Elections

Mr. Marchant, who lost his bid for Nevada’s secretary of state last year, will now attempt to unseat Senator Jacky Rosen, the Democratic incumbent.Jim Marchant, a vocal election denier and Trump ally who lost his bid for Nevada’s secretary of state in last year’s midterm elections, declared his candidacy on Tuesday for the Senate in a swing state contest that could decide control of the chamber in 2024.Mr. Marchant, a Republican, is seeking to challenge Senator Jacky Rosen, a moderate Democrat who is in her first term. No other high-profile Republicans have entered the contest so far.During last year’s midterm elections, Mr. Marchant helped organize a national “America First” slate of secretary of state candidates, a group of right-wing election deniers whose campaigns centered on re-litigating baseless voter fraud claims. All but one of the candidates were rejected by voters.The once-obscure election oversight post has taken on heightened significance since the 2020 election. In Mr. Marchant’s race, he did not appear to concede.Mr. Marchant, 66, a former one-term assemblyman, was also part of Nevada’s alternate slate of pro-Trump electors who sought to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state in 2020. He refused to accept the results that same year in his race for Congress, unsuccessfully challenging them in court.“There’s nothing more precious than our freedom and personal liberty,” Mr. Marchant said on Tuesday, speaking at a Las Vegas church known for having tested Nevada’s pandemic stay-at-home orders in court in 2020. “And I’m running for United States Senate to protect Nevadans from the overbearing government, from Silicon Valley, from big media, from labor unions, from the radical gender change advocates, where Jacky Rosen has failed you.”In a statement on Twitter on Tuesday, Ms. Rosen cast Mr. Marchant as an extremist.“Nevadans deserve a Senator who will fight for them, not a MAGA election denier who opposes abortion rights even in cases of rape and incest,” she wrote. “While far-right politicians like Jim Marchant spread baseless conspiracy theories, I’ve always focused on solving problems for Nevadans.”Mr. Marchant was joined on Tuesday by the political strategist Dick Morris, who Mr. Marchant said would be working as a general consultant on his campaign. Mr. Morris, who preceded him onstage, also repeated false claims about election fraud. More

Throughout his life — in his overlapping business, TV and political careers — Donald Trump has attempted to portray himself as what is conventionally known as an “alpha male.” But now he has run into a buzz saw of criminal investigations and civil suits that threaten to reveal both the ludicrousness of his self-image and his failure to meet the traditional standards of leadership.This does not diminish the seriousness of the threat he poses to American democracy.As both a candidate and as president, Trump has repeatedly made grandiose claims. Perhaps the best recent example came during his speech at a March 25 campaign rally in Waco, Texas: “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump told his supporters. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, described one way of looking at Trump in an email:Trump is a cartoon of an alpha-male wannabe, including the ruff of hair to exaggerate his height, his oversize phallic necktie, his defensiveness about the size of his hands and boast about the size of his genitals, his exaggeration of his height in his official biography, his looming behind Hillary Clinton during their presidential debate; his bizarre objection to her taking, like most of the other debate participants, a mid-debate break (“I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said, “No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting”) and his hair-trigger reaction to sleights and challenges.Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, sees Trump a bit differently, writing by email:Trump’s behavior in office — from his aggressive morning tweets to the Cabinet meetings he held in which obsequious beta males, like the vice president and attorney general, engaged in elaborate rituals of submission in the presence of their alpha — mirrors closely the tactics of domination and intimidation exhibited by alpha chimps in chimpanzee colonies. More than any other American president in memory, and like Putin and Orban, Trump exhibits what evolutionary social psychologists call “dominance” leadership, which is an evolved tendency (tracing back at least 5-7 million years in human prehistory) to attain status and exert influence in groups through brute force and intimidation.Trump’s bid for dominance has never, however, produced majority support. His unfavorable ratings remained consistently higher than his favorable ratings throughout his presidency and afterward, according to RealClearPolitics, and remain so to this day.Let’s put this approach to the Trump phenomenon into a larger context, starting with the work of Amar Sarkar and Richard Wrangham, both of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Sarkar and Wrangham are the authors of the March article “Evolutionary and Neuroendocrine Foundations of Human Aggression.”“Socio-cognitive advances in the mid-Pleistocene (781,000 years to 126,000 years ago),” they write, “are hypothesized to have enabled lower-ranking males to form alliances that effectively controlled coercive alpha males.”Sarkar and Wrangham are describing the crucial evolutionary role of coalition formation to overcome the power of “coercive alpha males.” So-called sub-elite males, according to them, had the ability to form coalitions in order to inflict “capital punishment and targeted conspiratorial killing” that would overcome “individuals who persistently or egregiously violate social norms.”At that point, Sarkar and Wrangham observe that “a physically formidable coercive alpha male was nonetheless vulnerable to less formidable sub-elite males who possessed sufficient cognitive capacity to form an alliance to kill the alpha male.”Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, contended in his 2001 book, “Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior,” that these prehistoric developments are actually tracing “the roots of democracy.”Boehm’s main hypothesis is that “the collective weapon of the rank and file has been their ability to define their own social life in moral terms, and to back up their thoughts about political parity with pointed actions in the form of collectivized social sanctioning.”Boehm goes on: “The ‘democratic’ origins I describe are not recent and historical, but evolutionary and ancient. They date well back in the Paleolithic era and were intimately involved with the development of human nature itself.”In effect, Sarkar, Wrangham and Boehm are describing an early stage of what over time has become an essential ingredient of a civilized, ordered society: the acquisition by the state of police power and the legal use of force to enforce norms and laws.In an email, Sarkar put it this way: “Humans appear to have inherited the capacity to coordinate with one another to enact violence.” While chimpanzees also demonstrate this capacity, according to Sarkar, “one factor that contributes to the uniqueness of human violence is the ability to use language, which allows individuals to freely share thoughts and intentions with one another and to form remarkably precise plans. This means that humans are able to engage in much higher levels of coordination in planning and performing aggression.”Sarkar added that it is “very difficult — or impossible — to connect the evolutionary origins of aggression to contemporary political events.”In their article, Sarkar and Wrangham continue the argument:For coalitionary proactive aggression against a formidable alpha male to be adaptive, it was critical for sub-elite males to ensure that their alliance was stable and that the execution could be performed at minimal risk to alliance members. Only then could they act safely without retribution from the alpha male or his sycophants.This shift of authority and control away from abusive, domineering individual males to collective groups of less powerful men and women had substantial consequences for the composition of society, then and now:Alpha alliances of sub-elite males could kill coercive alpha males, drastically reducing the reproductive success of coercive alpha males. Such control would also have signaled the limits of acceptable intragroup aggression. The direction of selection on male aggression thus changed as a result: rather than selection favoring coercive behavior that males used to achieve and maintain alpha status, the actions of alpha alliances ensured that selection acted against it. Simultaneously, the necessity of coordination and cooperation for targeted conspiratorial killing of alpha males meant that selection favored proactive aggression, and especially coalitionary proactive aggression.The result: “Individual alpha males were thus replaced by alpha alliances of subelite males.”In a separate 2019 article, Wrangham argues:The explanation that best accounts for a novel selection pressure leading to a reduction in reactive aggression starting around 300,000 years ago is the emergence of collective intentionality in the form of language-based conspiracy. The evolution of this newly sophisticated cognitive ability would have led subordinates to socially select against aggressive fighters, creating a reverse dominance hierarchy. The spread of the new style of hierarchy could have occurred by individual learning or by selection of group-cultures, and would have paved the way for diverse selection pressures to additionally influence the evolution of the characteristically human social traits.Where does all this fit in with the state of politics today?The barrage of criminal investigations and civil suits against Trump is, in many respects, the sophisticated and complex way America’s democratic system of government has developed to constrain an ominous, and even somewhat delusional, deregulated “alpha-male wannabe.”Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, describes Trump in an email as “a unique case. He is a narcissist. He is not hungry for power. He wants attention and praise. So he has some alpha male traits, certainly, but he is not prototypical.”In his book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Haidt cites Boehm while making the case that the early acquisition of weaponry played a crucial role in the democratization of authority within groups of humans:Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between alpha males (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering.Once early humans had developed spears, Haidt continues,anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations, then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.Over time, the aversion to bullying males developed into what Haidt calls “the liberty/oppression moral foundation,” which, he proposes,evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance.The liberty foundation, Haidt goes on to say,supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”Pinker argued by email that over the long haul,History has seen the invention of increasingly complex systems that limit the power of the leader, such as coalitions (as per Sarkar and Wrangham), power-sharing or turn-taking agreements, parliaments, constitutions, and rule-governed bureaucracies. Our leader is called a “president” because he merely presides over the government, rather than ruling over it.But, Pinker cautioned,We’re always in danger of slipping back into the dynamic of dominance. In democracies, voters, on average, favor the taller candidate and often crave a “strong leader.” Presidents and prime ministers, for their part, often arrogate more power than the constitution allows. The system of laws that constrains the leader’s power is often tested to its limits, and in countries that are not democracies, their only hope may be what Sarkar and Wrangham call an “alpha coalition,” namely the coup-plotters that many of us hope might someday depose Putin.Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown whose research has focused in part on the biological and genetic bases of political behavior, provided further explanation in an email: “Humans show self-domestication over time — they become more peaceful — and that may seem like it is not true in light of all the violence in the world, but relative to the death rates in earlier hunter-gatherer kinds of nomadic communities, it is true.”This process of self-domestication, she continued,happens as groups of beta and gamma males (the less strong ones) work together to unseat alphas who exploit the community. They might ostracize him (the alpha male) but mostly they assassinate him. What that means is that slowly over time you get more egalitarian dynamics (such as the birth of democracy, for example).In the case of the former president, McDermott wrote:Trump is a poster child for a “coercive alpha male” and frankly I have been surprised that more Republicans don’t try to take him on directly. I think part of it is that other potential Republican leaders are so narcissistic that they cannot band together in the kind of coalition that historically would have brought down a leader like this in one way or another. This depends on coalitional dynamics: men working together in cooperation, not against each other.Democratic norms, according to McDermott,are one way the country has tried to constrain the negative effects of Trump through things like rule of law and elections (Biden won in 2020). But they have not been as strong as many would like or hope for, and I agree that this is partly (although not entirely) related to increasing polarization (i.e. the inability to form strong united coalitional bonds).As far as “coercive alpha males” go, Trump is a bully, as demonstrated by his treatment both of competitors for the nomination in 2016 and of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida now; he boasts of his predatory sexual activity; and he lacks empathy, as reflected in his policies separating the children of detained immigrants from their parents at the border.As the same time, Trump has a long and detailed history of violating the fundamental obligations of a true leader. He is both unreliable and a liar, repeatedly failing to pay bills for services, products and construction; defrauding students who paid to learn about real estate; distorting the truth repeatedly and extensively, about everything from President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the size of his inauguration crowd all the way on through to the results of the 2020 election; promising to “drain the swamp” only to preside over an administration rife with self-dealing.On top of all that, Trump is often simply preposterous, more a late-night TV subject of ridicule, lacking character and the observable qualities of a credible leader, crude more than calculating, a con artist, huckster and hustler.Even so, there are a large number of people who are not persuaded by Wrangham’s line of thinking. John Horgan, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he serves as director of the Stevens Center for Science Writings, emailed his response to my inquiry:I have a meta-objection to Wrangham’s use of biology to explain modern social behavior. It’s far too deterministic, it lets us off the hook, it reduces our autonomy. When Wrangham’s ideas seep into popular culture, they feed into peoples’ fatalism about hierarchies, inequality and militarism.R. Brian Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, responded to my inquiry regarding the Sarkar-Wrangham paper by first acknowledging:I come from a very critical position. One foundational difference in perspectives is that my new book, “Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?” is intended to refute current primatological consensus that chimpanzees have evolved propensities to “proactively” kill neighbors.Ferguson continued:I have been deeply involved in understanding war, conflict, and politics in tribal societies, and I do not recognize anything like their idea of alphas facing death because of sub-alpha elite coalitions, except in the notable category of segmental tributary chiefdoms and states, where there are rivals near the top ready to rebel, and usually then take over.McAdams, the professor of psychology at Northwestern, does not share Horgan and Ferguson’s doubts about Wrangham. In an essay written in the first year of the Trump presidency, “The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J. Trump,” Ferguson argued along lines similar to Pinker’s:If angry extraversion and disagreeableness characterize his temperament style, narcissism captures Trump’s underlying motivational agenda. Although some dominant leaders subscribe to an overarching set of values and goals, Trump has no political philosophy to speak of, and his central goal in life is, and always has been, to promote himself. In Trump’s case, narcissism seems to play well with the authoritarian dynamic.Trump, McAdams continues, “harkens back to an older evolutionarily paradigm for achieving status in primate groups. It is the paradigm of brute dominance, an atavistic proclivity whose primal appeal never seems to fade.”Why, McAdams asks, “did 63 million Americans elect a president of the United States who was repeatedly described during the campaign, by both Democrats and Republicans, as a serial liar, a sexual predator, a swindler, a narcissist and a bully?”He answers:No U.S. president in recent memory, and perhaps none ever, has tapped so effectively into the primal psychology of dominance. None has so effectively cultivated an authoritarian dynamic with his followers.In addition, according to McAdams:Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate.To some, Trump is less a cause than a symptom of the pervasive contemporary undermining of the American commitment to democratic values.Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, argued by email that there is no doubt that there has been a weakening of democratic norms and that this erosionhas loosened the constraints on what counts as behavioral red lines for political leaders. This is almost certainly true for “coercive alpha males,” but I think it is broader than that. As those norms decay there is simply more room available for a range of personalities to get their swagger on in the political arena, as it were, aggressively and openly seeking power to aggrandize themselves and punish those who stand in the way.Smith pointed out that there are no “gender limits here (think of Marjorie Taylor Greene).” In addition, in Smith’s view, the issue goes to the heart of “the corroding of what’s considered beyond the behavioral pale.”In a large heterogeneous republic like ours, Smith wrote, “it is not easy, it is not just a matter of having clear rules or laws, but establishing broad acceptance and respect for the process, something more in the realm of custom, tradition or folk intuition.” But “once established, those norms can help insulate democratic systems from what otherwise is a natural vulnerability to demagogues and tyrants.”Those norms, Smith continued,are incredibly hard to institutionalize, but unfortunately apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained “coercive alpha male behavior,” but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else?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

Justice John Paul Stevens’s files on thousands of cases, including landmark decisions on abortion and the 2000 election, have been made public, opening a window on the Supreme Court.WASHINGTON — In June 1992, less than two weeks before the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy sent a colleague some “late-night musings.”“Roe was, at the least, a very close case,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the three-page memorandum, which included reflections on the power of precedent, the court’s legitimacy and the best way to address a cutting dissent.The document is part of an enormous trove of the private papers of Justice John Paul Stevens released on Tuesday by the Library of Congress. They provide a panoramic inside look at the justices at work on thousands of cases, including Bush v. Gore and the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.The papers are studded with candid and occasionally caustic remarks, sometimes echoing current concerns about the court’s power and authority.In the Casey decision, Justice Kennedy joined a controlling opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David H. Souter that saved the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe in 1973.In June, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey after considering questions about precedent and the court’s legitimacy, coming to the opposite conclusion from Justice Kennedy.There are other echoes of recent events in the papers of Justice Stevens, who served on the court for 35 years, retired in 2010 and died in 2019, at 99.There was, for instance, an apparent leak, one that prompted Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to write a stern note to all of the law clerks on June 10, 1992. The current issue of Newsweek, the chief justice wrote, “contains a purported account of what is happening inside the court in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”The article, attributing its information to “sources” and “clerks,” said that “at least three of the nine justices are planning to draft opinions in Casey” and predicted, correctly, that the decision would be released on June 29.Chief Justice Rehnquist admonished the clerks to follow a rule in the court’s code of conduct, which said, “There should be as little communication as possible between the clerk and representatives of the press.” He added, underlining the last three words: “In the case of any matter pending before the court, the least possible communication is none at all.”Researchers will be studying the Stevens papers for decades, and only small glimpses were possible in a day’s scrutiny of a selection of them. But those glimpses made clear that the current turmoil at the court has historical analogues.In 2000, for instance, when the court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore by a 5-to-4 vote, members of the majority wrote scathing private memos protesting what they called unduly harsh language in the dissents.Justice Stevens’s dissent ended this way: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”In a memo to his colleagues on Dec. 12, 2000, the day the decision was issued, Justice Kennedy, who had voted with the majority, appeared wounded.“The tone of the dissents is disturbing both on an institutional and personal level,” he wrote. “I have agonized over this and made my best judgment.”He added, “The dissents, permit me to say, in effect try to coerce the majority by trashing the court themselves, thereby making their dire, and I think unjustified, predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy.”Justice Antonin Scalia, who had also voted with the majority, said he was “the last person to complain that dissents should not be thorough and hard hitting.”But he said he could not “help but observe that those of my colleagues who were protesting so vigorously that the court’s judgment today will do irreparable harm have spared no pains — in a veritable blizzard of separate dissents — to assist that result.”At an earlier stage of the case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented in Bush v. Gore, urged his colleagues to stay away from the dispute, recalling the role that Supreme Court justices had played on a commission created to resolve the contested presidential election of 1876.“Rather than the court lending the process legitimacy, the process damaged the legitimacy of the court,” Justice Breyer wrote. “I doubt very much that our intervention would assure anyone that the process had worked more fairly. Rather, I fear that history could repeat itself, were we to intervene now.”In statements after the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has said that attacks on the court’s legitimacy, as opposed to its reasoning, should be out of bounds.In the 1992 memo containing his “late-night musings,” which was addressed to Justice Souter and copied to Justices O’Connor and Stevens, Justice Kennedy also reflected on the court’s legitimacy in the context of abortion.He appeared troubled by aspects of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, which said public opinion should not affect the court’s work.“You can fend off the chief,” Justice Kennedy told Justice Souter, “by stating that we are not concerned with preserving our legitimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the Constitution. Thus, when we speak of the principled character of our decisions, we mean that they are informed by precedent, logic and the traditions of our people, all with reference to our constitutional heritage.”“We must be clear,” he went on, “that we are not guided by expediency, contemporary attitudes or our own morality.”The newly released files cover the years up to 2005, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court. They are filled with notes in Justice Stevens’s not always legible scrawl, marked-up briefs, draft opinions, vote tallies, memos among the justices, recommendations from clerks and all manner of other paperwork.Before the new release, the most recent set of Supreme Court papers was from the files of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who served through 1994 and died in 1999.The only current member of the court featured in the new files is Justice Clarence Thomas. The remaining parts of Justice Stevens’s papers are scheduled to be released in 2030.Kitty Bennett More

In private comments to aides and confidants, Donald J. Trump has indicated he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing a debate stage with them.The leading Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, is likely to skip at least one of the first two debates of the 2024 Republican presidential nominating contest, according to five people who have discussed the matter with the former president.Last month, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, announced that Fox News would host the first G.O.P. primary debate in Milwaukee in August. The second debate will be held in Southern California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.In private comments to aides and confidants in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has made it clear that he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing the stage with them. Mr. Trump has led his nearest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by around 30 percentage points in recent polls. All other contenders are polling in single digits.“I’m up by too many points,” one associate who spoke with Mr. Trump recalled him saying.One adviser stressed that the situation was fluid, particularly given how early it remains in the 2024 race and with Mr. DeSantis not yet even a declared candidate. Mr. Trump may find it hard to stay away from a stage where others are criticizing him, and some senior Republicans expect that he will ultimately join the debates. He has long credited the debates in the 2016 campaign, both in the primary and the general election, for his victories.Mr. Trump has long credited the debates in the 2016 campaign, both in the primary and the general election, for his victories. Sophie Park for The New York TimesStill, if Mr. Trump opts out of some primary campaign debates — as he did once before in 2016 — he will shrink the viewing audience and limit his rivals’ chances to seize a breakout moment on the debate stage. The visibility such moments offer is hard to come by in a race in which Mr. Trump almost monopolizes the news media’s attention.For Mr. Trump, denying his low-polling rivals access to a massive television audience is part of his calculations in potentially skipping the debates, according to the people who have discussed the matter with him. In 2015, Fox News drew an audience of 24 million for the first primary debate of the 2016 campaign. It was, at the time, the biggest viewership for a nonsports event in cable television history.“In his mind there’s not enough candidates who are polling close enough to him,” said a person familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with the former president. “And that if he does a debate this early with candidates who are polling in the single digits, there’s no upside for him.”Another motivation for Mr. Trump is revenge: The former president has a history with the two institutions hosting the first two Republican candidate debates.Mr. Trump has told advisers that the second debate is a nonstarter for him because it will be held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. The chairman of the library’s board of trustees, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., also serves as the publisher and chief executive officer of The Washington Post, a fact that Mr. Trump regularly brings up.Mr. Trump is also sour that the Reagan library has invited numerous other leading Republicans to speak at its events over the past two years, including his presidential rival Mr. DeSantis, but has never extended an invitation to Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with his thinking.The library started a speakers series in 2021 called “Time for Choosing,” and invitees have included Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador; and, more recently, Mr. DeSantis. A spokesperson for the library said no former president has been included in the series.One reason Mr. Trump may skip the first debate is its timing — he believes it’s too early, and has told aides he does not want to debate in August. Another reason is the host, Fox News.In 2015, Fox News drew an audience of 24 million for the first primary debate of the 2016 campaign. At the time it was the biggest viewership for a nonsports event in cable television history.John Taggart for The New York TimesMr. Trump has been warring with Fox News since the conservative network announced on election night in 2020 that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the state of Arizona. While the former president maintains warm relationships with several prime-time hosts — especially Sean Hannity, a reliable Trump booster — Mr. Trump’s overall relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s television network has deteriorated as the network showered Mr. DeSantis with praise over the past two years while constricting its coverage of Mr. Trump.“Why would I have Bret Baier” question me, Mr. Trump told an associate, explaining a reason to skip the Fox News debate. Mr. Trump was furious with Mr. Baier, a Fox host, over his coverage of the 2020 election, in which Mr. Baier refuted many of the election-fraud claims made by the Trump team.Mr. Trump has also mentioned his previous skirmish with the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in his private conversations with associates as a reason not to agree to a debate hosted by the network.In the first Republican debate of the 2016 campaign cycle, Ms. Kelly asked Mr. Trump about demeaning things he’d said about women. Mr. Trump viewed this as a declaration of war from Fox News’ management. He later attacked Ms. Kelly in crude and sexist terms.And Mr. Trump has obliquely raised a more specific issue in some other recent discussions about the upcoming debates, acknowledging that there will be questions about the charges filed against him in Manhattan — falsifying business records in connection with payments to a porn star — that could change the character of the debates.Mr. Trump has negotiated with CNN to hold a town hall-style event, the type of event the network has held with Mr. Biden and with former Vice President Mike Pence. For Mr. Trump, taking part in the CNN event is a shot at both Fox and Mr. DeSantis, who refuses to engage with the mainstream media. Even as Mr. Trump attacks mainstream media coverage and calls reporters the “enemy of the people,” the former fixture of New York City’s tabloids routinely invites a handful of mainstream reporters on board his private plane, where he holds court and provides fodder for news stories.A campaign official, speaking with anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the private deliberations, said Mr. Trump’s decision to leave the traditional Republican “comfort zone” was key to his victory in 2016 and contended that some candidates were now “afraid” to do anything other than Fox News.The Trump campaign had warned the Republican National Committee not to announce any debates before Labor Day, because Mr. Trump had no intention of debating before then, according to two people familiar with the conversations. But last month, Ms. McDaniel, the chairwoman, announced on “Fox and Friends” that the network would host the first debate in August. A campaign official insisted that despite the logistical issues, the Trump team has a good working relationship with the party chairwoman.For the party committee, operating outside of Mr. Trump’s demands and appearing neutral is seen as a positive development, according to a person familiar with Ms. McDaniel’s thinking. An R.N.C. official declined to comment.Ms. McDaniel also said that the R.N.C. would ask all debate participants to pledge they would support the party’s eventual nominee — no matter who that person is. Advisers to Mr. Trump were unsure whether he would agree to such a pledge.The Republican National Committee has not yet set the criteria for candidates to qualify for debates, but that criteria is expected to involve a combination of polling averages and total individual donors. The committee has also said that if specific conditions are not met, it wants the eventual nominee to sign a pledge saying the nominee will not participate in general-election debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. The R.N.C. has been actively looking at alternative options.Shane Goldmacher More

The NewsThe Florida Legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that would shield the travel records of Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top elected officials from public view, a significant change to the state’s vaunted sunshine laws as Mr. DeSantis explores a potential presidential campaign.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has faced increasing scrutiny for his use of private chartered flights.Justin Ide/ReutersWhy It Matters: Who’s paying, and who else is flying?Though the law purports to shield Mr. DeSantis’s and other top officials’ travel records under the umbrella of increasing threats and operational security, it also includes a sweeping retroactive clause that would block the release of many records of trips already taken by Mr. DeSantis and other officials, as well as those taken by their families and staff members.Mr. DeSantis has been facing increasing scrutiny for his use of private chartered flights — including questions about who paid for the travel and who flew with him — especially as his presidential ambitions come into clearer focus and he travels the country more extensively.In years past, Florida’s expansive transparency laws have exposed officials’ abuses of state resources: In 2003, for example, Jim King, the president of the State Senate, was found to have used a state plane to fly home on the weekends.What’s Next: A target for other potential Republican contenders.The bill now heads to Mr. DeSantis’s desk. The governor has avoided directly commenting on the bill and has stated that he did not draft the initiative, but many Florida Republicans expect that he will sign it into law.“It’s not necessarily something that I came up with,” Mr. DeSantis said on Monday at an event in Titusville. He added that the legislation was “motivated by a security concern” and that he had been receiving a lot of threats.The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is led by a DeSantis appointee, has also expressed support for the bill, stating in April that releasing travel details “represents a risk not only to those we protect, but also F.D.L.E. agents and citizens attending events.”Critics of the bill, however, note that adding the retroactive clause does not fit with a security justification. “How is there a security issue for travel that’s already occurred?” said Barbara Petersen, the executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, after the bill first advanced out of committee in April.The proposed changes have drawn the attention of some of Mr. DeSantis’s potential Republican rivals for president.“In recent months, Governor DeSantis has used taxpayer dollars to travel around the country for his 2024 presidential campaign, including to the early voting states of Iowa and Nevada,” the campaign of Donald J. Trump said in a statement last month. “DeSantis’s gubernatorial office, however, refuses to tell reporters — and the public — how much taxpayer money has been spent to fund these travels, or how much DeSantis’s April globe-trotting will cost.” More

Latest results from Aug. 9

Candidate

Richard Blumenthal

Winner

Uncontested

*Incumbent More

Also, Australia’s vape crackdown.“We were just like comfort women for the Japanese military,” said Cho Soon-ok, a survivor. “They had to take Japanese soldiers and we American G.I.s.”Jean Chung for The New York TimesSouth Korea’s brutal sex tradeThe euphemism “comfort women” typically describes South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. But long after Japan’s colonial rule ended, the sexual exploitation continued with Korean and American soldiers.After South Korea’s Supreme Court last year ordered the government to compensate 100 of the comfort women, the victims now aim to take their case to the U.S. Their legal strategy is unclear, as is what recourse they may find.Park Geun-ae, who was sold to a pimp in 1975, when she was 16, said she endured severe beatings and other abuse from G.I.s. “The Americans need to know what some of their soldiers did to us,” she said.In its ruling, South Korea’s Supreme Court said that the government was guilty of “justifying and encouraging” prostitution to help South Korea maintain its military alliance with the U.S. and earn American dollars. The court also blamed the government for the “systematic and violent” way it detained the women and forced them to receive treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.Numbers: In 1961, the local government of Gyeonggi Province, the populous area surrounding Seoul, estimated that the number of comfort women in its jurisdiction was 10,000 and growing and that they catered to 50,000 American troops. Many of these women worked in gijichon, or “camp towns,” built around American military bases.Recreational vapes are still widely available at retail stores across Australia.Sandra Sanders/ReutersAustralia moves to stamp out vapesAustralia’s government proposed a ban on e-cigarettes in one of its most sweeping tobacco regulatory moves in years.Nicotine vapes are supposed to be available only with a prescription in Australia. But they are sold in many convenience stores, and the government said it was particularly concerned about the growing popularity of vaping among young people.“We were promised this was a pathway out of smoking, not a pathway into smoking,” the health minister said yesterday. But, he continued, “that is what it has become.”The proposal, announced yesterday, would ban all single-use, disposable vapes, stop the imports of nonprescription vapes and restrict some flavors, colors and ingredients. It would also work to limit the nicotine in the products.A New Zealand comparison: Australia’s health minister said the country had no plans to ban smoking or to phase it out by birth year, as New Zealand did recently when it placed a lifetime prohibition on cigarette sales to everyone born after 2008.A U.S. comparison: Health regulators began a crackdown in recent years — they had not accounted for young people becoming addicted to nicotine through the fruity flavors of vapes.People lined up at a Hermès store in Shanghai.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesChina’s splurge festLuxury spending in China is bouncing back even faster than the country’s overall economy now that pandemic lockdowns have ended. Many Western brands have reaped the benefits.Before the pandemic, as much as two-thirds of the country’s luxury spending took place outside of mainland China: Wealthy Chinese shopped abroad to avoid their country’s import tariffs and taxes. But traveling outside China remains far more difficult than it was before the pandemic.The numbers:LVMH, the owner of brands like Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Company and Dior, last month posted a 17 percent increase in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier, driven in large part by the rebound in China.Retail sales of jewelry, gold and silver soared 37.4 percent in March from a year earlier.Hermès said sales in Asia (excluding Japan) were up 23 percent, “driven by a very good Chinese New Year.”THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificThe Philippines leader, left, has reforged a strong alliance with the U.S.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has emerged as one of the Philippines’ most transformative foreign policy presidents, our Southeast Asia bureau chief writes in an analysis.Keshub Mahindra, an Indian industrialist who was convicted in connection with the poison gas leak in Bhopal in 1984, died at 99 last month.The War in UkraineThe U.S. said at least 100,000 Russians had been killed or wounded in Ukraine in the past five months.Russia is imposing tighter restrictions in occupied parts of Ukraine, including on travel between towns, Ukrainian officials said.As attacks on journalists rise in Russia and beyond, our publisher warned of risks to democracy while speaking at an event to mark World Press Freedom Day.Around the WorldKhader Adnan was the first Palestinian prisoner to die on a hunger strike since 1992.Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKhader Adnan, a prominent Palestinian prisoner, died after a hunger strike in an Israeli prison. Palestinian leaders and armed groups threatened retaliation.South Sudan said that the two rival generals in Sudan agreed to a seven-day truce, starting tomorrow, but there was no confirmation from the warring sides.The U.S. could run out of money to pay its bills by June 1, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, if lawmakers do not reach a deal on debt.FIFA’s president said the Woman’s World Cup would not be televised in Europe unless broadcasters met its demands for higher fees. Culture NewsLil Nas X, bejeweled.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLil Nas X wore body paint and a silver thong to the Met Gala. Rihanna showed up last, and Doja Cat donned a feline facial prosthetic. Here are photos of the big event.Hollywood writers went on strike for the first time in 15 years, halting many productions.The Tony Award nominations are out. Broadway is banking on a busy summer as New York City theater continues its rebound from the pandemic.A Morning ReadFour desserts, which nod to both their creators’ Korean heritage — and French training.Clockwise from top left, Jun Michael Park for The New York Times; Joann Pai for The New York Times; Peter Flude for The New York Times; Aya Brackett for The New York TimesSome South Korean chefs, trained in the French culinary tradition, have blended the two traditions to create a distinct genre of pastry. Their work is defining a growing category of pastry art that is confined neither to South Korea nor to France.ARTS AND IDEASCan A.I. read minds?Neuroscientists from the University of Texas, Austin, have developed A.I. models that can translate people’s private thoughts — without using implants.In the scientists’ study, three participants listened to 16 hours of narrative stories while hooked up to an fMRI machine, which measures the blood flows to different parts of the brain. The scientists then used a large language model to match patterns in the brain activity to the words and phrases that the participants had heard.The model was able to turn a person’s imagined speech into actual speech. In one instance, almost every word was out of place in the decoded script, but the meaning of the passage was preserved:Original transcript: “I got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead only finding darkness.”Decoded from brain activity: “I just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass I stood on my toes and peered out I didn’t see anything and looked up again I saw nothing.”Essentially, the decoders were paraphrasing and capturing the gist, if not the precise language.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookDavid Malosh for The New York TimesA common Chinese American adaptation of a scallion egg wrap uses store-bought tortillas.What to Listen toThe folk musician Gordon Lightfoot has died at 84. Listen to his unlikely hit, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”What to Watch“A Small Light” tells the story of Miep Gies, who helped Anne Frank and others hide during World War II.HealthHow a gastroenterologist cares for her gut.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Try to fly (four letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Ahead of King Charles’s coronation on Saturday, we’d love to hear from you: Is there a moment in British royal history that resonates with you? Tell us about it here.“The Daily” is on U.S. bank turmoil.Was this newsletter useful? Send us your feedback at [email protected]. More

Since leaving the White House, Donald J. Trump has favored more friendly, right-wing outlets. His decision to appear on CNN represents a shift in his media strategy ahead of the 2024 election.After a long hiatus, former President Donald J. Trump will return to CNN.Mr. Trump, who has openly feuded with CNN hosts and executives over the years, has not appeared on the network since his 2016 presidential campaign. But next Wednesday, May 10, he will appear at a town hall-style forum the network is hosting in New Hampshire.CNN said that its morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins, would moderate, and that the former president would take questions from Republicans and independents.Mr. Trump’s decision to sit for questioning on a network he considers less than friendly represents a shift in his approach with the media. In his post-presidency, Mr. Trump has largely shunned mainstream networks like CNN, preferring to speak with conservative outlets and talk show hosts.And his on-again, off-again clashes with Fox News have meant he’s been absent from that network’s airwaves for months at a time. Though Fox helped introduce Mr. Trump to a conservative audience in the early 2010s and gave him a powerful platform from which to start his political career, it has also shunned him at times.He has attacked the network in turn — most recently, he criticized them for firing its star host, Tucker Carlson — and still holds a grudge over its projection on election night in 2020 that he would lose Arizona. Fox was the first network to do so.His decision to appear on a rival network, CNN, is a signal to Fox, which is a crucial pipeline to Republican primary voters: He doesn’t consider it the only game in town. The move is also a way of drawing a sharp contrast with one of his expected opponents in the race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who largely shuts out the mainstream media.Lately, Mr. Trump has fumed about the release of private emails that show how Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, expressed derision and contempt for him and his false claims of being cheated in the 2020 election. Those messages were released as part of the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed against the network for amplifying conspiracy theories that Dominion machines were somehow involved in a plot to steal votes from him and flip them to President Biden.Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Murdoch and Fox for “aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA” on his social media platform, Truth Social.Mr. Trump also plans to skip at least one of the first two debates with his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination, according to several people familiar with his plans. The first, scheduled for August in Milwaukee, is being hosted by Fox News. He has said he does not want to give the lower-polling G.O.P. candidates the oxygen that a nationally televised debate would provide.In recent weeks, however, Mr. Trump has started appearing more regularly on Fox News. He has done interviews with three Fox hosts since the end of March. And the network has aired coverage critical of the Manhattan district attorney’s decision to pursue criminal charges against him.In 2016, coverage of Mr. Trump by outlets outside of the conservative media bubble was crucial to his success. He sat for lengthy interviews with NBC News, The Washington Post, CNN and others. And despite his branding of the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people,” he has long cultivated relationships with a broad variety of reporters. More