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It has become commonplace for Donald Trump to talk about how he will use the Justice Department to punish his enemies should he regain the presidency. He routinely calls for prosecuting his current opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and regularly accuses her and President Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department against him. Though there is […] More
Existe la preocupación generalizada de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense haya llegado a un punto crítico.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En los nueve años transcurridos desde que Donald Trump entró en la política estadounidense, la percepción global de Estados Unidos se ha visto sacudida por la imagen de una nación fracturada e impredecible. Primero un atentado contra la vida del expresidente, y ahora un segundo posible atentado, han acentuado la preocupación internacional, suscitando temores de una agitación violenta que podría desembocar en una guerra civil.Keir Starmer, el primer ministro británico, ha dicho que está “muy preocupado” y “profundamente perturbado” por lo que, según el FBI, fue un intento de asesinar a Trump en su campo de golf de Florida, a menos de 50 días de las elecciones presidenciales y dos meses después de que una bala ensangrentó la oreja de Trump durante un mitin de campaña en Pensilvania.“La violencia no tiene cabida alguna en un proceso político”, afirmó Starmer.Sin embargo, la violencia ha tenido un lugar preponderante en esta tormentosa y tambaleante campaña política estadounidense, y no solo en los dos posibles intentos de asesinato. Ahora existe una preocupación generalizada en todo el mundo de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense, que solía ser un modelo para el mundo, haya llegado a un punto crítico.En México, donde este año se celebraron las elecciones más violentas de la historia reciente del país, con 41 candidatos y aspirantes a cargos públicos asesinados, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador dijo en una publicación en la plataforma social X: “Aun cuando todavía no se conoce bien lo sucedido, lamentamos la violencia producida en contra del expresidente Donald Trump. El camino es la democracia y la paz”.En un momento de guerras en Europa y el Medio Oriente y de inseguridad global generalizada mientras China y Rusia afirman la superioridad de sus modelos autócratas, la precariedad estadounidense pesa bastante.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Readers discuss Nicholas Kristof’s column urging Democrats not to demean Trump supporters.To the Editor:Re “Here’s Why Democrats Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Sept. 1):I take exception to Mr. Kristof patronizing Democrats and instructing them how to address Donald Trump’s supporters. Yes, there are those supporters who have suffered addiction and hardship, but that this might logically lead them to support a criminal and potential dictator who gives no reason for a rational person to believe he would serve their interests is simply a bridge too far.Besides, many Trump supporters can’t even plead hardship as an excuse. They include the wealthy, the angry and the just plain ignorant.Robert MillsapWoodland, Calif.To the Editor:I appreciated Nicholas Kristof’s measured view in this column, though I know many people did not.It is far easier to diminish Trump supporters, to view them as morally degraded and backward, than it is to focus on the very real issues that animate them. Like those on the political left, they are troubled by the state of our country, by the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and by the growing sense that most of us are getting shafted for the benefit of a few. They see the American system as wildly off course and in desperate need of fixing.These views are familiar to Democrats. Indeed, I suspect that there is quite a lot more common ground than we realize.These are not fundamentally bad people. Most are not bigots. Most are not xenophobes. So why on earth do we call them these things? All it does is ensure that they remain in the arms of a man who has already shown his greatest concern is power — and holding onto it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
La decisión del candidato opositor de solicitar asilo en España y el antagonismo del líder autocrático, Nicolás Maduro, hacia las potencias regionales reducen las posibilidades de una transición política.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La noticia de que Edmundo González, candidato de la oposición venezolana, había huido del país en un avión de la Fuerza Aérea Española este fin de semana tomó al país, y al mundo, por sorpresa.El año pasado estuvo marcado por meses de represión que desembocaron en unas disputadas elecciones presidenciales. A la votación siguió una brutal represión por parte del gobierno autoritario de Nicolás Maduro.Aun así, muchos venezolanos mantenían la esperanza de que, mediante una salida negociada, el gobierno de inspiración socialista pudiera hacerse a un lado y dejar que González, un exdiplomático de voz suave, asumiera el poder.Su partida el sábado redujo aun más esa remota posibilidad. Y se produjo mientras las fuerzas de seguridad venezolanas rodeaban la residencia diplomática argentina en Caracas, donde seis altos dirigentes de la oposición se han refugiado desde marzo.Según algunos analistas, Maduro se ha afianzado en el poder, aunque muchos venezolanos y gobiernos de todo el mundo no han reconocido su afirmación de que fue reelegido para la presidencia en los comicios del 28 de julio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The opposition candidate’s decision to seek asylum in Spain and the autocratic leader’s antagonism toward regional powers lessen the chances of a political transition.The news that Edmundo González, Venezuela’s opposition candidate, had fled the country on a Spanish Air Force plane this weekend took the country, and the world, by surprise.The past year has been marked by months of repression leading up to a disputed presidential election. The vote was followed by a brutal crackdown by the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro.Still, many Venezuelans held out hope that through a negotiated exit the socialist-inspired administration might step aside and let Mr. González, a soft-spoken former diplomat, assume power.His departure on Saturday narrowed that slim possibility even further. And it came as Venezuelan security forces surrounded the Argentine diplomatic residence in Caracas where six top opposition leaders have been taking shelter since March.Mr. Maduro has solidified his hold on power, some analysts say, even if many Venezuelans and governments around the world have not recognized his claim that he was re-elected to the presidency in the July 28 election.Efforts by countries in the region, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, to broker a resolution to the conflict have gone nowhere, and the opposition, which has called on the global community to rally behind it, has seemingly few options.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.Here’s what I mean.Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods during Trump’s effort to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their conduct while counting votes. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of Dinesh D’Souza’s fantastical “documentary” of election fraud, “2,000 Mules.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Nicolás Maduro, el líder autoritario de Venezuela, parece haber sobrevivido una vez más en unas elecciones que lucen profundamente injustas y plagadas de irregularidades. El resultado, que ya enfrenta resistencia y ha ocasionado disturbios que podrían aumentar en los próximos días, no es solo una decepción para la oposición y los millones de venezolanos que anhelan un cambio democrático. Las elecciones también han sido una prueba crucial de la permanencia del nuevo tipo de autoritarismo que se apodera del continente americano, y han demostrado que esa tendencia no desaparecerá pronto.La democracia está siendo sofocada o seriamente desafiada en todo el hemisferio occidental. En los últimos 20 años, Venezuela, Nicaragua y El Salvador han derivado en dictaduras. Aunque acabó detenido, el entonces presidente de Perú intentó disolver el Congreso a finales de 2022. El año pasado, Guatemala estuvo a punto de seguir esta tendencia cuando el Ministerio Público buscó impedir una transición pacífica del poder. Y queda por ver si la recién elegida próxima presidenta de México, Claudia Sheinbaum, continuará la erosión de los controles y equilibrios democráticos que inició su predecesor.El panorama no es tan desalentador. En otros lugares —Brasil, Chile, Colombia y Estados Unidos— la democracia está triunfando. Pero se está poniendo a prueba a medida que crece la oposición al pluralismo y la inclusión y se extiende el malestar social y la insatisfacción con el gobierno en un contexto de clara desigualdad e inestabilidad institucional.Las elecciones de Venezuela son un momento decisivo para América. A pesar de la alta participación, se registraron numerosos reportes de irregularidades en los comicios, intimidación de votantes y problemas en los centros de votación. Sin embargo, con el 80 por ciento de los votos escrutados, el Consejo Nacional Electoral declaró ganador a Maduro con el 51,2 por ciento de los votos, frente al 44,2 por ciento de su principal contrincante. Debido a que los funcionarios de muchos centros de votación se negaron a entregar copias físicas de los recuentos de votos, la oposición no tenía modo concreto de señalar un resultado distinto.Si Maduro logra sortear la agitación poselectoral y mantenerse en el poder otro mandato, dará pie a que otros autócratas en ciernes de la región sepan que también pueden actuar con casi total impunidad. Los procesos electorales cuestionables, los abusos contra los derechos humanos y la corrupción podrían extenderse si no se coordina una respuesta internacional contra ellos, mientras que las voces de los electores de esos países son apagadas por la represión. El retroceso de la democracia es algo que ya ha ocurrido: muchas democracias incipientes de Latinoamérica se perdieron durante la Guerra Fría y regresaron después de que terminara.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Americans received a sobering reminder on Saturday of the threat that political violence poses to our democracy. It is a mercy that Donald Trump was not seriously injured by gunfire at an evening campaign rally in Butler, a Pennsylvania city north of Pittsburgh, and a tragedy that at least one person at the rally was killed. We hope that Mr. Trump recovers quickly and fully.There is much we don’t know yet about the gunman and the shooting, which is being investigated as an attempted assassination. But this much is clear: Any attempt to resolve an election through violence is abhorrent. Violence is antithetical to democracy. Ballots, not bullets, should always be the means by which Americans work through their differences.It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.Americans also must be cleareyed about the challenge that is confronting this nation. Saturday’s events cannot be written off as an aberration. Violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series The Danger Within in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.Democracy requires partisans to accept that the process is more important than the results. Even before Saturday’s events, there were worrying signs that many Americans are failing that essential test. In a survey conducted last month by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, 10 percent of respondents agreed that the use of force was justified to prevent Mr. Trump from becoming president, and 7 percent said the use of force was justified to return Mr. Trump to the presidency.Mr. Trump’s political agenda cannot and must not be opposed by violence. It cannot and must not be pursued through violence.The attack on Saturday was a tragedy. The challenge now confronting Americans is to prevent this moment from becoming the beginning of a greater tragedy.This election must be resolved by the votes Americans will cast.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, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More
