Elections

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Aleksei NavalnyNavalny’s Life in OppositionKremlin AnxietyCourt DecisionWhat Will Yulia Navalnaya Do?Putin’s ‘Palace’AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythe media equationHow Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile RussiaA new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin’s power.Roman Dobrokhotov, the founder of The Insider, one of a wave of new investigative news outlets in Russia, said that Russia “is possibly the most transparent country in the world.”Credit…Pierre Crom/Getty ImagesFeb. 21, 2021Updated 5:25 p.m. ETThe Russian language has introduced a few words that in recent years have been widely used and misused in English: disinformation, kompromat, Novichok.But the one that blows my mind is “probiv.” It’s drawn from the word that means “to pierce” — or to enter something into a search bar. Today, it refers to the practice by which anyone can buy, for a couple of dollars on the social media app Telegram or hundreds on a dark web marketplace, the call records, cellphone geolocation or air travel records of anyone in Russia you want to track. Probiv is purchased by jealous spouses or curious business partners, and criminals of various sorts. But it has also been used recently, and explosively, by journalists and political activists, overlapping categories in Russia, where the chief opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, often makes use of the tools of investigative journalism.Probiv is only one of the factors that have made Russia, of all places, the most exciting place in the world for investigative journalism. There is a new wave of outlets, many using more conventional sourcing to pierce the veil of President Vladimir V. Putin’s power. And there is a growing online audience for their work in a country where the state controls, directly or indirectly, all of the major television networks.The boom in independent journalism and criticism of the government has reached a level “unseen in our country since the end of the 1990s,” Denis Volkov, the deputy director of the Levada Center, a Russian public opinion research group, wrote recently.Probiv has been a crucial part of that revival. The practice was at the heart of a stunning revelation late last year by the international investigative collective Bellingcat, working with the Russian site The Insider and other partners, identifying the agents from a secret Russian spy unit who poisoned Mr. Navalny. A reporter spent “a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency” for a trove of data. Then, in a riveting piece of theater, Mr. Navalny, working with Bellingcat, called one of those agents, pretending to be a senior government official, and tricked him into a confession. When Mr. Navalny returned to Russia after his treatment in Germany, he was promptly jailed for a parole violation in a case he has called fabricated, and now faces transport to a penal colony.The irony is delicious, of Mr. Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale. “Whatever Putin does keeps backfiring,” said Maria Pevchikh, who runs the investigative unit at Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.Aleksei Navalny, the chief opposition leader to President Vladimir Putin, at a court hearing in Moscow this month. He faces transport to a penal colony.Credit…Babushkinsky District CourtProbiv is almost exclusively a Russian phenomenon. When Roman Dobrokhotov, who founded The Insider in 2013, was in Kyiv a couple of years ago, he said he asked a local journalist where he could find the phone records for someone he was researching and was surprised to learn that wasn’t a common practice. He said he realized that “Russia is possibly the most transparent country in the world,” adding, “If you have 10 bucks, you can find any information on anyone.”The New York Times and some other major Western outlets don’t use probiv, on the principle that you shouldn’t pay for stolen information. Many Russian journalists debate the ethics and legality of it as well. Bellingcat’s probiv maestro, Christo Grozev, has said he spent his own money — the independent news site Meduza estimated it at more than $13,000 — unmasking murderous Russian spies. (He told The Washington Post that his vendor assumed he was a criminal, and was horrified to learn he was a journalist.) Mr. Dobrokhotov said he wouldn’t buy probiv himself, but had analyzed the data Mr. Grozev purchased. (CNN and Der Spiegel also collaborated on the investigation of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning.) Other reporters said it’s routine to use for research, but not to cite in a finished article. But for some, those norms are shifting, too.“The audience doesn’t care whether you bought data or got it from a source,” said Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a nonprofit Russian investigative site with a staff of 15. He said he had concluded that “since we live in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let’s forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.”A bot on Telegram that offers to identify the owner of any car.Credit…The New York TimesThat portal into Vladimir Putin’s world has opened even as some American journalists covering Russian interference in the 2016 election produced overheated essays and viral Twitter threads. They cast Mr. Putin, in the American imagination, as an all-powerful puppet master and everyone whose name ends in the letter “v” as his agent. But it was actual Russians, running their websites on the margins of legality or from abroad, who opened windows into Mr. Putin’s real Russia. And what they’ve uncovered is unbelievable personal corruption, shadowy figures behind international political interference and murderous but sometimes inept security services.Here are a few examples of these revelations:The investigative nonprofit outlet Proekt identified Mr. Putin’s “secret family,” and found that the woman it linked to the president had acquired some $100 million in wealth from sources tied to the Russian state.IStories used a trove of hacked emails to document how Mr. Putin’s former son-in-law built a huge fortune out of state connections.Bellingcat, which was founded in London, and the Russia-based Insider identified, by name and photograph, the Russian agents who poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.The media group RBC delved into the political machinery behind the troll farm interfering in U.S. elections.Meduza exposed deep corruption in all corners of the Moscow city government, down to the funeral business.Mr. Navalny’s foundation flew drones over Mr. Putin’s palace, a vast estate on the Black Sea that Mr. Navalny labeled “the World’s Biggest Bribe” in a scathing, mocking nearly two-hour video he released on his return to Russia last month. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.There’s a tendency in parts of the American media right now to reflexively decry the rise of alternative voices and open platforms on social media, seeing them solely as vectors for misinformation or tools of Donald J. Trump. Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world’s most corrupt governments. That’s why, for instance, Mr. Navalny was a vocal critic of Twitter’s decision to ban Mr. Trump, calling it an “unacceptable act of censorship.”The new Russian investigative media is also resolutely of the internet. And much of it began with Mr. Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who created a style of YouTube investigation that draws more from the lightweight, meme-y formats of that platform than from heavily produced documentaries or newsmagazine investigations.Mr. Navalny doesn’t cast himself as a journalist. “We are using investigative reporting as a tool to achieve our political ends,” his aide, Ms. Pevchikh, said. (One convention they don’t follow: getting comment from the target of an investigation.) Indeed, his relationship with the independent journalists can be complicated. Most are careful to maintain their identity as independent actors, not activists. They criticize him, but also message him their stories, hoping he’ll promote them to his own vast audience, and he publicly criticizes them, in turn, for being too soft on the Kremlin.The new news outlets learned from Mr. Navalny as well. Many of them have imitated his style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines could be crossed. What’s more, they all undoubtedly benefit from the homogeneity of the television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if the only news channels available were Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.The traffic they see online also tells them they’re connecting.For Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, reporting on Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession.Credit…James Hill for The New York Times“I see the numbers and I think that all this is not in vain,” said Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, for whom Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession. (A confusingly high percentage of the founders of these new outlets are named Roman.) In a particularly surreal moment this month, the young woman who Proekt suggested was Mr. Putin’s daughter said — in a conversation on the social audio app Clubhouse with the reporter who wrote the article — that she was “grateful” for all the attention his reporting had brought … to her Instagram account.Mr. Badanin, who modeled Proekt on the American nonprofit news organization ProPublica, said he had begun to see another sign of intense interest: financial support from his audience. About a third of the budget that supports a staff of 12, he said, now comes from donations averaging $8, mirroring the global trend toward news organizations relying on their readers. In Russia, some of this is still nascent. For instance, a colleague in Russia, Anton Troianovski, tells me that there’s a cafe near the Kurskaya Metro station where you can add to your bill a donation to MediaZona, which was founded by two members of the protest group Pussy Riot to hold the Russian justice system to account. But the protests against Mr. Navalny’s imprisonment also seem to be driving support for independent media, a phenomenon that The Bell, another of the new independent websites, christened “the Navalny Effect.”That might help these outlets navigate a narrowing legal window in Mr. Putin’s decades-long game of cat-and-mouse with independent journalism. (The government is also struggling to balance its citizens’ love of the open internet with the threat it can pose to government power.)Many of the new outlets, along with BBC Russia, have drawn talent from a previous wave of independent voices that the government effectively put out of the investigations business. Some of the new outlets, like the Latvia-based Meduza, have their operations abroad. But many are incorporated overseas, even as their journalists live and work in Moscow. Some subsist on grants whose sources they keep confidential — a vulnerability the Russian government appears likely to exploit under a new law broadening restrictions on what it considers “foreign agents.”MediaZona’s editor, Sergei Smirnov, center, at a hearing at the Moscow City Court this month. He was arrested for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest.Credit…Moscow City Court Press OfficeIndeed, the sense of possibility is rivaled only by the sense of menace. Virtually every journalist I spoke to in Russia said they expected this period to end at any moment. In a particularly ominous sign, police arrested the editor of MediaZona, Sergei Smirnov, on Jan. 30 for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail for violating the rules on holding public events, and journalists debated whether it was an incompetent mistake or a deliberate warning to his peers.“To be an independent journalist in Russia is like being a lobster in a pot,” said Meduza’s editor in chief, Ivan Kolpakov. “They are boiling you, but you don’t know exactly when you will die.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Israeli Election, a Chance for Arabs to Gain Influence, or Lose ItJewish politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are courting Arab Israeli voters, and some Arab politicians are prepared to work with them.Mansour Abbas, an Islamist leader hoping to join the next Israeli government, campaigns in Daburiyya, an Arab village in northern Israel.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York TimesPatrick Kingsley and Feb. 21, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETKAFR KANNA, Israel — Mansour Abbas, a conservative Muslim, is an unlikely political partner for the leaders of the Jewish state.He is a proponent of political Islam. He heads an Arab party descended from the same religious stream that spawned the militant Hamas movement. And for most of his political life, he never considered supporting the right-leaning parties that have led Israel for most of the past four decades.Yet if Mr. Abbas has his way, he could help decide the next Israeli prime minister after next month’s general election, even if it means returning a right-wing alliance to power. Tired of the peripheral role traditionally played by Israel’s Arab parties, he hopes his small Islamist group, Raam, will hold the balance of power after the election and prove an unavoidable partner for any Jewish leader seeking to form a coalition.“We can work with anyone,” Mr. Abbas said in an interview on the campaign trail in Kafr Kanna, a small Arab town in northern Israel on the site where the Christian Bible says Jesus turned water into wine. In the past, “Arab politicians have been onlookers in the political process in Israel,” he said. Now, he added, “Arabs are looking for a real role in Israeli politics.”Mr. Abbas’s shift is part of a wider transformation occurring within the Arab political world in Israel.Accelerated by the election campaign, two trends are converging: On the one hand, Arab politicians and voters increasingly believe that to improve the lives of Arabs in Israel, they need to seek power within the system instead of exerting pressure from the outside. Separately, mainstream Israeli parties are realizing they need to attract Arab voters to win a very close election — and some are willing to work with Arab parties as potential coalition partners.Both trends are born more of political pragmatism than dogma. And while the moment has the potential to give Arab voters real power, it could backfire: Mr. Abbas’s actions will split the Arab vote, as will the overtures from Jewish-led parties, and both factors might lower the numbers of Arab lawmakers in the next Parliament.Campaign billboards for Balad, a left-wing Arab party, attacking Mr. Netanyahu. The one on the left says, “Out of tune.”Credit…Ammar Awad/ReutersBut after a strong showing in the last election, in which Arab parties won a record 15 seats, becoming the third-largest party in the 120-seat Parliament, and were still locked out of the governing coalition, some are looking for other options.“After more than a decade with Netanyahu in power, some Arab politicians have put forward a new approach: If you can’t beat him, join him,” said Mohammad Magadli, a well-known Arab television host. “This approach is bold, but it is also very dangerous.”Palestinian citizens of Israel form more than a fifth of the Israeli population. Since the founding of the state in 1948, they have always sent a handful of Arab lawmakers to Parliament. But those lawmakers have always struggled to make an impact.Jewish leaders have not seen Arab parties as acceptable coalition partners — some on the right vilifying them as enemies of the state and seeking the suspension of Arab lawmakers from Parliament. For their part, Arab parties have generally been more comfortable in opposition, lending infrequent support only to center-left parties whose influence has waned since the start of the century.In some ways, this dynamic worsened in recent years. In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the threat of relatively high Arab turnout — “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations,” he warned on Election Day — to scare his base into voting. In 2018, his government passed new legislation that downgraded the status of Arabic and formally described Israel as the nation-state of only the Jewish people. And in 2020, even his centrist rival, Benny Gantz, refused to form a government based on the support of Arab parties.But a year later, as Israel heads to its fourth election in two years of political deadlock, this paradigm is rapidly shifting.Mr. Netanyahu is now vigorously courting the Arab electorate. Following his lead, Yair Lapid, a centrist contender for the premiership, said he could form a coalition with Arab lawmakers, despite disparaging them earlier in his career. Two left-wing parties have promised to work with an alliance of Arab lawmakers to advance Arab interests.Polling suggests a majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel want their lawmakers to play a role in government. Mr. Abbas says Arab politicians should win influence by supporting parties that promise to improve Arab society. Another prominent Arab politician, Ali Salam, the mayor of Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, has expressed support for Mr. Netanyahu, arguing that despite his past comments, the prime minister is sincere about improving Arab lives.Arab men in Umm al Fahm praying at a protest against increasing crime and violence in Arab communities.  Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“In the Israeli political system, it used to be a sin to collaborate with Arab parties or even Arab voters,” said Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known columnists. But Mr. Netanyahu has suddenly made Arabs “a legitimate partner to any political maneuver.”“In a way he opened a box that, I hope, cannot be closed from now on,” Mr. Barnea added.Mr. Netanyahu’s transition has been among the most remarkable. He has pledged greater resources for Arab communities and to fight endemic crime in Arab neighborhoods. And he has begun calling himself “Yair’s father” — a reference to his son, Yair, that also riffs affectionately on the Arab practice of referring to someone as the parent of their firstborn child.In a watershed moment in January, he announced a “new era” for Arab Israelis at a rally in Nazareth and made a qualified apology for his past comments about Arab voters. “I apologized then and I apologize today as well,” he said, before adding that critics had “twisted my words.”Critics say Mr. Netanyahu is courting Arab voters because he needs them to win, not because he sincerely cares about them. This month he also agreed to include within his next coalition a far-right party whose leader wants to disqualify many Arabs from running for Parliament. And he has ruled out forming a government that relies on Mr. Abbas’s support.Next month’s election is expected to be as close as each of the previous three.Mr. Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption charges, and if he stays in power he could pursue laws that insulate him from prosecution.“What Netanyahu cares about is Netanyahu,” said Afif Abu Much, a prominent commentator on Arab politics in Israel.Courting Arab voters, Mr. Netanyahu has pledged greater resources for Arab communities and to fight endemic crime in Arab neighborhoods.Credit…Pool photo by Reuben CastroLikewise, Arab politicians and voters have not shed all their discomfort with Zionism and Israeli policies in the occupied territories. But there is a growing realization that problems the Arab community faces — gang violence, poverty and discrimination in access to housing and land — will not be solved without Arab politicians shaping policy at the highest level.“I want different results so I need to change the approach,” Mr. Abbas said. “The crises in Arab society reached a boiling point.”Yet Mr. Abbas’s plan could easily fail and undercut what little influence Arab citizens currently have.To run on his new platform, Mr. Abbas had to withdraw from an alliance of Arab parties, the Joint List, whose remaining members are unconvinced about working with the Israeli right. And this split could dilute the collective power of Arab lawmakers.Support for Mr. Abbas’s party currently hovers near the threshold of 3.25 percent that parties need to secure entry to Parliament. Even if his party scrapes above the line, there is no guarantee that any contender for the premiership will need or seek the party’s support to secure the 61 seats necessary to form a coalition.“Arabs are looking for a real role in Israeli politics,” Mr. Abbas says.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu, despite his previous incitement against Arabs, could also draw Arab voters away from Arab parties, reducing their influence. Still more might stay home, disillusioned by the divisions within the Arab parties and their inability to achieve meaningful change, or to boycott a state whose authority they reject.“I don’t believe in any of them, or trust any of them,” said Siham Ighbariya, a 40-year-old homemaker. She rose to prominence through her quest to achieve justice for her husband and son, who were murdered at home in 2012 by an unknown killer.“I’ve dealt with all of them,” Ms. Ighbariya said of the Arab political class. “And nothing has happened.”For some Palestinians, participation in Israel’s government is a betrayal of the Palestinian cause — a criticism Mr. Abbas understands. “I have this deep personal conflict inside of me,” he acknowledged. “We have been engaged in a conflict for 100 years, a bloody and difficult conflict.”But it was time to move on, he added. “You need to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone, both Arabs and Jews.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeMurder Charges?The Oath KeepersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. Is Said to Be Examining Stone’s Possible Ties to Capitol RiotersA full criminal investigation is far from certain, a person familiar with the inquiry said.Trump loyalists storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021Updated 9:22 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department is examining communications between right-wing extremists who breached the Capitol and Roger J. Stone Jr., a close associate of former President Donald J. Trump, to determine whether Mr. Stone played any role in the extremists’ plans to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s electoral victory, a person familiar with the matter said on Saturday.Should investigators find messages showing that Mr. Stone knew about or took part in those plans, they would have a factual basis to open a full criminal investigation into him, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing inquiry. While that is far from certain, the person said, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington are likely to do so if they find that connection.Mr. Stone, a self-described fixer for Mr. Trump, evaded a 40-month prison term when the former president commuted his sentence in July and pardoned him in late December. Mr. Stone had been convicted on seven felony charges, which included obstructing a House inquiry into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, lying to Congress and witness tampering. But that pardon does not protect Mr. Stone from future prosecutions.Justice Department officials have debated for weeks whether to open a full investigation into Mr. Stone, the person said. While Mr. Stone spoke at an incendiary rally a day before the attack, had right-wing extremists act as his bodyguards and stood outside the Capitol, those actions themselves are not crimes.But the F.B.I. also has video and other information to suggest that in the days leading to and including the day of the assault, Mr. Stone associated with men who eventually stormed the building and broke the law, said the person familiar with the inquiry. That has given investigators a window to examine communications to see whether Mr. Stone knew of any plans to breach the complex.The Washington Post earlier reported that the Justice Department was scrutinizing Mr. Stone’s possible ties to right-wing extremists at the Capitol.The New York Times has identified at least six members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group founded by former military and law enforcement personnel, who guarded Mr. Stone and were later seen inside the Capitol after a pro-Trump mob took the building by force. Prosecutors have charged two of those men with conspiring to attack Congress.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Stone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In a statement posted online this month, Mr. Stone denied any role in the “lawless attack” and said that members of the Oath Keepers “should be prosecuted” if there was proof that they had broken the law. He added that he “saw no evidence whatsoever of illegal activity by any members” of the group.A day after the Capitol assault, Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney in Washington, told reporters that he would not rule out pursuing charges against Mr. Trump or his associates for their possible role in inciting or otherwise encouraging the mob..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{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;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{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-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.“We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Mr. Sherwin said. Asked whether such targets would include Mr. Trump, who exhorted supporters during a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, telling them that they could never “take back our country with weakness,” Mr. Sherwin stood by his statement. “We’re looking at all actors,” he said. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”Another member of Mr. Sherwin’s office appeared to walk back those remarks soon after, suggesting that people in Mr. Trump’s orbit were unlikely to be investigated. But Mr. Sherwin later said he stood by his original statement.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021)ObituaryLimbaugh’s LegacyPresidential Medal of FreedomLimbaugh and TrumpAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Schedules Address Before CPAC Next SundayThe former president will make his first lengthy remarks since leaving office before the annual conference of conservatives Feb. 28.President Donald Trump at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 6:19 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump will speak at the conservative event known as CPAC on Feb. 28, his first public appearance and lengthy address since he left the White House for a final time last month.A senior aide to Mr. Trump confirmed that he would attend the Conservative Public Action Conference, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., this year, and that he planned to talk about the future of the Republican Party as well as President Biden’s immigration policies, which have been aimed at undoing Mr. Trump’s.What Mr. Trump plans to talk about and what he ultimately says once he’s onstage often diverge, as he discards scripts that aides prepare for him.But it will be the first time that he has spoken in a public setting since the deadly Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol building.The former president, who was permanently banned from Twitter and who is facing investigations into his businesses as well as whether he has culpability for the assault on the Capitol, has generally kept a low profile, except for giving a small round of interviews to sympathetic news outlets about the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh last week. Even though the interviews were supposed to be about Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Trump still strayed into repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.But CPAC is traditionally a cattle call for Republican candidates for office as well as aspiring figures in the party. And Mr. Trump has signaled to several allies and advisers in recent days that he is focused on running for president again in 2024.Whether he actually does is an open question. But his presence could freeze the field for the next two years, preventing other candidates from developing operations and, more important, networks of donors to sustain their candidacies.Mr. Trump is currently locked in a battle with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, over the party’s future and what kind of candidates it attracts. Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he wants to try to minimize Mr. Trump’s influence after the deadly riot.But Mr. Trump has said he will try to encourage candidates who will carry his brand of politics forward.The CPAC conference is the event where, a year ago, when it was held in Washington, D.C., Mr. Trump gave a speech downplaying the threat of the novel coronavirus and insisting that his administration had the situation in hand. A New Jersey man who attended the conference tested positive for the virus, setting off a scramble by officials with the American Conservative Union, who run the conference.Within two weeks of Mr. Trump’s speech, the pandemic was a full-blown crisis, one that ultimately engulfed his administration. The administration’s failed response to the virus was a key issue for voters in the 2020 election.Mr. Trump’s modern political life began with a speech at CPAC in 2011.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?Disappointed by down-ballot losses, Democratic interest groups are joining forces to conduct an autopsy of the election results. Republicans do not yet seem willing to reckon with the G.O.P.’s major defeats.Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaking outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., after winning the election on Nov. 7.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETDemocrats emerged from the 2020 election with full control of the federal government and a pile of lingering questions. In private, party leaders and strategists have been wrestling with a quandary: Why was President Biden’s convincing victory over Donald J. Trump not accompanied by broad Democratic gains down ballot?With that puzzle in mind, a cluster of Democratic advocacy groups has quietly launched a review of the party’s performance in the 2020 election with an eye toward shaping Democrats’ approach to next year’s midterm campaign, seven people familiar with the effort said.There is particular concern among the Democratic sponsors of the initiative about the party’s losses in House districts with large minority populations, including in Florida, Texas and California, people briefed on the initiative said. The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing.Democrats had anticipated they would be able to expand their majority in the House, pushing into historically red areas of the Sun Belt where Mr. Trump’s unpopularity had destabilized the G.O.P. coalition. Instead, Republicans took 14 Democratic-held House seats, including a dozen that Democrats had captured in an anti-Trump wave election just two years earlier.The results stunned strategists in both parties, raising questions about the reliability of campaign polling and seemingly underscoring Democratic vulnerabilities in rural areas and right-of-center suburbs. Democrats also lost several contested Senate races by unexpectedly wide margins, even as they narrowly took control of the chamber.Strategists involved in the Democratic self-review have begun interviewing elected officials and campaign consultants and reaching out to lawmakers and former candidates in major House and Senate races where the party either won or lost narrowly.Four major groups are backing the effort, spanning a range of Democratic-leaning interests: Third Way, a centrist think tank; End Citizens United, a clean-government group; the Latino Victory Fund; and Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black Democratic candidates.They are said to be working with at least three influential bodies within the House Democratic caucus: the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist lawmakers. The groups have retained a Democratic consulting firm, 270 Strategies, to conduct interviews and analyze electoral data.The newly elected Democratic Representatives Jason Crow, Antonio Delgado, Jared Golden and Abigail Spanberger participated in a forum hosted by End Citizens United in 2019.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockDemocrats are feeling considerable pressure to refine their political playbook ahead of the 2022 congressional elections, when the party will be defending minuscule House and Senate majorities without a presidential race to drive turnout on either side.Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said there was a recognition in the party that despite Mr. Biden’s victory the 2020 cycle had not been an unalloyed Democratic success story.“I think people know that there was good and bad coming out of ’20 and there is a desire to look under the hood,” Mr. Sena said.Among the party’s goals, Mr. Sena said, should be studying their gains in Georgia and looking for other areas where population growth and demographic change might furnish the party with strong electoral targets in 2022.“There were a series of factors that really made Georgia work this cycle,” he said. “How do you begin to find places like Georgia?”Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, confirmed in a statement that the four-way project was aimed at positioning Democrats for the midterm elections.“With narrow Democratic majorities in Congress and the Republican Party in the thrall of Trump-supporting seditionists, the stakes have never been higher,” he said. “Our organizations will provide Democrats with a detailed picture of what happened in 2020 — with a wide range of input from voices across the party — so they are fully prepared to take on the G.O.P. in 2022.”In addition to the outside review, some of the traditional party committees are said to be taking narrower steps to scrutinize the 2020 results. Concerned about a drop-off in support with Latino men, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas earlier this year, one person familiar with the study said. It is not clear precisely what conclusions emerged from the exercise.So far there is no equivalent process underway on the Republican side, party officials said, citing the general lack of appetite among G.O.P. leaders for grappling openly with Mr. Trump’s impact on the party and the wreckage he inflicted in key regions of the country.As a candidate for re-election, Mr. Trump slumped in the Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest — giving up his most important breakthroughs of 2016 — and lost to Mr. Biden in Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally red states where the G.O.P. has suffered an abrupt decline in recent years. The party lost all four Senate seats from those states during Mr. Trump’s presidency, three of them in the 2020 cycle.But Mr. Trump and his political retainers have so far responded with fury to critics of his stewardship of the party, and there is no apparent desire to tempt his wrath with a comprehensive analysis that would be likely to yield unflattering results. One unofficial review, conducted by Mr. Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, concluded that Mr. Trump had shed significant support because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with particularly damaging losses among white voters.In the past, Democratic attempts at self-scrutiny have tended to yield somewhat mushy conclusions aimed at avoiding controversy across the party’s multifarious coalition.Donald J. Trump spoke on election night at the White House.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Democratic Party briefly appeared headed for a public reckoning in November, as the party absorbed its setbacks in the House and its failure to unseat several Republican senators whom Democrats had seen as ripe for defeat.A group of centrist House members blamed left-wing rhetoric about democratic socialism and defunding the police for their losses in a number of conservative-leaning suburbs and rural districts. Days after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said the party should renounce the word “socialism,” drawing pushback from progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.That airing of differences did not last long: Democrats quickly closed ranks in response to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, and party unity hardened after the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But there are still significant internal disagreements about campaign strategy.It has been eight years since either political party conducted a wide-ranging self-assessment that recommended thorough changes in structure and strategy. After the 2012 election, when Republicans lost the presidential race and gave up seats in both chambers of Congress, the Republican National Committee empaneled a task force that called for major changes to the party organization.The so-called 2012 autopsy also recommended that the G.O.P. embrace the cause of immigration reform, warning that the party faced a bleak demographic future if it did not improve its position with communities of color. That recommendation was effectively discarded after House Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate, and then fully obliterated by Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy.Henry Barbour, a member of the R.N.C. who co-authored the committee’s post-2012 analysis, said it would be wise for both parties to consider their political positioning after the 2020 election. He said Democrats had succeeded in the election by running against Mr. Trump but that the party’s leftward shift had alienated otherwise winnable voters, including some Black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities that shifted incrementally toward Mr. Trump.“They’re running off a lot of middle-class Americans who work hard for a living out in the heartland, or in big cities or suburbs,” Mr. Barbour said. “Part of that is because Democrats have run too far to the left.”Mr. Barbour said Republicans, too, should take a cleareyed look at their 2020 performance. Mr. Trump, he said, had not done enough to expand his appeal beyond a large and loyal minority of voters.“The Republican Party has got to do better than that,” he said. “We’re not just a party of one president.”Henry Barbour, a member of the Republican National Committee, at the party’s 2020 convention in Charlotte, N.C.Credit…Carlos Barria/ReutersIn addition to the four-way review on the Democratic side, there are several narrower projects underway focused on addressing deficiencies in polling.Democratic and Republican officials alike found serious shortcomings in their survey research, especially polling in House races that failed to anticipate how close Republicans would come to retaking the majority. Both parties emerged from the campaign feeling that they had significantly misjudged the landscape of competitive House races, with Democrats losing seats unexpectedly and Republicans perhaps having missed a chance to capture the chamber as a result.The chief Republican and Democratic super PACs focused on House races — the Congressional Leadership Fund and House Majority PAC — are both in the process of studying their 2020 polling and debating changes for the 2022 campaign, people familiar with their efforts said.The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican group, is said to be undertaking a somewhat more extensive review of its spending and messaging, though it is not expected to issue any kind of larger diagnosis for the party. “We would be foolish not to take a serious look at what worked, what didn’t work and how you can evolve and advance,” said Dan Conston, the group’s president.Several of the largest Democratic polling companies are also conferring regularly with each other in an effort to address gaps in the 2020 research. Two people involved in the conversations said there was general agreement that the industry had to update its practices before 2022 to assure Democratic leaders that they would not be caught by surprise again.Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster involved in reviewing research from the last cycle, said that the party was only now digging more deeply into the results of the 2020 election because the last few months had been dominated by other crises.Several Democratic and Republican strategists cautioned that both parties faced a challenge in formulating a plan for 2022: It had been more than a decade, she said, since a midterm campaign had not been dominated by a larger-than-life presidential personality. Based on the experience of the 2020 campaign, it is not clear that Mr. Biden is destined to become such a polarizing figure.“It’s hard to know what an election’s like without an Obama or a Trump,” Ms. Greenberg said, “just normal, regular, ordinary people running.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNeera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to ConfirmationSenator Joe Manchin III said he would oppose President Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a move that could scuttle her chances.Neera Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to pass confirmation, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 8:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III announced on Friday that he would oppose the nomination of Neera Tanden, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, imperiling her prospects for confirmation in an evenly divided Senate.The announcement by Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, underscored the fragility of the ambitions of the new Democratic majority in the Senate and the outsize power that any one senator holds over the success of Mr. Biden’s administration and agenda.The fate of the nomination is now in the hands of a party that Ms. Tanden has frequently criticized in the past, particularly moderate Republicans she has previously scorned. Ms. Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to to be confirmed, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Given Ms. Tanden’s previous litany of critical public statements and posts on Twitter against members of both parties, it is unclear whether such support exists.Mr. Manchin cited statements from Ms. Tanden that were personally directed at Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader; Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent now in charge of the Senate Budget Committee; and other colleagues.“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” said Mr. Manchin, who will also cast a decisive vote on Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination. As I have said before, we must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics.”Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday that he did not plan to withdraw her nomination.“I think we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,” he said.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated that position in a statement: “Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties.”But the lack of support from Mr. Manchin could be enough to derail the nomination altogether, should Republicans remain united against her selection.Ms. Tanden would be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget, an agency that is critical to the execution of the administration’s economic and policy agendas. But Mr. Biden’s decision to nominate her even before Democrats won control of the Senate in January stunned several lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill, given the slim margins in the upper chamber and Ms. Tanden’s prolific venom on social media.The New WashingtonLatest UpdatesUpdated Feb. 19, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ETGeorgia legislators want to restrict voting methods popular among Democrats.Lloyd Austin addressed a viral video about sexual harassment in the Marine Corps.House Budget Committee unveils a 600-page, $1.9 trillion economic relief bill.A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Ms. Tanden had frequently clashed with Mr. Sanders and other prominent liberals long after the conclusion of the primary race that year. Once she was formally nominated to oversee the budget agency, Ms. Tanden deleted more than 1,000 negative tweets, and liberal senators rallied to her defense.But she faced tough questioning from both Republicans and Democrats during her two confirmation hearings this month, with lawmakers from both parties examining her previous tweets and statements and grilling her over the millions of dollars of corporate donations that her think tank, Center for American Progress, received.Republicans spent the first hour of her first hearing before a Senate homeland security committee asking Ms. Tanden to explain her past tweets and why she deleted more than 1,000 shortly after the November election.Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, read aloud posts in which she called Mr. McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and said that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” a Republican senator from Texas.Her second hearing was no less fiery, with Mr. Sanders confronting Ms. Tanden over her history of leveling personal attacks on social media. He also demanded details about the donations the Center for American Progress received from corporations under her leadership and a promise that it would not influence her work in the Biden administration.Ms. Tanden apologized to lawmakers during both hearings, saying she regretted many of her previous remarks, and she vowed that the donations would carry no weight over her role as budget director.“I worry less about what Mrs. Tanden did in the past than what she’s going to do in the future,” Mr. Sanders said Friday night on CNN. “I’m talking to her early next week.”Many Democrats accused Republicans of unfairly singling out Ms. Tanden’s social media posts after years of evading queries about President Donald J. Trump’s tweets, even when they espoused racist and offensive commentary or targeted their own colleagues.“Honestly, the hypocrisy is astounding,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at the time. “If Republicans are concerned about criticism on Twitter, their complaints are better directed at President Trump. I fully expect to see some crocodile tears spilled on the other side of the aisle over the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.”Mr. Biden’s pick for deputy director of the agency, Shalanda Young, is respected by lawmakers and aides in both parties after serving as staff director for House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. The first Black woman to serve in the role, she helped wrangle the compromise that ended the nation’s longest government shutdown in 2019 and the coronavirus relief packages Congress approved in 2020.Jim Tankersley More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Presidential Primary Calendar Stinks. Now’s the Time to Shake It Up.Democrats should take the opportunity to reform an out-of-touch system.Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.Feb. 19, 2021Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York TimesDon’t freak out, but Nevada’s Democrats are already looking ahead to the next presidential election — and, more specifically, how to pick their nominee.On Monday, a bill was introduced in the State Assembly that would replace the current caucus system with a primary. As conceived, the move threatens to throw the party’s national nominating calendar into conflict and chaos.It’s about time.Nevada’s nominating process has had a rocky run of late. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the caucuses, but complex delegate-selection rules led to chaos at the state party’s convention, when Bernie Sanders’s fans became convinced that the process had been “hijacked” for Mrs. Clinton. (Intraparty death threats are rarely a good sign.) The 2020 cycle was less explosive but still bumpy. Mr. Sanders scored a clear win, but there were initially competing claims for second place, the reporting of results was delayed, and Pete Buttigieg’s campaign claimed “irregularities.”Not all of this is poor Nevada’s fault. Caucuses are a convoluted, vaguely anti-democratic way to pick a nominee. The rules are mind-numbing and the process time-consuming, giving an unfair advantage to party activists and people with numerous hours to kill. If anything, Nevada’s 2020 headaches could have been far worse if the party hadn’t scrambled at the 11th hour to shore up its systems in response to the epic failure of the Iowa caucuses.For those who have already repressed the debacle, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses suffered a meltdown last year. The system “crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field,” The Times found. The results were not reported for days and, even then, were a hot mess. More than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, incomplete or flat-out impossible under the rules.It’s not as though the caucus states weren’t aware of the potential for trouble. Post-2016, as part of a push to simplify and clarify the nominating process, the Democratic National Committee urged the state parties to shift to primaries. Most did. The few that refused were instructed to adopt measures to make voting more inclusive. Iowa and Nevada toyed with remote telephone voting, but those plans fell apart over security concerns.Despite adopting changes, including setting up caucus sites in casinos to accommodate workers and providing for early voting, Nevada Democrats have now decided that “the only way we can bring more voices into the process is by moving to a primary,” the state party chairman said in a statement.This is the sensible — and democratic — thing to do. But there’s a hitch.Nevada Democrats aren’t looking simply to shift to a primary system. They are looking to host the first primary election of the presidential cycle. “Nevada’s diverse population and firsthand experience in issues relating to climate change, public lands, immigration, and health care provide a unique voice that deserves to be heard first,” said Jason Frierson, the Assembly speaker, in announcing the bill.Nevada is a lovely, diverse state with much to recommend it. But its attempt to claim pole position in the presidential primaries will not be well received by New Hampshire, which has held that honor for more than a century. New Hampshire so values its first-primary status that state law requires that the state hold its vote at least seven days before any “similar election.” A caucus is considered different enough not to pose a conflict, but if Nevada tries easing toward a primary: Fight on. New Hampshire’s longtime secretary of state has already told the local media, in effect: Relax. I’ll handle it.It’s hard to blame early states for clinging to their privilege. Leading the presidential calendar means they get lavished with time, attention and obscene amounts of money from the candidates, the parties and the legions of journalists who cover the circus. Their voters and their issues receive preferential treatment. Who knows how many Iowa diners would fail if not for all the candidates and journalists jockeying to hobnob with “real Americans”?That said, oceans of words have been devoted to why Iowa and New Hampshire should not have a lock on early voting. Especially for Democrats, these lily-white states are hardly representative of the party’s electorate. This cycle, Joe Biden’s abysmal showing in both Iowa and New Hampshire had many declaring his candidacy deader than disco.After South Carolina Democrats, dominated by Black voters, saved Mr. Biden’s bacon, the calls to overhaul the nominating calendar grew even louder and more pointed. “A diverse state or states need to be first,” Tom Perez told The Times as he was wrapping up his tenure as head of the D.N.C. last week. “The difference between going first and going third is really important.”Yes it is.There is, in fact, a strong argument to be made that no state — even a superdiverse one — should have a permanent claim on that privilege. Many worthy states would love to have their parochial concerns receive saturation coverage during an election. And the denizens of small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire are no more entitled to having candidates fawn all over them than those in North Carolina or Ohio or Maine. The current nominating scheme is not the only option. Plenty of alternatives have been floated, including a system of rotating regional primaries. It’s past time to give them a serious look.Nevada Democrats are aiming to shake things up. The national party should seize the opportunity to shake even harder, reforming a system that’s increasingly out of touch with voters.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn WashingtonThe Relationship Between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’tThe unlikely alliance delivered results they both wanted but fell apart after the election once their political interests diverged.President Donald J. Trump meeting in July with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time, in the Oval Office.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — At a White House event in November 2019, President Donald J. Trump offered unrestrained praise for one person on hand he regarded as singularly responsible for his administration’s remarkable record of placing conservatives on the courts.“The nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to a man whose leadership has been instrumental to our success,” Mr. Trump said.That man was Senator Mitch McConnell, now enmeshed in an ugly feud with the former president that has significant ramifications for the future of the Republican Party. The rift is extraordinary partly because perhaps no one did more to advance Mr. Trump and his Washington ambitions than Mr. McConnell, who had ambitions of his own and saw Mr. Trump as a vessel to pour them in.“Trump would not have been able to achieve his objectives without a strong Senate leader,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush.The relationship had its rocky moments but was usually cordial enough — until it went extremely bad in recent days as Mr. McConnell excoriated Mr. Trump on the Senate floor after acquitting him in an impeachment trial and Mr. Trump responded with a cutting personal broadside. It was a messy breakup years in the making.Like most Americans, Mr. McConnell expected Mr. Trump to lose to Hillary Clinton in November 2016, and he also braced for the potential loss of the Senate majority as party pollsters and strategists predicted a big night for Democrats. Much to the surprise of Mr. McConnell, Republicans held on and Mr. Trump triumphed, an outcome for which Mr. McConnell could deservedly take some credit.A strong argument can be made that Mr. McConnell, by preventing President Barack Obama from filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, cleared Mr. Trump’s path to the White House.The sudden political focus on the court provided a way for Mr. Trump to assure conservatives wary of his character flaws that he could be their champion. He and his legal advisers assembled a now famous list of potential conservative nominees that he promised he would choose from to calm evangelicals and others on the right who worried he might appoint a more liberal justice to succeed Justice Scalia.Mr. Trump himself recognized the political power of that list and the Scalia vacancy as he lavished praise on Mr. McConnell that day at the White House.“It really did have an impact on the election,” Mr. Trump said at the celebration in the East Room. “People knew me very well, but they didn’t know, ‘Is he liberal? Conservative?’”Mr. McConnell, the canny Senate leader, and Mr. Trump, the Washington novice suddenly ensconced in the White House, became a team. It was not a great personal match. Mr. McConnell spilled nothing of his intentions; Mr. Trump spilled all.Mr. Trump could not relate to the buttoned-lip approach of Mr. McConnell as he made clear this week in his scathing statement describing Mr. McConnell as “dour, sullen and unsmiling.” Mr. McConnell held private disdain for Mr. Trump and saw a flawed personality with a sketchy history who was not at all versed in the customs and rites of Washington.But as the Trump era opened, Mr. McConnell was just happy that Mr. Trump didn’t turn out to be a Democrat, though some congressional Republicans were not so sure. And it didn’t hurt that Mr. Trump brought on Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as transportation secretary.“Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it,” Mr. McConnell told The New York Times in February 2017 as the chaotic White House set up shop. “But if you look at the steps that have been taken so far, looks good to me.”As he looked, Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an occasional go-between who is traveling to meet Mr. Trump this weekend in Florida to try to smooth things over, said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job.”Then came the election. Mr. Trump refused to accept the results, making wild and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Mr. McConnell indulged him and refused to recognize President Biden as the winner until he could avoid it no longer after the states certified their electoral votes on Dec. 14. He congratulated Mr. Biden the next day.The interests of Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump now sharply diverged, with Mr. McConnell fixated on regaining power in 2022 while Mr. Trump was stuck on 2020, making outlandish allegations that threatened to drive off more suburban voters and imperiled two Georgia seats that went to Democrats on Jan. 5. Then the riot the next day found marauders in the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell’s sanctum sanctorum.“This mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell declared on Jan. 19, accusing Mr. Trump of provoking the rioters and prompting rumblings that he of all people might vote to convict Mr. Trump in the coming impeachment trial. But he did not. Instead, he voted to acquit Mr. Trump then tried to bury him minutes later while distinguishing between Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and the Trump voters Mr. McConnell and Republican Senate candidates would need next year.“Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” Mr. McConnell said. “One person did. Just one.”Mr. Rove said Mr. McConnell handled it well.“McConnell reads his conference and he knows that, like him, they thought simultaneously that this was a highly partisan process and not good for country, but also that Trump had played a significant role in fomenting Jan. 6,” he said.Then it was Mr. McConnell doing the provoking. His post-trial speech and a subsequent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal drew the ire of Mr. Tump, who fired back with a call for Republicans to dump their leader — an unlikely prospect — and a threat to mount primary challenges against candidates allied with Mr. McConnell, a more worrisome prospect for members of the party.Now the question is whether Mr. Trump will follow through, causing intramural fights that ultimately lead to Democratic victories. Mr. McConnell’s allies note that he has been in this position before facing challenges from the right and came out on top.“My money,” said Bob Stevenson, a former top Senate Republican leadership aide active in Senate races, “is on Mitch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More