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    Republicans Place Shooting in Trump’s Narrative of Persecution

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    For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters, the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr. Trump has been telling for years.It is the story of a fearless leader surrounded by shadowy forces and intrigue, of grand conspiracies to thwart the will of the people who elected him. A narrative in which Mr. Trump, even before a gunman tried to take his life, was already a martyr.“They’re not coming after me,” he declared at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, last year in Waco, Texas. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”In the hours after the shooting — before the gunman’s name, much less a motive, was known — many Republican politicians and Trump supporters blamed Democrats and the news media. They pointed to portrayals of Mr. Trump as an authoritarian and anti-democratic force in politics, which they argued created a climate that made an attempt on his life inevitable.“Dems and their friends in the media knew exactly what they were doing” in comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Sunday in one of several accusatory posts on X about his father’s shooting.Others pointed to President Biden’s remarks on a call with donors last week in which he said, “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.” Citing the speech, Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia, wrote on X: “Joe Biden sent the orders.”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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      The Squandered Potential of Tim Scott

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week having failed to make good on his early promise as a candidate who could broaden the party coalition in a general election. And while he could still have a long career ahead of him in Republican politics, his failure to connect with the primary electorate ought to trouble those pining for a more diverse and capacious G.O.P.Mr. Scott spent much of his campaign making hard-right appeals in a vain effort to wrest a portion of his party’s base from Donald Trump. For social conservatives, he offered a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks. For immigration and crime hard-liners, he supported ending birthright citizenship and committing troops to a war in Mexico against the drug cartels. In a recent appearance in Iowa, he even broadly alleged that Chinese college students studying in America could be “reporting back to the Chinese Communist Party.” And last month, he accused President Biden of having “blood on his hands” after Hamas attacked Israel, baselessly suggesting that by releasing Iranian oil revenue ⁠as part of a prisoner swap — for humanitarian uses, under American supervision — the president might have financed the massacre.None of this separated Mr. Scott, either in substance or in the polls, from the rest of the pack. But Mr. Scott did try make his candidacy distinctive in one important way: selling Republican voters, at every opportunity, a message of racial uplift that minimizes the extent to which racism still shapes American life.On paper, Mr. Scott was well positioned to deliver it.He could have been the first Black Republican nominee. Already, he is not only the South’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, but the first the region has ever popularly elected (he won a special election in 2014 after being appointed to his seat a year earlier by a rival 2024 candidate, Nikki Haley). And over the years, he has spoken often about his experiences as a Black man. He has described being pulled over on the road some 18 times in 20 years and being stopped by the Capitol Police on the way to work even as he wore a senator’s pin.Mr. Scott makes frequent reference, too, to voices on the left who have exposed their own racism by subjecting him to stereotypes and slurs and dismissing his agency. “When I fought back against their liberal agenda,” he said in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, “they called me a prop, a token, because I disrupt their narrative.”But Mr. Scott always sweetened these disclosures with a spoonful of sugar. “Is there racism in America?” he asked at a July campaign event. “Of course there is. Are the systems of our country racist? I don’t think so.” While racism lingers on, in other words, the strides we’ve made since slavery and the civil rights movement have been so great that we should deride those who argue it defines American identity or still structures our present.His own life story ⁠is, as far as he’s concerned, strong evidence in support of this idea. “Growing up in a single-parent household, I wondered if the American dream would work for a kid in the inner city,” he said at September’s Republican debate. “I’ve got good news for every single child, whether you’re in the inner cities of Chicago or the rural parts of Iowa. America and the dream — it is alive, it is well and it is healthy.”While most Republicans surely agreed that Mr. Scott’s background fatally undermined the critiques their opponents have been making of America and its history — “I am living proof that our founders were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled,” he told a crowd in Iowa early this year — they weren’t enthralled by his campaign, perhaps because Mr. Scott’s message of racial uplift doesn’t have more than a cerebral appeal to an overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. Thus far, the party’s voters have preferred to get their defenses of American history straight and neat from Mr. Trump and Ron DeSantis, without the detours into personal narrative that Mr. Scott offered up.Mr. Scott insists often that he doesn’t want people to think about his race at all. “People are fixated on my color,” he said to Politico in a 2018 profile. “I’m just not.” There’s a similar line in “America: A Redemption Story,” Mr. Scott’s 2022 entry in a now-venerable genre, the pre-campaign memoir. “Today we live in a world that thrives on creating narratives of division,” it reads. “But my childhood and my life have not been defined by my blackness.”The book itself suggested otherwise — that Mr. Scott was not only as fixated on his own color as the critics he scorned but also as determined to make use of it. The words “Black” or “African American” appear 75 times, or once every three-and-a-half pages — often within its capsule biographies of Black figures like Jackie Robinson and Madam C.J. Walker, whom Mr. Scott evidently sees as his historic peers. In truth and by design, the book is as much a kind of Black History Month reader as it is about Mr. Scott’s own life. And even that material begins with his grandfather teaching his mother how to pick cotton.Ben Carson’s more successful run for the Republican nomination in 2016 seemed to have some of what Mr. Scott’s campaign lacked — though almost forgotten today, Mr. Carson, unlike Mr. Scott, actually found his way to the top tier of contenders for a time. To be sure, the substance of Mr. Carson’s commentary on race did resemble Mr. Scott’s. In a representative interview with the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, he both denied the persistence of deep racial inequality in American society — “Race doesn’t really keep you down in this country if you get a good education” — and argued that the racism worth worrying about was coming from his progressive critics. “It’s mostly with the progressive movement who will look at someone like me, and because of the color of my pigment, they decide that there’s a certain way that I’m supposed to think,” he said. “And if I don’t think that way, I’m an Uncle Tom and they heap all kinds of hatred on you. That, to me, is racism.”But unlike Mr. Scott, Mr. Carson rarely discussed race of his own volition, on or off the stump. “Asked about it,” Molly Ball observed in The Atlantic, “he tends to deflect, rejecting racial distinctions as divisive.” And to the extent that Mr. Carson’s campaign did attempt to harness race to its advantage, as it did in a pair of conservative talk radio ads it aired before South Carolina’s primary that year, it did so the old-fashioned way: appealing to the racial anxieties and outright racism of white right-of-center voters. One of the South Carolina ads “inveighed against affirmative action as ‘racial entitlement’ while the other depicted Black crime as a ‘crisis,’” Ms. Ball wrote. “Taken together, the ads were a striking attempt to provoke white voters’ racial attitudes by a candidate who has otherwise avoided the subject.”Mr. Carson’s own bootstraps story, meanwhile, mirrors Mr. Scott’s in certain respects — both men came to success from poverty and broken homes — but Mr. Carson’s personal narrative was also a tale of Christian redemption. As he tells it, he worked past the anger and violence of his youth through studying the Bible, which made him famous among the conservative evangelicals who would take an interest in his campaign long before he entered politics.Mr. Scott has nothing like that story in his own narrative — a comparatively simple rags-to-Republican tale about the virtues of hard work and rejecting racial victimhood that, while appealing in the abstract to essentially everyone on the right, wasn’t compelling enough to excite any important constituency in particular. So where Mr. Carson ran largely as a conventional evangelical Republican candidate — racial dog whistles and all — Mr. Scott actively tried and failed to make a race-based message connect.It is important to note that Mr. Scott — a descendant of slaves who is, by all accounts, still warmly received in the North Charleston community where he grew up — is no less fully and authentically Black for being a conservative or having used his identity to sell conservatism. Criticisms of Mr. Scott on this front are inane. The Black community is ideologically diverse — and, in fact, substantively more conservative than the Democratic margins among Black voters might suggest.The pool of Black voters who are skeptical or hostile to the progressive movements that Mr. Scott reviles or who believe, as he does, that unshackling capitalism further might liberate struggling Black communities, may be even larger — and it includes Democrats and independents. This is what might have made Mr. Scott such a formidable general election contender: Given the thin electoral margins in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, even mild slippage rightward among Black voters could be potentially catastrophic for Democrats.But luckily for them, the G.O.P. is still Donald Trump’s party, and nothing Mr. Scott could have said or done would have changed that.Mr. Scott, in fact, has taken pains to frame himself as an occasionally critical but generally loyal friend of the former president, going as far as absolving him of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In his campaign memoir, Mr. Scott describes being invited to the White House for a conciliatory chat after publicly condemning Mr. Trump for what he said after the violence in Charlottesville. When Mr. Trump asked him what he could to do make amends to those he’d offended, Mr. Scott sensed an opportunity to plug Opportunity Zones — tax incentives for private investment in specific high poverty areas, a policy idea he’d nurtured for some time.“The next day, I was stunned to read about President Trump answering a question as he boarded Air Force One,” he writes. “When asked about how our meeting went, he started talking about the importance of rebuilding lower-income neighborhoods through Opportunity Zones.”Opportunity Zones eventually found their way into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and are talked up today, by Mr. Scott, as an example of how rejecting the politics of racial outrage — and, implicitly, countenancing the racism of Republican politicians like Mr. Trump — might pave the way toward making material, market-driven gains for racial minorities. The fact that nearly half of the tax breaks offered under the program thus far had gone to just 1 percent of the designated zones by the end of 2020 — and to projects like a $600 million Ritz-Carlton development in Portland, Ore. — is of no consequence to him.This is Mr. Scott’s dream and, by his lights, America’s: the notion that we might continue making racial progress (even though there’s not much left to make) with the business-friendly policy tools already available to us, and without fundamentally reworking our politics or our economy. It is a thoroughly conservative vision that was offered by a capable conservative spokesman — one who won the respect of Republican voters but not nearly enough of their support.Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian.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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      Biden’s First Task at HUD: Rebuilding Trump-Depleted Ranks

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      An exodus of top-level officials during the previous administration has left the Department of Housing and Urban Development short of expertise even as its role expands.WASHINGTON — During the 2020 campaign, President Biden pledged to transform the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a frontline weapon in the fight against racial and economic inequality.But when his transition team took over last fall, it found a department in crisis.The agency’s community planning and development division, the unit responsible for a wide array of federal disaster relief and homelessness programs, had been so weakened by an exodus of career officials that it was faltering under the responsibility of managing tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid, according to members of the team.And it was not just the planning unit. In some divisions, as many as 25 to 30 percent of jobs were unfilled or occupied by interim employees. The losses were concentrated among the ranks of highest-skilled managers and policy experts, many of whom had been overruled, sidelined, exiled and eventually driven away under President Donald J. Trump and his appointees.Roughly 10 percent of the agency’s work force left during Mr. Trump’s first years in office, according to agency estimates. But that came on top of a decade-long decline resulting from attrition, poor recruitment and budget deals cut by the Obama administration with a Republican-led Congress at the time that prevented the agency from replacing departing employees.As a result, the agency’s total head count fell by 20 percent, to 6,837 from 8,576, from 2012 to 2019.Other cabinet departments, like the Education Department and Environmental Protection Agency, face similar problems. But the staffing shortfall at the housing department is a case study in the personnel issues generated in part by Mr. Trump’s conflicts with experienced career government employees who carry out programs and policies. And it is especially worrisome to Biden administration officials because it threatens to undermine their hope of transforming the agency into a central player in the president’s efforts to put more focus on social justice issues.“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Marcia L. Fudge, Mr. Biden’s new housing secretary, told a Senate committee last week during budget hearings. “Until we can start to build up our staff, and build up our capacity, we are at risk of not doing the things we should do.”Ms. Fudge, a former congresswoman from the Cleveland area, was there to urge lawmakers to adopt the agency’s 2021 budget request, which includes money to hire hundreds of managers and skilled technical support staff.The problem comes as the department’s responsibilities are growing along with the scale of the programs it manages.The administration’s relief package, passed in March, included $21.55 billion for emergency rental assistance, $5 billion in emergency housing vouchers, $5 billion for homelessness assistance and $850 million for tribal and rural housing, on top of a similar amount allocated under the Trump administration.Some of the funding is routed through the Treasury Department. Even so, it amounts to the greatest increase in housing and related programs in decades. Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, now the subject of intense negotiations on Capitol Hill, would provide $213 billion more.A Maricopa County constable preparing eviction orders last year in Phoenix. The Biden administration’s coronavirus relief package included funding for emergency rental assistance and homelessness assistance, among others.John Moore/Getty ImagesThe department has long sought to shake off the legacy of scandals. And under Mr. Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants who had managed to hold on during other crises, current and former officials said.One former career official, who departed in early 2020 for a job at a less embattled federal agency, estimated that two-thirds of the most experienced employees he interacted with day to day had left over the previous three years.“It’s more than just the number of valuable staff they have lost, it’s all that expertise that was driven out,” said Lisa Rice, the president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a group in Washington that has pressured the department to bring more antidiscrimination cases.“It will set back the department for years,” she said. “HUD just doesn’t have the in-house legacy knowledge they used to have.”Mr. Biden’s transition team, made up of Obama-era veterans, deployed several of their most experienced members into interim leadership roles to plug the gap at the planning unit. Ms. Fudge, in turn, has installed experienced officials in other hard-hit divisions, although it has been slow going, as evidenced by the dozens of vacancies still visible on its online organizational chart.The losses are seriously affecting the response to the pandemic, Ms. Fudge told the Senate hearing. They are hindering distribution of emergency aid to low-income tenants and leaving many localities without guidance from experienced HUD employees on how to run new programs funded by the flood of coronavirus assistance cash, she said.In November, the department’s inspector general identified numerous “leadership gaps” at the headquarters, concluding that “employees often do not have the right skill sets, tools or capacity to perform the range of functions” needed to do their jobs.Many of the problems the watchdog identified were chronic, such as an ineffective human resources department. But about two dozen current and former department officials interviewed for this article blamed the chaos and disruption on Mr. Carson, who once admitted the job was more complicated than his previous gig — brain surgery.Mr. Carson, an unsuccessful 2016 Republican presidential candidate, took little interest in the day-to-day operations of the department, and was often informed of key hires by White House officials after the fact, according to people who worked with him. He often ceded control to political appointees, some embedded inside his department, others working from the White House, who pursued their own agendas.Under Ben Carson, the Trump administration’s housing secretary, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“People like to make Carson a scapegoat,” said Armstrong Williams, his spokesman and political adviser. “People moved on from HUD for all kinds of reasons. Blaming him is a cop-out.”Nonetheless, three of the agency’s divisions were especially crippled under his watch. One was the unit responsible for overseeing disbursement of federal block grants to states hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters. Another was the homeless assistance operation. The third was the fair housing division, whose job is to enforce federal laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity and disability.This was the unit Mr. Trump singled out for attack in the 2020 campaign, stoking white grievance by claiming that an initiative to review discriminatory local zoning restrictions was a war on suburbia.The fair housing division, led by a Texas Republican operative named Anna Maria Farías, became an especially toxic workplace, according to three former staff members with knowledge of the situation.Shortly after taking over, Ms. Farías informed her staff that she intended to root out “Obama plants” and froze antidiscrimination investigations involving large residential construction companies, including Toll Brothers and Epcon Communities, and an inquiry into Facebook’s online advertising division, among others.As part of the overall strategy of reducing regulatory action, Ms. Farías sidelined two of the unit’s most experienced managers, Bryan Greene, who had served as interim chief of the division, and Tim Smyth, a young lawyer working on some of the department’s most complex cases involving housing discrimination.Ms. Farías bypassed Mr. Greene, and stopped inviting him to meetings of his own staff. She marginalized Mr. Smyth in similar fashion, according to officials who worked with both men. The pair eventually left after being reassigned to jobs unrelated to major civil rights cases.Ms. Farías did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Carson’s political staff aides, housed on the agency’s 10th floor, were, at times, unaware of these machinations, and not even knowledgeable about basic departmental functions, according to people who worked with them at the time.After Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017, several Carson aides expressed surprise when told the housing department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance for tenants and homeowners whose dwellings were damaged by the storms, according to an aide who was present at a briefing session.For a while, their lack of knowledge worked to the benefit of career officials, who quietly slipped in Obama-era provisions to the aid rules — including a stipulation that rebuilding efforts conformed to green building standards.A flooded neighborhood in Beaumont, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Several aides to Mr. Carson were unaware that the department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times But the White House quickly caught on, further fueling suspicions there about the presence of a so-called deep state hostile to Mr. Trump’s agenda. Mr. Trump, in turn, began seeking opportunities in attacking the agency to make political points, slow-walking $20 billion in relief for Puerto Rico, then stonewalling investigators, according to the department’s inspector general.Frustrated staff members departed for private-sector jobs, taking their expertise with them, most notably Stan Gimont, a 32-year agency veteran with deep knowledge of federal disaster relief programs who was the top career official in the planning division.A long-running ideological fight over how best to deal with the worsening homelessness crisis resulted in other departures, led by the division’s director, Anne Oliva, in 2017. Others fled after religious conservatives began to focus on cultural rather than housing issues, like an edict in 2020 allowing grantees to deny shelter to transgender people.Even units with no policymaking roles were affected by the staffing shortfall.Late last year, the agency’s inspector warned that a 28 percent vacancy rate at the information technology division could compromise the personal information of millions of aid recipients. In her testimony, Ms. Fudge blamed the staffing problems at the unit for slowing the response to a recent virus attack that infected 750 agency computers.Ms. Fudge has expressed frustration at the amount of time she has to spend on recruiting and retaining staff, aides said. And while she had success wooing several high-profile staff though discretionary political hiring, the overall pace of appointments has been sluggish, and career civil servants, like Mr. Greene, have proved difficult to reel back in.Lawmakers in both parties, while expressing confidence in Ms. Fudge, said they were worried the department’s staffing problems might leave it unable to manage all the programs it had been given control over, especially if Mr. Biden’s big infrastructure bill passes.“I’m concerned that HUD lacks the capacity to manage and oversee such an influx of funding, regardless of how well intentioned those proposals may be,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who helped shield the department from deep budget cuts proposed by Mr. Trump and backed by Mr. Carson, said at the recent hearing. More