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      Why Haley Voters Should Support Biden

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      Last Wednesday, a day before he delivered a rousing State of the Union address, Joe Biden issued an invitation to the roughly 30 percent of Republican primary voters who had voted for Nikki Haley in the G.O.P. presidential primaries before she dropped out. The message was simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want you, but we do. After all, Trump said on Truth Social that anyone who made a “contribution” to Haley would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Biden, by contrast, acknowledged differences of opinion with Haley voters but argued that agreement on democracy, decency, the rule of law and support for NATO should unite Haley voters against Trump.Is Biden correct? Is there an argument that could persuade a meaningful number of Haley conservatives to vote for Biden? In ordinary times the answer would be no. It still may be no. Negative polarization is the dominant fact of American political life. Asking a person to change political teams is like asking him or her to disrupt friendships and family relationships, to move from the beloved “us” to the hated “them.” They’re going to do it only as a last resort, when they truly understand and feel the same way about the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan felt when he departed the Democratic Party: He didn’t leave the party. The party left him.Now, however, it’s the G.O.P. that is sprinting away from Reagan — and from Haley Republicans — as fast as MAGA can carry it. The right is not just mad at Republican dissenters for defying Trump; it has such profound policy disagreements with Reagan and Haley Republicans that it’s hard to imagine the two factions coexisting for much longer. Given the power imbalance in a Trump G.O.P., that means that for the foreseeable future traditional conservatives will face a choice: conform or leave.It’s likely that most people will conform. But they ought to leave. If a political party is a shared enterprise for advancing policies and ideas with the hope of achieving concrete outcomes, then there are key ways in which a second Biden term would be a better fit for Reagan Republicans than Round 2 of Trump.Take national security. Even apart from his self-evident disregard for democracy, Trump’s weakness in the Ukraine conflict and his hostility to American alliances may represent the most dangerous aspects of a second term, with potential world-historic consequences similar to those of American isolationism before World War II.Biden’s continuing support for NATO, by contrast, has made America stronger. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has added their potent militaries to the Western alliance. The strategic Baltic Sea is now a “NATO lake.” Biden was smart to start his State of the Union address by contrasting Reagan’s demand to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who “don’t pay.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If There’s One Thing Trump Is Right About, It’s Republicans

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      For the thousandth time, the Republican Party refused an off-ramp that would free itself from Donald Trump. As long as he’s around, it never will.In this year’s presidential primary campaign, the party had the chance to nominate Nikki Haley, a successful, conservative former two-term governor of South Carolina. Unlike Mr. Trump’s, her public career hasn’t been characterized by a lifetime of moral squalor. And many polls show she would be a more formidable candidate against President Biden than Mr. Trump. No matter. Mr. Trump decimated Ms. Haley, most recently on Super Tuesday. She suspended her campaign the next day. But she never had a chance.The Republican Party has grown more radical, unhinged and cultlike every year since Mr. Trump took control of it. In 2016, there was outrage among Republicans after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. On the tape, in words that shocked the nation, Mr. Trump said that when you’re a star, “You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”In 2023, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. His “locker room talk” turned out to be more than just talk. Yet no Republican of significance said a critical word about it.The same was true earlier this year when Mr. Trump was found liable for civil fraud. The judge in the case, Arthur F. Engoron, said that the former president’s “complete lack of contrition” bordered on “pathological.” Yet Republicans were united in their outrage, not in response to Mr. Trump’s actions but at the judge for the size of the penalty.Today, many Republicans not only profess to believe that the election was stolen; prominent members of Congress like Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator J.D. Vance say they would not have certified the 2020 election results, as Vice President Mike Pence, to his credit, did. Mike Johnson, who played a leading role in trying to overturn the election, is speaker of the House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After South Carolina, Trump’s March to the Nomination Quickens

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      The reality has been clear for weeks, since former President Donald J. Trump trounced his opponents across the frozen fields and icy highways of Iowa. But his overwhelming victory on Saturday in South Carolina, where he defeated Nikki Haley in her home state, makes it all but official.The Republican nominating contest isn’t a competition. It’s a coronation.The party primaries this winter represented the best chance for Republicans who were opposed to the former president to oust him from his dominant position in the G.O.P. The stakes were extraordinarily high: Many of his Republican opponents see Mr. Trump as, at best, unelectable and, at worst, a threat to the foundations of American democracy.And yet, as the campaign has moved through the first nominating contests, the race has not revealed Mr. Trump’s weaknesses, but instead the enduring nature of his ironclad grip on the Republican Party. From the backrooms of Capitol Hill to the town hall meetings of New Hampshire to the courtrooms of New York City, Mr. Trump shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the party — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.“I think the party will be done with Trump when Trump is done with the party,” said David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist who is opposed to Mr. Trump. “That’s the long and short of it.”All of Mr. Trump’s primary rivals, except Ms. Haley, have folded and endorsed his candidacy. He has conquered state parties and the Republican National Committee, installing loyalists in key posts, and collected the backing of vast numbers of Republican elected officials. And what once appeared to be extraordinary political liabilities — the 91 felony counts against him, his increasingly extreme rhetoric, his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — have only served to bolster his support among the Republican faithful.With his victory on Saturday, Mr. Trump has swept all the early nominating contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the U.S. Virgin Islands, South Carolina — an unprecedented achievement in a contested primary race. He heads into Super Tuesday on March 5, when a third of all delegates to the G.O.P. convention will be awarded, with “maximum velocity,” said the Republican governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, who endorsed Mr. Trump over his predecessor, Ms. Haley.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court to Decide How the First Amendment Applies to Social Media

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      Challenges to laws in Florida and Texas meant to protect conservative viewpoints are likely to yield a major constitutional ruling on tech platforms’ free speech rights.The most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, may turn on a single question: Do platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most closely resemble newspapers or shopping centers or phone companies?The two cases arrive at the court garbed in politics, as they concern laws in Florida and Texas aimed at protecting conservative speech by forbidding leading social media sites from removing posts based on the views they express.But the outsize question the cases present transcends ideology. It is whether tech platforms have free speech rights to make editorial judgments. Picking the apt analogy from the court’s precedents could decide the matter, but none of the available ones is a perfect fit.If the platforms are like newspapers, they may publish what they want without government interference. If they are like private shopping centers open to the public, they may be required to let visitors say what they like. And if they are like phone companies, they must transmit everyone’s speech.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a 2022 dissent when one of the cases briefly reached the Supreme Court.Supporters of the state laws say they foster free speech, giving the public access to all points of view. Opponents say the laws trample on the platforms’ own First Amendment rights and would turn them into cesspools of filth, hate and lies. One contrarian brief, from liberal professors, urged the justices to uphold the key provision of the Texas law despite the harm they said it would cause.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Did No One Tell Ron DeSantis That Trump Was Running, Too?

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      Despite the early enthusiasm for his policies and political persona in various corners of the conservative media, it was easy to see from the start that Ron DeSantis would not — and clearly does not — have the juice to defeat or supplant Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary.Part of this was the Florida governor’s soft skills or rather lack thereof. He is not a people person. He does not excel at the task of retail politics. He is not, to put it gently, strong on the stump, and he has a bad habit of speaking in the esoteric and jargon-filled language of online conservatives.Consider his first major performance in Iowa last year, in front of an audience of likely Republican caucusgoers. “We say very clearly in the state of Florida that we will fight the woke in the Legislature,” DeSantis said, as he tried to rouse the crowd to applause. “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the businesses, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”There is a relatively small group of people for whom this is a resonant message. For everyone else, it is basically static. It doesn’t speak to the animating concerns of the blue-collar voters who will make or break a campaign in the Republican primary. DeSantis’s inability to craft a compelling message, however, may not have been fatal to his campaign if he had been able to distance or distinguish himself from Trump in any meaningful way. The opportunities were there. DeSantis could have used the multiple criminal indictments against the former president to make the practical case that Trump would not win if he was in jail.But DeSantis chose to run as Trump’s heir apparent and treated him as though he wasn’t actually in the race. He could not turn on the former president without undermining the premise of his own campaign. And so DeSantis sat silent or even defended Trump against legal accountability for his actions in office. “Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” DeSantis wrote on the website formerly known as Twitter after Trump was charged with four felony counts by a federal grand jury in connection with his effort to overturn the 2020 election. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”To the extent that DeSantis tried to differentiate himself from the former president, it was by running to Trump’s political right. The Florida governor in this view would be a more competent Trump — the Trump who gets things done. It was a good pitch for the conservative intellectuals who wanted to support a Trump-like figure without embracing Trump himself. But it was a terrible pitch to the Republican electorate, which did not nominate Trump in 2016 — or turn out in 2020 — because of Trump’s ability to clear a checklist of agenda items.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What’s a Never-Trump Conservative to Do?

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      David French and Jillian Weinberger and Donald Trump is expected to win decisively in New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday. For Republican voters who don’t want Trump as their nominee, what alternatives exist?In this audio interview, the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, talks with Opinion columnist David French about how a probable Trump nomination will “cement a significant change in two directions with the G.O.P.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York TimesThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger with help from Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud with engineering support from Isaac Jones. Original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Source photograph by juliaf/Getty Images. More

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      The Lost DeSantis Moment

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      For months, he routinely led Donald Trump in head-to-head polls and gave a possible glimpse at a post-Trump Republican future.Ron DeSantis after winning re-election as Florida governor in 2022. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesRon DeSantis began the 2024 campaign as a formidable candidate, with early poll numbers that rivaled or even exceeded the likes of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.In the end, that early strength meant only that he had more room to fall.There are countless reasons Mr. DeSantis fell apart and ultimately ended his campaign Sunday — including that his opponent proved once again to be a juggernaut. Perhaps Mr. DeSantis might have won the nomination in most other years, if he hadn’t been going against a former president.But rather than dwell on his losing campaign, it’s worth returning to his apparent strength at the outset — that brief moment when Mr. DeSantis, or at least the idea of Mr. DeSantis, routinely led Mr. Trump in high-quality head-to-head polls.In the eight years since Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination, this was the only moment when Republican voters appeared willing to go a different direction. Mr. DeSantis didn’t capitalize on the moment, but nonetheless it’s the only glimpse we’ve had into the post-Trump Republican Party. We saw something that might bring it about, and we saw what it might look like.What brought it about: the midtermsOver the last eight years, Mr. Trump has said and done countless things that might have doomed any other politician. He’s been impeached twice. He encouraged what turned into the Jan. 6 riot. He’s been charged with multiple federal crimes. None of it really made any difference in his support.That is, until November 2022. The disappointing Republican showing in the midterms damaged Mr. Trump in the polls, and Mr. DeSantis surged to take a clear lead in head-to-head polls that lasted for months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism’

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      Since taking over the Heritage Foundation in 2021, Kevin D. Roberts has been making his mark on an institution that came to prominence during the Reagan years and has long been seen as an incubator of conservative policy and thought. Roberts, who was not well known outside policy circles when he took over, has pushed the think tank away from its hawkish roots by arguing against funding the war in Ukraine, a turnabout that prompted some of Heritage’s policy analysts to leave. Now he’s looking ahead, to the 2024 election and beyond. Roberts told me that he views Heritage’s role today as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This includes leading Project 2025, a transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power. The lesson of Trump’s first year in office, Roberts told me, is that “the Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”You’ve taken the Heritage Foundation, once a bastion of the Reagan doctrine of peace through strength, in a different direction. Under you, Heritage has vocally opposed recent aid packages to Ukraine. It has criticized the Biden administration for what you’ve said is a lack of transparency when it comes to how the money is being spent and how you believe those packages are impacting the administration’s domestic priorities. Can you explain some of your thinking on that pivot?Yeah, sure. But perhaps it would be helpful to start with my perception of those examples you mentioned relative to the Reagan principle of peace through strength. We believe that the manner in which the Ukraine aid packages have been put together, the manner in which they’ve been debated or really not debated in Congress, the manner in which they’ve not been analyzed, the manner in which there’s no transparency, the fact that there’s no strategy actually is a violation of the principle of peace through strength. So while much ink has been spilled about Heritage no longer believing in peace through strength, that’s not true. But I don’t want to dismiss the part of your question about the shift in the conservative movement toward more skepticism, if not restraint, in foreign policy, and I think a lot of that is prudent. Because what the American people are saying, conservatives in particular, but not exclusively conservatives, is why are we prioritizing any other place internationally above the problems we have in the United States?I hear you that there are a lot of problems at home to be solved, and they’re costly problems. But we had Russia invade a sovereign country on the doorstep of a democratic Europe. Does it not seem to you squarely within the U.S. national interest to stop Russian aggression?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More