy Manning in the Greensboro area and Wiley Nickel in the Raleigh area. A seat held by a fourth Democrat, Representative Don Davis, is expected to be competitive.“If either of these maps become final, it means I’m toast in Congress,” Mr. Jackson said in a video on X last week after the release of two draft maps, one of which became the final product. “This is the majority party in the state legislature in North Carolina basically saying, ‘We want another member of our party in Congress, so we’re going to redraw the map to take out Jeff.’”On Thursday, he announced that he would run for attorney general of North Carolina “to fight political corruption,” a label he applied to the gerrymandered maps.Mr. Nickel, who won a close race last year, was also defiant.“I don’t want to give these maps credibility by announcing a run in any of these gerrymandered districts,” he said on X. “The maps are an extreme partisan gerrymander by Republican legislators that totally screw North Carolina voters. It’s time to sue the bastards.”Ms. Manning did not announce specific plans but said she was “not willing to let these partisan maps take away my constituents’ right to representation.” She criticized Republicans for diluting voters in Guilford County, which includes Greensboro, by dividing them among three districts that also include distant parts of the state.Republicans openly acknowledged the advantage they were drawing for themselves. “There’s no doubt that the congressional map that’s before you today has a lean towards Republicans,” State Representative Destin Hall, the chairman of the redistricting committee, said on the floor, while adding that legislators had “complied with the law in every way.” (Mr. Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)The new map and the events that led to it illustrate both the power of gerrymandering to render voters’ preferences electorally irrelevant, and the extent to which control of the House is being determined by courts’ interpretation of what lines are permissible.North Carolina has long been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, as well as the subject of years of legal battles. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that a previous gerrymandered map was illegal, and court-drawn lines were used in the midterm elections, producing more competitive districts and, ultimately, an evenly divided congressional delegation.But something else also happened in the midterms: A Republican won a seat on the state Supreme Court, flipping it from a Democratic to a Republican majority. Though none of the facts had changed except the composition of the court, the justices promptly threw out the 2022 ruling, opening the door for Republican legislators to restore their party’s advantage.In several other states, the courts are also prevailing.In Wisconsin, where voters recently elected a liberal justice, the state Supreme Court is widely expected to rule against an existing Republican gerrymander. In Alabama, a court ordered a map this month that includes two districts, instead of one, where Black voters have or are close to a majority. That change, stemming from a United States Supreme Court decision earlier this year, will most likely result in one more Democratic representative.The same Supreme Court ruling could lead to a new majority-Black district in Louisiana, though that is tied up in another lawsuit. Separately, a contentious redistricting process is on the table in New York. More

Michael Simon Johnson and Rachel Quester and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWarning: this episode contains strong language.After 21 days without a leader, and after cycling through four nominees, House Republicans have finally elected a speaker. They chose Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a hard-right conservative best known for leading congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The Times, was at the capitol when it happened.On today’s episodeLuke Broadwater, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana won the election on Wednesday to become the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBackground readingThe House elected Mike Johnson as speaker, embracing a hard-right conservative.Speaker Johnson previously played a leading role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.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.Luke Broadwater More

The state’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, has a strategy to win the state. If it halts Democrats’ momentum on the issue, it could be a model for the party in 2024.Abortion has been a losing issue at the polls for Republicans across the country since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But now in Virginia, which holds elections in early November, the party thinks it has hit upon a formula to stop the electoral drubbings.Legislative races across the state will offer a decisive test of a strategy led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has united Republicans behind a high-profile campaign in support of a ban on abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. The party calls it a “common sense” position, in contrast to Democrats, who it says “support no limits.”The strategy is meant to defuse Republicans’ image as abortion extremists, which led to losses in last year’s midterms and threatens further defeats next month in an Ohio referendum and the Kentucky governor’s race.The approach is similar to one being pursued by Republican Senate candidates in battleground states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has been open to some exceptions, a stance that research shows is more popular than an outright ban.Virginia Republicans aren’t looking to win over abortion-rights supporters so much as they want to neutralize the party’s disadvantage with swing voters. The hope is that these voters will prioritize a competing set of issues such as crime and the economy, on which Republicans have an advantage in some polls.All 140 seats in the state’s General Assembly are on the ballot this fall, with Republicans looking to take full control. Democrats have made the threat to abortion rights their No. 1 issue, pouring money into ads and looking to motivate voters in an off-year election with President Biden’s unpopularity dimming enthusiasm.If Republicans take majorities in both legislative chambers under Mr. Youngkin, a governor with national ambitions, it would clear the way for Virginia to become the last Southern state to sharply restrict abortions.Since mid-October, Mr. Youngkin’s political action committee has run a $1.4 million ad campaign taking the offensive on the issue. Accusing Democrats of “disinformation,” it promotes the 15-week limit with exceptions as “reasonable” and “common sense.”The Younkin ad, targeted at swing districts and echoed by the ads of individual Republicans running, shatters the formula of most G.O.P. candidates in battleground states after the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, who dodged abortion in midterm races and often lost.“We’re just simply not going to repeat 2022,” said Zack Roday, the coordinated campaigns director for Mr. Youngkin’s political group.Kaitlin Makuski, the political director of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a national anti-abortion group with close ties to Mr. Youngkin, said that if Virginia Republicans prevailed this year, it would be a clear signal to candidates in 2024 that leaning into a 15-week ban can be successful.“He and his team looked back at what they saw in 2022 and realized we can’t continue burying our head in the sand,” she said of the governor. “We need to move forward. This is a great template to follow.”Existing Virginia laws, which Democrats want to keep in place, allow abortions with no restrictions through the second trimester, about 26 weeks, and thereafter if three doctors certify that a pregnancy would “irremediably impair” the mother’s health.“Virginia has in place a law that parallels Roe v. Wade, that allows women to have freedom of choice to make their own health decisions,” said Senator Mamie Locke, chairwoman of the Virginia Senate Democratic caucus. “Why do you have to change the law to this 15-week ban? What’s ‘reasonable’ about that?”Democrats point to other Republican-led states that have banned abortion in almost all circumstances and say a 15-week limit is a ruse that will give way to stricter limits if Republicans gain full control of government. Last year, Mr. Youngkin told conservative activists that he would “happily and gleefully” sign any bill to “protect life.” The governor has insisted he is only interested in a 15-week limit.A 15-week ban, just past the first trimester of pregnancy, polls well in some surveys. A Gallup poll this year found that 69 percent of U.S. adults support abortion in the first trimester, but support falls to just 37 percent in the second trimester.In a Washington Post-Schar School poll this month, Virginia voters were equally divided on the 15-week ban with exceptions: 46 percent supported such limits and 47 percent opposed them.But in an illustration of how abortion polling can yield conflicting results, 51 percent of voters in the poll said they trusted Democrats to do a better job handling abortion vs. 34 percent who trust Republicans.Even if a 15-week ban doesn’t convert many voters for whom abortion rights are a top issue — and most of those who say so are Democrats — the G.O.P. bet is that they can neutralize the issue with independent voters. In the Washington Post poll, independents said they trusted Democrats more on abortion, but Republicans more than Democrats on crime and the economy.“Youngkin thinks the Republicans have an advantage on a set of issues people care about. They don’t on abortion, so they have to reduce the level of threat so people don’t vote on that issue,” said Bob Holsworth, the founding director of the School of Government at Virginia Commonwealth University. “He wants them to vote on these other issues where he thinks he’s in better shape.”Danny Diggs, a Republican running for State Senate in a crucial district around Newport News, enlisted his adult daughter Michelle to record an ad about his support for a 15-week limit. “Take it from me,” she says in the ad, her father “will not cater to the extremes.”Danny Diggs during a debate in September in Newport News, N.H. He is supporting a 15-week ban on abortions, with exceptions.Kendall Warner/The Virginian-PilotOver the weekend, as Mr. Diggs, a retired sheriff, greeted voters at a seafood festival in Poquoson, a town on Chesapeake Bay, he said he would vote against any bill limiting abortion earlier than 15 weeks. “I’m good with the 15 weeks, that’s what I’ve told people,” he said.Charles Salas, 53, who is retired from the Army, greeted Mr. Diggs as he stood beside a Republican Party tent and liked what the candidate had to say. On abortion, he sounded more conservative than Mr. Youngkin’s proposed 15-week cutoff. “I haven’t decided how early but I think it should be early enough,” he said. “I don’t believe it should be on demand and I shouldn’t have to pay for it,” he said.Ann Holland, a 58-year-old school district employee, said she was undecided in the election, but on the abortion issue, she wanted women to have broad leeway to make a choice. “I was in my third month and didn’t know,” she said with a laugh. “No morning sickness, no nothing.”Mr. Diggs said that in knocking on the doors of thousands of Republicans and independent voters, the top issues he heard about were public safety and education. Abortion did not often come up. “I don’t think it’s as important as the Democrats hope that it is,” he said. More

Shawn Fain owes his rise within the United Automobile Workers to a group determined to make the union far more confrontational toward automakers.When Shawn Fain sought the presidency of the United Automobile Workers union last year, he ran on a platform that promised: “No corruption. No concessions. No tiers.”That pledge encapsulated many members’ frustrations with years of union scandal and concessions to the three big Detroit automakers, including the creation of a lower tier of wages for newer employees. The platform helped propel Mr. Fain to the top job — where he has led a mounting wave of walkouts in recent weeks to demand more favorable contract terms.But the platform largely predated Mr. Fain’s candidacy. It was devised by a group called Unite All Workers for Democracy, which was officially formed in 2020 as a caucus — essentially, a political party within the union.The group set out to topple the ruling party, known as the Administration Caucus, which had run the union for more than 70 years. In 2022, Unite All Workers hashed out its party line, recruited candidates and ramped up a campaign operation to elect them.When the dust settled, the slate had won half the seats on the union’s 14-member executive board, with Mr. Fain, previously a union staff member, as president. Unite All Workers’ role helps explain why the union has taken such a hard line with the automakers.“We had a platform we ran on, and we’re trying to push that platform forward,” said Scott Houldieson, a founder of the group and a longtime Ford Motor worker in Chicago. “Shawn has been really upfront about what we’re trying to accomplish.”The first fruits of that approach may have emerged Wednesday, when negotiators for the union and Ford agreed on terms for a new four-year contract, including a wage increase of roughly 25 percent over the four years, according to the union.“We hit the companies to maximum effect,” Mr. Fain said in a Facebook livestream. The deal is subject to ratification by the company’s union workers.Since at least the 1980s, U.A.W. members have formed groups to challenge the union’s top officials, or at least prod them to be more confrontational with automakers. The efforts took on added urgency in 2007, when the union accepted tiers as a way to stabilize the automakers’ financial footing. (General Motors and Chrysler later filed for bankruptcy anyway; Ford avoided it.)Scott Houldieson, a founder of United Auto Workers for Democracy, said, “We had a platform we ran on, and we’re trying to push that platform forward.”Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBut the Administration Caucus always held a trump card: The union leadership wasn’t elected directly by members. Rather, future leaders were effectively chosen by existing leaders, then approved by delegates to a convention every four years.That changed after a corruption scandal in which two recent U.A.W. presidents were charged with embezzlement in 2020. As part of a consent decree with the federal government, members voted in a referendum on whether to directly elect union leaders. Unite All Workers, which was pressing for the change, waged an all-out campaign to persuade union members to support “one member one vote.”When the initiative passed by nearly a two-to-one ratio, Unite All Workers, whose members paid an annual fee, was poised to become a kingmaker of sorts in the union’s 2022 elections. The group had a budget of over $100,000, two full-time staff members and hundreds of volunteer organizers.“It was obvious that we could use the same infrastructure” of staff and volunteers to compete in the election, said Mike Cannon, a retired U.A.W. member who serves on the Unite All Workers steering committee. “The only question at that point was, were we going to have any candidates?”Unite All Workers announced that anyone who wanted to join its campaign slate would have to fill out a detailed questionnaire and attend at least one meeting with its members.The group wanted to ensure that the candidates it backed were committed to running the union with extensive input from rank-and-file members, and to driving a much harder bargain with employers. It wanted an end to wage tiers, which it said divided and demoralized workers, and a focus on organizing new members, especially among electric vehicle and battery workers.Among those responding to the call was Mr. Fain, then a staff member in the union division responsible for Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram. During his interview process, Mr. Fain explained how, as a local official in Indiana in 2007, he had helped lead opposition to the two-tier wage structure the union had agreed to, and how he had argued for more favorable contract terms after joining the headquarters staff.Some members of the group were skeptical that an employee of the old guard could be a reformer. But other U.A.W. dissidents vouched for him. “I knew the claims were legit,” said Martha Grevatt, a longtime Chrysler employee on the steering committee of Unite All Workers.Martha Grevatt said she had found Mr. Fain’s pledges to shake up the union “legit” even though he had been a staff member under the previous leadership.Daniel Lozada for The New York TimesThe group backed Mr. Fain and six other candidates for the union’s 14-member executive board, and all seven won.As president, Mr. Fain has appointed critics of the former leadership as his top aides, including one who served on the Unite All Workers steering committee. Board members, including Mr. Fain, have attended some of the group’s monthly membership meetings and taken part in one of its WhatsApp chats.Many of the group’s priorities became demands in the union’s contract negotiations, and Mr. Fain has indicated that he hopes to use momentum from the strike to organize nonunion companies like Tesla and Honda, a key objective of Unite All Workers.But for all the connections between the group and the union leadership, they are not one and the same.Some board members who ran on the Unite All Workers slate have at times taken positions in tension with the group’s priorities. In recent weeks, Margaret Mock, the union’s second-ranking official, has expressed concern to fellow board members about the walkout’s cost to the union’s budget. At a special board meeting last week, she offered a proposal intended to scale back spending on organizing during the strike, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The board set aside the proposal; Ms. Mock did not respond to a request for comment.For its part, Unite All Workers considers itself accountable to rank-and-file members, not an extension of the leaders it helped elect. On a tentative deal with any of the three large automakers, Unite All Workers plans to appoint a task force to provide an assessment of the proposal to the union’s members. The group’s members will then decide whether to support it.“I would say it’s not automatic that the caucus endorses” an agreement, said Andrew Bergman, who serves on the Unite All Workers steering committee.Still, as a practical matter, the group is highly unlikely to oppose an agreement, since Mr. Fain has forcefully pressed for its core priorities.“For years, we’ve been playing defense at every step, and we’ve been losing,” Mr. Fain said in a video streamed online on Friday, explaining why the strike would continue. “When we vote on a tentative agreement, it will be because your leadership and your council thinks we’ve gotten absolutely every dollar we can.” This week, the union expanded the strike to the largest U.S. factories at Stellantis and General Motors.The approach has raised concerns among employers and business groups. John Drake, a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that the Detroit automakers could struggle to remain competitive after the strike, and that Mr. Fain appeared to be overreaching in extracting concessions.“It feels like there’s not really a strategy here,” Mr. Drake said. “It’s like pain is the goal.”Mr. Fain has indicated that he hopes to use momentum from the strike to organize nonunion companies like Tesla and Honda, a key objective of the insurgent group that endorsed his candidacy.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe best analogy for Unite All Workers may be to a group called Brand New Congress, created by supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont independent, to help elect congressional candidates beginning in 2018.Not long after the 2016 presidential election, Brand New Congress urged an obscure New York bartender and activist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge a longtime incumbent in a Democratic congressional primary. A sister group provided her with training and campaign infrastructure. After she won, two people involved with the groups joined her staff.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has since become far more prominent than those early backers, and in principle she could take positions at odds with their progressive stands. But in practice, it’s unlikely. The worldview is embedded in her political identity.Mr. Fain’s story is similar: a once-obscure progressive who was catapulted to a position of power by a group of insurgents and was determined to enact their shared principles once he got there. Except that, in backing him and his colleagues, Unite All Workers helped win not just a few legislative seats, but the reins of an entire union.After Vail Kohnert-Yount, a Unite All Workers steering committee member, seconded Mr. Fain’s nomination for president at the union’s convention last year, he spoke to her about relying on government assistance as a new parent decades ago.“I remember thinking this guy has not forgotten where he came from — he’s very much stayed that person,” Ms. Kohnert-Yount said. “We did our best to endorse a candidate we believed in.” More

True the Vote challenged the legality of 250,000 Georgia voters, offered cash for fraud evidence and recruited poll watchers. A federal trial will determine why.As Republican candidates and their supporters increasingly focus on specious claims of rampant voter fraud, a federal trial starting in Georgia on Thursday will examine whether a key campaign to unmask illegal voters in 2020 actually aimed to intimidate legal ones.The outcome could have implications for conservative election integrity organizations that are widely expected to ramp up antifraud efforts during next year’s general election. The trial also could clarify the reach of an important section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the historic civil-rights law that the Supreme Court has steadily pared back over the last decade.That question is serious enough that the Department of Justice has filed a brief in the case and will defend the government’s view of the act’s scope at the trial. The campaign, mounted in December 2020 by a right-wing group called True the Vote, filed challenges with local election officials to the eligibility of some 250,000 registered Georgia voters. The group also offered bounties from a $1 million reward fund for evidence of “election malfeasance” and sought to recruit citizen monitors to patrol polls and ballot drop-off locations.The lawsuit, filed by the liberal political action committee Fair Fight Inc., alleges that finding fraud was a secondary concern. The actual purpose, the group argues, was to dissuade Democratic voters from turning out in tight runoffs that month for Georgia’s two seats in the U.S. Senate.That would violate a clause of the Voting Rights Act that broadly prohibits any “attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.”Lawyers for True the Vote argue that the group’s efforts have nothing to do with intimidation and are an essential form of constitutionally protected free speech. Two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, won the Senate runoffs in early January 2021. The case has since plodded through the legal system for nearly three years before coming to trial.In a briefing last week, Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Fair Fight, cast the lawsuit as a move to head off what she called “a troubling plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election based on disinformation and bad faith attacks on voter eligibility.”“Georgia has become the testing ground for modern-day voter challenges and other antidemocratic tactics we believe are being deployed as part of a national effort led by followers of the Big Lie,” she said, referring to former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.Catherine Engelbrecht, a founder and president of True the Vote, did not respond to requests for comment. But in court filings, lawyers for her and the organization said that efforts to search for illegal voters like those in Georgia are protected by the First Amendment.Threatening to punish people for casting ballots clearly violates the Voting Rights Act and has no free-speech protection, one of the lawyers for True the Vote, Cameron Powell, said in an interview. But he said that there was reason to worry that people might cast ballots in places where they did not live. He said the state had mailed seven million absentee ballots to Georgia residents, a measure to make voting easier during the Covid pandemic, although some people on voter rolls no longer lived where they had registered.(In fact, the state sent absentee ballot applications — not actual ballots — to 6.9 million registered voters in 2020. About 1.3 million absentee ballots were cast in the November election, and the state said that “all of them were verified for the voter’s identity and eligibility.”)Lawyers for Catherine Engelbrecht, a founder and president of True the Vote, said that efforts to root out fraud are protected by the First Amendment.Bridget Bennett/Reuters“Engaging in speech about elections and voter integrity, engaging in facilitating petitions by Georgia voters who are concerned about the residency status of other Georgia voters, is subject to the highest First Amendment protections,” he said. “And it’s a very high bar to show that this was done in bad faith.”The intimidation clause of the Voting Rights Act has been invoked before to punish both large-scale challenges to voters’ eligibility and the dispatch of monitors to watch polling places for “suspicious” activity. The national Republican Party was barred from participating in so-called ballot security efforts from 1982 to 2018 because of its involvement in both.The Georgia lawsuit presents a less clear-cut picture than those instances, said Justin Levitt, an election law scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.“It’s not in the center of the strike zone, but it’s not a wild pitch, either,” he said. “The context in this is everything.”True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that arose from Ms. Engelbrecht’s Tea Party activities more than a decade ago, has a checkered financial and legal history. Ms. Engelbrecht’s forays into conspiracy theories and far-right politics have led even some former allies to distance themselves from her activities.The organization’s former lawyer, the conservative legal powerhouse James Bopp Jr., quit the Georgia case in March and sued her and True the Vote over what he claimed was nearly $1 million in unpaid bills.The group has regularly aired charges of fraudulent voting and helped produce the recent film “2,000 Mules” that made widely debunked charges of ballot-stuffing at voting drop boxes in Georgia and elsewhere. In Georgia, the group, saying that it had planned to challenge 364,000 voter registrations statewide, unveiled its election integrity initiative in mid-December 2020, as early voting in the Senate runoffs was getting underway. The voters who faced a legal challenge were among Georgians who had filed change-of-address notices with the Postal Service but had not registered to vote at a new address. Experts say that comparing address lists and registration rolls is not a reliable method of identifying potentially illegal voters. True the Vote and a handful of allies, including local Republican Party officials, eventually forwarded to county election boards some 250,000 potential challenges to registrations. A majority of boards refused to consider them, and those that did appeared to have found no evidence of illegality.But in some cases, the plaintiffs said, local officials summoned voters to bring proof of their eligibility to hearings, and others were told to cast provisional ballots that would be counted only if their eligibility were proven. Political operatives have long used a similar tactic, sometimes sending warning letters about eligibility directly to voters, in efforts to depress turnout.Fair Fight claims that the Georgia effort, combined with the public recruitment of poll watchers and the promise of a financial payoff for allegations of fraud, were largely designed to frighten voters, not to uncover wrongdoing. In court filings, True the Vote has called the allegations overblown and stressed that very few voters were ever notified that their legitimacy had been challenged.Sheelagh McNeill More

The former president is facing down Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, in a Manhattan courtroom, while other ex-loyalists are cooperating in a case against him in Georgia.Donald J. Trump could not hide his anger. Sitting at the front of a crowded New York courtroom this week, he folded his arms tightly across his chest. He tossed his head and scowled. He stared into the middle distance and scrolled through his phone.His ire was directed at Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had taken the witness stand 15 feet away and had promptly called Mr. Trump a liar. Mr. Cohen has told his share of lies as well. But in court, he swore he had done so “at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of Mr. Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s two days of dramatic testimony this week provided the first glimpse of what could become a familiar scene: Mr. Trump, sitting at a defense table, watching as a lawyer who once did his bidding now cooperated with the authorities seeking to hold him to account.On the same day Mr. Cohen began his testimony, Jenna Ellis, who had sought to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty to state charges in Georgia. She was preceded by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both lawyers who worked with Mr. Trump’s campaign, both now expected to cooperate in the criminal case that the Georgia prosecutors brought against him.The circumstances surrounding the Georgia criminal case and the Manhattan civil fraud trial are vastly different. But near the center of each case are lawyers who pledged public fealty to Mr. Trump — until they very publicly did not.Mr. Trump has long relied on a phalanx of legal attack dogs to speak on his behalf, or to do or say things he would rather not do or say himself. And because Mr. Trump has such a tenuous relationship with the truth, those lieutenants often spread a message that prosecutors and investigators consider to be outright lies. Lies about an election he lost, a relationship with a porn star he may have had and a net worth he may not quite have achieved.Now those statements are ricocheting back at Mr. Trump as he contends with the civil trial in New York, brought by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, and with four criminal indictments up and down the East Coast. And while Mr. Trump is quick to blame his betrayers — Mr. Cohen is “proven to be a liar,” he said outside the courtroom this week — his predicament was born from his own lopsided approach to relationships.Mr. Trump has a history of disavowing people who were once close to him and find themselves in trouble. He had long since cut ties with Mr. Cohen — until Tuesday, they had not seen each other in five years — and more recently he distanced himself from the lawyers in the Georgia case. He had also refused to pay their mounting legal bills.Their relationships, a one-way street flowing in Mr. Trump’s direction, appeared to work for a time. But when those loyal soldiers faced their own legal jeopardy, their allegiance to the former president became strained or even shattered.There have been exceptions since Mr. Trump’s split with Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump’s political action committee has picked up the legal bills for his co-defendants in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified government documents, as well as those of several witnesses connected to the case.Mr. Trump’s company also agreed to dole out a $2 million severance payment to his longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, and continues to pay for Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers. Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and testified at the company’s criminal trial last year, but has stopped short of turning on Mr. Trump.Mr. Cohen was among several in a series of people who Mr. Trump turned to over decades in the hopes they would emulate his first fixer and defender, the lawyer Roy Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Mr. Trump told one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, in an interview. “He brutalized for you.”That brutality — along with Mr. Cohn’s method of conflating public relations defenses with legal ones, making showy displays in court and accusing the federal government of “Gestapo-like tactics” against Mr. Trump in a 1970s suit alleging housing discrimination — became Mr. Trump’s preferred model for a lawyer.Mr. Cohen has often said that those sort of tactics influenced what Mr. Trump looks for in those who defend him.While it is unclear how useful Ms. Ellis and the other two lawyers will be to the case against Mr. Trump in Georgia, Mr. Cohen has already been tormenting Mr. Trump for the last five years. Ms. Ellis became critical of him publicly in the last several months.Mr. Trump made a point of attending the trial in Manhattan this week to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony in person.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesFor Mr. Trump, the feud with Mr. Cohen is personal. Although he is running for president and fighting the four indictments, none of those obligations could pry him away from the Manhattan courtroom to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony. Mr. Trump did not have to attend the testimony, but people close to him say he believes events go better for him when he is present.Mr. Trump’s falling out with Mr. Cohen stemmed from their dealings with the porn star Stormy Daniels.In the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier — an affair that Mr. Trump denied had ever taken place.The deal came to light in 2018, and soon, the F.B.I. had searched Mr. Cohen’s home and office. As Mr. Cohen’s life imploded, Mr. Trump began to distance himself from his fixer, and eventually, his company stopped paying Mr. Cohen’s legal bills altogether.Mr. Cohen soon lashed out and began to speak with prosecutors. When he pleaded guilty that year for his role in the hush-money deal, he stood up in court and pointed the finger at the then-president. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen declared, had directed the payment of the hush money.Although the federal prosecutors declined to indict Mr. Trump, this year the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against him related to the deal, using Mr. Cohen as a potential star witness for a trial scheduled to start in the spring. Mr. Cohen has also testified before Congress that the former president’s company had manipulated financial statements to reach Mr. Trump’s desired net worth. That testimony was the catalyst for Ms. James to open her investigation.When Ms. James’s team questioned Mr. Cohen on Tuesday, he repeated many of the same accusations, testifying that Mr. Trump had directed him to “reverse engineer” annual financial statements to reach the former president’s desired net worth.Mr. Cohen spoke calmly and confidently as he recounted Mr. Trump’s obsession with his net worth.But the Trump team’s cross-examination exposed the perils of relying on a disgruntled former aide, especially one as temperamental as Mr. Cohen.Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on Mr. Cohen’s inconsistent statements about the former president and his own crimes, leading him to admit to having lied a number of times. Toward the end of the second day of cross-examination, Mr. Cohen appeared visibly flustered as he tripped over rapid-fire questions about whether Mr. Trump had personally directed him to inflate numbers on his annual financial statements. Mr. Cohen said he had not, prompting Mr. Trump and one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, to throw their hands up in victory.Ms. Habba also resurfaced a series of glowing remarks Mr. Cohen once made about his boss, further underscoring his about-face.“I think he’s going to be an amazing president”; “I’m the guy who would take the bullet for the president”; “I think the world of him, I respect him as a business man and I respect him as a boss,” Ms. Habba emphatically read, as she circled the courtroom with a hand-held microphone like a preacher delivering a sermon.This appeared to delight Mr. Trump, who turned to watch Ms. Habba while draping his arm over her empty chair.Before Mr. Cohen completed his testimony on Wednesday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Justice Arthur J. Engoron to dismiss the case, citing Mr. Cohen’s contradictions.Justice Engoron denied the request, and Mr. Trump stormed out of the courtroom.Kate Christobek More

A contest between two New York City councilmen, Justin Brannan and Ari Kagan, will measure how strong the rightward shift is in southern Brooklyn.At a public housing complex in Coney Island, Brooklyn, a powerful Democratic councilman sought to quickly make the case for why voters should reject his opponent.“He was elected as a Democrat,” the councilman, Justin Brannan, said to a resident. “But he sold us out and became a Trump Republican.”Until recently, that simple argument would have been persuasive enough to convince most voters in this part of New York. But times have changed, and so has the political makeup of certain swaths of the city: Even though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district by three to one, Republicans won three competitive state legislative seats in southern Brooklyn in 2022.Mr. Brannan’s opponent is Ari Kagan, a councilman who was elected as a Democrat to represent Coney Island, but is now a Republican. Because of redistricting, Mr. Brannan and Mr. Kagan have wound up contesting the same district.Mr. Kagan, who would probably have faced long odds against Mr. Brannan in a Democratic primary, won the Republican primary in June, setting up the most competitive and contentious Council election in the city. Its outcome could be a harbinger of whether recent Republican gains in southern Brooklyn might continue.It’s an area where in the 2021 mayoral election, the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, drew slightly more votes than the Democrat, Eric Adams, who won by 40 percentage points citywide.Mr. Kagan has quickly adopted the talking points of his party, criticizing Mr. Brannan, who heads the Council’s Finance Committee, for failing to rein in the city’s spending and allowing the trinity of city crises — crime, migrants and homelessness — to flourish.Justin Brannan spoke to Julia Daniely while canvassing voters in Coney Island. He left the Councl’s progressive caucus this year.Paul Frangipane for The New York Times“He voted for and advocated for $1.4 billion for migrant services for the unbelievable migrant crisis, the public safety crisis, homelessness crisis, quality of life crisis, exorbitant taxation, exorbitant cost of living,” Mr. Kagan said in an interview.“He’s the chair of the Finance Committee, and he likes to say that he’s in the room where all decisions are made,” he added. “Then he has to own his own decisions.”Mr. Brannan talked about the money he has brought back to his district to renovate parks and build new schools and said Mr. Kagan is more focused on “demagoguery” than solutions.As early voting for the Nov. 7 election begins Saturday, issues such as abortion, the influx of asylum seekers and the war between Israeli and Gaza have often overshadowed more local concerns like trash pickup, the need for new parks and the poor living conditions in public housing.The district, the 47th, includes Coney Island, Bay Ridge and part of Bath Beach, and its residents are 49 percent white and 20 percent Asian. The race there is a prime example of how the nation’s divisive political debate has seeped into more local discourse, said Andrew Gounardes, a progressive Democratic state senator who represents southern Brooklyn and who endorsed Mr. Brannan.“If we’re cutting a ribbon for a new park and you’re sitting there talking about vaccines, it’s hard to bring you back from that,” Mr. Gounardes said. “Maybe we never really had you.”Mr. Brannan has nonetheless seemed to have adjusted his political stances, perhaps in recognition of the shifts among voters in South Brooklyn. He left the Council’s Progressive Caucus earlier this year because he opposed a new statement of principles that required its members to commit to reducing “the size and scope” of the Police Department.He, like Mr. Kagan, says he opposes the placement of migrant shelters in their district — a stance that has put him at odds with fellow Democrats, including Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, an assemblywoman who leads the Brooklyn Democratic Party. She said that predominantly white neighborhoods like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn should have migrant shelters and criticized Mr. Brannan for not being supportive.“Justin has an opportunity to contrast himself from his Republican opponent and support a Bay Ridge shelter as a true blue progressive Democrat,” Ms. Bichotte Hermelyn said.Mr. Brannan still has broad support from reliable Democratic mainstays, including several labor unions. He is also being backed by Future NYC, a pro-business super PAC supporting moderate Democrats, which is expected to spend around $100,000 on attack ads that paint Mr. Kagan as “unhinged” and a “Democrat turned Republican.”“Justin is actually a pretty good example of someone who is a center left Democrat. He’s not for defunding the police,” said Jeff Leb, the group’s treasurer. “Ari has become a complete extremist.” Mr. Brannan has attacked Mr. Kagan for refusing to fire his campaign manager, who made derogatory statements on social media about African Americans and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He has also criticized Mr. Kagan for shifting his stance on abortion.In the Campaign Finance Board’s voter guide, Mr. Kagan wrote that “life starts at conception,” and that abortions should only be allowed in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is in danger. But in July 2022, when he was a Democrat, Mr. Kagan voted in favor of a package of bills that strengthened access to abortion and reproductive health in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Ari Kagan, right, still has the support of Wanda Feliciano, center, even though he has switched parties.Paul Frangipane for The New York Times“I‘m still a Democrat,” Mr. Brannan said, noting Mr. Kagan’s rightward shift. “I didn’t sell my soul to keep my job.” He launched a website called the “Ari Kagan Accountability Project” to track the positions Mr. Kagan has shifted on since switching parties. Mr. Kagan said that he’s against racism and homophobia, and that his campaign manager apologized. He regrets his vote on the abortion legislation but not his shift to being a Republican — a move that may make him more attractive to the area’s Russian American voters.Gregory Davidzon, who owns Russian language media outlets where Mr. Kagan — who emigrated from Russia three decades ago — once worked, said that Mr. Kagan, like other Republican candidates in the area, would have broad support in the community.He pointed to a neighboring district encompassing Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, where the sitting councilwoman, Inna Vernikov, was recently arrested after she openly displayed a gun on her hip at a pro-Palestine rally that she opposed. He said the arrest would not hurt her chances at re-election.“If it was Mickey Mouse on the ballot, it would be a vote for the Republican as well,” Mr. Davidzon said.Mr. Kagan has also won endorsements from several law enforcement unions; the Parent Party, a group that supports school choice and policing; and the conservative Asian Wave Alliance.Among the few things Mr. Brannan and Mr. Kagan agree on is that a casino shouldn’t be built in Coney Island. Each also thinks that his opponent represents his party’s more extreme positions.At a recent visit to Unity Towers, a city housing development in Coney Island, Wanda Feliciano, a former tenant leader, told Mr. Kagan that he still had her support even though he was now a Republican.“He did what he had to do for a reason,” Ms. Feliciano said, adding that she remembered how Mr. Kagan helped expedite repairs to the heating system in the buildings and brought food and supplies for residents during the pandemic.“He’s still going to do good for us no matter what party he’s in,” she added.At Carey Gardens, the public housing development that Mr. Brannan had visited, Mr. Kagan’s party switch was met with far less enthusiasm.Mr. Brannan told Star Turnage, 42, a construction worker, that her Council representative had switched parties. After she told Mr. Brannan that her bedroom wall was leaking, he informed her that Mr. Kagan had voted against the $107 billion municipal budget in June that contained funding to repair public housing.Mr. Kagan was the sole Republican to vote against the budget because he said it included “billions for migrant services” but not enough money to hire more police officers. Ms. Turnage had no doubt about her view of Republican politicians. “I would never vote for them,” she said. “They’re not for the people.” More

Since the heinous Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s declaration of war against the terrorist group, I have been going over and over a question I’ve not been able to answer fully: During this episode, why has the Palestinian cause sparked so much passion among veteran activists of the movement for Black lives?Last week, I wrote that this could be traced to the ideological lens and residual energy of a younger generation attuned to protest and the ideas of equality and justice. But after interviewing several prominent activists in recent days, I realize there’s more to explore in the critical dynamics fueling that passion, which is born, in part, out of longstanding personal connections and a common sense of purpose.There are two pivotal events that seem to have ignited the new era of solidarity between some young American activists and the people of Palestine. The first came in the form of Palestinian activists expressing support on social media for the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., which activists describe as an uprising, not just a series of protests. Palestinians provided not just moral support, but offered practical tips that, as activist Cherrell Brown told me, included advice for protesters about how to protect themselves from tear gas.Around that time, a small delegation of Palestinians even traveled to Ferguson and St. Louis to meet with American activists. This all created a moment of bonding around a shared sense of resistance.The second event was a 2015 pilgrimage to Israel and the Palestinian territories organized by Ahmad Abuznaid, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian American who co-founded the Dream Defenders, a group of activists who came together in response to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin.The small delegation included some people who would also become central in the American movement, like the journalist and scholar Marc Lamont Hill.When we spoke, Abuznaid, who has been criticized for his support for B.D.S., a movement calling for boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel, said he has led or been a part of several delegations to the Palestinian territories focused on what he describes as the injustices caused by the Israeli occupation.These trips help not only to develop strong bonds between communities half a world away from each other, but also to connect the issues facing them. Hill, who lost his job as a CNN contributor after he gave a speech at the United Nations about Israel and Palestine that was condemned by groups including the Anti-Defamation League, would go on to be a co-author of a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.”The events during this period reinforced a sense of internationalism among activists and connected a present solidarity with a historical one. It called back to a time when an American figure as notable as Malcolm X spoke out for the Palestinian cause.Even activists who didn’t make these journeys describe coming to this cause in part through personal connections with Palestinians and Palestinian Americans.And unlike some conflicts around the world, this one continues to play out in full view, in traditional media and social media. As the comedian, actress and activist Amanda Seales told me, this crisis has an urgency around it that others don’t because “we’re able to see it” in an unfiltered way.The other thing that I initially underestimated is the level of criticism of the Biden administration for its response to this conflict and what effect that might have in 2024.Shaun King, a former writer for The Daily News who has millions of followers on Facebook, Instagram and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, posted recently about how he would not vote for President Biden next year because of his embrace of Israel.King, who has never been a strong Biden supporter and is far from a mainline Democrat, told me, “I feel like a voter without a candidate.”While most activists I spoke to didn’t sound a note as strident as King’s about their voting intentions, several of them sounded an alarm about a possible wave of voter disappointment on the left over Biden’s stance in this conflict.As Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me, he couldn’t think of a more “demobilizing experience” for young, democracy-minded, multiracial coalition voters than an escalating war and escalating human suffering “with the understanding that our country and our government could have done more to prevent it.”Tiffany Loftin, who describes herself as a civil rights activist and labor union organizer, and is a former national director of the N.A.A.C.P. youth and college division, said she would have a difficult time casting her ballot for “somebody who supported genocide” of Palestinians, which is how she characterized Biden’s position in the Israel-Gaza war. “I don’t know if I can do that, Charles,” she said.The questions for the Democratic Party and the Biden administration are: How much of their support base does this discontent represent, and how much voter abstention can they absorb?A lot will happen next year, and public attention will inevitably turn to other issues and controversies, but in a tight presidential race, an increasingly disaffected activist base on the left could be disastrous for Biden, and in a rematch with Donald Trump, that could be disastrous for our democracy.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More