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      Zoom Fatigue on the Campaign Trail: 5 Takeaways From the Mayor’s Race

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }N.Y.C. Mayoral RaceWho’s Running?11 Candidates’ N.Y.C. MomentsA Look at the Race5 Takeaways From the DebateAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyZoom Fatigue on the Campaign Trail: 5 Takeaways From the Mayor’s RaceThe candidates in New York City can barely keep up with a dizzying schedule of online forums. One candidate joins from his closet.Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, regularly appears in front of a dark wooden bookcase bathed in a golden glow.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesEmma G. Fitzsimmons, Dana Rubinstein and Feb. 15, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETThink you’re sick of Zoom calls? Try running for mayor of New York City.The campaign has gone mostly virtual during the pandemic, forcing the crowded field of candidates to sit in front of their computers attending one online forum after another.This is no exaggeration.On a recent evening, three mayoral forums were somehow scheduled back to back to back: At 4 p.m., candidates gathered to talk about restaurants and nightlife; at 6 p.m., they participated in an event with Muslim groups; and at 8 p.m., they were hosted by Democrats in Staten Island.The topics of the forums may be different, but there is also certainly a sameness about them all, with candidates appearing night after night, smiling (mostly) in their “Brady Bunch” boxes and struggling to unmute themselves or mute their cellphones.Here are some observations and behind-the-scenes moments in the virtual mayor’s race:Not another Zoom!Running for mayor means always navigating a demanding gantlet of parades, church visits and neighborhood events — a preview of what life could be like if you are lucky enough to move into Gracie Mansion.The pandemic has simplified the routine, but in a stultifying way: Nearly everything is online, making it easier — perhaps much too easy — to organize events. Instead of working out numerous logistics, organizers simply have to find a suitable time, and send out invitations.Campaigns say privately that they feel obligated to participate, especially once a rival campaign has said yes.“It’s a staring contest — who is going to blink first?” said one campaign aide, who asked for anonymity to speak bluntly. “Everyone wants to be able to say no.”In the first six weeks of the year, there were at least 21 forums hosted by groups as disparate as the school principals’ union and the LittleAfrica BronxNews website. With more than two dozen candidates in the race, the events can stretch on for three hours.“Welcome to virtual Staten Island — all the local flavor, but you can skip the Verrazzano toll,” one forum began, with a host noting that a mere 100 viewers were watching.Candidates, their staffers and journalists are reaching a breaking point.Sally Goldenberg, the City Hall bureau chief for Politico, recently sent an email to other reporters with the subject line: “Forum insanity.” She wanted to brainstorm about how to make the schedule more manageable.“While as a reporter I find it useful to hear politicians and candidates speak extemporaneously and not solely from talking points, I am tired of cooking dinner at 11 p.m.,” she said.Ms. Goldenberg recalled that in the 2013 mayor’s race, there seemed to be fewer forums. “I thought they were overwhelming back then,” she said. “But I clearly didn’t know what we’d be in for in this brave new world.”All Zoom boxes are not created equalNone of the candidates seem given to vanity, but they do acknowledge some pressure to look good. The quality can vary dramatically.Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, has been relegated to a corner of the apartment he shares in Manhattan with his wife and young sons.“To make space for my two boys, I’m now zooming from the closet of my bedroom,” he said.Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, like many of the candidates, sits in front of a handsome bookcase, occasionally visited by her cats.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, seems to speak from a different location each time. Carlos Menchaca, a city councilman from Brooklyn, recently joined a forum while walking outside, wearing a face mask.Loree Sutton, the retired Army brigadier general, uses her MacBook Air camera, with a portable halo light — “My concession to Zoom vanity!” she said.But Raymond J. McGuire has gone to greater lengths, and the results show. Mr. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, regularly appears in front of a dark wooden bookcase bathed in a golden glow.“For the camera, it’s good to have a low F-stop so you get depth of field,” said Charles Phillips, a software executive who serves as his campaign chairman.Mr. Phillips, a self-described “proud tech geek,” brought a duffel bag of equipment to Mr. McGuire’s Central Park West duplex in the fall. It contained equipment like a Sony mirrorless camera that retails for $3,900, a “capture card” and floor lighting by Elgato, and a special microphone that has its own mute button.The quality of his setup has not gone unnoticed.“Ray McGuire, of course, continues to have his super-HD camera setup from the year 3000,” quipped one Twitter user last week.Candidates reveal differences on policyThe candidates mostly stick to their scripts, but sometimes the forums highlight subtle differences.Take a recent forum on the candidates’ agenda in Albany. Ms. Wiley said she supports a campaign, known as Invest in Our New York, that includes six measures to raise taxes on the wealthy to help the city recover from the pandemic.Mr. Stringer, who like Ms. Wiley is vying for progressive voters, gave a less enthusiastic response, saying the proposal should be considered. Ms. Wiley retorted that supporting the tax package should be a no-brainer for Democratic candidates. (Mr. Stringer’s spokesman, Tyrone Stevens, quickly took to Twitter to clarify that Mr. Stringer does support the campaign.)Mr. Adams, for his part, went through the list of proposals, saying he supports some of the ideas — like a progressive income tax and capital gains tax — but not others.The candidates differed on whether the city should take control of the subway away from the state — an idea championed by Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate. Ms. Wiley was open to the idea.Mr. Adams said he would prefer that the city gain more control by adding five new city members to the board governing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway and bus system — one new member for each borough.Mr. Stringer said city control would be a “disaster” and he wants to focus on the streets, which the city already controls.“I’m going to be the bus mayor,” he said.Beware the ‘resting Zoom face’Under normal circumstances at a normal debate, candidates might chat offstage and forge some camaraderie, even with their rivals. Much of that is gone, though sometimes they schmooze in virtual waiting rooms. Mr. Adams recently discussed a vegan bread recipe, an opponent recalled.“Shaun was like, ‘I haven’t had dinner yet, I’ve been on Zoom,’” Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, said of Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary. “‘You’re making me hungry.’”Some candidates say the routine can be physically draining — “It’s a lot of sitting,” Ms. Garcia said. It is also difficult to gauge how one is connecting with the audience.“You can never tell a joke on Zoom, particularly if people are muted, because you can’t read the room,” she said, also acknowledging that campaigning by Zoom offered more ways to reach people in the winter.And the forums require plenty of preparation. Ms. Wiley’s campaign said she “diligently prepares for the forums” and that her “resting Zoom face” — a common look of boredom while others are talking — did not reflect a lack of interest in what her opponents had to say.The candidates also return to Zoom for fund-raisers — an effort that is paying off for Mr. Yang, whose campaign announced on Sunday that it had qualified for public matching funds after only a month.Mr. Yang was on a video call in his son’s room when one of his sons walked in and asked for breakfast.“I looked around and gave my son the only thing edible I saw in the room — chocolate-covered pretzels,” he said. “Made my son happy but knocked me out of the running for any parenting award.”A risqué statue turns headsIn the beginning, Ms. Sutton didn’t pay much attention to Zoom backgrounds. Then, on Nov. 12, a post on Twitter caught her eye: “I’m not in the business of judging Zoom backgrounds, but this (nude?) statue needs to back up and give @LoreeSuttonNYC some space!”Ms. Sutton nearly fell off her chair laughing.Her wife, Laurie Leitch, bought the statue in question, “Erotic Secrets” by the artist Altina Schinasi Miranda, years ago. It features a naked woman whispering to a raven, joined by a naked man. Unfortunately, during that mayoral forum, the naked man was facing the camera.It was not the first time the statue had caused a stir.When Ms. Leitch’s children were teenagers, she said, they hated it and “would cover its anatomically distinguishing parts with dish towels, socks, hoodies or whatever was near when their friends would come to visit.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tom Perez on Democrats’ Mistakes and Why Iowa Shouldn’t Go First

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTom Perez on Democrats’ Mistakes and Why Iowa Shouldn’t Go FirstIn an interview, the former D.N.C. chairman discussed a possible bid for Maryland governor and said Iowa and New Hampshire starting the presidential nominating process was “unacceptable.”Former D.N.C. chairman Tom Perez  is considering a bid for Maryland governor.Credit…Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021, 8:56 a.m. ETFor the past four years, Tom Perez had perhaps the most thankless job in American politics: chairman of the Democratic National Committee.During that time Mr. Perez, the first Latino to lead the committee, oversaw the rebuilding of the party apparatus from an indebted hollowed-out mess after years of neglect during the Obama administration to a cash-flush organization with more than twice as many employees as it had when he took over in February 2017.But Mr. Perez, who was urged to seek the party chairmanship by former President Barack Obama after serving under him as labor secretary, hardly had a smooth tenure. He faced internal dissent in 2018 for stripping superdelegates of their voting power in presidential contests and took public and private fire throughout 2019 from more than half of the party’s two dozen presidential candidates, who bellyached about, among other things, standards that Mr. Perez had set to qualify for debates.Mr. Perez spoke with The New York Times on Thursday about his experience running the party, the results of last year’s elections and his future political plans. His final day working for the party committee was Friday. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.Do you think that the D.N.C. should have devoted more attention and resources to down-ballot contests given the results in state legislative and congressional races?The thing about this election cycle that is really regrettable is that we had record turnout. And we should be celebrating that on a bipartisan basis, because we did really well. We won the presidency. We have the House. We have the Senate. And Republicans won in a number of critical races. That’s undeniable. They won a number of Senate seats. They won a number of congressional seats. And they won because a lot of their people turned out. And instead, what Donald Trump and the far right chose to do is to invest in this fiction that there was some sort of massive voter fraud, which is inaccurate.The reality is we won a series of really important races. And they won a number of down-ballot races. Those are the facts of 2020. And that’s why we’re absolutely drilling down deeper to answer the question of how did we do well for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden in Arizona and not so well in some of the State House and State Senate races. Really important question. It certainly wasn’t for lack of investment. And that’s why we’re looking to understand what else do we have to do.Why was Latino support for Democrats so much softer in 2020 after four years of Trump than it was in 2016 and elections before that?Do we need to do more with Latino voters? Absolutely. And I am very committed to that. We did more than the party has ever done. But again, every cycle, we need to build on what we did before. And that’s exactly what we will do. The misinformation campaigns in South Florida were very real. And they involved both domestic and foreign actors.And the appeals to socialism in South Florida were more successful. They made those same socialism arguments in Arizona. But they fell flat. And they fell flat, in no small measure, because we had a really aggressive and longstanding organizing infrastructure in Arizona that enabled us to counteract that.Will the 2022 and 2024 elections be a referendum on President Biden’s handling of the pandemic and the economy?What voters are going to ask themselves is the same question they always ask. “Am I better off than I was two years ago? Am I seeing results that are improving my life?” As they are able to return to normalcy, whatever normalcy is going to look like post-Covid, I think that they will appreciate that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led during this crisis.Should Iowa and New Hampshire keep going first in the presidential nominating process?That will be up to the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.I’m aware. But what does the private citizen Tom Perez think?A diverse state or states need to be first. The difference between going first and going third is really important. We know the importance of momentum in Democratic primaries.I’ll try one more time. Could you make a case for defending Iowa and New Hampshire going first?The status quo is clearly unacceptable. To simply say, “Let’s just continue doing this because this is how we’ve always done it,” well, Iowa started going as an early caucus state, I believe, in 1972. The world has changed a lot since 1972 to 2020 and 2024. And so the notion that we need to do it because this is how we’ve always done it is a woefully insufficient justification for going first again.This is the Democratic Party of 2020. It’s different from the Democratic Party in how we were in 1972. And we need to reflect that change. And so I am confident that the status quo is not going to survive.How far down the road are you in thinking about running for governor of Maryland?I’m seriously considering a run for governor in Maryland.We need a governor who can really build strong relationships with the Biden administration, will build strong relationships with every one of the jurisdictions in Maryland.Marylanders are just like everybody else. We want an end to this pandemic. We want to put kids back to school. We want to put people back to work. The pandemic has disproportionately touched women and communities of color in Maryland. And I’ve had the fortune of working in local government, and with the nonprofit faith communities and state government there.So I’m currently listening. I’m on a listening tour in Maryland. And I think we need leadership, really, with a bold vision of inclusion and opportunity because ZIP code should never determine destiny in any community across America.Has Larry Hogan been a good governor for Maryland?I appreciate the fact that Larry Hogan has said critical things about Donald Trump. I appreciate that. What we really need, I think, in Maryland is leaders who will sweat the details of governance. The pandemic rollout, the vaccination process has been nothing less than chaotic in Maryland. We’ve had an unemployment insurance crisis, people waiting months and months to get their unemployment benefits. That’s just a failure of leadership at a state level.I didn’t hear a yes or no on Hogan.I applaud that he tried to get some tests from South Korea. But then it turned out that the tests didn’t work. And he covered it up. And there’s always going to be moments where mistakes are made. And good leaders fess up to those mistakes. But he tried to sweep it under the rug.Again, it’s great to see a governor who criticizes Donald Trump. But we need governors who do a hell of a lot more than just criticize.What would you be doing differently to accelerate vaccine distribution and reopen schools faster?I would be on the phone every day with county executives making sure: “What do you need? What do you not have? What do you have? What can we do?” I would be relentlessly reaching out to our colleagues in the federal government to say: “Here’s what we need. Here’s what’s going on.” I would have a war room set up and, again, every single day, say: “You value what you measure. You measure what you value. What are we doing?”Donald Trump is partly to blame for this. He was a disaster. But you look at other states — other states have been able to work around that and are doing better. Our vaccination rates do not compare well. We’re the richest state in the United States — Maryland — but we have way too many people who are on the outside looking in.You said good leaders admit their mistakes. What were the biggest mistakes you made at the D.N.C.?I wish that we could have won more elections. And so I’m looking back at what we did and some of the races we didn’t win. I was really frustrated in January and early February of 2017, because Donald Trump was in power and he was issuing all sorts of executive actions that were turning life upside down for so many people. That was in the middle of the D.N.C. race because the election wasn’t set until the end of February. So we got a late start. And I think that was a mistake.It was frustrating to see Feb. 27, a month into the administration, and I’m just showing up at work for the first time. So I think we have to be very mindful. And if there are periods of time in the future where we’re in a similar situation, where we’ve lost the White House, we better make sure we start early because I had to play a lot of catch-up. And that was a mistake.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Democrats Could Have Made Republicans Squirm

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Democrats Could Have Made Republicans SquirmG.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.Mr. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”Feb. 13, 2021, 9:13 p.m. ETRepresentative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, with colleagues after the Senate vote.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesProbably nothing could have moved enough Republican senators to vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.But the way the House chose to frame the article of impeachment made the prospect less likely. If the purpose of the proceeding was to produce a conviction and disqualification from future office, as opposed to mere political theater, the House should have crafted a broader and less legalistic set of charges.The sole article of impeachment was for “incitement of insurrection.” It focused on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when then-President Trump addressed an initially peaceful crowd of supporters and egged them on to go to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” against the recognition of an Electoral College victory for his opponent Joe Biden.Presumably, the drafters of the House impeachment resolution chose to frame their charge as incitement because this is an actual crime. The first impeachment of Mr. Trump was criticized (wrongly, in my view) for failing to allege a crime. But it is not necessary for an impeachment to be based on criminal conduct. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment proceedings “can never be tied down by such strict rules” as “in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors” in criminal trials. Rather, he said, the target of impeachment proceedings is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”By charging Mr. Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime. This is not to say that senators may vote to convict only if those elements are proved, but that the terms of the impeachment article invited the defense to respond in the same legalistic terms presented by the House impeachment managers. They tried to broaden the focus during the trial, though not successfully.One element of the crime of incitement is the intent to induce imminent violence. The evidence shows that Mr. Trump was reckless and that violence was a foreseeable consequence of his incendiary speech, but a senator might reasonably conclude that it falls short of proving that he wanted his followers to assault members of Congress or to vandalize the Capitol.Moreover, the terms of the impeachment article opened the door for Mr. Trump’s defense team to play videos in which various Democrats said things that can be construed to encourage violence — a comparison that should be irrelevant but certainly muddied the waters.The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Mr. Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.Whether or not Mr. Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Mr. Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.Moreover, Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were of a piece with attempts — nonviolent but no less wrongful — to intimidate other officials, such as Georgia’s secretary of state, to use their powers to thwart the election results. The Trump campaign had every opportunity to substantiate its claims of massive fraud in court and failed miserably to do so.By focusing the impeachment resolution on the charge of incitement of insurrection, the House made it easier for Mr. Trump’s supporters in the Senate to dismiss these acts of intimidation as irrelevant to the accusation on which they were voting.It should not be necessary to point out that the use of the presidential office to keep power after losing an election is the gravest possible offense against our democratic constitutional order — one that the authors of the Constitution specifically contemplated and sought to prevent. The violence of Jan. 6 was bad, but even if no one at the Capitol had been hurt that day, Mr. Trump’s attempts to mobilize a mob to impede the democratic process was still a high crime or misdemeanor.To make matters worse, Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence even when he was aware it was occurring. He did not deploy forces to the Capitol to put down the riot and protect members of Congress. He sent two messages to the rioters, but his appeals for peaceable behavior were tepid, and intermixed with words of support and affection for the rioters.Perhaps most egregious was his tweet that “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” at a time when rioters were threatening to hang the vice president. We now know that a senator informed Mr. Trump of the danger to Mr. Pence — but Mr. Trump did not retract his tweet or lift a finger to protect Mr. Pence.This dereliction of his constitutional duty was wholly apart from any incitement and was an impeachable offense in itself. But it was not charged in the article of impeachment.It would be foolish to think that the vote on impeachment would come out differently if the charge had been differently framed. But if House was going to impeach, it should have framed the case to make it as difficult as possible for the Senate to acquit.It is far from clear that Mr. Trump incited the violence of Jan. 6 in a technical legal sense, but it is abundantly clear that he sought to intimidate members of Congress and other officials to block Mr. Biden’s election, and that he failed in his duty to do what he could to end the violence once it started. Those would be ample grounds for conviction, quite apart from whether Mr. Trump committed the crime of incitement.Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Acquitted of Inciting Insurrection, Even as Bipartisan Majority Votes ‘Guilty’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentTrial HighlightsKey Takeaways From Day 5How Senators VotedTrump AcquittedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Acquitted of Inciting Insurrection, Even as Bipartisan Majority Votes ‘Guilty’The verdict was unlikely to be the final word for former President Donald J. Trump, his badly divided party or the festering wounds the Jan. 6 riot that prompted the impeachment left behind.The House impeachment managers working in the Capitol on the last day of the impeachment trial against President Donald J. Trump.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 13, 2021Updated 8:26 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — A Senate still bruised from the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries acquitted former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday in his second impeachment trial, as all but a few Republicans locked arms to reject a case that he incited the Jan. 6 rampage in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power.Under the watch of National Guard troops still patrolling the historic building, a bipartisan majority voted to find Mr. Trump guilty of the House’s single charge of “incitement of insurrection.” They included seven Republicans, more members of a president’s party than have ever returned an adverse verdict in an impeachment trial.But with most of Mr. Trump’s party coalescing around him, the 57-to-43 tally fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict, and allow the Senate to move to disqualify him from holding future office.Among the Republicans breaking ranks to find guilty the man who led their party for four tumultuous years, demanding absolute loyalty, were Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania.The verdict brought an abrupt end to the fourth presidential impeachment trial in American history, and the only one in which the accused had left office before being tried. But it was unlikely to be the final word for Mr. Trump, his badly divided party or the sprawling criminal and congressional investigations into the assault.It left behind festering wounds in Washington and around the country after a 39-day stretch unlike any in the nation’s history — encompassing a deadly riot at the Capitol, an impeachment of one president, the inauguration of another and a brief but rancorous trial in the Senate.The House had charged Mr. Trump with a single count of “incitement of insurrection.”Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesIt took only five days to reach a verdict, partly because Democrats and Republicans were united in their desire to avoid a prolonged proceeding and partly because Mr. Trump’s allies made clear before it even began that they were not prepared to hold him responsible. Most of the jury of senators had themselves witnessed the events that gave rise to the charge, having fled for their own lives, along with the vice president, as the mob closed in last month while they met to formalize President Biden’s victory.Party leaders and even the president’s most loyal supporters in the Senate did not defend his actions — a monthslong campaign, seeded with election lies, to overturn his decisive loss to Mr. Biden that culminated when Mr. Trump told thousands of his supporters to “fight like hell” and they did. Instead, in the face of a meticulous case brought by nine House prosecutors, they found safe harbor in technical arguments that the trial itself was not valid because Mr. Trump was no longer in office.But their overriding political calculation was clear. After party leaders briefly entertained using the process to purge Mr. Trump from their ranks, Republicans doubled down on a bet made five years ago: that it was better not to stoke another open confrontation with a man millions of their voters still singularly embrace.Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, embodied the tortured balancing act, denouncing Mr. Trump on Saturday, minutes after voting to acquit him, for a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” In blistering remarks from the Senate floor, Mr. McConnell, who had openly considered voting to convict Mr. Trump, effectively argued that he was guilty as charged, while arguing that there was nothing the Senate could do about it.“There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell said. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”But Mr. McConnell, who refused to call the Senate back into session to hold the trial while Mr. Trump was still in office, argued that he could not be convicted once he no longer was. Mr. McConnell said the only way to punish him now was through the criminal justice system. Mr. Trump, he said, “didn’t get away with anything yet.”Minutes after the verdict, Mr. Trump, barred from Twitter, broke an uncharacteristic silence he had maintained during the trial with a defiant statement issued from his post-presidential home in Florida, calling the proceeding “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.”He expressed no remorse for his actions, and strongly suggested that he planned to continue to be a force in politics for a long time to come.“In the months ahead, I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people,” Mr. Trump said.The “not guilty” verdict left him free to run for office again, but it remained unclear whether he could recover after he became the first president to seriously threaten the peaceful transfer of power. Public polling suggests Republicans have pulled their support in droves since the events of last month, but an acquittal is likely to empower Mr. Trump with the party’s activist base and further stoke the party’s gaping divisions.National Guard troops have remained at the Capitol since the deadly attack on Jan. 6.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesDemocrats, for their part, condemned the verdict but intended to quickly turn Washington’s focus to the new president’s ambitious legislative agenda and the coronavirus pandemic passing grim new milestones each day. The outcome promised to leave Mr. Biden, who took office pledging to “end this uncivil war,” with the monumental task of moving the nation past one of its most violent and turbulent chapters since the 19th century.But that did not mean party leaders were willing to forgo a potential political advantage. Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly batted down the idea of a bipartisan censure resolution, saying it would let “cowardly senators” off the hook and constitute “a slap in the face of the Constitution.”“Five years ago, Republican senators lamented what might become of their party if Donald Trump became their presidential nominee and standard-bearer,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said moments after the vote. “Just look at what has happened. Look at what Republicans have been forced to defend. Look at what Republicans have chosen to forgive.”In a Capitol still ringed by fencing and barbed wire, the presiding officer, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, set the question before senators shortly before 4 p.m.:“Senators, how say you? Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, guilty or not guilty?”Seated at mahogany desks defiled just weeks before by insurrectionists in search of material they could use to stop Mr. Biden’s victory, senators wearing masks to guard against spreading the coronavirus rose in alphabetical order to cast their votes.“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is, hereby acquitted of the charge in said article,” Mr. Leahy declared.The vote came hours after the trial briefly dissolved into chaos when House prosecutors made, then dropped, a surprise demand for witnesses who could reveal what the former president was doing as the assault unfolded. Instead, the two legal teams agreed to admit as evidence a written statement by a Republican congresswoman who has said she was told that the former president sided with the mob as rioters were attacking the Capitol.With the outcome a foregone conclusion, the trial itself became an illuminating and cathartic act for history, clarifying the scope of the violence that occurred.Representative Madeleine Dean hugging Representative Jamie Raskin, both impeachment managers, during the trial.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIt could scarcely have been more different than Mr. Trump’s first trial a year ago. Then, the House tried to make its case around an esoteric plot to pressure Ukraine to smear Mr. Biden, and it failed largely on party lines.But over five days this week, the House managers put forward in harrowing detail an account of a horror that had played out in plain sight. Using graphic video and sophisticated visual aids, they made clearer than ever before how close the armed mob had come to a dangerous confrontation with Vice President Mike Pence and the members of the House and the Senate.All of it, the prosecutors argued, was the doing of Mr. Trump, who spread lies that the election had been “stolen” from him, cultivated outrage among his followers, encouraged violence, tried to pressure state election officials to overturn democratically decided results and finally assembled and unleashed a mob of his supporters — who openly planned a bloody last stand — to “stop the steal.” With no signs he was remorseful, they warned he could ignite a repeat if allowed to seek office again.“If that is not ground for conviction, if that is not a high crime and misdemeanor against the Republic and the United States of America, then nothing is,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead manager, said as he summed up his case. “President Trump must be convicted, for the safety and democracy of our people.”After stumbling out of the gate earlier in the week with meandering presentations, Mr. Trump’s legal team delivered the president a highly combative and exceedingly brief defense on Friday. Calling the House’s charge a “preposterous and monstrous lie,” they insisted over just three hours that the former president was a “law and order”-loving leader who never meant for his followers to take the words “fight like hell” literally, and could not have foreseen the violence that followed.Mr. Trump’s legal team, including Michael T. van der Veen, center, arriving at the Capitol on Saturday.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times“They were not trying a case,” Michael T. van der Veen, a member of the hastily assembled legal team, said of Democrats in his own closing remarks. “They were telling a political tale, a fable, and a patently false one at that.”They also offered more technical arguments aimed at giving Republicans refuge for acquittal, arguing that it was not constitutional for the Senate to try a former president and that Mr. Trump’s election lies and bellicose words to his supporters could not be deemed incitement because the First Amendment protected his right to speak freely.The seven Republicans who rejected those arguments in favor of conviction were an ideologically diverse group at various stages of their political careers. Mr. Burr and Mr. Toomey plan to retire next year. Mr. Cassidy, Ms. Collins and Mr. Sasse were just re-elected, and Mr. Romney and Ms. Murkowski are among Mr. Trump’s most durable Republican critics.They appeared to draw strength from one another. Shortly before the vote, Mr. Cassidy walked a note to Mr. Burr. It read, “I am a yes,” he said later. Mr. Burr nodded back at him.Ms. Murkowski, who faces re-election next year in a state Mr. Trump won twice, said afterward she would not let her vote be “devalued by whether or not I feel that this is helpful for my political ambitions.”“This is not about me,” she told reporters. “This is really about what we stand for, and if I can’t say what I believe, what our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?”After the attack and Republicans’ loss of the Senate, there had been a brief window in which it seemed as if the outcome might be different. Mr. McConnell privately told advisers that an impeachment conviction might be the only way to purge Mr. Trump from the party after four tumultuous years, and his openness to finding him guilty held out the possibility that a coalition of Republicans might follow his lead.But by the time the proceeding began, with Mr. Biden already in office, the party’s rank and file in Congress had made clear that Mr. Trump still had far too strong a pull among their voters to engage in a head-on fight. As the former president threatened to back primary challengers to the House Republicans who voted to impeach him, state parties across the country lined up votes to censure them or call for their resignations.Emily Cochrane More

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      Can Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?

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      Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionCan Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?A childhood friend’s deadly mistakes prompt reflection on our country’s — and my own.Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistFeb. 13, 2021, 2:30 p.m. ET More

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      How Stable Is the Democratic Coalition?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Stable Is the Democratic Coalition?The party may control the elected branches in Washington. But it may be facing some slippage in support from minority communities.Mr. Kaufmann is a professor who studies and writes about demographics, partisanship and ideology.Feb. 13, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ETVoters waited in Phoenix to cast their ballots in the 2020 election.Credit…Edgard Garrido/ReutersDemocrats are riding high in Washington, with control of the White House and Congress. They got there with a broad coalition that included suburban white and minority voters — I estimate, based on exit poll data, that nearly half of the Democrats’ roughly 81 million votes came from the latter group. For Republicans, it was just 18 percent.If the Democrats are to avoid losing Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, they will need to continue to carry an overwhelming number of minority voters. Yet there are signs that the party’s dominant grip on this growing demographic is beginning to slip.The 2020 presidential election results illustrate a clear edge for Democrats among nonwhite voters. Exit poll data show that just 32 percent of Hispanics and Latinos, 34 percent of Asian-Americans and 12 percent of Black respondents voted for former President Donald Trump. Data from AP VoteCast Survey put those numbers at 35 percent for Hispanics and Latinos, 28 percent for Asian-Americans and 8 percent for African-Americans.For Democrats, the problem with those figures is that they represent a step back from the strong results of 2012. Since then, minority support for Republicans has inched up. Without minority votes, Mr. Trump would not have won in 2016 or come as close as he did in 2020.Democrats see a simple story: Barack Obama galvanized minorities to vote Democratic. His departure from the ballot means things have simply returned to normal.But what if something more enduring is going on — and what is considered “normal” has shifted? Namely, Democrats may be seeing a slippage in support from some minority communities. And in the case of Hispanics in particular, some of that movement is a result of a form of identity politics, as they more and more see themselves as identifying with the white majority. And since nearly six in 10 whites voted Republican in 2020, it should follow that as minorities move toward what we might think of as a mainstream white Americanism, some will become more Republican.The trajectory of earlier generations of white Catholics in America provides a good example of this sort of political movement. From the country’s founding, the United States was largely Protestant — in the late 19th century, I estimate it was around 80 percent. The political historian Paul Kleppner calculated that around 70 percent of white Catholics (largely descended from post-1840 Irish and German immigrants) voted Democratic from 1853 to 1892, and roughly the same percentage (68 percent) of Northern white Catholics identified as Democrats in 1952-60, as the political scientist Alan Abramowitz, using American National Election Studies data, showed. More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Deny He Incited Capitol Mob, Saying It’s Democrats Who Spur Violence

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentFriday’s HighlightsDay 4: Key TakeawaysWhat Is Incitement?Trump’s LawyersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump’s Lawyers Deny He Incited Capitol Mob, Saying It’s Democrats Who Spur ViolenceThe former president’s legal team rested its case without using even a quarter of the 16 hours allotted to it.Michael T. van der Veen, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, on Friday before presenting the defense’s case.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesPeter Baker and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 8:04 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump’s legal team mounted a combative defense on Friday focused more on assailing Democrats for “hypocrisy” and “hatred” than justifying Mr. Trump’s own monthslong effort to overturn a democratic election that culminated in last month’s deadly assault on the Capitol.After days of powerful video footage showing a mob of Trump supporters beating police officers, chasing lawmakers and threatening to kill the vice president and House speaker, Mr. Trump’s lawyers denied that he had incited what they called a “small group” that turned violent. Instead, they tried to turn the tables by calling out Democrats for their own language, which they deemed just as incendiary as Mr. Trump’s.In so doing, the former president’s lawyers went after not just the House Democrats serving as managers, or prosecutors, in the Senate impeachment trial, but half of the jurors sitting in front of them in the chamber. A rat-a-tat-tat montage of video clips played by the Trump team showed nearly every Democratic senator as well as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris using the word “fight” or the phrase “fight like hell” just as Mr. Trump did at a rally of supporters on Jan. 6 just before the siege of the Capitol.“Suddenly, the word ‘fight’ is off limits?” said Michael T. van der Veen, one of the lawyers hurriedly hired in recent days to defend Mr. Trump. “Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation. It’s a term that’s used over and over and over again by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And, of course, the Democrat House managers know that the word ‘fight’ has been used figuratively in political speech forever.”To emphasize the point, the Trump team played some of the same clips four or five times in less than three hours as some of the Democratic senators shook their heads and at least one of their Republican colleagues laughed appreciatively. The lawyers argued that the trial was “shameful” and “a deliberate attempt by the Democrat Party to smear, censor and cancel” an opponent and then rested their case without using even a quarter of the 16 hours allotted to the former president’s defense.Representative Jamie Raskin, center, the lead House impeachment manager, on Friday at the Capitol with aides and other managers during a break in the trial.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn the process, they tried to effectively narrow the prosecution’s “incitement of insurrection” case as if it centered only on their client’s use of that one phrase in that one speech instead of the relentless campaign that Mr. Trump waged since last summer to discredit an election he would eventually lose and galvanize his supporters to help him cling to power.“They really didn’t address the facts of the case at all,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead impeachment manager. “There were a couple propaganda reels about Democratic politicians that would be excluded in any court in the land. They talk about the rules of evidence — all of that was totally irrelevant to the case before us.”After the Trump team’s abbreviated defense, the senators posed their own questions, generally using their queries to score political points. The questions, a total of 28 submitted in writing and read by a clerk, suggested that most Republicans remained likely to vote to acquit Mr. Trump when the Senate reconvenes for final arguments at 10 a.m. Saturday, blocking the two-thirds supermajority required by the Constitution for conviction.Some of the few Republicans thought to be open to conviction, including Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, grilled the lawyers about what Mr. Trump knew and when he knew it during the attack. The managers have argued that it was not just the president’s words and actions in advance of the attack that betrayed his oath, but his failure to act more assertively to stop his supporters after it started.Responding to the senators, the defense lawyers pointed to mildly worded messages and a video that Mr. Trump posted on Twitter after the building was stormed calling on his supporters not to use violence while still endorsing their cause and telling them that he loved them. The managers repeated that Mr. Trump never made a strong, explicit call on the rioters to halt the attack, nor did he send help.Mr. Romney and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, zeroed in on Mr. Trump’s failure to exhibit concern for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was targeted for death by the former president’s supporters because he refused to try to block finalization of the election. Even after Mr. Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber that day, Mr. Trump attacked him on Twitter, saying that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Senator Mitt Romney returning to the Senate chamber after a break in the trial on Friday.Credit…Brandon Bell for The New York TimesMr. van der Veen told the senators that “at no point was the president informed that the vice president was in any danger.” But in fact, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told reporters this week that he spoke by telephone with Mr. Trump during the attack and told him that Mr. Pence had been rushed out of the chamber. Officials have said that Mr. Trump never called Mr. Pence to check on his safety and did not speak with him for days.The defense team struggled to avoid directly addressing what managers called Mr. Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen, which led his supporters to invade the Capitol to try to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes ratifying the result. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, challenged Mr. Trump’s lawyers to say whether they believe he actually won the election.“My judgment?” Mr. van der Veen replied derisively and then demanded: “Who asked that?”“I did,” Mr. Sanders called out from his seat.“My judgment’s irrelevant in this proceeding,” Mr. van der Veen said, prompting an eruption from Democratic senators. He repeated that “it’s irrelevant” to the question of whether Mr. Trump incited the riot.Senate Democrats dismissed the defense’s efforts to equate Mr. Trump’s actions with Democratic speeches. “They’re trying to draw a dangerous and distorted equivalence,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, told reporters during a break in the trial. “I think it is plainly a distraction from Donald Trump inviting the mob to Washington.”But for Republicans looking for reasons to acquit Mr. Trump, the defense was more than enough. “The president’s lawyers blew the House managers’ case out of the water,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin.Even Ms. Murkowski, who called on Mr. Trump to resign after the Capitol siege, said the defense team was “more on their game” than during the trial’s opening day this week, although by day’s end, she indicated to a reporter she was agonizing over the decision.“It’s been five weeks — less than five weeks — since an event that shook the very core the very foundation of our democracy,” she said. “And we’ve had a lot to process since then.”During the question period, senators closely watched for clues about where their colleagues stood. Although most lawmakers still guessed that only a handful of Republicans would vote to convict, an additional group of Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have said almost nothing to colleagues about the unfolding trial in private or during daily luncheons before it convenes, prompting speculation that they could be preparing to break from the party.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, on the Senate subway before the trial on Friday.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe managers need 17 Republicans to join all 50 Democrats to reach the two-thirds required for conviction. While Mr. Trump can no longer be removed from office because his term has ended, he could be barred from ever seeking public office again.The former president had trouble recruiting a legal team to defend him. The lawyers who represented him last year during his first impeachment trial did not come back for this one, and the set of lawyers he initially hired for this proceeding backed out in disagreement over strategy. Bruce L. Castor Jr., the leader of this third set, was widely criticized for his preliminary presentation on Tuesday, including reportedly by Mr. Trump.Mr. Castor and David I. Schoen were largely supplanted on Friday by Mr. van der Veen, who has no long history with the president and in fact was reported to have once called Mr. Trump a “crook” with an expletive, a statement he has denied. Just last year, Mr. van der Veen represented a client suing Mr. Trump over moves that might limit mail-in voting and accused the president of making claims with “no evidence.”But Mr. van der Veen on Friday offered the sort of aggressive performance that Mr. Trump prefers from his representatives as he accused the other side of “doctoring the evidence” with “manipulated video,” all to promote “a preposterous and monstrous lie” that the former president encouraged violence.A personal injury lawyer whose Philadelphia law firm solicits slip-and-fall clients on the radio and whose website boasts of winning judgments stemming from auto accidents and one case “involving a dog bite,” Mr. van der Veen proceeded to lecture Mr. Raskin, who taught constitutional law at American University for more than 25 years, about the Constitution. The managers’ arguments, Mr. van der Veen said, were “less than I would expect from a first-year law student.”He and his colleagues argued that Mr. Trump was exercising his free-speech rights in his fiery address to a rally before supporters broke into the Capitol. The lawyers leaned heavily on Mr. Trump’s single use of the word “peacefully” as he urged backers to march to the Capitol while minimizing the 20 times he used the word “fight.”“No thinking person could seriously believe that the president’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse was in any way an incitement to violence or insurrection,” Mr. van der Veen said. “The suggestion is patently absurd on its face. Nothing in the text could ever be construed as encouraging, condoning or inciting unlawful activity of any kind.”Bruce L. Castor Jr. and Mr. van der Veen arriving at the Capitol on Friday.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesSensitive to the charge that Mr. Trump endangered police officers, who were beaten and in one case killed during the assault, the lawyers played video clips in which he called himself a “law and order president” along with images of antiracism protests that turned violent last summer.They likewise showed video clips of Democrats objecting to Electoral College votes in past years when Republicans won, including Mr. Raskin in 2017 when Mr. Trump’s victory was sealed, comparing them with Mr. Trump’s criticism of the 2020 election. At the same time, those videos also showed Mr. Biden, then vice president, gaveling those protests out of order.Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands and one of the managers, objected that many of the faces shown in the videos of Democratic politicians and street protesters were Black. “It was not lost on me so many of them were people of color and women, Black women,” she said. “Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children.”The defense lawyers contended that Democrats were pursuing Mr. Trump out of personal and partisan animosity, using the word “hatred” 15 times during their formal presentation, and they cast the trial as an effort to suppress a political opponent and his supporters.“It is about canceling 75 million Trump voters and criminalizing political viewpoints,” Mr. Castor said. “That’s what this trial is really about. It is the only existential issue before us. It asks for constitutional cancel culture to take over in the United States Senate. Are we going to allow canceling and banning and silencing to be sanctioned in this body?”Emily Cochrane More

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      Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State Blue

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      Credit…June ParkSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionStacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State BlueIt may take 10 years. Do it anyway.Credit…June ParkSupported byContinue reading the main storyStacey Abrams and Ms. Abrams was the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018. Ms. Groh-Wargo was her campaign manager. They opened Fair Fight Action in late 2018.Feb. 11, 2021We met and became political partners a decade ago, uniting in a bid to stave off Democratic obsolescence and rebuild a party that would increase the clout of regular, struggling Georgians. Our mission was clear: organize people, help realize gains in their lives, win local races to build statewide competitiveness and hold power accountable.But the challenge was how to do that in a state where many allies had retreated into glum predictions of defeat, where our opponents reveled in shellacking Democrats at the polls and in the Statehouse.That’s not all we had to contend with. There was also a 2010 census undercount of people of color, a looming Republican gerrymander of legislative maps and a new Democratic president midway into his first term confronting a holdover crisis from the previous Republican administration. Though little in modern American history compares with the malice and ineptitude of the botched pandemic response or the attempted insurrection at the Capitol, the dynamic of a potentially inaccurate census and imminent partisan redistricting is the same story facing Democrats in 2021 as it was in 2011. State leaders and activists we know across the country who face total or partial Republican control are wondering which path they should take in their own states now — and deep into the next decade.Georgians deserved better, so we devised and began executing a 10-year plan to transform Georgia into a battleground state. As the world knows, President Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in November, and the January runoff elections for two Senate seats secured full congressional control for the Democratic Party. Yet the result wasn’t a miracle or truly a surprise, at least not to us. Years of planning, testing, innovating, sustained investment and organizing yielded the record-breaking results we knew they could and should. The lessons we learned can help other states looking to chart a more competitive future for Democrats and progressives, particularly those in the Sun Belt, where demographic change will precede electoral opportunity.We realize that many people are thinking about Stacey’s political future, but right now we intend to talk about the unglamorous, tedious, sometimes technical, often contentious work that creates a battleground state. When fully embraced, this work delivers wins — whether or not Donald Trump is on the ballot — as the growth Georgia Democrats have seen in cycle after cycle shows. Even in tough election years, we have witnessed the power of civic engagement on policy issues and increases in Democratic performance. This combination of improvements has also resulted in steady gains in local races and state legislative races, along with the continued narrowing of the statewide loss margin in election after election that finally flipped the state in 2020 and 2021.The task is hard, the progress can feel slow, and winning sometimes means losing better. In 2012, for example, we prevented the Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the Georgia House of Representatives, which would have allowed them to pass virtually any bill they wanted. We won four seats they had drawn for themselves, and in 2014 we maintained those gains — just holding our ground was a victory.The steps toward victory are straightforward: understand your weaknesses, organize with your allies, shore up your political infrastructure and focus on the long game. Georgia’s transformation is worth celebrating, and how it came to be is a long and complicated story, which required more than simply energizing a new coterie of voters. What Georgia Democrats and progressives accomplished here — and what is happening in Arizona and North Carolina — can be exported to the rest of the Sun Belt and the Midwest, but only if we understand how we got here.Understand why you’re losing.To know how to win, we first had to understand why a century of Democratic Party dominance in Georgia had been erased. For most of the 20th century, Georgia Democrats had existed in a strained alliance of rural conservatives, urban liberals and suburbanites, all unconvinced that voting Republican would serve their ends. After serving as the incubator of the Gingrich revolution in the early 1990s, Georgia turned sharply to the right. When Democrats lost U.S. Senate seats in 2002 and 2004, as well as the governorship in 2002, it showed that former conservative Democrats had fully turned Republican. The Democratic Party lost its grip on power. By 2010, Democrats were losing every statewide race, and in 2012 the State Senate fell to a Republican supermajority. Clearly, Democrats had to change tactics. More