Elections

The former governor of New Jersey — who ran against Donald Trump in 2016 and is exploring a presidential campaign in 2024 — tried to thread the needle with his answer at a New Hampshire town hall.At a town hall in New Hampshire on Thursday, Chris Christie cited a long list of promises that former President Donald J. Trump failed to deliver on while in office. Above all else, however, he expressed disgust at the idea that Republicans would consider renominating Mr. Trump after he “undermined our democracy” by lying about the 2020 election and inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The event took place on the campus of New England College. After several gray-haired attendees asked Mr. Christie about Medicare, prescription drug prices and the like, a 15-year-old audience member named Quinn Mitchell — who had also heard Mr. Christie strike similar themes a month earlier in New Hampshire — spoke up.A Question for Chris Christie“I heard you say that one of the reasons you endorsed Trump is that you really did not want Clinton to be president in 2016. And now, based on recent knowledge that Trump was arrested — Trump was prosecuted on criminal charges — do you think that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have been the better bet for democracy in 2016?”The SubtextMr. Christie, who is exploring a 2024 Republican presidential bid, has positioned himself as the one G.O.P. hopeful willing to attack Mr. Trump. But a well-crafted question from Mr. Mitchell got to the heart of a contradiction in Mr. Christie’s posture, forcing him to own his support for the man he had just forcefully denounced.Chris Christie’s Answer“Hillary Clinton, in many, many ways, was a huge detriment to our democracy too. The American people had in 2016 the biggest hold-your-nose-and-vote choice they ever had. And so, look, philosophically, some of the stuff that Trump did accomplish is more in line with what I believe than what Hillary would have tried to accomplish. So I still would’ve picked Trump.”The SubtextMr. Christie’s answer was revealing. As much of a threat to democracy as he had just declared Mr. Trump to be, Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor, could not bring himself to say that Hillary Clinton would have been the better choice to preserve democracy.Mr. Christie’s unwillingness to declare that he would have voted for a Democrat if he had known what was coming gets to the heart of the dilemma for anti-Trump candidates. It’s why true Never Trumpers don’t trust candidates like Mr. Christie, who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016 and in 2020 and served as an outside adviser while Mr. Trump was president. At the same time, Mr. Christie is making the straightforward political calculation that a would-be 2024 Republican who acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton would have been the better president would be dead in any G.O.P. primary.The moment also highlighted the challenge that almost every current or potential Republican primary candidate faces against Mr. Trump: Almost all of them, some of whom served in his administration, have a history of praising or supporting Mr. Trump during his presidency — words that can be expected to come back to haunt them.Alyce McFadden contributed research. More

Watching the nascent Republican primary race, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. As much as I abhor Donald Trump’s opponents, I’m desperate for one of them to prevail. Trump might be easier for Joe Biden to beat, but anyone who gets the Republican nomination has a chance of being elected, and the possibility of another Trump term is intolerable. So it’s harrowing to see Trump abetted, again, by the cowardice of his opponents.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was supposed to stop Donald Trump, is deflating before even entering the race, with his poll numbers softening and donors fretting. Trump, meanwhile, seems more buoyed than hindered by his ever-proliferating scandals, and is racking up endorsements at DeSantis’s expense. There are several explanations for why this is happening, including the backlash to Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s near total lack of charisma, and concern among Republican elites about the sweeping abortion ban he just signed. But there’s another dynamic at work here, and I think it’s the big one: Like Trump’s 2016 rivals, DeSantis is making the mistake of believing that the primary race is about issues, while Trump instinctively understands that it’s about dominance.Dueling super PAC attack ads about Social Security and Medicare illustrate DeSantis’s problem. The ad from the Trump camp is inspired by reporting about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers on an airplane. Over a nauseating video of a man messily consuming chocolate pudding with his hands, the spot says, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements.” But the policy argument is just an excuse for the disgusting visuals; the point is not to disagree with DeSantis, but to humiliate him.The ad from DeSantis’s allies misses this point entirely. It attempts to fact-check the claims in the pro-Trump spot with video of DeSantis promising to protect Social Security, then tries to turn the tables by airing a clip of Trump saying that “at some point” he’ll “take a look” at entitlements. “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Governor DeSantis,” the ad continues — whining about Trump’s aggression rather than countering it.This approach didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not working now. Witness the parade of Florida Republicans turning their back on DeSantis and bending the knee to Trump with their endorsements.Republican attempts to outflank Trump from the right, a strategy tried by Ted Cruz in 2016, are also falling flat again. Before Mike Pence’s speech to the National Rifle Association last week, Politico reported that the former vice president was aiming “to get to the right of Donald Trump on guns, bringing debates the two once had behind closed doors in the White House into the public eye.” Pence ended up getting booed by the crowd and then mocked by his former boss.The upcoming Republican primary race, like the last one, is going to be fought on a limbic level, not an ideological one. It will be about who is weak and who is strong. That’s why, if Republicans want a non-Trump candidate in 2024, they’re going to have to find someone willing to tear him down. I understand that this is made difficult by the fact that Republican primary voters often seem excited by Trump’s most repulsive qualities, including his authoritarianism, rapacious greed, incitements to violence, friendly relations with white supremacists and antisemites, and the corruption that’s already led to multiple felony charges. It’s also hard to tar Trump as a loser when so much of the right-wing base believes the fantasy that in 2020 he actually won.Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about how Trump would take on a candidate like Trump. I don’t think he’d do it with passive-aggressive sniping, like when DeSantis, while attacking the New York district attorney Alvin Bragg for indicting Trump, worked in a dig about the ex-president paying “hush money to a porn star.” Trump, faced with an opponent who had Trump’s own flaws, would just blast away at them all until he found something that stuck.Trump’s approach to DeSantis’s war on Disney is instructive. Until approximately five minutes ago, DeSantis’s willingness to do battle with ostensibly “woke” corporations — even a giant of Florida tourism like Disney — was part of his appeal. But Trump didn’t try to show that he’d be even harder on Disney than DeSantis has been. Instead, he trolled DeSantis by taking Disney’s side, taunting the governor for getting “destroyed” by Disney and speculating that the company would stop investing in Florida. There is, so far, little sign that this is hurting Trump, even though the right has spent months demonizing Disney, a company Tucker Carlson compared to a “sex offender.” Consistent displays of dominance matter more to Republicans than consistent displays of principle.This doesn’t mean that Republican candidates should try to copy Trump’s insult comic act; they’ll almost certainly fail if they do. But they need to be, to use a Trumpish word, tough. As House speaker, Nancy Pelosi managed to repeatedly emasculate Trump not because she imitated him, but because she treated him like a petulant child. Most of Trump’s would-be Republican rivals, on the other hand, are treating him like an unstable father, fantasizing about supplanting him even as they cower in fear of his wrath.An exception is the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who understands that you can’t beat Trump without fighting him. “I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump,” he told Politico, adding, “If you think you’re a better person to be president than Donald Trump, then you better make that case.” Whether Christie can make it is hard to say, given that he’s already abased himself before Trump more than once. But he’s right that no one’s going to defeat Trump until they stop acting scared of him.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

On Fox News, the conservative talk radio host said he had “a moral, religious and a patriotic duty to give back to a country that’s been so good to my family and me.”Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host who was a breakout star on the right after running unsuccessfully in California’s recall election in 2021, said on Thursday evening that he was running for president.He made the announcement on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, joining a growing Republican field that is led by former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not yet made his run official.“My father was a World War II vet,” Mr. Elder told Mr. Carlson. “He served on the island of Guam. He was a Marine.” He added: “My older brother, late older brother, Kirk, was in the Navy during the Vietnam era. My little brother Dennis actually served in Vietnam in the Army. I’m the only one who didn’t serve, and I don’t feel good about that. I feel I have a moral, religious and a patriotic duty to give back to a country that’s been so good to my family and me. And that is why I am doing this.”Mr. Elder, a Los Angeles Republican who bills himself as “the sage from South Central,” was the top vote-getter among challengers to Gov. Gavin Newsom in the attempted recall, and would have succeeded him had voters not overwhelmingly chosen to keep Mr. Newsom in office. During his run, Mr. Elder earned critics in both parties, with some Republicans calling him an inexperienced opportunist. The recall’s lead proponent, a Republican and a retired sheriff’s sergeant, declined to back him.Explaining his decision to run on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Elder said: “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable. We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there.” More

The former New Jersey governor is testing a campaign as Donald Trump’s most vocal critic in the Republican field.Don’t ask Chris Christie what “lane” there is for him in the Republican primary. Don’t ask how someone polling at 1 percent, who is sharply critical of Donald J. Trump, could possibly win the 2024 nomination when the party base has no tolerance for attacks on the former president.“I think there’s this fiction about lanes,” Mr. Christie said on Thursday in New Hampshire, his second exploratory visit in a month. “There is one lane, OK? There are not multiple lanes. At the front of that lane right now is Donald Trump. If you want to win the Republican nomination for president, you have to beat Donald Trump and get to the front of that lane.”Mr. Christie, the former two-term governor of New Jersey and unsuccessful 2016 presidential candidate, was visiting the Republicans’ first primary state as part of a trial period that he said would culminate by mid-May in a decision about a 2024 run.He spoke to a small group of reporters who came to observe him in a discussion with a dozen people at a residential treatment program for drug-addicted pregnant women. Addiction is an issue Mr. Christie has long been passionate about, and he visited the same program, Hope on Haven Hill, eight years ago while running for president. “I thought before Covid that this is the public health crisis of our generation, and I’m even more convinced now the Covid has passed that it is,” he told the group.Afterward, he portrayed the visit as an exercise in reconnecting with people who had supported his 2016 campaign, which ended abruptly after his sixth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, despite intensive campaigning in the state. He also met this week in Washington with former donors and campaign employees to gauge their reactions to a new run.It’s clear that Mr. Christie sees potential in being the most outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, whom he has bashed over 2020 election lies as well as for Republican defeats in the past three national elections.But that tack may be a losing proposition. Republicans have been abandoning the most prominent Trump alternative, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to rally around the former president. A poll this week of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center showed Mr. DeSantis falling to 22 percent, from 43 percent in a January survey by the same pollster. Mr. Trump far outdistanced rivals, at 42 percent. Mr. Christie was at 1 percent.“I don’t think that anybody is going to beat Donald Trump by sidling up to him, playing footsie with him and pretending that you’re almost like him,” Mr. Christie said. “I’m going to tell people the facts about his presidency and about his conduct. If they decide they want that again, that’s up to them.”Later on Thursday, Mr. Christie held a town hall-style event at New England College in Henniker, N.H. He spoke to about 100 students and a smattering of adults seated in a semicircle of white folding chairs.He ran through a menu of what he identified as Mr. Trump’s policy failures in office, then took aim at his urging supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which Mr. Trump passively watched on TV. “And when he saw that, you know what he did? He ate his well-done cheeseburger, and sat there and did nothing.”He expressed disgust that Republicans would think of renominating Mr. Trump. “Donald Trump is a TV star. Nothing more, nothing less,” Mr. Christie said. “And let me suggest to you that if we put it back to the White House, the reruns will be worse than the original show.”Mr. Christie, who was one of the most combative governors of the modern era — eager to joust with lawmakers, hecklers or New Jersey residents who confronted him in forums — claimed, nonetheless, that what the country needed is a return to civility, and he was just the one to restore it.It did not prevent him, though, from getting in a jab at President Biden’s age. Should the president win a second term, Mr. Christie suggested, he might well die in office and be succeeded by his vice president. “A vote for Donald Trump,” he said, implying that he would surely lose, “is a vote for Kamala Harris.”Taking questions, Mr. Christie was asked by a teenager whether, given Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy, he would have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mr. Christie demurred. He still would have supported Mr. Trump, he said, because he preferred his policies.Afterward, voters said that they appreciated Mr. Christie’s candor but that it was too early to commit to backing him.“I hope he runs. I think it’d be good to see him in the mix this year,” said J.P. Marzullo, a retiree and former Republican state representative from Deering, N.H., who supported Mr. Christie in 2016. But he wanted to play the field. “I’m still looking at some other people right now,” he said.Josh Merriam, 19, a student from Gilford, N.H., said the evening was “the first presidential hearing-thing I’ve ever been to,” and said his interest was piqued by Mr. Christie. “I do like Trump,” he said, but then he quoted back Mr. Christie’s warning that a Trump vote was akin to a vote for Ms. Harris. That was not a prospect he cared to contemplate. More

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, seeking a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, threatened to campaign against any candidate who does not support the proposal.Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion political group, threatened on Thursday to campaign against Donald J. Trump unless he endorsed a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a bold challenge that exposed the rift between the former president and some of his onetime allies.The group’s statement was a line in the sand for all conservative 2024 hopefuls. “We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America.Mr. Trump has been unwilling to wade into abortion battles after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and ended federal protections, thanks largely to a majority of conservative justices he helped muscle through as president. Last year, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation for a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks, an idea that split Republicans.Democrats campaigned on abortion rights in the 2022 midterms, and Republicans had another disappointing cycle. Mr. Trump blamed anti-abortion activists for Republican losses, saying they “could have fought much harder.” Others have attributed the party’s disappointing showing to Mr. Trump’s insistence on making election fraud a top issue for candidates.Ms. Dannenfelser’s statement on Thursday was a response to a Washington Post article about the abortion issue in which Mr. Trump’s campaign did not directly address whether he supported an abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy, which was the limit that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is preparing his own Republican presidential bid, recently signed into law in the state.Instead, Mr. Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying abortion “is an issue that should be decided at the state level.”Mr. Trump was mostly muted about the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade when it happened. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Trump downplayed his central role in paving the way for the decision’s reversal.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, whose name is affixed to most of his businesses and properties.In a statement, Mr. Trump’s campaign said he was “the most pro-life president in American history, as pro-life leaders have stated emphatically on repeated occasions.”It added: “Even though much work remains to be done to defend the cause of life, President Trump believes it is in the states where the greatest advances can now take place to protect the unborn.”In her statement, Ms. Dannenfelser said “President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”A Gallup survey last year found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said. More

A campaign video is said to be in production, and donors are being mobilized, for a run that could be announced early next week.President Biden is nearing a final decision to formally enter the 2024 presidential race as early as Tuesday, with a video to announce his run already in production, according to four people with knowledge of the plans.Mr. Biden, who said last week while in Ireland that he would enter the race “relatively soon,” will spend the weekend at Camp David, and he is expected to be joined by family members and some advisers. He has not yet given final approval to the announcement plan, according to one person with knowledge of the discussions.The New York Times reported on Monday that the Biden operation was discussing the possibility of a low-key video announcement next week on Tuesday, which marks the fourth anniversary of his entry into the 2020 race. One of Mr. Biden’s favorite poems, which he has often quoted, is about making “history and hope rhyme.”On Thursday, The Washington Post first reported that plans for an announcement next week were being finalized with Tuesday as a target.Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, declined to comment in a text Thursday evening. At a press briefing earlier in the day, she told reporters: “What I will say is that any announcement or anything that is related to 2024 certainly will not come from here.” The Democratic National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.At 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest president in American history and, by the end of a potential second term, he would be 86.The timing of a 2024 decision has been closely held by Mr. Biden’s inner circle at the White House, where re-election planning has been underway for months, overseen by two top advisers, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn. Still, planning has intensified in recent weeks with meetings between White House advisers and Democratic Party officials, with a focus on what kind of apparatus would support the president from the outside.Mr. Biden has a long history of extending deadlines around making major political decisions, injecting a measure of uncertainty into the timetable in the eyes of some of his allies.The political durability of the Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, has added to Mr. Biden’s ability to keep a coalition of Democrats together, including progressives who have at times taken issue with some White House policies. Mr. Trump, who has continued leading polls despite being indicted by the Manhattan district attorney this month, has proved to be a glue holding factions of the Democratic Party in place since 2020, when Mr. Biden won the South Carolina primary after losing the first two early state contests.Mr. Biden has already summoned donors to Washington next week, inviting those who have given at least $1 million to a two-day gathering starting on Friday. The event, which is not a fund-raiser, is intended to rally his army of bundlers and donors ahead of a 2024 campaign that is likely to top more than $1 billion, including super PAC spending.Cash considerations have been at the center of the Biden team’s thinking for when to enter the race. Announcing will allow him to begin banking contributions from big and small donors, but opening a campaign will incur significant expenses that might otherwise be deferred.Some outside groups have already begun preparing for a campaign, including a group called Future Forward that is expected to take the lead in television advertising; the long-running Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, which primarily focuses on digital work; and the group American Bridge, which has held events attended by administration officials.For instance, Ms. Dunn attended an American Bridge conference in Fort Lauderdale and appeared as a keynote speaker in her personal capacity.Mr. Biden is expected to face only token opposition in the primary. The author Marianne Williamson, who ran and lost in 2020, and the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are both running long-shot campaigns.Chris Cameron More

No matter the Republican, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 potential officials in a database akin to a right-wing LinkedIn.If a Republican enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Donald J. Trump or someone else, there is a good chance that president will turn to the same electronic database to staff the White House and federal agencies.Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and their teams, Dr. Roberts said, as well as staff members for other current and potential candidates, including Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations; the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; and former Vice President Mike Pence. They plan to give private briefings to all conservative candidates. The glaring problem with such an effort is that the various Republican hopefuls would most likely use different staffing criteria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner, cares far more about personal loyalty than ideological convictions.Indeed, he spent the bulk of his presidency trying to root out people whom he perceived as aligned with political critics, such as the Bush family, or Obama administration officials.In meetings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that his first administration was full of “snakes” and “traitors.” Those he complains about the most are not career bureaucrats but instead people like William P. Barr, a former Barry Goldwater supporter whom Mr. Trump himself selected as his attorney general.Dr. Roberts has anticipated the Trump challenge — and, though he doesn’t advertise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key people involved with the Heritage-led database served in the former president’s administration. They include James Bacon, a Trump loyalist who worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, John McEntee. In the final year of the Trump administration, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEntee overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed a questionnaire to vet government employees’ loyalty to Mr. Trump and his “America First” agenda.Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.In late 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would establish a new employment category for federal workers, called “Schedule F.” Barely anyone noticed because the order was developed in strict secrecy over more than a year and issued only two weeks before the 2020 election.The news was lost amid the postelection chaos as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the result.But key officials involved with the federal civil service immediately grasped the significance of Schedule F and its potential to create a new federal work force in which loyalty to Mr. Trump was the highest criteria, they said. Everett Kelley, who as national president of the American Federation of Government Employees represents more than half a million government workers, described Schedule F, at the time it was released, as “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”Mr. Trump’s staff estimated that Schedule F would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policy.President Biden rescinded the Schedule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, several of Mr. Trump’s confidants, including his former budget director Russell T. Vought, have been working on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration.Now, the two plans — Mr. Trump’s and Heritage’s — are dovetailing, even as Mr. Trump himself has shown no interest in the details. Conveniently, Dennis Kirk, a former Trump administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of Schedule F, is now employed by Heritage. Mr. Kirk is busy at work on Project 2025, Dr. Roberts said. More

In many legal settlements, both sides declare victory. The settlements themselves are often confidential, or are for amounts so far below the plaintiff’s original demand that a defendant can argue, with a straight face, that he settled essentially to make the case go away. Rather than deal with the risk of a rogue jury, defendants can settle for a reasonable sum and then often, in exchange for the cash, gain the silence of the plaintiff. The public, to the extent it cares, is left to argue over what “victory” truly meant.Not so with Dominion’s settlement against Fox. The moment the amount of the settlement emerged — $787,500,000 — I knew that Dominion had won and Fox had lost, and it wasn’t even close. The reason was clear to anyone who’d followed the case carefully: Damages, not guilt, were the weakest part of Dominion’s case. It had asked for $1.6 billion in damages, based in part on a theory outlined in the complaint that Fox’s “viral disinformation campaign” had “destroyed the enterprise value of a business that was worth potentially more than $1 billion.”To call that claim speculative is an understatement. According to a 2020 report in Forbes, Dominion had been paid $118.3 million for its election services between 2017 and 2019. I’ve litigated lost profit/lost enterprise value cases, and I know how difficult it is to prove estimated future financial fortunes.In other words, it was going to be straightforward to prove that Fox employees lied and deliberately platformed lies. It was going to be much harder to prove the kind of damages that Dominion claimed. Then, in the settlement, Fox paid Dominion a sum larger than Dominion could reasonably presume a jury would require. Why?This brings us to the difference between justice and accountability. The legal system can achieve justice when an aggrieved party is made whole. And make no mistake, Dominion received justice. It was more than made whole for Fox’s lies, and its quest for even more justice continues. Its lawsuits against OAN, Newsmax, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell are still pending.But accountability is different. Accountability occurs when the people responsible for misconduct — and not merely their corporate bank accounts — experience proportionate consequences for their actions. One of the #MeToo movement’s greatest achievements was exposing to the world the degree to which corporations essentially paid for the privilege of continued corruption. They’d write checks to the survivors of abuse (granting them justice) without taking action against the abusers (enabling them to avoid accountability).This is not a critique of the plaintiffs at all. They need justice, and they don’t have the power to impose accountability. They can’t mandate that corporations apologize or terminate employees without the agreement of the corporation. The system itself can generally only give them money. Do we want to ask people who’ve been harmed by misconduct to delay or risk their own quest for justice for the sake of using the settlement process to mandate apologies or terminations that the courts don’t have the power to compel?The end result, however, is a system whereby wealthy institutions can essentially build in their corruption as a cost of doing business. In 2021, for example, my wife and I published a report detailing years of sexual abuse at one of the largest and most prominent Christian summer camps in America, Kanakuk Kamp. The pattern there was clear: pay survivors, get them to sign confidential settlements, and continue on with the same leaders who had abjectly failed to protect the kids in their care.The Fox settlement reeks of justice without accountability. Not only is Fox not publicly apologizing for its misconduct, it has released deceptive descriptions of the settlement and the court’s findings. Its initial statement said in part: “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”That is not what the settlement reflects. The settlement reflects Fox’s abandonment of even the most minimal journalistic standards.Fox’s “news” story about the settlement was perhaps even worse. The headline stated that “Fox News Media, Dominion Voting Systems reach agreement over defamation lawsuit,” but it didn’t state the amount of the settlement and instead mainly focused on the judge’s compliments of Fox’s legal team. No, really:Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who was overseeing the defamation lawsuit, praised both parties for their handling of the case.“I have been on the bench since 2010. … I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever,” Davis said, adding, “I would be proud to be your judge in the future.”No mention, of course, that less than a week before, the same judge rebuked Fox’s lawyers, said he was concerned about “misrepresentations to the court” and lamented, “What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” And then the Fox story ends with this howler of a paragraph:Then-President Donald Trump and his allies fiercely challenged Joe Biden’s victory in the weeks following the election. Some of them, including members of his legal team, made false and unsubstantiated claims against Dominion Voting Systems and are the subject of separate defamation lawsuits.Note the deflection of responsibility. It was Trump’s legal team that made “false and unsubstantiated claims.” That’s unquestionably true, but those same lawyers were enthusiastically put on the air by Fox for the purpose of spreading their “false and unsubstantiated claims.” And as the court’s summary judgment ruling made clear, Fox employees also made what they knew to be false and unsubstantiated claims.The end result is that Fox has paid an immense price for its lies, but it recognizes that its true vulnerability isn’t in its bank account but in its audience. It can absorb huge financial losses so long as those losses are fleeting. It cannot prosper if it loses its audience. Shielding its audience from the truth is easily worth almost $800 million to a company that made $1.2 billion in net income last year and is sitting on $4 billion in cash reserves.In the meantime, many of the viewers who keep the company so very profitable won’t know anything meaningful about the Dominion settlement or Fox’s lies — because Fox won’t tell them. I can think of any number of friends, relatives and neighbors who regularly consume conservative media and know nothing about the case. They know nothing about Fox’s falsehoods. Their ignorance is of incalculable worth to Fox.While this newsletter is admittedly rather bleak even in the face of Fox’s decisive court defeat, the story is far from over. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox is pending in New York State court in Manhattan, and the larger right-wing media world is facing a series of reckonings in cases across the country. My friends at Protect Democracy have filed cases against Project Veritas, Gateway Pundit, Rudy Giuliani, Dinesh D’Souza and several additional defendants related to some of the most grotesque lies in the entire Stop the Steal effort.There is a chance that great weight of legal judgments will lead to legal accountability. Justice can be so punishing that even the most amoral institutions have to respond as a matter of self-preservation. But true accountability remains elusive.Indeed, the Dominion lawsuit is perfectly representative of a vital lesson we’ve learned during the Trump era. The law can stave off disaster, but only moral norms truly preserve the republic. The law (and law enforcement) blocked Trump’s attempted coup. Legal processes are underway to hold Trump responsible for his alleged criminal misdeeds. Court cases are likely to compensate multiple victims of defamation for their profound losses. Yet still our public square is overrun with ignorance and outright lies. A Machiavellian spirit stalks the land.But the legal system does give our nation a chance to come to its senses. In the words of the old Fox show “The X-Files,” “The truth is out there.” Not only did Dominion receive justice, but its litigation gave the public the gift of truth. Now it’s incumbent on our nation to receive that truth and react accordingly. Fox News has tried to purchase the privilege of continued corruption, but even its vast bank account can’t protect it from the public — but only if that public possesses a trace of curiosity and preserves a moral core. More