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      They Seemed Like Democratic Activists. They Were Secretly Conservative Spies.

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      CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The young couple posing in front of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas fit right in, two people in a sea of idealistic Democrats who had arrived in the city in February 2020 for a Democratic primary debate.Large donations to the Democratic National Committee — $10,000 each — had bought Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca tickets to the debate. During a cocktail reception beforehand, they worked the room of party officials, rainbow donkey pins affixed to their lapels.In fact, much about them was a lie. Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca were part of an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle, according to interviews and documents.Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump.At the center of the scheme was an unusual cast: a former British spy connected to the security contractor Erik Prince, a wealthy heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune and undercover operatives like Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca who used Wyoming as a base to insinuate themselves into the political fabric of this state and at least two others, Colorado and Arizona.In more than two dozen interviews and a review of federal election records, The New York Times reconstructed many of the operatives’ interactions in Wyoming and other states — mapping out their associations and likely targets — and spoke to people with whom they discussed details of their spying operation. Publicly available documents in Wyoming also tied Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca to an address in Cody used by the former spy, Richard Seddon.What the effort accomplished — and how much information Mr. Seddon’s operatives gathered — is unclear. Sometimes, their tactics were bumbling and amateurish. But the operation’s use of spycraft to manipulate the politics of several states over years greatly exceeds the tactics of more traditional political dirty tricks operations.It is also a sign of how ultraconservative Republicans see a deep need to install allies in various positions at the state level to gain an advantage on the electoral map. Secretaries of state, for example, play a crucial role in certifying election results every two years, and some became targets of Mr. Trump and his allies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Sofia LaRocca and Beau Maier were in Las Vegas last year for the Democratic primary debate. They had insinuated themselves into the fabric of progressive movements in the West.The campaign followed another effort engineered by Mr. Seddon. He aided a network of conservative activists trying to discredit perceived enemies of Mr. Trump inside the government, including a planned sting operation in 2018 against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and helping set up secret surveillance of F.B.I. employees and other government officials.Mr. Prince had set Mr. Seddon’s work in motion, recruiting him around the beginning of the Trump administration to hire former spies to train conservative activists in the basics of espionage, and send them on political sabotage missions.By the end of 2018, Mr. Seddon secured funding from the Wyoming heiress, Susan Gore, according to people familiar with her role. He recruited several former operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas, where he had worked previously, to set up the political infiltration operation in the West.Project Veritas has a history of using operatives with fake names to target liberal organizations and make secret recordings to embarrass them.The endeavor in the West appears to have had two primary goals: penetrate local and eventually national Democratic political circles for long-term intelligence gathering, and collect dirt on moderate Republicans that could be used against them in the internecine party battles being waged by Mr. Trump and his allies.Nate Martin, the head of Better Wyoming, a progressive group that was one of the operation’s targets, said he suspected that its aim was to “dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody.”Toward the first goal, operatives concocted cover stories and made large campaign donations to gain entree to Democratic events such as the Las Vegas debate and a Washington fund-raiser attended by Democratic lawmakers.They also took aim at the administration of the Republican governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon, whom hard-right conservatives considered far too moderate and whose candidacy Ms. Gore had opposed in 2018. They targeted a Republican state representative, now the Wyoming speaker of the house, because of his openness to liberalizing marijuana laws — a position Ms. Gore vigorously opposes.Using her Democratic cover identity, Ms. LaRocca got a job working for a consortium of wealthy liberal donors in Wyoming — the Wyoming Investor Network, or WIN — that had decided to back some moderate Republicans. The job gave her access to valuable information.“Getting the WIN stuff is really damaging,” said Chris Bell, who worked as a political consultant for the consortium. “It’s the entire strategy. Where the money is going. What we’re doing long term.”Mr. Seddon, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca did not respond to requests for comment about the operation or the campaign contributions. Cassie Craven, a lawyer for Ms. Gore, also did not respond to emails or a voice mail message seeking comment about the operation, nor did Ms. Gore herself.When The Times reached out to political activists and politicians who had come to know Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca, informing them of the couple’s true agenda, some said the news confirmed their own suspicions that the pair might not have been on the level. Others were stunned and said they regretted any part they had played in helping them gain entree to political circles in the West.George Durazzo Jr., a Colorado businessman and fund-raiser who coaxed the large donations from Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca and shepherded them around Las Vegas before the debate, said he was both angry and embarrassed. He had planned, he said, to take them to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee before the pandemic turned it into a virtual event.“If they are indeed Benedict Arnold and Mata Hari,” he said, “I was the one who was fooled.”Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca volunteered at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Old Wilson Schoolhouse near Jackson, Wyo., in August 2019.Ryan Dorgan for The New York TimesSetting Up in WyomingMs. LaRocca first met Mr. Seddon in 2017, when he ran training for Project Veritas operatives at Mr. Prince’s family ranch in Wapiti, Wyo. Mr. Seddon taught them how to work undercover, build aliases and recruit sources. Mr. Prince, who had recruited Mr. Seddon, is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary.Mr. Maier, 36, a brawny and tattooed veteran of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division who fought in Iraq, also trained at the Prince ranch that year. His mother is a baker and was the cook at the ranch, and he is the nephew of Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator. At one point, Ms. Gore came to watch the training at the ranch.The next year, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca lived in a luxury house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington that Project Veritas rented for undercover sting operations against government officials that tried to expose “deep state” bias against Mr. Trump.The Women’s March in Cheyenne in 2019.Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle, via Associated PressPeople who worked for the conservative group identified the couple and linked them to the Georgetown house. Others confirmed Ms. LaRocca was pictured on the website Project Veritas Exposed, where she was identified as “Maria.”Mr. Seddon left Project Veritas in the summer of 2018. He lured Mr. Maier, Ms. LaRocca and others to work with him in Wyoming on a new venture — one that would more closely model his time as a British intelligence officer working overseas. Mr. Seddon wanted to run a classic espionage operation in which undercover agents would burrow into organizations and potentially recruit others to help collect information. As in his days at MI-6, the goal was to spy on potential adversaries or targets without getting caught and then quietly use the information to gain an advantage. If conducted correctly, such operations can last for years.And he found someone to pay for it: Ms. Gore, the Gore-Tex heiress who for years had supported conservative and libertarian causes.Hints of Mr. Seddon’s project surfaced recently in a memoir by Cassandra Spencer, a onetime Project Veritas operative. In the book, she describes being called in June 2018 by an associate of her former colleague, Richard, who was trying to secure funding for a new initiative. The man, whom she calls Ken, told her it was a “pay for play” operation — where clients would put up money for an undercover effort.Ms. LaRocca, 28, first approached the Wyoming Democratic Party in January 2019, fresh off her attendance at the Women’s March in Cheyenne, with an offer to help raise money. Her goal, she told people, was ambitious: help “flip” one of America’s most conservative states into a reliable victory for Democratic presidential candidates — as Colorado had become over the past two decades.Mr. Seddon appears to have directed Ms. LaRocca’s outreach to the Wyoming Democratic Party as a safe first step toward building up her bona fides for future operations. Democrats in the state are vastly outnumbered, have little political clout and are eager for volunteers. Ms. LaRocca quickly declared her candidacy for vice chairwoman of the Wyoming Young Democrats, obtained a contract position at the party as a fund-raiser paid by commission and had meetings with the state party’s top two officials, Joe Barbuto and Sarah Hunt.Sarah Hunt, the executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party.Chet Strange for The New York TimesHer behavior raised some suspicion. Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier lived in Fort Collins, Colo., only about 45 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital, but their residence prompted some Democrats to ask how they planned to organize a grass-roots campaign to flip the state while living in Colorado. Ms. LaRocca told others she could not rent a home in Cheyenne because she had a dog, an implausible explanation.Ms. LaRocca had also introduced herself to party officials as Cat Debreau. She eventually told a story about why she later went by the name Sofia LaRocca: She had been the victim of an online stalker, she said, but decided to once again use her original name because the police had told her that her stalker had reformed.“Her story from the start rang very untrue,” said Nina Hebert, who at the time was the digital director for the Wyoming Democratic Party. “The police don’t call you and say, ‘Hey, your stalker is better.’”Ms. Hebert said she began to restrict Ms. LaRocca’s access to the party’s email system in the summer of 2019.At the same time, Mr. Maier was making connections of his own around the state, meeting with Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the medicinal use of marijuana, which he said was particularly valuable for war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.In August 2019, the couple volunteered at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Old Wilson Schoolhouse, a community center in the shadow of the Teton mountain range near Jackson. Ms. LaRocca had her picture taken with the event’s headline guest: Tom Perez, the former labor secretary and then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.Months later, Ms. LaRocca secured a spot in a program training young progressives in the state on the basics of political and community organizing. She dashed off an email to Mr. Martin, the head of the group running the program, saying how thrilled she was to be receiving the training.During the course, she paired up with Marcie Kindred, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Wyoming Legislature; Ms. LaRocca later gave $250 to her campaign. Ms. LaRocca used a picture they took together for her Facebook profile.Ms. LaRocca, left, used a picture with Marcie Kindred as her Facebook profile photo. Ms. Kindred lost a bid for a seat in the Wyoming Legislature.“It was kind of odd she put it on Facebook,” Ms. Kindred said. “We weren’t really that close. Now it makes total sense. She was playing the long game, trying to be my friend in the hopes of me getting into the legislature.”Ms. LaRocca also told Ms. Kindred that she wanted to work on the campaign of Karlee Provenza, a police reform advocate who ultimately won a seat in the legislature in one of a few Democratic districts in the state.She and Mr. Maier eventually began going on double dates with Ms. Provenza and Mr. Martin, the head of Better Wyoming who was then her fiancé and is now her husband.Over dinner one night at Sushi Jeju in Fort Collins, Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier made a big announcement: They, too, were engaged. Ms. LaRocca flashed a large diamond ring. Mr. Maier paid for dinner.But the relationship began taking strange turns. Months later, meeting with Ms. Provenza and Mr. Martin in Laramie, Mr. Maier told them to turn off their phones.He then proposed a plan to target Republicans — using some of his contacts who could befriend politicians and dig up dirt on them. Mr. Maier said he had friends in military intelligence who could run background checks on people and suggested he had been on a “kill squad” while serving in Iraq.“This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they can do,” Mr. Martin recalled Mr. Maier saying, adding that the conversation danced around who would fund the operation.A Wyoming state representative, Karlee Provenza, and her husband, Nate Martin, went on double dates with Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier.Chet Strange for The New York TimesDuring the meeting, Mr. Maier described the purpose of the operation, saying they would collect the damaging material and hold it quietly until the person they targeted mattered — a philosophy that seemed to reflect Mr. Seddon’s view on long-term infiltration efforts.Mr. Maier had brought intelligence reports that appeared to be drawn mostly from public records. One was about the Wyoming attorney general, Bridget Hill, Mr. Martin said.Why Mr. Maier proposed this operation is unclear.“We knew something was fishy, but we couldn’t prove it,” Mr. Martin said.Weeks later, Mr. Martin and a colleague hosted an advocacy training event at a library in Laramie County. Mr. Martin was secretly videotaped, in what appears to be a sting operation tied to Mr. Seddon’s project.Shortly afterward, a video clip appeared on a now-defunct website, showing Mr. Martin declaring that he had voted in the Republican primary race. The video’s publication served as an attempt to expose alliances between progressives and moderate Republicans.Mr. Martin said he immediately suspected it was recorded by a woman who had attended the event and approached him afterward, claiming that her name was Beth Price and that she was from Michigan. The woman, whose real name is Alexandra Pollack of Grand Ledge, Mich., acknowledged in a brief interview that she was in Wyoming at the time but declined to answer questions about what she was doing there, saying she had a nondisclosure agreement. Ms. Kindred, who had attended the Laramie event, recognized Ms. Pollack from a photo on her LinkedIn profile.Ms. Pollack lived not far from Ms. LaRocca in Maryland when they were younger, and both are around the same age. She did not respond to an email asking whether she knew Ms. LaRocca.Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier attended the debate in Las Vegas in February 2020.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesDonations, Then AccessDemocrats across the country began 2020 with twin goals: ensuring that Mr. Trump was defeated, and pouring energy into key congressional races that could flip the Senate and keep the House in Democratic hands.Achieving those goals meant raising millions of dollars, and the large checks written by Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca opened doors for them into elite political circles.In February, Mr. Durazzo, the Colorado fund-raiser, secured a pledge of $10,000 each from the couple to the Democratic National Committee. “We are all vulnerable to charm and hefty contributions,” he said later. “Ten thousand bucks, you definitely have me by the ears.”Within days, they were in Las Vegas for the Democratic presidential debate, schmoozing with committee staff members and other donors during a party beforehand.Before submitting their names to be cleared by security for the Democratic National Committee events in Las Vegas, Mr. Durazzo said he asked Mr. Maier whether any “surprises” might come up. Mr. Maier revealed that he was the nephew of Mr. Beck but said he did not share his uncle’s politics.He said: “I’m a supporter of your causes,” Mr. Durazzo recalled.George Durazzo Jr., a Colorado businessman and fund-raiser, secured a pledge of $10,000 each from the couple to the Democratic National Committee. Chet Strange for The New York TimesSeparately, Mr. Maier gave $1,250 to the campaign of Jena Griswold, a rising Democratic star in Colorado, for her re-election bid as secretary of state. The donation gained him and Ms. LaRocca an invitation to a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser, where they met Ms. Griswold.A $2,000 donation to the campaign of Mark Kelly, then a candidate in Arizona for a U.S. Senate seat, got the couple on a committee for an April fund-raiser. The next month, Mr. Maier gave $6,000 to the Wyoming Democratic Party.It was not clear where they got the money to make a flurry of generous campaign donations. Under federal law, it is illegal to make campaign donations at the behest of another person, then get reimbursed. So-called straw donations have been at the center of numerous federal investigations.“Sometimes when you’re looking at patterns of contributions, you start to see people with relatively limited resources making sizable political contributions,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center and an expert on campaign finance law. “That can be a red flag.”The operatives also took aim at Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, whom hard-right conservatives considered too moderate.Josh Galemore/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated PressA Wealthy Conservative DonorWyoming is a rural state with a small population, a place where cities are separated by hours of open highway, vast prairies and jagged mountains. Statewide political campaigns can be won on a shoestring budget.In this political environment, Ms. Gore has long been a mysterious yet influential figure — quietly using her large fortune to ensure the supremacy of conservative causes.She was one of several children to inherit the wealth of her father, who helped invent the waterproof fabric that came to be known as Gore-Tex.After getting a divorce in 1981, she joined the Transcendental Meditation movement, according to court documents in Delaware, but she became gravely ill and left the movement to convalesce in monasteries for three years. In a bizarre turn two decades later, she tried to adopt her former husband in an attempt to increase their children’s share of the family inheritance.Susan Gore, an heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, has backed conservative causes and been a force in Wyoming politics since she moved to the state in the 1990s.Dan Cepeda/Casper Star-TribuneShe has been a force in Wyoming politics since she moved to the state in the 1990s. In 2008, she established Wyoming Liberty Group, a nonprofit in Cheyenne that pushes libertarian and conservative causes.In 2018, Ms. Gore opposed the candidacy of Mr. Gordon to become Wyoming governor. His main opponent in the Republican primary was Mr. Friess, the wealthy investor who was also a Project Veritas donor. Both Mr. Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had endorsed Mr. Friess, with the president posting on Twitter that “he will be a fantastic Governor! Strong on Crime, Borders & 2nd Amendment.”Mr. Friess lost, in part because a large number of Democrats switched parties to vote for Mr. Gordon. The outcome embittered Mr. Friess and his allies, who saw Mr. Gordon’s victory as part of a worrying trend of creeping progressivism in the state — and believed too many Republicans were part of that trend.Mr. Friess died last month at age 81.2020 StrategyWith months to go before the 2020 election, the biggest political fights in Wyoming were in the Republican Party, between hard-right candidates and more moderate politicians battling to represent the party in November.Mr. Trump was eager to make all elections something of a referendum on his leadership, and in Wyoming, the battle lines hardened between the Trump loyalists and the candidates the right wing of the party derided as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only.”Given the barren political landscape for Democrats, a consortium of wealthy liberal donors — the Wyoming Investor Network — made the strategic decision to quietly support certain Republican moderates. One regular donor to WIN is Elizabeth Storer, a Jackson millionaire and granddaughter of George Storer, who amassed a fortune in the radio and television industry.By hiring Ms. LaRocca, the consortium put her in a position that gave her valuable intelligence about which Republican candidates the group was supporting with independent advertising. She took notes during a board meeting and had access to the complete list of the candidates WIN supported.Mr. Maier began making contacts in the offices of moderate Republican legislators and befriended Eric Barlow, now the Wyoming speaker of the house. He told Mr. Barlow that he was passionate about the medicinal uses of marijuana, and the men met several times — including once when Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca had dinner at Mr. Barlow’s ranch.In an interview, Mr. Barlow, a retired veterinarian who said he was open to decriminalizing marijuana and allowing it for medical use, labeled himself a “practical Republican.”“For some people, that’s a RINO,” he said.Mr. Barlow said that he believed he had met Ms. Gore only once, but that she usually gave money to his Republican primary opponents every election cycle.Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier at a fund-raiser.Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca often told her colleagues that they were committed to upending the political dynamics in the Mountain West — saying that even a deeply conservative state like Wyoming could eventually turn liberal. Ms. LaRocca said she wanted to continue working at the Wyoming Investor Network and other progressive groups.But then, right before the November election, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca disappeared. On Oct. 21, she wrote an email to her boss saying that she had to leave the country. “I have a family emergency and am going to Venezuela as my grandmother is gravely ill,” she wrote.Others she had worked with — and befriended — over two years said they had not heard from her in months.“She kind of dropped off the face of the earth,” said Ms. Hunt, the executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party.In fact, the couple never left the area. Mr. Maier and Mr. Seddon have also been working together on a business venture importing ammunition from overseas, according to a business document linking the two men that was obtained by The Times.Last week, Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier married in Big Horn, Wyo. Mr. Beck, the conservative commentator and Mr. Maier’s uncle, delivered a wedding toast.Kitty Bennett More

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      Texas Leaders Are Having Problems. Time to Attack the Feds!

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      Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has been going through a bumpy stretch of late. Last year he irked many of his conservative brethren by imposing a mask mandate and other public safety measures aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus — suspiciously non-MAGA moves that prompted some Republican state lawmakers to discuss trimming his executive authority. Then there was the state’s pathetic handling of this year’s winter storm, which left at least 150 (and possibly hundreds more) Texans dead and millions shivering in the dark without power. The governor’s initial stab at damage control — falsely blaming the outages on green energy sources — prompted pushback from those more concerned with facts than partisan palaver.These are not the sort of stumbles the governor wants voters pondering as he prepares for his 2022 re-election fight. Already he is facing a primary challenge from the right by Don Huffines, a former state senator. And there is chatter about a possible run by the right-wing bomb thrower Allen West, an ex-congressman from Florida who migrated to Texas and won election as chairman of the state G.O.P. last year. A loud critic of the governor’s pandemic leadership, Mr. West stepped down as chairman this month to ponder his next political move.How is an ambitious guy like Mr. Abbott navigating this turbulence? Simple. He’s borrowing a political play long favored by foreign adversaries who find themselves in sticky situations: Attack the U.S. government as a way to distract from one’s troubles and rally the public against an external foe.Thus the governor has been making much ado about his big plans to deal with the influx of migrants across his state’s border with Mexico. Accusing the Biden administration of abdicating its national security duties, Mr. Abbott has announced that Texas is — wait for it — going to build a wall. The governor is using $250 million in general revenues as a down payment. For the rest of the cost, he is turning to online crowdfunding. If anyone wants to donate land along the border, he thinks that would be swell, too.Mr. Abbott is not yet prepared to address some of the logistical nitty-gritty — like what to do about the land near the border that people aren’t inclined to donate or that the federal government owns. Those are quibbles for another day. For political purposes, what matters is that he has found an issue that resonates with conservatives and, with a little luck, gets them riled up enough at the feds that they forgive, or even forget, his bumbling.Vilifying Washington is a time-honored tradition among state and local leaders — especially Republicans, for whom big government is an enduring boogeyman. This play works all the better in Texas, where state pride runs hot and on any given day some political clique is agitating to return the state to its glory days as an independent republic. The unofficial state motto — Don’t mess with Texas! — applies double to busybody federal authorities. (Unless they’re doling out disaster aid, of course.)Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, is another master of this two-step. He was elected in 2014 and quickly drew national attention as a conservative warrior. He led the legal crusade to dismantle Obamacare and opposed various environmental regulations and immigration policies that he considered a liberal assault on Texas.During this time, Mr. Paxton was jowl deep in his own legal drama. His first year in office, he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of securities fraud and failing to register with the state securities board. He managed to win re-election in 2018, albeit narrowly, and the case has continued to drag out. He maintains his innocence and (surprise!) suggests the charges are politically motivated.Last fall, Mr. Paxton’s legal troubles exploded. Seven members of his staff, including top aides, announced that they had asked federal authorities to investigate him for “violating federal and/or state law, including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” The F.B.I. is reportedly looking into whether he inappropriately did favors for a wealthy political donor who hired a woman with whom the attorney general, who is married, was said to have had an affair. Mr. Paxton has denied all wrongdoing and claims the accusations are intended to derail an ongoing inquiry into other officials.Many leaders would be cowed by such a development. Not Mr. Paxton. After the presidential election, he became a high-profile peddler of former President Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. In December, Mr. Paxton filed a long-shot suit against four states that had helped give Joe Biden the win, effectively asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside the states’ election results (which had already been certified). The court rejected the case like the cheap PR stunt it was.As weak as Mr. Paxton’s suit was — so weak that the Texas state bar is looking into whether it constituted professional misconduct — it delighted at least one person: Mr. Trump. Some political observers even speculated that Mr. Paxton was angling for a pre-emptive presidential pardon for whatever federal charges he might be facing.A pardon didn’t materialize, but the question of the attorney general’s political future remains. He is up for re-election next year, and his personal legal controversies could prove problematic. His fund-raising late last year was looking pitiful until his election suit. “In the days after mounting the unsuccessful legal bid, Paxton raked in nearly $150,000 — roughly half of his entire campaign haul in the last six months of 2020,” reported The Dallas Morning News.The more Mr. Paxton plays up his role as a dauntless MAGA fighter, the better his chance of persuading pro-Trump Texans to stick with him. He may stand accused of multiple crimes, but at least he’s not going to let the courts or the Biden administration or any deep state sympathizers boss him around. It’s not a perfect campaign message, but it may be his best option.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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      When It Comes to Big City Elections, Republicans Are in the Wilderness

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      The party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas comes at a considerable cost, sidelining conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might.When Jerry Sanders finished his second term as mayor of San Diego in 2012, he was the most prominent Republican city executive in the country. A former police chief close to the business community, Mr. Sanders appeared to be a political role model for other would-be Republican mayors, a moderate who worked with the Obama administration on urban policy and endorsed gay marriage at a pivotal moment. More

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      A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

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      The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More

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      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

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      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”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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      How the Storming of the Capitol Became a ‘Normal Tourist Visit’

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      It is no wonder that Republican leaders in the House do not want to convene a truth and reconciliation commission to scrutinize the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The more attention drawn to the events of that day, the more their party has to lose.Immediately after the riot, support for President Donald Trump fell sharply among Republicans, according to surveys conducted by Kevin Arceneaux of Sciences Po Paris and Rory Truex of Princeton.The drop signaled that Republicans would have to pay a price for the Trump-inspired insurrection, the violent spirit of which was captured vividly by Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise of The Times:The pure savagery of the mob that rampaged through the Capitol that day was breathtaking, as cataloged by the injuries inflicted on those who tried to guard the nation’s elected lawmakers. One police officer lost an eye, another the tip of his finger. Still another was shocked so many times with a Taser gun that he had a heart attack. They suffered cracked ribs, two smashed spinal disks and multiple concussions. At least 81 members of the Capitol force and 65 members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured.Republican revulsion toward the riot was, however, short-lived.Arceneaux and Truex, in their paper “Donald Trump and the Lie,” point out that Republican voter identification with Trump had “rebounded to pre-election levels” by Jan. 13. The authors measured identification with Trump by responses to two questions: “When people criticize Donald Trump, it feels like a personal insult,” and “When people praise Donald Trump, it makes me feel good.”The same pattern emerged in the Republican Party’s favorability ratings, which dropped by 13 points between the beginning and the end of January, but gained 11 points back by April, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys.Mitch McConnell himself was outraged. In a Feb. 13 speech on the Senate floor he said:January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.Memorably, McConnell went on:There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.McConnell’s indignation was also short-lived. Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 25, McConnell told Fox News that if Trump were the nominee in 2024, he would “absolutely” support the former president.Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia nearly matched McConnell’s turn-on-a-dime. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday,Clyde last week downplayed the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, comparing the mob’s breaching of the building to a “normal tourist visit.” But photos from that day show the congressman, mouth agape, rushing toward the doors to the House gallery and helping barricade them to prevent rioters from entering.McConnell and Clyde’s turnabouts came as no surprise to students of the Senate minority leader or scholars of American politics.Gary Jacobson of the University of California-San Diego wrote in an email that “the public’s reaction to the riot, like everything else these days, is getting assimilated into the existing polarized configuration of political attitudes and opinions.”Jacobson added:Such things as the absurd spectacle (of the vote recount) in Arizona, Trump’s delusory rantings, the antics of the House crackpot caucus, and the downplaying of the riot in the face of what everyone saw on TV, may weigh on the Republican brand, marginally eroding the party’s national stature over time. But never underestimate the power of motivated reasoning, negative partisanship and selective attention to congenial news sources to keep unwelcome realities at bay.Along similar lines, Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, suggested that voters have developed a form of scandal fatigue:At a certain point, the scandals start to blur together — Democrats have scandals, Republicans have scandals, no one is seemingly above or below such behavior. One of the reason’s President Trump survived all his scandals and shortcomings is because the public had seen so many of these before and has reached the point of a certain amount of immunity to being surprised.While this mass amnesia seem incomprehensible to some, an August 2019 paper, “Tribalism Is Human Nature,” by Cory Jane Clark, executive director the Adversarial Collaboration Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and three fellow psychologists, provides fundamental insight into the evanescing impact of Jan. 6 on the electorate and on Republicans in particular:Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other.The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.Within this framework, there are two crucial reasons that politics is “one of the most fertile grounds for bias,” Clark and her co-authors write:Political contests are highly consequential because they determine how society will allocate coveted resources such as wealth, power, and prestige. Winners gain control of cultural narratives and the mechanisms of government and can use them to benefit their coalition, often at the expense of losers ….We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis, and recent research has supported it.Clark argues further, in an email, that rising influence of “tribalism” in politics results in part from the growing “clarity and homogeneity of the Democrat and Republican coalitions,” with the result that “people are better able to find their people, sort into their ideological bubbles, find their preferred news sources, identify their preferred political elites and follow them, and signal their political allegiance to fellow group members (and attain friends and status that way).”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, adds some detail:My sense is that the move by Republican office holders to muddy the waters over what happened at the Capitol (and Trump’s role instigating the events) likely contributes to the waning of G.O.P. voters’ concerns. We heard a burst of these efforts to rewrite the history this past week during the House oversight hearing, but keep in mind that those efforts came on the heels of earlier efforts to downplay the violence, whitewash Trump’s role, and to cast doubt on the identities of the insurrectionists. No doubt, House G.O.P. leaders’ stalling of Democrats’ effort to create a “9/11 type” commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6 has also helped to diffuse G.O.P. interest and to keep the issue out of the headlines. No bipartisan inquiry, no media spotlight to keep the issue alive.In this context, Kevin McCarthy’s announcement on May 18 that the House Republican leadership opposes the creation of a Jan. 6 commission is of a piece with the ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference, according to Binder.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt the end of the day, Binder continued,We probably shouldn’t be surprised that public criticism of the Jan. 6 events only briefly looked bipartisan in the wake of the violence. G.O.P. elites’ decision to make loyalty to Trump a party litmus test (e.g., booting Rep. Cheney from her leadership post) demands that Republicans downplay and whitewash Trump’s role, the violence that day, and the identity of those who stormed the Capitol. Very little of American political life can escape being viewed in a partisan lens.Alexander G. Theodoridis of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst wrote in an email that “the half-life of Jan. 6 memory has proven remarkably short given the objectively shocking nature of what took place at the Capitol that day.” This results in part from the fact thatthere is now seemingly no limit to the ability of partisans to see the world through thick, nearly opaque red and blue colored lenses. In this case, that has Republicans latching onto a narrative that downplays the severity of the Capitol insurrection, attributes blame everywhere but where it belongs, and endorses the Big Lie that stoked the pro-Trump mob that day.A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists. The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.The refusal of Republicans to explore the takeover of the Capitol reflects a form of biased reasoning that is not limited to the right or the left, but may be more dangerous on the right.Ariel Malka, a professor at Yeshiva University and an author of “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:There is convincing evidence that cultural conservatives are reliably more open to authoritarian and democracy-degrading action than cultural liberals within Western democracies, including the United States. Because the Democratic Party is the party of American cultural liberals, I believe it would be far more difficult for a Democratic politician who favors overtly anti-democratic action, like nullifying elections, to have political success.These differences are “transforming the Republican Party into an anti-democratic institution,” according to Malka:What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.In the paper, Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker and Eliyahu Spivack, of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Amsterdam and Yeshiva University, ask: “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”Their answer is twofold.First,Westerners with a broad culturally conservative worldview are especially open to authoritarian governance. For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.Second,Westerners who hold a protection-based attitude package — combining a conservative cultural orientation with redistributive and interventionist economic views — are often the most open to authoritarian governance. Notably, it was the English-speaking democracies where this combination of attitudes most consistently predicted openness to authoritarian governance.Julie Wronski of the University of Mississippi replied to my inquiry about Jan. 6 suggesting that Democrats appear to have made a strategic decision against pressing the issue too hard:If voters’ concerns over Jan. 6 are fading, it is because political elites and the media are not making this issue salient. I suspect that Democrats have not made the issue salient recently in order to avoid antagonizing Republicans and exacerbating existing divides. Democrats’ focus seems more on collective action goals related to Covid-19 vaccine rollout and economic infrastructure.Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).In a twist, Wronski suggests that it may be to Democrats’ advantage to stay out of the Jan. 6 debate in order to let it fester within Republican ranks:Not all Republican identifiers are strong partisans. Some people may align with the party for specific issue, policy reasons. Their identity is not as tied up in partisanship that an electoral loss becomes a loss to self-identity. This means there are intraparty fractures in the Republican Party regarding the big lie.Republican leaners “seem to be moving away from the party when hearing about intraparty conflict regarding the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win,” Wronski wrote, citing a May 14 paper by Katherine Clayton, a graduate student in political science at Stanford.Clayton finds thatthose who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.Wronski writes thatthe implication of these results would be for the Democratic Party to do nothing with regards to their messaging of January 6 and let the internal Republican conflict work to their benefit. In a two-party system, voters who do not espouse the big lie and are anti-Trump would eventually align with the Democratic Party.Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, takes an opposing position in his May 12 article, “A G.O.P. Civil War? Don’t Bet On It”:It’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grass roots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total.More significant, Greenfield continued,History is littered with times that critics on the left, and in the pundit class, were positive the Republican Party was setting itself up for defeat by embracing its extremes, only to watch the party comfortably surge into power.Despite Trump’s overt attempt to subvert the election, Greenfield observes, anddespite his feeding the flames that nearly led to a physical assault of the vice president and speaker of the House, the Republican Party has, after a few complaints and speed bumps, firmly rallied behind Trump’s argument that he was robbed of a second term.The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.The advent of Trump Republicans poses an unprecedented strategic quandary for Democrats, a quandary they have not resolved and that may not lend itself to resolution.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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      The G.O.P.’s Big Cancellation

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      The party’s cancel mob runs wild on Capitol Hill.Mr. Potato Head is under siege.So are the Muppets, baseball and Coca-Cola.Even a horse fell victim. “It was like a cancel culture kind of thing,” the trainer of Medina Spirit told Fox News after the Kentucky Derby-winning horse failed a drug test.In the Biden era, wailing about cancel culture has emerged as a major tenet of Trumpism, a defining principle of a Republican Party far more focused on fighting culture wars than promoting any kind of policy platform.Yet in recent weeks, it has been Republicans who seem most focused on canceling ideas they don’t like. And on Wednesday morning, the G.O.P. cancel mob came for Liz Cheney.After a defiant speech on Tuesday evening, she was purged from House Republican leadership for refusing to echo Donald Trump’s lies about the election and holding him responsible for the deadly riot on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.Her extraordinary address on the House floor came immediately after Republicans finished a series of remarks condemning the cancellation of a long list of characters that included Pepé Le Pew, J.K. Rowling, Miss Piggy, Goya Foods, George Washington, “the My Pillow guy” and kids wearing MAGA hats.Ms. Cheney made only a sly reference to the irony of the moment.“I know the topic, Mr. Speaker, is cancel culture,” she said, taking her place at the lectern. “I have some thoughts about that. But tonight, I rise to discuss freedom and our constitutional duty to protect it.”Republicans were left tying themselves into knots over whether Ms. Cheney had, in fact, been canceled.“Liz Cheney was canceled today for speaking her mind and disagreeing with the narrative that President Trump has put forth,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said on Wednesday after her ouster.Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who built his postelection brand by casting himself in his media appearances as a victim of cancellation, disagreed.“It’ll give her, certainly, a media platform,” he said. “I don’t think it’s being canceled in terms of she’s being silenced.”Republican cancel culture isn’t limited to Ms. Cheney. At times, the party seems to be trying to cancel the truth entirely.When Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was asked about Ms. Cheney’s replacement — Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — and her vote to object to the 2020 election results, he gave a head-spinning answer.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy replied after leaving a meeting at the White House with President Biden on Wednesday. “I think that is all over with, sitting here with the president today.”Six days earlier, Ms. Stefanik had raised doubts about the integrity of the election in interviews with Trump allies that helped cement her status as the front-runner for Ms. Cheney’s post.In Florida and Texas, Republican officials who once praised the handling of the 2020 election in their states now argue that a widespread lack of faith in the electoral system necessitates broadly restrictive voting laws. That justification is widespread: Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a reason to pass bills that restrict voting.It’s also slightly dizzying: As election experts told my colleague Maggie Astor for an article this week, it was the “fear of fraud” stoked by Republicans with their false claims of voter malfeasance that eroded public trust in the 2020 results.And in a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Republicans cast the riot at the Capitol in January as little more than a normal day, rewriting what many of them personally witnessed while huddling for safety on the House floor. Several downplayed the violence of the day, describing the Trump supporters who attacked the complex as “peaceful patriots.”“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall, showed people in an orderly fashion in between the stanchions and ropes taking pictures,” Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia said. “If you didn’t know the footage was from Jan. 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Sure, an average tourist stop that involved violently crushing police officers, stealing historic property and urinating in Nancy Pelosi’s office.There are plenty of reasons to believe that despite this effort to rewrite history, voters will not cancel Republicans at the polls in 2022. The party out of power typically picks up seats in a new president’s first midterm elections. Redistricting favors Republicans. And a number of House Democrats are opting against re-election bids, a sign of anxiety about their political prospects.But internal strife is never good for a party’s re-election chances. Nor is staking your political brand on the pet issues of a former president whose never-all-that-healthy favorability ratings have slipped further since leaving office. Voters generally don’t respond well to lies that are easily disproved by video footage and their own memories of a national trauma.The question that worries some Republican strategists as they look toward next year’s midterm elections is not whether the country agrees with their fears of cancellation.It’s whether voters still believe in consequences.Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or message me on Twitter at @llerer.By the numbers: 1.7 million… That’s the number of people who traveled through airports on Sunday, the most since the start of the pandemic.… SeriouslyYou’re all invited to my mask burning party. Just let me dig out my lipstick first.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      In Liz Cheney vs. Donald Trump, Guess Who Won

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      Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressI asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.The takedown of Representative Cheney was not an “inflection point,” as some have called it. It was the opposite — the latest (but it won’t be the last) confirmation that the Republican Party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal, caught in the grip of what Ms. Cheney described in The Washington Post as the “anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney, unbroken and unbowed, said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.” Her Republican colleagues, cowardly and classless, cleared the chamber as she began her remarks. But they can’t escape her searing indictment.Declaring fealty to a lie has become the single most important test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party. Everyone recognizes this, but from time to time we need to stop to register its true significance.“It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level,” Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 10th Congressional District before Mr. Trump’s unpopularity in the suburbs sunk her chances in the 2018 election, told Lisa Lerer of The Times. “We’re just going to say that black is white now.”This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. For more than five years, the Republican Party and its leading media propagandists embraced and championed Mr. Trump’s mendacities, conspiracy theories and sociopathic tendencies. As a result, their brains became rewired, at least metaphorically speaking; the constant accommodation Republicans made to Mr. Trump caused significant cognitive distortions.As a result, they have detached themselves from reality. The expectation that once Mr. Trump left office the Republican Party would become a normal party again was wishful thinking from the beginning. There is no post-Trump fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party. At least for now, that battle has been decided.Liz Cheney understands that only a decisive break with Mr. Trump will stop the continuing moral ruination of the Republican Party. But her break with the former president, while courageous, came too late to change anything. She is trying to rally an army that doesn’t exist.It doesn’t exist for two reasons. The first is that many grass-roots Republicans, having been fed a steady diet of fabrications and disinformation for the last half-decade, are deluded. They believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories, in large measure because they want to believe them, and now they are addicted to them. And addictions are hard to break.The latest CNN/SSRS survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the false allegation that Joe Biden did not defeat Mr. Trump; a mere 23 percent said Mr. Biden won, despite the Trump administration’s admission that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history.”These Republicans believe they are truth-tellers and patriots, sentries at freedom’s gate. They are utterly sincere; they are also quite dangerous. They are taking a sledgehammer to pillars of American democracy: confidence in the legitimacy of our elections, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power.Most Republican members of Congress, on the other hand, don’t believe President Biden was illegitimately elected. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham aren’t deceived. They are play acting in ways that are unethical and cynical, but they are not stupid. They’re fully aware that the cancerous lies have metastasized — they each played a crucial role in spreading them, after all — and to refute those lies publicly would put targets on their backs.Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.So we have reached the point where a member of one of the Republican Party’s leading families, a person of unquestioned conservative credentials, is now less popular with the Republican base and more reviled by the House leadership than the onetime QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just before the Jan. 6 insurrection referred to that day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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