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      Don’t Be Fooled. Ron DeSantis Is a Bush-Cheney Republican.

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      One of the strangest ads of the 2022 election cycle was an homage to “Top Gun,” featuring Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In it, DeSantis is the “Top Gov,” setting his sights on his political enemies: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your governor speaking. Today’s training evolution: dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”The ad concludes with DeSantis in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, rallying viewers to take on the media’s “false narratives.”The imagery plays on the governor’s résumé. He was never a pilot, of course, but he was in the Navy, where he was a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers from 2004 to 2010. DeSantis served in Iraq and at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and made his military career a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for governor. “Service is in my DNA,” he wrote at the time. “My desire to serve my country has been my goal and my calling.”In recent weeks, we have learned a little more about what that service actually entailed, details that weren’t more widely known at the time of his 2018 race.As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”The reason to highlight these details of DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo is that it helps place the Florida governor in his proper political context. The standard view of DeSantis is that he comes out of Donald Trump’s populist Republican Party, a view the governor has been keen to cultivate as he vies for leadership within the party. And to that end, DeSantis has made himself into the presumptive heir apparent to Trump in look, language and attitude.But what if we centered DeSantis in Guantánamo, Iraq and the war on terrorism rather than the fever house of the MAGA Republican Party, a place that may not be a natural fit for the Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer? What if we treated DeSantis not as a creature of the Trump years but as a product of the Bush ones? How, then, would we understand his position in the Republican Party?For a moment in American politics — before Hurricane Katrina, the grinding occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis that nearly toppled the global economy — George W. Bush represented the clear future of the Republican Party.And what was Bush Republicanism? It promised, despite the circumstances of his election in 2000, to build a new, permanent Republican majority that would relegate the Democratic Party to the margins of national politics. It was ideologically conservative on most questions of political economy but willing to bend in order to win points with key constituencies, as when Bush backed a large prescription drug program under Medicare.Bush’s Republicanism was breathtakingly arrogant — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one unnamed aide famously told The New York Times Magazine in 2004 — contemptuous of expertise and hostile to dissent, as when the president condemned the Democratic-controlled Senate of 2002 as “not interested in the security of the American people.”Bush’s Republicanism was also cruel, as exemplified in the 2004 presidential election, when he ran, successfully, against the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Americans, framing them as a threat to the integrity of society itself. “Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society,” he said, endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Bush’s Republicanism — or rather, Bush’s Republican Party — was that it was still an elite-driven institution. He ran a Brooks Brothers administration, whose militarism, jingoism and cruelty were expressed through bureaucratic niceties and faux technical language, like “enhanced interrogation.”To me, DeSantis looks like a Bush Republican as much as or more than he does a Trump one. He shares the majoritarian aspirations of Bush, as well as the open contempt for dissent. DeSantis shares the cruelty, with a national political image built, among other things, on a campaign of stigma against trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans.Despite his pretenses to the contrary, DeSantis is very much the image of a member of the Republican establishment. That’s one reason he has the almost lock-step support of the organs of that particular elite, for whom he represents a return to normalcy after the chaos and defeat of the Trump years.It is not for nothing that in the fight for the 2024 Republican nomination, DeSantis leads Trump among Republicans with a college degree — the white-collar conservative voters who were Bush stalwarts and Trump skeptics.The upshot of all of this — and the reason to make this classification in the first place — is that it is simply wrong to attribute the pathologies of today’s Republican Party to the influence of Trump alone. If DeSantis marks the return of the Bush Republican, then he is a stark reminder that the Republican Party of that era was as destructive and dysfunctional as the one forged by Trump.You could even say that if DeSantis is the much-desired return to “normal” Republicans, then Republican normalcy is not much different from Republican deviancy.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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      Trump Could Stand in the Middle of Fifth Avenue and Not Lose Mike Pence

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      Mike Pence wants to have it both ways.He wants to be the conservative hero of Jan. 6: the steadfast Republican patriot who resisted the MAGA mob and defended the institutions of American democracy. “Make no mistake about it,” Pence said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, D.C., this month. “What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Donald Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”But Mike Pence also wants to be president. And he can’t fully repudiate the previous Republican president if he hopes to win the Republican presidential nomination, especially when that president is still on the stage, with a commanding role in Republican politics.The result is that Mike Pence has to talk out of both sides of his mouth. With one breath, he takes a righteous stand against the worst dysfunction of the Trump years. “We have to resist the politics of personality, the lure of populism unmoored by timeless conservative values,” Pence said last week while speaking to an audience of Republican donors in Keene, N.H.With his next breath, however, Pence rejects any effort to hold Trump accountable, especially when it asks him to do something more than give the occasional sound bite. Asked to testify about the events surrounding Jan. 6, Pence says no. Faced with a grand jury subpoena forcing him to testify, Pence says he’ll challenge it, under the highly dubious theory that as president of the Senate he was a legislative officer who, like other lawmakers, was covered by the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution and thus free of any obligation to testify.When asked this past weekend about potential criminal charges against the former president — possibly for falsifying records of a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — Pence deflected, telling ABC News, “At the time when there’s a crime wave in New York City, the fact that the Manhattan D.A. thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority I think just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left.”Who will hold Trump accountable, according to Pence? No one living. “History will hold Donald Trump accountable,” he said, as if “history” has agency separate from the people who make or write it.In fairness to Pence, he’s not the only Republican hedging his bets. None of Trump’s rivals — or anyone else who hopes to have a future in Republican politics — views either the investigation into his behavior or the potential charges against him as legitimate.“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical D.A. who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.“I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” he added, without irony.“The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” said the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, the pot calling the kettle black.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and current presidential aspirant, has been silent on the matter, and the long-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist, condemned the potential Trump indictment as a “disastrously politicized prosecution.”Whether or not you think it is a good idea to indict Trump in this particular case, it is striking to see how Republicans commit to the former president when asked to speak to his alleged crimes.But it speaks to a larger point, beyond the double-talk of Pence or the deflection and avoidance of other Republican politicians. Trump may not be as strong as he was as president. He may have been wounded by the long investigations into Jan. 6 and diminished by the failure of many of his handpicked MAGA candidates in the midterm elections. And yet, Trump is still the dominant figure in Republican politics. He still occupies the commanding heights of the Republican Party. And there’s no one — not DeSantis or Haley or any other potential contender — ready to challenge Trump for control of the party.There was hope, after the 2020 presidential election, that after his defeat Trump would somehow fade away. He didn’t. There was hope, after his failed putsch, that his time in the spotlight was over. It wasn’t. And there was hope, after the 2022 elections, that MAGA had run its course and Trump along with it. Wrong again.The only way to remove Trump from the board — to neutralize his influence in the Republican Party and to keep him out of power — is for Republicans to move against him with as much force as they can muster. It was true in 2015, when Republican elites could have coordinated themselves against him when he was still a curiosity and not the leading candidate for the nomination; it was true in 2019 and 2021 when he was impeached by the House, and it’s true now.Republicans can’t avoid conflict if they want to be free of Trump. They have no choice but to condemn him, reject his influence and refuse to defend his criminality.We can see, of course, in this instance and so many others that they won’t. Among Republicans with an ambition to lead, there’s no one who will take that step. Which tells us all we need to know about the state of the Republican Party. It was Trump’s when he was president, it is Trump’s while he’s still a private citizen, and it will be Trump’s next year, when the presidential race starts in earnest.Put differently, if there’s no voter Trump could lose if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody, as Trump famously said, there are probably no leading Republican politicians who would leave his camp, either. Hell, they might even say the victim deserved it.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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      Ron DeSantis’s Ukraine Stance Angers G.O.P. Hawks

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      The Florida governor, who joined Donald Trump in declaring that defending Ukraine from Russia was not a vital interest, drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans.Declaring this week that defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was not a vital interest for the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida cemented a Republican shift away from hawkish foreign policy that has played out over the past decade and accelerated with Donald J. Trump’s political rise.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis — whose combined support makes up more than 75 percent of Republican primary voters in the nascent 2024 presidential contest — are now largely aligned on Ukraine, signaling a sharp break from the interventionist approach that drove former President George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.Republican foreign policy hawks recoiled at Mr. DeSantis’s statement on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News on Monday night, in which the governor deviated from the position held by most of the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. Mr. McConnell and other top congressional Republicans have framed the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.“DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan,” said former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who led the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“This is not ‘a territorial dispute,’” she said in a statement, echoing Mr. DeSantis’s phrasing. “The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom. Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”She went on: “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon. Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday morning that he “could not disagree more” with Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the stakes attached to the defense of Ukraine.“The Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” said Mr. Graham, comparing Mr. DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. “This is an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also took issue with Mr. DeSantis’s comments — a significant rebuke from the senior Republican in Mr. DeSantis’s home state.“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is,” Mr. Rubio, a former presidential candidate, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.And Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico he was “disturbed” by Mr. DeSantis’s comments.Mr. Trump has long made his views on foreign intervention clear, railing against the Iraq war in his 2016 campaign, but Mr. DeSantis had sought to avoid being pinned down on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing the prospective Republican presidential field.His choice of words, describing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” was telling. By referring to Russia’s unprovoked invasion that way, he dismissed the argument that Mr. Putin’s aggression threatened the postwar international order. Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump have unequivocally rejected the idea that the conflict is a war to defend “freedom,” a position espoused by two of their potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.Mr. DeSantis left himself some wiggle room in his statement, which came in response to a questionnaire that Mr. Carlson had sent to all of the major prospective Republican presidential candidates. The governor did not promise to end all U.S. aid to Ukraine — an omission noticed by some hard-line opponents of support for Ukraine, who criticized Mr. DeSantis for leaving open the possibility that he would keep up the flow of American assistance.Leading congressional Republicans have framed the Russian invasion as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesYet by downplaying the stakes of the conflict to the extent he did, Mr. DeSantis angered many Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who said he had talked himself into a corner. Even if he were to change his mind about Ukraine, how would a President DeSantis rally the public and Congress to send billions of dollars and high-tech weapons for a mere “territorial dispute” of no vital interest to America?Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said that the remarks were “a naïve and complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what’s going on,” and that authoritarians would fill the void if the U.S. retreated from global leadership.Charles Kupperman, who served under John R. Bolton as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, said Mr. DeSantis had shown “a very poor understanding of our national security interests,” adding, “I’m surprised he’s gone so far so fast.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.It was unclear who, if anyone, helped Mr. DeSantis write the statement.Ms. Haley, one of the three major Republicans who have announced a 2024 campaign, released her response to Mr. Carlson on Tuesday, offering an unequivocal “yes” to the question of whether stopping Russia was of vital interest to the U.S.“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war,” she said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”“History has shown us that telling the enemy what you won’t do leads to more aggression, not less,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday. Julia Nikhinson for The New York TimesConservatives who want the United States to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on combating China were delighted by Mr. DeSantis’s statement.“Americans desperately need a foreign policy that understands what’s really in their interests and pursues those interests strategically and realistically in a dangerous world,” said Elbridge Colby, a former senior official at the Defense Department who recently briefed Senate Republicans on China policy.“That’s clearly the approach Governor DeSantis laid out in his response to Tucker Carlson,” Mr. Colby added. “He prioritized the top threats to America, such as China and narcotics streaming over the border, rightly seeing Ukraine as a distraction from these top challenges, while also rejecting the Wilsonian radicalism that has led us to disaster before and would be catastrophic if pursued today.”And there is a sharp divide between elite Republican opinion and the views of party voters. While many top Republicans were outraged by Mr. DeSantis’s statement, he and Mr. Trump stand closer to the average G.O.P. voter than Republicans like Mr. McConnell who are urging Mr. Biden to do more to support Ukraine.A January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine. Only 17 percent thought the U.S. was not doing enough.Conservative interventionists had held out hope that Mr. DeSantis would split with Mr. Trump on Ukraine policy. Mr. DeSantis spooked them late last month when he suggested on Fox News that he was not committed to defending Ukraine.But Mr. DeSantis’s comments in that interview were brief and vague enough for these conservatives to stay hopeful that he would end up on their side. They searched for positive signs, finding solace in Mr. DeSantis’s record in Congress. In 2014 and 2015, after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis criticized President Barack Obama as not doing enough to support Ukraine. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis recently hosted the historian William Inboden, the author of a recent book about President Ronald Reagan’s efforts during the Cold War, to exchange thoughts about foreign policy, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Dr. Inboden and an associate did not respond to emails seeking comment. An aide to Mr. DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.Several hawks went into overdrive as they tried to lobby Mr. DeSantis. Kimberley A. Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist, urged him not to join what she called Mr. Trump’s “G.O.P. surrender caucus.”“The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism,” Ms. Strassel wrote.But pro-Ukraine Republicans who had observed Mr. DeSantis closely had more reasons to be alarmed. They were unsettled by his ties to the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank that promotes foreign policy views broadly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. On Monday night, only the most optimistic interventionists could have still been hopeful that Mr. DeSantis would end up on their side. More

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      ‘History Will Hold Donald Trump Accountable’ for Jan. 6, Pence Says

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      At a Washington dinner event, Mike Pence criticized the president he served under as well as Republicans who are minimizing the Capitol riot.Former Vice President Mike Pence, delivering his strongest public rebuke yet to the president who made him his running mate, said on Saturday night “that history will hold Donald Trump accountable” for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which he called “a disgrace.”The annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington is usually a venue for lighthearted ribbing between political figures, government officials and the district’s media veterans, but Mr. Pence used the occasion on Saturday to dig into Mr. Trump at a moment when conservative media commentators and some Republicans in Congress have again tried to dismiss the seriousness of the Capitol riot.“Tourists don’t injure 140 police officers by sightseeing,” Mr. Pence said, according to media reports from the event, an implicit rebuke of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other conservatives who have used selective security camera footage to reframe the riot as a largely peaceful demonstration. Thousands of hours of that footage was released to Mr. Carlson by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California. “Tourists don’t break down doors to get to the speaker of the House or voice threats against public officials.”And Mr. Pence made his reprimand of Mr. Trump personal when he said, “President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”The timing of the remarks was significant. Mr. Trump and his ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, are the only two major, declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, but other potential challengers are edging closer. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is on a swing through early primary and caucus states, including Iowa and Nevada. Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, is on a “listening tour” in the same states. Mr. Pence is considering a run as well.But until Saturday, any rival jabs at the former president and presumed front-runner for the nomination have been implicit. Mr. Pence called him out by name, setting a new bar for other Republicans hoping to replace Mr. Trump as the party’s leader.Early this month, a group of men imprisoned for their participation in the Capitol attack released a song titled “Justice for All” — the national anthem interspersed with Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — and House Republicans on the party’s right flank have started what they are calling an investigation into the treatment of such “political prisoners.”Mr. Pence was unsparing in his condemnation of such efforts, as well as the selective editing of thousands of hours of security footage.“The American people have a right to know what took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.”He also jokingly hinted at his presidential ambitions.“I will wholeheartedly, unreservedly support the Republican nominee for president in 2024,” he said. “If it’s me.” More

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      Seeking Evangelicals’ Support Again, Trump Confronts a Changed Religious Landscape

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      Evangelicals were wooed by Donald Trump’s promise of an anti-abortion Supreme Court. Now, they’re back playing the field.On a recent Sunday morning at Elmbrook Church, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Brookfield, Wis., Jerry Wilson considered the far-off matter of his vote in 2024.“It’s going to be a Republican,” he said, “but I don’t know who.”In 2016 and 2020 he had voted for Donald J. Trump. “He did accomplish a lot for Christians, for evangelicals,” Mr. Wilson, 64, said. But “he’s got a lot of negative attributes, and they make you pause and think, you know? I’d like to see what the other candidates have to offer.”White evangelical voters were central to Mr. Trump’s first election, and he remains overwhelmingly popular among them. But a Monmouth University poll in late January and early February found Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who has not declared his candidacy for president but appears to be Mr. Trump’s most formidable early rival, leading Mr. Trump by 7 percentage points among self-identified evangelical Republican voters in a head-to-head contest.It was an early sign that as he makes a bid for a return to office, Mr. Trump must reckon with a base that has changed since his election in 2016 — and because of it.Some of the changes clearly benefit Mr. Trump, but others may have weakened his hold on evangelical voters and the prominent evangelical pastors who are often seen as power brokers in Republican politics.The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, has shifted much of the fight to further roll back abortion rights — the near-singular political aim of conservative evangelicals for more than four decades — to the state level. Last year, Mr. Trump disparaged Republican candidates for focusing too much on the “abortion issue,” a statement that was viewed as a betrayal by some evangelicals on the right and an invitation to seek other options.Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curriculums in schools and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shaped by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom. These are areas where Mr. DeSantis has aggressively staked his claim.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Larry Hogan: I’m Not Seeking the Republican Nomination for President

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      I truly appreciate all those around the nation who have for many years encouraged me to run for president. After eight years of pouring my heart and soul into serving the people of Maryland, I have no desire to put my family through another grueling campaign just for the experience.I would never run for president to sell books or position myself for a cabinet role. I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. And that is why I will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president.Since Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016, I have fought to make clear that our party cannot be successful if we put personality before principle, if our elected officials are afraid to say publicly what they freely admit behind closed doors, and if we can’t learn from our mistakes because of the political cost of admitting facts to be true. In 2020, the party didn’t even bother passing a campaign platform. For too long, Republican voters have been denied a real debate about what our party stands for beyond loyalty to Mr. Trump. A cult of personality is no substitute for a party of principle.I believe the tides are finally turning. Republican voters are growing tired of the drama and are open to new leadership. And while I’m optimistic about the future of the Republican Party, I am deeply concerned about this next election. We cannot afford to have Mr. Trump as our nominee and suffer defeat for the fourth consecutive election cycle. To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from Mr. Trump. There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. But the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.I continue to be inspired by the example of our founders. They believed that the work of our democracy was meant to be done by citizen leaders, not a permanent political class. Public service was supposed to be a temporary sacrifice, while the work of citizenship lasts for a lifetime. I’m not a career politician, and that has never been my aspiration. I’ve spent nearly my entire career founding and running businesses, and that’s what I’m going to go back to doing.An encouraging trend for Republican politics lies in the fact that the excesses of progressive elites have created the opportunity to attract more working-class voters from all different backgrounds. But many in the Republican Party falsely believe that the best way to reach these voters is through more angry, performative politics and bigger government. These are just empty calories that can’t sustain the lasting governing coalition necessary to restore America.I still believe in a Republican Party that stands for fiscal responsibility and getting the government off our backs and out of our pockets. I still believe in a Republican Party that celebrates entrepreneurship and economic opportunity for every American. I still believe in a Republican Party that backs law enforcement and the rule of law. I still believe in a Republican Party that works to secure peace through strength in our dangerous world. I still believe in a Republican Party that can win not just the electoral college or the popular vote but sweep landslide elections with an inclusive, broad coalition of Americans and a hopeful, optimistic vision for America’s future. And I still believe in a Republican Party that upholds and honors perhaps our most sacred tradition: the peaceful transfer of power.Some say this Republican Party is a relic of the past, but I disagree. In Maryland over the last eight years, we have earned overwhelming support not just from Republicans and independents but also from Reagan Democrats and Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. We did this by cutting taxes and regulations, turning the state’s record deficit into a record surplus, standing behind our brave police and leading the charge against elitist higher education policies by opening alternative pathways to success.Our nation faces great challenges; we can’t afford to be consumed by the pettiest grievances. We can push back and defeat the excesses of elitist policies on the left without resorting to angry, divisive and performative politics. We can deliver safe streets, more economic opportunity and respect for traditional values without abandoning our limited government conservative principles and America’s role as leader of the free world.I will stand with anyone who shares that common sense conservative vision for the Republican Party and can get us back to winning elections again. Serving as Maryland’s governor and chairing the National Governors Association was the honor of a lifetime, but elected office is not the only way to make a difference.The work to build a Republican Party that can win and deliver for working people, not just talk loudly about it, has only just begun. Though I will not be a candidate for my party’s nomination for president, I’ve only just begun fighting for our future.Larry Hogan is the former governor of Maryland and a former chair of the National Governors Association.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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      This Is Trump’s ‘Magic Trick’

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      In his effort to outflank Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida — his most potent challenger-in-waiting for the Republican presidential nomination — Donald Trump goes only in one direction: hard right.At the start of this year, Trump announced his education agenda, declaring that he would issue mandates to “keep men out of women’s sports,” end teacher tenure and cut federal aid to any school system that teaches “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”“As the saying goes,” Trump declared, “personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.”Later in January, Trump revealed his “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity,” in which he promised to bring a halt to “gender-affirming care,” to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and to pass legislation declaring that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.”“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump declared. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”At one level, these pronouncements reflect Trump’s determination to prevent DeSantis from outflanking him. On a larger scale, they reveal a predicament facing not only the former president as he seeks renomination in 2024, but the conservative movement in general, including white evangelicals, the Republican Party and Fox News.Trump’s strategy requires him to continue his equivocation on white supremacism and his antisemitic supporters and to adopt increasingly extreme positions, including the “termination” of the Constitution in order to retroactively award him victory in the 2020 election. The more he attempts to enrage and invigorate his MAGA base in the Republican primaries, the more he forces his fellow partisans and conservatives to follow suit, threatening Republican prospects in the coming general election, as demonstrated by the poor showing of Trump clones in the 2022 midterm contests.Questions about the pandemicCard 1 of 4When will the pandemic end? More

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      For Republicans’ Rising Stars, CPAC Is Losing Its Pull

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      At the annual conference this week, conservative celebrities like Mike Lindell and Kari Lake will attend, as will Donald Trump, but many possible 2024 rivals are skipping it.For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference occupied a center ring in Republican politics.In 1974, Ronald Reagan used the inaugural event to unveil his brand of optimistic conservatism, describing a “city on the hill” to the conservative activists. In 2010, libertarian supporters of Ron Paul lifted their candidate to victory at the event’s presidential straw poll, an early harbinger of the Tea Party upheaval that would soon shake the party. And in 2011, a Manhattan businessman walked onto the stage to the tune of “For the Love of Money,” declared himself an opponent of abortion and began a yearslong takeover of the Republican Party.That businessman, Donald J. Trump, will be back at the four-day conservative gathering known as CPAC this week near Washington. He’ll be joined by a long list of right-wing media provocateurs, culture-war activists and a smattering of senators. Missing from the agenda: many of the Republicans seen as the future of the party.When Mr. Trump became leader of the Republican Party, he remade the conference in his political image. Now, as the party’s voters, donors and officials consider a future that may not include Mr. Trump as their leader, some Republicans say the decades-old CPAC gathering has increasingly become more like a sideshow than a featured act, one that seems made almost exclusively for conservative media.“It’s a content machine for the right-wing media ecosystem,” said David Kochel, a strategist on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, who noted that many of the catchiest lines from speeches will be replayed on Breitbart, Newsmax and the radio show hosted by Stephen K. Bannon. “But I don’t think it makes any difference in the 2024 run-up to the primary. You’ve got a couple people who aren’t going and a couple people who will go. It has faded in its importance.”Some of that fade, Mr. Kochel said, is directly linked to the allegations against Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which runs the conference. He was accused of groping an aide to Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign last year. Mr. Schlapp has denied the accusations. The campaign aide filed a lawsuit against Mr. Schlapp in January.Those accusations were cited by some Republicans as one of the reasons they were steering clear of the conference, including Mike Pence, the former vice president who is considering a run for the White House. He passed on accepting an invitation, according to a person briefed on his decision. Instead, Mr. Pence is spending his week being hosted by other conservatives, including at a Club for Growth donor retreat to which Mr. Trump was not invited.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 6The race begins. More