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      ¿El máximo tribunal de Brasil se extralimita en su defensa de la democracia?

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      El principal contrapeso al poder del presidente Jair Bolsonaro ha sido el Supremo Tribunal Federal de Brasil. Ahora muchos temen que el organismo se convierta en una amenaza.RÍO DE JANEIRO — El chat grupal en WhatsApp era una especie de vestidor de gimnasio para decenas de los más grandes empresarios de Brasil. Estaba un magnate de centros comerciales, el fundador de una tienda de ropa para surfear y el multimillonario de la tienda departamental más conocida de Brasil. Se quejaban de la inflación, enviaban memes y, a veces, compartían opiniones incendiarias.El Times More

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      Kenya Awaits Supreme Court Ruling on Presidential Election

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      The Supreme Court is expected to rule by Monday on whether the recent election of William Ruto as president, now mired in a welter of conflicting accusations, should stand.NAIROBI, Kenya — With its hefty price tag and sophisticated anti-rigging measures, Kenya’s recent presidential election was supposed to be among the best that money could buy — an elaborate system that experts said was more transparent than those in many Western countries, posting online tens of thousands of results in a matter of hours.But since a victor was declared on Aug. 15, giving William Ruto a narrow margin over Raila Odinga, Kenya’s election still hangs in the balance. The outcome has been mired in a storm of rigging allegations, baroque conspiracy theories and vicious personal attacks directed at the same electoral commission chairman who only recently was being praised for a polling process seen by many as a model for Africa, and beyond.At the center of the dispute is Mr. Odinga, who at 77 is making his fifth bid for the presidency. As with most of his previous four attempts, he says he was cheated of a rightful victory.He has taken his accusations straight to Kenya’s Supreme Court, where seven judges have spent much of the past week trying to sift fact from fiction. A decision is expected by Monday evening.The task is considerable. Mr. Odinga turned up outside the courthouse with a van filled with boxes of legal fillings, which he helped to carry inside. But while Mr. Odinga enjoyed a fair measure of public sympathy in his previous election battles — by most estimates, victory was stolen from him at least once — this time his accusations are more contentious.His legal team appear to have taken a kitchen sink approach, making a wide range of charges that, analysts say, range from the plausible to the outlandish. They will be scrutinized by a Supreme Court with a reputation for independence: It forced a rerun of the 2017 election and earlier this year overturned constitutional changes championed by Mr. Odinga and President Uhuru Kenyatta.Raila Odinga speaks to supporters as he arrives to hold a news conference at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi last month, after filing a petition to the country’s top court, challenging his defeat in the presidential election.Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWith Kenya bitterly divided, the judges’ verdict on the election will be consequential, analysts say — not only for determining the result of the Aug. 9 vote, but also for the legitimacy of the ballot in a country widely seen as beacon of democracy on a continent where authoritarianism is rising.“These seven men and women are walking a tightrope,” Denis Galava, a former managing editor at the Daily Nation newspaper, said of the Supreme Court justices.After a series of bitterly, often violently, contested elections, many Kenyans hoped this one would yield a clean result followed by a smooth transfer of power. Violence was nearly absent during the vote and its aftermath. International and local groups that deployed thousands of election observers across Kenya said the vote went well.But in the hours before Mr. Ruto was declared winner on Aug. 15, with 50.5 percent of votes against 48.9 percent for Mr. Odinga, the process plunged into rowdy discord.At the national tallying center, Mr. Odinga’s top electoral representative proclaimed it a “crime scene” then stormed the dais with other supporters, flinging chairs and clashing with security officials who eventually drove the group out with truncheons. Two electoral commissioners were injured in the melee.Around the same time, signs emerged that powerful figures inside the government also opposed a Ruto victory.Supporters of William Ruto celebrating in Eldoret, Kenya, last month.Brian Inganga/Associated PressMany Kenyans, including members of the political elite, had supposed that Mr. Odinga would coast to victory thanks to his political alliance with Mr. Kenyatta, who had reached his two-term limit. That assumption was overturned as the results poured in. Some officials allegedly turned to other means to influence the result.Top government officials loyal to Mr. Kenyatta turned up at the tallying center hours before the result was announced, pressuring the electoral commission to push the election into a second round, according to a court filing by the commission chairman, Wafula Chebukati. (If no candidate gets over 50 percent of votes, Kenya’s system requires a runoff).He said the group, including the inspector general of police, the deputy chief of the armed forces and the solicitor general, warned him that “the country is going to burn” if Ruto was declared the winner, leaving “the blood of dead Kenyans” on the commission’s hands. More

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      How a Corporate Law Firm Led a Political Revolution

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      On a balmy Saturday night in June, Traci Lovitt hosted a 50th birthday party for her husband, Ara, at their 9,800-square-foot Westchester mansion overlooking Long Island Sound. The couple met while clerking for Supreme Court justices: Traci for Sandra Day O’Connor, Ara for Antonin Scalia. These days, Ara worked in finance. Traci was a top partner at — and a contender to one day run — the international law firm of Jones Day, best known for representing Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. To serve as M.C. for the event, the Lovitts flew in Richard Blade, the veteran disc jockey Ara listened to while growing up in Southern California. But Blade wasn’t the party’s biggest star. That distinction belonged to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.One day earlier, Barrett and four of her colleagues on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. Now she was wearing a pink dress and sitting at a flower-bedecked table under a tent on the Lovitts’ lush lawn. Barrett clerked for Scalia in the same session as Ara, in 1998 and 1999, and also became friends with Traci, jogging together around the National Mall after work. (When Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Traci wrote to senators, praising the judge’s fair-mindedness and commitment to the rule of law.) But the connection to the court ran deeper than that. Scalia had spent years at Jones Day in the 1960s. And Traci ran an elite practice inside the firm that was focused in part on arguing cases before Barrett and her colleagues. Guests at the Lovitts’ estate danced to Blade’s beats until 1 a.m. At one point, an attendee spotted Barrett chatting with Noel Francisco, another Jones Day partner, who had himself clerked for Scalia the year before Lovitt and Barrett. Francisco left the firm in 2017 to become Trump’s solicitor general, responsible for representing the government before the Supreme Court, and returned in 2020, eventually taking over Jones Day’s enormous Washington office. Now his and Lovitt’s underlings were appearing regularly before the court. In one recent case brought by Jones Day, the court killed the Biden administration’s moratorium on home evictions during the pandemic. Less than a week after the Lovitts’ party, in another case Jones Day worked on, the court would severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of power-plant emissions.For much of its history, Jones Day was a juggernaut in the field of corporate litigation. A global goliath with more than 40 offices and about 2,500 lawyers, it raked in billions a year in fees from tobacco, opioid, gun and oil companies, among many other giant corporations in need of a state-of-the-art defense. More than most of its competitors, the firm had an army of litigators who had perfected the art of exploiting tiny legal wrinkles, of burying outmatched opponents in paperwork and venue changes and procedural minutiae. But over the past two decades, Jones Day has been building a different kind of legal practice, one dedicated not just to helping Republicans win elections but to helping them achieve their political aims once in office. Chief among those aims was dismantling what Don McGahn — the Jones Day partner who helped run Trump’s campaign and then became his White House counsel — disparagingly referred to as the “administrative state.” To do that, the firm was bringing all the ruthless energy and creativity of corporate law to the political realm.Jones Day lured dozens of young Supreme Court clerks, mostly from conservative justices, with six-figure signing bonuses and the opportunity to work on favored causes, including legal challenges to gun control and Obamacare. The firm allotted countless pro bono hours to aiding the needy — and also to assisting deep-pocketed right-wing groups as they fought against early voting and a federal corporate-oversight body.Representing Trump’s 2016 campaign, Jones Day helped him solidify Republican support by pledging to pick federal judges from a list that was vetted in advance by the law firm and the Federalist Society. When Trump won, a large fleet of Jones Day lawyers sailed into his White House, the Justice Department and other parts of his administration. But the biggest impact was on the judiciary. Trump delegated the task of selecting federal judges to McGahn, who — working closely with Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — placed well over 100 conservatives on the federal courts, including several who had recently worked at Jones Day. Even after rejoining Jones Day in 2019, McGahn continued to advise Senate Republicans on judicial strategy.It is not uncommon for partners at corporate law firms to dabble in politics. Nor is it rare for a firm itself to throw its weight behind causes on the left or the right. One of the country’s richest firms, Paul, Weiss, for example, has long staked out liberal stances on the public issues of the day (even as it rakes in fees from companies that undercut those ideals). What sets Jones Day apart is the degree to which it penetrated the federal government under Trump and is now taking advantage of a judicial revolution that it helped set in motion.The power of that revolution, which is spreading to courtrooms and statehouses around the country, is now on vivid display. Even with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the Supreme Court has been on a rightward tear. In its most recent term, Trump’s three appointees — the first two handpicked by McGahn and the third, Barrett, plucked by him out of academia for the federal bench — helped erase the constitutional right to abortion, erode the separation of church and state, undermine states’ power to control guns and constrain the authority of federal regulators. Jones Day had a hand in some of those cases, and the firm has telegraphed that it is eyeing additional legal challenges in line with its leaders’ ideology.Jones Day’s influence seems poised to grow. This year, it has been collecting fees from a remarkable assortment of prominent Republican players: a Trump political-action committee; moderates like Senator Susan Collins; Trump allies like Dr. Mehmet Oz; hard-liners like Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — not to mention an assortment of super PACs supporting fringe candidates like Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. star who is running for a Senate seat in Georgia. Francisco recently represented former Attorney General Bill Barr before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. McGahn recently began representing Senator Lindsey Graham as he fights a grand jury subpoena to testify about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The chief of staff to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is a recent Jones Day alum. The next Republican presidential administration — whether it belongs to Trump, DeSantis or someone else — will most likely be stocked with Jones Day lawyers.Founded in Cleveland in 1893, Jones Day was at the vanguard of an era of breakneck expansion in the legal industry. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was one of the first law firms to open multiple offices in the United States and then overseas. It was a tireless, and extremely successful, defender of some of America’s worst corporate actors. The firm helped R.J. Reynolds sow doubts about the dangers of cigarettes. It helped Charles Keating’s fraud-infested savings-and-loan association fend off regulators. It helped Purdue Pharma protect its patents for OxyContin. But it didn’t become a conservative machine until Stephen Brogan took over as managing partner in 2003.Brogan, the son of a New York City police officer, joined Jones Day straight out of the University of Notre Dame’s law school in 1977 and, aside from a two-year stint in the Reagan Justice Department, has worked there ever since. A number of Brogan’s allies said the key to understanding him and his politics was through his faith. “Brogan is extremely conservative, hard-core Catholic, and that is the bedrock of who he is,” one of his Jones Day confidants told me. Brogan brought on a series of high-profile devotees of the Federalist Society — including leading Reagan and Bush administration lawyers like Michael Carvin and Noel Francisco — to work in the firm’s issues-and-appeals practice, which became a sort of in-house conservative think tank. Even as most of the firm’s lawyers remained focused on bread-and-butter work for big companies, Jones Day took on a growing list of ideologically charged cases and causes, including efforts by the ultraconservative Buckeye Institute to prevent the expansion of early voting in Ohio and challenge the legitimacy of the Obama administration’s newly inaugurated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By 2014, when a trio of Republican lawyers at Patton Boggs, a Washington law firm that was in financial trouble, began looking for a new home, Jones Day was a natural fit. It was huge, it had a thriving Washington office and its leaders were conservative. Plus, the Patton Boggs crew — McGahn, Ben Ginsberg and William McGinley — would fill a void. While Jones Day had built up a formidable practice advising companies on how to navigate the federal bureaucracy, the firm didn’t have a practice advising politicians on how to navigate election and campaign-finance laws. And without the relationships that came from helping people win office, it was harder for Jones Day to wield influence on Capitol Hill and in the White House. It helped that Ginsberg, who had been the top lawyer on presidential campaigns by George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, had known Francisco and Carvin for years. During the interview process, Ginsberg told Francisco that he recognized that Jones Day, despite its conservative reputation, probably employed a lot of Democrats. Would it be a problem to bring in a team that would represent polarizing Republicans? It would not, Francisco assured him. Indeed, promoting conservative principles was becoming part of the firm’s marketing pitch. “The government’s tentacles invade virtually every aspect of what our clients do,” Francisco said in a Jones Day promotional video in 2015. “The job of a lawyer and the job of courts is to ensure that the federal government lives within the limits that our Constitution sets, and I love making sure that those lines are enforced.” Ginsberg and McGahn were well known throughout the Republican establishment, and several would-be presidents soon came to them seeking counsel; Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Perry of Texas and Chris Christie of New Jersey would become clients. McGahn — who had recently served on the Federal Election Commission, watering down campaign-finance rules and slowing the agency’s decision-making in what he said was an effort to make it more responsive to the people and groups it regulated — also represented a who’s who of other G.O.P. power players: the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association, the billionaire Koch brothers.There was at least one other key client: Citizens United. The group, famous for its successful Supreme Court challenge of campaign spending restrictions, was run by Dave Bossie, an influential right-wing activist. One day in late 2014, Bossie and McGahn were on the phone, batting around ideas about which presidential campaigns the Jones Day lawyers should work for.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6The Trump InvestigationsNumerous inquiries. More

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      Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Former Leader, Appears in Court

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      The police were ordered not to arrest the former prime minister, who has been charged under Pakistan’s antiterrorism act, before a hearing set for next Wednesday.Former Prime Minister Imran Khan appeared in court in the Pakistani capital on Thursday after being charged under the country’s antiterrorism act, the latest step in an intensifying crackdown on Mr. Khan and his allies since he was removed from office in April.It was his first court appearance since being charged on Sunday, after giving a speech in which he threatened legal action against police officers and a judge involved in the recent arrest of one of his top aides.Mr. Khan made no public comment during his brief appearance Thursday before an antiterrorism court in Islamabad, where his bail bond was set at 100,000 rupees, or roughly $450. The court set the next hearing in the case for Wednesday and ordered the police not to arrest him before then.“Pakistan is being mocked all over the world,” Mr. Khan said outside the courthouse after the hearing. He said the government was afraid of his popularity, and that the case against him had “made Pakistan look like a banana republic.”Before the hearing, many in Pakistan had been worried about the possibility of violent unrest. A day earlier, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah had warned that if the court rejected Mr. Khan’s bail plea, the government would arrest him — a move that his supporters have said would cross a “red line.”The charges against Mr. Khan have been seen as an escalation of the monthslong clash between Pakistan’s current government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and its former leader, who has made a stunning political comeback in recent months.His court appearance was the latest twist in Mr. Khan’s political second act, since falling out with the country’s powerful military and being removed from office in a no-confidence vote.Supporters of Mr. Khan gathered outside his residence in Islamabad on Monday.Anjum Naveed/Associated PressIn recent months, Mr. Khan has drawn tens of thousands to his rallies, where he has doubled down on accusations that the United States and the country’s powerful military conspired to topple his government. His speeches have also tapped into Pakistanis’ growing frustration with the country’s economic downturn, which the current government has struggled to address.His message has resonated widely, and his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, has won seats in provincial elections in two crucial regions.“I would say there is a soft revolution taking place in Pakistan,” Mr. Khan said in an hourlong interview with New York Times journalists on Wednesday. “I never thought in my life I would see this sort of thing happening in the country — people sort of spontaneously coming out without being led out by political parties.”But his growing popularity has also prompted a clampdown on Mr. Khan’s supporters and allies, in what is widely considered a coordinated campaign by the authorities to force him out of politics.Journalists considered “pro-Khan” have been harassed, intimidated and arrested by the authorities, he said. A top aide to Mr. Khan, Shahbaz Gill, was imprisoned after making anti-military remarks, and the television channel that broadcast them was forced off the air. Mr. Khan has accused the authorities of torturing Mr. Gill, who remains in custody. Government officials have denied the claim.In the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Khan went to lengths not to directly condemn the country’s powerful military, which has long served as the true power broker in Pakistani politics.Shahbaz Gill, center in blue shirt, an aide to Mr. Khan, at a court appearance on Monday. Mr. Khan has accused the authorities of torturing Mr. Gill, a claim the government has denied.Associated PressBut in toeing a careful line, Mr. Khan suggested the military establishment had played a role in the current crackdown, claiming that some officials involved in detaining Mr. Gill had said they were being “pushed from behind” — a common phrase in Pakistan referring to coming under military pressure.The Pakistani military has denied accusations that it has played any role in the recent clampdown, insisting the institution has adopted a “neutral” stance amid the political uncertainty. Military officials have also emphasized that the military is not involved with police cases and civilian courts.Mr. Khan’s lawyers claim that the case against him is little more than a sham. The Islamabad police charged Mr. Khan under a section of the country’s antiterrorism laws, and a police report stated that he had “terrorized and threatened top police officials and a respected female additional sessions judge” during the speech.“We won’t spare you,” Mr. Khan had said, addressing the officials.Mr. Khan has called for fresh elections. And he has repeatedly insisted that he hopes the country can avoid violent unrest even as political tensions build.“One thing I don’t want is violence,” he said. “That would not suit us; that would suit the guys who have been put in power, because the last thing they want are elections. For us, any violence or disruption would mean there won’t be an election.”But given widespread frustration over the economic crisis and a political scene that has been dominated for decades by often-corrupt family dynasties, many fear that any street action over Mr. Khan’s fate could easily spill into violent unrest.“There’s been this ratcheting up of the rhetoric, the instigation,” said Adil Najam, a professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and an expert on Pakistani politics. “I cannot imagine a world where his arrest — if it happens — will go down quietly.” More

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      Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act by limiting help to voters, a judge rules.

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      A federal judge ruled that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act with its six-voter limit for those who help people cast ballots in person, which critics had argued disenfranchised immigrants and people with disabilities.In a 39-page ruling issued on Friday, Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., wrote that Congress had explicitly given voters the choice of whom they wanted to assist them at the polls, as long as it was not their employer or union representative.Arkansas United, a nonprofit group that helps immigrants, including many Latinos who are not proficient in English, filed a lawsuit in 2020 after having to deploy additional employees and volunteers to provide translation services to voters at the polls in order to avoid violating the state law, the group said. It described its work as nonpartisan.State and county election officials have said the law was intended to prevent anyone from gaining undue influence.Thomas A. Saenz is the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented Arkansas United in the case. He said in an interview on Monday that the restrictions, enacted in 2009, constituted voter suppression and that the state had failed to present evidence that anyone had gained undue influence over voters when helping them at the polls.Read More About U.S. ImmigrationA Billion-Dollar Business: Migrant smuggling on the U.S. southern border has evolved over the past 10 years into a remunerative operation controlled by organized crime.Migrant Apprehensions: Border officials already had apprehended more migrants by June than they had in the entire previous fiscal year, and are on track to exceed two million by the end of September.An Immigration Showdown: In a political move, the governors of Texas and Arizona are offering migrants free bus rides to Washington, D.C. People on the East Coast are starting to feel the effects.“You’re at the polls,” he said. “Obviously, there are poll workers are there. It would seem the most unlikely venue for undue voter influence to occur, frankly.”Mr. Saenz’s organization, known as MALDEF, filed a lawsuit this year challenging similar restrictions in Missouri. There, a person is allowed to help only one voter.In Arkansas, the secretary of state, the State Board of Election Commissioners and election officials in three counties (Washington, Benton and Sebastian) were named as defendants in the lawsuit challenging the voter-assistance restrictions. It was not immediately clear whether they planned to appeal the ruling.Daniel J. Shults, the director of the State Board of Election Commissioners, said in an email on Monday that the agency was reviewing the decision and that its normal practice was to defend Arkansas laws designed to protect election integrity. He said that voter privacy laws in Arkansas barred election officials from monitoring conversations between voters and their helpers and that this made the six-person limit an “important safeguard” against improper influence.“The purpose of the law in question is to prevent the systematic abuse of the voting assistance process,” Mr. Shults said. “Having a uniform limitation on the number of voters a third party may assist prevents a bad actor from having unlimited access to voters in the voting booth while ensuring voter’s privacy is protected.”Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said in an email on Monday that the office was also reviewing the decision and having discussions with the state attorney general’s office about possible next steps.Russell Anzalone, a Republican who is the election commission chairman in Benton County in northwestern Arkansas, said in an email on Monday that he was not familiar with the ruling or any changes regarding voter-assistance rules. He added, “I follow the approved State of Arkansas election laws.”The other defendants in the lawsuit did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment.In the ruling, Judge Brooks wrote that state and county election officials could legally keep track of the names and addresses of anyone helping voters at the polls. But they can no longer limit the number to six voters per helper, according to the ruling.Mr. Saenz described the six-voter limit as arbitrary.“I do think that there is a stigma and unfair one on those who are simply doing their part to assist those who have every right to be able to cast a ballot,” he said. More

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      Giuliani Is a Target in Georgia’s Trump Election Inquiry, Lawyer Says

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      Rudolph W. Giuliani, as former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.ATLANTA — The legal pressures on Donald J. Trump and his closest allies intensified further on Monday, as prosecutors informed his former personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Mr. Giuliani was a target in a wide-ranging criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia.The notification came on the same day that a federal judge rejected efforts by another key Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, to avoid giving testimony before the special grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Atlanta.One of Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert Costello, said in an interview that he was notified on Monday that his client was a target. Being so identified does not guarantee that a person will be indicted; rather, it usually means that prosecutors believe an indictment is possible, based on evidence they have seen up to that point.Mr. Giuliani, who as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, emerged in recent weeks as a central figure in the inquiry being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta.Earlier this summer, prosecutors questioned witnesses before the special grand jury about Mr. Giuliani’s appearances before state legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.For Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, the developments are the latest in a widening swath of trouble, though he got some good news recently when it emerged that he was unlikely to face charges in a federal criminal inquiry into his ties to Ukraine during the 2020 presidential campaign.Mr. Giuliani is scheduled to appear before the special grand jury on Wednesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse. His lawyer, Mr. Costello, said in the interview that Mr. Giuliani would probably invoke attorney-client privilege if asked questions about his dealings with Mr. Trump. “If these people think he’s going to talk about conversations between him and President Trump, they’re delusional,” Mr. Costello said.The rejection of Senator Graham’s effort to avoid testifying came in a written order from a Federal District Court judge in Atlanta, Leigh Martin May. Mr. Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, is now set to testify on Aug. 23.The judge found that prosecutors had shown that there is “a special need for Mr. Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections.”Lawyers for Mr. Graham have said that he was informed by prosecutors that he was a witness, not a target.Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Will the F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago Raid Help Re-Elect Trump?

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      Why is Donald Trump so powerful? How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president? Is it his hair? His waistline? No, it’s his narratives. Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.It simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.Into this situation walks the F.B.I. There’s a lot we don’t know about the search at Mar-a-Lago. But we do know how the Republican Party reacted. The right side of my Twitter feed was ecstatic. See! We really are persecuted! Essays began to appear with titles like “The Regime Wants Its Revenge.” Ron DeSantis tweeted, “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” As usual, the tone was apocalyptic. “This is the worst attack on this Republic in modern history,” the Fox News host Mark Levin exclaimed.The investigation into Trump was seen purely as a heinous Regime plot. At least for now, the search has shaken the Republican political landscape. Several weeks ago, about half of Republican voters were ready to move on from Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. This week the entire party seemed to rally behind him. Republican strategists advising Trump’s potential primary opponents had reason to be despondent. “Completely handed him a lifeline,” one such strategist told Politico. “Unbelievable … It put everybody in the wagon for Trump again. It’s just taken the wind out of everybody’s sails.”According to a Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action survey, 83 percent of likely Republican voters said the F.B.I. search made them more motivated to vote in the 2022 elections. Over 75 percent of likely Republican voters believed Trump’s political enemies were behind the search rather than the impartial justice system, as did 48 percent of likely general election voters overall.In a normal society, when politicians get investigated or charged, it hurts them politically. But that no longer applies to the G.O.P. The judicial system may be colliding with the political system in an unprecedented way.What happens if a prosecutor charges Trump and he is convicted just as he is cruising to the G.O.P. nomination or maybe even the presidency? What happens if the legal system, using its criteria, decides Trump should go to prison at the very moment that the electoral system, using its criteria, decides he should go to the White House?I presume in those circumstances Trump would be arrested and imprisoned. I also presume we would see widespread political violence from incensed Trump voters who would conclude that the Regime has stolen the country. In my view, this is the most likely path to a complete democratic breakdown.In theory, justice is blind, and obviously no person can be above the law. But as Damon Linker wrote in a Substack post, “This is a polity, not a graduate seminar in Kantian ethics.” We live in a specific real-world situation, and we all have to take responsibility for the real-world effects of our actions.America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes. On the other hand, America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president. What do we do if the former makes the latter more likely? I have no clue how to get out of this potential conflict between our legal and political realities.We’re living in a crisis of legitimacy, during which distrust of established power is so virulent that actions by elite actors tend to backfire, no matter how well founded they are.My impression is that the F.B.I. had legitimate reasons to do what it did. My guess is it will find some damning documents that will do nothing to weaken Trump’s support. I’m also convinced that, at least for now, it has unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances. It has unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base.It feels as though we’re walking toward some sort of storm and there’s no honorable way to alter our course.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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      We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.

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      It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style relief. The summer’s protests altered the public’s perception of race’s role in the criminal justice system. And analyses were pointing to Republican losses large enough to clear the way for the biggest burst of progressive legislation since the 1960s.Two years on, the truth is easier to see. We aren’t living in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, or Lyndon Johnson’s, or Donald Trump’s, or even Joe Biden’s. We’re living in Richard Nixon’s.Not the America of Nixon’s last years, though there are dim echoes of it in the Jan. 6 hearings, but the nation he built before Watergate brought him down, where progressive possibilities would be choked off by law and order’s toxic politics and a Supreme Court he’d helped to shape.He already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness,” he said, “when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.”There it is — the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency.Over the course of that year, he gave his pitch a populist twist by saying that he was running to defend all those hard-working, law-abiding Americans who occupied “the silent center.”A month later, after a major Supreme Court ruling on school integration, he quietly told key supporters that if he were elected, he would nominate only justices who would oppose the court’s progressivism. And on the August night he accepted the Republican nomination, he gave it all a colorblind sheen. “To those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply,” he said. “Our goal is justice for every American.”In practice it didn’t work that way. Within two years of his election, Nixon had passed two major crime bills laced with provisions targeting poor Black communities. One laid the groundwork for a racialized war on drugs. The other turned the criminal code of Washington, D.C., into a model for states to follow by authorizing the district’s judges to issue no-knock warrants, allowing them to detain suspects they deemed dangerous and requiring them to impose mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted of violent crimes.And the nation’s police would have all the help they needed to restore law and order. Lyndon Johnson had sent about $20 million in aid to police departments and prison systems in his last two years in office. Nixon sent $3 billion. Up went departments’ purchases of military-grade weapons, their use of heavily armed tactical patrols, the number of officers they put on the streets. And up went the nation’s prison population, by 16 percent, while the Black share of the newly incarcerated reached its highest level in 50 years.Nixon’s new order reached into the Supreme Court, too, just as he said it would. His predecessors had made their first nominations to the court by the fluid standards presidents tended to apply to the process: Dwight Eisenhower wanted a moderate Republican who seemed like a statesman, John Kennedy someone with the vigor of a New Frontiersman, Johnson an old Washington hand who understood where his loyalties lay. For his first appointment, in May 1969, Nixon chose a little-known federal judge, Warren Burger, with an extensive record supporting prosecutorial and police power over the rights of the accused.When a second seat opened a few months later, he followed the same pattern, twice nominating judges who had at one point either expressed opposition to the integration of the races or whose rulings were regarded as favoring segregation. Only when the Senate rejected both of them did Nixon fall back on Harry Blackmun, the sort of centrist Ike would have loved.Two more justices stepped down in September 1971. Again Nixon picked nominees who he knew would be tough on crime and soft on civil rights — and by then, he had a more expansive agenda in mind. It included an aversion to government regulation of the private sector — and so one pick was the courtly corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who had written an influential memo that year to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a robust corporate defense of the free enterprise system. Another item on Nixon’s agenda was to devolve federal power down to the states. William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general committed to that view, was his other pick. The two foundational principles of an increasingly energized conservatism were set into the court by Nixon’s determination to select his nominees through a precisely defined litmus test previous presidents hadn’t imagined applying.Our view of the Burger court may be skewed in part because Nixon’s test didn’t include abortion. By 1971, abortion politics had become furiously contested, but the divisions followed demography as well as political affiliation: In polling then (which wasn’t as representative as it is today), among whites, men were slightly more likely than women to support the right to choose, the non-Catholic college-educated more likely than those without college degrees, non-Catholics far more likely than Catholics, who anchored the opposition. So it wasn’t surprising that after oral arguments, three of the four white Protestant men Nixon had put on the court voted for Roe, and that one of them wrote the majority opinion.Justice Blackmun was still drafting the court’s decision in May 1972 when Nixon sent a letter to New York’s Catholic cardinal, offering his “admiration, sympathy and support” for the church stepping in as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.” The Republican assemblywoman who had led New York’s decriminalization of abortion denounced his intervention as “a patent pitch for the Catholic vote.” That it was. In November, Nixon carried the Catholic vote, thanks to a move that gave the abortion wars a partisan alignment they hadn’t had before.Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H. W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration. The ideological vetting of justices has increased in intensity and in precision.Mr. Trump’s term entrenched a party beholden to the configurations of politics and power that Nixon had shaped half a century ago. The possibility of progressive change that seemed to open in 2020 has now been shut down. The court’s supermajority handed down the first of what could be at least a decade of rulings eviscerating liberal precedents.Crime and gun violence now outstrip race as one of the electorates’ major concerns.Mr. Trump, in a speech on Tuesday, made it clear that he would continue to hammer the theme as he considers a 2024 run: “If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom,” he said, adding that “America First must mean safety first” and “we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it. And be tough. And be nasty and be mean if we have to.”An order so firmly entrenched won’t easily be undone. It’s tempting to talk about expanding the court or imposing age limits. But court reform has no plausible path through the Senate. Even if it did, the results might not be progressive: Republicans are as likely as Democrats to pack a court once they control Congress, and age limits wouldn’t affect some of the most conservative justices for at least another 13 years. The truth is the court will be remade as it always has been, a justice at a time.The court will undoubtedly limit progressive policies, too, as it has already done on corporate regulation and gun control. But it’s also opened up the possibility of undoing some of the partisan alignments that Nixon put into place, on abortion most of all. Now that Roe is gone, the Democrats have the chance to reclaim that portion of anti-abortion voters who support the government interventions — like prenatal and early child care — that a post-Roe nation desperately needs and the Republican Party almost certainly won’t provide.Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear. To do that, liberals must take up violent crime as a defining issue, something they have been reluctant to do, and then to relentlessly rework it, to try to break the power of its racial dynamic by telling the public an all-too-obvious truth: The United States is harassed by violent crime because it’s awash in guns, because it has no effective approach to treating mental illness and the epidemic of drug addiction, because it accepts an appalling degree of inequality and allows entire sections of the country to tumble into despair.Making that case is a long-term undertaking, too, as is to be expected of a project trying to topple half a century of political thinking. But until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of, most recently, “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”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