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    Gavin Newsom’s Podcast Hosts Steve Bannon, Covering Musk, Trump and Taxes

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    The California governor hosted one of the architects of President Trump’s political movement on his new podcast, and their friendly sparring revealed a few points of agreement.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is one of the most powerful Democrats in America, but this week he used his perch not to push back on the Trump administration but to instead podcast with an intellectual architect of the MAGA movement: Stephen K. Bannon.Their fast-paced, hourlong discussion was both good-natured and peppered with predictable disagreements. But the conversation revealed some curious policy overlap and potentially exposed each man’s views to supporters of the other.“This is part of the process to unwind you from being a globalist to make you a populist nationalist,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s a long journey.”Mr. Newsom seemed amused: “This is part of the deprogramming, is it?”But Mr. Bannon didn’t so much use the opportunity to press Mr. Newsom on his positions as he did to advance his own perspective during their cursory coverage of some of the most complex issues facing the nation and the world.The podcast was the latest episode of “This Is Gavin Newsom,” a new show in which he has hosted several prominent conservatives. The Bannon conversation focused on economic issues, avoiding culture-war topics that dominated an earlier episode in which he broke with other leaders of his party in speaking out on transgender athletes.The tenor with Mr. Bannon was set early on, when Mr. Newsom did not push back on his guest’s repeated false claims that President Trump won the 2020 election. The governor does not appear to view the discussions as fact-checking sessions: He interjected only intermittently, including when Mr. Bannon referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is What the Courts Can Do if Trump Defies Them

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      Are we heading toward a full-blown constitutional crisis? For the first time in decades, the country is wrestling with this question. It was provoked by members of the Trump administration, including Russell Vought, the influential director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, who have hinted or walked right up to the edge of saying outright that officials should refuse to obey a court order against certain actions of the administration. President Trump has said he would obey court orders — though on Saturday he posted on social media, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”Some have argued that if the administration is defiant there is little the courts can do. But while the courts do not have a standing army, there are actually several escalating measures they can take to counter a defiant executive branch.The fundamental principle of the rule of law is that once the legal process, including appeals and stay applications, has reached completion, public officials must obey an order of the courts. This country’s constitutional traditions are built on, and depend upon, that understanding.A profound illustration is President Richard Nixon’s compliance with the Supreme Court decision requiring him to turn over the secret White House tape recordings he had made, even though Nixon knew that doing so would surely end his presidency.If the Trump administration ignores a court order, it would represent the start of a full-blown constitutional crisis.The courts rarely issue binding orders to the president, so these orders are not likely to be directed at President Trump personally. His executive orders and other commands are typically enforced by subordinate officials in the executive branch, and any court order — initially, it would come from the Federal District Court — would be directed at them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bannon Pleads Guilty to Fraud in Border Wall Case but Will Serve No Time

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      President Trump had already pardoned his adviser in a similar federal case, which accused him of skimming money from donations to build a Southern border barrier.Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to President Trump, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Manhattan criminal court to a single count of defrauding donors who sought to help build a wall at the Southern border.Mr. Bannon’s plea deal stipulates that he will be given a three-year conditional discharge, meaning he will receive no prison time if he does not reoffend.He had faced five felony counts, including money laundering and conspiracy charges, and faced a maximum sentence of five to 15 years on the most serious charge.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

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      Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.And that’s exactly where we are today.If you grow up in the rural South, you understand populism almost by osmosis. The region has long been populist territory, and sometimes for understandable reasons. The antebellum South was an extraordinarily economically stratified society, with a small planter elite that both owned slaves and exercised political and economic dominance over the yeoman farmers who made up the bulk of the white Southern population.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Conservative German Princess Says She Hosted Justice Alito at Her Castle

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      Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis said Justice Alito and his wife were guests at St. Emmeram Palace for a summer music festival. She called the couple her “friends” and the justice “a hero.”An eccentric German princess who evolved from a 1980s punk style icon to a conservative Catholic known for hobnobbing with far-right figures said on Monday that she hosted Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his wife at her castle during a July 2023 music festival.Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis also told The New York Times that she viewed the justice as “a hero.”“He is pro-life in a time where the majority follows the culture of death,” she wrote in a text exchange with The Times. She then typed a skull emoji, adding, “Christians believe in life. The Zeitgeist is nihilistic and believes in destruction.”The 64-year-old princess said that Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, are her “friends” and that after her castle festivities, the three attended the opening of the Bayreuth Festival, the world’s premier venue for the performance of Wagner’s operas.The details of the princess’s gift and the justice’s travels emerged after Justice Alito listed a $900 gift of concert tickets on his annual financial disclosure form, which was released late last week. The disclosure has prompted a new round of scrutiny of the justices, who have been in the spotlight after a series of revelations that some of them — most notably Justice Clarence Thomas — failed to report lavish gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors.Justice Alito was the focus of a ProPublica report for failing to disclose a private jet flight paid for by a conservative billionaire who later had cases before the court. The jet trip was part of a luxury salmon-fishing vacation. Justice Alito, in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal before the article was published, maintained that he did not have a conflict in accepting the “hospitality” and that he was not obligated to disclose the trip.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Alito Reported $900 Concert Tickets From a German Princess

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      Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a former 1980s party girl and art collector who is now known for her connections to far-right conservatives, told a German news organization the Alitos were “private friends.”On his most recent financial disclosure form, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. reported a single gift: $900 concert tickets from a German princess known for her links to conservative activists.The disclosure does not list the event’s details, including the concert’s name, location or how many tickets the princess provided. But in an interview with a German news organization, the gift provider, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, described Justice Alito and his wife as “private friends” and said the tickets were for the Regensburg Castle Festival, an annual summer celebration she hosts at her 500-room Bavarian castle.The princess, known in earlier decades as a party-loving, art-collecting aristocrat and who was once christened Princess TNT for her explosive personality, has become known in recent years for her close relationships with several high-profile people who oppose the current pope, as well as with Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime ally of former President Donald J. Trump.The disclosure only heightened the scrutiny around ethics at the Supreme Court, which has been in the spotlight after revelations that some of its members, most notably Justice Clarence Thomas, accepted luxury gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors without disclosing the largess on their mandatory annual financial forms.“No matter the identity of the patron — whether it be a German princess, Queen Bey or the king of Dallas real estate — the justices should not be accepting expensive gifts,” Gabe Roth, who leads Fix the Court, an organization that has been critical of transparency on the court, said in response to Justice Alito’s disclosure. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2023.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stephen Bannon Plans to Record His Podcast and Then Report to Prison

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      The recording will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald J. Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence.Immediately before reporting for a four-month sentence in federal prison on Monday, Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, will host the two final hours of his podcast from just outside the low-security facility in Danbury, Conn.“We’ll be as close to the prison as we can possibly get,” said Mr. Bannon in a high-spirited interview over the weekend. And when the taping, which he cast as an unsubtle troll pointed at the Justice Department, is concluded, “I’ll walk across the street and surrender.”Mr. Bannon on Friday lost his last-ditch bid to avoid incarceration, after the Supreme Court denied a request to postpone the sentence while he appealed a jury verdict that found him guilty of contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena. As a result, the very public figure will remain out of view — and off the air — until just a few days before the Nov. 5 election.But the right wing firebrand insists that swapping his studio mic for a prison job, and his trademark double-collared shirts for government khakis, will have little impact on his influential “War Room” podcast. In fact, he claims, it will “only get bigger and more powerful” while he’s in custody.He has prepared for this moment for months, Mr. Bannon said, enlisting a team of nearly 20 guest hosts to continue pumping out the show, which streams its distinctive stew of unvaryingly pro-Trump political patter for four hours a day, Monday through Friday, plus two additional hours on Saturdays.That group includes Andrew Giuliani, the son of Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Mr. Bannon’s daughter, Maureen; Noor bin Laden, the niece of Osama bin Laden, who is known for her belief in conspiracy theories; and Jeffrey Clark, who served in the Justice Department under Mr. Trump and faces criminal charges in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss there. They’ll be responsible for managing the stream of Republican politicians, consultants, media figures, pollsters, policy wonks, donors, intellectuals and economists who use “War Room” as a bullhorn aimed directly at what is arguably Mr. Trump’s most loyal and engaged base of support.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Navarro’s Prosecutors Ask for 6-Month Sentence

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      Mr. Navarro would be the second Trump official to be sentenced for stonewalling Congress in its Jan. 6 investigation.Federal prosecutors asked on Thursday night for a sentence of six months in prison for Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump, for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence at the top end of the guidelines because of his “bad-faith strategy” of “sustained, deliberate contempt of Congress.”“The defendant, like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation,” they wrote in their sentencing memo. “The defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”The memo echoed the sentence recommendation for Stephen K. Bannon, who was ultimately given four months in prison for defying his own subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. The sentencing would make Mr. Navarro the second Trump official to be sentenced for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas.Sentencing is set for Jan. 25 in Federal District Court in Washington.Mr. Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in September, and this week the judge presiding over the case, Amit P. Mehta, turned down a request from his lawyers to dismiss the verdict and convene a new trial. Mr. Navarro had argued that jurors were exposed to political bias while lunching outside the courthouse where demonstrators were protesting.“The evidence establishes that the jurors only interacted with each other” and a court security officer, Judge Mehta wrote in a ruling on Tuesday.Mr. Navarro’s lawyers argued that the subpoena flew in the face of the notion that a president could direct his subordinates to refuse to testify before Congress, citing executive immunity.In their own memo, they wrote that “history is replete” with people who “have refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a vocal critic of China, helped devise some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies and played a role in the U.S. pandemic response. But after the 2020 presidential election, he became more focused on efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro frequently made television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud. He also documented those assertions in a report, as well as in a memoir he published after leaving the White House in which he described a strategy known as the Green Bay Sweep aimed at overturning the election results.When the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify, he repeatedly asserted executive privilege, insisting that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. But Judge Mehta ruled that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense at trial, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee. More

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      Trump Deploys Familiar Tactic: I’m Rubber. You’re Glue.

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      Whenever Donald Trump is accused of something, he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.Days before the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald J. Trump is appearing twice in court this week — on Tuesday in Washington and Thursday in New York.He was not required to attend either hearing. But advisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is fast becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who is describing the likely Republican nominee as a peril to the country — is the true threat to American democracy.Mr. Trump’s claim is the most outlandish and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something — no matter what that something is — he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.It is an impulse more than a strategy. But in Mr. Trump’s campaigns, that impulse has sometimes aligned with his political interests. By this way of thinking, the more cynical voters become, the more likely they are to throw their hands in the air, declare, “They’re all the same” and start comparing the two candidates on issues the campaign sees as favorable to Mr. Trump, like the economy and immigration.His flattening moral relativism has undergirded his approach to nearly every facet of American public life, including democracy.In 2017, when the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a “killer,” Mr. Trump responded that there were “a lot of killers,” adding, “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”And in the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump applied the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” approach to a wide range of vulnerabilities.When Mr. Trump was described by voters as racist in polls after, among other things, he described undocumented immigrants from Mexico as “rapists,” he claimed that his rival, Hillary Clinton, was the true “bigot.”When Mrs. Clinton suggested he was temperamentally unfit to be entrusted with the nation’s nuclear codes, Mr. Trump declared her “trigger happy” and “very unstable.”When Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Trump a “puppet” of Mr. Putin during one of their general election debates, Mr. Trump interrupted: “No puppet. You’re the puppet.”Mr. Trump during a debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016.Damon Winter/The New York TimesA spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.For years, Mr. Trump championed and breathed life into the previously fringe “birther” movement that falsely claimed Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore an illegitimate president. When he finally renounced the conspiracy theory out of political expediency shortly before Election Day in 2016, he falsely claimed that it was Mrs. Clinton who had started attacking the first Black president with that assertion.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — “Lyin’ Ted,” Mr. Trump had dubbed him — was a victim of this Trumpian tactic in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries at a time when Mr. Trump was being called out for almost constant falsehoods. Mr. Cruz once summarized the injustice in a fit of indignation, saying of Mr. Trump: “He lies — practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”Now, Mr. Trump is repurposing his favored tool to neutralize what many see as his worst offense in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after he lost the 2020 election, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office.And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims Mr. Biden is stage-managing the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have coined a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his onetime client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now fighting Mr. Biden over an issue that many Republican consultants and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, given that candidates promoting election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.Mr. Bannon sees it differently.“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw on this, which I think you can, it’s over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview, referring to the imperiling of American democracy. “He’s got nothing else he can pitch. This is his main thing.”Mr. Bannon added, “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all this kind of ephemeral stuff, Trump will go there in a second.”It was Mr. Bannon who pushed for Mr. Trump to “go on offense” after a tape leaked of him boasting to the TV host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. Mr. Bannon helped arrange for three women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault to join Mr. Trump at a news conference shortly before a debate with Mrs. Clinton. It created a disorienting effect at a moment of acute vulnerability for Mr. Trump.“You’ve got to remember something,” Mr. Bannon said of the Trump campaign’s “Biden Against Democracy” gambit. “This is the whole reason he’s actually running: to say he believes that, burned into his soul, is the 2020 election was stolen, and that Jan. 6 was a setup by the F.B.I.”It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump actually believes that Jan. 6 was orchestrated by the “deep state.” His explanations of that day have shifted opportunistically, and he was a relative latecomer to the baseless far-right conspiracy theory that the Capitol riot was an inside job by the F.B.I.Mr. Trump has also sought to muddy the waters on voter concerns about corruption, by trying, along with his allies, to neutralize his liabilities on that front by attacking Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, for foreign moneymaking while his father was vice president.But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers think there is less to gain from the Hunter Biden angle than from the “Biden Against Democracy” theme. They recognize that Hunter Biden is not the president and doubt the issue will move voters significantly without the emergence of a connection to the president strong enough to convince Senate Republicans who remain skeptical that there is a basis for impeachment.Mr. Trump has also privately expressed concern about overplaying personal attacks on the president’s son to such an extent that they backfire and make Mr. Biden look like a caring father, according to a person who has heard Mr. Trump make these remarks.In a 2020 general election debate, Mr. Trump made such an error, when he mocked Hunter Biden’s past drug use, prompting a humanizing response from Mr. Biden: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”President Biden has repeatedly said Mr. Trump is a threat to American democracy. Mr. Trump has been lately saying the same of Mr. Biden. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Trump and his advisers are hoping to do more than paper over his liabilities related to his election lies and the violent attack on the Capitol, which Democrats are confident remain deeply troubling to a majority of voters. They hope they can persuade voters that Mr. Biden is actually the problem.Voter attitudes related to Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, among voters who said democracy was under threat, 45 percent saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Mr. Trump as such a threat.But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric seems to have already altered public opinion, even before the campaign deployed his new slogan. In another more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump’s re-election would pose a threat to democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought either candidate would be a threat to democracy.The repetition that Mr. Trump has used consistently in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.“If people think he’s inconsistent on message, he ain’t inconsistent on this message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s effort to brand Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and just look at how he pounds it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s very powerful.”David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said polling indicated Mr. Trump had “made headway with his base in this project.” But a general election, he said, is a “harder” race to convince people that his lies about Jan. 6, 2021, are true.It is “one of the reasons he’s so desperate to push the Jan. 6 trial past the election,” Mr. Axelrod said of the federal indictment charging Mr. Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States.“A parade of witnesses, including his own top aides, White House lawyers and advisers, testifying, followed by a guilty verdict, would damage him outside the base,” Mr. Axelrod said.Ruth Igielnik More