Elections

A new report, in perhaps the most thorough soul-searching done by either party this year, points to an urgent need for the party to present a positive economic agenda and rebut Republican misinformation.Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.The 70-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.Read the reportThree prominent Democratic groups, Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, conducted a review of the 2020 election.Read Document 73 pagesIn part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-election in South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat, lost re-election in South Florida last year. She remains worried about her party’s outreach to Hispanic voters.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, who helms the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”“That’s been a ridiculous idea and that’s never been true,” Mr. Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” Mr. James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”A report by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attributed the party’s setbacks to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to Republican attacks.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesKara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Mr. Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trump’s impact.Republicans will continue to have structural advantages in Washington because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College. Erin Scott for The New York TimesThe Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.’s clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they write. More

El TimesElecciones del 6 de junio: México y Perú van a las urnasLabores previas a la elección del 6 de junio en el Instituto Estatal Electoral de Chihuahua en Ciudad Juárez, MéxicoJose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersLas dos jornadas electorales han sido percibidas como referendos sobre el manejo de la pandemia y un modelo económico que parece incapaz de mitigar la desigualdad.Las elecciones de hoy, domingo 6 de junio, serán cruciales para millones de latinoamericanos que acudirán a las urnas en México y Perú. América Latina es una de las regiones más afectadas por la pandemia de COVID-19: alrededor de una tercera parte de las muertes causadas por el virus en el mundo se han registrado en países latinoamericanos, a pesar de que solo el 8 por ciento de la población mundial vive ahí. El impacto regional del virus al sur del río Bravo es notable si se considera que, mientras Estados Unidos se prepara para volver a la normalidad pospandémica, países como Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica y Uruguay atraviesan su peor brote.Mexicanos y peruanos no son los únicos que han votado desde que inició la pandemia. En total, entre 2020 y 2022, se celebran 9 comicios presidenciales a lo largo de 25 meses en América Latina.Ecuador eligió en abril a un exbanquero conservador como su presidente después de una campaña que fue crucial para el movimiento indígena. En noviembre, Honduras y Nicaragua tendrán elecciones presidenciales.Además, este año, los chilenos aprobaron en un plebiscito reescribir su Constitución y Argentina irá a las urnas en octubre para las legislativas de medio término.¿Qué está en juego en las elecciones de hoy? Aquí tenemos las claves. México a elecciones de medio términoLa votación será una prueba de la popularidad del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador, quien busca consolidar la mayoría que hoy tiene su partido en el Congreso para avanzar en su proyecto político en los tres años restantes de su sexenio. Para alcanzar una supermayoría en la Cámara baja (334 escaños) el partido de López Obrador, Morena, ha formado coaliciones con el Partido Verde y el Partido del Trabajo.La jornada del domingo será el ejercicio electoral más grande de la historia: 93 millones de mexicanos están convocados a las urnas para decidir sobre unos 20.000 cargos, entre ellos los 500 asientos de la Cámara de Diputados, 15 gubernaturas y miles de puestos locales.López Obrador, quien gobierna el país desde 2018, ha emprendido lo que llama “la cuarta transformación” del país con la promesa de combatir la corrupción y la violencia y redistribuir la riqueza entre los más vulnerables. La austeridad es parte clave de su mandato.Los críticos del presidente han señalado que hasta ahora no ha cumplido con sus promesas electorales y señalan que, en materia de migración, cedió a las demandas del expresidente Donald Trump. Sin embargo, López Obrador llega la mitad de su mandato con altos índices de popularidad.México ha sufrido los embates del coronavirus sin cerrar fronteras ni suspender actividades como muchos de sus vecinos con un manejo muy cuestionado de la emergencia sanitaria. El brote ha infectado a 2,3 millones de mexicanos y ha cobrado la vida de más de 221.695 personas.Los resultados comenzarán a darse a conocer la tarde del domingo y el Instituto Nacional Electoral hará un anuncio hacia las 11 p. m., hora del centro de México, en cadena nacional. Perú en segunda vueltaLos peruanos elegirán a su próximo presidente en un balotaje entre Pedro Castillo, un exmaestro rural y dirigente sindical que postula con un partido de extrema izquierda, y Keiko Fujimori, heredera del legado del exmandatario encarcelado Alberto Fujimori y ella misma acusada por crimen organizado. Ninguno de los dos era el favorito en primera vuelta, cuando se presentaron 18 candidatos.La votación en segunda vuelta se ha convertido en una suerte de referéndum sobre el modelo económico del país, que en los últimos 20 años ha logrado un crecimiento ejemplar en la región pero no ha conseguido eliminar la desigualdad. El Congreso, definido en la primera vuelta, estará dominado por Perú Libre (37 escaños de 130), el partido de Castillo; Fuerza Popular, el partido de Fujimori, tendrá 24 congresistas en la nueva legislatura.Perú ha tenido cuatro presidentes en el último quinquenio: Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, el último mandatario electo en contienda regular, renunció en 2018 después de varios intentos del Congreso por destituirlo; su vicepresidente y sucesor, Martín Vizcarra, quien gozaba de aprobación incluso en los primeros meses de la pandemia, tuvo el mismo destino. La turbulencia política del último quinquenio ha estado marcada por escándalos de corrupción y un creciente descontento popular con la clase gobernante. Tres expresidentes de Perú han estado investigados por casos de corrupción y uno más, Alan García, se suicidó cuando las autoridades estaban a punto de arrestarlo. A pesar de las rápidas medidas para contener el avance del coronavirus, el país ha sido uno de los más afectados por la pandemia a nivel mundial. Recientemente las autoridades sanitarias reconocieron que la cantidad de fallecimientos por COVID-19 era de más de 180.764, casi el triple de lo reflejado en el registro oficial.Los resultados empezarán a darse a conocer en el sitio del Jurado Nacional de Elecciones conforme vayan cerrando las mesas de votación la tarde del domingo. More

A leftist former schoolteacher with no governing experience and the right-wing daughter of a jailed ex-president face off for president on Sunday.LIMA, Peru — On paper, the candidates on the presidential ballot in Peru on Sunday are a leftist former schoolteacher with no governing experience and the right-wing daughter of a jailed ex-president who ran the country with an iron fist.Yet voters in Peru face an even more elemental choice: whether to stick with the neoliberal economic model that has dominated the country for the past three decades, delivering some earlier successes but ultimately failing, critics say, to provide meaningful support to millions of Peruvians during the pandemic.“The model has failed a lot of people,” said Cesia Caballero, 24, a video producer. The virus, she said, “has been the last drop that tipped the glass.”Peru has endured the worst economic contraction in the region during the pandemic, pushing nearly 10 percent of its population back into poverty. On Monday, the country announced that its virus death toll was nearly triple what had been previously reported, suddenly raising its per capita mortality rate to the highest in the world. Millions have been left jobless, and many others evicted.The leftist candidate, Pedro Castillo, 51, a union activist, has promised to overhaul the political and economic system to address poverty and inequality, replacing the current constitution with one that will grant the state a larger role in the economy.His opponent, Keiko Fujimori, 46, has vowed to uphold the free-market model built by her father, Alberto Fujimori, who was initially credited with beating back violent leftist insurgencies in the 1990s, but who is now scorned by many as a corrupt autocrat.Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo at the end of a debate last week in Arequipa.Sebastian Castaneda/ReutersPolls show the candidates in a near tie. But many voters are frustrated by their options.Mr. Castillo, who has never held office before, partnered with a radical former governor convicted of corruption to launch his bid. Ms. Fujimori has been jailed three times in a money laundering investigation and faces 30 years in prison, accused of running a criminal organization that trafficked in illegal campaign donations during a previous presidential bid. She denies the charges.“We’re between a precipice and the abyss,” said Augusto Chávez, 60, an artisanal jeweler in Lima who said he might cast a defaced ballot as a form of protest. Voting is mandatory in Peru. “I think extremes are bad for a country. And they represent two extremes.”Mr. Castillo and Ms. Fujimori each won less than 20 percent of votes in a crowded first-round race in April that forced Sunday’s runoff election.The election follows a rocky five-year period in which the country cycled through four presidents and two Congresses. And it comes as the pandemic has pushed voter discontent to new levels, fueling anger over unequal access to public services and growing frustration with politicians ensnared in seemingly endless corruption scandals and political score settling.The hospital system has been so strained by the pandemic that many have died from lack of oxygen, while others have paid off doctors for spots in intensive care units — only to be turned away in agony.Empty oxygen cylinders on the outskirts of Lima. The hospital system has been so strained by the pandemic that many patients have died from lack of oxygen.Marco Garro for The New York TimesWhoever wins on Sunday, said Peruvian sociologist Lucía Dammert, “the future of Peru is a very turbulent future.”“The deep inequities and profound frustrations of the people have stirred, and there’s no organization or actor, whether private companies, the state, unions, to give voice to that.”When Ms. Fujimori’s father swept to power in 1990 as a populist outsider, he quickly reneged on a campaign promise not to impose free-market “shock” policies pushed by his rival and Western economists.The measures he used — deregulation, government spending cuts, privatization of industry — helped end years of hyperinflation and recession. The constitution he ushered through in 1993 limited the state’s ability to take part in business activities and break up monopolies, strengthened the autonomy of the central bank and protected foreign investments.Subsequent centrist and right-wing governments signed more than a dozen free trade agreements, and Peru’s pro-business policies were declared a success, credited with Peru’s record poverty reduction during the commodities boom of this century.But little was done to address Peru’s reliance on commodity exports and longstanding social inequalities, or to ensure health care, education and public services for its people.The pandemic exposed the weakness of Peru’s bureaucracy and the underfunding of its public health system. The country had just a small fraction of the intensive care unit beds its peers had, and the government was slow and inconsistent in providing even small cash assistance to the needy. Informal workers were left with no safety net, leading many to turn to high-interest loans from private banks.People lining up outside a bank in Lima. Peru has endured the worst economic contraction in the region during the pandemic, pushing nearly 10 percent of its population back into poverty.Angela Ponce for The New York Times“The pandemic showed that the underlying problem was the order of priorities,” said David Rivera, a Peruvian economist and political scientist. “Supposedly we’d been saving money for so long to use in a crisis, and what we saw during the pandemic was that the priority continued to be macroeconomic stability, and not keeping people from dying and going hungry.”Ms. Fujimori has blamed the country’s problems not on its economic model, but on the way past presidents and other leaders have used it. Even so, she says, some adjustments are needed, like raising the minimum wage and pension payments for the poor.She framed her campaign against Mr. Castillo as a battle between democracy and communism, sometimes using Venezuela’s socialist-inspired government, now mired in crisis, as a foil. Mr. Castillo, who is from Peru’s northern highlands, gained national recognition by leading a teachers union strike in 2017. He campaigns wearing the wide-brimmed hat of Andean farmers, and has appeared on horseback and dancing with supporters.Keiko Fujimori at a campaign event. She faces 30 years in prison on corruption charges.John Reyes/EPA, via Shutterstock“For us in the countryside, we want someone who knows what it’s like to work the fields,” said Demóstenes Reátegui.When the pandemic began, Mr. Reátegui, 29, was one of thousands of Peruvians who trekked and hitchhiked his way from Lima to his rural family home after a government lockdown pushed migrant workers like him out of their jobs.It took him 28 days.Mr. Castillo has revealed little about how to make good on vague promises to ensure the country’s copper, gold and natural gas resources benefit Peruvians more broadly. He has promised not to seize companies’ assets, but to renegotiate contracts instead.He has said he wants to restrict imports of agricultural products to support local farmers, a policy that economists have warned would lead to higher food prices.Pedro Castillo addressing supporters at a final campaign event on Thursday in Lima, Peru. Liz Tasa/ReutersIf he wins, it will be the clearest repudiation of the country’s political elite since Mr. Fujimori took office in 1990.“Why do we have so much inequality? Does it not outrage them?” Mr. Castillo said at a rally in southern Peru recently, referring to the country’s elites.“They can’t lie to us anymore. The people have woken up,” he said. “We can take this country back!” More

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement on Saturday may cement Ms. Wiley as the left-wing standard-bearer in the New York City mayor’s race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most prominent left-wing leaders in the country, endorsed Maya D. Wiley in the race for New York City mayor on Saturday, urging voters to “come together as a movement.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement represents the most significant development yet in left-wing efforts to shape the June 22 Democratic primary that is almost certain to determine the city’s next mayor.“If we don’t come together as a movement, we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires, and we need a city for and by working people,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said outside City Hall in Manhattan, as Ms. Wiley waited in the background. “So we will vote for Maya No. 1.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Ms. Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, comes at a moment of extraordinary volatility in the mayor’s race — one week before early voting begins.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has increasingly been seen as the Democratic front-runner in the race, in close competition with Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate. Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, has also demonstrated growing traction. All three candidates are considered relative moderates on issues including policing and their postures toward the business community.Ms. Wiley has generally been considered part of the top tier of candidates, too, but she has not been seen as a front-runner throughout the race. In recent weeks, however, she has landed a growing number of endorsements, especially from the left. On Saturday afternoon, Representative Jamaal Bowman, another left-wing New York Democrat who is close to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, wrote on Twitter that he, too, was supporting Ms. Wiley. But for months, it was Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s decision that had been one of the most consequential open questions in the mayor’s race.Surrogates for various candidates pitched her team. Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, a Wiley backer, encouraged Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to meet with the candidate directly. And Ms. Wiley said that she and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had had conversations over Zoom and by phone.But, like the rest of New York City, Ms. Wiley received almost no advance notice that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez intended to endorse her on Saturday, she said. The congresswoman made the announcement following a scheduled rally with City Council candidates.“I found out right before I came down here,” Ms. Wiley said in a brief interview after the event. “I was extremely excited when she called me and said: ‘You’re my No. 1. Let’s talk about how we do this.’”For months, it was unclear whether Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 31, would use her platform to influence the mayor’s race. Sparse public polling and interviews with party strategists suggested that a significant number of voters remained undecided, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement most likely cements Ms. Wiley as the liberal standard-bearer in the contest and could signal a new measure of viability around her campaign.The endorsement may also provide a boost to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which, despite significant recent victories at the congressional and state legislative levels in New York, seemed to be at a disadvantage in the mayor’s race as leaders and activists struggled to coalesce around a single candidate.On several issues, but especially on matters of policing, Ms. Wiley has positioned herself to the left of Mr. Adams, Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia, and her candidacy will offer an important test of how potent that pitch is among Democratic voters who want to rein in police misconduct but are also concerned about rising violent crime.“I know I’m in a different lane, because I’m in the progressive lane,” Ms. Wiley said. “I think that progressive lane is its own lane now in this race.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not mention Mr. Yang or Mr. Adams by name, but she blasted the “dark money” shaping the race — both have attracted controversy over donors to their super PACs — and she implicitly warned against candidates who support what she cast as overpolicing. (Ms. Wiley also has independent expenditure support.)“We’ve already tried Giuliani’s New York,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that the city had also tried “Bloomberg’s New York.”“And what that got us was a New York that was harder to afford and a New York that criminalized young people and put them into lifelong carceral cycles,” she said. “It ends now.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“These are the stakes,” she continued. “Maya Wiley is the one. She will be a progressive in Gracie Mansion.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has publicly rebuked Mr. Yang twice during the race: once after he laid out his plan to support a “Green New Deal for public housing,” and again following remarks he made about Israel. She indicated that she might announce “further ranks” before New York City’s ranked-choice voting election, but it would stun many political observers if Mr. Yang or Mr. Adams made her list.Ms. Wiley’s campaign has promoted a number of progressive policy proposals, including cutting $1 billion from the police budget and trimming at least 2,250 officers; helping poor families pay for child care by offering $5,000 grants to caregivers; and giving subsidies to low-income New Yorkers to help pay for rent. She is seeking to build a coalition that includes voters of color from across the ideological spectrum and white progressives.Minutes after the endorsement was announced, Mr. Adams — who, more than any candidate, is running on the issue of public safety, casting it as the “prerequisite” to prosperity — released a statement blasting Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Wiley over the issue of police funding.“Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Maya Wiley want to slash the Police Department budget and shrink the police force at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets, hate crimes are terrorizing Asian and Jewish communities, and innocent New Yorkers are being stabbed and shot on their way to work,” said Mr. Adams, a former police officer. “They are putting slogans and politics in front of public safety and would endanger the lives of New Yorkers.”In a statement, Ms. Wiley accused Mr. Adams of taking a “reactionary approach to public safety” and said that he was using right-wing talking points.Many left-wing activists and leaders have been divided over how to approach the mayor’s race. Some backed Ms. Wiley; others supported Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, or Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive. But in recent weeks, Mr. Stringer and Ms. Morales have struggled with controversies, and some of their backers have rescinded their endorsements.Mr. Stringer has faced two accusations of making unwanted sexual advances decades ago. He denied wrongdoing in one instance. On Friday, in response to a New York Times report about a second accusation of harassment and unwanted advances, he said that he did not recall the woman making the allegations but that he apologized if he had met her and made her uncomfortable.He has lost a number of high-profile left-wing endorsers, including Mr. Bowman.Ms. Morales’s struggles center on a campaign implosion, as staff members accused the campaign of not living up to its left-wing ideals, senior members departed and battles over a late-stage union drive unfolded.The Working Families Party had initially supported Mr. Stringer as its first choice and then backed Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales after the first allegation against Mr. Stringer. On Friday, the party endorsed Ms. Wiley alone as its first choice.“We can’t afford to not engage because of what could have been,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said on Saturday. “We engage in the world that we have. And we do everything we can to make that world better. We have a choice to make New York City better.”Mihir Zaveri and Anne Barnard contributed reporting. More

Last fall and winter, the president of the United States attempted, with ineffectual strategy but violent consequences, to pressure Republicans to overturn an election that he quite clearly lost. Now he reportedly believes that swing-state “audits” will somehow reinstall him in the White House by the end of summer. Many of the courtiers who encouraged his earlier delusions are still busily at work; one of them, Michael Flynn, recently suggested (before backpedaling) that the United States needed a Myanmar-style military coup. More

Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation.Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time.In the days before Christmas, as Mr. Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.Mr. Meadows also joined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote.Yet the newly unearthed messages show how Mr. Meadows’s private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish, and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Mr. Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Mr. Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss.“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”A spokesman for Mr. Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Mr. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.The requests by Mr. Meadows reflect Mr. Trump’s belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Mr. Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Mr. Trump also urged Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Trump continued to push Mr. Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.None of the emails show Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, agreeing to open investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.Ting Shen for The New York TimesThroughout those weeks, Mr. Rosen privately told Mr. Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William P. Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Meadows’s outreach to Mr. Rosen was audacious in part because it violated longstanding guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.“The Justice Department’s enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president. That’s the key idea that gave rise to these policies,” said W. Neil Eggleston, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. “If the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Nevertheless, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.On Jan. 1, Mr. Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Mr. Trump’s favor.Mr. Meadows had previously forwarded Mr. Rosen an email about possible fraud in Georgia that had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign. Two days after that email was sent to Mr. Rosen, Ms. Mitchell participated in the Jan. 2 phone call, during which she and Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to reconsider his findings that there had not been widespread voter fraud and that Mr. Biden had won. During the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him the votes necessary to declare victory in Georgia.Mr. Meadows also sent Mr. Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesman for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.And in his request that the Justice Department investigate the Italy conspiracy theory, Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link to a video of Brad Johnson, a former C.I.A. employee who had been pushing the theory in videos and statements that he posted online. After receiving the video, Mr. Rosen said in an email to another Justice Department official that he had been asked to set up a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the F.B.I., had refused, and had then been asked to reconsider.The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.Mr. Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.He is also negotiating with the Justice Department about what he can disclose to Congress and to the inspector general given his obligation to protect the department’s interests and not interfere with current investigations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Rosen said last month during a hearing before the oversight committee that he could not answer several questions because the department did not permit him to discuss issues covered by executive privilege.Mr. Durbin opened his inquiry in response to a Times article documenting how Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who had found favor with Mr. Trump, had pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded election fraud claims. The effort almost ended in Mr. Rosen’s ouster.Last month, Mr. Durbin asked the National Archives for any communications involving White House officials, and between the White House and any person at the Justice Department, concerning efforts to subvert the election, according to a letter obtained by The Times. He also asked for records related to meetings between White House and department employees.The National Archives stores correspondence and documents generated by past administrations. More

For the vice president, another run at the Oval Office is a near certainty. How her current responsibilities help or hurt that bid is an open question.Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.Is Kamala Harris drawing the shortest straws in the White House?This week, President Biden announced that Ms. Harris would lead the administration’s effort to protect voting rights, a task he immediately said would “take a hell of a lot of work.”And on Sunday, Ms. Harris leaves for her first trip abroad, visiting Mexico and Guatemala as part of her mandate to address the root causes of migration from Central America that are contributing to a surge of people trying to cross the United States’ Southern border.The central political question facing Ms. Harris has never been whether she will run for president again. It’s when and how.Yet for a history-making politician with big ambitions, Ms. Harris has adopted an early agenda that has left some Democrats fretting about the future of a politician who is already positioned as a presidential-nominee-in-waiting.Both immigration and voting rights are politically fraught problems with no easy solutions. Democrats’ expansive election legislation has faltered in the Senate, with moderate party lawmakers like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia expressing concerns about the bill.And despite the best efforts of her team, Ms. Harris has become the administration’s face — sometimes quite literally — for the influx of migrants, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, at the Southern border.Allies point out that Ms. Harris’s portfolio extends beyond those two high-profile issues. She’s also responsible for expanding broadband internet access, combating vaccine hesitancy, advocating the infrastructure plan, helping women re-enter the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate and aiding small businesses, among other issues.The allies cite the challenges Mr. Biden took on during his first term as vice president — including leading the White House effort to draw down troops in Iraq and overseeing the implementation of the stimulus bill — and argue that voters reward politicians for tackling hard issues, even if they remain unresolved.And many argue that there are no easy problems in a country still grappling with a devastating pandemic, continued economic uncertainty and a divisive racial reckoning.“These are long-term systemic issues,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic Party chairwoman who speaks with Ms. Harris and her team. “She’s defined by what I call real big problems, and problems that require a different kind of leadership to solve.”Of course, “real big problems” also carry a far greater risk of political missteps and policy failures, particularly for a politician who is more polarizing than the president she serves, polls show.Even before she became the first Black female vice president, Ms. Harris emerged as an early target of Republicans, who found it easier to rile up their base with racist and sexist attacks against her than with condemnations of Mr. Biden. In the conservative media, she’s relentlessly defined as an untrustworthy radical, with an unpronounceable name and an anti-American agenda.The false caricature may be having an impact on her image: Tracking polls find Ms. Harris’s approval rating hovering a few percentage points lower than Mr. Biden’s, with more voters expressing negative views of her performance.Aides to Ms. Harris have quietly placed some of the blame for the politically damaging situation on Mr. Biden, according to some Democrats outside the White House. The president announced her new diplomatic assignment by telling reporters before a March meeting on immigration at the White House that the vice president would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”Ms. Harris’s staff spent weeks explaining that her job was not to reform the country’s immigration system but a narrowly focused foreign policy mission. That distinction is difficult to draw, given the interconnected nature of global migration.And it seems to have been lost on Republicans, who see the situation at the border as one of their most potent lines of attack against a relatively popular administration. They’ve spent weeks falsely calling her Mr. Biden’s “border czar,” releasing #BidenBorderCrisis videos and calling on the vice president to visit the southern border, which she will fly over this weekend on her way to meetings in Central America.But there are some indications that behind the scenes, Ms. Harris pushed for leadership roles on these charged policy issues.After the election, some allies of Ms. Harris’s urged her to take on immigration, according to people who have spoken with her team, even though the issue has long been so intractable that the last president to pass significant legislation addressing it was Ronald Reagan. And the vice president personally asked Mr. Biden if she could spearhead the administration’s fight against Republicans’ new voting restrictions, as an extension of her past work as a senator and the attorney general of California on a problem she believes threatens the underpinnings of American democracy.Yet in the Senate, Ms. Harris was not known for her close relationships with moderates like Mr. Manchin. It’s unclear if she will be able to broker the kind of compromises within her party that will be necessary to pass a voting rights bill. And given the lack of Republican support, little is likely to happen on the bill unless Democrats agree to abolish the filibuster, which several moderates oppose.Beyond legislation, her influence is limited. In the states, Republicans have made the passing of laws that restrict voting an early litmus test for their party. While the Justice Department can bring litigation against voter-suppression measures, Ms. Harris can’t been seen as pressuring the agency to do so. Filling judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges could help stop some of the state laws, but that is a role that falls to Congress and Mr. Biden.Still, there may be political upside for Ms. Harris in taking on voting rights. Voting rights advocates have expressed frustration at what they see as the administration’s tepid approach to countering voter suppression and the prospect that it could hamper Democrats’ ability to win elections in 2022 and beyond.Ms. Harris can travel the country rallying her party’s base, particularly voters of color who are the backbone of Democratic politics. Allies say her role will extend far beyond the legislative wrangling in the Senate to include meetings with activists, state officials and corporations — building relationships with the kinds of Democrats who can help bolster a presidential bid.“From her perspective, what I would say she’s thinking about is, ‘Look, if we don’t fix this, our democracy is gone,’” said Leah Daughtry, a veteran of Democratic campaigns. “She will be using the power of the bully pulpit of the White House to get people engaged and involved.”But some suggest that Ms. Harris’s portfolio may have more to do with office politics than those of the presidential variety. While Mr. Biden feels comfortable with Ms. Harris, Democrats familiar with the workings of the White House say, some on his team remain skeptical of her loyalty after the divisive primary race. Her agenda, they argue, may simply be the White House version of cleaning up after the office party: What better way to prove her fidelity than by taking on some of the most thankless tasks?“There’s always the long view when you are vice president and you think about the future,” Ms. Brazile said. “But it’s too early. Joe Biden has said he’s running in 2024, and she is a real team player.”Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at [email protected] or message me on Twitter at @llerer.By the numbers: 29… That’s the number of days former President Donald J. Trump’s blog existed before being shuttered this week.… SeriouslyThe campaign swag that is worth a thousand words.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

The former president speaks on Saturday to the North Carolina Republican convention, as he resumes political speeches and rallies.WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, commutes to New York City from his New Jersey golf club to work out of his office in Trump Tower at least once a week, slipping in and out of Manhattan without attracting much attention.The place isn’t as he left it. Many of his longtime employees are gone. So are most of the family members who once worked there with him and some of the fixtures of the place, like his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who have since turned on him. Mr. Trump works there, mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.His political operation has also dwindled to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016. Most of them go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.But as he heads to the North Carolina Republican convention on Saturday night, in what is billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches, Mr. Trump is both a diminished figure and an oversized presence in American life, with a remarkable — and many say dangerous — hold on his party.Even without his favored megaphones and the trappings of office, Mr. Trump looms over the political landscape, animated by the lie that he won the 2020 election and his own fury over his defeat. And unlike others with a grievance, he has been able to impose his anger and preferred version of reality on a substantial slice of the American electorate — with the potential to influence the nation’s politics and weaken faith in its elections for years to come.Still blocked from Twitter and Facebook, he has struggled to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office and promote the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Some party leaders, like the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, are pretending he doesn’t exist anymore, while being deferential when Mr. Trump cannot be ignored.Others, like Senator Rick Scott of Florida, have tried to curry favor by presenting Mr. Trump with made-up awards to flatter his ego and keep him engaged in helping Senate Republicans recapture a majority in 2022.Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said Mr. Trump had defied the model of ex-presidents who lose an election and tend to fade away, and the experience of Richard M. Nixon, who was treated like a pariah in the way Mr. Trump has managed to avoid.As for being simultaneously big and small, Mr. Beschloss said: “He’s big if the metric is that politicians are afraid of him, which is one metric of power in Washington. Many Republican leaders are terrified of him and abasing themselves in front of him.”Jason Miller, an adviser to the former president, agreed on Mr. Trump’s control over the party.“There are two types of Republicans inside the Beltway,” Mr. Miller said. “Those who realize President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and those who are in denial.”Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far. Lawmakers who have challenged his dominance of the party, like Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who implored her colleagues to reject him after the Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol, have been booted from Republican leadership.From his strange dual perch of irrelevance and dominance, Mr. Trump has been narrowly focused on three things — his repeated, false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and his support for efforts to try to overturn the results; the state and local investigations into the practices of the Trump Organization; and the state of his business.Mr. Trump, who White House officials said watched with pleasure as his supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College vote, has told several people he believes he could be “reinstated” to the White House this August, according to three people familiar with his remarks. He has been echoing a theory promulgated by supporters like Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, and Sidney Powell, the lawyer being sued for defamation by election machine companies for spreading conspiracy theories about the safety of their ballots.President Biden’s victory, with more than 80 million votes, was certified by Congress once the Jan. 6 riot was contained. There is no legal mechanism for reinstating a president, and the efforts by Republicans in the Arizona Senate to recount the votes in the state’s largest county have been derided as fake and inept by local Republican officials, who say the result is a partisan circus that is eroding confidence in elections.Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has zeroed in on the Arizona effort and a lawsuit in Georgia to insist that not only will he be restored to office, but that Republicans will also retake the majority in the Senate through those same efforts, according to the people familiar with what he has been saying.Mr. Trump’s supporters demonstrated outside the Dallas County elections office in Dallas in November.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesHe has pressed conservative commentators and writers to echo his claims that the election was rigged. His focus has intensified in recent weeks, coinciding with the empaneling of a special grand jury by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, into his businesses.Frustrated by the lack of coverage, he has expressed his anger in news releases that still refer to him as the “45th President of the United States.”“Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife,” he said in a statement on Friday after Facebook announced it would keep its ban against him in place for at least two years. “It will be all business!”Last week, he shut down his blog after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant, according to a person familiar with his thinking.Some of his aides are not eager to engage with him on his conspiracy theories and would like to see him press a forward-looking agenda that could help Republicans in 2022. People in his circle joke that the most senior adviser to the former leader of the free world is Christina Bobb, a correspondent with the far-right, eternally pro-Trump One America News Network, whom he consults regularly for information about the Arizona election audit.It remains to be seen what he says about the 2020 election during his appearance in North Carolina.Mr. Trump was eager to take back the microphone on Saturday night in Greenville, where aides said he planned to attack Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as well as the Biden administration.“Joe Biden wants American taxpayers to pay reparations,” Mr. Trump was expected to say, according to an aide involved in drafting the speech. “I want the Chinese to pay American taxpayers reparations.”Mr. Trump’s first post-presidential rally is scheduled for later in June, followed by more appearances both for himself, paid for by his super PAC, and on behalf of House Republicans who support his agenda, advisers said.He has been so eager for an audience that he is even billed as a speaker who will appear live, via Jumbotron, at a rally in New Richmond, Wis., where the other headliners are Diamond and Silk, the MAGA movement social media stars, and Dinesh D’Souza, who received a presidential pardon from Mr. Trump for a felony conviction of making illegal campaign contributions.Despite the modest nature of some of the events he is interested in attaching his name to, even some his biggest detractors are loath to write him off.“I wish I was more confident it was ridiculous,” said Bill Kristol, a prominent “Never Trump” conservative. “It’s missing the forest through the trees to fail to see how strong he is.”Contractors packing boxes containing ballot tallies during the much-criticized Arizona Senate’s review of the vote in state’s largest county.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesBoth of his 2020 campaign managers, Bill Stepien and Brad Parscale, are on Mr. Trump’s payroll and still involved in his world. But Mr. Trump is episodically enraged with most members of his team.This time around, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who oversaw his 2020 campaign operation, has mostly dropped out, telling the small circle of advisers around the ex-president that he wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship with Mr. Trump, where he is just a son-in-law. Donald Trump Jr. has stepped in as the most politically involved family member in his father’s life.Susie Wiles, the veteran Florida political consultant whom the former president and everyone in his orbit credit with winning the critical state in 2016 and again in 2020, oversees Mr. Trump’s fund-raising operation from Florida, shepherding the weekly conference call of the skeletal team that still runs the post-presidential operation.In the evenings, Mr. Trump has attended fund-raisers at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course, both for his own political action committee and for Republican candidates.But he has been eager to get back to holding rallies, announcing states where he planned to travel to before his team had finalized any venues or dates.“If you’re a one-term president, you usually go quietly into the night,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “He sees himself as leading the revolution, and he’s doing it from the back of a golf cart.” More