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      How Kevin McCarthy Forged a Bond With Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      The close alliance that has developed between the speaker and the hard-right Georgia Republican explains his rise, how he might govern and the heavy influence of the extremes on the new House G.O.P. majority.WASHINGTON — Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.“I will never leave that woman,” Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.”Such a declaration from Mr. McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Ms. Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Ms. Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced.But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Ms. Greene, the far-right rabble-rouser and acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, and Mr. McCarthy, the affable fixture of the Washington establishment, according to interviews with 20 people with firsthand knowledge of the relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how Mr. McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Ms. Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” Mr. McCarthy said. Both he and Ms. Greene agreed to brief interviews for this article. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”It is a relationship born of political expediency but fueled by genuine camaraderie, and nurtured by one-on-one meetings as often as once a week, usually at a coffee table in Mr. McCarthy’s Capitol office, as well as a constant stream of text messages back and forth.Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.Ms. Greene, in turn, has taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to Mr. McCarthy, who has little in the way of a fixed ideology of his own and has come to regard the Georgia congresswoman as a vital proxy for the desires and demands of the right-wing base that increasingly drives his party. He has adopted her stances on opposing vaccine mandates and questioning funding for the war in Ukraine, and even her call to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to show what she has called “the other side of the story.”Mr. McCarthy’s agenda, Ms. Greene said, “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees.”When Ms. Greene entered Congress in January 2021, she was viewed by Republican leaders as a headache.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times‘Kevin Did This to You’It was a right-wing conspiracy theory that first came between Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Greene, but not in the way that many people think.When Ms. Greene entered Congress in January 2021, Republican leaders viewed her as a headache, and Mr. McCarthy regarded her as potentially beyond redemption. During her primary, social media posts had emerged in which she embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and warned of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”A Divided CongressThe 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.A Wide-Ranging Inquiry: The House approved the creation of a committee to scrutinize what Republicans say is the “weaponization” of government against conservatives. Democrats and historians see dark historical parallels.Abortion: As part of an anti-abortion rights effort, House Republicans pushed through a bill that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.I.R.S. Funds: Republicans in the House voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the agency.Nebraska: Former Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Republican, was appointed as the state’s next senator, replacing Ben Sasse, who resigned to become president of the University of Florida.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, had intervened to oppose Ms. Greene — an affront she would not forget — but Mr. McCarthy, who eschews confrontation and conflict, would not go that far. He issued a statement through a spokesman condemning the statements, but did not endorse her opponent.Weeks after Ms. Greene was sworn in, more conspiracy-laden posts surfaced, including diatribes in which she had questioned whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and endorsed the executions of Democratic politicians including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.Outraged Democrats demanded that Mr. McCarthy oust her from congressional committees, and when he made no move to do so, they scheduled a vote to do it themselves. As the pressure built, some of Ms. Greene’s far-right allies told her yet another conspiratorial story that she believed: Mr. McCarthy, they said, was secretly working with Ms. Pelosi to strip her of power.Enraged, Ms. Greene stormed into Mr. McCarthy’s office in the Capitol late one night in February 2021 and handed him a letter signed by local Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on her committees. They had received “countless” messages, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.It served as a not-so-subtle warning to Mr. McCarthy that the Republican base would be outraged if he did not ensure she kept her committee seats. Mr. McCarthy tried to explain to Ms. Greene that he agreed that what Democrats were doing was outrageous, but that as minority leader, he had neither the power nor the votes to stop it..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.But Ms. Greene did not believe Mr. McCarthy, a person familiar with her thinking said. After she was booted off the Education and Budget Committees, members of her inner circle told her, “Don’t forget: Kevin did this to you.”Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene.Tom Brenner for The New York Times‘The Principal’s Office’The relationship remained fraught throughout Ms. Greene’s first year in Congress, as the same pattern played out again and again in their interactions. A controversy would erupt over an outrageous comment Ms. Greene had made, then Mr. McCarthy would summon her to deal with the matter privately.Ms. Greene would joke to friends, “Uh-oh, I’ve been called to the principal’s office.”But even as she continued to traffic in offensive conspiracy theories and spoke at a white nationalist rally, Mr. McCarthy refused to punish her and often refrained from even criticizing her comments until pressed by reporters. It was a calculated choice by Mr. McCarthy, who leads more by flattery and backslapping than through discipline.And by early 2022, Ms. Greene had begun to believe that Mr. McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Ms. Greene raced to Mr. McCarthy’s office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.Instead of telling Ms. Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, Mr. McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Ms. Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Ms. Greene’s case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.The efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but they impressed Ms. Greene and revealed how far Mr. McCarthy was prepared to go to defend her. It was part of a broader and methodical courtship of the hard right by Mr. McCarthy that included outreach to conservative media figures and Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser Stephen Miller.He had studied the two previous Republican speakers of the House, former Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio and Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, a person familiar with his thinking said, and concluded that one of their fatal errors had been unnecessarily isolating far-right members, who in turn made their lives miserable. So Mr. McCarthy set out to do the opposite.Ms. Greene whipped votes on the House floor to support Mr. McCarthy during his fight to become speaker.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesApproaching SymbiosisStill, the alliance between Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Greene did not truly begin to flourish for several more months. At a party in the Dallas suburbs at the home of Arthur Schwartz, a G.O.P. consultant and outside adviser to Mr. McCarthy, Ms. Greene found herself in the corner of a great room chatting with Devin Nunes, the former top Republican on the Intelligence Committee and a committed Trump ally.Mr. Nunes told Ms. Greene about the time he had witnessed Mr. McCarthy yelling at Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who was then the majority leader, for his party’s decision to remove Ms. Greene from her committees, and threatening that he would do the same to Democrats when Republicans came to power.Ms. Greene recalled it as the first time she had heard from somebody she trusted that Mr. McCarthy had defended her, rather than conspired with Democrats to blackball her. “That conversation had a big impact on me,” she said.From then on, the two settled into a kind of symbiotic relationship, both feeding off what the other could provide. Ms. Greene began regularly visiting Mr. McCarthy, frequently dropping by his office, and he began inviting her to high-level policy discussions attended by senior Republicans and praising her contributions.He was impressed not only by Ms. Greene’s seemingly innate understanding of the impulses of the party’s hard-right voters, but also by her prowess at building her own brand. He once remarked to allies with wonder at how Ms. Greene, as a freshman, was already known by a three-letter monogram: M.T.G. “She knows what she’s doing,” Mr. McCarthy marveled privately. “You’ve got A.O.C. and M.T.G.”After Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, winning only a narrow majority and guaranteeing that Mr. McCarthy would have a tough fight to become speaker, Ms. Greene was quick to begin barnstorming the right-wing media circuit as one of his top surrogates, using her conservative credentials to vouch for his. As her peers on the far-right flank of the party refused to support Mr. McCarthy, subjecting the Republican leader to a four-day stretch of defeats, Ms. Greene was unflinching in her support, personally whipping votes on the House floor and strategizing on calls with Mr. Trump.Ms. Greene’s support for Mr. McCarthy created a permission structure for other G.O.P. lawmakers to do the same.Representative Barry Moore, Republican of Alabama, said in an interview that when conservatives back home sought an explanation for his support for Mr. McCarthy, he would comfort them by replying: “Well, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are standing with Kevin McCarthy. And so am I.”The relationship has also paid off for Ms. Greene, no longer the fringe backbencher stripped of her power. Republican leaders announced last week that she would serve on two high-profile committees: Oversight and Homeland Security. She is also likely to be appointed to a new Oversight select subcommittee to investigate the coronavirus, according to a source familiar with Mr. McCarthy’s thinking who was not authorized to preview decisions that have yet to be finalized.It is already clear that she is influencing Mr. McCarthy’s policy agenda.Ms. Greene has taken on an outsize role as an adviser to Mr. McCarthy.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAfter Ms. Greene had told Mr. McCarthy that vaccine mandates were morally wrong and that he needed to stop them, he fought vociferously — and successfully — to include the repeal of the military coronavirus vaccine mandate in last year’s defense bill. After she told him that the party faithful could not understand why Congress continued to send money to help Ukraine secure its borders, when the United States’ southern border was not secure, Mr. McCarthy helped pave the way for Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee to put forward and support a bill sponsored by Ms. Greene, who does not sit on the panel, demanding that Congress audit American aid sent to Ukraine.And after she told Mr. McCarthy that many people imprisoned for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were being victimized, he signaled that Republicans would start an inquiry of their own digging into the work of the panel that was investigating the assault.“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Ms. Greene said. “It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”In the early hours of Jan. 7, after Mr. McCarthy had finally clinched the speakership on the 15th ballot and pallets of champagne were being wheeled into his new office, Ms. Greene opted not to join the celebration. But she sent him a text message the next day telling Mr. McCarthy how happy and proud she was — and how she could not wait to get started.Kitty Bennett More

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      How Covid Played a Role in Jacinda Ardern’s Resignation

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      In a part of the world where coronavirus restrictions lingered, Jacinda Ardern struggled to get beyond her association with pandemic policy.Jacinda Ardern explained her decision to step down as New Zealand’s prime minister on Thursday with a plea for understanding and rare political directness — the same attributes that helped make her a global emblem of anti-Trump liberalism, then a target of the toxic divisions amplified by the coronavirus pandemic.Ms. Ardern, 42, fought back tears as she announced at a news conference that she would resign in early February ahead of New Zealand’s election in October.“I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” she said. “It is that simple.”Ms. Ardern’s sudden departure before the end of her second term came as a surprise to the country and the world. New Zealand’s youngest prime minister in 150 years, she was a leader of a small nation who reached celebrity status with the speed of a pop star.Her youth, pronounced feminism and emphasis on a “politics of kindness” made her look to many like a welcome alternative to bombastic male leaders, creating a phenomenon known as “Jacindamania.”Her time in office, however, was mostly shaped by crisis management, including the 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch, the deadly White Island volcanic eruption a few months later and Covid-19 soon after that.The pandemic in particular seemed to play to her strengths as a clear and unifying communicator — until extended lockdowns and vaccine mandates hurt the economy, fueled conspiracy theories and spurred a backlash. In a part of the world where Covid restrictions lingered, Ms. Ardern has struggled to get beyond her association with pandemic policy.“People personally invested in her, that has alway been a part of her appeal,” said Richard Shaw, a politics professor at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.“She became a totem,” he added. “She became the personification of a particular response to the pandemic, which people in the far-flung margins of the internet and the not so far-flung margins used against her.”A coronavirus-related lockdown in Wellington in April 2020. As the virus spread, New Zealand closed its borders and imposed severe restrictions.Mark Tantrum/Getty ImagesThe country’s initial goal was audacious: Ms. Ardern and a handful of prominent epidemiologists who were advising the government held out hope for eliminating the virus and keeping it entirely out of New Zealand. In early 2020, she helped coax the country — “our team of five million,” she said — to go along with shuttered international borders and a lockdown so severe that even retrieving a lost cricket ball from a neighbor’s yard was banned.When new, more transmissible variants made that impossible, Ms. Ardern’s team pivoted but struggled to get vaccines quickly. Strict vaccination mandates then kept people from activities like work, eating out and getting haircuts.Dr. Simon Thornley, an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland and a frequent and controversial critic of the government’s Covid response, said many New Zealanders were surprised by what they saw as her willingness to pit the vaccinated against the unvaccinated.“The disillusionment around the vaccine mandates was important,” Dr. Thornley said. “The creation of a two-class society and that predictions didn’t come out as they were meant to be, or as they were forecast to be in terms of elimination — that was a turning point.”Ms. Ardern became a target, internally and abroad, for those who saw vaccine mandates as a violation of individual rights. Online, conspiracy theories, misinformation and personal attacks bloomed: Threats against Ms. Ardern have increased greatly over the past few years, especially from anti-vaccination groups.The tension escalated last February. Inspired in part by protests in the United States and Canada, a crowd of protesters camped on the Parliament grounds in Wellington for more than three weeks, pitching tents and using parked cars to block traffic.The police eventually forced out the demonstrators, clashing violently with many of them, leading to more than 120 arrests.Protesters gathering near Parliament grounds in Wellington last March to demonstrate against coronavirus restrictions and mandates.Dave Lintott/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe scenes shocked a nation unaccustomed to such violence. Some blamed demonstrators, others the police and the government.“It certainly was a dark day in New Zealand history,” Dr. Thornley said.Dylan Reeve, a New Zealand author and journalist who wrote a book on the spread of misinformation in the country, said that the prime minister’s international profile probably played a role in the conspiracist narratives about her.“The fact that she suddenly had such a large international profile and was widely hailed for her reaction really seemed to provide a boost for local conspiracy theorists,” he said. “They found support for the anti-Ardern ideas from like-minded individuals globally at a level that was probably out of scale with New Zealand’s typical prominence internationally.”The attacks did not cease even as the worst of the pandemic receded. This month, Roger J. Stone Jr., the former Trump adviser, condemned Ms. Ardern for her Covid approach, which he described as “the jackboot of authoritarianism.”In her speech on Thursday, Ms. Ardern did not mention any particular group of critics, nor did she name a replacement, but she did acknowledge that she could not help but be affected by the strain of her job and the difficult era when she governed.“I know there will be much discussion in the aftermath of this decision as to what the so-called real reason was,” she said, adding: “The only interesting angle you will find is that after going on six years of some big challenges, that I am human. Politicians are human. We give all that we can, for as long as we can, and then it’s time. And for me, it’s time.”Suze Wilson, a leadership scholar at Massey University in New Zealand, said Ms. Ardern should be taken at her word. She said that the abuse could not and should not be separated from her gender.“She’s talking about not really having anything left in the tank, and I think part of what’s probably contributed to that is just the disgusting level of sexist and misogynistic abuse to what she has been subjected,” Professor Wilson said.Ms. Ardern arriving for prayers near Al Noor mosque in Christchurch in March 2019. Her time in office was partly shaped by her response to an attack at mosques.Kai Schwoerer/Getty ImagesIn the pubs and parks of Christchurch on Thursday, New Zealanders seemed divided. In a city where Ms. Ardern was widely praised for her unifying response to the mass murder of 51 people at two mosques by a white supremacist, there were complaints about unfulfilled promises around nuts-and-bolts issues such as the cost of housing.Tony McPherson, 72, who lives near one of the mosques that was attacked nearly four years ago, described the departing prime minister as someone who had “a very good talk, but not enough walk.”He said she fell short on “housing, health care” and had “made an absolute hash on immigration,” arguing that many businesses had large staff shortages because of a delayed reopening of borders after the lockdowns.Economic issues are front and center for many voters. Polls show Ms. Ardern’s Labour Party has been trailing the center-right National Party, led by Christopher Luxon, a former aviation executive.On the deck of Wilson’s Sports Bar, a Christchurch pub, Shelley Smith, 52, a motel manager, said she was “surprised” at the news of Ms. Ardern’s resignation. She praised her for suppressing the community spread of the coronavirus in 2020, despite the effects on the New Zealand economy. Asked how she would remember Ms. Ardern, she replied: “as a person’s person.”That appeal may have faded, but many New Zealanders do not expect Ms. Ardern to disappear for long. Helen Clark, a former prime minister who was a mentor to Ms. Ardern, followed up her time in office by focusing on international issues with many global organizations.“I don’t know she’ll be lost to the world,” Professor Shaw said of Ms. Ardern. “She may get a bigger platform.”Emanuel Stoakes More

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      In Pennsylvania, the 2020 Election Still Stirs Fury. And a Recount.

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      Election deniers in Lycoming County convinced officials to conduct a 2020 recount, a three-day undertaking that showed almost no change, but left skeptics just as skeptical.WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.A ballot cast for former President Donald J. Trump that was part of the county’s recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?It did not.“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday.“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.The county’s election professionals spent months responding to the arguments of the election deniers in public hearings and fielding their right-to-know requests for the minutiae of voting records. Mr. Lehman said he did not think an encounter with the facts would change the views of some people.“You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” he said.Mr. Trump hosted a campaign rally in Lycoming County at the Williamsport Regional Airport in October 2020. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOne of the residents who pushed for the hand recount, Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, the former chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Lycoming County, said he was happy the results matched the 2020 voting machine counts, though he said other questions needed to be addressed.“Our goal from Day 1 when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we find it, we’ll fix it — we just want to restore voter confidence,” said Mr. Stroehmann, a founder of the far-right Lycoming Patriots group.He and Ms. DiSalvo were inspired by the debunked claims of a retired Army officer named Seth Keshel, who gained attention in 2021 with the assertion that there were 8 million “excess votes” cast for Mr. Biden. His analysis has been dismissed by professors at Harvard, the University of Georgia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.A petition circulated by Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann noted that registered Republicans grew their numbers in Lycoming County compared with Democrats from 2016 to 2020, but that Mr. Biden managed to win more votes than Hillary Clinton. Election deniers found this suspicious.“If Republicans GAINED voters and Democrats LOST voters — why did Biden receive 30% MORE votes in the November 2020 election than Hillary Clinton did in 2016?” their petition asked.Mr. Lehman called the argument nonsensical. Party registration does not dictate how someone will vote, he said. Mr. Biden outperformed Mrs. Clinton in nearly every Pennsylvania county in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump also raised his vote totals in the county by 16 percent.“The voters’ unpredictability — it makes democracy both majestic and messy,” Mr. Lehman told county commissioners at a hearing last year. The commission ultimately approved the recount two to one, along partisan lines.Mr. Lehman monitoring ballots being recounted in Williamsport on Wednesday.Pat Crossley/Williamsport Sun-GazetteElection officials at every level have been harassed and vilified since 2020, when election conspiracists echoing Mr. Trump blamed officials and helped inspire the “Stop the Steal” movement. On an election conspiracy show that was streamed on Rumble, Mr. Stroehmann called for an investigation into Mr. Lehman, who he said is “part of the steal.”“Our director of voter services is playing for the other team,” Mr. Stroehmann said on the show. “He’s as liberal as the day is long.”Richard Mirabito, a Lycoming County commissioner who is a Democrat, said there was no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing by Mr. Lehman. “He’s held in the highest esteem of integrity,” he said. “Those kinds of statements undermine the confidence of people in our system.”Mr. Mirabito voted against the recount but was overruled by the two Republicans on the board. Scott L. Metzger, a Republican and the chair of the county commission, also vouched for Mr. Lehman. “He’s done an outstanding job,’’ he said. After the 2022 midterms, requests for recounts in Pennsylvania races that were not close inundated counties, delaying the certification of some results. In Arizona and New Mexico, rural county commissions held up certifying primary or general election results last year.Across the country, a wave of Trump-backed election conspiracists who ran for statewide offices with control over voting lost their races. But some election deniers won races at the local level, where pressure by activists on officials has a better chance of yielding results.Officials in Lycoming County, a rural area of north-central Pennsylvania, were still estimating the final cost of the recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Metzger — one of the two Republicans on the commission who approved the recount — said that he voted for it after thousands of people signed petitions, and others approached him on the street saying they didn’t want to vote because they distrusted the system. Now that the recount matched what voting tabulator machines showed in 2020 and that there was no evidence of fraud, Mr. Metzger said, it was time to move on. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it,” he said.Before the commissioners voted for the recount, Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann presented the results of what they called a door-to-door canvass of some county residences. The canvassing was conducted by volunteers from Audit the Vote PA, a group founded in 2021 under the false belief that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, won Pennsylvania.Canvassers claimed to have found multiple “anomalies,” including votes that were tabulated from people in nursing homes who did not recall voting, as well as people who said they had voted, though there was no record of it.Mr. Lehman said he and his staff addressed each case. For those in nursing homes, the election office pulled records showing they had returned a mail ballot with their signature on the envelope. The canvass, he said, lacked rigor, adding that he was not surprised some people might have claimed to have voted in a face-to-face interview when they actually had not.Election deniers have no plans to stand down. They have requested reams of documents that they believe will expose fraud once and for all.“We’ve received a series of crazy records requests,” Mr. Lehman said. “You can quote me. They are insane.”Stacks of boxes containing ballots from the 2020 election, which are stored in a secure room of the county’s elections department. Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesElection deniers asked for copies of every application for a mail ballot, requiring Mr. Lehman and his staff to laboriously redact all personal information. They are pressing for copies of every ballot cast on Election Day 2020, and they have gone to court to seek digital data from the voting machines at each of the 81 county precincts.Though observers from both parties watched the hand recount this week, Ms. DiSalvo raised questions about the process, including that Mr. Lehman oversaw the adding up of the recounted votes.“We asked to see the tally sheets before the final processing and were denied,” Ms. DiSalvo said, referring to the paperwork used by ballot counters. The elections director, she added, had a “vested interest in making sure the numbers aligned.”Her group has filed a right-to-know request for the hand-count tally sheets.Mr. Lehman, a former Eagle Scout and teacher, displays two iconic photographs in his office. One shows Harry S. Truman in 1948 holding aloft the famously erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline. The other shows Lyndon Johnson solemnly taking the oath of office on Air Force One in 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy.“They’re both transitions of power,” Mr. Lehman said. “One is comic, the other tragic. We’ve managed to process them both as a country. I don’t know which category to put 2020 in. We need to get back to a place where we can process the outcomes of elections in a constructive, healthy way.” More

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      Arizona Judge Rejects Kari Lake’s Effort to Overturn Her Election Loss

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      Kari Lake, a Republican who was defeated by Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race, had made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign.A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.The ruling, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake and her supporters conjured up what they called a deliberate effort by election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, to disenfranchise her voters. But they never provided evidence of such intentional malfeasance, nor even evidence that any voters had been disenfranchised.In a 10-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson acknowledged “the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers as technical problems arose” in this year’s election.But he said his duty was “not solely to incline an ear to public outcry,” and noted that, in seeking to overturn Katie Hobbs’s victory by a 17,117-vote margin, Ms. Lake was pursuing a remedy that appeared unprecedented.“A court setting such a margin aside, as far as the Court is able to determine, has never been done in the history of the United States,” Judge Thompson wrote.He went on to rule flatly that Ms. Lake and the witnesses she called had failed to provide evidence of intentional misconduct that changed the election’s outcome.“Plaintiff has no free-standing right to challenge election results based upon what Plaintiff believes — rightly or wrongly — went awry on Election Day,” the judge wrote. “She must, as a matter of law, prove a ground that the legislature has provided as a basis for challenging an election.”Undaunted, Ms. Lake insisted her case had “provided the world with evidence that proves our elections are run outside of the law,” and said she would appeal “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”Ms. Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor, lost to Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat who is the Arizona secretary of state, and who rose to national prominence when she resisted efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the vote in 2020.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s What They’re Tweeting.

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      Many reinstated users are tweeting about topics that got them barred in the first place: Covid-19 skepticism, election denialism and QAnon.Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in October, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” has ad-libbed his way through the company’s moderation policies.He initially argued that bans should be reserved for spam accounts, offering “amnesty” to thousands of suspended users and reinstating former president Donald J. Trump. Last week, he suspended several journalists, claiming they had shared public flight data revealing his private location. (Many of the bans were later reversed.)To gauge how Mr. Musk’s content decisions influenced Twitter’s content, The New York Times analyzed tweets from more than 1,000 users whose accounts were recently reinstated. The posts were collected for The Times by Bright Data, a social media tracking company, using a list of reinstated users identified by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who has tracked extremism on Twitter.Most of the reinstated accounts were deeply partisan — often vocal supporters of Mr. Trump — and they appeared eager to bring their fiery takes back to the social network. It was not clear from the data why the users were originally suspended or why they were reinstated, though their post histories suggest many were banned as Twitter cracked down on Covid-19 and election-related misinformation.Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said the message Mr. Musk sent to the formerly suspended users was clear: “‘Welcome back, welcome home.”Inside Elon Musk’s TwitterA Management Guru?: To many, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter may look like an unmitigated disaster. But his unsparing style has still made him a hero to leaders in Silicon Valley.Rival Platforms: Twitter rolled out a new policy to prevent users from sharing links and user names from rival social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon. After a backlash from users, the policy was curtailed.Account Suspensions: Twitter’s decision to suspend (and later reinstate) the accounts of several journalists set off a heated debate about free speech and online censorship.A Flood of Bots: People protesting China’s Covid rules shared their demonstrations on Twitter. But despite Mr. Musk’s vow to remove bots, spam accounts drowned out their posts.Twitter and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.“I finally got this account back after being banned for being a #Republican thanks @elonmusk,” one user tweeted. Just 10 minutes later, the same person wrote: “Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and the 2020 election was stolen.”Here is some of what these users have been saying on Twitter since their return.Covid-19 misinformation and vaccine doubtsDuring the pandemic, Twitter introduced a policy that banned misinformation about the virus, suspending over 11,000 accounts, including many prominent users, after they pushed falsehoods. But in November of this year, after Mr. Musk took control of the company, Twitter said that it would no longer enforce that policy.Several reinstated users who were banned after the Covid-19 policies went into effect started posting again about the virus and its vaccines. Some raised doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines or suggested, without evidence, that vaccines kill people.Several posts mentioned “Died Suddenly,” a misleading documentary released this year that claimed people were dying from the vaccine. Others shared their own unsupported anecdotes.“If you watched ‘Died Suddenly’ here is more confirming evidence,” one user tweeted, adding a link to a website titled “Covid Jab Side Effects.” Before being banned in January 2021, the user had posted several times about Covid-19, including posts that the virus was not dangerous.Election fraudTwitter cracked down on election fraud conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, suspending thousands of accounts that pushed false and misleading ideas about the election results. Hundreds of users have since returned to Twitter, pushing those ideas once again.Many reinstated users focused on close races in the midterm elections, including the governor’s race in Arizona and the Senate race in Pennsylvania. Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, lost her race but has refused to concede, citing problems with the voting process and claiming fraud. Many reinstated users echoed her ideas.Those tweets recycled falsehoods and conspiracy theories from the 2020 election, including that voting machines were rigged to influence the outcome.“Voters, not voting machines, used to decide elections in Arizona,” one reinstated user tweeted. “That’s no longer the case.”QAnonQAnon, the online conspiracy theory, appeared to reach its peak on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building. Twitter suspended over 70,000 accounts linked to the group afterward. But many of the movement’s core ideas have continued playing a significant role in the far-right imagination.On Twitter, reinstated users have returned to familiar themes in QAnon lore, raising questions about prominent Democrats and their association with Jeffrey Epstein, a former financier who was charged with child sex trafficking and is a central figure in QAnon conspiracies.They have claimed without evidence that Democrats and Hollywood personalities are engaged in widespread sex trafficking and pedophilia. And they have also repeated claims that liberals are “grooming” children using drag performances and sex education.“I just was reinstated today after 2 years of permanent suspension,” wrote one reinstated user with “QAnon” in his user name. “I guess I owe that to the new owner thank you Elon Musk.” More

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      Hannity and Other Fox Employees Said They Doubted Trump’s Fraud Claims

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      On Wednesday, lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems shared some of the strongest evidence yet that some Fox employees knew what they broadcast about the claims was false.On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump.At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used “to trash large batches of votes.”Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle-blowers who could prove this fraud?Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?“I did not believe it for one second.”That was the answer Mr. Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April.Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.More on Fox NewsDefamation Case: ​​Some of the biggest names at Fox News are being questioned in the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. The suit could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.Exploring a Merger: Fox and News Corp, the two sides of Rupert Murdoch’s media business, are weighing a proposal that could put Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the Fox broadcasting network under the same corporate umbrella.‘American Nationalist’: Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, the TV host transformed Fox News and became former President Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.The high legal standard of proof in defamation cases makes it difficult for a company like Dominion to prevail against a media organization like Fox News. Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite. And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network.In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.One lawyer for Dominion said that “not a single Fox witness” so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to the Dominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford.This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.“Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies,” he said, naming both Ms. Cooper and Mr. Carlson.Mr. Shackelford described how Mr. Carlson had “tried to squirm out of it at his deposition” when asked about what he really believed.Mr. Shackelford started to elaborate about what Mr. Carlson had said privately, telling the judge about the existence of text messages the host had sent in November and December of 2020. But the judge, Eric M. Davis, cut him off, leaving the specific contents of those texts unknown.A spokeswoman for Fox News had no immediate comment.Another previously unknown detail emerged on Wednesday about what was going on inside the Fox universe in those frantic weeks after the election. A second lawyer representing Dominion, Justin Nelson, told Judge Davis about evidence obtained by Dominion showing that an employee of the Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, had tried to intervene with the White House to stop Ms. Powell. According to Mr. Nelson, that employee called the fraud claims “outlandish” and pressed Mr. Trump’s staff to get rid of Ms. Powell, who was advising the president on filing legal challenges to the results.Mr. Nelson said that evidence cut straight to the heart of whether the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, was also liable for defamation. Judge Davis ruled in June that Dominion could sue the larger, highly profitable corporation, which includes the Fox network on basic television and a lucrative sports broadcasting division.A spokesman for the Fox Corporation had no immediate comment.Over the last several months, Dominion has been combing through mountains of private email and text messages from people at every level of Fox News and the Fox Corporation — hosts like Mr. Hannity, senior executives and midlevel producers. A lawyer for Fox, Dan K. Webb, said on Wednesday that the company had produced more than 52,000 documents for Dominion, with more to come.During the hearing, the judge was asked to rule on several issues. One was whether a second voting company that is suing Fox for defamation, Smartmatic, could be given access to the documents Dominion had obtained for its case. Judge Davis ruled in Fox’s favor, denying Smartmatic’s motion.A second issue was whether certain evidence that Dominion has used against Fox in its court filings — including emails among Fox employees and a page from a deposition in which someone from Fox describes the journalistic processes of one of the network’s programs — should be made public.Throughout the case, Fox has asked the court to keep almost everything in the case pertaining to its inner workings under seal. A third lawyer for Dominion, Davida Brook, argued on Wednesday that the public had a fundamental right to see what it had filed with the court in the interest of fostering the openness that a democracy requires.Judge Davis disagreed, ruling that the evidence would stay under seal. But he admonished the lawyers that neither party in the case should be overly aggressive in trying to keep facts in the case confidential.If, for instance, someone says something “not bright” — and therefore embarrassing — that wouldn’t be enough to keep that information under seal, Judge Davis said.“That’s too bad,” he said. More

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      Will 2024 Be a Vaccine Election?

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      Will Republicans once again nominate Donald Trump for president? Or will they turn to Ron DeSantis instead? I have no idea.What I do know is that anyone imagining DeSantis as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump — a right-wing populist without the reality-denying paranoia — is delusional. DeSantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent has been just as deep.Above all, DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division and have contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.Let’s back up and talk about the story of Covid-19 vaccines so far.In the spring of 2020 the U.S. government initiated Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership intended to develop effective vaccines against the coronavirus as quickly as possible. The effort succeeded: By December 2020, far sooner than almost anyone had imagined possible, vaccinations were underway. (I received my first shot the next month, on Jan. 28, 2021.) And yes, this was a success for the Trump administration.Have the vaccines worked? And how. There are multiple ways to evaluate their lifesaving effect, but I’m especially taken with a simple approach promoted by the analyst Charles Gaba, who looks at the correlation across U.S. counties between vaccination rates and Covid death rates. Between May 2021, when two-dose vaccinations first became widespread, and September 2022 the least-vaccinated 10 percent of counties suffered a death rate more than three times as high as the most-vaccinated.Now, you may have heard that at this point deaths among vaccinated Americans are exceeding those among the unvaccinated, which is true. But that’s partly because most deaths are among the elderly, who are overwhelmingly vaccinated; very few Americans have received no shots; and not enough vaccinated people are getting booster shots.But why are some U.S. counties so much less vaccinated than others? The answer, as Gaba shows, is partisanship: There’s a startlingly close relationship between the share of a county’s voters who supported Trump in 2020 and the percentage of that county’s residents who haven’t received their shots — and the percentage who have died from Covid.You can, by the way, see the same patterns at the level of whole states. For example, although New York was hit hard in the first months of the pandemic (before we knew how the coronavirus spread or what precautions to take), since May 2021 more than twice as many people have died of Covid in Florida than in New York. Even taking Florida’s slightly larger and much older population into account, that’s thousands of excess deaths in the Sunshine State.Yet why should vaccination be a partisan issue?Right-wing opposition to lockdowns and social distancing in the early stages of the pandemic made at least some sense, since these public health measures involved requiring that people make some sacrifices to protect other people’s lives. (Some might say that such trade-offs are what civilization is all about, but whatever.) Even mask mandates required accepting a bit of inconvenience, at least partly for the sake of others.But getting vaccinated is mainly about protecting yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?The immediate answer is the widespread belief on the right that the vaccines have terrible side effects. This belief is hard to justify: If it were true, shouldn’t there be a lot of evidence for such claims, given that more than 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide?Ah, but the usual suspects claim that sinister elites are suppressing the evidence. Which brings us back to DeSantis, who announced on Tuesday that he was forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations — and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified “crimes and misdemeanors” related to coronavirus vaccines.OK, I doubt that anyone believes that DeSantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts, on public health or anything else, with “wokeness,” and demonizes anyone saying things it doesn’t want to hear.As far as I can tell, DeSantis hasn’t joined the likes of Elon Musk in calling for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response. But he has called Fauci a “little elf” and said that we should “chuck him across the Potomac.” (Presidential!)Now, will DeSantis’s attempt to position himself as the leader of the anti-vax movement and give at least tacit approval to conspiracy theories actually endear him to the Republican base? Again, I don’t know. Even if it does, I suspect that it will hurt him in the general election if he does become the nominee: Vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions in the electorate at large.But anyone who imagines that replacing Trump with DeSantis as the G.O.P.’s leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.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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      Donald Trump Is Weak. And Powerful. Now What?

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      Everyone knows by now how many Trump candidates lost this year, especially the higher-profile, more hard-core ones who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Kari Lake lost in Arizona. Doug Mastriano lost in Pennsylvania. Most of the notable pro-Trump secretary of state candidates lost. The Senate candidates, too. The Democrats even added on in Georgia on Tuesday, with the same, central animating force behind each development: that Donald Trump forced his party to run a candidate, Herschel Walker, who lost, weakening Mr. Trump and the party — a mutual descent.What everyone does not know by now is what to do with Mr. Trump’s third candidacy for president. What is this campaign? He’s a candidate without opponents, who has made less frequent public appearances since his announcement than he did before, whose party’s other notable members seem to want to move on but often still don’t really say so publicly. The 2022 incarnation of Mr. Trump is like some kind of trap: He keeps losing and forcing others to go with him, in part because of his and their nature and in part because without him, Republicans might not quite be able to win, either.Looming over every aspect of Mr. Trump’s current campaign is the simple question: Will this be like before? That has a technical, outcome-driven dimension (will he win and become president?) and a more cultural, psychological one (will he dominate American life, and will each day’s news turn on the actions and emotions of one person cascading through society?). Politics is about a lot more than just the outcomes of elections; a long time separates us from the 2024 election, and each day has the potential to influence the ones after. Something can be weak and a considerable force in politics or culture at the same time; someone can be losing and influential at the same time. These things are compatible.The country spent nearly two years hearing about voting machine conspiracies and the possibility of subversion in future elections. Voters rejected all that in many cases. What did the last two years mean for Mr. Trump and these candidates? For all of us? Nobody got anything of real value out of conspiracy theories and Trump recriminations. Not the Republicans, certainly, and that’s been the tenor of much post-election coverage and conversation — the way Mr. Trump’s choices produced certain outcomes that hurt the Republican Party.“The people that were on the crazy side, they’ve kind of been sent off to the frontier,” Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, told Semafor this week. “If you’re denying the last election or any election, I think that balloon has been popped.” Even so, it’s no great gift to the country as a whole that candidates ran for two years on suspicion about normal election practices or advancing conspiracy theories, which people heard and internalized — a more intangible result with effects harder to measure.Since Mr. Trump’s announcement for president, as you have also heard by now, he’s repeatedly demanded that the 2020 election be redone, even straight up saying that there could be a “termination” of the Constitution. Two nights before Thanksgiving, he ate dinner with a white supremacist and Kanye West, who can’t stop saying antisemitic things. These events can also be viewed through this dual dynamic of weakness and influence. In the most basic horse race political sense, Mr. Trump’s actions almost certainly hurt him; more Republicans have criticized him, and we have multiple election cycles of results suggesting that people reject his choices. This weakens him. But he still has influence, and through this one dinner, for instance, many, many people heard about an extreme racist they probably never heard about before.In 2022, even when Mr. Trump seems to be fading politically, nobody has conclusively resolved the question of how to deal with him — when to step in and when to ignore, how to measure one action against another. The central issue flows from an understanding that most people in this country seem to share, however they feel about him: Mr. Trump will not be stopped from endlessly wanting things. And he will not confine himself to the ways in which a president or public person is supposed to behave, in pursuit of this endless array of wants and needs.Faced with this uncontrollability, people fall into complex emotional dynamics of how to react to Mr. Trump — to care or not care, how to demonstrate caring, to ignore him or this or that, to never ignore it, how far to go, when to walk away, when to stay, when someone else’s silence becomes unacceptable. How is a person supposed to be? What can a single person do? What are our duties and obligations? These questions animate centuries of literature and philosophy, but Mr. Trump’s chemical mix of emotion and power turns them into an hourly concern. He will not change; you can. This is an exhausting texture of American life in this era, even now.It’s almost hard to remember what the first campaign was like, though it, too, started with a weak hand. Mr. Trump defeated a splintered field with, initially, mere pluralities of votes. And you were constantly finding out how weak American institutions were: the thinness of political belief among Republican politicians, the inability of different institutions to do anything about Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the true incentives of cable news, how game people were to go along with, for instance, an attack on Mexicans or Gold Star parents. Practically overnight, Republican and conservative groups went from opposing Mr. Trump to caving in to the reality of his candidacy to emphatically supporting him. This general dynamic repeated again and again for years.Seven years in, one of the more disorienting aspects of the Trump era is the way there’s never any sense of resolution. The entire population hangs in a kind of eternal suspense, without past or future. Since the week of Jan. 6, 2021, without Mr. Trump’s ceaseless presence on the major social platforms, things have been somewhat different. But who knows where he goes from here? He might return to Twitter. He might really be fading. He might lose to Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. He might not accept a loss to anyone, at any point. He might be president again. Could we really revert to the full chaotic, exhausting, late-2010s immersion in Mr. Trump’s emotions?The need to know how it ends with Mr. Trump, what will happen next and how people respond to him, can obscure the current situation. And over the past year, it’s become clearer how power and weakness and influence can exist in one space and in one person. In this dark environment, Mr. Trump can lose an election and still change American life indefinitely.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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