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      How Dana Perino, G.O.P. Debate Moderator, Walks a Fine Line at Fox News

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      The former press secretary in the Bush White House will moderate the next Republican debate. She’s managed to rise at Fox without being a Trump supplicant.Dana Perino can punch and parry with the best of them. But she could be better at ducking.In 2008, when Ms. Perino was the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, she got clocked in the face with a boom microphone in the scuffle that broke out after a journalist threw his shoes at Mr. Bush.“I had a black eye for six weeks,” Ms. Perino, now an anchor for Fox News, said in an interview last week from her sun-dappled Upper West Side apartment.That kind of fracas — and the nearly two years she spent taking questions from reporters in the White House briefing room — may be good preparation for her next act: moderating the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday in Simi Valley, Calif.It will be the biggest moment for Ms. Perino at Fox News since she began co-hosting “The Five” in 2011. Not known for being as provocative or partisan as many of her colleagues behind the desk, Ms. Perino, 51, has spent a good part of the last decade trying to thrive as a Bush Republican working for a network where loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump is often the ticket to high ratings and the career advancement that accompanies them.Ms. Perino, who also co-hosts the two-hour morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor. She says she modeled her transition after two other former West Wing staff members who had made the transition — George Stephanopoulos, the ABC News anchor who served as Bill Clinton’s communications director, and Diane Sawyer, also of ABC, who was an assistant to Richard M. Nixon.Ms. Perino at her final briefing as the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush on Jan. 16, 2009.Doug Mills/The New York TimesCurrent and former colleagues said that she has managed to persevere at Fox by being neither a Trump supplicant nor fierce critic. During the raucous discussions on “The Five,” she can often be seen ducking the fray, flashing a knowing smile as her co-hosts mock Mr. Trump’s liberal antagonists.And she feels no need to deliver the pro-Trump monologues that other conservative hosts have made a staple of their programs.“If she tried to fake it, she knows people would see through her,” said Tony Fratto, a former Bush administration official who worked with Ms. Perino in the White House and remains a friend. Mr. Fratto said that Ms. Perino’s independence was something she was determined to keep while working her way up at the network.“She’s very rational and respectful of people with different views,” he said.Ms. Perino is one of the few Fox anchors to have never interviewed Mr. Trump. And she doesn’t appear especially eager to do so.When Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News over its promotion of conspiracy theories relating to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, some of Ms. Perino texts with her colleagues became public, revealing how little she thought of the former president and his claims that extensive voter fraud cost him the election. She said as much on air as well and told Mr. Fratto, who was representing Dominion at the time, in one text exchange how she was being threatened. “The maga people are crushing me for it,” she wrote, “and I even have death threats now.”Asked last week whether she would prefer it if Mr. Trump participated in this week’s debate — he will skip it, as he did the debate last month in Milwaukee — Ms. Perino wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm.“Sure,” she said. If she were advising Mr. Trump, she said, she would encourage him to go. But she also said she believed his absence presents his rivals with opportunities to break out in ways that have eluded them so far.She said she believed that the last debate, which was hosted by her Fox News colleagues Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, was not particularly successful for the candidates because they spent so much time interrupting each other.“The candidates made a decision to break the rules, and to talk over each other,” she said.She will not shy away from interrupting them if they do the same, she said. And she does not fear playing the role of schoolmarm if she needs to. (Her co-moderator in the debate, Stuart Varney of Fox Business, is no shrinking violet either.)Ms. Perino, the co-host of the morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“I’m happy to be that,” she said, adding that she hopes that isn’t necessary. “I think that for them, they should not want that either, right, because it didn’t help them. If you think about that debate, there was no consensus of who won.”Preparing for the debate can be a thankless task, as many moderators before her have discovered. The candidates often dismiss the carefully drafted questions the moderators have written.Friends and former colleagues said that Ms. Perino has a knack for preparedness that exceeds most.“When she would prepare President Bush for press conferences, you’d go through the anticipated questions,” said Ed Gillespie, who served as counselor to the president during Mr. Bush’s second term. “A question would come, and it would be one that Dana said would come. And then there would be another that Dana said would come. And a third. And every single question would be one that Dana said would come.”President George W. Bush with Ms. Perino in the White House briefing room in August 2007, after announcing that she would be taking over as press secretary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHer Fox colleague Greg Gutfeld, a fellow host on “The Five,” said he pokes fun at her for how she comes to the show armed with a notebook full of ideas based on the news articles that are driving the day. “Unlike me, she reads the articles. She’s like the grade-A student in your class,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “She doesn’t throw it in your face. But she’s prepared.”Former colleagues said that Ms. Perino wasn’t one to pull her punches when it came to briefing the president, which she always came to extensively prepped.“If you’re preparing the president, you have to do it nicely, of course, since he’s the one who was elected,” said Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state during Mr. Bush’s second term. “But you also have to be willing to say, ‘Mr. President, that answer isn’t going to fly.’ Dana did that. And I think President Bush respected her for it.”Ms. Perino’s second act as a news anchor puts her back where she started her career right out of college. After working as a disc jockey on the overnight shift at a country music station in Pueblo, Colo., she graduated from the University of Southern Colorado and moved to the Midwest, eventually landing a job as a reporter for a television station in Champaign, Ill. She decided a life of covering local news — holiday parades, municipal government meetings — wasn’t for her.“I didn’t see how you could get ahead quickly. And I had an ambition,” she explained, adding that she never saw herself becoming “the replacement for Tom Brokaw.” When she left local news, she said, she thought that would be the end of her time in television news. “I really thought if I do this I’ll never work in TV again.”Her first big job in the Bush White House came in 2006 when, after holding a series of communications jobs throughout Washington, she was hired at age 34 as the deputy press secretary under Tony Snow, a former host of “Fox News Sunday.” He stepped down in 2007, after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Mr. Bush named Ms. Perino as the new press secretary.“She can handle you all,” the former president told the room of journalists. Now, she is the journalist. And the G.O.P. presidential candidates will have to handle her. More

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      David McCormick Is Set to Announce Republican Senate Bid in Pennsylvania

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      Brutal primary fights weakened the party’s nominees in several states last year. Now, as David McCormick runs again for Senate in the battleground state, he appears to have cleared the field.To avoid costly Senate battleground defeats in 2024, Republicans have a plan: run like Democrats.That means trying to replicate Democrats’ success at avoiding the kinds of vicious intraparty battles that have weakened Republican nominees in recent years.It remains to be seen whether the party’s attempt to sidestep fault lines between Trumpian loyalists and traditional conservatives will be effective, but the strategy’s first victory could come in Pennsylvania, where David McCormick appears to have cleared the Republican primary field of any major challengers.Mr. McCormick — a former hedge fund executive who lost one of the party’s nastiest and most expensive Senate primaries to Dr. Mehmet Oz last year — announced his new campaign on Thursday evening in Pittsburgh. He is aiming to unseat Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat who has announced plans to seek a fourth six-year term in office.“The truth is both parties need to be shaken up — what they’re doing just isn’t working” Mr. McCormick said during a 15-minute speech in which he portrayed himself as “the only candidate in this race that can change Washington.”Senate Republicans have begun similar efforts to clear the path for Gov. Jim Justice in West Virginia, where Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, is weighing a re-election bid. Mr. Justice, however, faces a primary fight against Representative Alex Mooney, who has vowed to oppose the “establishment swamp.”In Montana, Senator Steve Daines, who is the chairman of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, has endorsed Tim Sheehy’s bid to take on Senator Jon Tester, the incumbent Democrat. But Mr. Sheehy, a wealthy businessman and military veteran, could face a primary challenge from Representative Matt Rosendale, who lost to Mr. Tester in 2018 and said last month that Montanans should decide the race, “not Mitch McConnell and the D.C. cartel.”But in Pennsylvania, Mr. McCormick appears to have assuaged concerns from the right. He announced endorsements from all eight Pennsylvania Republicans in Congress. One of his competitors in the Senate primary race last year, Kathy Barnette, is working for Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 presidential bid.And crucially, Doug Mastriano, a far-right state senator who was viewed as a potential Senate candidate from the Trumpian wing of the party, has declined to run.Mr. Mastriano appeared on the verge of endorsing Mr. McCormick after meeting with him and his wife, Dina Powell, a former Goldman Sachs executive who served in the Bush and Trump administrations. During their meeting, the two men found common ground over their military service, according to two McCormick allies familiar with the conversation.“It’s time to unify,” Mr. Mastriano, who lost the governor’s race by 15 percentage points last year, said on Monday in an interview with Real America’s Voice, a conservative news outlet. “If he’s our nominee, I’m backing him.”Doug Mastriano, a far-right state senator who was viewed as a potential Senate candidate from the Trumpian wing of the party, has suggested that he would support Mr. McCormick’s candidacy.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesStill, Mr. McCormick’s ability to avoid a primary — at least so far — does not necessarily signal a new willingness by Republicans to put aside their differences.Instead, the lack of a serious contender may stem from Mr. McCormick’s continued politicking in Pennsylvania, and a reluctance from others to take on the enormous challenge of unseating an incumbent.Pennsylvania Democrats argue that President Biden’s unpopularity will not be as much of a problem in their state. Mr. Biden has already traveled to Pennsylvania at least nine times this year, and Mr. Casey has greeted him at several of those stops. Mr. Casey helped John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro campaign in their successful bids for Senate and governor last year, and aides to both men said they were eager to return the favor.The race last year to replace the retiring Senator Patrick J. Toomey ended up costing more than $360 million, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group. Similar amounts could be spent in 2024, when Pennsylvania — unlike Montana and West Virginia — will double as a top battleground in the presidential race.Mr. McCormick will be able to bring his own financial firepower to the race: He earned a salary of more than $22 million at his most recent job and listed assets worth between $116 million and $290 million on his candidate financial disclosure last year.His deep pockets were on display on Thursday in Pittsburgh, where his announcement on the fifth floor of the Heinz History Center — an event space overlooking the Allegheny River — included passed appetizers of chicken tacos, pierogies and kielbasa and bacon-wrapped sweet potatoes, a buffet of Tuscan antipasto and “farmers crudités,” a cocktail bar and a live band that played Taylor Swift, Van Morrison and other rock covers.Mr. McCormick addressed his audience of about 200 people from a stage framed by giant U.S. flag and behind a lectern adorned with a placard with only his first name: Dave.“America is in decline — economically, militarily, spiritually — you see it, you know it, you feel it,” Mr. McCormick said. “I’m here to tell you tonight it doesn’t have to be that way. With your help, with your support, with your leadership, we can have a much brighter future ahead.”Still, many Republicans contend that Pennsylvania is not among the three states where the party has the best chance to win back a majority that has eluded them since 2021. Republicans’ clearest opportunities to flip seats appear to be in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia, all of which Donald J. Trump easily won in 2020.But Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, raised eyebrows this year when he added Pennsylvania to his list of top priorities. Some Republicans involved in efforts to recruit Senate candidates have privately wondered whether Mr. McConnell’s statement was meant to help persuade Mr. McCormick to enter the race.“Dave has the guts — and the money — to run,” said Doug McLinko, a county commissioner in Bradford County who describes himself as a “hard-core Republican on ballot security” and a Trump loyalist.Mr. McLinko did not support Mr. McCormick in the 2022 race but said he would next year because he had gotten to know the businessman.Even after losing the primary last year, Mr. McCormick helped Pennsylvania Republicans campaign and raise money for the general election, and he has since continued those efforts.His political committee, Pennsylvania Rising, has contributed more than $100,000 to conservative candidates and causes since last year. Multiple Republicans described Mr. McCormick as a ubiquitous presence at state party events since the 2022 election.Jackie Kulback, the Republican chairwoman in Cambria County, said she was backing Mr. McCormick partly because her choice last year, Jeff Bartos, was not running, but also because she had been impressed by Mr. McCormick when he spoke at a recent event about his private-sector experience in China.“I like to win and try to get behind winners,” Ms. Kulback said. “Not many have Dave McCormick’s résumé, and I just feel like he’s the whole package.”Mr. Trump, who backed Dr. Oz last year, attacked Mr. McCormick over that same experience in China during the primary race and derided him as a globalist, which helped sink Mr. McCormick’s campaign.The former president has not endorsed anyone in the Pennsylvania race this time. A campaign spokesman declined to comment.Mr. McCormick lost the primary by fewer than 1,000 votes. He earned good will among some Pennsylvania Republicans by not pressing for a recount, said Sam DeMarco, the Allegheny County Republican chairman. Mr. DeMarco helped collect signatures from more than half of the state party’s 67 county chairs supporting Mr. McCormick’s candidacy.“I’m tired of losing,” Mr. DeMarco said. “David is someone who can appeal to both sides of the party.”Mr. McCormick was largely unknown in Pennsylvania political circles before last year, partly because he spent much of his adult life outside the state. Democrats are already attacking him over his residency, a strategy that helped torpedo Dr. Oz.Last year, Mr. McCormick lost the Senate primary race to Dr. Mehmet Oz by fewer than 1,000 votes. He earned good will among some Pennsylvania Republicans by not pressing for a recount.Matt Rourke/Associated PressOn Thursday, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party described Mr. McCormick in a news release as a “Wall Street mega-millionaire who is lying about living in Pennsylvania.”Pennsylvania Democrats also criticized Mr. McCormick on Wednesday for deleting from his YouTube page a 2022 interview in which he said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was a “huge step forward and a huge victory for the protection of life.”“He does not reside in Pennsylvania and has built his career as a Wall Street executive, advocating for policies that support job outsourcing and tax cuts primarily benefiting himself and his Wall Street associates,” said Sharif Street, a state senator and chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.But McCormick’s allies insist he is ready to beat back residency questions and to appeal to suburban women — and other voters turned off by Mr. Trump’s brand of politics — by leaning on his private-sector experience and his personal background.“I’m Pennsylvania First,” Mr. McCormick said Thursday, adopting Mr. Trump’s “America First” slogan.Mr. McCormick grew up in Bloomsburg, Pa., about an hour southwest of Scranton, Mr. Biden’s birthplace. He graduated from West Point, served five years in the Army — where he was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 — and earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Princeton.He returned to Pennsylvania and joined FreeMarkets, a Pittsburgh-based internet auction company. After the company was sold in 2004, Mr. McCormick held multiple roles in the Bush administration.In 2009, Mr. McCormick moved to the Northeast and joined Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund in Westport, Conn., that manages $150 billion in assets. After becoming chief executive in 2017, he resigned in 2022 and turned his attention to a Senate campaign.As much as Mr. McCormick may try to focus on issues, he will also have to answer questions about Mr. Trump and seek to satisfy the competing factions inside his own party.“If anyone is drawing the conclusion that a clear path for McCormick is because fractures are gone and we’re all singing ‘Kumbaya,’ they’re sadly mistaken,” said Sam Faddis, who leads a coalition of right-wing activist groups in the state, adding that he liked Mr. McCormick but remained on the fence about his candidacy.Mr. Faddis added, “The division between the grass roots and the establishment is massive in Pennsylvania, and massive nationwide.” More

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      Donald Trump Tests Pro-Life America

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      On Sunday, Donald Trump sent shock waves through the Republican primary when an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” aired in which he said that Ron DeSantis did a “terrible thing” and made a “terrible mistake” when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It’s the kind of statement that could end virtually any other Republican presidential campaign. Opposition to abortion rights, after all, is every bit as fundamental to Republican identity as support for abortion rights is to Democratic identity. Breaking with the party on that issue is the kind of heresy that no national politician can survive.Or is it? When it comes to Republican identity, is support for Trump, the person, now more central than any other issue, including abortion?My colleague Michelle Goldberg speaks often of the distinction between movements that seek converts and movements that hunt heretics. It’s an extremely helpful one. Cultural and political projects centered around winning converts tend to be healthier. They’re outward-facing and bridge-building. Heretic hunters, by contrast, tend to be angrier. They turn movements inward. They believe in addition by subtraction.The G.O.P. under Trump hunts heretics. Oddly enough, it has grown more intolerant even as it has become less ideological. The reason is simple: Trump is ideologically erratic but personally relentless. He demands absolute loyalty and support. He relishes driving dissenters out of the party or, ideally, into political retirement.Trump presents the pro-life movement with multiple heresy-hunting problems. First, and most obviously, if support for Trump is the central plank of the new G.O.P. orthodoxy, then the pro-life movement will find its cause subordinated to Trump’s ambitions as long as he reigns. If he believes the pro-life movement helps him, the movement will enjoy the substantial benefits of his largess — for example, the nomination of pro-life judges, including the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. But if he perceives the movement to be hurting his political ambitions — as his comments to Welker suggest he feels now — then its members will be cast as the heretics and will stand outside, in the cold, complaining about their lost influence to a Republican public that will not care.Second, as long as the Trumpian right shapes the pro-life movement more than the other way around, the movement will adopt many of the same tactics. It won’t merely serve Trump, it will also imitate Trump. Every movement adopts the character of its leaders, and if Trump is the leader of the G.O.P. and by extension the pro-life movement, then his manners and methods will dominate the discourse.Finally, and more important, if the backlash to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision teaches us anything, it’s that the pro-life movement cannot be hunting heretics. As a strategy, heretic hunting is far less costly to the side with the more popular position, which can afford its purity, at least for a time. The same impulse can be utterly destructive to those in the minority, as the pro-life movement clearly is now.As I discussed in a Times Opinion Audio short last week, the Guttmacher Institute published new research suggesting that the number of legal abortions has actually increased after Dobbs. Even though abortion is illegal or sharply restricted in 14 states, there were roughly 10 percent more abortions in the remaining 36 states and Washington, D.C., in the first six months of 2023 than there were when abortion was legal across the country in 2020.At the same time that abortion numbers rise, the electoral results for the pro-life movement have been exceedingly grim. When abortion referendums have been placed on statewide ballots, the pro-choice movement has won. Every time. Even in states as red as Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The general polling numbers, moreover, are disastrous. There has been a marked increase in support for abortion rights positions, and there’s evidence that the pro-life movement began its sharp decline during the Trump administration. After years of stability in abortion polling, support for the pro-life cause is at an extraordinarily low ebb.In this context, heretic hunting is disastrous. The pro-life movement has to seek converts. Its first three priorities should be to persuade, persuade and, yes, persuade. Donald Trump is not the man for that job, not only because he’s a bully and a heretic hunter but also because it is quite clear that he is not convictionally pro-life. He is conveniently pro-life, and the moment it stops being convenient, he stops having a meaningful opinion either way.How would someone who is convictionally pro-life and also eager to persuade have responded to Kristen Welker’s questions? Such a person wouldn’t condemn pro-life laws unless those laws were poorly written or had glaring flaws. Instead, he or she would use a challenging question from Welker as an opportunity to persuade, in terms that even skeptics could understand.For example, when speaking of so-called heartbeat bills that ban abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy, one could connect the concept to one of the happiest moments in parents’ lives — the first moment they heard their child’s heartbeat. Parents feel that joy because it is tangible evidence of life and health. Even for a parent who is anxious, or financially stressed, or caught in a terrible relationship, that heartbeat still signals a life that is precious.If a politician is challenged to describe the kind of pro-life legislation he’d seek in a nation or state that increasingly favors abortion rights, he could emphasize how a holistic pro-life movement can work with pro-choice allies on legislation that would improve the lives of mothers and children. It turns out that our nation can reduce abortions without banning abortions, and it did so for decades before the abortion rate rose under Trump.To take one example, in 2021, Mitt Romney advanced a child allowance proposal that would provide families with $4,200 per year per child for each child up to age 6, and $3,000 per year per child between the ages of 6 and 17. Crucially, benefits would begin before birth, helping financially distressed families to prepare to care for their new children.Not only would the plan cut childhood poverty (while paying for itself through cuts elsewhere), it would almost certainly also reduce the number of abortions. Writing in Public Discourse, the Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone analyzed the impact of financial support for mothers on abortion rates and found that not only does financial support decrease abortion, that decrease is also most pronounced in jurisdictions with the fewest restrictions on abortion.That’s what persuasion can look like — defending the source of your convictions by explaining and demonstrating love for kids and moms while also looking for areas of agreement and common purpose. But does any of that sound like Donald Trump to you?Despite generating interest from conservatives and progressives, Romney’s proposal went nowhere. An astute analysis by Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic noted that the Biden administration had a competing child tax credit plan and Romney himself was an “isolated figure” in his party. While some Republicans reject direct cash transfers, it’s also true that working with Romney meant crossing Trump, and that, of course, would be heresy.In the days after the Dobbs decision, I wrote a piece arguing that when Roe was reversed, the right wasn’t ready. A Trump movement animated by rage and fear wasn’t prepared to embrace life and love. And now the pro-life movement is forced to ponder: Is Donald Trump more important to the G.O.P. than even the cause of life itself? Is he under any circumstances the best ambassador for a cause that’s already losing ground?For a generation, the pro-life movement was powerful enough to hunt heretics right out of the Republican Party. Now, if it clashes with Trump, it might find itself the heretic. And if the movement is that weak — if it is that beholden to such a corrupt and cruel man — then we might look back at the Dobbs decision not as a great victory for the pro-life cause, but rather as the beginning of a long defeat, one of a movement that forgot how to persuade. More

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      It’s Not a Race, Yet, in the Republican Primary

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      Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.Reba Saldanha/ReutersDonald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.On paper, Mr. Trump faces greater risks than Mr. Bush did — including the risk of imprisonment. On the trail, he’s relatively weak in Iowa, where his recent comments about abortion — he called a six-week ban a “terrible thing” — might raise additional skepticism from the state’s religious conservatives. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in Iowa (roughly 45-15) is quite similar to where Mr. Bush stood in New Hampshire at this time 24 years ago.Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump hasn’t consolidated the support of Republican elites. Unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. DeSantis is not a mere factional candidate. There remains a chance, unlikely though it may seem today, that Mr. Trump’s skeptics could consolidate against him, perhaps fueled by an unprecedented criminal trial in the heart of the primary season.But to this point, the theoretical risks to Mr. Trump haven’t materialized. More than anything, this probably reflects his unique strengths. He’s a former president, not the son of a former president. Perhaps this race is more like a president seeking re-election than a typical open, contested primary. At the very least, his resilience in the face of electoral defeat and criminal indictment is a powerful indication of his unusual standing.And in contrast with Mr. McCain at this stage in the 2000 race, Mr. Trump’s opposition is well known. It’s probably fair to say that Mr. DeSantis has faded more than he has been outright defeated, so there’s room for a resurgence — something like Mr. McCain’s comeback in 2008. But the easiest path to surge in a primary is usually to be discovered by voters for the first time, and that path will not be available to the likes of Mr. DeSantis, Mike Pence and Chris Christie.The winner of the first debate might have been Nikki Haley, but she represents something of a best case for Mr. Trump: moderate and strong enough to peel away anti-Trump votes from Mr. DeSantis; far too moderate to pose a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis or to win the nomination.So while history and today’s circumstances suggest a path toward a tighter race, it’s worth being frank about what we’re watching today. This race currently has many of the features of a noncompetitive contest, like an overwhelming polling lead, a leading candidate who doesn’t need to debate and party leadership that’s unwilling to attack the front-runner, despite major reservations. It’s a lot like what we see in the Democratic race, which is not considered competitive. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in the latest polls is getting about as large as President Biden’s recent leads over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Of course, there are several ways in which the Republican contest is different from the Democratic one. Unlike Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has mainstream challengers. The G.O.P. race is closer in the early states, where Mr. Trump is beneath 50 percent. If Mr. DeSantis beat Mr. Trump in Iowa, perhaps Republicans could rapidly coalesce around him, much as moderates did for Mr. Biden against Bernie Sanders in 2020. And there is the extraordinary prospect of a federal trial in March. Together, it’s easy to imagine how this becomes a competitive race again.But while the race might become hotly competitive in the future, it isn’t exactly a competitive one today. More

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      Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

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      Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.

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      As Ron DeSantis’s challenge to Donald Trump has seemed to wither on the vine, a piece of conventional wisdom has hardened: That DeSantis has been offering Republican voters Trumpism without the drama, but now we know Republicans love the drama, indeed they can’t live without the drama, and mere substance simply leaves them cold.In one sense, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the way that Trump’s multiplying indictments seemed to solidify his front-runner’s position, the way that he’s sucked up media oxygen and built his primary lead on the basis of what would be, for any normal politician, terrible publicity.But it elides the fact that DeSantis, like many of his rivals in the current battle for second place, hasn’t actually offered voters an equivalent of Trumpism, and certainly not the Trumpism that won the 2016 Republican primary fight and then upset Hillary Clinton.He has offered part of that package, certainly: the promise to wage war on liberalism by all available means, the harsh words for self-appointed experts and elites, the hostility to the establishment press. But he hasn’t really tried to channel another crucial element of Trumpism — the marriage of rhetorical extremism with ideological flexibility, the ability to drop a vicious insult one moment and promise to make a big, beautiful bipartisan deal the next.That was what Trump offered throughout 2016. While his rivals in the primaries impotently accused him of being unconservative, he cheerfully embraced various heterodoxies on health care and trade and taxes, selling himself as an economic moderate with the same gusto that he promised to build the wall and ban Muslim visitors from the United States.These heterodoxies were often more a salesman’s patter than a sincere policy agenda, which helps explain why his presidency was more conventionally conservative than his campaign.But now candidate Trump is back at the salesman’s game. In the last week, the man whose judicial appointees overturned Roe v. Wade and whose administration was reliably hostile to unions has condemned the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis, promised to magically bring the country together on abortion and indicated he’s going to counterprogram next week’s Republican presidential debate by showing up on the U.A.W. picket line.You can see these forays as proof that Trump thinks he’s got the nomination in the bag, that the pro-life movement especially has no choice but to support him and that he can start presenting himself as a general-election candidate early.But I suspect it’s a little more complicated than that, and that Trump’s willingness to show ideological flexibility — or, to be a bit harsher, to pander emptily to any audience he faces — has its uses in the primary campaign as well. Because what it showcases, even to primary voters who disagree with him, is an eagerness to win even at the expense of ideological consistency, an eagerness that much of American conservatism lacks.And showcasing electability is arguably even more important for Trump in 2024 than in 2016, because he was at his weakest after the 2022 midterms, which seemed to expose his election fraud obsessions as a political disaster for the G.O.P. So by moving to the center early, while DeSantis and others try to run against him from the right, he’s counteracting that narrative, trying to prove that he’s committed to victory and not just vanity. (And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.)Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. strike or a coherent pro-worker agenda? The answers are no and not really. But if showing public sympathy for workers and promising a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods are respectively an empty gesture and a dubious gambit, they are still a better political message than, say, what we got from Tim Scott, the candidate of pre-Trump conservatism, who suggested that the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. (This kind of nonsense position, invoking Reagan’s firing of federal employees in the completely different context of a private-sector fight where employers can’t fire strikers, is exactly what the term “zombie Reaganism” was invented to describe.)Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? I wouldn’t bet on it; for better or worse, I expect his transactional relationship with anti-abortion organizations to survive in a potential second term.But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans. If you aspire to restrict abortion beyond the reddest states in a politically sustainable way, you need at the very least a rhetorical modulation, a form of outreach to the wavering and conflicted. And better still would be some kind of alternative offer to Americans who are pro-choice but with reservations — with the obvious form being some new suite of family policies, some enhanced support for women who find themselves pregnant and in difficulty.But most Republicans clearly don’t want to make that kind of offer, beyond a few pro forma gestures and very modest state-level initiatives. DeSantis was quick (well, by his standards) to attack Trump for selling out the pro-life cause, and any abortion opponent should want to see Trump punished politically for that attempted sellout. But nothing in the DeSantis response was directed at the outreach problem, the political problem, the general-election problem that Trump in his unprincipled way was clearly trying to address.And so it has been throughout the primary season thus far. Trump makes big bold promises; his rivals check ideological boxes. Trump talks like a general-election candidate; his rivals bid against one another for narrower constituencies. Scott and Nikki Haley rerun the Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio campaigns; DeSantis aims to improve on Ted Cruz’s Iowa-first strategy … but the only candidate really promising the Trumpism of 2016 is, once again, Donald Trump himself.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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      Pence Calls Trump’s Populism a ‘Road to Ruin’ for the G.O.P.

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      The former vice president used a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday to call on Republicans to choose between conservatism and Donald Trump’s brand of populism.Former Vice President Mike Pence devoted an entire speech on Wednesday to what he called a “fundamental” and “unbridgeable” divide within the Republican Party — the split between Reaganite conservatives like himself and propagators of populism like former President Donald J. Trump and his imitators.Mr. Pence, who is polling in the single digits in the G.O.P. presidential primary race and lags far behind the front-runner Mr. Trump, has been warning about the dangers of populism for nearly a year. But his speech on Wednesday went further than he has gone before, casting Mr. Trump’s populism as a “road to ruin.”“Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party as we have long known it will cease to exist,” Mr. Pence said at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “And the fate of American freedom would be in doubt.”In his plea to Republicans to abandon populism and embrace conservatism, Mr. Pence said that “we have come to a Republican time for choosing.” The line echoed his hero Ronald Reagan’s 1964 televised address, “A Time for Choosing,” in which the former Hollywood actor framed that year’s presidential election as a choice between individual freedom and governmental oppression.“Republican voters face a choice,” Mr. Pence said. “I believe that choice will determine both the fate of our party and the course of our nation for years to come.”He asked if the G.O.P. will be “the party of conservatism or will we follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles? The future of this movement and this party belongs to one or the other — not both. That is because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.”Mr. Pence defined Republican populism as a trading away of time-honored principles for raw political power. He said populists trafficked in “personal grievances and performative outrage.” And he said they would “abandon American leadership on the world stage,” erode constitutional norms, jettison fiscal responsibility and wield the power of the government to punish their enemies.He connected Mr. Trump’s populist movement to a long line of progressive populists, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana. He said that progressivism and Republican populism were “fellow travelers on the same road to ruin.”And Mr. Pence named names.“Donald Trump, along with his imitators,” he said, “often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House.”In response to Mr. Pence’s speech, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement, “President Trump’s victory in 2016 exposed the massive divide between voters around the country and the establishment Beltway insiders who made terrible trade deals, allowed our southern border to become overrun and never missed an opportunity to play world cop. The conservative movement and the Republican Party have changed for the better, and nobody wants it to go back to the way it was before.”Mr. Pence, in his speech, also called out Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using state power to punish corporations for taking political stands he disagreed with — a reference to Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to strip Disney of its special tax status.Mr. Pence said he understood the frustrations that had led to populist movements both on the left and the right. He listed income inequality caused by globalization and increased automation, the opioid epidemic and the cultural demonization of conservatives. He did not include on his list the invasion of Iraq — which, unlike most Republicans, he still defends to this day.But he glossed over his own role in promoting Trumpism as Mr. Trump’s vice president as well as his traveling booster, a role Mr. Pence served throughout the 2016 campaign and all four years of the Trump presidency. Mr. Pence finally broke with him by refusing Mr. Trump’s demand that he overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.In Mr. Pence’s telling, it is Mr. Trump who has changed. He said Mr. Trump ran as a conservative in 2016 and governed as one with Mr. Pence’s help. But that story ignores inconvenient facts, including that the Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt, enacted a protectionist trade policy and laid the groundwork for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence opposed.The former vice president has woven warnings about populism into many of his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks since at least last October, when he condemned “Putin apologists” in the Republican Party. But at the first Republican debate last month in Milwaukee, the split between New Right populism and Reaganite conservatism came under a brighter spotlight in the onstage clashes between Mr. Pence and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.In recent weeks, Mr. Pence and his team decided the subject was important enough to warrant its own speech, according to a person familiar with the planning, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. His invocation of Mr. Reagan as an inspirational figure — a common theme of Mr. Pence’s speeches but done at length on Wednesday — comes as Mr. Pence and other Republican presidential candidates prepare for their second debate, which will be held on Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.As he extolled his hero, Mr. Pence all but pleaded for Republicans to remember there was a time before Mr. Trump. And that it was a time worth returning to.“The truth is,” he said, “the Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015.” More

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      How America Made James Bond ‘Woke’

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      After so many decades fighting evil masterminds bent on Britannia’s destruction, the 21st-century version of James Bond has found a very 21st-century antagonist. In the newest Bond novel, “On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” 007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a supervillain whose nom de guerre is Athelstan of Wessex — in other words, a Little Englander, a Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.The novel’s Bond, who carries on a “situationship” with “a busy lawyer specializing in immigration law” (not to worry, he’s not taking advantage, “he wasn’t the only man she was seeing”), must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation; along the way the secret agent muses on the superiority of the metric system and the deplorable dog whistles of populism.The book’s mere existence seems designed to agitate conservatives; I wouldn’t have read it without the spur of hostile reviews from right-of-center British scribblers. But the progressive Bond also usefully illustrates an interesting feature of contemporary politics in the English-speaking world. It isn’t just that American progressivism supplies an ideological lingua franca that extends across the Anglosphere, such that what we call “wokeness” naturally influences the fictional MI6 no less than the real C.I.A. It’s that forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbors than they do in America itself.This is not a fully provable assertion, but it’s something that I felt strongly on recent visits to Canada and Britain. Politically, Canadian Conservatives and Britain’s Tories seem to be in very different positions. In Canada, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, looks poised for a major victory in the next election, which would end Justin Trudeau’s three-term reign as prime minister. In Britain, the Tories are poised for a drubbing in the next election, which would push them into the opposition for the first time since 2010.But in power or out of power, both groups seemed culturally beleaguered, resigned to progressive power and a touch envious of the position of American conservatives (if not of our political captivity to Donald Trump). In Canadian conversations there were laments for what was lost when Trudeau defeated Stephen Harper in 2015 — how elections have consequences, and the consequences in Canada were a sharp left-wing turn that no Conservative government is likely to reverse. In British conversations, the talk was all about how elections don’t have consequences, and how notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in the culture.These complaints encompass a lot of different realities. In Canada, they cover the rapid advance of social liberalism in drug and euthanasia policy — with nationwide marijuana decriminalization followed by British Columbia’s new experiment in decriminalizing some harder drugs, while assisted suicide expands more rapidly than in even the most liberal U.S. state. In Britain, they cover the increasing enforcement of progressive speech codes against cultural conservatives — like the Tory councilor recently arrested by the police for retweeting a video criticizing how police officers dealt with a Christian street preacher.In both countries the complaints cover rising immigration rates — the conscious policy of the Trudeau government, which is presiding over an extraordinary surge in new Canadians, and the sleepwalking policy of the British Tories, who despite Brexit and repeated populist revolts find themselves presiding over record net migration rates. (By contrast, when America elected the immigration restrictionist Trump, immigration rates did actually decline.)And in both countries, conservatives feel that their national elites are desperately searching for their own versions of the “racial reckoning” that convulsed the United States in the summer of 2020, notwithstanding the absence of an American-style experience with either slavery or Jim Crow.Thus the spate of national apologies, canceled patriotic celebrations and church burnings in Canada in 2021, following claims about the discovery of a mass grave in British Columbia near one of the residential schools for Indigenous children that the Canadian government sponsored, often through religious institutions, in the 19th and 20th century. (The cruelty and neglect at these schools was real but the specific claims about graves at the B.C. school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) Or thus the attempted retcon of England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least — into an American-style “nation of immigrants” narrative, and the sense, as the British writer Ed West wrote in 2020, that in English schools “America’s history is swallowing our own.”To the extent that these complaints capture an Anglosphere reality, I think you can identify several different points that might explain what Canadian and British conservatives are seeing.The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium, so it’s not surprising that their leaders and tastemakers would sometimes rush to embrace ideas that seem to be in the American vanguard — behaving, as the British writer Aris Roussinos puts it, like “Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets” to establish their identification with Rome. By contrast in continental Europe, in countries that are under the American security umbrella but don’t share as much of our language and culture, the zeal for imitation feels a bit weaker, and “anti-woke” politics that double as anti-Americanism feel more influential.The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. The new progressivism is not simply a new or semi-Christian substitute for the former Western faith, but the rhetoric of diversity-equity-inclusion and antiracism clearly fills part of the void left by Christianity’s and especially Protestantism’s retreat. So it would not be surprising for an ideology that originates in the post-Protestant precincts of the United States to carry all before it in post-Protestant Canada or Britain, while meeting more resistance in the more religious regions of America — and not just in the white-Christian Bible Belt but among the religious-conservative minorities whose rightward trend may be keeping the Republican coalition afloat.Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse. Once a set of ideas take hold among the cognoscenti — progressive ideas in this case, though it could apply to other worldviews as well — it’s more natural to conform, and more difficult to dissent, in the cozier precincts of Westminster or among Canada’s Laurentian elite than it is in the American meritocracy, which spins off more competing power centers and dissenting factions.An extreme example of this tendency is visible in Ireland, which shifted incredibly rapidly from being the West’s conservative-Catholic outlier to being close to uniformly progressive, a swing that the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald attributes to a fundamental reality of small-island life: “Because of Ireland’s size, it is much more socially costly for an Irish person to appear to go against a consensus than it is for other people in other countries.”A recent essay by the Cardiff academic Thomas Prosser makes a related point about other small Celtic polities, noting that Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland have governments that are more progressive than their voters, a pattern he attributes to the way that ascendant ideologies (neoliberalism in the 1990s, or woke progressivism now) can sometimes achieve a kind of full elite “capture” more easily in smaller countries.Bucking consensus is presumably easier in Britain and in Canada. But not as easy, perhaps, as in the vast and teeming United States — which in its First Amendment-protected multitidinousness can be both the incubator of a potent new progressivism and also the place where resistance to that ideology runs strong, indeed stronger even than among 007 and other servants of His Majesty the King.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