Elections

The founder of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, and members of his anti-government group will be the first January 6 defendants sentenced for seditious conspiracy in hearings beginning this week and expected to set the standard for punishments to follow.Prosecutors will urge the judge on Thursday to put Rhodes behind bars for 25 years, which would be the harshest sentence by far handed down over the US Capitol attack.Describing the Oath Keepers’ actions as “terrorism”, the justice department says stiff punishments are crucial.“The justice system’s reaction to January 6 bears the weighty responsibility of impacting whether January 6 becomes an outlier or a watershed moment,” prosecutors wrote this month.The hearings will begin on Wednesday with lawyers expected to argue over legal issues and the start of victim impact statements being read.Rhodes, from Granbury, Texas, and the Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs – who were convicted of seditious conspiracy in November – will receive their sentences on Thursday. Six more Oath Keepers will be sentenced this week and next.Rhodes and Meggs were the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty at trial of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a plot to stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Three co-defendants were acquitted of sedition but convicted of obstructing certification of Biden’s victory. Another four Oath Keepers were convicted of sedition in January.Prosecutors are seeking sentences ranging from 10 to 21 years for the Oath Keepers besides Rhodes. The judge canceled sentencing scheduled this week for one defendant, Thomas Caldwell of Berryville, Virginia, as he weighs whether to overturn a guilty verdict on two charges.Prosecutors are urging the judge to apply enhanced penalties for terrorism, arguing the Oath Keepers sought to influence the government through “intimidation or coercion”. Judges have so far rejected a request to apply the so-called “terrorism enhancement” in a handful of January 6 cases but the Oath Keepers case is unlike any others that have reached sentencing.“The defendants were not mere trespassers or rioters, and they are not comparable to any other defendant who has been convicted for a role in the attack on the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote.More than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes stemming from the riot. Just over 500 have been sentenced, more than half receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a week to more than 14 years. The longest sentence came earlier this month, for a man with a long criminal record who attacked police with pepper spray and a chair.The sentences for the Oath Keepers may signal how much time prosecutors will seek for leaders of the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy this month. They include the former national chairman Enrique Tarrio, perhaps the most high-profile person charged. The Proud Boys are scheduled to be sentenced in August and September.Prosecutors made the case that Rhodes and his followers prepared an armed rebellion to keep Biden out of the White House. Over seven weeks, jurors heard how Rhodes rallied followers to fight to defend Trump, discussed the prospect of a “bloody” civil war and warned the Oath Keepers may have to “rise up in insurrection”.Jurors watched video of Rhodes’s followers wearing combat gear and shouldering through the crowd in military-style stack formation before forcing their way into the Capitol. They saw surveillance video at a Virginia hotel where prosecutors said Oath Keepers stashed weapons for “quick reaction force” teams which never deployed.Rhodes, who did not go inside the Capitol, told jurors there was never any plan to attack the Capitol and his followers who did went rogue. His lawyers urged the judge to sentence him to roughly 16 months already served. Attorneys argued that Rhodes’s writings and statements are “protected political speech”. More

As the Florida governor prepares to enter the 2024 race, his allies are building an army of organizers to flood the states with the first nominating contests.A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns.Top officials with the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, provided their most detailed account yet of their battle plan to aid Mr. DeSantis, whom they believe they can sell as the only candidate to take on — and win — the cultural fights that are definitional for the Republican Party in 2024.The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from an old DeSantis state political account, for the daunting task of vaulting the Florida governor past former President Donald J. Trump, who has established himself as the dominant early front-runner.Mr. DeSantis is set to enter the presidential race on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter, and the super PAC’s enormous cash reserves are expected to be among the few advantages that Mr. DeSantis has in the race.The group is already taking on many tasks often reserved for the campaign itself: securing endorsements in early primary states, sending mailers, organizing on campuses, running television ads, raising small donations for the campaign in an escrow account and working behind the scenes to build crowds for the governor’s events. Hiring is underway in 18 states and officials said plans were in the works to assemble various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those focused on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.“No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,” said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. “This has just never even been dreamed up.”In Iowa, the group has opened a boot camp on the outskirts of Des Moines, giving the facility the code name “Fort Benning,” after the old Army training outpost, with 189 graduates of an eight-day training program the first wave of an organizing army to follow. Door knocking begins on Wednesday in New Hampshire.The endeavor echoes the “Camp Cruz” that Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign set up near Des Moines.As Mr. DeSantis prepared for his first campaign events as a declared candidate, his allies for the first time detailed the show of force they are mustering to advance their strategy for prying away supporters of Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis at a round-table discussion last week in New Hampshire. Before his 2024 campaign is official, he has been making routine stops on the campaign trail.Sophie Park for The New York TimesAt the helm of the DeSantis super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016. In an interview, Mr. Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers by the fall would be roughly double the peak of Senator Bernie Sanders’s entire 2020 primary campaign staff.Mr. Roe also previewed some of the contrasts that Never Back Down planned to draw with Mr. Trump. He argued that Mr. Trump had shied away from key fights that motivate the Republican base and on which Mr. DeSantis has led, including on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, schools and taking on corporate America.“How do you beat Trump?” Mr. Roe said, pointing to Mr. DeSantis’s assertiveness on those cultural issues. “Well, you beat Trump by beating Trump. And where Ron DeSantis has beaten Trump is by doing what Republican voters want him to do the most.”Mr. DeSantis has steadily lost ground so far in 2023 and is trailing Mr. Trump nationally in polls by an average of 30 percentage points. And as the governor’s standing has diminished, more candidates have jumped into the race, an ever-expanding field that could make the sheer math even harder for Mr. DeSantis to topple a former president with a significant base of loyalists.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, mocked the group as “Always Back Down,” calling it “a clown show of epic proportions.”Mr. DeSantis at a speech last week in Orlando. “Ultimately, politics is a team sport,” he told donors recently.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“If DeSantis runs his campaign the same way as his super PAC, he’ll be in for a rude awakening,” Mr. Cheung said.In framing the 2024 race, Mr. Roe acknowledged that Mr. Trump has been “the leader of a movement.” But, in Mr. Roe’s telling, it is Mr. DeSantis alone who “has the opportunity to be the leader of the party and the movement.”“That is a key difference,” he said. “I don’t believe people fundamentally understand that you can be a leader of a movement and not be the leader of your party. Ron DeSantis has the ability to be both. Trump does not.”That is a line that Mr. DeSantis himself articulated last week in a private call with donors that was organized by Never Back Down. He played up the money he has raised for state parties, including in New Hampshire.“Ultimately, politics is a team sport,” Mr. DeSantis told donors, adding an oblique shot at Mr. Trump. “You know, there’s some that kind of raise money just for themselves.”Republican primary voters, Mr. Roe said, see the battle against the progressive left as an existential fight. He argues that Mr. DeSantis, not Mr. Trump, has led on three touchstone issues in that fight: taking on corporate America, engaging in what is being taught in schools and confronting shifting norms and acceptance around sexual orientation and transgender medical care.The governor’s clash with Disney touches on all three: battling a big corporation over what began as a fight over classroom discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. Mr. Trump sees the Disney battle as futile and has recently cheered on the company as it hit back against Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Roe added that the intensity of the threat that Republicans perceive to their way of life is what makes electability a more salient issue for the party in 2024, and what makes Mr. DeSantis’s ability to fight those fights and still win in Florida so appealing.“That is a manifest separation between the two candidates,” he said.Unlike a candidate’s campaign committee, which has to abide by strict caps for each donor, there are no limits on how much a super PAC is allowed to raise.And this one begins with unmatched financial firepower. Never Back Down is expected to begin with around $120 million — $40 million it says it already raised and $80 million from Mr. DeSantis’s old state political committee — a sum that is equal to what Jeb Bush’s super PAC spent in total in 2016.But there are several legal impediments to this financial freedom. The people who run super PACs are prohibited from discussing strategy with the candidate or the campaign staff. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis disagrees with any super PAC decisions, he can always say so publicly and urge them to change course.As a result, the biggest super PACs — entities that have existed for just the last roughly 12 years — have often essentially become independent vehicles to buy expensive television advertising. That model, however, is extremely inefficient. When the election nears, the airwaves are cluttered and candidates are guaranteed, by law, far lower rates than super PACs. It is one reason the pro-DeSantis group plans to spend so heavily on its field program, officials said, citing studies that show personal voter contact has far greater return on investment.Hiring is underway in 18 states and officials said plans were in the works to assemble various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those focused on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“That’s not to say that we won’t do TV, it’s that it’s not all that we’ll do,” said Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer of Never Back Down. “We understand that in the first four states that peer-to-peer, neighbor-to-neighbor conversation and conversion is going to be extremely important.”Strategists with Never Back Down have been consulting lawyers and studying precedent to see exactly how far the group can stretch the legal bounds of what tasks it can perform without tripping any legal wires. One overlooked twist in election law is that super PAC advisers can move to the campaign, so it is possible entire departments at Never Back Down could eventually join the DeSantis campaign.The hand-in-glove efforts were on display during Mr. DeSantis’s recent trip to Iowa. After Mr. Trump canceled a rally near Des Moines, the governor decided he wanted to swoop in for a last-minute event in the area. But it wasn’t the governor’s staff that scrambled to bring people to the location but employees of the super PAC, who, working with Mr. DeSantis’s team, sent a flurry of texts and calls to assemble a crowd at Jethro’s BBQ that evening.“On like two hours’ notice, at some local pizza joint or barbecue joint, we got like 200 people to show up,” Mr. DeSantis raved to donors on the call, which The New York Times listened to.Despite Mr. DeSantis’s professed aversion to political consultants, particularly those who work around Washington, and his history of asking questions about what people who work for him are making, his team has anointed one of the Republican Party’s most famous consultants to oversee Never Back Down.Mr. Roe has emerged as an unusual lightning rod, among DeSantis allies and rivals alike. His aggressive approach to both campaigning and business development was the subject of a recent Washington Post article that detailed his firm’s efforts to vacuum up ever more revenue, including from its political clients.Mr. Trump himself obsesses over Mr. Roe, who is the only political consultant that he regularly talks about, according to people who have discussed the matter with the former president. Advisers so regularly feed him stories about the money spent on Mr. Roe’s losing campaigns that Mr. Trump has coined a nickname for him: “the kiss of death.”Never Back Down has already spent more than $10 million on pro-DeSantis television ads this spring. The early spending has been the subject of second-guessing from some DeSantis allies as it coincided with a drop in the polls. But Never Back Down advisers defended the ads as not just propping up Mr. DeSantis before he enters the race but as part of an enormous experiment — including mail, text messaging and control groups — to study what means of communicating works against Mr. Trump.Officials said voters were surveyed before and after in tens of thousands of interviews to determine the impact. More

If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).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

It’s never a good sign when political analysts are writing “What Went Wrong?” stories about your presidential campaign before it’s announced.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has endured more than his share of pre-mortems as the conventional wisdom has turned decisively against his imminent campaign and his standing has dropped into the teens and low 20s in recent national polls of the Republican primaries from above 30 percent in March.Despite the increasingly loud chorus of doubters the last couple of months, though, the DeSantis bid still has the makings of a strong campaign. In the weeks ahead he could well change the narrative of the 2024 Republican nomination fight from “Trump is burying DeSantis” to “He’s still kicking despite Trump doing everything he can to bury him.”He’ll be lavishly funded; his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans; he can draw a crowd; he’ll finally actually be in the race; and perhaps most importantly, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Trump.We’ve gotten used to the idea of DeSantis running but it’s worth remembering how audacious his campaign is. He’s not in the same position as, say, Nikki Haley, who can duck Trump as much as possible, hope that lightning strikes for her and if it doesn’t, that maybe she’ll still be in Trump’s good graces if he’s the nominee.This evasion isn’t available to DeSantis, whom Trump is already accusing of grooming teenage girls and of maybe being gay. DeSantis is signing up for the possibility of getting his reputation tarnished and his political career forever blighted. A friendly rapprochement is very unlikely at the end. If they do come to terms after a Trump victory, it will surely be humiliating to DeSantis — think of a defeated foreign king being paraded as one of the props in an ancient Roman triumph.And he’s getting in when Trump is once again making his dominant position in the party unmistakable. Earlier this year, it looked as if the 800-pound gorilla had perhaps slimmed down to 400 or 500 pounds, but now he’s clearly back at his accustomed weight.If Trump is clearly the odds-on favorite, though, it’s too early to declare him inevitable, and there is a big element of the party that is still open to someone else, at least in theory. How DeSantis campaigns will matter.At the mechanical level, he’ll need to post a big fund-raising number out of the gate, continue to roll out endorsements by state officials (he’s had impressive hauls in Iowa and New Hampshire), and win the contest for the best talent among activists and organizers while building robust organizations in the early states.None of that is easy, but, with significant backing from Republican donors, it’s doable.More fundamentally, a presidential candidate needs a personal narrative that dovetails with his political message in a way that candidates for lesser offices simply don’t. Without one, they rarely succeed. Barack Obama was a groundbreaking African American candidate for a country that needed the audacity of hope. Donald Trump was the outsider billionaire for a country that needed to be made great again.What is DeSantis? He has spent the last several months talking about his record in Florida more than about himself, which is admirable in a way — but policies don’t tell a story. At the moment, the average Republican knows little or nothing about his Yale baseball career, his military service during the war on terrorism, his wife’s fight against breast cancer or his life as a very busy father of three young children. In a recent trip through Iowa, his wife, Casey, talked in a more personal mode about their life together; there will have to be more of that.Much has been made lately of DeSantis’s standoffishness. Even if this has been exaggerated, there’s no doubt that he isn’t a Bill Clinton-style politician who feeds off people. For him, retail politics is clearly work, and he needs to do it. His team now has him staying after events, to glad-hand. He’ll have to do it wherever he goes, without showing any boredom or irritation, lest he confirm the idea that he lacks a personal touch.He’ll need to plant his feet firmly on tricky issues in a Republican primary: What does he think of the legitimacy of the 2020 election? Where he is now on entitlement reform? Perhaps his worst moment in the pre-announcement phase was his backtracking on a poorly drafted statement calling the Ukraine war “a territorial dispute,” which dismayed both G.O.P. supporters and opponents of large-scale aid to Ukraine.Then, of course, there’s the big, looming question of how to respond to Trump’s attacks. Ignoring them, as DeSantis has mostly done this spring, seems weak; responding risks playing Trump’s game. No Republican has yet figured out this conundrum, with the exception of Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia.When Trump put a bounty on Kemp’s head for the offense of defying him after the 2020 election, the governor responded deftly. He said that Trump had a beef with him, not the other way around, and when responding to Trump’s claims about the election, did it dispassionately and factually. He survived Trump’s onslaught, but had the advantage of fighting a proxy war in a primary battle on his home turf, rather than running directly against Trump himself.DeSantis would do well to study the Kemp example; while it shows it’s possible to win against Trump, it also underlines that he has to be fought with care to avoid triggering a defensive reaction from his fans. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Trump as unfit to serve that “Never Trump” Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is.Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Trump blew a winnable race in 2020 — DeSantis will need to say he really did lose — and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterm last year. In all likelihood, DeSantis would have a much easier time beating Biden than Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument. Trump is competitive with Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified “very conservative” primary voters DeSantis needs to pry from Trump.The risk to DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner — lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message — when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States.To counter that, DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues. The continued fight against Disney, which has become a morass, may actually help him: With other candidates effectively taking the side of Disney out of principle or to score points against DeSantis, he can portray himself as the most committed warrior against woke corporations.And he needs to attack Trump from the right, both on the former president’s past record (Anthony Fauci, criminal justice reform, not building the border wall) and on current disputes. Even though it causes agita among some of his big donors, the issue of abortion is a clear opening for DeSantis. Trump is foggy, while DeSantis just signed a six-week ban. He should make maximum use of this contrast, especially in Iowa where social-conservative voters are so important.For all the talk of how DeSantis has modeled his combative political style on Trump, he’s a vastly different politician and character. His approach as a speaker and campaigner is conventional, whereas Trump is outlandish. DeSantis is highly professional, whereas even after being president of the United States for four years, Trump reeks of amateurism. All indications are that DeSantis is a dutiful family man, whereas Trump has been, at best, a playboy and a boor.It may be that Republicans decide that they still want the show that only Trump can provide. If that’s the case, DeSantis and all the other non-Trump candidates will indeed be done. But he’s not dead yet.Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.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

Despite his struggles, fortunes can change very quickly in presidential primaries.Will Ron DeSantis start attacking Donald Trump?Sophie Park for The New York TimesIs the Ron DeSantis campaign already over?After the last few months, it’s hard not to wonder. His poll numbers have plummeted. Would-be donors seem skeptical. Pundits have questioned whether he should even run at all.But as he finally announces a presidential bid, expected later today, it is worth mulling his path back to contention. Despite it all, Ron DeSantis could still be the next Republican nominee.That might seem hard to imagine, but fortunes can change astonishingly quickly in presidential primaries. There are still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and there will be plenty of opportunities for him to right his ship.In the end, the factors that made Mr. DeSantis formidable at the beginning of the year could prove to be more significant than the stumbles and miscues that have recently hobbled him. The damage is not yet irreparable.Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. And even if his campaign is ultimately run differently than it has been so far, it’s not clear that even a perfectly run Republican campaign would defeat Donald J. Trump — at least if the former president survives his various legal challenges politically unscathed.But if you’re tempted to write off Mr. DeSantis, you might want to think again. The history of primary elections is littered with candidates who are written off, only to surge into contention. Unknown candidates like Herman Cain briefly become front-runners. Early front-runners like Joe Biden and John McCain are written off, then come back to win. Even Barack Obama spent six months struggling and trailing an “inevitable” Hillary Clinton by double digits.Perhaps one day we’ll say something similar about Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. He is still defined by issues — like the fight against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions — that also have broad appeal throughout his party. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.Mr. DeSantis’s strategy so far this year may have also increased the likelihood of big swings. As I wrote last week, there are two theories for defeating the former president — Trumpism without Trump, and a reinvigorated conservative alternative to Trump. Of the two, the proto-DeSantis campaign can more easily be interpreted as a version of Trumpism without Trump. If his campaign has done anything, it’s to narrow any disagreement with Mr. Trump — even to a fault. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t really made either an explicit or implicit case against the former president. Perhaps worse, he hasn’t punched back after being attacked.This combination of choices has helped set up an unusually rapid decline in Mr. DeSantis’s support. After all, the only thing that unifies a hypothetical Trumpism without Trump coalition is opposition to Mr. Trump and the prospect of beating him. If you’re not attacking him and you’re losing to him, then you’re not saying or doing the only two things that can hold your supporters together.The evaporating basis for Mr. DeSantis’s support has played out subtly differently on two different fronts. On the right, conservative voters open to someone other than Mr. Trump nonetheless have returned to the side of the former president. What kind of conservative wants Trumpism without strength? Toward the center, the many relatively moderate and neoconservative establishment Republicans who yearn for a candidacy opposed to Trumpism, not just to the conduct of the man himself, have withheld crucial support for Mr. DeSantis and flirted with other options, from Chris Christie to Chris Sununu.But if the DeSantis campaign can revitalize the case for his Trumpism without Trump candidacy, he might quickly reclaim many of the voters who backed him a few months ago. Indeed, it’s even possible that the current media narrative and low expectations are setting the stage for a DeSantis resurgence.Imagine what it might feel like if he launched a successful, vigorous attack against Mr. Trump after all of these months on defense. What might have otherwise been a routine sparring match would be imbued with far greater significance, unleashing months of pent-up anxiety among his supporters. What if part of the reason he’s announcing his candidacy on Twitter is to mock Truth Social? Silly as it sounds, successfully putting down Mr. Trump might breathe life into his candidacy — and the media loves a comeback story.One important factor keeping Mr. DeSantis’s path open is that, so far, none of the potential moderate alternatives to him have gained a foothold in the race. If they did, it would deny him the moderate and neoconservative voters who supported the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio in the last primary. He would essentially become another Ted Cruz.But for now, Mr. DeSantis is the only viable not-Trump candidate in town. As long as that’s true, he will have every chance to rebound among the voters who would prefer someone other than Mr. Trump — if there is a market for someone other than Mr. Trump.In the end, whether there’s sufficient demand for a Trump alternative may be the bigger question than whether Mr. DeSantis can resuscitate his campaign. With Mr. Trump already holding more than 50 percent support in the polls, actually defeating Mr. Trump might require some breaks, like the possibility that his legal challenges are worse than we might assume. It might also require a DeSantis win in Iowa to break Mr. Trump’s grip on a crucial segment of the party, much as the midterms seemed to temporarily crack Mr. Trump’s base last winter.But even if Mr. Trump is a clear favorite, it’s easy to see how Mr. DeSantis can at least make this a competitive race again. When he’s able to focus on his own issues, he has a distinctive political brand with rare appeal throughout a divided Republican Party. With expectations so low, the groundwork for a recovery might even be in place. It’s happened before. More

Two lawyers for the former president asserted that he was being treated unfairly in the investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to remain in power.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump sent a letter on Tuesday requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland related to the special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct.The letter cited no specifics but asserted that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material that was discovered at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency, as well as his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election.There are indications that Mr. Smith is approaching the stage of the investigation where he could start making decisions about whether to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and others in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, is less clear.“Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the lawyers for Mr. Trump, James Trusty and John Rowley, wrote to Mr. Garland.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion,” they wrote.They requested a meeting to discuss the “ongoing injustice” by Mr. Smith’s team.The letter was reported earlier by ABC News.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The letter’s tone is markedly different from the approach taken by Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, recovering documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena demanding that they be returned to the government. At the time, Mr. Trump, through an intermediary, sent a message to Justice Department officials that the search inflamed the country, and he asked how he could help to lower the temperature.The letter from his lawyers on Tuesday was directly confrontational. It implied that the family of Mr. Biden, who appointed Mr. Garland and who is himself the focus of a special counsel investigation into a far smaller number of classified documents from his vice-presidential and Senate days found in spaces where he worked and in his home, is benefiting from more favorable treatment.Hunter Biden is under separate investigation on possible tax charges and for possibly having lied about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in an increasingly crowded Republican field. But with the letter, Mr. Trump is relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.Most recently, he tried suggesting the judge overseeing an indictment against him in a state court in Manhattan has a conflict because a family member works for Democrats.Seen another way, the letter could be an attempt by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to lay down a marker toward asking Mr. Garland to recuse himself from involvement in whether Mr. Trump faces charges.While Mr. Smith will make the recommendation on whether to charge Mr. Trump with federal crimes in the two cases, a final decision would be made by Mr. Garland. In the documents-related case, prosecutors have examined evidence related to obstruction of justice, as well as to whether he mishandled classified material.Mr. Smith’s team is still hearing from witnesses in the two cases, according to multiple familiar with the activity, although all signs point to the documents investigation nearing its end point.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately predicted that the former president will face charges in the case related to the documents at a minimum, although they maintain he did nothing wrong. They have also grown angry at the number of people who have been subpoenaed, from low-level workers at Mar-a-Lago to former government officials.Mr. Trump is under indictment in New York on charges of paying hush money to a porn star and is facing a separate investigation in Georgia into his efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls there in 2020.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Garland would agree to meet with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of the attorney general’s former aides said.“Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers,” said Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s former spokesman. “Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”Glenn Thrush More

Adding a twist to the beginning of his presidential campaign, the Florida governor is expected to appear on a live audio conversation with Mr. Musk, the social platform’s owner, on Wednesday evening.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is planning to announce the start of his 2024 presidential campaign on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter with Elon Musk, the platform’s polarizing owner, according to people with knowledge of his plans.Mr. DeSantis’s entry into the Republican primary race against former President Donald J. Trump has been widely expected, but the decision to do so with Mr. Musk adds a surprising element and gives Mr. DeSantis access to a large audience online. NBC News first reported the plans.The event on Twitter Spaces, which is planned for 6 p.m. Eastern, injects a level of risk into a rollout that is expected to be carefully scripted and ensures that Mr. DeSantis’s first impression as a presidential candidate will be aligning himself with Mr. Musk, an eccentric businessman who has ranked at times as the world’s richest man.One challenge for Mr. DeSantis as he enters the 2024 race will be competing for attention with Mr. Trump, who for decades has shown a knack for commandeering the limelight. Mr. Trump’s aides have signaled for months that he plans to return to Twitter sooner rather than later. Mr. Musk already lifted the ban on the former president that was imposed when Twitter was a public company.In addition to his Twitter event, Mr. DeSantis is expected to appear on Wednesday evening on Fox News in an interview with Trey Gowdy, a former congressman from South Carolina, according to the network. The governor has also gathered donors on Wednesday at the Four Seasons in Miami to began raising money for his campaign.A super PAC backing Mr. Trump mocked the plans.“This is one of the most out-of-touch campaign launches in modern history,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Make America Great Again, the pro-Trump group. “The only thing less relatable than a niche campaign launch on Twitter, is DeSantis’s after party at the uber-elite Four Seasons resort in Miami.”Mr. Musk said at an event with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that he was not formally throwing his support behind Mr. DeSantis, or any other Republican. On Monday, he retweeted a video of the presidential kickoff event for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, another Republican contender.Under Mr. Musk, Twitter has cultivated a more Republican audience. This month, Tucker Carlson, the fired former Fox News star, announced he would host his popular show on Twitter.The DeSantis event with Mr. Musk will be moderated by David Sacks, a Republican donor who is a supporter of the governor and is close to Mr. Musk. Mr. Sacks, a technology entrepreneur and investor, donated $50,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s state political committee ahead of his re-election, campaign finance records show. He has spoken positively of the governor’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida. “He was the first governor to stop these insane lockdowns,” Mr. Sacks said on Bloomberg TV in 2021. “I respect that.”In choosing Spaces, Mr. DeSantis is relying on an audio-only streaming tool with a history of bugs and failures. Mr. Musk has used the feature regularly in the six months since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, appearing on Spaces to talk about the state of his various businesses and give interviews, which draw tens of thousands of listeners.Mr. Musk has said he voted for President Biden in the 2020 election, but has since been critical of him and his administration, which has a frosty relationship with Tesla, his electric car company. The billionaire has said it is difficult for Mr. Biden to stay in touch with voters at the age of 80.When asked about Mr. Biden in an interview on CNBC last week, Mr. Musk said he just wanted “a normal human being” to lead the country.“It’s not simply a matter of, do they share your beliefs?” he said. “But are they good at getting things done?”While Mr. Musk has called himself a moderate, donating relatively small amounts to both Republicans and Democrats in the past, he has shifted his support in recent years toward the right. On Twitter he has engaged with and shared right-wing conspiracy theories, including one about the October attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Mr. Musk has voiced his support for Mr. DeSantis, including last July, when he tweeted that the Florida governor would “easily win” if matched up against Mr. Biden in 2024. And in November he responded in the affirmative when asked by a Twitter user if he would support Mr. DeSantis in that year’s election.Last summer, when Mr. DeSantis was asked about Mr. Musk’s potential support, the Florida governor cracked: “I welcome support from African Americans. What can I say?” (Mr. Musk is white and from South Africa.)In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has supported legislation intended, in his words, to protect people against “Silicon Valley elites.” He has also criticized tech companies for their efforts to remove misinformation from their platforms, which he has likened to an assault on free speech and truth undertaken in concert with government officials.“You’ve seen the administrative state collude with Big Tech to censor truthful information, whether it’s people attacking Covid lockdowns, whether it’s them questioning the efficacy of masks or school closures,” Mr. DeSantis said in an April speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There was a concerted effort for Big Tech companies to do what government is never permitted to do directly.”On Tuesday evening, the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, tweeted a video of Mr. DeSantis preparing to walk onto a stage — a clear foreshadowing of his pending announcement. “They call it faith because in the face of darkness you can see that brighter future,” a narrator intones. The video asks supporters to text a phone number for more information.“Thank you for subscribing to receive texts from Ron DeSantis for President,” the automatic reply reads. “Pre-launch status: PENDING.” More

Lawyers for Ms. Lake, a Trump ally who lost the governor’s race, claimed Maricopa County did not properly review mail-in ballot signatures. A judge said the arguments “do not clear the bar.”An Arizona judge threw out a lawsuit filed by Kari Lake over her defeat in last year’s race for governor, ruling that she had failed to prove that the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, had neglected to review voters’ signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.The decision, issued late Monday, is the latest legal setback for Ms. Lake, a Republican who was backed by former President Donald J. Trump in one of the nation’s most prominent governors’ races in 2022.During a three-day bench trial last week in state Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ms. Lake’s lawyers argued that election workers worked too quickly to properly review 300,000 signatures that accompanied mail-in ballots.But in a six-page decision, Judge Peter A. Thompson wrote that the process had complied with state law, which requires signatures to be compared to ones in public voter files, but does not include specific guidelines for how much time a worker must spend on each ballot.“Plaintiff’s evidence and arguments do not clear the bar,” he wrote, adding: “Not one second, not three seconds, and not six seconds: No standard appears in the plain text of the statute.”At a news conference on Tuesday in Arizona, Ms. Lake said that she would appeal the ruling and that her lawyers were exploring various pathways forward.“We can’t trust the buffoons running our elections in Maricopa County anymore,” she said, later adding, “You’ve not seen the last of our case.”The case was the latest in a string of court losses over the election for Ms. Lake, who has claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting compromises election integrity. Other claims in her lawsuit had previously been rejected by the court.Ms. Lake has suggested she may run for office again. This year, she said she was considering a run for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent.Clint L. Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which helps oversee elections in the county, praised the judge’s decision in a statement on Monday.“Wild claims of rigged elections may generate media attention and fund-raising pleas, but they do not win court cases,” he wrote. “When ‘bombshells’ and ‘smoking guns’ are not backed up by facts, they fail in court.” More