Elections

The US is at an increased risk of domestic terror attacks by rightwing “lone wolf” actors, experts have warned, as inflammatory Republican rhetoric around a variety of issues seems likely to continue ahead of the 2024 election.The number of attacks by adherents to rightwing ideology has soared since 2016, as Republican lies about election interference, and escalating rhetoric from the right about minority groups, have served to “provide mechanisms” for individuals to become radicalized, an analyst said.As the threat of domestic rightwing terrorism rises, researchers say individuals, rather than organized groups, are now far more likely to commit what analysts call “crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.There have been a series of such attacks in recent years. In May 2022 a white supremacist killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The attacker said he had chosen the location because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year.A self-described white nationalist killed 23 people and injured 22 in a shooting in El Paso, on the border of Mexico and the US, in 2019, in an anti-immigration attack targeting Hispanic people.In recent years a white supremacist killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, while just this week a man was arrested after he crashed a rented truck into bollards near the White House. The man subsequently praised Adolf Hitler to investigators and said he intended to “kill the president”, according to charging documents.​Michael Jensen, senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start) at the University of Maryland, said 70% of individuals committing terrorist acts in the US are individuals, or part of “isolated cliques” – small groups of three to four people.“That said, these individuals might be lone actors, but they’re not lonely actors,” Jensen said.“They are embedded in these online ecosystems where they are exchanging ideas with each other all day every day.”Jensen leads the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (Pirus) project, a database tracking how US extremists came to be radicalized.According to the data, 90% of the cases of US terrorists are classed as domestic. Of the domestic extremists, 95% are far-right, Jensen said: white supremacists, Proud Boys, anti-immigrant groups and anti-government groups.There has been a worrying increase in the number of attacks. Prior to 2016, Jensen and his team logged about 150 individuals a year who were “committing crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.Since 2016, the number of people committing such crimes has jumped to about 300-350 cases a year, Jensen said – not including a huge spike in 2021 as a result of the January 6 insurrection.As the number of incidents have risen, there have been changes in how people come to rightwing terrorism.“Before the internet and before social media, how an individual was likely to radicalize is that it was going to be through a face-to-face relationship that they had in the physical world,” Jensen said.“So they had a cousin that was involved in a skinhead gang and they recruited them, or there was a group active in their neighborhood and they saw a flyer and took an interest in it.“It was a much more labor intensive process to get people involved.”With the advent of social media, white supremacist ideas and groups are available “at the click of a button”, Jensen said. Individuals have a much easier path to becoming radicalized.At the same time, the threat of rightwing terrorism has been exacerbated by the normalizing of political violence, or violent rhetoric, by elected officials and media personalities. Prominent figures can provide a gateway for people to commit violence when they demonize immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, or indulge conspiracies like the great replacement theory, Jensen said.“They get this disinformation and conspiracy theories that are a bit more watered down: does not make calls to violence, but they provide the mechanisms for people to follow that narrative to the places where they will encounter that rhetoric.”Susan Corke, Intelligence Project Director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the far right has been “increasingly mobilized since the beginning of the Trump era”.“Currently, the level of mobilization, coordination and sustained focus of the far right’s anti-LGBTQ+, particularly anti-trans, is much worse.“The past year saw unprecedented violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and the most frequent victims were women of color, especially black transgender women,” Corke said.Corke said terror attacks by individuals should be seen within the wider context of hate-filled rhetoric and extremist platforms.“While a shooter or someone who takes violent action may act on their own, I would say that they are not solo actors,” she said.“People do not ‘self-radicalize’ – they exist within social and political structures that perpetuate these ideas, often through deliberate disinformation and active recruitment from groups espousing hateful ideologies.”Corke said the way to combat and prevent rightwing terrorism is to educate young people and work towards early intervention.“Communities and governments need to adopt a public health approach to preventing extremism by engaging communities, mental health experts, social workers and, especially, people involved in the day-to-day lives of young people,” she said.In 2021 a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the head of the US Intelligence Community – warned that racially motivated extremists posed the most lethal domestic terrorism threat. It echoed post-January 6 warnings from Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, that the threat from domestic violent extremism was “metastasizing” across the country.But despite the FBI and US intelligence pronouncements, a major problem with combating rightwing terrorism is that law enforcement does not adequately track of instances of violence, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent infiltrated white supremacy groups in the 1990s who now works at the Brennan Center for Justice.“The FBI doesn’t know how many people white supremacists killed last year in the United States. They don’t collect that information,” German said.When attacks by white supremacists do happen, “they often get parsed in a way that minimizes them,” he said. White supremacist violence is frequently recorded under the category of gang violence, rather than domestic terrorism, while attacks conducted by individuals who have far-right beliefs are frequently classified as hate crimes – outside of the domestic terrorism umbrella.“You would think that if the FBI and the justice department had a real interest in significantly suppressing this type of crime, they would at least count them,” German said.German said a significant change from the time he spent undercover to investigating neo-Nazi organizations in the 1990s to the modern environment is the language elected officials use to talk about certain groups.“Back in the 90s there were Republicans who used dog whistle politics, they used phrases and arguments that the far-right militant crowd understood as speaking to them about their issues,” German said.“Now you see sitting politicians who exalt in violence, and call for more of it and call for exonerating the people who committed violence because they committed violence in furtherance of their political cause.”That’s the kind of rhetoric that led to the January 6 insurrection, German said – and could continue to cause problems in the future.“If the government is saying: ‘Do it, and do it for me, and I’ll pardon you, or I’ll pay your legal bills, which are things that are said today. Then it’s easier [for members of the far right] to say: ‘Okay, this is this is authorized.’“That’s how you get 10,000 people attacking the US Capitol.” More

The election of Ryyan Alshebl, a young man who fled Syria, offers surprising lessons for a Germany wrestling with its multicultural identity after an influx of refugees in 2015.The beer was flowing, the bratwurst were sizzling and the brass band at the village May Day festival led the crowd in ever tipsier renditions of the local drinking song.Clinking glasses all around was Ryyan Alshebl, a lanky, bearded 29-year-old from Syria.Eight years ago, Mr. Alshebl was part of the historic influx of refugees who crossed the Mediterranean Sea by dinghy and trekked the continent on foot, seeking asylum in Germany and other countries.Now he is the new mayor of Ostelsheim, a village of 2,700 people and tidily kept streets nestled in the rolling hills near the Black Forest in southwestern Germany.Ostelsheim appears to be the first German town to elect a mayor from the nearly one million Syrian refugees who reached the country in 2015, a wave that provoked a right-wing backlash and upended the political landscape. And the story of how this small, tight-knit village chose a refugee as mayor holds clues for a nation wrestling with an ever more multicultural identity.“If you look at our state elections, Ostelsheim is the kind of place that votes so conservatively. I thought it was going to be very, very tough for him,” said Yvonne Boeckh, a tax accountant, shouting over a rowdy polka number at the festival. “It’s just remarkable.”When Mr. Alshebl reached Germany with a college degree in banking, politics was hardly on his mind. Alone without his parents, who stayed behind in Syria, he threw himself into his new world and its traditions.Yet like many of the 2015 refugees, now gaining citizenship and building new lives, he never wanted to hide where he came from or apologize for it. And he rejected Germany’s old notions of integration.“Integration​ ​was a term that meant: We have a group of people that we need to find a way to teach some of the language and get them working,” he said. “And what kind of jobs? To work for the baker, the butcher, the shoemaker. But not to become mayor.”An aerial view of Ostelsheim, which dates to the fourth century and is nestled in rolling hills near the Black Forest.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesThe 2015 refugees were welcomed at first with an exuberant “Wilkommenskultur” — and former chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous line, “we can do it.” But wariness among parts of the population was leveraged by the far right, who became a force in German politics. That trend has regained momentum — even pushing mainstream politicians into harsher positions — as the numbers of people seeking asylum are again rising.A leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats recently argued for removing Germany’s constitutional commitments to offer asylum. Today, over half of Germans polled believe the disadvantages of immigration outweigh advantages.Yet a majority of 2015 refugees have successfully found jobs and learned the language. And some have not simply integrated, but become leaders. For these newcomers, however, electoral success has been more elusive — even in large, multicultural cities like Berlin.Another Syrian refugee ran in the capital as a Green Party candidate for the federal parliament in the autumn of 2021. He faced death threats, was attacked at a subway stop and ultimately withdrew his candidacy.Mr. Alshebl, meeting with Franziska Binczik, the head of the kindergarten, in Althengstett, Germany, a village near Ostelsheim, in May.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesMr. Alshebl’s journey from Syria began in Sweida Province, where his middle-class family was passionate about politics, but kept their conversations secret. When President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian government drafted him into the army, he fled the country.Joining him was a friend, Ghaith Akel, a jovial tech engineer. The two 21-year-olds escaped to Turkey and spent eight nerve-racking hours on a rubber boat in the Mediterranean. They journeyed by train, bus and on foot across Europe to reach Germany.German officials sent the pair to the town of Althengstett, next door to Ostelsheim, in the rural Swabia region, where many people work in agriculture or the region’s famous auto industry. At first, they found the locals — mostly white Germans, with heavy regional dialects — daunting.“They put up boundaries,” Mr. Akel recalled. “You have to get past each and every one of those barriers to reach them. Anything new or strange, they find worrisome — ‘he’s not blonde, he doesn’t speak Swabian dialect.’”Eventually, they discovered the key to gaining acceptance by the community. They joined the local clubs.Mr. Alshebl volunteered at the recreation center. When a leadership position organizing games opened up, he ran. “People could have said, ‘No, we can’t have this Syrian guy who doesn’t know anything about this place,’” he said. “But they gave me a chance.”Ostelsheim’s town hall. Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesThat experience rekindled his interest in politics. He vowed to perfect his German, enrolled in a vocational program for government administration and applied for an internship at the Althengstett town council. Eventually, the Althengstett mayor, Clemens Götz, hired him.Mr. Alshebl also learned to appreciate the local food.Ulrich Gellar, an Ostelsheim retiree, beamed at Mr. Alshebl’s enjoyment of spaetzle, a cheesy noodle dish, and maultaschen, the local dumplings. “And he drinks beer with us,” he said. “Little things like that have a big impact.”When Mr. Alshebl heard about Ostelsheim’s mayoral race last winter, Mr. Götz encouraged him to run.The main rival was a wealthy Ostelsheimer, with three children and a large family home.His friend, Mr. Akel, was nervous for him. “It’s a small village,’” he said, adding, “Their views on refugees are not always the nicest.”But Mr. Akel helped his friend campaign, with a simple strategy: Talk to everyone.Mr. Alshebl not only went door to door, he put up advertisements offering house calls on request.The May Day festivities were held at the local soccer club.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesSipping beers at the May Day celebration, locals recalled how intently he listened. Mothers unburdened complaints about day care shortages. Seniors were impressed by his familiarity with their retirement home grievances. For the first time since anyone could remember, a mayoral campaign energized the village.Not everyone was friendly. On local news websites, some readers posted comments asking how anyone could vote for a refugee. One family confronted Mr. Alshebl with news reports of refugees committing vandalism elsewhere in Germany. Others spread rumors he would impose Islamic sharia law.Friends in Ostelsheim urged Mr. Alshebl to advertise he was not Muslim; he is from Syria’s minority Druze sect. But he refused: “I didn’t want to stigmatize Muslims.” On election night, he won decisively — with his biggest support from Ostelsheim’s oldest, most conservative residents.Rainer Sixt, head of the band playing the May Day festival, insisted the surprise victory made sense. “The values in some places abroad, like tradition and home, are more like here in the countryside than in our own big cities,” he said.After the celebration, Mr. Alshebl visited his mentor, Mr. Götz. and his wife, Isabel. It was funny, they agreed, how long it has taken Germany to embrace an identity as a country of immigrants; since the 1950s, it has taken in Turkish guest workers, Balkan civil war refugees and Eastern Bloc exiles.A children’s soccer game at the local club, in May. Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times“This was long the reality in Germany,” Ms. Götz said. “Only now, the public finally became aware that Germany is not the same thing it was before.”Sipping his coffee, Mr. Alshebl grinned mischievously: “Or, at least, not since the election in Ostelsheim.”Mr. Alshebl, who officially starts his new job next month, now straddles two worlds — a comfortable one in Germany, and his family’s life in Syria, where they struggle to survive in a country ravaged by 12 years of war.“Everything OK?” he asked his mother recently, quickly picking up her call in his office.“We’re all fine — just waiting for the electricity, like always,” she said. Their diverging paths are palpable. Mr. Alshebl throws German words into the conversation, often oblivious to his family’s confusion.He compares his life to that of Syrian friends who have resettled in cosmopolitan German cities. There, they can create a small community, set up shops to buy familiar foods and speak Arabic together.But driving past Ostelsheim’s charming stone buildings, Mr. Alshebl mused that he was elected mayor not in spite of his l community — but because of it.“Maybe the only place you can become a mayor as a refugee is actually in a conservative country town,” he said. “Because to live here, you have to be a part of them.”“Maybe the only place you can become a mayor as a refugee is actually in a conservative country town,” Mr. Alshebl said. “Because to live here, you have to be a part of them.”Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times More

Ron DeSantis entered the presidential race last week along with Tim Scott, with others to follow. For the former president, the more candidates the better.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida officially entered the presidential race last week, but he appears farther than ever from the one-on-one matchup that his allies believe he needs to wrest the nomination from former President Donald J. Trump.Former Vice President Mike Pence is burrowing deeper into Iowa, crucial to his effort to dislodge the Republican front-runners, even before he has announced his bid. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is intensifying preparations for another campaign, with an expected focus on New Hampshire. And Republican donors and leadership on Capitol Hill are showing fresh interest in Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who kicked off his campaign last week. Even candidates who have barely been mentioned are suddenly expressing interest in 2024.The rapidly ballooning field, combined with Mr. Trump’s seemingly unbreakable core of support, represents a grave threat to Mr. DeSantis, imperiling his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and could mirror the dynamics that powered Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party in 2016.Ron DeSantis met with supporters in Manchester, N.H., this month. Along with Iowa, the state is crucial for the Florida governor.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIt’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of Mr. DeSantis’s potential coalition — whether it be Mr. Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Mr. Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat into Mr. Trump’s votes. The former president’s base — more than 30 percent of Republicans — remains strongly devoted to him.“President Trump — he should go to the casino, he’s a lucky guy,” Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist based in New Hampshire, said of the former casino owner, Mr. Trump.“It’s a gigantic problem” for Mr. DeSantis, added Mr. Carney, who has worked on past presidential campaigns, because “whatever percentage they get makes it difficult for the second-place guy to win because there’s just not the available vote.”Mr. Trump’s advisers have almost gleefully greeted each successive entry as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that his team has spoken about since 2021. And many of the candidates seem more comfortable throwing punches at Mr. DeSantis than at Mr. Trump.The DeSantis campaign sees the landscape differently.“We don’t believe it’s 2016 again,” Ryan Tyson, a senior adviser to Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview.And in a private briefing for donors this week, Mr. Tyson described a Republican electorate split into three parts: 35 percent as “only Trump” voters, 20 percent as “never Trump” and the remaining 45 percent as the DeSantis sweet spot.Mr. Tyson told donors, in audio that was leaked and published online, that every entrant besides the two front-runners were isolated in the “never Trump” segment. “If your name is not Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, you are splitting up this share of the electorate,” he said.In the months leading up to his campaign launch, Mr. DeSantis and his allies framed the 2024 primaries as a two-man race. But as he has stumbled in recent months, amid questions about his personality and political dexterity, rivals have become emboldened. And some have the cash to stay relevant deep into the primary calendar.Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, announced his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination last week.Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesMr. Scott entered the race with nearly $22 million on hand, and he raised $2 million more in his first day as a candidate. The wealthy, little-known governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, now sees a 2024 opening, filming ads recently to prepare for an imminent campaign, according to two people involved in the planning.Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, has invested $10 million of his own money in his campaign. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy sells a similar anti-woke sentiment, but he does so with the charm of a natural communicator.Mr. Trump has welcomed the non-DeSantis entrants to the race. In January, when Nikki Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, called to tell him she planned to run, Mr. Trump did not rant about her disloyalty, as some had expected. He sounded unbothered, telling her to “do what you’ve got to do,” according to two people briefed on their conversation.And in the days leading up to Mr. Scott’s announcement, Mr. Trump was watching Fox News in his Mar-a-Lago office when he said, “I like him. We’re just going to say nice things about Tim,” according to a person familiar with his private comments.The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the year was that the field would be relatively small, perhaps as few as five people running. Republican anti-Trump donors were working to thin the herd to prevent a repeat of the divided field that guaranteed Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. Now, after Mr. DeSantis’s early stumbles, there will likely be as many as 10 candidates competing for attention and vying for the debate stage.For Mr. DeSantis, the squeeze was apparent on the day he entered the race.In New Hampshire, Ms. Haley mocked him on Fox News as merely “copying Trump,” down to his mannerisms. “If he’s just going to be an echo of Trump, people will just vote for Trump,” she said.In Iowa, Mr. Pence sat down with the type of mainstream media outlets that Mr. DeSantis has shunned, including The Des Moines Register. Mr. Pence also met with Bob Vander Plaats, the same evangelical leader Mr. DeSantis had recently brought to Tallahassee for a private meal.The split screen was a reminder that Mr. DeSantis is being pinched both ideologically and geographically, as the field expands.Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, announced her bid for president in February.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Pence and Mr. Scott have made plain their plans to vie for influential evangelical voters in Iowa. In New Hampshire, both Mr. Christie, who focused his campaign on the state in 2016, and the state’s sitting governor, Chris Sununu, a moderate who has left the door open to a run, threaten to siphon votes from Mr. DeSantis. And in South Carolina, he will be sandwiched between two home-state candidates, the former governor Ms. Haley and Mr. Scott.Many Republicans who want to defeat Mr. Trump are aghast at the exploding field — along with Mr. DeSantis’s underwhelming performance in recent months. Mr. DeSantis has slipped in the polls and now trails Mr. Trump in all states and by an average of more than 30 percentage points nationally.“All Republicans have to be hitting Donald Trump,” said Mr. Sununu, who described himself as “50-50” about entering the race. “Any Republican that isn’t hitting Donald Trump hard right now is doing the entire party a disservice because if only one or two people are willing to take a shot at Donald Trump, it looks personal. It looks petty.”So far, Mr. Christie has gotten the most attention for his direct attacks on Mr. Trump, which he has signaled would be crucial to his candidacy. But he also has delighted in needling Mr. DeSantis at times, an acknowledgment of the Florida governor’s position in the race.Former Vice President Mike Pence, in dark suit, talks with Will Rogers, a lobbyist, during a meet-and-greet in Des Moines, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe reluctance to go after Mr. Trump, for many Republicans, feels eerily like a repeat of 2016. Then, Mr. Trump’s rivals left him mostly alone for months, assuming that he would implode or that they were destined to beat him the moment they could narrow the field to a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never transpired.The two Florida-based candidates in that race, Senator Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, a former governor, spent millions of dollars strafing each other. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who wound up as Mr. Trump’s top rival, gloated privately to donors that he was bear-hugging Mr. Trump while also patiently waiting for the moment to pounce. It never came.Mr. Trump’s current rivals seem exasperated by their collective inability to crack his foundation: Mr. Trump’s supporters have been trained for years to come to his defense whenever he is under fire.Mr. Trump has another asymmetrical advantage: Current and potential rivals have sought to avoid criticizing him too harshly so as not to alienate Republicans who still like Mr. Trump and are automatically suspicious of anyone attacking him. By contrast, other 2024 contenders have shown no hesitation in going after Mr. DeSantis.“His team — maybe him — is excellent at manufacturing the veneer of courage without actually delivering on the real thing,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview last month. “And that can work across TV and even social media,” he added. “But once you poke a little bit, it’s like a little bubble in the air: A little touch, and it’s burst.”Mr. Ramaswamy, who has criticized Mr. Trump, has aimed most of his fire at Mr. DeSantis. A close friend of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr. Ramaswamy dined with Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner at the former president’s New Jersey club, Bedminster, in 2021, according to two people familiar with the event.And while the field grows, there is the matter of the debate stage, where Mr. Trump eviscerated his opponents in the 2016 primary.The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, said earlier this year that she did not expect to need two debate stages as the party required in 2016, with the tiers of candidates determined by polling.But there could be as many as a dozen declared candidates by August, and many are already racing to collect the 40,000 donors and 1 percent polling threshold the party has indicated will be needed to get onstage. This pool includes longer-shot candidates like Larry Elder, the talk radio host who got walloped in the California recall election.“Everyone says, ‘We have to keep people from getting in.’” Mr. Sununu said. “That’s the wrong message, the wrong mentality, and that’s not going to work.”But he acknowledged that consolidation will eventually be needed to defeat Mr. Trump.“The discipline,” Mr. Sununu added, “is getting out.” More

This week, two candidates officially joined the Republican presidential field: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.They join four other declared candidates: Donald Trump; a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley; a former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson; and a businessman, Vivek Ramaswamy. Also, Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, is poised to make another bid for the presidential nomination, and the governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, is reconsidering his decision to take himself out of the race. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota (who?) might make a run, and Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, continues to act as if he’s in the ring.All told, the Republican presidential field might end up almost as large and divided as the one in 2016. Which is to say that the 2024 Republican primary is, at this stage, shaping up to be a retread of the one that catapulted Trump to the commanding heights of the American political system.Once again, it is clear that many Republican elites would prefer to have someone other than Trump at the top of the ticket. But once again, those elites — donors, intellectuals, activists — are having a hard time finding a single alternative candidate to challenge the former president. DeSantis was supposed to play that part, but he has struggled to gain a foothold with Republican voters and has shown a tin ear for the challenges of national politics. As of Friday, he is far behind Trump in nearly every major poll of the national Republican primary electorate.If DeSantis continues to recede, other candidates will try to claim his spot as the party’s main alternative to Trump. And therein lies the problem. As long as there are multiple candidates vying for this position, Trump has the political space he needs to consolidate his support, which is still much greater than his rivals’.What’s more, there’s no sign that any candidate is ready to truly go on the offensive against the former president and try to render him anathema to Republican voters. Supporters of DeSantis, for example, can point to his credentials and fund-raising and conservative record in Florida. But none of that matters unless he is willing and able to make the case against Trump. So far, DeSantis hasn’t been. So far, none of the most viable candidates in the Republican presidential field appear to be ready to take that step.You could even say that there are no truly anti-Trump candidates in the Republican primary, just people hoping to take his place in the conservative political imagination. That’s why DeSantis has, as part of his campaign rollout, said he will consider pardoning some of the Jan. 6 rioters.Unless any of this changes, we can expect this Republican primary to unfold like the one in 2016, with each candidate doing everything in their power to avoid alienating Trump voters too much in the vain hope that they might capture them once Trump is out of the race. But now as then, there’s no reason to think he will leave. Which means that now as then, there’s no reason to think Trump will lose.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on Justice Neil Gorsuch’s blinkered view of American history.In which case, Gorsuch’s denunciation of pandemic restrictions acts as an inadvertent glimpse into his view of the United States. With one notable exception (and it is quite notable) — the history of Native Americans — he is willing to ignore or doesn’t even see our long, peacetime history of repression and internal tyranny. What he seems to see instead is a long history of liberty with some significant exceptions, including our recent experience with the pandemic.My Friday column was on state governments as threats to American freedom rather than defenders of American liberties.That it is states, and specifically state legislatures, that are the vanguard of a repressive turn in American life shouldn’t be a surprise. Americans have a long history with various forms of subnational authoritarianism: state and local tyrannies that sustained themselves through exclusion, violence and the political security provided by the federal structure of the American political system.And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discuss the 1995 film “Judge Dredd.”Now ReadingKate Aronoff on the Inflation Reduction Act for Dissent.Michael Kazin on the Industrial Workers of the World for The Nation.Jeremy Lybarger on Rainer Werner Fassbinder for The Baffler.Sheryll Cashin on American poverty for Politico magazine.Moira Donegan on the connection between conservative attacks on abortion and trans health care for The Guardian.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieThere’s an old hotel in Charlottesville that caught fire and sat dilapidated for years until recently, when it was bulldozed. This is a photo of the hotel just before it was razed. I think the owners are, as you might expect, going to build a new hotel.Now Eating: Chile-Oil Noodles With CilantroI am going to spend most of Memorial Day cooking a big meal for friends and family, which means that I don’t want to spend much time in the kitchen on Sunday. Enter chile-oil noodles. They are extremely easy to throw together, and I can serve them with virtually any protein. (In this case, I’ll stir-fry some chicken I have in the freezer.) Most important, I know the kids will eat them. The children are, for reasons I don’t completely understand, obsessed with noodles.Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients14 ounces dried udon noodles¼ cup chile oil with crunchy garlic2 tablespoons pure sesame oil2 teaspoons Sichuan chile oil, or to taste2 teaspoons soy sauce½ cup finely sliced garlic scapes or scallions, plus more for garnish2 tablespoons store-bought fried shallots, crumbled by hand (optional)½ cup finely chopped cilantro (see Note), plus a few sprigs for garnishDirectionsBring a large pot of water to boil and cook noodles according to package instructions, stirring from time to time to prevent them from sticking. Drain well in a colander, then run noodles under cold water until cooled.Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine all three oils with the soy sauce and ½ cup garlic chives.Toss cooled noodles into the chile oil mixture. Gently fold in the crumbled fried shallots and chopped cilantro. Divide among four bowls and top with more garlic chives and cilantro sprigs. More

In August 2021, the Fox Corporation board of directors gathered on the company’s movie studio lot in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News.The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court.Mr. Dinh told others inside the company that Fox’s possible legal costs, at tens of millions of dollars, could outstrip any damages the company would have to pay to Dominion.That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making.The case resulted in one of the biggest legal and business debacles in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures from internal messages released in court filings; the largest known settlement in a defamation suit, $787.5 million; two shareholder lawsuits; and the benching of Fox’s top prime-time star, Tucker Carlson.And for all of that, Fox still faces a lawsuit seeking even more in damages, $2.7 billion, filed by another subject of the stolen-election theory, the voting software company Smartmatic, which can now build on the evidence produced in the Dominion case to press its own considerable claims.In the month since the settlement, Fox has refused to comment in detail on the case or the many subsequent setbacks. That has left a string of unanswered questions: Why did the company not settle earlier and avoid the release of private emails and texts from executives and hosts? How did one of the most potentially prejudicial pieces of evidence — a text from Mr. Carlson about race and violence — escape high-level notice until the eve of the trial? How did Fox’s pretrial assessment so spectacularly miss the mark?Repeatedly, Fox executives overlooked warning signs about the damage they and their network would sustain, The Times found. They also failed to recognize how far their cable news networks, Fox News and Fox Business, had strayed into defamatory territory by promoting President Donald J. Trump’s election conspiracy theories — the central issue in the case. (Fox maintains it did not defame Dominion.)When pretrial rulings went against the company, Fox did not pursue a settlement in any real way. Executives were then caught flat-footed as Dominion’s court filings included internal Fox messages that made clear how the company chased a Trump-loving audience that preferred his election lies — the same lies that helped feed the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — to the truth.It was only in February, with the overwhelming negative public reaction to those disclosures, that Mr. Murdoch and his son with whom he runs the company, Lachlan Murdoch, began seriously considering settling. Yet they made no major attempt to do so until the eve of the trial in April, after still more damaging public disclosures.At the center of the action was Mr. Dinh and his overly rosy scenario.Mr. Dinh declined several requests for comment, and the company declined to respond to questions about his performance or his legal decisions. “Discussions of specific legal strategy are privileged and confidential,” a company representative said in a statement.Defenders of Mr. Dinh, a high-level Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, say his initial position was sound. Because of the strength of American free speech protections, Dominion needed to clear a high bar. And unfavorable rulings from the Delaware judge who oversaw the case hurt Fox’s chances, they argue.“I think Viet and Fox carried out just the right strategy by moving down two paths simultaneously — first, mounting a strong legal defense, one that I think would have eventually won at the appellate stage, and, second, continuously assessing settlement opportunities at every stage,” said William P. Barr, the former attorney general under Mr. Trump who worked with Mr. Dinh earlier in his career. Of course, the case would have been difficult for any lawyer. As the internal records showed, executives knew conspiracy theories about Dominion were false yet did not stop hosts and guests from airing them.That placed Fox in the ultimate danger zone, where First Amendment rights give way to the legal liability that comes from knowingly promoting false statements, referred to in legalese as “actual malice.”An Unanswered LetterMaria Bartiromo was the first Fox host to air the Dominion conspiracy theory.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesThe fall of 2020 brought Fox News to a crisis point. The Fox audience had come to expect favorable news about President Trump. But Fox could not provide that on election night, when its decision desk team was first to declare that Mr. Trump had lost the critical state of Arizona.In the days after, Mr. Trump’s fans switched off in droves. Ratings surged at the smaller right-wing rival Newsmax, which, unlike Fox, was refusing to recognize Joseph R. Biden’s victory.The Fox host who was the first to find a way to draw the audience back was Maria Bartiromo. Five days after the election, she invited a guest, the Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell, to share details about the false accusations that Dominion, an elections technology company, had switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.Soon, wild claims about Dominion appeared elsewhere on Fox, including references to the election company’s supposed (but imagined) ties to the Smartmatic election software company; Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013; George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor; and China.On Nov. 12, a Dominion spokesman complained to the Fox News Media chief executive, Suzanne Scott, and the Fox News Media executive editor, Jay Wallace, begging them to make it stop. “We really weren’t thinking about building a litigation record as much as we were trying to stop the bleeding,” Thomas A. Clare, one of Dominion’s lawyers, said recently at a post-mortem discussion of the case held by a First Amendment advocacy group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.As Fox noted in its court papers, its hosts did begin including company denials. But as they continued to give oxygen to the false allegations, Dominion sent a letter to the Fox News general counsel, Lily Fu Claffee, demanding that Fox cease and correct the record. “Dominion is prepared to do what is necessary to protect its reputation and the safety of its employees,” the letter warned.It came amid more than 3,600 messages that Dominion sent debunking the conspiracy theories to network hosts, producers and executives in the weeks after the election.Such letters often set off internal reviews at news organizations. Fox’s lawyers did not conduct one. Had they done so, they may have learned of an email that Ms. Bartiromo received in November about one of Ms. Powell’s original sources on Dominion.The source intimated that her information had come from a combination of dreams and time travel. (“The wind tells me I’m a ghost but I don’t believe it,” she had written Ms. Powell.)Dan Novack, a First Amendment lawyer, said that if he ever stumbled upon such an email in a client’s files, he would “physically wrest my client’s checkbook from them and settle before the police arrive.”Fox, however, did not respond to the Dominion letter or comply with its requests — now a key issue in a shareholder suit filed in April, which maintains that doing so would have “materially mitigated” Fox’s legal exposure.The CaseDominion’s chief executive, John Poulos, at a news conference in April after the company settled its defamation suit against Fox.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThree months after the election, another voting technology company tied to the Dominion conspiracy, Smartmatic, filed its own defamation suit against Fox, seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Dominion told reporters that it was preparing to file one, too.Mr. Dinh was publicly dismissive.“The newsworthy nature of the contested presidential election deserved full and fair coverage from all journalists, Fox News did its job, and this is what the First Amendment protects,” Mr. Dinh said at the time in a rare interview with the legal writer David Lat. “I’m not at all concerned about such lawsuits, real or imagined.”Mr. Dinh was saying as much inside Fox, too, according to several people familiar with his actions at the time. His words mattered.A refugee of Vietnam who fled the Communist regime and landed with his family in the United States virtually penniless, he graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law and was a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As an assistant attorney general for George W. Bush, he helped draft the Patriot Act expanding government surveillance powers. He and Lachlan Murdoch later became so close that Mr. Dinh, 55, is godfather to one of Mr. Murdoch’s sons.Mr. Dinh took a hands-on approach to the Dominion case, and eventually split with a key member of the outside team, Charles L. Babcock of Jackson Walker, according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions.After disagreement over the best way to formulate Fox’s defense, Jackson Walker and Fox parted ways. George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for The Times, said Mr. Babcock’s exit had left Fox down a seasoned defamation defense lawyer. “He’s probably the best trial lawyer in the media bar,” Mr. Freeman said.By then, Mr. Dinh was fashioning the legal team more in his own image, having brought in a longtime colleague from the Bush administration, the former solicitor general Paul Clement.Mr. Clement’s presence on the Fox team was itself an indication of Mr. Dinh’s willingness to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court — few members of the conservative legal bar had more experience there.Mr. Dinh hired Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney, for the role of lead litigator, succeeding Mr. Babcock. Mr. Webb was known for representing a beef manufacturer that sued ABC News over reports about a product sometimes referred to as “pink slime.” The case was settled in 2017 for more than $170 million.The Fox legal team based much of the defense on a doctrine known as the neutral reportage privilege. It holds that news organizations cannot be held financially liable for damages when reporting on false allegations made by major public figures as long as they don’t embrace or endorse them.“If the president of the United States is alleging that there was fraud in an election, that’s newsworthy, whether or not there’s fraud in the election,” Mr. Clement told Jim Geraghty, a writer for National Review and The Washington Post. “It’s the most newsworthy thing imaginable.”Fox remained so confident, the company said in reports to investors that it did not anticipate the suit would have “a material adverse effect.”But the neutral reportage privilege is not universally recognized. Longtime First Amendment lawyers who agree with the principle in theory had their doubts that it would work, given that judges have increasingly rejected it.“Most astute media defamation defense lawyers would not, and have not for a very long time, relied on neutral reportage — certainly as a primary line of defense, because the likelihood that a court would accept it as a matter of First Amendment law has continued to diminish over time,” said Lee Levine, a veteran media lawyer. An early warning came in late 2021. The judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, rejected Fox’s attempt to use the neutral reportage defense to get the suit thrown out altogether, determining that it was not recognized under New York law, which he was applying to the case. Even if it was recognized, Fox would have to show it reported on the allegations “accurately and dispassionately,” and Dominion had made a strong argument that Fox’s reporting was neither, the judge wrote in a ruling.That ruling meant that Dominion, in preparing its arguments, could have access to Fox’s internal communications in discovery.That was a natural time to settle. But Fox stuck with its defense and its plan, which always foresaw a potential loss at trial. “There was a strong belief that the appeal could very well be as important, or more important, than the trial itself,” Mr. Webb said at the post-mortem discussion of the case with Mr. Clare.Things Fall ApartText messages that came to light in the Dominion case included assertions by the Fox host Tucker Carlson that voter fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesFox executives did not foresee how daunting the discovery process would become.At nearly every step, the court overruled Fox’s attempts to limit Dominion’s access to private communications exchanged among hosts, producers and executives. The biggest blow came last summer, after a ruling stating that Dominion could review messages from the personal phones of Fox employees, including both Murdochs.The result was a treasure trove of evidence for Dominion: text messages and emails that revealed the doubts that Rupert Murdoch had about the coverage airing on his network, and assertions by many inside Fox, including Mr. Carlson, that fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.The messages led to even more damaging revelations during depositions. After Dominion’s lawyers confronted Mr. Murdoch with his own messages showing he knew Mr. Trump’s stolen election claims were false, he admitted that some Fox hosts appeared to have endorsed stolen election claims.That appeared to have undermined Fox’s defense. But Mr. Dinh told Mr. Murdoch afterward that he thought the deposition had gone well, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. Mr. Murdoch then pointed a finger in the direction of the Dominion lawyer who had just finished questioning him and said, “I think he would strongly disagree with that.”During Mr. Carlson’s deposition last year, Dominion’s lawyers asked about his use of a crude word to describe women — including a ranking Fox executive. They also mentioned a text in which he discussed watching a group of men, who he said were Trump supporters, attack “an Antifa kid.” He lamented in the text, “It’s not how white men fight,” and shared a momentary wish that the group would kill the person. He then said he regretted that instinct.Mr. Carlson felt blindsided by the extent of the questions, according to associates and confirmed by a video leaked to the left-leaning group Media Matters: “Ten hours,” he exclaimed to people on the set of his show, referring to how long he was questioned. “It was so unhealthy, the hate I felt for that guy,” he said about the Dominion lawyer who had questioned him.There is no indication that Mr. Carlson’s texts tripped alarms at the top of Fox at that point.The alarms rang in February, when reams of other internal Fox communications became public. The public’s reaction was so negative that some people at the company believed that a jury in Delaware — which was likely to be left-leaning — could award Dominion over a billion dollars. Yet the company made no serious bid to settle.With prominent First Amendment lawyers declaring that Dominion had an exceptionally strong case, a siege mentality appeared to set in.In the interview with Mr. Geraghty, Mr. Clement said Fox was being singled out for its politics. Unlike mainstream media, which tend to report on major events the same way and have power in numbers, he said, “conservative media, or somebody like Fox, is in a much more vulnerable position.” He added, “If they report it, and the underlying allegations aren’t true, they’re much more out there on an island.”Reflecting the view of Mr. Dinh’s supporters even now, Mr. Barr, the former attorney general, said the “mainstream media stupidly cheered on Dominion’s case,” which he said they would come to regret because it would weaken their First Amendment protections. (He made a similar argument in March in The Wall Street Journal.)But Judge Davis had determined that Fox had set itself apart by failing to conduct “good-faith, disinterested reporting” in the segments at issue in the suit. That was in large part why, just ahead of opening statements, he ruled that Fox could not make neutral reportage claims that the conspiracy theory was newsworthy at the trial, knocking out a pillar of Fox’s strategy. (He also ruled that Fox had, indeed, defamed the company in airing the false statements.)Mr. Webb, who had already drafted much of his opening statement and tested it with a focus group, had to remove key parts of his remarks, he said in the post-trial discussion with Mr. Clare.The Directors Step InRupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesAll along, the Fox board had been taking a wait-and-see approach.But the judge’s pretrial decisions began to change the board’s thinking. Also, in those final days before the trial, Fox was hit with new lawsuits. One, from the former Fox producer Abby Grossberg, accused Mr. Carlson of promoting a hostile work environment. Another, filed by a shareholder, accused the Murdochs and several directors of failing to stop the practices that made Fox vulnerable to legal claims.The weekend before trial was to begin, with jury selection already underway, the board asked Fox to see the internal Fox communications that were not yet public but that could still come out in the courtroom.That Sunday, the board learned for the first time of the Carlson text that referred to “how white men fight.” Mr. Dinh did not know about the message until that weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter. Fox’s lawyers believed it would not come out at trial, because it was not relevant to the legal arguments at hand. The board, however, was concerned that Dominion was prepared to use the message to further undermine the company with the jury.In an emergency meeting that Sunday evening, the board — with an eye on future lawsuits, including those from Smartmatic and Ms. Grossberg — decided to hire the law firm Wachtell, Lipton Rosen & Katz to investigate whether any other problematic texts from Mr. Carlson or others existed.Over that same weekend, Lachlan Murdoch told his settlement negotiators to offer Dominion more than the $550 million for which he had already received board approval.In interviews, people with knowledge of the deliberations disagreed about how much Mr. Carlson’s text contributed to the final $787.5 million settlement price.By the time the board learned of the message, the Murdochs had already determined that a trial loss could be far more damaging than they were initially told to expect. A substantial jury award could weigh on the company’s stock for years as the appeals process played out.“The distraction to our company, the distraction to our growth plans — our management — would have been extraordinarily costly, which is why we decided to settle,” Lachlan Murdoch said at an investment conference this month.But there was broad agreement among people with knowledge of the discussions that the Carlson text, and the board’s initiation of an investigation, added to the pressure to avoid trial.The text also helped lead to the Murdochs’ decision a few days later to abruptly pull Mr. Carlson off the air. Their view had hardened that their top-rated star wasn’t worth all the downsides he brought with him.Fox’s trouble has not ended. In the weeks since the settlement and Mr. Carlson’s ouster, prime-time ratings have dropped (though Fox remains No. 1 in cable news), and new plaintiffs sued the network, most recently a former Homeland Security official, Nina Jankowicz.As one of Ms. Jankowicz’s lawyers said in an interview, the Dominion case “signals that there is a path.”Still pending is the Smartmatic suit. In late April, Fox agreed to hand over additional internal documents relating to several executives, including the Murdochs and Mr. Dinh. In a statement reminiscent of Mr. Dinh’s early view of the Dominion case, the network said that the $2.7 billion in damages sought by Smartmatic — operating in only one county in 2020 — were implausible and that Fox was protected by the First Amendment.“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” the statement said. More

If you had told me several months ago, immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and Ron DeSantis celebrated a thumping re-election victory, that DeSantis would launch his presidential campaign in conversation with Musk, I would have thought, intriguing: The rightward-trending billionaire whose rockets and cars stand out in an economy dominated by apps and financial instruments meets the Republican politician whose real-world victories contrast with the virtual populism of Donald Trump.The actual launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, in a “Twitter Spaces” event that crashed repeatedly and played to a smaller audience than he would have claimed just by showing up on Fox, instead offered the political version of the lesson that we’ve been taught repeatedly by Musk’s stewardship of Twitter: The internet can be a trap.For the Tesla and SpaceX mogul, the trap was sprung because Musk wanted to attack the groupthink of liberal institutions, and seeing that groupthink manifest on his favorite social media site, he imagined that owning Twitter was the key to transforming public discourse.But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.Thus he’s tried to sell the privilege of verification, the famous “blue checks,” without recognizing that they were valued because of their connection to real-world institutions and lose value if they reflect a Twitter hierarchy alone. Or he’s encouraged his favored journalists to publish their scoops and essays on his site when it isn’t yet built out for that kind of publication. Or he’s encouraged media figures like Tucker Carlson and now politicians like DeSantis to run shows or do interviews on his platform, without having the infrastructure in place to make all that work.It’s entirely possible that Musk can build out that infrastructure eventually, and make Twitter more capacious than it is today. But there isn’t some immediate social-media shortcut to the influence he’s seeking. If you want Twitter to be the world’s news hub, you probably need a Twitter newsroom. If you want Twitter to host presidential candidates, you probably need a Twitter channel that feels like a professional newscast. And while you’re trying to build those things, you need to be careful that the nature of social media doesn’t diminish you to the kind of caricatured role — troll instead of tycoon — that tempts everyone on Twitter.That kind of diminishment is what the Twitter event handed to DeSantis, whose choppy launch may be forgotten but who would be wise to learn from what went wrong. There’s an emerging critique of the Florida governor that suggests that his whole persona is too online — that his talk about wokeness, wokeness, wokeness is pitched to a narrow and internet-based faction within the G.O.P., that he’s setting himself to be like Elizabeth Warren in 2020, whose promise of plans, plans, plans thrilled the wonk faction but fell flat with normal Democratic voters.I think this critique is overdrawn. If you look at polling of Republican primary voters, the culture war appears to be a general concern rather than an elite fixation, and there’s a plausible argument that the conflict with the new progressivism is the main thing binding the G.O.P. coalition together.But it does seem true that the conflict with progressivism in the context of social media is a more boutique taste, and that lots of anti-woke conservatives aren’t particularly invested in whether the previous Twitter regime was throttling such-and-such right-wing influencer or taking orders from such-and-such “disinformation” specialist. And it’s also true that DeSantis is running against a candidate who, at any moment, can return to Twitter and bestride its feeds like a colossus, no matter whatever Republican alternative the Chief Twit might prefer.So introducing himself in that online space made DeSantis look unnecessarily small — smaller than Musk’s presence and Trump’s absence, shrunk down to the scale of debates about shadowbanning and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The Florida governor’s best self-advertisement in a primary should be his promise to be more active in reality than Trump, with his claim to be better at actual governance made manifest through his advantage in flesh-pressing, campaign-trail-hitting energy.The good news for DeSantis is that he doesn’t have billions invested in a social media company, so having endured a diminishing introduction he can slip the trap and walk away — toward the crowds, klieg lights and the grass.For Musk, though, escape requires either the admission of defeat in this particular arena or else a long campaign of innovation that eventually makes Twitter as big as he wrongly imagined it to be.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 Texas attorney general has called for his supporters to protest at the state capitol when Republicans in the House of Representatives take up historical impeachment proceedings against him. The state house has set a Saturday vote to consider impeaching Republican Ken Paxton and suspending him from office over allegations of bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of public trust. ‘I want to invite my fellow citizens and friends to peacefully come let their voices be heard at the capitol tomorrow,’ Paxton said at a news conference on Friday. The request echoes that of the former president Donald Trump for people to protest against his electoral defeat on 6 January 2021, when a mob violently stormed the US Capitol in Washington. More

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More