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      DeSantis Steps Up Attacks on Trump, Hitting Him on Crime and Covid

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More

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      in US Politics

      Conservative attacks on abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place | Moira Donegan

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      On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.They’re not alone. Abortion bans have been proliferating wildly in the year since the US supreme court eliminated the right in their Dobbs decision, declaring that any state can compel women to remain pregnant, and creating different, lesser entitlements to bodily freedom and self-determination based on sex. But as the abortion bans have spread like an infection across the American south, midwest, and mountain west, they have been accompanied by a related political disease: laws seeking to prohibit minors and sometimes adults, from accessing medical treatments that facilitate gender transitions.Twenty-five states have enacted pre-viability abortion bans since Roe was overturned last summer, although in some states, like Iowa and Montana, abortion has remained legal pending judicial stays. Meanwhile, 20 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, with a rush of bills being introduced over the past months. In addition to Nebraska, a slew of states have passed transition-care bans in 2023, including Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida. Texas is soon to join them.It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.It is no accident that the states that would forbid a teenager from transitioning are the same that would compel that teenager to give birth; it is no accident that the states with the greatest control over what women do with their reproductive organs are the ones where women’s restrooms have become sites of surveillance and control, with patrons, cis and trans alike, subjected to invasive and degrading inquisitions as to whether they are conforming sufficiently to the demands of femininity. That Nebraska combined these two projects into one bill, then, is less inventive than it is a dropping of pretense: the anti-feminist movement is anti-trans, and the anti-trans panic is at its core anti-feminist.The attacks on gender freedom from the right are not only united in their ideology, but increasingly in their rhetoric. Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition. But increasingly, the right has begun to attack the notion of abortion and trans rights as healthcare, arguing that neither pregnancy nor non-transition constitute “illness”.At a recent oral argument over the fate of the abortion drug mifepristone, Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee on the fifth circuit court of appeals whose rabidly conservative opinions and trollish affect suggest supreme court ambitions, argued that the drug should be removed from the market in part because “pregnancy is not a serious illness”. “When we celebrate Mother’s Day,” Ho asked, his voice dripping with contempt, “are we celebrating a serious illness?” In that moment, Ho sounded uncannily like anti-trans activists seeking to ban care for young people, who argue, ad nauseam, that “puberty is not a disorder”.The rhetoric suggests a narrow and myopic view of “health”, the notion that bodies have destinies and should be made to fulfill them regardless of the desires of the people involved. A healthy body, we’re told, is one that conforms to socially imposed gender hierarchies, regardless of how miserable that conformity and imposition makes the people who inhabit those bodies.But while these practices of abortion and transition care constitute medicine and while their outcomes encourage health, it would be a mistake to fight the political battle for these services only on the ground of what counts as “healthcare”. Because the truth is that conservatives do not care about health – they don’t care about the integrity of the medical profession, or about patient outcomes, or about bodies, not really. They care about people, and about making sure that those people stay in line. In the grand tradition of feminists and queers alike, we should refuse to.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      The DeSantis Delusion

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      If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      Fresh US abortion bans show Republicans trying to soften message

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      After repeated failed attempts to pass stricter bans, Republicans in some US states are changing their messaging, touting “common sense” abortion laws presented as more lenient than outright bans, but that are more restrictive than they seem when looked at in detail.Nebraska’s state legislature passed a 12-week ban on Friday, days after another 12-week ban cleared its final hurdle in North Carolina.Meanwhile, South Carolina’s senate will again weigh a six-week abortion ban that the legislature has repeatedly tried and failed to pass in previous weeks.In Nebraska, Republican lawmakers praised the ban as a compromise, but their Democratic colleagues did not see it that way. “This place is morally bankrupt,” said the Omaha state senator Machaela Cavanaugh. “I’m looking forward to 2025 when I no longer have to serve with many of you.” Cavanaugh filibustered for hundreds of hours in recent months in an attempt to stop the bill passed on Friday, an anti-trans measure to which the abortion ban was attached.Two weeks ago, a six-week ban was tanked in Nebraska, partly by one of its original co-sponsors – the Republican state senator Merve Riepe – who had come to think of it as too extreme, as many women do not yet realize they are pregnant at six weeks. Ahead of the earlier vote, which Riepe abstained from, he passed around a news article warning that abortion was hurting the Republican party, according to the Washington Post. Polling has consistently found that strong majorities of Americans oppose abortion bans.The Nebraska ban includes no exceptions for fetal anomalies or pregnancies incompatible with life and threatens doctors with jail time.Republicans in Nebraska’s technically non-partisan legislature (where each lawmaker nonetheless identifies either as Republican or Democrat) have painted the bill as a huge step down from the six-week ban.Nebraskans crowded the statehouse as the bill progressed on Wednesday, drowning out the lively debate on the house floor with angry chants and foot stomping. By the end of the night, lawmakers were forced to seek refuge, fleeing the capitol rotunda through a back tunnel flanked by police escorts in a bid to avoid angry protesters.With the legislative session about to end, lawmakers craftily advanced the ban by attaching it to a measure limiting gender-affirming care to transgender people.“You are willing to drive this state into the ground. You look ridiculous,” Cavanaugh, said on Wednesday, adding: “Women will die, children are dying, and you are responsible.”In North Carolina, the 12-week ban was passed on Wednesday, when Republican politicians overrode the Democratic governor’s veto. The fresh ban brings the current limit down from 20 weeks.Republicans described the bill as “pro-life plan, not an abortion ban”, as they passed it amid protestors chanting “shame” from inside the state legislature. But the bill will make it incredibly difficult to obtain an abortion in North Carolina, a state that has become somewhat of a safe haven for abortion in the increasingly restrictive Bible belt.Most notably, the bill limits the use of medication abortion – the most common US method of abortion – to 10 weeks of pregnancy, and requires three in-person visits to get pills or any other form of the procedure. Those restrictions will make it harder to get an abortion for those with uncompromising work schedules, those who can’t afford to pay for childcare and those traveling from out of state.Further worsening the effect of abortion bans on low-income people and women of color, it will also make people seeking abortions wait 72 hours between visits. It will require women to watch ultrasounds before they have an abortion, and to be warned about unfounded medical side-effects of abortion before having one.Strict licensing requirements written into the bill could also shutter a number of the state’s remaining 14 clinics, and oblige abortion providers to report details on people who have sought an abortion to the state department of health and human services.And in South Carolina on Wednesday, a six-week abortion ban finally progressed to the senate, after weeks of Republicans repeatedly trying and failing to move it forward. But even if it passes, it must be upheld by the state supreme court, which blocked a similar six-week ban earlier this year. (The composition of that supreme court has since changed – the judge who wrote the decision striking down the ban has been replaced by judge who GOP lawmakers hope will overturn it.) Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic women have repeatedly united in a filibuster to stop the bill from passing. They have said they plan to do so again.Some 900 amendments were affixed to the legislation – many by Democrats hoping to delay the passage of the bill. Some of those amendments included making the state liable for funeral costs of people who die after being denied an abortion, and making men liable for child support and the costs of half of all pregnancy expenses, starting from fertilization. More

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      in Elections

      DeSantis Avoids Talk of Abortion Ban on the Trail

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      The Florida governor is reluctant to talk about the restrictive law he signed as he seeks to attract support from across the Republican Party.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida could not have asked for a friendlier venue to highlight the sweeping six-week abortion ban he signed last month: an annual gala hosted by a deeply conservative Christian group that welcomed him with a sustained standing ovation and provided a bagpiper in full Highland regalia playing “Amazing Grace.”But instead of taking a victory lap on Saturday, Mr. DeSantis breezed through his remarks on Florida’s abortion law, one of the most restrictive in the nation. His rhetoric was far less soaring than that of other speakers, including one who compared abortion to slavery, suggesting it was an evil that should be totally eliminated.“We believe that everybody counts, everybody is special, and our Heartbeat Protection Act shows that we say what we mean and we mean what we say,” said Mr. DeSantis, referring to the law, which he was initially slow to back.He then pivoted to familiar talking points, including his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his opposition to defunding the police and his signing of a law prohibiting gender-transition care for minors.During the primary, Mr. DeSantis will need to court conservative voters without alienating centrists — all while fending off allegations from Republican rivals who could argue he is too extreme on abortion. Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. DeSantis’s brief comments on abortion underscore his general hesitancy to speak about the issue in visits to key states ahead of his upcoming presidential run. On the trail, his remarks about the ban are usually limited to a single line in his roughly 45-minute stump speech, placed alongside a laundry list of his other legislative accomplishments.The reluctance to highlight abortion — even when speaking on his home turf to grateful Christian conservatives — reflects a careful calibration that could be crucial to his campaign for the Republican nomination.Although many evangelicals and hard-core party activists favor abortion bans like the one he signed in Florida, moderate Republicans are less inclined to support them. During the primary, Mr. DeSantis will need to court those conservative voters without alienating centrists — all while fending off allegations from Republican rivals who could argue he is too extreme on abortion. He will also need to avoid delivering any sound bites to Democrats that could become fodder for attack ads in a general election. Other Republican contenders for president, including Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, have offered less strident views on abortion. Ms. Haley has declined to support a federal abortion ban at a specific number of weeks of pregnancy. And Mr. Scott, who is expected to declare his candidacy on Monday, has said he would back a 20-week federal ban. Former President Donald J. Trump, who is fighting to retain the backing of the anti-abortion movement, has criticized Florida’s six-week law without saying what restrictions he might support, leading Mr. DeSantis to punch back over his reluctance to take a position. The comments, one of his most direct public challenges to the former president so far, demonstrated how Mr. DeSantis could use his record, which anti-abortion activists praise, to distinguish himself.“He’s giving us action, and that’s what I’m interested in,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, the nonprofit group that hosted Mr. DeSantis’s speech on Saturday. “He’s been stellar and historic.”Democrats ran heavily on abortion rights in last year’s midterms with unexpected success. That has left some Republicans unsure of how to address the issue in 2024.As Mr. DeSantis is hitting the trail and visiting early nominating states, he is talking little about his abortion legislation. When he does, he does not explicitly tell audiences that the law prohibits the procedure after six weeks.“We enacted the Heartbeat Protection Act to promote life,” Mr. DeSantis said without elaborating as he addressed a crowd of voters in Iowa earlier this month. He sandwiched his comment between brief statements on his tax relief efforts and a law that allows Floridians to carry concealed weapons without training or permits. Speaking at Liberty University, another friendly setting, the day after he signed the ban, Mr. DeSantis almost entirely avoided the subject.And during a discussion with state lawmakers in New Hampshire on Friday, the governor did not mention abortion at all. Privately, lawmakers from the moderate state, which limits abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, said they thought Mr. DeSantis’s abortion law was too extreme for voters in New Hampshire. Many women do not realize they are pregnant at six weeks.Last spring, Mr. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in Florida limited access to the procedure after 15 weeks, with exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities or to save the life of the woman. That legislation is being challenged in front of the Florida Supreme Court.The six-week ban, which includes additional exceptions for rape and incest, is not yet in effect and will hinge, in part, on the court’s decision over the existing law. Women in Florida have suffered serious complications from dangerous pregnancies since the 15-week ban was passed, according to news reports. The state previously prohibited abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.For many conservatives, the governor is fulfilling a mandate from voters after a nearly 20-point re-election in November.“His leadership helped push that through,” Chris Jessee, a Florida pastor who came to Orlando to hear Mr. DeSantis address the Florida Family Policy Council, said of the six-week ban.Still, Mr. Jessee noticed that the governor did not seem to adjust his usual script much for the event, even though the group’s annual gala was its first since Roe v. Wade was overturned.“I really felt like I’d heard that speech before,” he said.Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Sioux Center, Iowa. More

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      in Elections

      Remember When Trump and DeSantis Loved Each Other? Neither Do They.

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      Our topic for today is — who’s worse, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis?Nonononofair! There is no way I’m ever going to vote for either one of them! Why should I care?Hey, knowledge of public affairs is always important.DeSantis made headlines this weekend when he showed up to campaign in Iowa while Trump canceled a rally because of bad weather.“Iowa is the Florida of the Midwest,” the governor of Florida claimed at one point in his burger-flipping, speech-giving trek. Now this was clearly intended as a compliment, but Iowans, do you actually want to be the Florida of the Midwest? The weather is certainly great in January, but there’s plenty of downside. Do your Midwestern neighbors ever mutter, “What our state needs is a heck of a lot more floods and sinkholes …”?DeSantis and his wife/political adviser, Casey, have three small children, who once starred in a gubernatorial election ad in which he demonstrated his devotion to President Donald Trump by showing one of his daughters how to build a toy wall and reading his son “The Art of the Deal.” (“Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.”)You may be seeing a lot more of little Madison, Mason and Mamie DeSantis in the months to come. But no one’s going to be reading from Trump’s collected works.Trump has five children counting Ivanka, who’s sorta cut herself off from the clan. And Tiffany, who everybody, including her father, seemed to have forgotten for a very long stretch. And Eric, whom we mainly hear about during riffs from the late-night comics. And Barron, the youngest at 17, who lives quietly with his mom.Donald Jr. is truly his dad’s kid. He’s off this summer to Australia for a speaking tour blasting “woke identity politics.” Ranting against “woke” is sort of a DeSantis thing, but give Junior a break. He’s spent his entire life trying to please a father who was absent for most of his childhood and who is said to have resisted having his firstborn named after him, in case the kid turned into a “loser.”Now Don Jr. has five children too! And he’s not shy about putting them in the news either. A while back he posted an Instagram photo of the kids publicizing a Trump-branded leash. (“You can get yours at the Trump Store too.”) Before that, Dad once tweeted that he planned to confiscate half of his then-3-year-old daughter’s Halloween candy “to teach her about socialism.”Hard to imagine the Trump and DeSantis families getting together for a cookout. But the gap between the two men grows much wider when you look at personal behavior. Only one of them just lost a $5 million verdict from a jury that found he sexually abused a woman in a department store dressing room.Trump has been trying to insinuate that DeSantis had some shady doings with high school girls in his far, far distant past. And running an ad reminding the world that his probable Republican opponent has a history of eating pudding with his fingers.But what about the issues? Sorta hard to pin down since Trump is given to, um, free-associating on this stuff. But he certainly has been running to DeSantis’s left, accusing the Florida governor of wanting to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits.When he was in Congress, DeSantis did vote for Republican proposals along that line. He’s on the no-changes-no-how bandwagon now. But let’s look at abortion — much easier to pin down. DeSantis, as governor, just signed a bill he supported that will bar abortions in Florida after six weeks. By which time many, many women — particularly the very young, very poor, very traumatized — have no idea they’re pregnant.DeSantis has at least been consistent. A devout Catholic, he’s had the same position for his entire political career. Trump, on the other hand, um, adapts.Trump made a huge impact by appointing three anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court. But now he’s noticed that voters are coming down very strong in favor of abortion rights, and he’s switched right around. He claims “many people within the pro-life movement” found the new Florida law “too harsh.”Our bottom line here, people, is that you have two top candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. DeSantis adheres to a strong, faith-based social conservatism. He’s pro-gun, opposed to diversity and inclusion programs in public colleges. And currently having a big fight with Disney, one of Florida’s top employers, over a comment from a Disney C.E.O. that criticized a DeSantis bill to prohibit classroom discussions of sexual orientation in the early grades.Hard to imagine a Gov. Donald Trump taking the same road.Unless it would somehow win him an election. Trump’s politics are deeply, deeply pragmatic. If an angel appeared promising him another term in the White House if he killed every puppy in America, those doggies would be toast.(That is an imperfect example since The Donald hates dogs anyway, but bear with me.)The bottom line: Would you rather see the Republicans nominate a candidate who had an exemplary family life and an agenda based on longstanding, extremely conservative beliefs? Or a guy with a sleazy personal history who’d probably go anywhere the votes were?Some days it pays to be a Democrat.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      Conservative judges hear challenge to abortion pill access in controversial lawsuit

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      Three US appeals court judges who have previously favored abortion restrictions prepared to hear oral arguments on Wednesday on the future of the major abortion drug mifepristone.The case – which has landed before judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, James Ho and Cory Wilson – essentially calls on them to rule on whether the federal government should suspend or scale back the federal Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone in 2000, along with later actions that made the pill more widely accessible.Mifepristone has consistently been found to be safe and effective, and advocates argue that it is safer than the erectile dysfunction medication Viagra and low-level pain reliever Tylenol.But an emboldened anti-abortion movement set its sights on mifepristone after the US supreme court’s conservative majority last year eliminated federal abortion rights that had been established by the Roe v Wade decision in 1973.After a coalition of groups brought a lawsuit in November against the FDA’s approval of the drug, Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in April issued a ruling suspending the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Joe Biden’s administration appealed, sending it to the appellate court in New Orleans where Elrod, Ho and Wilson sit – and to the supreme court, which indefinitely blocked the suspension as the case proceeds.The plaintiffs in the dispute are an alliance of physician groups who generally argue they have standing to bring the case because they have members in Texas and elsewhere in the US who have treated women and girls experiencing complications after taking mifepristone for abortions. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro Life OB-GYNs, the American College of Pediatricians and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations contend that the complications – bleeding and pain – are dangerous, and have trotted out unproven arguments that women who have abortions are prone to suicide and depression.Studies have shown that 95% of women who had abortions reported five years later that it had been the right decision for them.Their effort to in essence ban mifepristone also hinges on a 150-year-old law known as the Comstock Act, which criminalizes the mailing or shipping of any “lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article”, along with anything that is “advertised or described in a manner … for producing abortion”.Interpreted widely enough, opponents of the plaintiffs say, the previously dormant Comstock Act could prohibit the legal mailing of any abortion instrument, even to states which have chosen to keep abortion legal since last year’s supreme court ruling, bringing the US one step closer to a national abortion ban that – according to polling – most Americans would not support.Meanwhile, the FDA’s efforts to rebuff the physician group has involved defending mifepristone’s approval process against claims that it was inadequate, along with characterizing the plaintiffs as lacking standing despite their contentions to the contrary.Jennifer Dalven, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, on Monday described the fifth circuit panel hearing the case as “one of the worst panels of judges that could have been assembled for those who believe mifepristone should remain on the market”.“This case should’ve been laughed out of court from the start – it has no basis in science, it has no basis in law, it’s been roundly criticized by experts from across the ideological spectrum,” Dalven said during a virtual briefing with reporters. “But we’re living in strange times, and some judges have shown that they’re willing to blatantly ignore the rule of law to achieve their own ideological goals.”Donald Trump nominated Ho and Wilson to their posts during his presidency. (He also nominated Kacsmaryk, whose ruling is the subject of Wednesday’s hearing.)Trump’s fellow Republican president George W Bush nominated Elrod.All three in 2021 upheld a Texas law which outlawed an abortion method commonly used to terminate pregnancies in their second trimester.A 2018 opinion from Ho called abortion “a moral tragedy”. And in 2019, though he concurred with an opinion which found that an abortion ban in Mississippi had to be struck down under legal precedent then in effect, he asserted: “Nothing in the text or original understanding of the constitution establishes a right to an abortion.”For her part, Elrod not only wrote the 2021 opinion addressing Texas’s ban of the second-trimester pregnancy abortion method, but also an opinion that same year which declined to order Louisiana state officials to issue a delayed license for a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in New Orleans. The opinion declared no one had the federal right to operate an abortion clinic.Either side could appeal any ruling from Elrod, Ho and Wilson to the supreme court, which could take a year or more to issue the final word on the matter.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Pence Looks Toward 2024 Run, Using Reagan’s Playbook, Not Trump’s

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      A pro-Pence super PAC is being formed, and so is a plan to barnstorm Iowa. “This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” a G.O.P. operative said.Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-shot campaign for the White House against the president under whom he served, pitching himself as a “classical conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump roots, according to people close to Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.In a sign his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being set up. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence’s who served with him in Congress.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more supplicant than standard-bearer, at least until the rupture in their relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would begin far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in early national and state polls of 2024 Republican primary voters.The Pence team’s bet is that a “Reagan coalition” can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Pence candidacy will focus heavily on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. Iowa’s caucuses are the first contests for Republican presidential contenders early next year.“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview. “It just feels like home.”On a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence’s candidacy and foreshadowed an old-fashioned blitz of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, like we’re running him for county sheriff,” he said.If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s improbable bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — composed of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.“We have to resist the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” Mr. Pence said in the interview.In a Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire focused on economics, Mr. Pence is expected to call for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.He is casting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and staking out sharply different positions from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the most important policy questions framing the Republican 2024 race. Still, running against Mr. Trump so directly will force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes-man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” Mr. Reed said. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”It remains to be seen how frequently Mr. Pence will discuss the moment that has defined him for the last two years: his rejection on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while President Biden’s Electoral College victory was certified.That issue is not a winning one with the base of the Republican Party. But Mr. Pence’s team believes there are enough Republicans who might be won over by Mr. Pence describing the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Pence stands almost alone among the prospective Republican field in advocating views that were once standard issue for his party.Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Mr. Trump entered national politics in 2015, cutting entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has promised in his third campaign not to cut either program and he has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.“It is fairly remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency: The position of never going to touch Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.Mr. Pence said he would “explain to people” how the “debt crisis” would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.Mr. Pence is also drawing a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.“There’s a bit of a movement afoot in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to being the leader of the free world and that questions why we’re providing military support in Ukraine,” Mr. Pence said.Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.“In the aftermath of September 11th, the president articulated a doctrine that I wholly supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they’re running backward.”Mr. Pence supports a national ban on abortion. “For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” he said.Allison Joyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Pence is also resisting the anti-corporate furies that are dominating Republican politics today, arguing limited government means not intervening in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.In the view of New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naïve to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions — academia, Fortune 500 companies, the news media — and conservatives need to use governmental power to fight back.Mr. Pence will run as a staunch social conservative, drawing a contrast with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He has said the issue should be left to the states.Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national ban on abortion.“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” Mr. Pence said. His senior adviser, Marc Short, said Mr. Pence regarded a 15-week national ban as a “minimal threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life beginning at conception.”There is little chance Mr. Pence will receive many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence does not need elected officials to vouch for his credentials. Yet, it’s also unclear how many Republican donors will back his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas when the billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the gathering.Among the hires for the super PAC supporting Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful re-election campaign in Georgia in 2022, one of the few brights spots for Republicans in the midterms. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.For now, Mr. Pence is signaling he’s willing to do without a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s smash-mouth politics and constant warfare against the media.“People want to see us get back to having a threshold of civility in the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from crowds.” More