Elections

The settlement with Dominion Voting Systems was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news.Fox News abruptly agreed on Tuesday to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election, averting a lengthy and embarrassing trial just as a packed courtroom was seated in anticipation of hearing opening statements.The settlement, one of the largest ever in a defamation case, was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that has been full of remarkable disclosures that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news.In addition to the huge financial price, Dominion exacted a difficult admission from Fox News, which acknowledged in a statement that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were false.“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, said outside Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday.“Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesNews of the 11th-hour agreement stunned the full courtroom in Wilmington, where the case was being heard. Gasps filled the air when Judge Eric M. Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter. Lawyers for both sides had been preparing to speak to the jury for the first time, microphones clipped to their jacket lapels.The settlement spares Fox a trial that would have gone on for weeks and put many of the company’s most prominent figures — from the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to hosts like Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo — on the stand.The case held the potential to make public a stream of damaging information about how the network told its audience a story of fraud and interference in the 2020 presidential election that many of its own executives and on-screen personalities did not believe. And the network was not forced to apologize — a concession that Dominion lawyers had sought, lawyers involved in the case said.Dominion sued two years ago, after Fox aired false stories claiming that Dominion’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Tuesday, the company expressed a sense of exoneration about the large financial cost that Fox will have to pay. While Dominion’s suit asked for damages of $1.6 billion, almost double the settlement figure, the company will avoid many years of appeals that could have trimmed or eliminated any payout from a trial.“Over two years ago, a torrent of lies swept Dominion and election officials across America into an alternative universe of conspiracy theories causing grievous harm to Dominion and the country,” Mr. Nelson said. “Today’s settlement of $787.5 million represents vindication and accountability.”The case and the expected trial were significant because they raised the prospect for an elusive judgment in the post-Trump era: Very few allies of the former president’s have been held legally accountable for their roles in spreading the falsehoods that undermined confidence in the country’s democratic process and cast Mr. Biden’s victory as illegitimate. Polls show that large numbers of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was tainted.The size of the settlement, experts said, seems to have little precedent. RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, said she believed it was one of the largest settlements in a defamation case ever.“This was unquestionably the strongest defamation case we’ve ever seen against a major media company,” Ms. Andersen Jones said. The case was even more unusual, she added, because media companies typically seek to settle well before so much damaging information about their internal workings is released.A deal came together at the last possible minute, after months of almost no serious discussion between the two sides. As the case proceeded, Dominion divulged extraordinary details about the doubts that Fox employees expressed privately about voter fraud claims, even as they struck a different tone on the air.“Settlement before this trove of evidence became public would of course have been in Fox’s best interest,” Ms. Andersen Jones said. “Waiting until the eve of trial, when the whole nation had a chance to focus on what Fox said internally about Trump, its sources and its own viewers, gave Dominion the extra layer of accountability it was seeking.”It is uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high. It is rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released reams of internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who had tuned out after Mr. Trump’s loss. The messages tell the story of a frantic scramble inside Fox as it started losing audience share to competitors, like Newsmax, that were more willing to report on and endorse false claims about a plot involving Dominion machines to steal the election from Mr. Trump.Producers referred to pro-Trump guests like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani as “gold” for ratings and acknowledged that the audience didn’t want to hear about subjects like the possibility of a peaceful transition from a Trump administration to a Biden administration.Those communications have shown how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Mr. Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Some at Fox mocked Mr. Trump and his lawyers as “crazy” and under the influence of drugs like L.S.D. and magic mushrooms.Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Mr. Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers, despite doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve only a single disputed statement.The trial would have been a spectacle. Mr. Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, was slated to be one of Dominion’s first witnesses this week. Star anchors including Sean Hannity, Mr. Carlson and Ms. Bartiromo were likely to be called at other points.Even the most blockbuster media trials of the last generation — Ariel Sharon’s suit against Time and Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s against CBS, both in the 1980s — lacked the most explosive elements of this case, which raised weighty questions about the protections the First Amendment affords the media and whether one of the most influential forces in conservative politics would have to pay a price for amplifying misinformation.Both of those cases were settled out of court, too.In recent days, Fox raised questions about Dominion’s claims of damages. On Monday, it disputed Dominion’s worth, pointing to a recent legal filing in which the company lowered part of its request for compensation. Fox lawyers also raised doubts about the harm that Dominion had suffered, saying the company acknowledged that it had turned a profit in recent years.But the potential pitfalls for proceeding with a trial were real for Fox. Some of the revelations from the depositions that Dominion had conducted offered a preview of how damaging a trial could be. Mr. Murdoch acknowledged during his deposition that some Fox hosts had “endorsed” Mr. Trump’s lies, an admission that undercut Fox’s defense that it was merely reporting on — not amplifying — the former president’s claims.After the deposition concluded, the general counsel of Fox Corporation, Viet Dinh, tried to reassure Mr. Murdoch that he had done well.“I’m just going to say it. They didn’t lay a finger on you,” Mr. Dinh said.Mr. Murdoch disagreed, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. He pointed a finger at the lawyer who had questioned him for Dominion, Mr. Nelson, and said, “I think he would strongly disagree with that.”To which Mr. Nelson replied, “Indeed, I do.” More

After a decade of rising deficits and soaring debt, the top White House contenders, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, show little interest in battling over the nation’s finances.The first skirmish of the Republican presidential primary of 2024 broke through this weekend. It was not over a traditional theme of conservative politics, such as national defense, or more contemporary issues like immigration or “woke” social policy.Instead, the political organizations of former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida put their candidates forward as the guardians of the Democratic Party’s most precious policy legacies: Social Security and Medicare.The jousting between Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, and Mr. DeSantis, his undeclared and closest rival, signaled that after a decade of rising deficits, soaring debt and political silence from both parties, any grappling with the nation’s worsening fiscal condition will not be shaped by the Republican White House contenders. The party that once prided itself on cleareyed fiscal truth-telling — a message marred, without doubt, by successive tax-cutting — is still having none of it.And that signal came at a most inopportune moment, as House Republican leaders are girding for a fight over the government’s borrowing limit, linking any increase in the debt ceiling with tough spending cuts that the leaders of the party in 2024 show no interest in.“The facts are still on our side, and history is on our side,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who guided the fiscal policies of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “It’s just a bad era.”There was nothing particularly Republican in the exchange of advertisements posted by the super PACs of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis. On Friday, Make America Great Again Inc., a Trump-aligned political action committee, started running an advertisement declaring, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements, like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising our retirement age.”The DeSantis-linked Never Back Down PAC responded by accusing Mr. Trump of “repeating lies about Social Security,” then showed Mr. DeSantis saying, “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.”With that backdrop, Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California went on Monday to the New York Stock Exchange to try to prod President Biden into negotiations on the deficit, telling leaders in finance, “I want to talk to you about the debate that is not happening in Washington but should be happening over our national debt,” then adding, “America deserves to hear the truth.”The Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, on Monday at the New York Stock Exchange.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe problem with that truth is the math: With Republicans vowing once again not to raise taxes, exempting Social Security and Medicare from spending cuts would mean everything else funded by the federal government — the military, veterans’ programs, Medicaid, medical research, education, energy development — would need to be cut by 52 percent to balance the budget by 2033, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group that is highly critical of both parties.If the Social Security and Medicare exemption was extended to the military at a time when Republicans want to confront the threat from China, everything else needs to be cut by 70 percent. If veterans’ programs were also protected, Medicaid and a host of other programs — food stamps, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, agricultural subsidies, food safety inspections, federal student aid, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, National Parks, health care for the poor and self-employed, and much more — would need to be cut by 78 percent.“It used to be that everybody fought for political giveaways, but in the end, everybody knew the truth, so there was room for trade-offs and hard compromises,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “There is no good, hard governance anymore.”It has been just over a decade since Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, selected as his running mate the party’s embodiment of hair-shirt policymaking, Paul D. Ryan. At the time, then-Representative Ryan did not flinch in his assertions that the retiring baby boom generation made benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare absolutely vital to the nation’s future.And as a House member a decade ago, Mr. DeSantis readily embraced what was then the mainstream Republican position, voting repeatedly for Ryan-style changes to Social Security and Medicare that went nowhere, and promoting the restructuring of entitlements to make them “sustainable over the long term.”But in the loss of the Romney-Ryan ticket in 2012, Mr. Trump saw a lesson for his own presidential aspirations. And four years later, the business executive and reality television star ran on the improbable pledge to balance the budget, pay off the entire federal debt and never ever cut Social Security and Medicare.Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on their way to a rally in Denver in 2012.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times“Trump figured out in 2016 that an older, more working class, more populist party would become increasingly against fixing Social Security and Medicare, and he was right,” said Brian Riedl, who served as a budget adviser to former Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and is now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “It’s clearly good politics to recast yourself as the defender of Social Security and Medicare. It’s just bad for the country.”Deficits rose every year of the Trump presidency, from the $590 billion he inherited in the 2016 fiscal year, to $670 billion in 2017, $780 billion in 2018, $980 billion the following year, then a staggering $3.13 trillion in the pandemic year of 2020. By Mr. Riedl’s calculations, Mr. Trump added $7.8 trillion in deficit spending over 10 years through legislation and executive orders during his four years.That Mr. Trump fulfilled none of his promises of fiscal rectitude did not seem to matter; fiscal policy hardly came up during the campaign of 2020 and has not exactly reverberated in the Biden years either.“Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden has shown any interest in disciplining spending,” said Judd Gregg, a Republican and former New Hampshire senator who made a career of pushing for long-term deficit reduction. “But inevitably this comes to an end at some point — a herd of elephants coming over the horizon.”The herd is coming in two forms. The first is the aging baby boom generation, which is already driving up Social Security and Medicare costs. The number of Social Security recipients will rise from 44 million in 2010 to 73 million in 2030, raising Social Security spending from 4.8 percent of the economy to 5.9 percent.The second is interest on the national debt, which must cover interest rates that are rising after years of rock-bottom prices, driving up the cost of serving the government’s $31 trillion debt. After steep declines in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years that Mr. Biden bragged about on Tuesday, the federal deficit in the first half of 2023 reached $1.1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, up $430 billion from the first half of the previous fiscal year. Interest payments rose from $219 billion to $308 billion, a 41 percent leap that put debt servicing nearly on par with military spending.“You can’t have interest payments that are higher than defense payments, yet that’s the track we’re on in the next five years,” Ms. MacGuineas said. “We’re the frog in the boiling water.” More

Heider Garcia, the top election official in deep-red Tarrant County, had previously testified about being harassed by the former president’s right-wing supporters.Heider Garcia, the head of elections in Tarrant County, Texas, announced this week that he would resign after facing death threats, joining other beleaguered election officials across the nation who have quit under similar circumstances.Mr. Garcia oversees elections in a county where, in 2020, Donald J. Trump became only the second Republican presidential candidate to lose in more than 50 years. Right-wing skepticism of the election results fueled threats against him, even though the county received acclaim from state auditors for its handling of the 2020 voting. Why it’s importantWith Mr. Trump persistently repeating the lie that he won the 2020 election, many of his supporters and those in right-wing media have latched on to conspiracy theories and joined him in spreading disinformation about election security. Those tasked with running elections, even in deeply Republican areas that did vote for Mr. Trump in 2020, have borne the brunt of vitriol and threats from people persuaded by baseless claims of fraud.The threats made against himMr. Garcia detailed a series of threats as part of his written testimony last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he urged to pass better protections for election officials.One of the threats made online that he cited: “hang him when convicted from fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out his mouth.”He testified that he had repeatedly been the target of a doxxing campaign, including the posting of his home address on Twitter after Sidney Powell, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, falsely accused him on television and social media of manipulating election results.Mr. Garcia also testified that he received direct messages on Facebook with death threats calling him a “traitor,” and one election denier used Twitter to urge others to “hunt him down.”Heider Garcia’s backgroundMr. Garcia, whose political affiliation is not listed on public voting records, has overseen elections in Tarrant County since 2018. Before that, he had a similar role outside Sacramento in Placer County, Calif.He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.Election deniers have fixated on Mr. Garcia’s previous employment with Smartmatic, an election technology company that faced baseless accusations of rigging the 2020 election and filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News that is similar to one brought by the voting machine company Dominion, which was settled on Tuesday. He had several roles with Smartmatic over more than a dozen years, ending in 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. His work for the company in Venezuela, a favorite foil of the right wing because of its troubled socialist government, has been a focus of conspiracy theorists.What he said about the threats“I could not sleep that night, I just sat in the living room, until around 3:00 a.m., just waiting to see if anyone had read this and decided to act on it.”— From Mr. Garcia’s written testimony last year, describing the toll that the posting of his address online, along with other threats, had taken on him and his family.Other election officials who have quitAll three election officials resigned last year in another Texas county, Gillespie — at least one of whom cited repeated death threats and stalking.A rural Virginia county about 70 miles west of Richmond lost its entire elections staff this year after an onslaught of baseless voter fraud claims, NBC News reported.Read moreElection officials have resorted to an array of heightened security measures as threats against them have intensified, including hiring private security, fireproofing and erecting fencing around a vote tabulation center.The threats have led to several arrests by a Justice Department task force that was created in 2021 to focus on attempts to intimidate election officials. More

Susie Wiles helped Ron DeSantis become governor of Florida, but he turned against her and banished her from his orbit. Donald Trump was all too happy to bring her in from the cold.Two months before Election Day 2020, Susie Wiles stood uncomfortably inside a hospitality tent in Florida, caught between two proud and exacting men whom she had helped elect: President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis was not thrilled to see her.A year earlier, Ms. Wiles had been one of the most powerful people in the Florida governor’s orbit, leading his political operation and plotting his path to national prominence. Then he abruptly banished her, privately questioning her loyalty and moving to blackball her across Republican politics.So when Mr. Trump and Ms. Wiles, his top Florida adviser, saw the governor inside the tent at a joint event, Mr. Trump proposed a détente.“Shake hands,” he instructed them, according to two people with direct knowledge of the exchange.They did not. Both parties looked miserable and said little before walking off.Less than three years later, Ms. Wiles, 65, has ascended to become perhaps the most significant voice inside Mr. Trump’s third presidential campaign.Born into celebrity — her father, Pat Summerall, was a famed broadcaster — the attention-shunning Ms. Wiles has worked to send three Republicans to the White House and two to rule Tallahassee over a four-decade career. A key strength, friends say, is negotiating the egos of swaggering Republican men whom she can come to understand almost viscerally.And she and the rampaging former president suddenly have more in common: They both helped make Ron DeSantis. They would both like to unmake him.“She knows where the bodies are buried,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Trump adviser and expert of political dark arts who has known Ms. Wiles for more than 30 years.A Trump rally in Waco, Texas, in March. In a statement, Mr. Trump called Ms. Wiles “a great and well-respected leader from a wonderful family” and “a very smart and tough negotiator!”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesNow, she has become the unwitting embodiment of the conflict between her old boss and her current one, who has not hesitated to state the obvious.“This guy really hates you!” Mr. Trump has told Ms. Wiles privately, according to a person present, occasionally praising her if she is not in the room: “The only person who ever really had a problem with her is Ron DeSantis.”Ahead of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump rehired Ms. Wiles, over the governor’s objections, to run his campaign in Florida, as she had in 2016. After his defeat (though not in Florida), Mr. Trump placed her in charge of his post-presidential political affairs.In many ways, Ms. Wiles’s arc with him mirrors the party’s — the compromises made, the behaviors forgiven — reflecting professional Republicans’ unbridled embrace of a twice-impeached, freshly indicted former president who has lied for more than two years about the last election.A self-described “card-carrying member of the G.O.P. establishment” when she first joined Mr. Trump’s cause, Ms. Wiles has watched him redefine the term’s very meaning, helping to position him as a pseudo-incumbent in a party he has rebuilt in his image.Mr. Trump, forever enchanted by television celebrities of a certain era, is also partial to Ms. Wiles’s “good genes,” as he has told people, nodding at Mr. Summerall, whom the former president knew casually.“Susie is a great and well-respected leader from a wonderful family,” Mr. Trump said in a statement, “and she is also a very smart and tough negotiator!”Yet Ms. Wiles little resembles the spotlight-seeking, publicly combative Trump aides who have often passed through his upper campaign ranks. She spent much of the 1990s and 2000s working for medium-profile Jacksonville mayors. She is not a television surrogate. She tweets sparingly.Ms. Wiles has now survived in Mr. Trump’s circle for more than six years after he first mused, to her face, about firing her.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesBesides her tenure with Mr. DeSantis — whose allies now insist that Ms. Wiles leaked and influence-peddled at the governor’s expense when she was on his team — she has been the subject of far less internal backbiting than the typical senior Trump adviser. (In conversations with friends, Ms. Wiles, who declined to be interviewed, has furiously denied ever undermining Mr. DeSantis while working for him.)Those who know Ms. Wiles say she is motivated less by money or fame than by behind-the-scenes recognition that she has sway with the people who matter. She has assumed such unappealing duties as overseeing who gets paid, with a hand that aides have described as tightfisted.“She’s comfortable being staff and understanding that that’s who she is,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and an informal Trump adviser. “A lot of people, particularly in the early parts of his presidency, thought their job was to manipulate him.”The standard caveats about life with Mr. Trump remain immutable: No one can control him in earnest. No position is guaranteed in perpetuity. Ms. Wiles has now survived in his circle more than six years after he first mused, to her face, about firing her.If Ms. Wiles stops short of the let-Trump-be-Trump creed that has sometimes informed his senior team, neither has she fundamentally changed him or tried.She has not drastically curtailed his inputs from a constellation of far-right figures and MAGA hangers-on, whose value with the base Ms. Wiles recognizes. (“She has extraordinary judgment,” Mr. Stone said.)She was managing Mr. Trump’s political operation when he decided to endorse a roster of 2022 candidates who largely underperformed.She failed to head off Mr. Trump’s dinner in November with Kanye West and an entourage that unexpectedly included Nick Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist — a gathering that raised questions about what controls were in place around the candidate.Admirers say navigating Mr. Trump’s volatile impulses is part of the bargain for anyone in Ms. Wiles’s seat — or at least anyone hoping to hang onto it.Ms. Wiles, left, little resembles the spotlight-seeking, publicly combative Trump aides who have often passed through his upper campaign ranks.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd adversaries know enough to fear Mr. Trump’s chances more with Ms. Wiles at his side.“She’s formidable,” said Charlie Crist, the party-switching former Florida governor who lost a bid for his old office last year as a Democrat.“She wins,” said John Morgan, a prolific Democratic donor in the state.“Susie Wiles,” Mr. DeSantis said in his 2018 victory speech, as his wife, Casey, clapped behind him. “Really the best in the business.”‘She knows when to drop the hammer’For better and for worse, Ms. Wiles developed an early tolerance for flawed and famous men.Her father, Mr. Summerall, was a professional football player who later teamed with John Madden to form one of the most successful duos in sports broadcasting history. He was also, by his own account, an alcoholic and often absentee father who credited a letter from Ms. Wiles with eventually getting him to the Betty Ford Center for treatment.In his 2006 memoir, Mr. Summerall, who died in 2013, described his daughter as someone regularly mortified by his conduct but never compelled to abandon him entirely, recalling his own xenophobic language toward a doctor during a hospitalization. “Susan wanted to crawl under the nearest bedpan and hide,” he wrote.Raised mostly in New Jersey, Ms. Wiles took an early job as an aide to Jack Kemp, a Republican congressman who had been Mr. Summerall’s teammate. She worked on presidential campaigns for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.Pat Summerall and John Madden in 1981. Mr. Summerall was, by his own account, an alcoholic and often absentee father who credited a letter from Ms. Wiles with eventually getting him to the Betty Ford Center for treatment.CBS, via Getty ImagesShe forged ties to Republicans locally and nationally, serving in Jacksonville as a district aide to Representative Tillie Fowler but becoming close with Washington fixtures like Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who was later Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman (and the recipient of a presidential pardon).After leaving the business for roughly a decade when she had children, Ms. Wiles established herself as one of the party’s go-to strategists in northeastern Florida, alongside her former husband, Lanny Wiles, a veteran Republican advance man.She developed a reputation for elevating the strengths of her principals, stressing that perceived authenticity could overwhelm many warts. She did so with a down-home delivery that could sometimes be misread, colleagues said. “It all depends on how you deal with her,” said Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who knew Ms. Wiles before both worked for Mr. Trump. “She knows when to drop the hammer.”A client’s ideology has not generally been a chief concern. In 2010, Ms. Wiles helped lead Rick Scott’s campaign for Florida governor, throwing in with a Tea Party-era businessman-outsider.The next year, Ms. Wiles swerved to the establishment-friendly presidential campaign of Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and Obama administration ambassador to China, briefly managing his run before abruptly leaving.Ms. Wiles seemed to acknowledge the whiplash when she joined Mr. Trump’s 2016 bid; a top Florida adviser whom Mr. Trump adored, Karen Giorno, was among those who encouraged the campaign to give her a larger role. Ms. Wiles noted in an email at the time that many people thought her support for him “was ill advised — even crazy.”Yet she seemed to appreciate Mr. Trump’s talents at a microphone and his curated celebrity, appraising his drawbacks as pardonable and politically surmountable.“I think I can help him,” she said privately.Ms. Wiles’s presence lent Mr. Trump credibility with old-guard Florida Republicans who might have preferred Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio as their nominee.Mr. Trump, though, was not initially pleased to have her. Amid a state polling downturn in fall 2016 soon after Ms. Wiles took over in Florida, as Mr. Trump sawed at a steak one night at his Miami golf resort, she was summoned to his table for what amounted to a ritual castigation.When Ms. Wiles joined Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, she noted in an email at the time that many people thought her support for him “was ill advised — even crazy.”Stephen Crowley/The New York Times“I don’t think you can do this job,” Mr. Trump told her, tossing off expletives, before turning to others in the room. “Find me somebody else.”Ms. Wiles replied that if he wanted someone who would set her “hair on fire,” she was indeed the wrong fit. But she maintained that she could help him win.When Mr. Trump continued to complain, Ms. Wiles eventually left, shaken.But she did not leave the team. Mr. Trump, more confident as Election Day neared, later told Ms. Wiles that he was sorry they had to have “that little motivational talk,” according to a person familiar with the conversation.Ms. Wiles rejected the characterization. “We can’t do that again,” she said.“We won’t have to,” he promised.An alliance and a rupture with DeSantisMuch of Mr. DeSantis’s 2018 campaign in Florida was premised on Trump emulation: his endorsement, his talking points, a viral ad in which the would-be governor urged his toddler to “build the wall” out of blocks.So when Mr. DeSantis’s general-election bid sputtered early on, he and Representative Matt Gaetz, a close adviser at the time, determined that another Trump echo was in order. They needed Susie Wiles.It was an unnatural fit on paper — the sometimes standoffish candidate with few initial ties to Tallahassee and the genial consultant who had helped elect the man he hoped to succeed.But the two coexisted well enough at first. After Mr. DeSantis edged his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, he asked Ms. Wiles to help steer his transition. Some interviews for administration posts were conducted at her home.The period represented an inflection point for Ms. Wiles. After 2016, a previous moment of campaign triumph, she did not join Mr. Trump’s White House and kept little contact with him in the years that followed. She remained in Jacksonville, where she had worked since 2011 as a managing partner at Ballard Partners, the prominent lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard, a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis.Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, after he won the 2018 race for Florida governor. Much of his campaign was premised on emulating Mr. Trump. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThis time, she took a top position in Florida for herself, as chairwoman of Mr. DeSantis’s political committee, charting a course to national exposure for him.“It is the governor’s desire to fund-raise and maintain a high political profile at all times,” she wrote in a January 2019 memo, “inside and outside of Florida.”Within months, Mr. DeSantis resolved to achieve these aims without Ms. Wiles.The reasons given for this have varied. Even more than Mr. Trump, according to people who know both men, the governor and his wife, Casey, his closest adviser, can grow consumed with the idea that associates are trading on his name.Did Ms. Wiles accept too much credit for his victory? Reward friends and prioritize clients with her expanded power? Speak too freely to reporters, whom Mr. DeSantis reflexively distrusts?People who have spoken to the governor attributed the breakdown to a combination of such factors, without supplying evidence for the most explosive claims. One ally recalled Mr. DeSantis remarking that staff should remain staff, suggesting that Ms. Wiles had somehow drifted from her allotted lane.Others have wondered if the governor considered her too close to Mr. Scott, with whom Mr. DeSantis has had a prickly relationship. (In a statement, Mr. Scott called Ms. Wiles “one of the best operatives in the party and a good friend.”)A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment on Ms. Wiles.In September 2019, the rupture widened into public view. Ms. Wiles’s fund-raising memo, along with other snapshots from inside the governor’s operation, appeared in The Tampa Bay Times.Ms. Wiles, describing the entire experience to friends as bewildering and bizarre, assured anyone who would listen that she was not the source of a leak that would plainly damage her standing with a boss who prized discretion.The DeSantises would not hear it. The governor cited the article to others as a final straw.“It’s her,” he repeated. “It’s her.”Return to TrumpworldImmediately, Mr. DeSantis made it known among state power brokers that Mr. Ballard’s firm would lose favor with his office if Ms. Wiles remained there, according to people who spoke with the governor.Mr. Ballard has denied being strong-armed. Days after the Tampa Bay Times article, Ms. Wiles said she was leaving Ballard Partners “due to a nagging health issue.”In the insular, gossipy world of Florida politics, her exile was an earthquake. Friends recalled her bordering on despondent in the months afterward.Mr. DeSantis and Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, sought to prevent her from joining his re-election campaign, angering her former Trump colleagues. When Jacksonville was briefly considered as a backup 2020 convention site, Mr. DeSantis was said to discourage donors from aiding the effort to bring the event to his state because Ms. Wiles was advising the planners.By early summer 2020, after some unsettling Florida presidential polling, Mr. Trump wanted her back. He explained himself in a phone call he initiated with Mr. DeSantis, according to people familiar with the conversation, sounding unmoved as the governor disparaged her.In July, a Trump campaign Twitter account announced her return with a pledge to “win Florida again going away!”Mr. Trump did, even if little else went right in November.While Ms. Wiles was not among those pushing Mr. Trump’s stolen-election fantasies before or after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, neither did she appear to view any of his sins as unforgivable.Mr. Trump sounded incredulous for months that Mr. DeSantis would challenge him. But Ms. Wiles told him the governor would run. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs Mr. Trump soured on several aides after his presidency and others left on their own, Ms. Wiles was ultimately brought back, assuming broad responsibility for his political portfolio. Privately, she has signaled a gratitude for his trust in her, particularly after her experience with Mr. DeSantis.When Mr. Trump declared his candidacy, Ms. Wiles brought in an ally, Brian Jack, to oversee the campaign with her alongside Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican strategist.With the governor expected to formally enter the presidential race soon, some DeSantis allies suspect that Ms. Wiles has helped perpetuate a theme in news coverage that he churns through staff and interacts uncomfortably with donors. (Many former aides and even supporters have attested to his disdain for glad-handing.)But over her past two years beside Mr. Trump, Ms. Wiles’s most notable read on Mr. DeSantis was far simpler.The former president had sounded incredulous for months that his onetime acolyte would challenge him. Didn’t he remember what Mr. Trump had done for him? Why risk an embarrassing defeat?Ms. Wiles respectfully disagreed.“He’s running,” she would tell Mr. Trump. She knew her client.Kitty Bennett More

Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat who plans to kick off his campaign this week, says he wants to make vaccines safer, but he is spreading misinformation by twisting facts out of context.WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial in January 2022 and condemned the federal government’s coronavirus response by railing against totalitarianism. Jews in Nazi Germany, he suggested, had more freedom than Americans facing vaccination mandates and school, church and business closures in the era of Covid-19.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland,” he told a crowd of flag-waving anti-vaccine enthusiasts at a “Defeat the Mandates” rally. “You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”Mr. Kennedy later apologized, though it was not the first time he had invoked the Holocaust. Over the past two decades, as he has pursued what he calls “safe vaccine activism,” Mr. Kennedy has evolved from an environmental lawyer concerned about mercury poisoning into a crusader for individual liberty — a path that has landed him, a scion of a storied Democratic clan, in the unlikely embrace of the American political right.On Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy plans to formally announce that he is challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president. His vaccine skepticism gives him something in common with another candidate: former President Donald J. Trump, who like Mr. Kennedy has blamed childhood vaccines for autism — a discredited theory that has been repudiated by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies in multiple countries.“Robert F. Kennedy could jump into the Republican primary for president and only DeSantis and Trump, I think, would do better,” Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said recently on his podcast, referring to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Bannon said Mr. Kennedy had a “massive following” with his audience. “People love this guy,” he said.Vaccination is a singular public health success that has saved untold millions of lives. Vaccines have eradicated smallpox, averted millions of deaths from measles and sent naturally occurring polio cases plummeting, from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to six reported cases worldwide in 2021, according to the World Health Organization.Mr. Kennedy condemned the federal government’s coronavirus response in front of the Lincoln Memorial in January 2022.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy has insisted that he is not opposed to vaccines and that his sole interest is in making them safer. “I’m not anti-vaccine, although I’m kind of the poster child for the anti-vax movement,” he said during a recent speech at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian college in Michigan.But through his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, and his movies, speeches and books — including one that portrays Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry — Mr. Kennedy has used his platform and his family’s star power to sow doubts about vaccine safety, spreading misinformation by twisting facts out of context.In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate named him one of its “Disinformation Dozen” — the 12 people whom the organization found to have been responsible for roughly three-quarters of anti-vaccine content on Facebook.Facebook and Instagram have removed the accounts of Children’s Health Defense, and Mr. Kennedy has accused them of censorship. He is also suing the Biden administration and Dr. Fauci, who for decades led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, accusing them of pressuring social media companies to censor free speech.Mr. Kennedy declined to be interviewed. In an email message, he said Children’s Health Defense had “an extremely robust fact-checking operation.” He also pointed to a response by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, disputing the “Disinformation Dozen” report. Meta critiqued the study’s design, saying that focusing on just 12 people “misses the forest for the trees.”Family BacklashMr. Kennedy, 69, is the third-eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who urged Americans to take the Salk polio vaccine and signed the Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962 to help states and cities carry out childhood immunization programs.His activism, and now his political aspirations, have been wrenching for his family. Some of his family members have publicly rebuked him. His sister Rory Kennedy told CNN she was backing Mr. Biden, while his sister Kerry Kennedy said in a statement, “I love my brother Bobby, but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues.”Ahead of his White House bid, Mr. Kennedy is playing up his family history. He lives in California but plans to make his announcement in Boston, a city closely identified with the Kennedys. He recently tweeted a photo of himself in a vintage “Kennedy for President” T-shirt.His name and family reputation have opened doors for him. Dr. Fauci said he had met with Mr. Kennedy several times and had told him “that I believe that his intentions are not evil, but his information is incorrect, and he’s misguided and can inadvertently cause significant harm.” Dr. Fauci said that when Mr. Kennedy’s book about him, titled “The Real Anthony Fauci,” came out in 2021, he was “really shocked.”“The entire book is such a complete lie,” Dr. Fauci said.Mr. Kennedy, top left, is the third-eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy.Associated PressMr. Kennedy’s messages often have a grain of truth. The Children’s Health Defense website, for instance, says “vaccines contain many ingredients, some of which are known to be neurotoxic, carcinogenic and cause autoimmunity.” Vaccines do contain preservatives and additives, such as aluminum salts, which have been in use in vaccines for decades. Studies show adverse reactions are rare and typically involve skin allergies.The Children’s Health Defense website also states that certain vaccines are not tested against placebos in clinical trials, citing polio, hepatitis and meningitis vaccines as examples. That is misleading. Brand-new vaccines — from polio to measles to Covid-19 — are tested in large clinical trials that include placebo groups. But scientists agree it would be unethical to withhold lifesaving vaccines from study participants. For that reason, when older vaccines are reformulated or updated, studies do not include a placebo group.“Vaccine injuries can and do happen,” the website declares. That is true as well, but the federal government has an aggressive system to track and detect side effects so they can be addressed.The measles vaccine, for instance, lowers the platelet count in about one in every 25,000 to 30,000 people. That can cause red spots from bleeding under the skin — a problem that is usually “short-lived and self-resolving,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But measles causes that problem in one in 3,000 children — roughly 10 times as many as the vaccine, he said.“There are no risk-free choices, just choices to take different risks,” said Dr. Offit, who has been a vocal critic of Mr. Kennedy. “You could argue the greatest risk of vaccines is driving to the office to get them.”A Movement GrowsBy his own account, Mr. Kennedy was at first a reluctant critic of vaccination. He got involved in 2005, when he was an environmental lawyer suing coal-fired power plants to force them to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic chemicals.The anti-vaccine movement in the United States had been growing amid debate over a rise in cases of autism. In 1998, a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a study of 12 children in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, that suggested a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism.The article was retracted in 2010, and Mr. Wakefield was later barred from practicing medicine. But in the years after its publication, another theory began to take hold: that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that had been used for decades to prevent bacteria from growing in multiple-dose vials of vaccines, caused autism.Mr. Kennedy examining a canal that supplied water from a natural spring to a Palestinian village in 2019. He got involved in the anti-vaccine movement when he was an environmental lawyer.Daniel Rolider for The New York TimesThe measles, mumps and rubella vaccine never contained thimerosal, but other vaccines given to infants did. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is “no evidence” that the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines cause harm, “except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site.”But in 1999, after Congress directed the Food and Drug Administration to look at mercury in all products, the American Academy of Pediatrics, federal health agencies and vaccine manufacturers agreed that thimerosal should be removed from childhood vaccines. The decision was made “out of an abundance of caution,” said Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.But the move alarmed parents. As Mr. Kennedy traveled the country giving speeches, he has said, mothers of intellectually disabled children began buttonholing him, pressing him to investigate vaccines.“They would say to me in a very respectful but also kind of vaguely scolding way, ‘If you’re really interested in mercury exposures to children, you need to look at vaccines,’” he told the Hillsdale College audience.In 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon copublished an article by Mr. Kennedy, headlined “Deadly Immunity,” that blamed thimerosal in vaccines for fueling the rise in autism. Salon later retracted the article. Mr. Kennedy insisted Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.Thimerosal is still used in flu vaccines. In 2015, shortly after Mr. Kennedy published a book about the preservative, he met Eric Gladen, an engineer who believes he was sickened by thimerosal in a tetanus vaccine and who made a film about his experience. The two joined forces. Mr. Gladen’s advocacy group, World Mercury Project, was later rebranded as Children’s Health Defense.“We had two huge tools to raise funds; we had my film, which is about 10 years of research put into 90 minutes, and his book,” Mr. Gladen said in an interview, adding, “Between him being a Kennedy, the film and his book, it compelled a lot of people to get involved.”The anti-vaccine movement was, at the time, largely the province of the political left. Mr. Kennedy found allies in Hollywood celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy. In California, he waged an unsuccessful fight against a bill to eliminate the “personal belief” exemption that allowed parents to opt out of vaccinating their children.Mr. Kennedy speaking to an anti-vaccine rally at the New York State Capitol in Albany in 2020.Hans Pennink/Associated PressMr. Kennedy has been a vocal opponent of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, a 1986 federal law intended to promote the development of vaccines by shielding manufacturers from lawsuits. In 2003, at the height of the thimerosal controversy, a bipartisan measure to update the law by offering immunity to vaccine additive manufacturers collapsed in Congress.Mr. Kennedy points to such efforts as evidence that lawmakers and federal regulators are conspiring to protect drug companies, which he says lack incentives to focus on safety. During the fight over the California legislation, he invoked those arguments, said Dr. Richard Pan, a former state senator who was an author of the bill and met with Mr. Kennedy at the time.“He mainly focused on the F.D.A. being corrupt and in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies to hide the danger of vaccines,” Dr. Pan said.Meeting With TrumpShortly before Mr. Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, Mr. Kennedy met with him at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Mr. Kennedy said afterward that the president-elect wanted him to lead a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. He told Science magazine that Mr. Trump had told him he had five friends whose healthy children “developed a suite of deficits” after being vaccinated.The commission never came to pass, but the coronavirus pandemic gave Mr. Kennedy an even bigger platform. As the country grew ever more polarized, with many of Mr. Trump’s followers shunning the vaccines and Dr. Fauci becoming a lightning rod, Mr. Kennedy’s book about Dr. Fauci became a best seller.Another book by Mr. Kennedy is due out in June, this time focusing on the controversy over the origins of the coronavirus. Titled “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” it claims that federal health officials “conspired with the Chinese military” to hide the pandemic’s origins — an assertion that appears to conflate experiments by the Chinese military at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with other work there funded by the U.S. government.How much Mr. Kennedy will talk about vaccine safety during his presidential campaign remains unclear. As he did during the rally at the Lincoln Memorial, he used his talk at Hillsdale College to cloak his activism in a broader point — that the government, the press and social media companies are trying to silence him, pushing the United States toward tyranny.“The founders, specifically Hamilton, Madison, Adams, said, ‘We put freedom of expression in the First Amendment because all the other amendments are dependent on it,’” Mr. Kennedy said. “Because if you give a government the right to silence their opponents, they now have a license for any atrocity.” More

Mr. Santos, a Republican House member from New York, has admitted to lying about parts of his biography and is facing several ethics and criminal inquiries.Representative George Santos won his seat in Congress in part by deceiving voters with lies and exaggerations about his biography. Now, with his falsehoods exposed, Mr. Santos plans to test his luck with voters again.Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, formally announced that he was running for re-election on Monday. In a statement, he did not address the controversy that has surrounded him for months.Instead, he depicted himself as a political outsider who would eschew traditional Republican Party politics.“We need a fighter who knows the district and can serve the people fearlessly, and independent of local or national party influence,” Mr. Santos said. “Good isn’t good enough, and I’m not shy about doing what it takes to get the job done.”The announcement follows months of speculation over Mr. Santos’s political future, with fellow Republican lawmakers calling for his resignation, and federal and state prosecutors and his colleagues in Congress investigating his falsehoods on the campaign trail and his finances.Last month, Mr. Santos filed paperwork indicating his intent to run for re-election, but Monday’s announcement, which was first reported in The New York Post, was his first public declaration of his 2024 campaign.Though he has admitted to fabricating some parts of his résumé and biography, Mr. Santos has stood by other apparent falsehoods and insisted that the inquiries into him would find no criminal wrongdoing. Still, for months, he remained publicly ambivalent about whether he would run again.Shortly before sharing his intention to run for re-election on social media, Mr. Santos declined to confirm the announcement, telling a New York Times reporter, “I’m not confirming anything for you.”Mr. Santos enters the race with significant challenges. Polling has shown that he is unpopular in his district, with 78 percent of constituents believing that he ought to resign, according to a January Siena poll.He will also face a cash crunch: As of the end of last month, his campaign had just over $25,000 on hand, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.While other first-term Republicans in New York battleground districts raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first three months of the year, Mr. Santos raised only $5,333.26. During that same period he refunded nearly $8,400, bringing his fund-raising total into the negative.That is less than Mr. Santos raised during his first run for office in 2020, when he was virtually unknown and reported receiving about $7,000 in the same three-month period.Around the same time Mr. Santos made his intentions public, Republicans filed paperwork to create a new joint fund-raising committee that will allow Speaker Kevin McCarthy and others to pour money into defending the party’s seats in New York. Mr. Santos was the only vulnerable Republican left out of the effort.Even before he was mired in scandal, Mr. Santos was already expected to face a competitive race.Democrats, eager to reverse losses in New York that cost them their hold on Congress, were eyeing Mr. Santos’s suburban district, which covers northern Nassau County on Long Island and a small section of northeast Queens.But Mr. Santos’s seat became even more of a priority for Democrats after The New York Times and other news outlets published revelations that he had omitted key details from his financial disclosures and misled voters about his education, his professional background, his heritage and his ties to tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Sept. 11 attacks.Subsequent reporting uncovered a number of irregularities in his campaign filings, including an unusual pattern of payments for $199.99, an unregistered fund that purported to be raising huge amounts for Mr. Santos and thousands of dollars in unexplained expenses.The F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and the Nassau County district attorney’s office are now all investigating Mr. Santos’s campaign finances and how Mr. Santos operated his business, the Devolder Organization, about which he has disclosed little information.The House Ethics Committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, is conducting an inquiry into whether Mr. Santos failed to properly fill out his financial disclosure forms, violated federal conflict of interest laws or engaged in other unlawful activity during his 2022 campaign.Mr. McCarthy, who holds a slim majority in the House, has pinned Mr. Santos’s fate in Congress on that investigation. Yet the speaker, who supported Mr. Santos’s campaign in 2022, has also expressed reservations about a re-election bid, telling reporters in Washington earlier this year that he would “probably have a little difficulty” supporting one.Mr. Santos temporarily removed himself from two congressional committees at the direction of House leadership, and many rank-and-file Republicans have said they would not work with him on legislation.“From a political point of view, I don’t think there’s any future for him,” Edward F. Cox, the state Republican Party chairman in New York, said in an interview. He added that his organization would “clearly not” be helping Mr. Santos’s campaign.Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, a small but influential partner to the Republican Party, said in a statement that the Conservatives would not back Mr. Santos under any circumstances. “The party has called for his resignation and finds his pattern of deceit morally repugnant,” he said.Closer to home, just days after Mr. Santos was sworn in, a score of Republican officials in Nassau County called on him to resign, said they would not endorse him in 2024 and would work to circumvent his office whenever possible.Mr. Santos already faces a primary challenger, Kellen Curry, whose campaign biography says he served in the Air Force for eight years before working for J.P. Morgan.The seat is also being looked at by a raft of Democrats, including Mr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, and Josh Lafazan, a centrist Nassau County legislator who has entered the race.Party leaders are also encouraging a comeback attempt by Thomas R. Suozzi, the district’s former representative who retired last year. Mr. Suozzi is now working for a consulting firm, but he has spoken about the possibility in recent weeks with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat, and Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, according to two people with direct knowledge.Nicholas Fandos More

This month, her campaign said she had raised $11 million in the opening six weeks of her bid for the Republican presidential nomination. But the real figure appears to be about $8.3 million.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential run on an image as a straight shooter, with experience and drama-free competence.This weekend, though, it became clear that the impressive early fund-raising numbers her campaign promoted this month had been inflated, apparently because of double-counted money.The campaign had broadcast an $11 million haul in its opening six weeks, through the end of the first-quarter filing period on March 31. But when three of her affiliated committees filed reports on Saturday, the math did not add up.Instead, the three committees appeared to have taken in about $8.3 million, including $2.7 million that one of the committees transferred to two other committees and that was double-counted in the overall figure.On Saturday, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley said other campaigns had accounted for their money similarly in the past.How can this happen?The muddied accounting exposes the risks of building a campaign-finance operation with a patchwork of committees, which has become standard for presidential candidates. Ms. Haley is backed by four affiliated entities registered with the Federal Election Commission, three of which made filings on Saturday.Team Stand for America, her joint fund-raising committee, solicits contributions that are then divided between three entities: her presidential campaign committee, a multicandidate political action committee and a hybrid PAC (which did not file on Saturday).According to its filing on Saturday, Team Stand for America raised nearly $4.3 million in contributions in the first quarter. It also transferred $2.7 million to affiliated committees, and here is where the math got tricky. Without those transfers, the total raised by the three committees was $8.3 million, not $11 million.More details, pleaseMs. Haley’s principal campaign committee — Nikki Haley for President — disclosed that it had taken in $5.1 million in receipts. But only $3.3 million of that sum came from contributions: The remaining $1.8 million came from Team Stand for America in two transfers recorded on March 31, the filings show.Stand for America PAC, a group that supports her but can also raise money for other candidates, reported $1.5 million in receipts — but just $600,000 of that came from contributions, the filing shows. The PAC received $886,000 in transferred money from Team Stand for America on March 31.In offering the original $11 million figure, the campaign added up the total receipts for the three groups — $5.1 million, $4.3 million and $1.5 million — without accounting for the fact that $2.7 million was being moved between the groups.What does it mean?Not much. There is nothing inaccurate about the filings themselves — they appear to add up — and there is nothing new about campaigns overhyping their fund-raising.And $8.3 million is still a sizable haul for the first six weeks of a presidential campaign. In comparison, former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign disclosed $9.5 million in receipts in January for the first six weeks of his official bid.A spokeswoman for Ms. Haley did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.In 2021, Mr. Trump’s advisers announced, inaccurately, that his affiliated political committees had raised nearly $82 million in the first six months of the year. That figure improperly counted at least $23 million in transfers to new political action committees from other accounts, The New York Times found.Mr. Trump’s joint campaign committee — which has been the main vessel for his fund-raising this election cycle — raised $18.8 million in the first quarter, his campaign has said. It transferred $14 million to his principle campaign committee, according to filings Saturday. More

As the Republican primary field takes shape, the groups supporting the top two hopefuls are already spending millions.The super PACs supporting the top two Republican presidential hopefuls have opened a wave of TV attack ads, part of a multimillion-dollar attempt to control the political narrative in the early days of an increasingly likely primary matchup.The two groups — MAGA Inc., which is backing former President Donald J. Trump, and Never Back Down, supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — have already spent over $7.5 million combined.MAGA Inc. has spent exclusively on cable networks, while Never Back Down has targeted states that have traditionally held the party’s earliest presidential nominating contests, according to spokesmen for the two super PACs and data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm.The groups’ opposing methods reflect the politicians’ disparate standings in the party. Mr. Trump, a businessman-turned-TV star who has led two national political campaigns and announced his third last year, is universally recognized inside the party and seeking to leverage that advantage with a broad attack against Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis, who has all but declared his 2024 candidacy and who remains a distant second to Mr. Trump in most public opinion polls, is still introducing himself to voters. A poll by the Republican research firm Cygnal in Iowa this month showed 18 percent of respondents said they had either never heard of Mr. DeSantis or didn’t know much about him.If he opens a presidential campaign in the coming months, as expected, his chance of defeating Mr. Trump will depend largely on his performance in the early primary states.Mr. DeSantis should have the resources to make up ground. Never Back Down has said it has already raised $30 million, part of a $110 million war chest available to his allies.MAGA Inc. reported $54.1 million on hand at the end of 2022. The group has been criticizing Mr. DeSantis in ads for more than a month. The first spot targets Mr. DeSantis’s support for cutting Social Security and increasing the retirement age for Medicare benefits while he was a member of Congress. “The more you learn about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values,” the narrator says in the ad.The most recent spot attacks him over his supposed eating habits and his policy positions. It has aired on CNN, Fox and Newsmax.The ad accuses Mr. DeSantis of sticking his “dirty fingers” into senior entitlement programs, referring to his support for changes to Medicare and Social Security when he was a member of Congress. The spot also mocks Mr. DeSantis, a fast-food and snack enthusiast, for supposedly once eating pudding with three fingers instead of waiting for a spoon. (Mr. DeSantis has denied this.)“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” a narrator says as an anonymous man in a suit sloppily eats pudding with his hands. “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising the retirement age.”The super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down, returned fire this weekend with a spot aiming at Mr. Trump. Its ads are focused on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, all likely to hold early primaries.The pro-DeSantis ad opens by reminding viewers of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles. The former president was arrested on April 4 and charged with 34 felonies as part of an investigation into hush-money payments to a porn actress during the 2016 presidential campaign.The spot, titled “Fight Democrats, Not Republicans,” argues that Mr. Trump should be focused on those legal fights instead of attacking a fellow Republican and asks, “What happened to Donald Trump?”“Donald Trump has been attacked by a Democrat prosecutor in New York. So why is he spending millions attacking the Republican governor of Florida?” the narrator asks. “Trump’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook, repeating lies about Social Security.” More