Elections

In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Tex., the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as the sect’s doomed charismatic leader David Koresh did three decades ago.But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Mr. Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve Donald J. Trump.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” Mr. Pace said in an interview. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Mr. Trump, embattled by multiple investigations and publicly predicting an imminent indictment in one, announced last week that he would hold the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign on Saturday at the regional airport in Waco.The date falls in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the weekslong standoff involving federal agents and followers of Mr. Koresh that left 82 Branch Davidians and four agents dead at Mount Carmel, the group’s compound east of the city.More than 80 Branch Davidians died during the standoff at their compound outside Waco.Tim Roberts/AFP via Getty ImagesMr. Trump has not linked his Waco visit to the anniversary. Asked whether the rally — the former president’s first in the city of 140,000 — was an intentional nod to the most infamous episode in Waco’s history, Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman, replied via email that the Waco site was chosen “because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas’ biggest metropolitan areas — Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude.”But the rally comes amid a spate of increasingly aggressive statements by Mr. Trump claiming his persecution at the hands of prosecutors, and the historical resonance has not been lost on some of his most ardent followers.“Waco was an overreach of the government, and today the New York district attorney is practicing an overreach of the government again,” said Sharon Anderson, a retiree from Etowah, Tenn., who is traveling to Waco for Saturday’s event, her 33rd Trump rally.Mr. Pace said he believed it was “a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him.”“I’m going to the rally, for sure,” he added.The attention to Mr. Trump’s choice of locale highlights the long political afterlife of the Waco standoff. A polarizing episode in its own time, the deadly raid was invoked in the 1990s by right-wing extremists including Timothy McVeigh, often to the dismay of the surviving Branch Davidians. It has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” said Charles Pace, a pastor who preaches about the coming apocalypse. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAlex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.“Waco is a touchstone for the far right,” said Stuart Wright, a professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Tex., and an authority on the standoff.He said Mr. Trump’s decision to begin his campaign there, if intentional in its nod to the siege, would echo Ronald Reagan’s August 1980 speech affirming his support of “states’ rights” at a county fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town known for the murder of three civil rights activists 16 years earlier.“There’s some deep symbolism,” Mr. Wright said.Mr. Trump has a long history of statements that feed the far right, even as he claims that was not his intent. That list includes his equivocating response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one woman dead; his message to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in a presidential debate; and his exhortations to supporters in Washington just before many stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his defeat.As state and federal investigations have drawn closer to him in recent months, he has often portrayed himself in embattled or even apocalyptic terms. When F.B.I. agents searched his Mar-a-Lago resort in August looking for classified documents, he issued a statement declaring himself “currently under siege.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference this month, he described the 2024 presidential election as “the final battle” and vowed “retribution.” As word circulated this month of a possible indictment from a New York grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s role in payments made to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign, he posted a message to supporters in all-caps to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”Early Friday, still awaiting the grand jury’s action, Mr. Trump posted that the “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”Newt Gingrich, a prominent critic of the federal government’s handling of the standoff during his time as House speaker, noted a major theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign: “the degree to which the federal government is corrupt and incompetent.”Whether or not the historical resonance of his Waco rally was intentional, Mr. Gingrich said, “It would certainly fit as a symbol of federal overreach and a symbol of a Justice Department run amok.”Parnell McNamara, the sheriff of McLennan County, home to Waco, said he did not believe there were security concerns beyond the ordinary preparations for a presidential campaign rally.“Him coming here, to me, is just a totally different situation, and really has nothing to do with that,” he said in reference to the 1993 raid, for which he was present as a U.S. marshal. “I have not heard anybody even bring that up.”Visitors to Mount Carmel. The standoff at the Branch Davidian compound has inspired pilgrimages and conspiracy theorists.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesOn Feb. 28, 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms mounted a raid to serve a search and arrest warrant at the compound belonging to the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of Seventh-day Adventists then under the leadership of Mr. Koresh. Federal investigators suspected Mr. Koresh of possessing illegal weapons. A gunfight erupted, four A.T.F. agents and six Branch Davidians were killed, and a 51-day standoff began.It ended on April 19, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke off negotiations with Mr. Koresh and advanced with tanks. Mr. Koresh and 75 of his followers, many of them children, were killed as a fire consumed the compound.The Branch Davidians mostly eschewed politics. But the siege was overseen by the administration of a Democratic president and set off by an investigation of a Christian sect over a weapons charge, at a time when the National Rifle Association had begun stoking fears about the federal government seizing Americans’ guns, factors that help make it a cause on the right.An independent inquiry completed in 2000, led by the former Republican senator John Danforth, faulted federal agencies for their lack of transparency regarding the standoff, while also seeking to dispel many of the most lurid conspiracy theories.But by then, the Branch Davidians had already been embraced as martyrs by the far-right extremists of the era, including many members of a rapidly expanding “patriot” or militia movement and Mr. McVeigh, who visited Waco during the siege of Mount Carmel and bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the burning of the compound.David Thibodeau, a survivor of the siege who came from a “very Democratic liberal family,” found the embrace odd.“David and the people at Mount Carmel weren’t political at all,” he said. But he said he appreciated the attention of the right-wing groups when the survivors were struggling to make sense of their experience and were treated as pariahs in other political circles.“Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say except for people on the right,” Mr. Thibodeau said.Funds for the construction of the chapel at Mount Carmel were raised by Mr. Jones, whose obsession with Waco conspiracy theories led to his firing in 1999 from the Austin radio station KJFK and the start of his own media empire, Infowars.Invocations of Waco persisted into the next generation of militias and other extremists that emerged in response to Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Mr. Trump’s. In 2009, the founder of the Three Percenters movement warned of “No More Free Wacos” in an open letter to then-attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. The Oath Keepers issued a statement warning that the Bundy family could be “Waco’d” in their standoff with the federal government in 2014.Waco will host Donald Trump’s first campaign rally of the 2024 race on Saturday. A Trump flag flew at the site of the former Branch Davidian compound on Thursday.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAccording to Newsweek, in 2021, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys and a onetime F.B.I. informant, denounced the agency as the “enemy of the people” in a Parler post, writing: “Remember Waco? Are your eyes opened yet?”A Texas Proud Boys chapter made a pilgrimage to the Mount Carmel chapel on the anniversary of the raid last year, according to Mr. Pace, whose politicized, QAnon-inflected theology is rejected by some other Branch Davidians. “They come out and pay their respects, and find out what really happened here,” Mr. Pace said.Mr. Danforth, a Republican, lamented the changes in his party in the Trump years that had brought the conspiracy theories that his report had aimed to dispel into the political mainstream. “It’s the prevailing view of Republicans today that no matter what the facts show, the system is broken, our election system doesn’t work, we shouldn’t have confidence in elections, there’s no finality, it’s all a steal,” he said.Asked whether his Waco report would be widely accepted today, he said, “No. It’s just a very different time.” More

The expulsion of Rahul Gandhi is a devastating blow to the once-powerful Indian National Congress party. He and several other politicians are now in jeopardy through India’s legal system.NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi, one of the last national figures standing in political opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, was disqualified as a member of Parliament on Friday, sending shock waves across the country’s political scene and devastating the once-powerful Indian National Congress party Mr. Gandhi leads.Mr. Gandhi was expelled from the lower house the day after a court in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, convicted him on a charge of criminal defamation. The charge stemmed from a comment he made on the campaign trail in 2019, characterizing Mr. Modi as one of a group of “thieves” named Modi — referring to two prominent fugitives with the same last name. Mr. Gandhi received a two-year prison sentence, the maximum. He is out on 30 days’ bail.Any jail sentence of two years or more is supposed to result in automatic expulsion, but legal experts had expected Mr. Gandhi to have the chance to challenge his conviction. A notification signed by a parliamentary bureaucrat appointed by Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday stated that Mr. Gandhi had been disqualified automatically by the conviction itself, per the Constitution of India.“They are destroying the constitution, killing it,” said Srinivas B.V., president of the Indian National Congress Party’s youth wing. “The court gave Mr. Gandhi 30 days to appeal against the order, and hardly 24 hours have passed since.”Mr. Gandhi said in a Twitter post on Friday, “I am fighting for the voice of this country. I am ready to pay any price.”Lawmakers from the Congress Party and other opposition parties protesting outside of India’s parliament in New Delhi on Friday.Altaf Qadri/Associated PressMr. Srinivas said the party will fight the expulsion, politically and legally. One of the party’s most prominent members, Shashi Tharoor, who like Mr. Gandhi is a member of the lower house in the state of Kerala, said on Twitter that the action ending his tenure in Parliament was “politics with the gloves off, and it bodes ill for our democracy.”Mr. Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather served as prime minister, has taken pains to improve his national profile in recent months. He led an unexpectedly popular march late last year across swaths of India, rallying crowds to “unite India” against the Hindu-first nationalism espoused by Mr. Modi. And since the fortunes of Gautam Adani, a tycoon long associated with Mr. Modi, collapsed under pressure from a short-seller’s report in January, Mr. Gandhi has been using his platform in Parliament to call for an investigation of his business empire.The Congress Party is not alone in worrying about the implications for India’s democracy that Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification poses. With parliamentary elections coming next year, the government’s attempts to clamp down on dissent seem to be gaining momentum, other opposition leaders pointed out.Last month, Manish Sisodia, the second in command of the Aam Aadmi Party, was arrested on charges related to fraud. Earlier this month Kavitha K., a leader from a regional party that recently turned to national politics, was questioned by federal investigators in connection with the same case.The string of criminal cases against politicians — though none have been brought against high-profile members of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. — contrasts awkwardly with Mr. Modi’s presentation of India as “the Mother of Democracy” during a global publicity blitz to accompany its hosting the Group of 20 summit meeting this year.Police raids against the BBC’s office in India and some of the country’s leading think tanks have intensified doubts about the strength of India’s democracy. Eliminating the opposition from parliament through the courts might heighten those misgivings dramatically. More

A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.Gov. Ron DeSantis after signing HB7, dubbed the “stop woke” bill, during a news conference in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., last April.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated PressBelieve it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016.Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term.Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase “woke” is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a “woke” part of the federal budget. “Wokeness” was even faulted for the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.But while the definition of “woke” may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting “woke” than any other politician. Like it or not, “woke” will shape this year’s Republican primary.What’s woke?The new left emerged in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. At the time, liberalism seemed utterly triumphant. Yet for young progressives, “hope” and “change” had given way to the realization that Mr. Obama’s presidency hadn’t cured income inequality, racial inequality or climate change. These dynamics opened a space for a new left, as young progressives started to reach for more ambitious politics, just as the triumph of the Obama coalition gave progressives the confidence to embrace ideas that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era.A decade later, this new left is everywhere. On economic issues, there has been the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for Medicare for all; democratic socialism; and the Green New Deal. On race, there has been the Black Lives Matter movement; kneeling in protest during the national anthem; and defund the police. On gender and sex, there has been the Me Too movement and the sharing of preferred pronouns and more.On class and economics, it’s easy to delineate the new left. Mr. Sanders helpfully embraced the democratic socialism label to distinguish himself from those who would incrementally smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. It’s harder to distinguish the new left from Obama-era liberals on race, gender and sexuality. There is no widely shared ideological term like democratic socialism to make it easy.And yet the differences between Obama-era liberals and the new left on race, sexuality and gender are extremely significant, with big consequences for American politics.Here are just a few of those differences:The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”As Obama-era liberalism became dominant, a more righteous progressive discourse emerged — one that didn’t accommodate and even “called out” its opposition. This was partly a reflection of what played well on social media, but it also reflected that progressive values had become uncontested in many highly educated communities.The new left is very conscious of identity. Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions. Mr. Obama was even characterized as “post-racial.”Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.Today’s new left is conscious of identity in policymaking as well, whether it’s arguing against race-neutral policies that entrench racial disparities or advocating race-conscious remedies. Obama-era liberals rarely implemented race-conscious policies or mentioned the racial consequences of racially neutral policies.The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies.Indeed, almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century. Academic jargon like “intersectional” has become commonplace. It can be hard to understand what’s going on if you didn’t read Judith Butler, Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in college.Academic scholarship is also the source of the expanded, academic meanings of “trauma,” “violence,” “safety” and “erasure,” which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.The new left view that racism, sexism and other oppressive hierarchies are deeply embedded in American society all but ensures a pessimistic view of America. This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism. Indeed, Mr. Obama himself was cast as a redeeming figure whose ascent proved American greatness.When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change.In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities.Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values.A protester during a gathering of trans, queer and Black Lives Matter activists in New York in June 2020.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesWhy woke matters for Republicans The rise of the new left on race and gender is already reshuffling conservative politics.For this year’s Republican primary, one of the most important things about this rise is that it has helped bridge the usual divide between the conservative base and the establishment.At least for now, the establishment and the base share the fight against “woke,” for two reasons:The new left is far enough left that there’s room to side with the right while keeping one or both feet in the center. Whether it’s a MAGA fan or a zombie-Reaganite, there’s a path for an enterprising politician to bash “woke” and get on Fox News without alienating donors. Anyone can be a conservative hero, even a private equity magnate who would have been seen as an establishment squish in 2015, like Gov. Glenn Youngkin.Anti-woke politics seems to animate elite conservatives as much as the activist, populist base. After all, the new left is most prevalent in highly educated liberal bastions like New York or Washington, and among the young in highly educated industries like the news media and higher education. Its rise has probably been felt most acutely by highly educated conservatives as well.Whether this dynamic changes is an important question as the primary heats up.Over the last few months, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have staked out farther-right positions that might put this question to the test. Mr. Trump, for instance, said he would pass a federal law recognizing only two genders and would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Mr. DeSantis, for example, would ban gender studies. As the campaign gets underway, they may go further. We will learn whether other candidates match their positions, and whether there’s a cost if they do not. There is even a chance conservatives go too far.Another big question is whether anti-woke politics can supplant older culture war fights, like abortion or immigration. Most anti-new-left conservatives still vigorously oppose the old liberals on immigration, secularism, feminism and more. It remains to be seen whether attacking D.E.I., Disney and university professors, as Mr. DeSantis did in a recent trip to Iowa, is the red meat for rank-and-file conservatives that it is for conservatives in big cities who feel under siege by an increasingly assertive left.Unfortunately, there is almost no survey data that helps answer these questions at this stage. The behavior of Fox News producers and the rise of DeSantis suggest that there’s some kind of mass constituency for this politics, but whether it amounts to 30 percent or 60 percent of the Republican base and whether it’s compelling enough to carry a primary bid is entirely unclear.In the most extreme case for Democrats, the backlash against the new left could end in a repeat of how New Left politics in the 1960s facilitated the marriage of neoconservatives and the religious right in the 1970s. Back then, opposition to the counterculture helped unify Republicans against a new class of highly educated liberals, allowing Southern opponents of civil rights to join old-school liberal intellectuals who opposed Communism and grew skeptical of the Great Society. The parallels are imperfect, but striking.On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility that a populist, working-class conservative base perceives little distinction between “woke” and “liberal,” and would rather hear the old classics on illegal immigration, crime and coarse language about women and Mexicans than fight new battles against “woke capital,” critical race theorists and transgender teenagers. The range of possibilities for the general election are similarly wide. We’ll save the general election for another time. More

One of the strangest ads of the 2022 election cycle was an homage to “Top Gun,” featuring Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In it, DeSantis is the “Top Gov,” setting his sights on his political enemies: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your governor speaking. Today’s training evolution: dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”The ad concludes with DeSantis in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, rallying viewers to take on the media’s “false narratives.”The imagery plays on the governor’s résumé. He was never a pilot, of course, but he was in the Navy, where he was a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers from 2004 to 2010. DeSantis served in Iraq and at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and made his military career a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for governor. “Service is in my DNA,” he wrote at the time. “My desire to serve my country has been my goal and my calling.”In recent weeks, we have learned a little more about what that service actually entailed, details that weren’t more widely known at the time of his 2018 race.As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”The reason to highlight these details of DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo is that it helps place the Florida governor in his proper political context. The standard view of DeSantis is that he comes out of Donald Trump’s populist Republican Party, a view the governor has been keen to cultivate as he vies for leadership within the party. And to that end, DeSantis has made himself into the presumptive heir apparent to Trump in look, language and attitude.But what if we centered DeSantis in Guantánamo, Iraq and the war on terrorism rather than the fever house of the MAGA Republican Party, a place that may not be a natural fit for the Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer? What if we treated DeSantis not as a creature of the Trump years but as a product of the Bush ones? How, then, would we understand his position in the Republican Party?For a moment in American politics — before Hurricane Katrina, the grinding occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis that nearly toppled the global economy — George W. Bush represented the clear future of the Republican Party.And what was Bush Republicanism? It promised, despite the circumstances of his election in 2000, to build a new, permanent Republican majority that would relegate the Democratic Party to the margins of national politics. It was ideologically conservative on most questions of political economy but willing to bend in order to win points with key constituencies, as when Bush backed a large prescription drug program under Medicare.Bush’s Republicanism was breathtakingly arrogant — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one unnamed aide famously told The New York Times Magazine in 2004 — contemptuous of expertise and hostile to dissent, as when the president condemned the Democratic-controlled Senate of 2002 as “not interested in the security of the American people.”Bush’s Republicanism was also cruel, as exemplified in the 2004 presidential election, when he ran, successfully, against the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Americans, framing them as a threat to the integrity of society itself. “Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society,” he said, endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Bush’s Republicanism — or rather, Bush’s Republican Party — was that it was still an elite-driven institution. He ran a Brooks Brothers administration, whose militarism, jingoism and cruelty were expressed through bureaucratic niceties and faux technical language, like “enhanced interrogation.”To me, DeSantis looks like a Bush Republican as much as or more than he does a Trump one. He shares the majoritarian aspirations of Bush, as well as the open contempt for dissent. DeSantis shares the cruelty, with a national political image built, among other things, on a campaign of stigma against trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans.Despite his pretenses to the contrary, DeSantis is very much the image of a member of the Republican establishment. That’s one reason he has the almost lock-step support of the organs of that particular elite, for whom he represents a return to normalcy after the chaos and defeat of the Trump years.It is not for nothing that in the fight for the 2024 Republican nomination, DeSantis leads Trump among Republicans with a college degree — the white-collar conservative voters who were Bush stalwarts and Trump skeptics.The upshot of all of this — and the reason to make this classification in the first place — is that it is simply wrong to attribute the pathologies of today’s Republican Party to the influence of Trump alone. If DeSantis marks the return of the Bush Republican, then he is a stark reminder that the Republican Party of that era was as destructive and dysfunctional as the one forged by Trump.You could even say that if DeSantis is the much-desired return to “normal” Republicans, then Republican normalcy is not much different from Republican deviancy.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The justices refused to hear Ms. Lake’s claims disputing her loss in the governor’s race, but sent one part of her lawsuit back to a trial court for review.Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted.In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit.“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.”But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.The decision dealt another setback to Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor whose strident election denialism helped her to gain the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, contending on Twitter that remanding the signature verification aspect of her case back to the trial court was vindication.“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” Ms. Lake wrote. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”Ms. Lake had argued that “a material number” of ballots with unmatched signatures were accepted in Maricopa County. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling on the matter, effectively saying that she would have to show the numbers that prove the election outcome “would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”She fell to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was Arizona’s secretary of state, by just over 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million ballots cast in the battleground state — less than one percentage point.Representatives for Ms. Hobbs, a defendant in Ms. Lake’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ms. Lake has repeatedly pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Maricopa County, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who helps oversee elections, said in a statement, “Since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”He added, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”Ms. Lake’s chief strategist, Colton Duncan, vowed that Ms. Lake’s lawyers would expose more fraud and corruption.“Buckle up, it’s about to get fun,” he said. More

Donald Trump’s allies have accused the district attorney bringing a case against him as having been “bought” by Mr. Soros, the philanthropist. That is misleading, though the men do have a financial connection.WASHINGTON — As a potential indictment looms over former President Donald J. Trump, he and his allies have sought to tie the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case to a familiar Republican specter: George Soros, the financier and Democratic megadonor.Mr. Soros, who has backed Democratic candidates and causes as well as democracy and human rights around the world, has for years been a boogeyman on the right, confronting attacks that portray him as a “globalist” mastermind and that often veer into antisemitic tropes.The connections between him and Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, are real but overstated. In reality, Mr. Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system — in line with causes that he has publicly supported for years. That group used a significant portion of the money to support Mr. Bragg in his 2021 campaign.A spokesman for Mr. Soros said that the two men had never met, nor had Mr. Soros given money directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“Alvin Bragg received in EXCESS OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the Radical Left Enemy of ‘TRUMP,’ George Soros.”— Mr. Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday“Alvin Bragg is bought by George Soros. He allows violent criminals to walk the streets of New York City, but will prosecute the likely Republican nominee (and former president) on a baseless misdemeanor charge. These people are trying to turn America into a third-world country.”— Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, in a Twitter post on Saturday“Alvin Bragg is bought and paid for by George Soros and has repeatedly showed his hatred for President Trump based on purely political motives.”— Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, in a Twitter post on SaturdayThese claims are exaggerated.While the link between Mr. Bragg and Mr. Soros exists, arguments that the district attorney was “bought” by the philanthropist are misleading.Mr. Bragg announced his candidacy for the position in June 2019. Nearly two years later, on May 8, 2021, the political arm of Color of Change, a progressive criminal justice group, endorsed him. It pledged to spend $1 million on direct mailers, on-the-ground campaigning and voter turnout efforts on his behalf. (It did not donate to Mr. Bragg’s campaign directly.) A few days later, on May 14, Mr. Soros contributed $1 million to the group, which intended to help Mr. Bragg with the money.Color of Change did not meet its pledge. It eventually spent nearly $500,000 in support of Mr. Bragg. That amounted to about 11 percent of the group’s $4.6 million in total spending during the 2021-22 election cycle, according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.A spokeswoman for the political arm of Color of Change said that the group reviewed and interviewed reform-minded district attorney candidates each election cycle, and that the process was independent of funders. Mr. Soros was just one of many large donors to the group. Past donors included members of the wealthy Pritzker family, the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys.Mr. Bragg was not the only candidate Color of Change endorsed and aided through organizing efforts in 2021. The group also helped re-elect Larry Krasner, the district attorney of Philadelphia, by contacting more than 300,000 voters and sending nearly 200,000 pieces of direct mail on his behalf. In addition, it operated phone banks, ran advertisements and mobilized voters to support a local candidate in Virginia and a ballot initiative in Minneapolis.Nor was Mr. Soros’s $1 million contribution particularly unusual. Mr. Soros gave to the group multiple times before it endorsed Mr. Bragg; he personally donated $450,000 between 2016 and 2018, and his political action committee, Democracy PAC, gave $2.5 million in 2020.Neither Mr. Soros nor Democracy PAC contributed directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, according to Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.“George Soros and Alvin Bragg have never met in person or spoken by telephone, email, Zoom, etc.,” Mr. Vachon said. “There has been no contact between the two.”Mr. Vachon also noted that Mr. Soros had been open about his yearslong support of progressive prosecutors. In a 2022 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Soros explained his thoughts on overhauling the criminal justice system and wrote that “the idea we need to choose between justice and safety is false.”“I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform,” he wrote. “I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping.” More

Federal prosecutors disclosed on Wednesday that a witness expected to testify for the defense at the seditious conspiracy trial of the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four associates was a government informant for nearly two years after the January 6 US Capitol attack.Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for Zachary Rehl, a former chapter leader in the far-right group, asked a judge to schedule an immediate emergency hearing and suspend the trial “until these issues have been considered and resolved”. Lawyers for the other four defendants joined in Hernandez’s request.Hernandez said in court papers the defense was told by prosecutors on Wednesday afternoon the witness they were planning to call on Thursday had been a government informant.The judge ordered prosecutors to file a response to the defense filing by Thursday afternoon and scheduled a hearing for the same day, putting testimony in the case on hold until Friday. The US attorney’s office did not immediately comment.In her court filing, Hernandez said the unnamed informant participated in “prayer meetings” with relatives of at least one of the Proud Boys on trial and had discussions with family members about replacing one of the defense lawyers. The informant has been in contact with at least one defense lawyer and at least one defendant, Hernandez wrote.It is the latest twist in a trial that has been bogged down by bickering between lawyers and the judge. Defense lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to declare a mistrial.The trial in Washington federal court is one of the most serious cases to emerge from the January 6 attack. Tarrio, Rehl and three other Proud Boys – Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Dominic Pezzola – are charged with conspiring to block the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.Tarrio, a Miami resident, was national chairman for the far-right group, whose members describe it as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”. He and the other Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.Defense attorneys have argued there is no evidence the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress certifying Biden’s victory.Hernandez did not name the informant in her filing but said he or she was a “confidential human source” for the government since April 2021 through at least January 2023. Prosecutors knew in December the person was a potential witness, she said.It is not the first time government use of informants has become an issue in the case. Defense attorneys have pushed for more information about informants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn FBI agent, Nicole Miller, testified last week that she was aware of two informants in the Proud Boys, including one who marched on the Capitol.Hernandez said there were “reasons to doubt the veracity of the government’s explanation and justification for withholding information about the (confidential human sources) who have been involved in the case”.Law enforcement routinely uses informants in criminal investigations but methods and identities can be closely guarded secrets. Federal authorities have not publicly released much information about their use of informants in investigating the Proud Boys’ role on January 6. More

The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.The two social media influencers teamed up online years ago.Both had large right-wing followings and pseudonyms to hide their real identities. One called himself Ricky Vaughn, after a fictional baseball player portrayed in a movie by Charlie Sheen. The other called himself Microchip.In 2016, prosecutors say, they set out to trick supporters of Hillary Clinton into thinking they could vote by text message or social media, discouraging them from the polls.“Ricky Vaughn,” whose real name is Douglass Mackey, was charged in 2021 with conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote, and on Wednesday the men met face to face in court for the first time.Mr. Mackey sat at the defense table in Federal District Court in Brooklyn wearing a sober gray suit. He watched as Microchip, clad in a royal-blue sweatsuit and black sandals, approached the witness stand, where he was sworn in under that name and began testifying against him.This month, a federal judge overseeing the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, ruled that Microchip could testify without revealing his actual name after prosecutors said anonymity was needed to protect current and future investigations.The sight of a witness testifying under a fictional identity added one more odd element to an already unusual case that reflects both the rise of social media as a force in politics and the emergence of malicious online mischief-makers — trolls — as influential players in a presidential election. This week’s trial could help determine how much protection the First Amendment gives people who spread disinformation.Microchip’s testimony appeared intended to give jurors an inside view of what prosecutors describe as a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters. It also provided a firsthand account of crass, nihilistic motives behind those efforts.“I wanted to infect everything,” Microchip said, adding that his aim before the 2016 election had been “to cause as much chaos as possible” and diminish Mrs. Clinton’s chances of beating Donald J. Trump.Evidence presented by prosecutors has shown how Mr. Mackey and others, including Microchip, had private online discussions in the weeks before the election, discussing how they could move votes.While Mr. Mackey made clear that he wanted to help Mr. Trump become president, Microchip testified that he was driven mainly by animus for Mrs. Clinton, testifying that his aim had been to “destroy” her reputation.In the fervid and fluid environment surrounding the 2016 election, Mr. Mackey, whose lawyer described him as “a staunch political conservative,” and Microchip, who told BuzzFeed that he was a “staunch liberal,” became allies.Online exchanges and Twitter messages entered into evidence by prosecutors showed the men plotting their strategy. Mr. Mackey saw limiting Black turnout as a key to helping Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said that he posted an image showing a Black woman near a sign reading “African Americans for Hillary” and the message that people could vote by texting “Hillary” to a specific number.Microchip testified that Mr. Mackey was a participant in a private Twitter chat group called “War Room,” adding that he was “very well respected back then” and “a leader of sorts.”Prosecutors introduced records showing that Microchip and Mr. Mackey had retweeted one another dozens of times.Mr. Mackey’s particular talent, according to Microchip, was coming up with ideas and memes that resonated with people who felt that American society was declining and that the West was struggling.Microchip testified that he was self employed as a mobile app developer. He said he had pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge related to his circulation of memes providing misinformation about how to vote. Because of his anonymity the details of that plea could not be confirmed. And he added that he had signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors agreeing to testify against Mr. Mackey, and to help with other cases.Under cross-examination, Microchip said he had begun working with the F.B.I. in 2018. He also acknowledged telling an investigator in 2021 that there was no “grand plan around stopping people from voting.”His time on the stand included a tutorial of sorts on how he had amassed Twitter followers and misled people who viewed his messages.He testified that he had built up a following with bots, and used hashtags employed by Mrs. Clinton in a process he called “hijacking” to get his messages to her followers. He aimed to seduce viewers with humor, saying, “When people are laughing, they are very easily manipulated.”Microchip said that he sought to discourage voting among Clinton supporters “through fear tactics,” offering conspiratorial takes on ordinary events as a way to drive paranoia and disaffection.One example he cited involved the emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were made public by WikiLeaks during the campaign.There was nothing particularly surprising or sinister among those emails, Microchip said, yet he posted thousands of messages about them suggesting otherwise. “My talent is to make things weird and strange, so there is controversy.”Asked by a prosecutor whether he believed the messages he posted, Microchip did not hesitate.“No,” he said. “And I didn’t care.” More