Elections

Biden says Trump ‘lacked the courage to act’ during January 6 attackPresident criticizes Trump for inaction during Capitol riot, saying he ‘watched it all happen’ from the comfort of the White House Joe Biden has said that his presidential predecessor Donald Trump “lacked the courage to act” as a mob of his supporters tried to halt the congressional certification of his defeat in the 2020 election by mounting the January 6 attack on the Capitol.In virtual remarks Monday to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, Biden – who was recovering from Covid-19 – said police officers defending the Capitol were “speared, sprayed, stomped on, brutalized” for hours by white nationalists and other Trump sycophants who bought his false claims that he’d been robbed of victory by electoral fraudsters.“The defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office,” Biden said, alluding to evidence and testimony staged by the congressional committee investigating the assault during a series of public hearings throughout the summer. “While he was doing that, brave law enforcement officers are subjected to the medieval hell for three hours … dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage, face to face with a crazed mob that believed the lies of the defeated president.“The police were heroes that day. Donald Trump lacked the courage to act.”Brave women and men in uniform across America should never forget that the defeated former president of the United States watched January 6th happen and didn’t have the spine to act.In my remarks today to @noblenatl, I made that clear: https://t.co/pQ8E4IcZR1 pic.twitter.com/uO60QO0Wrz— President Biden (@POTUS) July 25, 2022
Biden’s criticism of Trump to the organization known as Noble came four days after the most recent hearing held by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack focused on Trump’s inaction that fateful day.At the hearing, the eighth of its kind this summer, the committee shared testimony from former White House aides that depicted Trump as repeatedly rejecting pleas from his senior advisers and even his own family members to wave off the mob invading the Capitol.The committee said he finally relented after three hours and seven minutes, when he issued a video message telling his supporters, “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.” By then, it had become clear they weren’t able to fully take control of the building, and a late-arriving national guard had come on the scene to reinforce the Capitol police force.A bipartisan Senate report linked at least seven deaths to the riots that day, which unfolded immediately after Trump told his supporters in a speech to “fight like hell”. About 140 police officers were injured as the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump was slowed by several hours.It’s unknown for now whether prosecutors intend to build a criminal case against Trump over his actions as well as inaction before the Capitol attack and after it got underway.According to committee members, their evidence is clear that he encouraged his supporters to take desperate measures to block Biden from taking the Oval Office and then stood idly by once they began executing those plans.Biden, in his remarks Monday, said that proved Trump isn’t the law and order politician that he long touted himself as.“You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-cop,” Biden said. “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-American.”TopicsUS Capitol attackJoe BidenDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

There was a time in 2016 when Elise Stefanik, now the third-ranking Republican in the House, was so disgusted by Donald Trump, she would barely mention his name. Today he proudly refers to her as “one of my killers.”She proved that again last month. In an effort to undermine confidence in the select committee investigating the violent assault on the Capitol, Ms. Stefanik said, “This is not a serious investigation. This is a partisan political witch hunt.” The committee, she said, is “illegitimate.” The hearings did not change her mind. In mid-July, before the final session planned for the summer, she referred to the committee as a “sham” and declared that “it is way worse than the impeachment witch hunt parts one and two.”Maybe Ms. Stefanik was continuing to discredit the House committee because the evidence it has produced from Trump insiders — and the compelling way the evidence has been presented — has inflicted staggering damage on Mr. Trump, even though it might not prevent him from winning the Republican presidential nomination for a third straight time. Ms. Stefanik has failed in her efforts to sabotage the committee, but it’s not for lack of trying.Ms. Stefanik’s fealty to Mr. Trump is so great that some of his advisers are mentioning her as a potential vice-presidential candidate if he runs in 2024, which he and his advisers are strongly hinting he will do.The transformation of Ms. Stefanik, who is 38, is among the most dramatic and significant in American politics. Her political conversion is a source of sadness and anger for several people I spoke to who were colleagues of hers — as I was in the White House of George W. Bush although I did not work with her directly — and who were, unlike me, once close to her. To them, Ms. Stefanik’s story is of a person who betrayed her principles and her country in a manic quest for power.Born in upstate New York, Ms. Stefanik graduated from Albany Academy for Girls and Harvard, after which she joined the Bush administration as a staff member for the Domestic Policy Council and later in the office of the White House chief of staff. She worked for the 2012 presidential campaign of Tim Pawlenty before overseeing debate preparation for the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan.Ms. Stefanik was elected to the House of Representatives in 2014, becoming at the time the youngest woman elected to Congress. In January 2017, Ms. Stefanik became a co-chair of the Tuesday Group, made up of moderate Republicans who served as a counterbalance to the right-wing Freedom Caucus, which was co-founded two years earlier by Mark Meadows, who later became chief of staff to Mr. Trump when he was president. At the time, Ms. Stefanik was viewed as pragmatic and highly competent, a member of the establishment wing of the Republican Party and a person Democrats felt they could do business with.But within a matter of a few years, all that changed, with Ms. Stefanik referring to herself as “ultra-MAGA and proud of it.” Because of her previous beliefs, she had to reassure Trump supporters. So last year she appeared on the podcast of the right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon, a popular figure with the Republican base who served as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, to make her case to replace Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference. Ms. Stefanik was supported in her effort to supplant Ms. Cheney by Mr. Trump, who issued a statement giving his “complete and total endorsement” to Ms. Stefanik. And understandably so. She voted to invalidate the 2020 election and has repeated his false claims about election fraud.I spoke to several people who have worked with Ms. Stefanik over the years — some who were willing to speak on the record, others who insisted on anonymity so that they could speak candidly to help me understand what had happened to her and what her rise to power and celebrity status says about the modern-day Republican Party.Those who know Ms. Stefanik well consider her smart and talented but hollow at the core. She is an individual of “ambition unmoored to principle,” as Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who served in Congress with Ms. Stefanik, told me.Margaret Hoover, the host of “Firing Line,” who worked in the Bush administration with Ms. Stefanik and was consulted by her before her run for Congress in 2014, described her as a person of “sheer ambition and not principled at all.” Another Republican — a former member of Congress who served with Ms. Stefanik and worked closely with her — also spoke to me of her towering ambition, invoking Icarus, the Greek mythological character. “She’s flying too close to the sun,” said this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly about her transformation.People who worked with Ms. Stefanik say that during the 2016 campaign, her reaction to Mr. Trump was quite negative and that she was particularly disgusted by his attitude toward women. She considered Mr. Trump’s comments on the “Access Hollywood” tape sickening — and like many others, she assumed he would lose the election. He didn’t, of course, and Ms. Stefanik, like so many other Republicans, began the process of accommodation. Soon hers would be complete.When the Republican Party was a George W. Bush party, she was a Bush Republican. When the Republican Party became a Trump party, she was a Trump Republican. Former colleagues of hers will tell you she meant it then and she means it now. She’s a person who takes her views from the place she finds herself — and the place she finds herself today is in a pro-Trump district and in a thoroughly Trumpified party.Several people I spoke to about Ms. Stefanik mentioned a couple of key moments in her journey to MAGA world. The first was an August 2018 visit by Mr. Trump to Fort Drum, an Army base that has a substantial economic and political impact in New York’s 21st Congressional District, which she represents. The large crowd the president drew and the enthusiasm he generated registered with Ms. Stefanik, who welcomed him. “Elise stood in front of the MAGA Trump crowd and decided to shed her old self and follow instead of lead,” Ms. Comstock told me. “It was the beginning of the end.”But the most important inflection point was the first impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, in 2019. Ms. Stefanik accused Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the committee overseeing the impeachment trial, of trying to silence Republicans and clashed with the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie L. Yovanovitch, whose testimony about Mr. Trump was damning.Mr. Trump was thrilled by Ms. Stefanik’s performance; he called her a “new Republican star” on Twitter. Her life changed after that. She became much better known and was able to raise a lot of money from her new position and with her new posture.“She became a celebrity,” I was told by a Bush administration colleague of Ms. Stefanik’s who requested anonymity so this individual could speak freely about what is still a very sensitive subject. Until that point, this person said, “she hadn’t gotten fully on board the Trump train. Then she was put into first class, and she couldn’t get off. And first class is pretty plush.”I reached out twice to Ms. Stefanik’s communications director, seeking comment from the congresswoman, but received no response. Ms. Stefanik, in defending herself, has argued that she’s reflecting the views of a majority of the people in her district, and she is. Mr. Trump carried her district by 14 percentage points in 2016. “I represent farmers, manufacturers and hard-working families who want someone who stands up for them, and President Trump spoke to those people,” she told Mr. Bannon on his show.But even if you believe that the job of an elected representative is to vote according to the will of the voters rather than to owe voters one’s “judgment and conscience,” as the British parliamentarian and conservative political theorist Edmund Burke famously put it, at some point carrying out the will of the voters can become indefensible. That is certainly true if it requires a member of Congress to support a seditious president.Looking at what happened with Ms. Stefanik is sad and disturbing because people who know her say she knows better. She was willing to be shaped by circumstances, even when circumstances drove her to ugly places and to embrace conspiracy theories. Contrast this with Ms. Cheney, who was stripped of her position in the Republican leadership and replaced by Ms. Stefanik. Ms. Cheney represents the people of Wyoming on many issues that are important to them, but she drew a line when it came to a fundamental attack on our democracy. She wouldn’t cross that line. Ms. Stefanik did.Ms. Stefanik’s story is important in part because it mirrors that of so many other Republicans. They, like Ms. Stefanik, are opportunists, living completely in the moment, shifting their personas to advance their immediate political self-interests. A commitment to ethical conduct, a devotion to the common good and fidelity to truth appear to have no intrinsic worth to them. These qualities are mere instrumentalities, used when helpful but discarded when inconvenient.The politicians and former Bush administration officials I spoke to were worried that Republicans in Congress will conclude that Ms. Stefanik’s path to power is the one to emulate. The fast track to leadership is to enlist figures like Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon and what one of my interlocutors called “the army of the base,” made up as it is of QAnon followers, Christian nationalists, right-wing talk radio aficionados and those who are determined to overturn elections.The Bush administration figure who worked with Ms. Stefanik told me that her move into MAGA-dom was illustrative because it was representative of a larger problem. “In isolation, Elise is not a particular malefactor. She’s more a symptom than a disease.” But, this individual said, she and other Republicans “could have made a difference if they had had collective courage.”They could have made the case against Mr. Trump’s malicious and unconstitutional conduct. They could have attempted to mold the sentiments of the Republican base in a healthy direction. But they refused.Never mind Ms. Stefanik. “I affix a lot of the blame on the dozens and dozens of Republican leaders who acquiesced in what they knew to be wrong,” this person said.During the Trump era, we saw a profound failure of leadership among Republican lawmakers when it came to calming down inflamed populist passions.Wise observers of politics have told me that what leadership does in a populist moment like ours is to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate grievances. Leaders speak to legitimate grievances and channel them in constructive ways through policies. Demagogues elevate illegitimate grievances and speak to them in reckless ways. In populist times, good leaders tamp down on the bad and elevate the good. Ms. Stefanik and many, many others chose to elevate the worst.This has inflicted a grave cost on the political profession, making Americans even more cynical about the whole political enterprise. I hate to think about the message it sends younger people who are thinking about running for office.Someone who takes the route to power Ms. Stefanik has chosen “degrades and demeans public service,” Ms. Hoover told me. “Anyone who cares about our political system should find what she’s done so deeply offensive. We deserve better. Our country deserves better, and those who came before us deserve better.”At the end of my conversation with Ms. Comstock, I asked for her assessment of the game Ms. Stefanik is playing.“I do believe this catches up with people,” she said. “There might be what appears as a short-term benefit, but situations like this often spectacularly fail.”“I don’t view Elise’s story as a success story,” she added. “It won’t end well. Stories like this never do.”Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) — a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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

Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, and Greg Jacob, a lawyer for Mr. Pence, were subpoenaed in the Justice Department’s expanding criminal inquiry.Two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence testified last week to a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the highest-ranking officials of the Trump administration so far known to have cooperated with the Justice Department’s widening inquiry into the events leading up to the assault.The appearances before the grand jury of the men — Marc Short, who was Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, who was his counsel — were the latest indication that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the events surrounding and preceding the riot is intensifying after weeks of growing questions about the urgency the department has put on examining former President Donald J. Trump’s potential criminal liability.The testimony of the two Pence aides marked the first time it has become publicly known that figures with firsthand knowledge of what took place inside the White House in the tumultuous days before the attack have cooperated with federal prosecutors.Both Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob played important roles in describing to a House select committee conducting a parallel investigation of the Capitol attack how Mr. Trump, working with allies like the lawyer John Eastman, mounted a campaign to pressure Mr. Pence into disrupting the normal counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of an effort to keep Mr. Trump in office.Mr. Short’s testimony was confirmed by two people familiar with it, as was Mr. Jacob’s.The Justice Department has at times appeared to be lagging behind the House select committee, which has spoken to more than 1,000 witnesses, including some from inside the Trump White House. Much of that testimony has been highlighted at a series of public hearings over the past two months.It remains unclear precisely what Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob told the grand jury or what questions prosecutors may have asked them. But both previously gave recorded and transcribed interviews to the House committee, and Mr. Jacob served as a live witness at one of the panel’s public hearings that focused on the effort to strong-arm Mr. Pence.Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were present in the Oval Office for a meeting on Jan. 4, 2021, at which Mr. Trump had Mr. Eastman try to persuade Mr. Pence that he could delay or block congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s Electoral College defeat.Mr. Eastman’s plan relied on Mr. Pence being willing to accept, as he presided over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, that there were disputes over the validity of electors whose votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. had already been certified by the states — a baseless assertion that had been promoted by a number of Trump allies in the previous weeks as a last-ditch way to help keep Mr. Trump in office.Mr. Pence ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s pressure on him to go along. But the so-called fake electors proposal has been one of the primary lines of inquiry to have become public in the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation.Mr. Short also provided the House committee with testimony that highlighted the sense of threat that built from Mr. Trump’s efforts to derail the congressional proceedings on Jan. 6.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners.But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.Let’s start with the politics. The other day The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, reporting from the campaign trail, noted that many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, suggesting that the G.O.P. base agrees with them. Actually, I’d like to see some surveys along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists?Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime.This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a “mixed-race” country.On the domestic violence front, a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left.Finally, about B.L.M.: The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion. That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective.Here’s one point of comparison. Back in April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, pulled a political stunt at the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused a major slowdown of traffic, disrupting business and leading to a lot of spoiled produce. Total economic losses have been estimated at around $4 billion; that is, a few days of border-security theater appear to have caused more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.Yet pointing out these facts probably won’t change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also alluded to in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes. It’s true that violent crime rose during the pandemic, but it rose about as much in rural America as it did in urban areas. And despite that recent rise, violence in many cities is far lower than it was not long ago.In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.But who among the Republican base will acknowledge this reality? Whenever I mention New York’s relative safety, I get a wave of mail saying, in effect, “You can’t really believe that.”The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.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

Joe Kent, a square-jawed Trump devotee running for a House seat in Washington State, is in a bit of a pickle.Kent has campaigned as a “Stop the Steal”-style candidate on Donald Trump’s “America First” platform, positions that apparently caught the eye of the former president, who has endorsed him.Kent insists the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents provocateurs. In September, he spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., in support of people accused of storming the Capitol, urging the release of what he called “political prisoners.”But in recent weeks, far-right figures led by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, have started an online drumbeat claiming that Kent, a retired Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer who has a fistful of Bronze Stars, is actually a deep-state denizen himself.Kent’s wife, Shannon, was a targeting specialist for the National Security Agency who was killed by a suicide bomber in northeast Syria in 2019 while fighting the Islamic State.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

Mike Pence’s ex-chief of staff testifies to grand jury investigating January 6Appearance of Marc Short indicates justice department has penetrated inner circle of Trump White House in criminal inquiry Former vice-president Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short appeared last week before a federal grand jury investigating events connected to the January 6 Capitol attack, indicating the justice department has penetrated the inner circle of the Trump White House in its criminal inquiry.The appearance by Short – the top adviser to the former vice president who was also by Pence’s side on the day of the Capitol attack – makes him the highest-ranking Trump White House official known to have testified before the grand jury in Washington.Short testified in response to a subpoena for around two to three hours, according to a source familiar with the matter, though it was unclear what he told the grand jury or whether he produced documents. ABC News earlier reported his appearance.The development was also the latest indication that the criminal investigation into the Capitol attack has only escalated in recent months, as the House January 6 select committee argues Trump obstructed an official proceeding – a crime – in trying to stop Joe Biden’s certification.It was not clear to which grand jury, and therefore to which investigation, Short testified. The justice department has impaneled several grand juries over the Capitol attack, including one examining Trump’s fake electors scheme, which is also being investigated by a special grand jury in Georgia.The grand jury investigating the fake electors scheme – grand jury #22-4 – sought information about the involvement of Donald Trump and his lawyers, while the grand jury that subpoenaed former Trump White House official Peter Navarro – grand jury #22-3 – sought his contacts with Trump.Nonetheless, Short’s grand jury appearance marks the first known time that a top Trump White House official with inside knowledge about Trump’s actions leading up to the Capitol attack and what took place in the West Wing in the following days has cooperated with the justice department.When Short testified in a transcribed interview with the select committee earlier this year, he told congressional investigators about how Trump tried to enlist Pence in order to have him stop Biden’s certification as part of a wider effort to overturn the 2020 election results.TopicsUS Capitol attackMike PenceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

More from our inbox:Josh Hawley Ran for His Life To the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong” (Sunday Opinion, July 24):Thank you for these columns. Although several seemed slightly grudging, many read as deeply felt self-examinations and sincere efforts to “walk a mile” in the shoes of others.In this age of righteousness on all sides, it takes great courage to approach the pains and the terrors of this world with real humility.What a world this would be if all our leaders — political, journalistic and religious — could allow themselves the sorrow and the glory of thinking, speaking and leading in such a manner!Steve WanghBrattleboro, Vt.To the Editor:The “I Was Wrong” columns were written by some of my favorite gurus. Their honesty and vulnerability in writing these pieces were so emotionally moving, authentic and valuable. Congratulations on putting this together.It meant so much to me, and I have passed the articles on to other colleagues in leadership, as this is what we propose to leaders of organizations in order to build trust. Thank you so much for the decision to do this!Kathy MinardiThe writer is executive director of the Whole School Leadership Institute.To the Editor:I admire Bret Stephens for admitting he was wrong (“I Was Wrong About Trump Voters”). But Mr. Stephens was mostly right.Trump voters were betrayed at least three times. The last time was by President Donald Trump himself; he did nothing for the “unprotected” citizens of the U.S., nor did he even try.Maybe, if Trump voters figure out what they really need and should expect from their government, and where justice is in the culture wars, they will make the right choice in 2024.Anthony J. DiStefanoMilton, Del.To the Editor:So Bret Stephens thinks he was wrong about Trump voters and states, “What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.”No, Mr. Stephens, you were not wrong about Trump voters; they simply did not choose to exercise their critical thinking skills to understand that Mr. Trump is one of the “self-satisfied elite” whose only goal in life is to obtain money and power.Moreover, if they had applied their critical thinking skills, they would have very quickly realized that Mr. Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a cheat and a master manipulator who duped them into believing that he is their savior; a 70-something golden-haired billionaire who lived on Fifth Avenue and now a mansion in Florida and who really cares about them! Really?And despite all of the recent information released from the Jan. 6 hearings, the vast majority simply reject it and continue to support Mr. Trump. So, Mr. Stephens, you were not wrong at all about Trump voters, but you are dead wrong in believing that you were and writing about it.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.To the Editor:Bret Stephens’s mea culpa is spot on. Now who will really listen with an honest ear and a strategic plan for doing something for the multitudes feeling unheard, unappreciated, misunderstood? Old-fashioned town meetings might be the place to start.Dawn KellerHendersonville, N.C.To the Editor:In “I Was Wrong About Capitalism,” David Brooks suggests that his views on the value of regulation have (finally) changed because “sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before.”While the specific regulations required certainly change with the times (there was, for example, no e-commerce to regulate until relatively recently), the need for well-crafted regulation to rein in the intrinsic detrimental tendencies of the free market, ranging from human exploitation to environmental devastation, is an unchanging truth.Capitalism is like fire; it is a powerful tool that offers transformative benefits to humanity, but, like fire, it must always be carefully managed because it can cause sweeping destruction.R. Daniel Valdes-DapenaCape May, N.J.To the Editor:Re David Brooks’s column:As a Midwestern 87-year-old lefty, I thank you for giving me a tiny sliver of hope in my tired old mind.Would that the ability to open new brain pathways be taught in schools, modeled in the halls of the government system and generally admired.There should be classes in “I was wrong.” It is such a mark of intelligence, and the school systems could redeem themselves from the sin of underpaying generous men and women who cannot break through the traps of the system.I admire you.Sally BrownMinneapolisTo the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong About Al Franken,” by Michelle Goldberg:Senator Franken was swept up in the “one size fits all” frenzy that consumed him predicated, in very large part, on one photo showing a comedian making an attempted joke gone horribly wrong.Even at the time I believed the clamor for his political head was an error. Now, given what has transpired in this nation since that day, and the very distinct possibility that Donald Trump may be his party’s 2024 presidential nominee despite a list of grievances that makes Mr. Franken’s seem as a pebble to a mountain, my belief in the mistaken rush to judgment for Mr. Franken has grown exponentially.I understand the mea culpa of this column. But too little, too late never seemed a more apt reply.Robert S. NussbaumFort Lee, N.J.To the Editor:Re Michelle Goldberg’s column about Al Franken:Thank you for your integrity, rising above pridefulness and acknowledging the costs of abridging due process. We need more of this accountability.Evelyn J. HightowerBlacklick, OhioTo the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong About Facebook,” by Farhad Manjoo:Truth will set you free, but you must be able to recognize it first. Facebook’s cacophony will not help you do that.Edgar PaukBrooklynTo the Editor:I enjoyed the collection of eight admissions from your columnists that they actually realize they were wrong about something. But only eight? This should be a weekly piece, considering how much material there is. I look forward to more of the same.Carl SchwarzNaples, Fla.To the Editor:I got through about three of the “I Was Wrong” columns before realizing that the theme was “I was wrong, but let me equivocate.” I always thought that wrong was wrong; I guess I was wrong (but I can explain).These read like a homework assignment no one wanted to do.Aaron SchurgTraverse City, Mich.Josh Hawley Ran for His Life Oliver Contreras/AFP— Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Video Shows Senator Fleeing Mob He Had Exhorted With a Raised Fist” (news article, July 23):The video of Senator Josh Hawley running for his life as his buddies threatened to become too friendly with him is a perfect symbol of the Republican Party’s cowardice.Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, of course, lead this pusillanimous bunch of big talkers and small men. That our country should be governed, if that is the correct word, by such a spineless group is sad beyond words.John T. DillonWest Caldwell, N.J. More

His endorsement of George E. Pataki in 1994 helped elect the state’s only Republican governor in 50 years.Michael R. Long, the devout ideologue who for three decades headed New York State’s Conservative Party — which in 1994 provided the winning margin to elect the state’s only Republican governor in the last 50 years — died on Sunday at his home in Breezy Point, Queens. He was 82.The cause was kidney failure, his protégé and successor as the state party chairman, Gerard Kassar, said.Mr. Long was a fierce opponent of abortion rights, gay rights, same-sex marriages and higher taxes to pay for more spending by government, but he was generally respected and even liked by his political opponents as a man of principle who, by his consistency, had earned their trust.He was the longest-serving chairman of the state Conservative Party, from 1988 through early 2019, after heading the party’s organization in Brooklyn.He also served as an at-large city councilman from Brooklyn from 1981 to 1983, when the boroughwide position was abolished. He was the only Council member elected as a Conservative.In November 1994, George E. Pataki, a Republican state senator, toppled the liberal Democrat Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who was seeking a fourth term, by drawing more than 300,000 votes on the Conservative Party’s ballot line.Its endorsement was a gamble: The party chose to paper over Mr. Pataki’s relatively permissive views on abortion and gay rights, but Mr. Pataki delivered on his vow to cut taxes and provided patronage appointments in state government to Conservatives, giving them greater influence over spending and other policies.“Without his support, I would never have been elected governor,” Mr. Pataki said Monday.Mr. Long stuck to his guns, a quality that even political opponents admired for its consistency.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesMichael Robert Long was born on Feb. 1, 1940, in Brooklyn to Michael T. Long, who worked at different times for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Stock Exchange, and Elmira (Nuetzel) Long, a supervisor for Blue Cross Blue Shield.He was raised in Queens, where he dropped out of Richmond Hill High School shortly before graduation in 1959 to join the Marines.“I just was that kind of a kid,” Mr. Long told The New York Times in 1999. “There were times when they were talking about throwing me out of school. And then I wound up on the honor roll.”“I was just contrary,” he added. “So I guess I’ve been contrary all my life.”He served in the Marines until 1961. In 1963, he married Eileen Dougherty. She survives him along with their sons, Michael, Matthew, James, Robert, Christopher, Francis and Edward; two daughters, Eileen Chelales and Maureen Hayes; 24 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.The Conservative Party in New York was founded in the 1960s by J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty, Wall Street lawyers and brothers-in-law who sought to tilt the state’s Republicans to the right. In this they followed the pattern of the Liberal Party, which would leverage its endorsement of Democratic candidates — sometimes providing the margin of victory in close races — to nudge them to the left (and exact patronage once they were elected).Mr. Long, who ran a liquor store with his brother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he lived, was of a different breed of political leader: He was politically savvy, able to hold his own in any debate, but unlike many a standard politician, he was passionately committed to causes and unwilling to make transactional endorsements.In 1964, he volunteered to work in Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential campaign and enrolled as a Conservative voter.The New York party achieved a stunning and unparalleled success in 1970 when James L. Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother, was elected United States senator in a tight three-way race. He remains the only Conservative candidate who won a statewide race without the Republican nomination.In 1980, Conservative support helped Alfonse M. D’Amato defeat an incumbent senator, Jacob K. Javits — the last of the original Rockefeller Republicans — in the Republican primary, leading to Mr. Javits’s unseating that November.Mr. Long was elected Conservative Party leader in his Brooklyn Assembly district in 1968 and Kings County chairman four years later, serving until 1988. In 1974, he was chosen as state vice chairman.Despite his endorsement of Mr. Pataki in 1994, in 1997 he refused to endorse Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for re-election as mayor of New York City because of the mayor’s liberal positions on social issues. Instead, he left the Conservative ballot line vacant and said he did not vote in the election. (In 1989, when Mr. Giuliani barely lost the mayoralty to David N. Dinkins, and in 1993, when Mr. Giuliani narrowly defeated Mr. Dinkins, the Conservative Party fielded its own candidates.)When the State Legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2010, Mr. Long declared that no candidate who supported same-sex marriage would be allowed to run on the Conservative Party line.His political counterparts vigorously contested his ideological arguments, but generally respect his consistency in an era of expedient waffling and pandering.“There’s something almost refreshing about it, though I profoundly disagree with him,” Judith Hope, the former chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said in 1999. “It’s rare to see what appears to be a principled stand from a party.”In 1990, the Conservative Party came perilously close to becoming what Mr. Long considered a typical political party.When the Conservative candidate for governor, Herbert London, campaigned as aggressively against the Republican nominee, Pierre A. Rinfret, as he did against the incumbent Democrat, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. London drew more than 800,000 votes, or 20 percent of the total, nearly outpolling Mr. Rinfret.“That was a little scary,” Mr. Long said at the time. Had Mr. London beaten Mr. Rinfret, the Conservatives would have dislodged the Republican Party from second place on the state ballot for four years and, Mr. Long asserted, “there would have been an infusion of people changing their registration, and you would have seen other players trying to take over the party.”“It would have become totally a political party and lost its vision,” he said.He added, “We’ve always understood that the Conservative Party is a philosophical movement, more than a political party.” More