Elections

Dustin Thompson, an unemployed exterminator from Ohio, was the first defendant tried in the Capitol attack to offer a Trump-made-me-do-it defense before a jury.WASHINGTON — Dustin Thompson’s trip down what he called “the rabbit hole” of election misinformation began eight months before a single vote was cast in 2020. It ended inside the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he was part of the mob of Trump supporters that stormed inside during Congress’s counting of electoral votes in the worst attack on the building since the War of 1812.An exterminator from Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Thompson, 38, was laid off in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Alone at home with his new wife, he began spending long days on the internet, steeping himself in conspiracy theories about the upcoming vote.As the election approached, he said, he fully believed that if Donald J. Trump ended up losing, it would only be because the voting had been rigged, as the president had been warning publicly for months. Even after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Thompson could not accept that it was true.All of this, he told a jury at his criminal trial on Wednesday, led him to Washington on Jan. 6 for a Stop the Steal rally, where he and a friend listened to Mr. Trump give an incendiary speech near the White House.In an hour on the witness stand, Mr. Thompson blamed Mr. Trump for what eventually occurred, saying that he had been answering the president’s call to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” when he joined the throng swarming into the building and made off with a bottle of bourbon and a coat rack.“If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something,” he said, “I felt obligated to do that.”Mr. Thompson’s story is not unusual. At several points during the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, many people charged with crimes have sought to blame Mr. Trump in various ways for their actions, mostly at pretrial bail hearings or at sentencings after pleading guilty.But Mr. Thompson is the first defendant to attempt the argument at trial in front of a jury. In making his case, he offered a window into the toxic and relentless flood of conspiracy theories and lies, stoked by Mr. Trump, that helped give rise to the riot.The move comes with considerable risk, and its success or failure could determine not only Mr. Thompson’s fate, but that of other defendants accused of taking part in the violence of Jan. 6.Before the trial began, Mr. Thompson admitted to prosecutors that he had gone into the Capitol and stolen government property, agreeing in advance to nearly every element of the six charges he faces. His defense will rest almost entirely on the question of his state of mind during the riot.Mr. Thompson has claimed that he did not knowingly or corruptly break the law, but rather, as his lawyer said on Tuesday, was “so influenced — so used and abused” by Mr. Trump that he could not be held accountable for his behavior.The Trump-made-me-do-it defense has not fared well with judges. While it could work better on a jury, Mr. Thompson seemed to stumble on Wednesday during cross-examination, undercutting key elements of his argument.William Dreher, a prosecutor, got him to admit several times that Mr. Trump had not been at his side, offering him step-by-step instructions, when he walked into the Senate parliamentarian’s office and walked out with the whiskey and the coat rack. Mr. Thompson acknowledged that he was a married adult with a college degree who could make his own decisions.Mr. Thompson also conceded under questioning by Mr. Dreher that he had known it was unlawful to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 while lawmakers were finalizing the results of the election. That appeared to contradict a central pillar of his own defense.While Mr. Thompson’s claims that he was under Mr. Trump’s spell do not carry any legal weight as evidence, they echo similar allegations the government has made in other cases connected to Jan. 6. In those cases, prosecutors have gone to great lengths to describe how rioters at the Capitol were motivated by Mr. Trump’s statements, including his speech at the Ellipse and a tweet he posted on Dec. 19, 2020 calling on his followers to attend a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

His name had surfaced as an influential figure in Ukraine with potential inside knowledge of Russian electoral meddling in the United States, though for years he had steadfastly denied it.But in recent days, the ground has shifted dramatically under Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is a close confidant of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and who had also been a client of the Republican political consultant Paul J. Manafort.Mr. Medvedchuk went into hiding early in the war, Ukrainian officials say, and was detained this week. President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Tuesday a picture on Telegram of the politician, looking tired and disheveled, wearing handcuffs. He was arrested after violating terms of his house arrest while awaiting trial for treason, in a case opened last year.That case is related to coal trading with pro-Russian separatists, but more broadly it has to do with the swirl of financial and political intrigue surrounding Moscow’s operations to influence politics in foreign countries.For now, it’s unclear whether Mr. Medvedchuk will ever testify in court in Ukraine or be interviewed by investigators looking into Russian influence operations elsewhere. Mr. Zelensky said he would seek to trade Mr. Medvedchuk to Russia for Ukrainian prisoners of war.“I offer the Russian Federation to trade your man for our boys and girls now in captivity,” Mr. Zelensky said. “It’s important our law enforcement and military study such a possibility.”A trade would presumably put Mr. Medvedchuk in Russia, out of reach of researchers tracking Russian attempts to influence political outcomes abroad, in which Mr. Medvedchuk is said to have played a central role in Ukraine.A photo released by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office Tuesday shows Viktor Medvedchuk in handcuffs after he was detained.Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, via Associated PressHis relevance to Russian electoral meddling in the United States related to his ties to Mr. Manafort, and he was not described as playing a central role in a special prosecutor’s report or in two federal trials of Mr. Manafort.Still, Mr. Medvedchuk has been close both politically and personally to Mr. Putin for more than two decades, and he was a prominent figure in the pro-Russian wing of Ukrainian politics, a circle where Mr. Manafort found several clients.Mr. Putin is the godfather to Mr. Medvedchuk’s daughter. The two men met frequently over the years, and Russian air traffic control authorities granted special exemptions for Mr. Medvedchuk’s private jet on flights to Moscow, he said in an interview in 2017.Some European politicians, including the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had publicly endorsed a role for Mr. Medvedchuk as an intermediary in the standoff between Russia and Ukraine, given his personal ties to Mr. Putin.But in Ukraine, outside of a narrow base of support mostly in the country’s east, he was widely viewed as a loathsome quisling who had reaped wealth from energy deals with the Kremlin while promoting Russian foreign policy goals, including weakening the central government under a federalization overhaul that he had championed for years.At various times, he had served as deputy speaker of Parliament, a presidential adviser and a negotiator in prisoner exchanges with Russia. And as a figure at the nexus of various financial and political influence operations run by the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedchuk’s importance extended beyond Ukraine.Mr. Manafort, before he became chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, worked for a decade as a consultant for Russian-leaning politicians in Ukraine, including the Opposition Bloc party, in which Mr. Medvedchuk was one of three leading figures.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.S. support. More

PARIS — Rejecting a “herd-like conformity” with the Biden administration, Marine Le Pen, the French far-right candidate for the presidency, said Wednesday that France would quit NATO’s integrated military command if she were elected and would seek for the alliance “a strategic rapprochement” with Russia.As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, Ms. Le Pen effectively signaled that her election would terminate or at least disrupt President Biden’s united alliance in confronting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and perhaps create a breach in Western Europe for Mr. Putin to exploit.Dismissing multilateralism, blasting Germany, criticizing the European Union, relegating climate issues to a low priority, attacking “globalists” and maintaining a near silence on Russia’s brutal assault in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen gave a taste of a worldview that was at once reminiscent of the Trump presidency and appeared to directly threaten NATO’s attempts to arm Ukraine and defeat Russia.A lurch to the far right by France, a nuclear power and permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, would realign the world, with unpredictable and disruptive consequences.In a wide-ranging 75-minute news conference devoted to international relations, and apparently conceived to bolster her credentials on the global stage, Ms. Le Pen said France would remain in NATO and respect its core Article 5, which says an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all.But, she added, “I would place our troops neither under an integrated NATO command nor under a European command.”“I would place our troops neither under an integrated NATO command nor under a European command,” Ms. Le Pen said.Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockHer position, she said, was “no submission to an American protectorate exercised on European soil under the cover of NATO” — a stance she compared to that taken by Gen. Charles de Gaulle in 1966, when he took France out of NATO’s integrated military command, where it remained until 2009.Her position, she said, did not signal “submission to Moscow.” But her promise to withdraw France from the command was consistent with the policy of “equidistance” from great powers she said she would pursue if she defeats the incumbent, President Emmanuel Macron, in a runoff vote for the French presidency on April 24.Polls show Mr. Macron with 53 to 55 percent of the vote, ahead of Ms. Le Pen with 45 to 47 percent. But the political situation is volatile as the president, scurrying around the country, scrambles to make up for a lackluster initial campaign. The French nationalist extreme right is closer to attaining power than at any time since World War II.The proposed rapprochement with Russia, “once the Russian-Ukrainian war is over and settled by a peace treaty,” would even be in the interest of the United States, Ms. Le Pen suggested, because Washington would not be served by a “close Russian-Chinese union.”Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, formerly the National Front, a fiercely anti-immigrant party, dismissed the Biden administration as “too aggressive toward Beijing,” saying the United States “needs enemies in order to unite its allies under its domination.”It was one of very few references to the United States, none of them positive, as Ms. Le Pen embarked on a kind of world tour of her preoccupations that also omitted Russia but did include a long exegesis of why France has solemn obligations in Lebanon.“France is not France without grandeur,” she declared.A protester outside the venue where Ms. Le Pen had her news conference. Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNor is it France without protests. The news conference was briefly disrupted by a protester carrying a heart-shaped image of Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Putin. The protester was wrestled to the ground and dragged out by security guards.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.S. support. More

The state is investigating whether Mr. Meadows cast a legal vote in 2020, after reports questioned if he lived at the address listed on his voter registration.Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, has been removed from the voter rolls in North Carolina as officials investigate whether he fraudulently registered to vote and cast a ballot in the state during the 2020 presidential election, according to a local election official.Mr. Meadows, who helped amplify former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was “administratively removed” from the poll book by the Macon County Board of Elections on Monday “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said in a statement.Mr. Meadows represented North Carolina in Congress until March 2020, when he went to work in the White House. Months later, Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote using the address of a modest, three-bedroom mobile home with a rusted roof in Scaly Mountain, N.C.On the voter registration application that Mr. Meadows submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, he stated that he intended to move into the home the following day.And in November, he voted absentee by mail from that address, according to state records.Last month, a report in The New Yorker cast doubt on whether Mr. Meadows had ever lived — or even spent the night — at the home.Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to telephone and text messages on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, declined to comment.In 2021, Mr. Meadows registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows bought the unit in July 2017.The inquiry into Mr. Meadows’s voting activity in North Carolina remains open, according to Anjanette Grube, public information officer for the state’s Bureau of Investigation.Though documented cases of voter fraud are rare, Mr. Meadows and other Republicans have seized on the concept in order to claim, without evidence, that the results of last presidential election are illegitimate.During an August 2020 interview on CNN, Mr. Meadows warned of fraud in voting by mail. “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with just people just moving around, let alone the people that die off?” he told the host, Jake Tapper.When Mr. Tapper said there was no evidence of widespread vote fraud, Mr. Meadows replied, “There’s no evidence that there’s not, either. That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”Reid J. Epstein More

Ordinary citizens play a critical role in maintaining democracy. They refuse to re-elect — at least in theory — politicians who abuse their power, break the rules and reject the outcome of elections they lose. How is it, then, that Donald Trump, who has defied these basic presumptions, stands a reasonable chance of winning a second term in 2024?Milan W. Svolik, a political scientist at Yale, anticipated this question in his 2019 paper “Polarization versus Democracy”: “Voters in democracies have at their disposal an essential instrument of democratic self-defense: elections. They can stop politicians with authoritarian ambitions by simply voting them out of office.”What might account for their failure to do so?In sharply polarized electorates, even voters who value democracy will be willing to sacrifice fair democratic competition for the sake of electing politicians who champion their interests. When punishing a leader’s authoritarian tendencies requires voting for a platform, party, or person that his supporters detest, many will find this too high a price to pay.In other words, exacerbated partisan competition “presents aspiring authoritarians with a structural opportunity: They can undermine democracy and get away with it.”Svolik and Matthew H. Graham, a postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University, expand on Svolik’s argument and its applicability to the United States. Supporters of democracy, they contend in their 2020 paper “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” can no longer rely on voters to serve as a roadblock against authoritarianism:We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence.Graham and Svolik cite survey data demonstrating that “Americans have a solid understanding of what democracy is and what it is not” and can “correctly distinguish real-world undemocratic practices from those that are consistent with democratic principles.”Despite this awareness, Graham and Svolik continue,only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices when doing so goes against their partisan identification or favorite policies. We proposed that this is the consequence of two mechanisms: first, voters are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan ends and second, voters employ a partisan ‘double standard’ when punishing candidates who violate democratic principles. These tendencies were exacerbated by several types of polarization, including intense partisanship, extreme policy preferences, and divergence in candidate platforms.The authors have calculated that “only 3.5 percent of voters realistically punish violations of democratic principles in one of the world’s oldest democracies.”Graham and Svolik go on:To get a sense of the real-world relevance of this implication, consider that in 2016 only 5.1 percent of U.S. House districts were won by a margin of less than 6.9 percent — the smallest margin that is necessary for violations of democratic principles to be electorally self-defeating. That share of districts was still only 15.2 percent in 2018. Put bluntly, our estimates suggest that in the vast majority of U.S. House districts, a majority-party candidate could openly violate one of the democratic principles we examined and nonetheless get away with it.Graham and Svolik tested adherence to democratic principles by asking respondents whether they would vote for a candidate who “supported a redistricting plan that gives own party 10 extra seats despite a decline in the polls”; whether a governor of one’s own party should “rule by executive order if legislators don’t cooperate”; whether a governor should “ignore unfavorable court rulings by opposite-party-appointed judges”; and whether a governor should “prosecute journalists who accuse him of misconduct without revealing sources.”“Put simply,” Graham and Svolik write, “polarization undermines the public’s ability to serve as a democratic check.”Graham and Svolik’s analysis challenges the canonical view of the role of the average voter as the enforcer of adherence to democratic principles. In their 1963 classic, “The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations,” Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, political scientists at Stanford and Harvard, wrote:The inactivity of the ordinary man and his inability to influence decisions help provide the power that governmental elites need if they are to make decisions. But this maximizes only one of the contradictory goals of a democratic system. The power of elites must be kept in check. The citizen’s opposite role, as an active and influential enforcer of the responsiveness of elites, is maintained by his strong commitment to the norm of active citizenship, as well as by his perception that he can be an influential citizen.The democratic citizen, Almond and Verba continue, “is called on to pursue contradictory goals: he must be active, yet passive; involved, yet not too involved; influential, yet deferential.”Trump and his allies in the Republican Party have correctly been the focus of those seeking to identify the instigators of political disruption. As Barton Gellman wrote in his December 2021 article in The Atlantic, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”:For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time.In the most recent issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, five political scientists, Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman, Jamila Michener, Thomas B. Pepinsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, write:For decades, political scientists have observed key threats to democracy that have been on the rise: political polarization; conflict — incited by racism and nativism — over the boundaries of American citizenship and the civic status of those in different social groups; soaring economic inequality; and executive aggrandizement. The confluence of these threats fueled the candidacy of Donald Trump, whose election was a symptom, not a cause, of American democratic dysfunction.As president, the authors continue, “Trump exacerbated all four threats, imperiling the pillars of democracy, including free and fair elections, the rule of law, the legitimacy of opposition, and the integrity of rights.”In an earlier article, in the September 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Fragile Republic: American Democracy Has Never Faced So Many Threats All at Once,” Lieberman and Mettler argue thatfor the first time in its history, the United States faces all four threats at the same time. It is this unprecedented confluence — more than the rise to power of any particular leader — that lies behind the contemporary crisis of American democracy. The threats have grown deeply entrenched, and they will likely persist and wreak havoc for some time to come.Trump, the authors argue,has ruthlessly exploited these widening divisions to deflect attention from his administration’s poor response to the pandemic and to attack those he perceives as his personal or political enemies. Chaotic elections that have occurred during the pandemic, in Wisconsin and Georgia, for example, have underscored the heightened risk to U.S. democracy that the threats pose today. The situation is dire.How much of a danger do Trump and his allies continue to represent? I asked Pepinsky how likely anti-democratic politicians are to use democratic elections to achieve their ends. He replied by email:It is very possible — not sure how likely, but entirely possible. The G.O.P.’s rhetoric is clear about what it believes a G.O.P.-led government should be able to implement, and the party has proven repeatedly unwilling to sanction its most visible political figure for plainly illegal and undemocratic behavior. And the G.O.P. machine at the state level is mobilizing to stack electoral bureaucracies with conspiracy-curious lickspittles who would love nothing more than to refuse to certify elections won by Democrats. The threat is real.Lieberman, in turn, stressed in an email the key role of white discontent as a factor in the crisis American democracy faces:The perception among many white Americans that their status at the top of the political hierarchy is eroding is certainly a critical factor fueling the crisis of American democracy today. This is a recurring pattern in American history: when proponents of expanded and more diverse democracy gain power, those who have a stake in old hierarchies and patterns of exclusion are often willing to defy democratic norms and practices in order to stay in power.But, Lieberman continued,It’s not necessarily inevitable that those defenders of old hierarchies will find refuge in the mainstream of a major political party, which gives their aims credibility and political force. When that has happened, as with the Democrats in the 1880s and 1890s, the result has been disastrous democratic backsliding. But in the 1960s, by contrast, a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans was able to overcome those antidemocratic forces, at least for a short time.The efforts by Republicans to take over control of elections through state laws giving local legislatures the power to overturn election results — as well as by running candidates for secretary of state who espouse the view that the 2020 election was stolen — are troubling, to say the least.Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University — and the author of “Delegitimization, Deconstruction and Control: Undermining the Administrative State” in the current issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science — wrote by email that he is “more worried about declines in democracy driven by formal changes in the law than by events like January 6th.”Moynihan pointed out that at 3:32 a.m. on Jan. 7 — hours after protesters incited by Trump swarmed the U.S. Capitol — a majority of House Republicansvoted not to accept the results of the last election. This represents an astonishing signal by a group of elected officials of their willingness to play procedural hardball to upend democratic outcomes. State legislatures are passing laws that constrain individual rights via democratic means, and also shifting powers in a way that can ensure Republican victories. It’s very possible to envision how newly elected state and local election officials who believe Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election would make decisions where they refuse to certify free and fair elections.It is now possible, Moynihan continued,to envisage some state legislatures using fraudulent fraud claims as an excuse to select a slate of electors consistent with their partisan interests rather than with the actual outcome of their election. This is not the most likely outcome, but it is significantly more likely than it was just a couple of years ago. The confluence of events — a close election in swing states, allegations of fraud, state legislatures stepping in to choose the winner and a Republican majority in Congress endorsing this — is an entirely plausible democratic process to nullify democracy.Partisan polarization has pushed Americans not only into mutually exclusive political parties, but also into two warring civic cultures.In a March 2022 paper, “‘Good Citizens’ in Democratic Hard Times,” Sara Wallace Goodman of the University of California, Irvine, examined the growing disagreement among voters over what the obligations of a good citizen are.Goodman compared voter attitudes on what constitutes “good citizen” norms in 2004 and in 2019. A strikingly high level of agreement between Republicans and Democrats in 2004 had nearly disappeared by 2019, according to her research:Where 15 years prior, the only difference between partisans was in helping others (and the difference was slight), we see in this second (2019) snapshot several items of disagreement. In the United States, Democrats are more likely to value associational life and respecting opinions of others as values of good citizenship. Moreover, the gap between Democrats and Republicans in “helping others” has widened significantly. For Republicans, respondents are significantly more likely to value obeying the law. This portrays a clear erosion of overlapping norms, on almost every item.In his March 2022 article “Moderation, Realignment, or Transformation? Evaluating Three Approaches to America’s Crisis of Democracy,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” argues that neither moderation nor realignment is adequate to address current problems in American democracy:Only reforms that fundamentally shake up the political coalitions and electoral incentives can break the escalating two-party doom loop of hyperpartisanship that is destroying the foundations of American democracy.Drutman makes the case that moderation is futile becausein today’s politics, with national identity, racial reckoning, and democracy itself front and center in partisan conflict, it is hard to understand moderation as a middle point when no clear compromise exists on what are increasingly zero-sum issues. This is where the moderation principle falls especially short. If one party or both parties have no interest in moderation or cross-partisan compromise, would-be “moderates” cannot straddle an unbridgeable chasm.What about a realignment in which the Democratic Party regains its majority status more firmly?Drutman writes in his essay:Any future scenario in which Democrats achieve a decisive and sustainable national majority is a future in which the Republican Party is almost certain to be led by the illiberal radicals who have been gaining power within the party for years as small-l liberal Republicans have fled the party. In short, “realignment” in the form of an extended period of Democratic majority rule does not offer a clear solution. It runs up against significant structural obstacles. And the more likely it seems, the more it stands a very good chance of pushing the Republican Party into even more radical insurrectionism.In fact, Drutman’s basic argument is that “there is no feasible solution to the current crisis within the two-party system itself, given the escalating polarization and the extremist trajectory of the Republican Party.”According to Drutman, “this kind of polarization, which involves not just (or not even) policy agreement but instead deep distrust of fellow citizens, is a very typical precursor of democratic decline.” Conversely, “in more proportional systems, out-party hatreds are rarer and tend to only be directed toward extreme parties.”Drutman acknowledges the many roadblocks that face the kind of transformation to a multiparty system he proposes. He argues, however, thatthe only way to make America governable for the foreseeable future is to allow new and more fluid political coalitions. Major electoral reform may seem radical, but the challenges that the American political system faces right now — toxic polarization, a major party that is rapidly embracing illiberalism, widening economic inequalities, and a racial reckoning — are immense and will blow right through straw and sticks. Only a genuine transformation of the structures of American democracy offers a solution.Still, the relentless, insidious and secretive assaults on democracy that now permeate American culture may not be amenable to procedural solution.Gerald J. Postema of the University of North Carolina describes the current embattled climate in his June 2021 essay “Constitutional Norms — Erosion, Sabotage and Response”:The degradation has resulted not from apathy or indifference, but from hostile subversion of democratic institutions and the values that they seek to serve. The attack can be stealthy. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary aspiring authoritarians pay striking attention to the forms of law in their efforts to consolidate and entrench their power. They seek to preserve the constitutional frame while “hollowing out” its substantive content and the constraints on their power that it seeks to impose. They use various devices to achieve their anti-democratic aims. They use constitutional amendments or legislation when they can, mobilizing artificial legislative majorities or manipulating weakened courts. Often, however, the assault is less direct, if no less visible, attacking the soft underbelly of the constitutional order: the norm-governed practices that give the Constitution and institutions of government their solidity, stability and vitality.The erosion of democracy is now self-evidently a global phenomenon with exogenous and endogenous causes. A brief list from the Hague Journal of the Rule of Law gives the idea:Economic inequality; political polarization; cultural backlash against rapid social, moral and demographic change; the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities by political forces; the profound — and often negative — effects of technology on society and the political system; the rise of non-liberal alternative governance models viewed as successful …. The trend of democratic decay itself — and the means by which political and social forces are degrading liberal democracy — is rapidly changing, developing and spreading. We are trying to understand a global phenomenon as it envelops the world in real time.It’s a lot to ask voters to adjudicate everything on that list. So the question that remains is this: Is the Trump version of this phenomenon the worst we are going to get, or are there people watching and waiting in the wings who will make it much 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

Capitol riot defendant blames actions on Trump and false election claimsLawyer for man charged with stealing a coat rack from the Capitol has vowed to show Trump abused his power to ‘authorize’ attack Mentions of Donald Trump have been rare at the first few trials for people charged with storming the US Capitol, but that has changed: the latest Capitol riot defendant to go on trial is blaming his actions on the former president and his false claims about a stolen election.Dustin Byron Thompson, an Ohio man charged with stealing a coat rack from the Capitol, doesn’t deny that he joined the mob on 6 January 2021. But his lawyer vowed Tuesday to show that Trump abused his power to “authorize” the attack.Describing Trump as a man without scruples or integrity, defense attorney Samuel Shamansky said the former president engaged in a “sinister” plot to encourage Thompson and other supporters to “do his dirty work”.“It’s Donald Trump himself spewing the lies and using his position to authorize this assault,” Shamansky told jurors Tuesday during the trial’s opening statements.Justice department prosecutor Jennifer Rozzoni said Thompson knew he was breaking the law that day.“He chose to be a part of the mayhem and chaos,” she said.Thompson’s lawyer sought subpoenas to call Trump and Rudolph Giuliani as witnesses at his trial this week. A judge rejected that request but ruled that jurors can hear recordings of speeches that Trump and Giuliani delivered at a rally before the riot.Thompson’s jury trial is the third among hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions. The first two ended with jurors convicting both defendants on all counts with which they were charged.In a February court filing, Shamansky said he wanted to argue at trial that Thompson was acting at the direction of Trump and “his various conspirators.” The lawyer asked to subpoena others from Trump’s inner circle, including former White House strategist Steve Bannon, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and former Trump lawyers John Eastman and Sidney Powell.Prosecutors said Thompson can’t show that Trump or Giuliani had the authority to “empower” him to break the law. They also noted that video of the rally speeches “perfectly captures” the tone, delivery and context of the statements to the extent they are “marginally relevant” to proof of Thompson’s intent on 6 January.Thompson’s lawyer argued that Trump would testify that he and others “orchestrated a carefully crafted plot to call into question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election”. Shamansky claimed that Giuliani incited rioters by encouraging them to engage in “trial by combat” and that Trump provoked the mob by saying that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”.Shamansky said Thompson, who lost his job during the pandemic, became an avid consumer of the conspiracy theories and lies about a stolen election.“This is the garbage that Dustin Thompson is listening to day after day after day,” Shamansky said. “He goes down this rabbit hole. He listens to this echo chamber. And he acts accordingly.”US district Judge Reggie Walton ruled in March that any in-person testimony by Trump or Giuliani could confuse and mislead jurors.More than 770 people have been charged with federal crimes arising from 6 January. Over 250 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. Thompson is the fifth person to be tried on riot-related charges.Thompson has a co-defendant, Robert Lyon, who pleaded guilty to riot-related charges in March.Thompson, then 36, and Lyon, then 27, drove from Columbus, Ohio, to Silver Spring, Maryland, stayed overnight at a hotel and then took an Uber ride into Washington DC on the morning of 6 January. After Donald Trump’s speech, Thompson and Lyon headed over to the Capitol.Thompson was wearing a Trump 2020 winter hat and a bulletproof vest when he entered the Capitol and went to the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office, where he stole two bottles of liquor and a coat rack worth up to $500, according to prosecutors.Thompson is charged with six counts: obstructing Congress’ joint session to certify the electoral college vote, theft of government property, entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly or disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly or disruptive conduct in a Capitol building, and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.Lyon pleaded guilty to theft of government property and disorderly conduct. Both counts are misdemeanors punishable by a maximum of one year imprisonment. Walton is scheduled to sentence Lyon on 3 June.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsUS crimenewsReuse this content More

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has spent his political career trying to rehabilitate the family name. As the front-runner in the upcoming election, he may finally succeed.MANILA — They bopped along to the beat of a martial law anthem updated into a pop tune. They cheered when an A-list celebrity proclaimed that the spirit of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the former dictator, was alive. And when Mr. Marcos’s son and namesake held up the peace sign made popular by his father a generation ago, the shrieking crowds mirrored it in return.It is election season in the Philippines, and history is being rewritten, one campaign rally at a time.Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has spent decades defending his family’s name against accusations of greed and corruption and downplaying the legacy of his father’s brutal rule. During his presidential campaign, he has portrayed himself as a unifier, while false narratives online reimagine his father’s regime as a “golden era” in the nation’s history.Now, as patriarch of the Marcos dynasty, Mr. Marcos is expected to be the first person to win the presidential election in the Philippines by a majority in more than three decades.The race is being cast as a competition between those who remember the past and those who are accused of trying to distort it, the last chapter in a brazen attempt to absolve the Marcoses of wrongdoing and quash any effort to hold the family accountable. Five years of President Rodrigo Duterte — a strong Marcos ally known for his bloody war on drugs and for jailing his critics — may have presaged a Marcos family comeback.“It will determine not just our future but our past,” said Maria Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Prize winner who is an outspoken critic of both Mr. Duterte and Mr. Marcos.Supporters at a rally cheering for Mr. Marcos, who has spent decades defending his family’s name against accusations of greed and corruption.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesThe Marcoses are accused of looting as much as $10 billion from the government before fleeing to Hawaii in 1986, when the peaceful “People Power” protests toppled the Marcos regime. The family returned to the country shortly after the death of the elder Mr. Marcos in 1989.Despite the exile, the Marcos name never truly left the political establishment.Mr. Marcos, known by his boyhood nickname, “Bongbong,” served as vice governor, governor and congressman in Ilocos Norte, the family stronghold, for most of the period between the 1980s and 2010. That year, he entered the national political scene when he was elected senator. Imelda Marcos, his 92-year-old mother, ran for president twice and lost in the 1990s.Rehabilitating the family name has been a recurring theme. Over the decades, the Marcoses have sought to target young voters with no memory of martial law or the torture and killing of political prisoners. Fifty-six percent of the voting population in the Philippines is aged between 18 and 41, and most did not witness the atrocities of the Marcos regime — ideal circumstances for the spread of disinformation, opponents say.A voter holding a portrait of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the dictator, and his wife, Imelda Marcos. The Marcoses are accused of looting as much as $10 billion from the Philippine government before fleeing to Hawaii in 1986. Jes Aznar for The New York TimesIn January, Twitter said it had removed more than 300 accounts promoting Mr. Marcos’s presidential bid for violating rules on spam and manipulation. The influential Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines said in a statement that it was appalled by the “historical revisionism” in the election, and “the attempt to delete or destroy our collective memory through the seeding of lies and false narratives.”Mr. Marcos’s spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, said there was “no certainty” that the Twitter accounts belonged to his supporters. Last week, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it had suspended more than 400 election-related accounts, pages and groups for violating its standards. The company cited a video on Mr. Marcos’s official Facebook page that falsely accused his election rival, Leni Robredo, who is vice president, of cheating in the 2016 vice-presidential race. (The president and vice president are elected separately in the Philippines.)Several groups have sought to disqualify Mr. Marcos’s candidacy, pointing to a 1995 tax evasion conviction and the $3.9 billion in estate taxes that his family still owes the government. Mr. Marcos, 64, has brushed off the attacks as “fake news,” and refused to participate in nearly all presidential debates.Instead, Mr. Marcos has used social media to reach a captive audience online, reviewing viral TikTok dances and agreeing to makeovers.Live streaming Mr. Marcos’s motorcade south of Manila. Instead of participating in debates, Mr. Marcos has used social media to reach a captive audience online, reviewing viral TikTok dances and agreeing to makeovers.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesAt a rally in Las Piñas, Ella Mae Alipao, 15, said that she got most of her news about Mr. Marcos from TikTok and Facebook, and that she did not “believe much in books.” After Mr. Marcos’s father was ousted, Ms. Alipao said, “the Filipinos found out how good he was; that’s when they realized that they should have made him president for a longer time.”Mr. Marcos has made similar comments: “I’m not going to vindicate my father’s name because his name doesn’t need vindication,” he said in 1995. “I am so confident that history will judge him well.”In the 36 years since the father was ousted, many Filipinos have become disillusioned with the country’s democracy. Poverty is widespread, income inequality remains high and few people trust their elected leaders. When Mr. Duterte came to power, he promised radical change, ushering in a new era of strongman politics that has been embraced by many across the country.The names of those who died during the Marcos regime are etched on a wall at a memorial site in Quezon City. Opponents fear a Marcos victory would amount to rewriting history.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesMr. Duterte formed an alliance with the Marcoses early in his six-year presidential term. In 2016, he arranged for the father’s body to be moved tothe Philippines’ equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, despite protests. And it was not until Sara Duterte, Ms. Duterte’s daughter, made the surprise announcement that she would run for vice president instead of president that Mr. Marcos gained his large lead in the polls.In recent weeks, the opposition has been working furiously to counter the false narratives online about the Marcoses. Sergio Osmena III, a former political prisoner, senator and a grandson of the fourth president of the Philippines, said he had hired 10,000 volunteers to wage a counteroffensive against the Marcos campaign by releasing videos on the economic devastation and human rights violations of the Marcos years.“It’s probably too late,” he said.The Marcoses have been remarkably adept at avoiding jail time. Mr. Marcos was sentenced to up to three years in prison in 1995 for tax-related convictions, but his sentence was overturned on appeal two years later, even though his conviction remained on the books. In 2018, his mother was sentenced to up to 11 years in prison for creating private foundations to hide her unexplained wealth. She posted bail, and the Supreme Court is still reviewing her appeal.Waiting to catch a glimpse of the Marcos motorcade south of Manila. “I’m not going to vindicate my father’s name because his name doesn’t need vindication,” Mr. Marcos said in 1995. Jes Aznar for The New York TimesThe government has recovered just $3.3 billion of the estimated $10 billion that the Marcoses are accused of stealing, but $2.4 billion in assets are still under litigation, with various groups tussling over them. Should Mr. Marcos win the presidency, many fear those proceedings, along with the $3.9 billion in estate taxes, will be swept away, cementing the false idea that the Marcoses are innocent.Among some young voters, that view has already taken hold. “If he is a thief, how come he hasn’t been jailed?” asked Rjay Garcia, a 19-year-old rug salesman, at a recent rally in the city of Santa Rosa. Mr. Garcia said that he believed the cases against Mr. Marcos’s family were meant “to destroy his reputation,” and that he had “never heard” of the People Power protests.Even those with intimate memories of the country’s struggle for democracy may feel it is time to move on.Benjamin Abalos Jr., Mr. Marcos’s campaign manager, led protests against the Marcos regime as a student council officer of the Ateneo Law School. He said he never talked about those days with his candidate. “Whatever justice was achieved in those 36 years, I think that’s already enough,” he said. “Perhaps now it’s about moving forward.”Such attitudes could signal that a full rehabilitation of the Marcos name may soon be complete. The family now includes a governor, a senator, a mayor and a possible congressman. Mr. Marcos’s eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander, 28, is running for a congressional seat in Ilocos Norte, where his cousin, Matthew Marcos Manotoc, is governor.Volunteers and supporters in front of a campaign logo for Mr. Marcos and Sara Duterte, the daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Marcos has seized on his alliance with the Dutertes to present himself as a unifier.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesMr. Marcos has seized on his alliance with Ms. Duterte to present himself as a unifier who is ready to lead, but his political track record is mostly thin.While in his six years in the Senate he helped pass laws on protecting older people and expanding emergency relief to children, nearly 70 percent of the 52 laws he pushed for were on designating holidays and festivals, renaming highways and reapportioning provinces and cities, a review by The New York Times found.An investigation in 2015 found that his résumé on the Senate website had been embellished to include a bachelor of arts from the University of Oxford. The university later said he did not complete his degree, but obtained instead a special diploma in social studies. Mr. Marcos has denied misrepresenting his education.Though Mr. Marcos is seen as the front-runner in the May 9 election, rallies for Ms. Robredo, the vice president, have drawn hundreds of thousands of young supporters in recent weeks. Hecklers have shouted “magnanakaw,” or “thief,” at Mr. Marcos’s motorcade, and the petitions to disqualify his candidacy are still under appeal, though experts say they are unlikely to succeed.“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” said Ms. Ressa, the journalist, recalling a quote from the author Milan Kundera. She described the election as a “microcosm of a global battle for facts.”“If facts don’t win,” she said, “we’ll have a whole new history.”Waving campaign posters and flashing the peace sign made popular by Mr. Marcos’s father, a dictator who oversaw the torture and killing of political prisoners in the Philippines.Jes Aznar for The New York Times More

The gunman who injured 23 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, escaped, but the police identified a person of interest.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Two stories will dominate the conversation today: the attack in the subway that left at least 23 people injured, 10 from gunfire, and the resignation of Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin, hours after he was arrested on corruption charges.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesA man dressed in a neon-orange vest and a green construction helmet strapped on a gas mask, released two smoke grenades and began firing a gun he was carrying.It was the beginning of an attack that rattled the city — a mass shooting that turned the subway into another edgy symbol of a city worn thin by violence.Videos from the subway car where the smoke bomb went off and the shots rang out showed commuters running and just trying to breathe as they pulled their sleeves and their collars across their faces. My colleague Sarah Maslin Nir writes that there were a few panicked screams before the train pulled into the next stop, the doors opened and riders who could escape poured out, gasping in the smoke.“There’s been a shooting,” a woman said as she fled. Behind her a man limped out of the smoky subway car. Other passengers collapsed once they made it out, while in the car, wounded passengers lay on the blue seats or on the floor.The gunman — who had been on the train for eight stops, according to the police — apparently escaped in the maelstrom on the platform. At least one surveillance camera that could have captured the gunman was not working, Mayor Eric Adams said. The camera malfunction appeared to hamper the search as the police fanned out through Sunset Park. Police officials said they were looking for a “person of interest,” Frank R. James, a 62-year-old man who had rented a U-Haul van they found several miles from the station where the attack occurred. They said the van had been rented in Philadelphia.In the station, they said, they had found a nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, a hatchet and a bag with fireworks. Keechant Sewell, the police commissioner, added that there were online “postings possibly connected to the man where he mentions homelessness, he mentions New York and he does mention Mayor Adams.” As a result, she said, the mayor’s security detail was being tightened “in an abundance of caution”Adams, confined to Gracie Mansion after testing positive for the coronavirus this week, said in radio and television interviews that the police presence in the subways would be doubled and that officers assigned to day shifts would work into the evening. He said on NY1 that the shooting “really elevates the conversation” about the “crisis that is playing across our country” involving the proliferation of guns.It was not the first time in his 100-plus days in office that Adams had ordered more police attention on the subways. He announced plans in January to order hundreds of street-level patrol officers to inspect subway stations regularly and to redeploy officers from desk jobs onto the trains. Adams also announced plans to stop homeless people from sheltering on trains and platforms a few weeks after a woman was pushed to her death in front of a train.But crime has continued to increase. For January and February, felony assaults were up 10 percent over the same period last year, and for many passengers, safety is a paramount concern. In a recent survey by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs the transit system, fear of crime and harassment were the top factors cited by people who said they no longer take the subway.On Tuesday, Marjorie Michele, a nursing technician from Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, took an Uber home from work. She said the subways were still snarled from the attack, but riding above ground also felt safer.“It could have been me,” she said. “It could have been any of my children.”WeatherIt’s a mostly cloudy day in the high 60s. Expect a slight chance of showers late at night when temps drop to the high 50s.alternate-side parkingIn effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Holy Thursday).The latest New York newsThe killing of a 12-year-old boy in East Flatbush reflected how a spike in shootings during the pandemic is complicating recovery in less affluent neighborhoods.A former lawyer and his husband filed a complaint against the city, saying they were denied insurance coverage because of a definition of infertility that excludes gay men.The “Fearless Girl” sculpture will continue to stand outside the New York Stock Exchange after city officials voted to extend the sculpture’s temporary permit.A lieutenant governor is indicted and resignsJefferson Siegel for The New York TimesOn his 216th day as the second-most powerful state official in New York, Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned, hours after federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing him of directing a corruption scheme. The charges included trading state funds for illegal donations to his past campaigns for the State Senate and New York City comptroller.The five-count indictment accused him of bribery, fraud and conspiracy in directing $50,000 in state funds to a nonprofit group controlled by a real estate developer, Gerald Migdol. In return, Migdol arranged for illegal contributions to go to Benjamin’s failed campaign for city comptroller last year. Benjamin was also accused of offering to help Migdol win a zoning variance if he gave $15,000 to a separate fund for State Senate Democrats.“This is a simple story of corruption,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference before Benjamin’s resignation was announced. “Taxpayer money for campaign contributions. A quid pro quo. This for that. That’s bribery, plain and simple.”Benjamin pleaded not guilty in Federal District Court in Lower Manhattan before his resignation and was released on $250,000 bond.The fallout for the governorThe case complicated this year’s campaign for Hochul. After Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace last summer, one of her first major decisions was to appoint Benjamin.Now that decision has become a potentially consequential liability as she runs for a four-year term. My colleague Luis Ferré-Sadurní writes that Democratic and Republican rivals are already sharpening their attacks.She can select a new lieutenant governor in the coming weeks, but it will be difficult to replace Benjamin on the Democratic primary ballot in June. Because he was designated as the Democratic Party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, election rules stipulate that his name could be removed at this point only if he were to move out of the state, die or run for another office.Benjamin left court without commenting on the case. He and his lawyers met with prosecutors last week, according to someone familiar with the matter, and Benjamin’s top aides were privately reassuring their allies that he expected to be cleared of wrongdoing.A charity gets $50,000 it did not ask forThe indictment said Benjamin had approached Migdol in March 2019, months before he announced his candidacy for comptroller, and that Migdol demurred, saying he needed to solicit the same potential donors for his charity, Friends of Public School Harlem.“Let me see what I can do,” Benjamin replied, according to the indictment. Then he arranged a $50,000 education grant for the charity that Migdol had not sought.Later, in a meeting in Benjamin’s office, Migdol handed over $25,000 in checks made out to Benjamin’s Senate campaign account. The prosecutors said he attempted to conceal his involvement by giving Benjamin checks drawn on the accounts of relatives or an L.L.C. he controlled. The indictment said Benjamin watched as Migdol, filling out campaign forms, signed the relatives’ names.The indictment also accused Benjamin of attempting a cover-up by falsifying campaign donation forms, misleading city authorities and giving incorrect information in a background check before he became lieutenant governor.What we’re readingLast month, our reporter Karen Zraick received a tip about elevator breakdowns at a high-rise residential building. It proved to be more than just griping.Curbed reported on four key landmarks in Little Ukraine in the East Village and how they reflect the community’s history.METROPOLITAN diaryLong tent dressDear Diary:A friend and I were on the subway to Brooklyn. We were standing and chatting, holding on to the pole at the end of the car.I was wearing a long tent dress from Marimekko. Since I am 6 feet tall, the dress presented as a large swath of fabric as I leaned on the pole.A seat next to us was empty, and construction worker in hard hat and work boots asked whether we would mind if he sat down. He said he had been injured at work that day.Of course, my friend and I said. We continued to chat as the train crossed the river. It was clear that the construction worker was eavesdropping on us.At a break in our conversation, he spoke.“Excuse me,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but that dress would look a lot better with a belt.”— Celia RodriguesIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected] up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More