Elections

The vote in Slovakia this month will be a test of European unity on Ukraine, and of Russia’s efforts to undermine it. The front-runner wants to halt arms shipments to Kyiv.When Ukraine discovered civilian mass graves in an area recaptured from Russian troops, Russia’s ambassador in neighboring Slovakia countered with his own discovery.The mayor of a remote Slovak village, as the ambassador announced last September, had bulldozed Russian graves from World War I. Ambassador Igor Bratchikov demanded that the Slovak government, a robust supporter of Ukraine, take action to punish the “blasphemous act.”The Slovak police responded swiftly, dismissing the ambassador’s claims as a “hoax,” but his fabrication took flight, amplified by vociferous pro-Russian groups in Slovakia and news outlets notorious for recycling Russian propaganda.A month later, the mayor of the village, Vladislav Cuper, lost an election to a rival candidate from a populist party opposed to helping Ukraine.Today, the same forces that helped unseat Mr. Cuper have mobilized for a general election in Slovakia on Sept. 30 with much bigger stakes.The vote will not only decide who governs a small Central European nation with fewer than six million people, but will also indicate whether opposition to helping Ukraine, a position now mostly confined to the political fringes across Europe, could take hold in the mainstream.Vladislav Cuper, the former mayor of Ladomirova, Slovakia, at his home in the village. Mr. Cuper says he was smeared by pro-Russian forces in Slovakia.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesThe front-runner, according to opinion polls, is a party headed by Robert Fico, a pugnacious former prime minister who has vowed to halt Slovak arms deliveries to Ukraine, denounced sanctions against Russia and railed against NATO, despite his country’s membership in the alliance.A strong showing in the election by Mr. Fico and far-right parties hostile to the government in Kyiv would likely turn one of Ukraine’s most stalwart backers — Slovakia was the first country to send it air-defense missiles and fighter jets — into a neutral bystander more sympathetic to Moscow. It would also end the isolation of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary as the only leader in the European Union and NATO speaking out strongly against helping Ukraine.“Russia is rejoicing,” Rastislav Kacer, a former foreign minister and outspoken supporter of Ukraine, said in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. “Slovakia is a great success story for its propaganda. It has worked hard and very successfully to exploit my country as a wedge to divide Europe.”Thanks to widespread public discontent with the infighting between pro-Western Slovak politicians who came to power in 2020, and deep pools of genuine pro-Russian sentiment dating back to the 19th century, Russia has been pushing on an open door.A survey of public opinion across Eastern and Central Europe in March by Globsec, a Bratislava-based research group, found that only 40 percent of Slovaks blame Russia for the war in Ukraine, while 51 percent believe that either Ukraine or the West is “primarily responsible.” In Poland, 85 percent blame Russia. In the Czech Republic, 71 percent think Russia is responsible.The World War I cemetery in Ladomirova that the Russian ambassador to Slovakia falsely said had been destroyed.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesDaniel Milo, director of an Interior Ministry department aimed at countering disinformation and other nonmilitary threats, acknowledged that “there is fertile ground here for pro-Russian sentiment.” But he added that genuine sympathy rooted in history had been exploited by Russia and its local helpers to sow division and sour public opinion on Ukraine.Those helpers include Hlavne Spravy, a popular anti-American news site, and a bikers group called Brat za Brata, or Brother for Brother, which is affiliated with the Kremlin-sponsored Night Wolves motorcycle gang in Russia.A freelance writer for Hlavne Spravy, Bohus Garbar, was convicted of espionage this year after being caught on camera taking money from Russia’s military attaché, who has since been expelled.Brat za Brata, which has a large following on social media and close ties to the Russian embassy, has meanwhile worked to intimidate Russia’s critics.Peter Kalmus, a 70-year-old Slovak artist, said he was beaten up by members of the biker group last month after he defaced a Soviet war memorial in the eastern city of Kosice to protest Russian atrocities in Ukraine. In March, the bikers reduced to pandemonium a government-sponsored public debate about the war in a town near the Ukrainian border attended by Mr. Kacer, who was then still a minister. Fiercely pro-Russian protesters bused in by the bikers, recalled Mr. Kacer, “jumped on the stage screaming and spitting at us.”Many Slovaks, said Grigorij Meseznikov, the Russian-born president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a Bratislava research group, “have an invented romantic vision of Russia in their heads that does not really exist” and are easily swayed by “lies and propaganda” about the West.The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Ladomirova. The former mayor said that in his view, Russia did not care who won the election in the village, but had spotted a good opportunity to “present itself as a victim.”Akos Stiller for The New York TimesThat, he added, has made the country vulnerable to efforts by Moscow to rally pro-Russian sentiment in the hope of undermining European unity over Ukraine. Slovakia is a small country, Mr. Meseznikov said, but “if you take even a small brick out of a wall it can crumble.”That is certainly the hope of Lubos Blaha, a former member of a heavy metal band and the author of books on Lenin and Che Guevara who is now the deputy leader of Mr. Fico’s surging political party, SMER. He is also one of Slovakia’s loudest and most influential Kremlin-friendly voices on social media and regularly denounces his country’s liberal woman president, Zuzana Caputova, as a “fascist” and pro-Ukrainian ministers as “American puppets.”“The mood in Europe is changing,” Mr. Blaha said in an interview, describing the conflict in Ukraine as “a war of the American empire against the Russian empire” that cannot be won because Russia is a nuclear power.Insisting he was “not pro-Russia, just pro my country’s national interests,” Mr. Blaha predicted that countries hostile to arming Ukraine would soon “be in the majority while supporters of Ukraine will be in a small minority,” especially if Donald J. Trump wins the next presidential election in the United States.In the run-up to Slovakia’s own election, the usually placid country has been swamped by heated accusations on all sides of foreign interference. Mr. Fico has accused NATO of meddling in the campaign, while his foes have pointed a finger at Russia.Describing Mr. Fico’s SMER party as a “Trojan horse” for Russia, Jaroslav Nad, a former defense minister who led a push to send arms to Ukraine, claimed this summer that, according to intelligence reports, a Slovak citizen he didn’t identify had visited Russia “to receive financial resources to benefit SMER.” But, citing confidentiality, he produced no evidence, and his claim has been widely dismissed as a pre-election smear.Still, the Russian ambassador’s fabricated story of desecrated war graves highlighted Russia’s skill at fishing in Slovakia’s troubled waters. It also provided what Mr. Milo, the interior ministry official, called “a very rare smoking gun” directly implicating Moscow in scripting a fake scandal. “They usually act more cleverly and try not to get caught red-handed,” he said.Children climbing on Soviet and German tanks at a World War II monument outside Ladomirova. In the run-up to a general election, Slovakia has been swamped by heated accusations of foreign interference.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesDuring a visit last week to the still-intact graveyard in Ladomirova, Mr. Cuper said that in his view Russia did not care who won the mayoral vote there, but had spotted a good opportunity “to distract attention from mass graves in Ukraine” and “present itself as a victim.”When the ambassador visited Ladomirova, he met with Mr. Cuper’s bitter rival, a former mayor whom Mr. Cuper had accused of embezzling village funds and who was convicted of fraud in 2019. The former mayor’s wife, Olga Bojcikova, who declined to be interviewed, was at the time running against Mr. Cuper, who was backed by pro-Ukrainian parties, in the local election last October. She won.The ambassador’s story of “razed” Russian graves, though debunked by the police, was, Mr. Cuper recalled, “blown out of all proportion” by Kremlin-friendly Slovaks, particularly the Brat za Brata bikers.The bikers posted incendiary statements on Facebook denouncing the mayor’s “blasphemous act” and rallied its members to respond. This set off calls for Mr. Cuper to be “executed,” “buried alive” and “flogged like a dog.”Slovakia’s prosecutor general, Maros Zilinka, who has a long history of sympathy for Russia and hostility to the United States, added fuel to the fire by announcing that the mayor could be liable for criminal prosecution for a “morally reprehensible act” that needed to be investigated.Mr. Cuper said he never touched the graves but had removed stone border markers because they were falling apart. Nor did he touch a notice board put up as part of renovation work financed by Russia in 2014: It falsely described the cemetery as the resting place of 270 Russian war dead. The cemetery contains the unidentified bodies of soldiers from various countries, including Russia, killed in a World War I battle.The ambassador’s story, he said, was “entirely untrue” but still “created a national uproar.” More

Cuando visité Guatemala en mayo de 2022, el sentimiento de desesperanza era palpable. El gobierno del presidente Alejandro Giammattei había desatado una feroz persecución contra los funcionarios de la justicia anticorrupción. En febrero de ese año, Virginia Laparra, fiscala de la Fiscalía Especial contra la Impunidad, fue detenida junto con otros cuatro abogados anticorrupción; todos fueron recluidos en la misma celda de la cárcel militar Mariscal Zavala de Guatemala.En 2017, Laparra presentó una denuncia administrativa contra Lesther Castellanos, juez del que sospechaba que había filtrado detalles confidenciales de un caso a un colega. Ahora Castellanos la había denunciado por abuso de autoridad.Cuando llegué, todos menos Laparra habían sido puestos en libertad, a la espera del juicio. Durante nuestra conversación en la cárcel, recitó varios argumentos jurídicos: “los funcionarios que tengan conocimiento de alguna irregularidad están obligados a presentar una denuncia”. Fue una desgarradora muestra de erudición. No la estaban reteniendo porque alguien creyera en serio que había cometido un delito. Estaba encarcelada en represalia por sus intentos de combatir la corrupción; en diciembre, fue sentenciada a cuatro años de prisión.Lilian Virginia Laparra Rivas, exfiscala de la Fiscalía Especial contra la Impunidad, en custodia el año pasadoJosue Decavele/Reuters, via ReduxEl mes pasado, los votantes guatemaltecos abrieron de manera inesperada una brecha en la permanencia en el poder de la élite corrupta del país al votar por alguien ajeno a ese grupo. Hasta ahora, el enfoque del gobierno del presidente de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, ha sido en su mayor parte el de mantenerse al margen respecto a la corrupción en Guatemala, y no ha llegado a imponer sanciones económicas ni, por lo demás, condenar enérgicamente al gobierno de Giammattei. Biden debería aprovechar esta oportunidad para contribuir al éxito de la verdadera democracia y apoyar al nuevo presidente electo, Bernardo Arévalo.En 1944, una revolución encabezada por los estudiantes, de la que formaron parte mi madre y mi tío, ayudó a abrirle el paso a la década de democracia en Guatemala tras un siglo de dictaduras. Poco después de aquello, emigró a Estados Unidos.Nací en Boston en 1954, el año en que un golpe de Estado dirigido por la CIA derrocó al gobierno electo de Guatemala. La guerra civil de tres décadas que siguió estuvo marcada por masacres genocidas contra los colectivos mayas en las áreas rurales y acabó con los acuerdos de paz en 1996. Las esperanzas de un futuro pacífico y democrático parecieron quedar frustradas en 1998, cuando el obispo Juan Gerardi, defensor de los derechos humanos, fue asesinado por agentes de la inteligencia militar. Sin embargo, en 2001, tres militares fueron condenados por participar en su ejecución extrajudicial, auspiciada por el Estado, un veredicto histórico que parecía anunciar una nueva era de justicia.Construir una democracia funcional mediante la defensa del Estado de derecho y el combate de la corrupción ha sido la lucha central de la política guatemalteca en el siglo XXI. Entre 2007 y 2019, la Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), que, con el respaldo de las Naciones Unidas, actuaba en conjunto con el Ministerio Público guatemalteco, dirigió una de las luchas anticorrupción más eficaces de América Latina. La comisión desmanteló 70 estructuras de crimen organizado y corrupción e imputó a unas 680 personas, entre ellas dos expresidentes. Esa lucha duró hasta 2019, cuando el entonces presidente, Jimmy Morales, quien estaba siendo investigado por corrupción, expulsó a la CICIG con el apoyo de los republicanos en Estados Unidos, dejando así el país a la deriva.Bajo el mandato de Morales y su sucesor, Giammattei, una alianza de políticos, militares, élites económicas y miembros del crimen organizado, que los guatemaltecos llaman el “pacto de corruptos”, se hizo rápidamente con el control del poder judicial y otras instituciones. La fiscala general, Consuelo Porras, junto con otros fiscales y jueces, fue incluida en la lista oficial del Departamento de Estado estadounidense de actores antidemócratas y corruptos.Se castigó a muchos de los fiscales y jueces que habían combatido la corrupción. José Rubén Zamora, periodista de investigación y fundador de elPeriódico, detenido en julio de 2022 por acusaciones falsas que la comunidad internacional denunció y calificó de intento de silenciarlo, ocupa ahora la antigua celda de Laparra en Mariscal Zavala.En junio fue acusado de lavado de dinero y sentenciado a seis años de cárcel; su periódico cerró en mayo. En febrero del año pasado, otras dos mujeres retenidas al principio con Laparra —Siomara Sosa, fiscala, y Leyli Santizo, abogada de la CICIG— cruzaron el río Suchiate en balsas neumáticas hasta México.Se encuentran entre los al menos 39 fiscales y jueces guatemaltecos que se han exiliado; la mayoría se marchó en los últimos tres años. En conjunto representan a una generación que alcanzó la mayoría de edad en las décadas posteriores a los acuerdos de paz, que cree en el Estado de derecho como base de la gobernanza democrática.Sosa me dijo una vez que su trabajo en la oficina anticorrupción le hacía sentir que el país tenía una forma de asegurar que los impuestos se destinasen al sistema sanitario y las escuelas, en vez de que se desvíe por medio de chanchullos. “Me gustaba desenmascarar a los que robaban descaradamente millones, porque, mientras ellos se hacían ricos, los niños morían de hambre”, dijo.Una manifestación exigiendo la dimisión de la fiscala general, Consuelo Porras, y del fiscal Rafael Curruchiche, acusados de generar una crisis electoral antes de la segunda vuelta electoral en agosto.Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMi guía en aquella visita a la cárcel en 2022 fue Jennifer Torres, voluntaria de una organización de defensa de los derechos humanos y brillante estudiante maya de derecho en la Universidad de San Carlos. Faltaba un año para las elecciones presidenciales, y todos mis interlocutores se mostraban pesimistas.Torres me dijo que ella y sus amigos iban a votar por Arévalo, profesor de 64 años y candidato del partido Movimiento Semilla. Aunque es hijo de Juan José Arévalo —el querido primer presidente elegido democráticamente de Guatemala, que gobernó entre 1945 y 1951—, pocos sabían de él o de su partido. Cuando les mencionaba su nombre a los expertos en política guatemalteca, se reían. “Le falta carisma”, me dijo uno de ellos.En el periodo previo a las elecciones, los jueces guatemaltecos expulsaron del proceso electoral a cuatro candidatos considerados poco proclives a apoyar al pacto de corruptos. A Arévalo, quien prometió resucitar la batalla contra la corrupción, se le permitió mantenerse en la contienda porque nadie pensaba que podía ganar. Las encuestas le daban solo el 3 por ciento, pero los sondeos no tuvieron en cuenta a los votantes jóvenes e indígenas como Torres.En un resultado sorprendente, Arévalo pudo pasar a la segunda vuelta del 20 de agosto, en la que arrasó. Muchos guatemaltecos no se habían sentido tan optimistas desde 1944. Mi madre, que por entonces era adolescente, repartía panfletos de la campaña del padre de Arévalo en la acera de delante de nuestra juguetería familiar. La victoria de Arévalo hijo une los recuerdos históricos de los mayores con las esperanzas de los jóvenes de hoy.La semana pasada, el Tribunal Supremo Electoral confirmó la victoria de Arévalo. Pero, también, a instancias de Porras, suspendió temporalmente su partido para, poco después, desandar esa decisión. Lo que parece cierto es que Semilla seguirá siendo asechado y se enfrentará a unos poderes legislativo y judicial repletos de miembros del establishment corrupto: los complots de magnicidio contra el presidente electo son una amenaza constante. El viernes, Arévalo denunció a Porras por orquestar un golpe para impedir que su gobierno tome posesión. En todo el país, los manifestantes están exigiendo la dimisión de Porras.La comunidad internacional, incluido el gobierno de Biden, debe estar alerta y dispuesta a prestar todo el apoyo que pueda a este nuevo gobierno. Pero los guatemaltecos han creado, por sí mismos, esta extraordinaria oportunidad democrática y, hasta ahora, parecen decididos a protegerla.Francisco Goldman es novelista y periodista, cuyo libro más reciente es Monkey Boy, obra finalista del Premio Pulitzer. More

A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

Unemployment is near historic lows, and inflation has come way down. We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk. The homicide rate fell by about 10 percent across 30 cities compared with last year. Democrats defied electoral trends by holding the Senate, scoring major legislative victories and easily confirming a Supreme Court nominee.Why, then, do only 20 percent of voters rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” versus 49 percent who call it “poor,” according to a New York Times/Siena poll? Why are Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future, according to the Pew Research Center? Why does Gallup find a significantly smaller percentage of Americans have confidence in the presidency today than they did in the last, disastrous year of Donald Trump’s tenure? And why is President Biden polling dead even with his predecessor in multiple surveys despite the former president’s 91 felony charges?In short, with everything so great, why are people so down? That’s a question that, as The Times’s Reid Epstein wrote last week, stumps the White House and its political allies, who seem to think the problem is a failure to communicate all the good news.But there’s another explanation: The news isn’t all that good. Americans are unsettled by things that are not always visible in headlines or statistics but are easy enough to see.Easy to see is the average price of a dozen eggs: up 38 percent between January 2022 and May of this year. And white bread: up 25 percent. And a whole chicken: up 18 percent. As for the retail price of gasoline, it’s up 63 percent since January 2021, the month Biden became president.Yet none of these increases make it into what economists call the core rate of inflation, which excludes food and energy. The inflation ordinary people experience in everyday life is not the one the government prefers to highlight.Easy to see is the frequent collapse of public order on American streets. In April hundreds of teenagers wreaked havoc in the Chicago Loop. Two boys were shot. A young couple was beaten by the doorway of a building on North Wabash. Yet only 16 people were arrested. Similar scenes unfolded last month in New York’s Union Square and again in Boston, where police officers were assaulted in two separate riots largely by juveniles.In New York, there were at least 66 arrests. In Boston, just 13.Easy to see is that the kids are not alright. The causes are many; social media companies have a lot to answer for. But so do teachers’ unions, handmaids of the Democratic Party, who pushed to keep school doors closed during the pandemic, helping themselves while doing lasting harm to children. The Biden administration spent much of its early months saying it wanted more than half of schools open at least one day per week by the 100th day of his presidency.“It is a goal so modest and lacking in ambition as to be almost meaningless,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter noted at the time.Easy to see is that the border crisis has become a national one. In May the administration boasted that new policies had contributed to a sharp decline in the “number of encounters” between border patrols and migrants crossing the southwestern border illegally. By August, arrests of migrants who crossed the border with family members had hit a monthly record of 91,000. In New York City alone, more than 57,000 migrants seek food and shelter from the city’s social services on an average night.Nobody can say for certain how many migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s presidency remain in the U.S., but it’s almost certainly in the millions. In 2021 the president dismissed the initial surge of migrants as merely seasonal. “Happens every year,” he said.Easy to see is that the world has gotten more dangerous under Biden’s watch. The president deserves credit for arming Ukraine, as he does for brokering a strategic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea. But he also deserves the blame for a humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal that almost surely played a part in enticing Vladimir Putin into launching his invasion of Ukraine and whetted Beijing’s appetite for Taiwan.How large a part is unquantifiable. Yet it was predictable — and predicted.Easy to see is that the president is not young for his age. The stiff gait and the occasional falls. The apparent dozing off. The times he draws a blank or struggles to complete a thought. Yet the same people yelling #ResignFeinstein or #ResignMcConnell don’t appear to be especially vocal when it comes to the president’s fitness, as if noting the obvious risks repeating a Republican talking point.But people notice, and they vote.Easy to see are tents under overpasses, from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York to the I-5 in Seattle. And the zombified addicts passed out on sidewalks in practically every city and town. And the pharmacies with everyday items under lock and key to prevent shoplifting. And women with infants strapped to their backs, hawking candy or gum at busy intersections. And news reports of brazen car thefts, which have skyrocketed this year.“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith said. Not all the ruin mentioned above is Biden’s fault, and none of it is irreversible. But there’s much more ruin than his apologists — blinkered by selective statistics and too confident about the president’s chances next year — care to admit.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 former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison on Tuesday for his part in the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 election.Prosecutors sought a 33-year term. The judge did not agree but nonetheless handed down the longest sentence yet in a case relating to 2020 and the January 6 Capitol attack. The longest sentence previously handed down was 18 years, to both Ethan Nordean, a member of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia.Tarrio was a top target in one of the most important cases prosecuted by the US justice department over the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.In May, Tarrio and three lieutenants were convicted of charges including seditious conspiracy, a civil-war-era offense previously rarely brought but now levied against members of far-right groups that took part in the January 6 attack.In remarks to the court in Washington, Tarrio said he was sorry for the events of January 6, and credited police officers for their bravery in resisting the attack.“What happened on January 6 was a national embarrassment,” Tarrio said, adding that he both now knew Trump lost to Joe Biden and blamed himself for actions that led to him losing his freedom.Becoming emotional, Tarrio said: “I do not think what happened that day was acceptable.”He pleaded with the judge, Timothy Kelly, for leniency. “Please show me mercy,” Tarrio said. “I ask you that you not take my 40s from me.”Kelly emphasised the damage done.“That day broke our previously unbroken tradition of peacefully transferring power,” he said. “That previously unbroken tradition is broken now, and it’s going to take time and effort to fix it.”Before handing down the sentence, the judge said he did not see any indication that Tarrio was remorseful for what he was convicted of, adding that there was a strong need to send a signal to others.“It can’t happen again,” Kelly said.The case was one of the most significant prosecutions in the federal investigation of the attack on Congress, which saw supporters of Trump shock the world with their attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.The Proud Boys are a so-called “western chauvinist” group, often involved in street fighting with leftwing activists. Tarrio was involved in the run-up to the January 6 insurrection but did not take part in the violence. Before members of the Proud Boys joined thousands in storming the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify Biden’s victory, Tarrio was arrested and ordered to leave Washington. But prosecutors showed he organised and led from afar.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Using his powerful platform, Tarrio has repeatedly and publicly indicated that he has no regrets about what he helped make happen on January 6,” prosecutors said.Tarrio’s lawyers denied the Proud Boys had any plan to attack the Capitol, arguing that prosecutors used Tarrio as a scapegoat for Trump, who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House on January 6, urging supporters to “fight like hell”.The justice department has charged Trump with conspiring to subvert American democracy. But the Tarrio case and hundreds of others stand as vivid reminders of the chaos fueled by Trump’s lies, including the storming of the Capitol in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, a riot now linked to nine deaths including suicides among law enforcement.Urging a lenient sentence, Tarrio’s lawyers noted that he has a history of cooperating with law enforcement. Court records uncovered in 2021 showed that Tarrio worked undercover and cooperated with investigators after he was accused of fraud in 2012.During the riot, however, Tarrio posted encouraging messages on social media, expressing pride and urging followers to stay at the Capitol. He posted a picture of rioters in the Senate chamber with the caption “1776”, the year of the Declaration of Independence.Several days before the riot, a girlfriend sent Tarrio a document entitled “1776 Returns”. It called for storming and occupying government buildings, “for the purpose of getting the government to overturn the election results”, prosecutors said.More than 1,100 people have been charged in relation to the Capitol attack. More than 600 have been sentenced, more than half receiving prison terms.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

Gloria Johnson, who barely avoided expulsion for her role in a gun control rally in the State Legislature, is hoping to unseat Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Gloria Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Tennessee who narrowly avoided being expelled from the Legislature in April after taking part in a gun control protest on the statehouse floor, announced plans on Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Ms. Johnson, 61, received a flood of national attention after she joined two other Democrats, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, to interrupt debate on the floor of the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives and rally for stricter gun control measures in late March, just days after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville that killed six people.In retribution, Republicans moved to expel the three Democrats — sometimes called the Tennessee Three — from the Legislature. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were both ousted. Ms. Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments but avoided expulsion by just one vote. (Both men were later voted back into their positions.)Last week, the State Legislature held an emotional and chaotic special session meant to be devoted to public safety that ended without agreement on any significant new restrictions on firearm access.In a video announcing her Senate campaign, Ms. Johnson led with that issue, playing clips of news coverage of the Nashville shooting and highlighting her involvement in the gun control protest.“When my friends and I believed mothers and fathers who lost children at Covenant deserved a voice, and we fought for it, they expelled them,” she says in the video.Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, was first elected to the Tennessee House in 2012, then lost subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 before again winning in 2018. For the 2024 Senate race, she is running in a contested Democratic primary against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice activist who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2020.Both hope to unseat Ms. Blackburn, 71, who in 2018 became the first woman elected to represent Tennessee in the Senate.In her video, Ms. Johnson suggested that Ms. Blackburn was beholden to “extremists and billionaires,” criticizing her views on abortion.Senator Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Sigler, accused Ms. Johnson in a statement of being a “radical socialist” who “would be a puppet” for President Biden and progressive Democrats. More

Mark Gonzalez, facing a conservative effort to remove him from the district attorney’s office in Nueces County, Texas, resigned and announced his campaign for the Senate.Mark A. Gonzalez, a progressive district attorney in Nueces County, Texas, took an unusual tack when he came under fire from conservatives who didn’t like how he was doing his job.He resigned — to run for the United States Senate.Mr. Gonzalez announced Tuesday that he would join a large field of candidates in the Democratic primary to challenge Senator Ted Cruz next year, the most prominent of whom is Representative Colin Allred. In an interview, Mr. Gonzalez said his decision was directly tied to efforts to remove him from his elected office.“Prior to that, I hadn’t really had any more taste or want for politics,” he said. But “with the petition and some of the stuff that’s been going on at least statewide, it just kind of — I don’t know if the word is just angered me or incited me or something — and so I just decided that I don’t want to represent or try to represent just Nueces County. I want to represent Texans that want change.”He said the other issues that animated him included preserving abortion rights and voting rights, and combating conservative efforts to limit the teaching of subjects like the United States’ racial history.His campaign announcement video highlights Mr. Cruz’s decision to leave Texas for a vacation in Cancún in 2021 while the state was dealing with a disastrous winter storm, and contrasts that decision with a clip of Mr. Gonzalez during the same storm, asking Nueces County residents to notify his office of any incidents of price gouging. Mr. Cruz, a Republican seeking a third term in the Senate, fended off an unexpectedly fierce challenge from Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, in 2018. He won that race by about 2.5 percentage points, two years after Donald J. Trump had won the state by nine points.It will be an uphill battle for any Democrat to unseat Mr. Cruz given Texas’ partisan leanings, but his is one of the few Republican-held Senate seats — along with one in Florida — that Democrats may target amid a tough 2024 map. By contrast, Republicans see pickup opportunities in eight red or swing states. Democrats currently control the Senate by a narrow margin.Mr. Gonzalez does, however, have a record of winning difficult races. He was elected in Nueces County, home to the city of Corpus Christi, in 2016 and 2020, even as Mr. Trump narrowly won the county. He previously said he would not run for re-election as district attorney.“I think that more Texans probably can identify with a guy like me,” he said when asked what set him apart from the other Democratic candidates — a guy like him meaning, among other things, someone from a low-income family who has a criminal record.He added: “We have strong family values, we believe in small government, but I also believe in opportunity and giving people chances, and I think most Texans feel that way.”In his announcement video and his resignation letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, Mr. Gonzalez took the unusual step of emphasizing an element of his background that many candidates might have sidestepped: a drunk-driving arrest when he was 19. In the resignation letter, he said he had taken responsibility and pleaded guilty, then been dismayed to see the same charges dismissed for a defendant who, unlike Mr. Gonzalez, could afford a lawyer.“It dawned on me that the wealthy and well-connected have a different criminal legal system applied to them and accusations against them than everyone else does,” he wrote. “My ignorance of the system was detrimental to my life and has been to so many others just like me.”Mr. Gonzalez also drew attention to an effort by conservative activists to remove him from office, which his resignation has made moot. The conservative petition accused him of incompetence and official misconduct.The petition was both specific and broad. Specifically, it accused him of mishandling two capital murder cases. But it also accused him of having “intentionally nullified duly enacted laws of his oath of office,” reflecting a growing pattern of right-wing attempts to remove progressive prosecutors who have used their discretion to seek lower sentences or to decline to charge certain crimes.“They want to use me as a sacrificial lamb to send a foreboding message to other duly elected D.A.s in Texas who exercise their discretion,” Mr. Gonzalez wrote of state Republicans in his resignation letter.“I will not be used that way, nor will I run from a fight,” he added. “Quite the opposite, in fact.” More

Offering a look at both parties’ political strategies this year, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, as well as local scandals and crime.Just over a year before the 2024 elections, three races for governor in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi are offering a window into the parties’ political strategies and how they might approach statewide and congressional contests next year.Strikingly, even as former President Donald J. Trump’s indictments and President Biden’s polling struggles have consumed the national political conversation, the two men rarely show up in advertising for the three governor’s races.Since July, nearly 150 ads have been broadcast across the contests. Just one ad mentioned Mr. Trump. Three brought up Mr. Biden.Instead, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, according to an analysis of ad spending data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Attack ads about local scandals and controversies are frequent, and crime is the top advertising issue in the Kentucky governor’s race.Much as education was a dominant theme in Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor of Virginia in 2021, the issue remains one of the top advertising topics in both Kentucky and Louisiana, with nearly one in five ad dollars spent focusing on education over the past 60 days, according to AdImpact data.“Glenn Youngkin winning an off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia is the playbook,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who has researched political advertising. “You go with the last playbook.”Allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican looking to unseat Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, have seized on a message about education similar to the one that helped propel Mr. Youngkin to victory.“The radical left has declared war on parents, and Andy Beshear is with them,” proclaims one ad from Kentucky Values, a group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association.Mr. Beshear has countered by praising teachers, running an ad calling them “heroes” and pledging to increase their pay and expand universal preschool.“Our teachers are heroes, and public schools are the backbones of our communities,” Mr. Beshear says in the ad, standing in the middle of a classroom.Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican running for re-election, is running an ad boasting that he “got us back to school fast” during the coronavirus pandemic and criticizing other states for closing schools.In Louisiana, Jeff Landry, the Republican front-runner, is putting money behind an ad criticizing “woke politics” in schools and pledging to bring school agendas “back to basics.”No issue is getting more attention, in terms of total spending, than crime is in Kentucky. Twenty-five percent of ad spending in the state has focused on crime in the past month, according to AdImpact data.Ads from allies of Mr. Cameron warn of dangerous criminals flooding the streets as a result of a commutation program Mr. Beshear signed during the pandemic.Ads from allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican nominee for governor of Kentucky, warn about the early release of prison inmates. School Freedom FundOf course, these three states are all deep-red bastions in the South and are not representative of the country’s broader politics.Abortion, perhaps the biggest issue in major battleground states, is barely registering in these three governor’s races; in the past 30 days, not a single campaign ad has been broadcast on the topic in Kentucky or Louisiana. In Mississippi, the only ad regarding abortion is from Brandon Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor, who has diverged from many in his party by supporting abortion restrictions.“Sometimes the family Bible is the only place you have to turn,” Mr. Presley says, sitting at a table next to a dog-eared Bible that he says is his family’s. “It’s shaped who I am and what I believe. It’s why I’m pro-life.”Given that Mr. Trump carried all three states by double digits in 2020, his absence from the airwaves shows he may not be helpful to Republican campaigns in a general election.“These campaigns are really smart and have done in-depth analytics on who their target voter is who’s actually going to move in this election, and he’s probably not helpful to that group of people,” said Michael Beach, the chief executive of Cross Screen Media, a media analytics firm.That one mention of Mr. Trump? It was in an ad from Mr. Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, boasting that he had followed the former president’s lead in releasing prison inmates early. More