Elections

On the morning that the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters, I knew it was going to be a pretty big day. Agence France-Presse (AFP) had photographers all over the city and my job was to be inside the Capitol, photographing the joint session where the vote counting would occur. But I had no idea what was coming our way.I have been working in Washington for almost 14 years and this is definitely the craziest day I have ever worked. Never in a million years could you imagine that the US Capitol would be overrun with protesters. It’s completely unprecedented territory.I had started the day photographing the session for 20 minutes and when it was adjourned, I went back to my laptop in another room. Suddenly, an announcement warned us of a “security situation” inside the building, urging us to shelter in place.Being a photographer, the last place you want to be is stuck inside a room when everything’s going on outside. So a group of us went down towards the commotion on the second floor, right outside the door to the Senate chamber. It’s a very inner part of the Capitol – normally a very secured area – so it’s highly unusual to see one protester, let alone the 12–15 that were there.That’s when I got my first big shot. Some of the protesters had face paint and body paint on, and were wearing costumes. One had a Viking hat on; a bunch were carrying Trump flags. Another had a Confederate flag. They were clearly Trump supporters there to disrupt things. They were shouting at police, who were trying their best to defuse the situation. About 12 officers were forming a line trying to prevent them from going any further into the building. For the most part they were trying to engage with them, saying, “How can we resolve this peacefully? How can we get you out of the building?”I thought, this is an area of the Capitol that never has protesters. This is going to be a big story of the day. Little did I know this was just the tip of the iceberg.Usually in a situation like this, the police act very quickly. They will tackle individuals to the ground, cuff them and take them out but that’s not what was happening. All these people had broken in somehow, and it wasn’t clear whether they had weapons, or what their intentions were.I heard commotion elsewhere and turned towards the Rotunda, underneath the dome. Hundreds of protesters were streaming in. That’s when I realized this was a much bigger deal than I could have ever imagined.People put Maga hats on the statues and had them hold their Trump flags, it was almost like a circus atmosphere.I was scared of the police clearing everyone out and getting stuck with them so I went down the tunnel towards the Senate and saw thick smoke in the air. People were retreating. People were running out coughing and there was a general craziness.That’s when we saw people going into the offices of Nancy Pelosi. Normally this is a very secure part of the building; she’s the speaker of the House, second in line from the presidency – nobody can just wander in. But there was no staff, no police. It was just a free-for-all.The protesters were sitting at desks, taking selfies and rummaging through the office. It was just a bizarre scene. I kept moving through the office and saw a guy with his feet up on the desk, looking through the mail and making himself at home. The staff had left in such a hurry that the computers were still on, with emails still up on the screens. I chatted with the guy with his feet up at the desk. I think everyone was just astonished. This is one of the most secure buildings in Washington and here it is with protesters who seemed to have complete control over the second floor of the US Capitol. It was just mind-boggling.You’re always worried people won’t want to be photographed, and you don’t want anyone to become violent towards you. But they either didn’t notice or didn’t care I was there. No one tried to hide their face, no one tried to discourage me from taking photos.Soon the crowd started to get larger and more volatile, so we went through another narrow hallway, turned a corner and came across a police Swat team who had their rifles like you see in the movies – sweeping the area, going room to room and immediately they say, “Hands up! Who are you?” It was definitely startling. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had a gun pointed at me. They let us through and told us to find shelter. Three of us barricaded ourselves in an office on the third floor where I could charge and check my phone. My wife knew I was at the Capitol and was very worried. At some point she texted saying shots had been fired inside the building, but that’s the only news I got about that. When you’re photographing, you’re on autopilot and don’t have time to think about what’s actually happening.I don’t know how what happened was made possible. During political conventions, inaugurations, even the State of the Union, they set up huge metal fencing around the building. During the Black Lives Matter protests, they set that up around the White House for maybe as much as a month. But that just wasn’t there that morning. During an event like this, it’s human nature to run away from it. But for better or for worse, we have to run towards it. No photographs are going to come from inside a locked office.By 8pm, we got word that the Senate and the House would reconvene to count the electoral votes.Sure, the windows were still broken, the floors were still slippery from the teargas, and there were broken things all over the place – doors, windows and desks in disarray. But Congress was going back to its business. Even then, just five hours after they cleared the building, things were returning to normal. I think that’s what members of Congress wanted to show: that the work of the government will continue.– As told to Poppy Noor More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe ArgumentSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsThe 46th: The End of Trump or the End of American Democracy?In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Michelle Cottle joins Ross and Michelle to look at what comes next.With Ross Douthat and Michelle GoldbergMore episodes ofThe ArgumentJanuary 8, 2021  •  More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow to Ensure This Never Happens AgainThe election and its aftermath have revealed weaknesses in our democracy. Here’s how we can fix some of them. Beverly Gage and Ms. Gage is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.Jan. 8, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by The New York Times; from left: Eli Durst for The New York Times, Angela Weiss, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Drew Angerer, via Getty Images and Pool photos by J. Scott Applewhite.The path from the Nov. 3 election has been harrowing for American democracy. Though state and local officials ran clean, well-functioning elections, leaving no doubt that Joe Biden was the victor, President Trump and a sizable faction of Republicans in Congress have relentlessly tried to subvert the results. Their assault culminated in yesterday’s insurrection at the Capitol, a physical attack on the home of our democracy, incited by the sitting president.This dark reality owes much to Trump’s malign political style — his narcissism and demagogy, his willingness to sell lies to his political base — and to the ways that the Republican Party has fed his worst tendencies. But certain aspects of the electoral system also helped bring us to this point. With even the soon-to-be Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, now conceding that elections are not supposed to look like this, the months ahead may present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix what’s wrong with American democracy — or risk losing it altogether.Generally speaking, politicians don’t like to run on a platform of small “d” democratic reforms. Structural change can seem abstract and the obstacles to success too great. But history shows that it can — and must — be done. In other fraught moments, under pressure from an outraged American public, politicians have managed to transcend party and regional divisions to strengthen the democratic process.During the Progressive Era, Congress and the states approved two constitutional amendments that changed the nature of national elections. The first, ratified in 1913, allowed Americans to vote directly for their senators rather than leaving the choice to their state legislatures. The second was the 1920 women’s suffrage amendment, which roughly doubled the size of the electorate.By the 1960s, the civil rights movement finally forced Congress, with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to end the exclusion of most Black people from voting. A few years later, both parties reformed their primary systems to give their voters a real say in choosing their party’s presidential candidate. And in 1971, it took the states less than four months to ratify a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 in response to widespread protests over the Vietnam draft, which called up men starting at age 18.Since then, bipartisan majorities in Congress have passed more technocratic but still useful reforms. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (also known as the motor voter law) required states to offer voter registration materials to people who get or renew a driver’s license or apply for public assistance. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 addressed meltdowns in the 2000 election — when an estimated four to six million ballots were not counted — by providing federal funds to replace faulty punch-card and lever-based balloting.Now we are once more in dire need of reform. But some proposals will be far easier to enact than others, and each will require a different strategy. Here are some ideas for fixing what ails, from the most feasible in the short run to the biggest reach.Fix the Electoral College ProcessThe 1887 Electoral Count Act, which is supposed to govern the resolution of a disputed presidential election, is “impenetrable or, at the very least, indeterminate,” according to Edward B. Foley, a scholar who has spent his career studying it. If we’re stuck with the Electoral College, we should at least make the rules for how it operates in the event of a dispute crystal clear.Congress could detail narrow circumstances in which a state election would be deemed to have failed (in the event of a natural disaster on Election Day, for example). A new law could also clarify that state legislatures have the power to choose electors only in those circumstances or not at all (the Constitution leaves the door open to more meddling). And it could outline what happens if a state submits dueling slates of electors, along with the current rules for choosing a president in the House if all else fails.Establish national best practices for voting and election securityAmerican elections don’t follow a set of best practices to enhance both access and security. Better election laws could provide for equitable access to polling places, early voting, and vote by mail, while protecting eligible voters from being purged from the rolls and ensuring that no one could vote twice. States could also build infrastructure that’s safe from hackers.Legislation in the House provides one possible blueprint. A bill it passed in 2019 would set national standards and fund election infrastructure. It also would grant the right to vote to people who have been convicted of a felony if they’ve been sentenced only to probation or released from custody (several states have since introduced their own such laws). And it sets up a pilot program to give high school students information about registering to vote before they graduate.Register voters automaticallyAutomatically registering voters — through drivers licenses, for instance — would add up to 50 million people to the rolls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. When the House passed national automatic voter registration in 2019, no Republicans voted for it. If national legislation proves unlikely, states can enact automatic voter registration on their own. Twenty states and the District of Columbia have some version, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into statesThe Senate’s structure, with each state, regardless of population, having two senators, favors rural, white, Republican-leaning states, creating a body that fails to reflect the national electorate. Diverse, blue-leaning California, with almost 40 million residents, has just two senators, while the states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska — all red-leaning and mostly white — have a combined 10 senators for fewer than five million residents overall. Statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico would not only provide representation in the national government to millions of Americans who now lack it, but would begin to address (though not eliminate) the imbalance in the Senate by adding four new Senate seats representing racially diverse, densely populated urban areas.The Democratic House passed a statehood bill for D.C. for the first time last year. Statehood itself would require both approval by Congress and by the state’s residents.End gerrymanderingPartisan gerrymandering reduces the number of competitive electoral districts, contributing to the polarization of Congress and state legislatures by pushing candidates away from the center and all but guaranteeing one party’s success in most races.In 2019, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are beyond the reach of federal courts. But state courts can limit gerrymandering based on state constitutions, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did in 2018. States can also adopt nonpartisan redistricting commissions, as several have done. Research shows that these commissions have succeeded in drawing electoral maps that neutralize partisan bias.Make People VoteCompulsory voting is, hands down, the most effective way to increase turnout. It also changes politics: Suppressing the vote is no longer a strategy. “Campaigns have to focus on persuasion, not demobilizing voters,” says Nathaniel Persily, co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.A city or a county could pass an ordinance imposing a penalty on people who fail to vote. The idea wouldn’t be to force voters to pick a candidate. They could turn in a blank ballot. But they couldn’t ignore the election without some penalty. (A potentially more popular alternative — giving people a tax credit or another benefit in exchange for voting — would probably require a change in federal law.)Shorten the TransitionIn the early 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress and the states came together on a constitutional amendment to shorten the presidential transition from four to two-and-a-half months. That change came too late to prevent a disastrous and lengthy transition between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which accelerated the country’s banking crisis and deepened the depression. Now, the period from Nov 3 to Jan 20 itself seems too long, given the fast-paced nature of political events. Rather than a time of peaceful transition, it has this year became an opportunity for mischief that can rattle democracy to its core. A new constitutional amendment could update the transition timeline, with no partisan implications.Eliminate the Electoral CollegeThe Electoral College, which apportions its electors based on the size of each state’s congressional delegation, skews elections by concentrating attention on a handful of swing states. One result is that a candidate can lose in the Electoral College while winning the popular vote. Ask Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.Eliminating the Electoral College altogether would require a constitutional amendment. As a more viable alternative, reformers have proposed a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States would pledge to award all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The compact would take effect once states with the winning minimum total of 270 votes join. So far, states with 196 electoral votes combined have signed on.Beverly Gage is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.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

In the 24 hours since the US Capitol in Washington was seized by a Trump-supporting mob disputing the results of the 2020 election, American social media companies have barred the president from their platforms for spreading falsehoods and inciting the crowd.Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch suspended Donald Trump indefinitely. Twitter locked his account temporarily. Multiple platforms removed his messages.Those actions, coming just days before the end of Trump’s presidency, are too little, too late, according to misinformation experts and civil rights experts who have long warned about the rise of misinformation and violent rightwing rhetoric on social media sites and Trump’s role in fueling it.“This was exactly what we expected,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who studies the rise of movements like QAnon. “It is very consistent with how the coalescing of different factions responsible for what happened yesterday have been operating online, and how platforms’ previous attempts to deal with them have fallen short.”Over the past decade, tech platforms have been reluctant to moderate Trump’s posts, even as he repeatedly violated hate speech regulations. Before winning the presidency, Trump used Twitter to amplify his racist campaign asserting, falsely, that Barack Obama was not born in the US. As president, he shared racist videos targeting Muslims on Twitter and posted on Facebook in favor of banning Muslims from entering the US, a clear violation of the platform’s policies against hate speech. He retweeted to his tens of millions of followers a video of one of his supporters shouting “white power!” in 2020 June. He appeared to encourage violence against Black Lives Matter protests in a message shared to multiple platforms that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.Trump’s lies and rhetoric found an eager audience online – one that won’t disappear when his administration ends. Experts warn the platforms will continue to be used to organize and perpetuate violence. They point, for example, to Facebook and YouTube’s failure to curb the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, a baseless belief that a secret cabal is controlling the government and trafficking children and that Trump is heroically stopping it. Parts of the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to bar the certification of Trump’s election defeat donned QAnon-related merchandise, including hats and T-shirts, and the action was discussed weeks in advance on many QAnon-related groups and forums.QAnon theories and communities have flourished on Facebook this year. By the time the company banned QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in October, hundreds of related pages and groups had amassed more than 3 million followers and members.YouTube removed “tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and terminated hundreds of channels” around the time of Facebook’s measures. It also updated its policy to target more conspiracy theory videos that promote real-world violence, but it still stopped short of banning QAnon content outright. A spokesman from YouTube noted the company had taken a number of other actions to address QAnon content, including adding information panels sharing facts about QAnon on videos as early as 2018.Trump’s leverage of social media to spread propaganda has gone largely unchecked amid a vacuum of laws regulating government speech on social media, said Jennifer M Grygiel, assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and expert on social media.Grygiel cited the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which regulates the distribution of government propaganda, as an example of one law that limits the government’s communication. But such regulation does not exist for the president’s Twitter account, Grygiel said. Instead we have relied on the assumption the president would not use his social media account to incite an insurrection.“What happened this week is the product of four years of systematic propaganda from the presidency,” Grygiel said.In the absence of any meaningful regulation, tech companies have had little incentive to regulate their massively profitable platforms, curb the spread of falsehoods that produce engagement and moderate the president.That’s why experts say things have to change. In 2020, Republicans and Democrats amplified calls to regulate big tech. The events this week underscore that the reckoning over big tech must include measures aimed at addressing the risks posed by leaders lying and promoting violence on their platforms, some argue.“The violence that we witnessed today in our nation’s capital is a direct response to the misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech that have been allowed to spread on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc,” said Jim Steyer, who runs the non-profit children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media and helped organize the Stop Hate for Profit campaign (with the ADL and a number of civil rights organizations), which called on advertisers to boycott Facebook over hate speech concerns and cost Facebook millions.“Social media platforms must be held accountable for their complicity in the destruction of our democracy,” he added, arguing that in absence of meaningful enforcement from social media, Congress must pass better legislation to address hate speech on these platforms.Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.Grygiel said it was time to move away from the idea that a president should be tweeting at all. Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s subsidiary Instagram, said on Twitter on Thursday evening that Facebook has long said it believes “regulation around harmful content would be a good thing”. He acknowledged that Facebook “cannot tackle harmful content without considering those in power as a potential source”.Grygiel said: “We need non-partisan work here. We need legislation that ensures no future president can ever propagandize the American people in this way again.” More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesCalls for Impeachment25th Amendment ExplainedTrump Officials ResignHow Mob Stormed CapitolAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCapitol Attack Leads Democrats to Demand That Trump Leave OfficeThe White House was propelled deeper into crisis as officials resigned in protest and prominent Republicans broke with the president after he incited a mob that assaulted Congress.National Guard troops on Thursday in front of the Capitol.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesPeter Baker and Jan. 7, 2021Updated 10:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration plunged deeper into crisis on Thursday as more officials resigned in protest, prominent Republicans broke with him and Democratic congressional leaders threatened to impeach him for encouraging a mob that stormed the Capitol a day earlier.What was already shaping up as a volatile final stretch to the Trump presidency took on an air of national emergency as the White House emptied out and some Republicans joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a cascade of Democrats calling for Mr. Trump to be removed from office without waiting the 13 days until the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.The prospect of actually short-circuiting Mr. Trump’s tenure in its last days appeared remote. Despite a rupture with Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence privately ruled out invoking the disability clause of the 25th Amendment to sideline the president, as many had urged that he and the cabinet do, according to officials. Democrats suggested they could move quickly to impeachment, a step that would have its own logistical and political challenges.But the highly charged debate about Mr. Trump’s capacity to govern even for less than two weeks underscored the depth of anger and anxiety after the invasion of the Capitol that forced lawmakers to evacuate, halted the counting of the Electoral College votes for several hours and left four people dead.Ending a day of public silence, Mr. Trump posted a 2½-minute video on Twitter on Thursday evening denouncing the mob attack in a way that he had refused to do a day earlier. Reading dutifully from a script prepared by his staff, he declared himself “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” and told those who broke the law that “you will pay.”While he did not give up his false claims of election fraud, he finally conceded defeat. “A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20,” Mr. Trump acknowledged. “My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.”Mr. Trump initially resisted taping the video, agreeing to do it only after aides pressed him and he appeared to suddenly realize he could face legal risk for prodding the mob, coming shortly after the chief federal prosecutor for Washington left open the possibility of investigating the president for illegally inciting the attack by telling supporters to march on the Capitol and show strength.Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, had warned Mr. Trump of just that danger on Wednesday as aides frantically tried to get the president to intervene and publicly call off rioters, which he did only belatedly, reluctantly and halfheartedly.“We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Michael R. Sherwin, the U.S. attorney in Washington, told reporters. Asked if that included Mr. Trump, he did not rule it out. “We’re looking at all actors,” he repeated. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”The president’s late, grudging video statement came after a day of disarray in the West Wing, where officials expressed growing alarm about the president’s erratic behavior and sought to keep more staff members from marching out the door. Aides hoped the latest statement would at least stanch the bleeding within Mr. Trump’s own party. Ivanka Trump, his eldest daughter, called lawmakers before it posted, promising it would reassure them.Despite the talk of healing, however, Mr. Trump quietly made plans to take a trip next week to the southwestern border to highlight his hard-line immigration policies, which have inflamed Washington over the years, according to a person briefed on the planning. He also told advisers he wanted to give a media exit interview, which they presumed might undercut any conciliatory notes.Washington remained on edge on Thursday, awakening as if from a nightmare that turned out to be real and a changed political reality that caused many to reassess the future. As debris was swept up, businesses and storefronts remained boarded up, thousands of National Guard troops began fanning out around the city and some of the participants in the attack were arrested. Amid scrutiny over the security breakdown, the Capitol Police chief and the Senate sergeant-at-arms resigned.The main focus, however, was on Mr. Trump. Ms. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called on Mr. Pence and the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. But after the vice president refused to take their telephone calls, Ms. Pelosi told reporters that she would pursue impeachment if he did not act.“While it’s only 13 days left, any day can be a horror show for America,” Ms. Pelosi said, calling Mr. Trump’s actions on Wednesday a “seditious act.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Thursday for President Trump to be stripped of his powers through the 25th Amendment or to be impeached again.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times“This president should not hold office one day longer,” said Mr. Schumer, who will become majority leader with the seating of two Democrats elected to the Senate in Georgia this week and the inauguration of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.Mr. Biden would not address whether Mr. Trump should remain in office but called Wednesday “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation” and forcefully laid blame at the president’s feet after years of stirring the pot. “I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming,” he said. “But that isn’t true. We could see it coming.”Even aides to Mr. Trump quietly discussed among themselves the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, and several prominent Republicans and Republican-leaning business groups endorsed the idea, including John F. Kelly, a former White House chief of staff to Mr. Trump; Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland; and Michael Chertoff, a former homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush.The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal called on Mr. Trump to resign, terming his actions “impeachable.”But Mr. Pence, several cabinet secretaries and other administration officials concluded that the 25th Amendment was an unwieldy mechanism to remove a president, according to people informed about the discussions. The notion became even less plausible when two cabinet members — Elaine L. Chao, the transportation secretary, and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary — resigned in protest of the president’s encouragement of the mob.John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who broke with him, said the idea was misguided. “People glibly have been saying it’s for situations like this,” he said in an interview. In fact, he said, the process of declaring a president unable to discharge his duties is drawn out and could lead to the chaos of having two people claiming to be president simultaneously.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 7, 2021, 9:15 p.m. ETBetsy DeVos, education secretary, is second cabinet member to resign.Here’s what Trump’s cabinet members have said about the storming of the Capitol.Lawmakers fear a coronavirus outbreak after sharing close quarters in lockdown.While an impeachment conviction would only strip Mr. Trump of his power days earlier than he is set to lose it anyway, it could also disqualify him from running again in 2024. And even if another impeachment might not be any more successful than the first one, in which he was acquitted by the Senate last year in the Ukraine pressure scheme, advocates argued that the mere threat of it could serve as a deterrent for the remaining days of his tenure.The latest danger signs may only encourage Mr. Trump to pardon himself before leaving office, an idea he had raised with aides even before the Capitol siege, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.In several conversations since Election Day, Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people.Mr. Trump has shown signs that his level of interest in pardoning himself goes beyond idle musings. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself, and his survey of aides’ views is typically a sign that he is preparing to follow through on his aims. He has also become increasingly convinced that his perceived enemies will use the levers of law enforcement to target him after he leaves office.Despite ransacking the Capitol, the mob failed to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes in the final procedural stage of the election held Nov. 3. After the rioters were cleared from the building, lawmakers voted down efforts by Mr. Trump’s Republican allies to block electors from swing states and formally sealed Mr. Biden’s victory at 3:41 a.m. Thursday with Mr. Pence presiding in his role as president of the Senate.A scarf left in the Capitol on Wednesday by a Trump supporter.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe bust of President Zachary Taylor appeared to have been smeared with blood in the Capitol.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s Twitter account was suspended for part of the day on Thursday before being restored, temporarily depriving him of that platform. But Facebook and Instagram barred him from their sites for the remainder of his presidency.Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump railed about Mr. Pence, who refused to use his position presiding over the electoral count to block it despite the president’s repeated demands.The vice president, who for four years had remained loyal to Mr. Trump to the point of obsequiousness, was angry in return at the president’s public lashing. Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, told The Tulsa World that Mr. Pence privately expressed a sense of betrayal by Mr. Trump “after all the things I’ve done for him.”Even when the vice president had to be evacuated during the siege on Wednesday, the president never checked with him personally to make sure he was OK. The Secret Service agents wanted the vice president to leave the building, but he refused and sheltered in the basement, according to two officials. Congressional leaders were whisked to Fort McNair for their safety, but the vice president later urged them to finish the count at the Capitol.On Thursday, Mr. Pence did not go to the White House complex, instead working out of the vice-presidential residence, according to administration officials.He was not the only one feeling betrayed by the president. In the White House, aides were exasperated and despondent, convinced that Mr. Trump had effectively nullified four years of work and ensured that his presidency would be defined in history by the image of him sending a mob to the Capitol in an assault on democracy.Ms. Chao stepped down a day after her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, forcefully repudiated Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election. “Yesterday, our country experienced a traumatic and entirely avoidable event as supporters of the president stormed the Capitol building following a rally he addressed,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “As I’m sure is the case with many of you, it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.”In her own letter, Ms. DeVos laid the responsibility for the mayhem directly at Mr. Trump’s feet. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote, just a couple weeks after Mr. Trump pardoned four security contractors convicted of war crimes in Iraq committed while working for her brother, Erik Prince.Mr. Trump was barred from Twitter for much of the day on Thursday, and Facebook barred him for the remainder of his term.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn addition to three White House aides who resigned on Wednesday, others stepping down included Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser; Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, who has been serving as a special envoy to Northern Ireland.Also leaving were two other National Security Council aides as well as officials at the Justice and Commerce Departments. Gabriel Noronha, a Trump appointee who worked on Iran issues at the State Department official, was fired after tweeting that the president was “entirely unfit to remain in office.”“The events of yesterday made my position no longer tenable,” Mr. Goodspeed said in a brief interview. On CNBC, Mr. Mulvaney said, “I can’t stay here, not after yesterday.”Mr. Mulvaney went further, suggesting Mr. Trump had become increasingly unhinged in recent months. “Clearly he is not the same as he was eight months ago and certainly the people advising him are not the same as they were eight months ago and that leads to a dangerous sort of combination, as you saw yesterday,” he said.Former Attorney General William P. Barr, perhaps the president’s most important defender until stepping down last month after a falling out, denounced Mr. Trump. In a statement to The Associated Press, Mr. Barr said that the president’s actions were a “betrayal of his office and supporters” and that “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable.”Even one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his bid to reverse the election results in Pennsylvania, Jerome M. Marcus, broke with him on Thursday, filing a motion withdrawing because “the client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”But concern about the exodus grew among some officials, who feared what Mr. Trump could do without anyone around him and worried about destabilizing the United States in a dangerous world. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser; and John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, among others, were urged to stay. Mr. Cipollone received calls from senators and cabinet members urging him to remain.“I understand the high emotions here,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview, “but I hope that the national security team will stay in place because it’s important to send a signal to our adversaries that the United States is prepared and functioning and they shouldn’t try to take advantage at this time.”In the weeks since the election, Mr. Trump has shrunk his circle, shutting out those who told him to concede and favoring those telling him what he wanted to hear, that he was somehow cheated of the presidency. As supporters stormed into the Capitol on Wednesday, Mr. Trump was initially pleased, officials said, and disregarded aides pleading with him to intercede.Unable to get through to him, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, sought help from Ivanka Trump. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a longtime friend who has publicly criticized his efforts to invalidate the election results, tried to call Mr. Trump during the violence, but could not get through to him.The video that Mr. Trump eventually released on Wednesday justified the anger of the rioters even as he told them it was time to go home. Rather than condemn their action, he embraced them. “We love you,” he said. “You’re very special.”Mr. Christie said he believed that Mr. Trump deliberately encouraged the crowd to march on the Capitol as a way to put pressure on Mr. Pence to reject the election results during the congressional count.“Unfortunately, I think what the president showed yesterday is he believes he’s more important than the system, bigger than the office,” Mr. Christie told the radio show host Brian Kilmeade. “And I think he’s going to learn that that was a very, very big miscalculation.”Peter Baker More

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Fotos de  la turba en el Capitolio

Elecciones en Georgia

6 falsedades sobre la elección

Ataque a la democracia

La diversidad del voto latino

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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesCalls for Impeachment25th Amendment ExplainedTrump Officials ResignHow Mob Stormed CapitolAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublicans Splinter Over Whether to Make a Full Break From TrumpRepublicans face a disturbing prospect: that Wednesday’s Trump-inspired violence could linger for decades as a stain on the party.The chaos and violence caused by supporters of President Trump on Wednesday have convinced some Republicans they need to break with him for good.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJonathan Martin and Jan. 7, 2021Updated 9:05 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Trump not only inspired a mob to storm the Capitol on Wednesday — he also brought the Republican Party close to a breaking point.Having lost the presidency, the House and now the Senate on Mr. Trump’s watch, Republicans are so deeply divided that many are insisting that they must fully break from the president to rebound.Those divisions were in especially sharp relief this week when scores of House Republicans sided with Mr. Trump in voting to block certification of the election — in a tally taken after the mob rampaged through the Capitol — while dozens of other House members and all but eight Republican senators refused to go along.Republicans who spent years putting off a reckoning with Mr. Trump over his dangerous behavior are now confronting a disturbing prospect: that Wednesday’s episode of violence, incited by Mr. Trump’s remarks, could linger for decades as a stain on the party — much as the Watergate break-in and the Great Depression shadowed earlier generations of Republicans.“His conduct over the last eight weeks has been injurious to the country and incredibly harmful to the party,” said Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who was the first major Republican to endorse Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie said Republicans must “separate message from messenger,” because “I don’t think the messenger can recover from yesterday.”A small number of Republican officials who have been critical of Mr. Trump in the past, including Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and two governors, Phil Scott of Vermont and Larry Hogan of Maryland, called for Mr. Trump’s removal from office.Top Republicans ran headlong into an immediate problem, though: Millions of Republican voters are seeking no such separation from Mr. Trump, nor are the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, many of his House colleagues and state lawmakers around the country.For the moment at least, they are far more loyal to their lame-duck president than the traditional party leaders who preceded him.Still, spurred by the threat many of them felt to their physical safety, and reduced to a political minority following twin losses in Georgia’s Senate runoffs, a swelling group of Republican lawmakers and strategists said publicly what many in their ranks have long voiced privately: It is time to move on.“What happened in Georgia, what happened today are all indicative that we have to chart a course,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican, who Mr. Trump has demanded be unseated in a primary next year. “I think our identity for the past several years was built around an individual, we got to get back to where it’s built on a set of principles and ideas and policies.”Mr. Thune added that “those conversations” must “happen pretty soon.”A handful of other Republican officials, including some who are also up for re-election next year, were even more critical.Asked if Republicans should cut ties with Mr. Trump, Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, a 34-year lawmaker, said, “After today I do.”Standing after midnight in a Capitol Rotunda still littered with the dirt and detritus left behind by the mob that breached the building, Mr. Upton said: “This is his legacy, not the tax cuts, not the judges. Today.”Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who Mr. Trump has also demanded be unseated, offered a measure of deadpan when she said Republicans should part ways with their divisive leader. “I think today is a pretty good reason why,” Ms. Murkowski said walking into a Senate chamber surrounded by machine gun-bearing law enforcement officers.Mr. Trump has targeted Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and others for primary challenges by more conservative Republicans.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe Republican crackup has been years in the making, but the party will hardly make a clean break — if it makes one at all.The gulf between Republican leaders and their grass-roots activists has never been wider since the start of the Trump era. And, as when the divisions first emerged after Mr. Trump denigrated Mexicans, Muslims and women, the party is not feuding over any sort of grand policy agenda. It’s simply a personal loyalty test.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 7, 2021, 9:15 p.m. ETBetsy DeVos, education secretary, is second cabinet member to resign.Here’s what Trump’s cabinet members have said about the storming of the Capitol.Lawmakers fear a coronavirus outbreak after sharing close quarters in lockdown.While veteran lawmakers were flatly urging a separation, more than 100 House Republicans, unpersuaded by the chaos in the Capitol, continued with their effort to block Congress from certifying President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Some adopted conspiracy theories from right-wing news outlets and social media that it was left-wing saboteurs carrying out a false flag operation who ravaged the halls of Congress.By Thursday morning, Mr. Trump was greeted with applause when he dialed into a breakfast at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, most of whose members have become a reflection of the party’s pro-Trump activist wing. On Friday, the committee was set to re-elect Mr. Trump’s handpicked committee chair with no opposition.When it comes to Mr. Trump, few better grasp the difficulty of balancing principle and political survival than Representative Chip Roy of Texas. A former chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, Mr. Roy broke with his former boss and was a leader in a group of House conservatives who resisted the president’s push to reject certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.“We are divided about even ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’’’ Mr. Roy said in an impassioned speech on the House floor Wednesday night. He said those words once united the nation but now they “tear us apart because we disagree about what they even mean.’’Now Mr. Roy is facing opprobrium from many Trumpists and wrestling with how the party can harness Trump-inspired grass-roots energy without remaining a cult of personality.“If the Republican Party is centered solely on President Trump himself, we will fail,” he said. “But if we forget what it was about his message that appealed to people who are really frustrated, then we will also fail.”Representative Chip Roy of Texas was a leader in a group of House conservatives who resisted Mr. Trump’s push to reject the Electoral College certification.Credit…Pool photo by Bill ClarkRepublicans may recover next year the way minority parties usually do in a new president’s first midterm election — with an oppositional message against Democrats. But their longer-term challenges could prove harder to resolve. The party drifted from any unifying policy vision in the Trump years and memorably did not even create a party platform last year.Former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, a Republican who served as Mr. Trump’s envoy to Russia, said the G.O.P. lacked a coherent set of priorities needed to make it a “relevant governing party.”“The party has to admit its failures and it has to bring party leadership from all demographics together in pursuit of a common agenda,” Mr. Huntsman said, adding, “We’ve got to basically start from a blank slate.”Some Republicans, particularly those who were always critical of Mr. Trump, are adamant that his exile will reveal him to be more of a spent force than a power broker. The president’s political legacy, they say, is one of defeat and division.“These antics have dampened enthusiasm for him and will diminish his influence even more,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, long an opponent of Mr. Trump.For a number of Republicans who have long been skeptical of Mr. Trump, the events of the last two months have been clarifying. From his initial refusal to concede defeat and his relentless attacks on Republican state officials, which undermined the party’s hopes for winning the Georgia Senate seats, to savaging lawmakers and his own vice president just hours before the Capitol riot, Mr. Trump has proved himself a political arsonist.“Trump is a political David Koresh,” said Billy Piper, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, referring to the cult leader who died with his followers during an F.B.I. siege in Waco, Texas. “He sees the end coming and wants to burn it all down and take as many with him as possible.”The violence in Washington appeared to embolden an array of Republican lawmakers, including some who took office only days ago, to condemn Mr. Trump’s political recklessness and urge the party toward a different course. The party’s humiliating double losses in Georgia, the day after Mr. Trump appeared at a rally there, also served to punctuate the growing peril for Republicans in the fastest-growing, more culturally diverse parts of the country, which are on track to amass more political power in the coming decade.The party faces a threat to its financial base, too. Several of the most powerful business federations in Washington denounced the chaos this week in stinging language, including an extraordinary statement from the normally nonpolitical National Association of Manufacturers that suggested Mr. Pence invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office. Representative Tom Reed of New York, who has emerged as a leader of more moderate Republicans in the House, said Thursday that the party needed to begin “not worrying about base politics as much, and standing up to that base.” He argued that Republicans should pursue compromise legislation with Mr. Biden on issues like climate change, and forecast that a sizable number of Republicans would take that path.“If that means standing up to the base in order to achieve something, they’ll do it,” Mr. Reed predicted.Mr. Reed warned his party that the Democrats would depict the G.O.P. as a dangerous party in 2022 if they did not rebut that charge.“They’re going to, obviously, paint us with the backdrop of yesterday,” he said, alluding to the mob violence.Representative Young Kim, a Republican elected two months ago to a purple seat in Southern California, said she had been “disgusted” by the Wednesday assault on the Capitol and blamed Mr. Trump for dishonestly telling his supporters that they had a chance to overturn the election.“The leaders at the top — in this case, our president — should have taken some responsibility and put down the flame before it ignited to the level that it did,” Ms. Kim said, adding of the mob: “People came because they listened to our leader, the president, telling us: Come to Washington, you have a vote, you have a voice, you can change the outcome. Well, that was simply not true.”Ms. Kim, who is one of a cohort of Republican female and minority candidates who helped the party cut deeply into the Democratic majority in the last election, acknowledged that she would most likely face “some blowback from the base” for voting to certify Mr. Biden’s election. But she said that should not be a primary consideration as Republicans emerge from the Trump era.“We need to be able to stand up and use our own independent judgment,” she said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More