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    Trump’s Abortion Comments Expose a Line of Attack for Rivals in Iowa

    After Donald Trump said a six-week ban signed by Ron DeSantis in Florida was “a terrible thing,” Iowa’s governor defended a similar law in her state, and others joined in the criticism.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa attacked former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday for his criticism of restrictive abortion legislation, highlighting a potential weakness for Mr. Trump in her state just months before the Iowa caucuses.During an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban signed by his main rival in the polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a “terrible thing.” Governor Reynolds signed a similar law in Iowa this summer.“It’s never a ‘terrible thing’ to protect innocent life,” she wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, adding that she was “proud” of the state’s six-week ban, known among conservatives as a “heartbeat” bill. She did not refer to Mr. Trump — who was set to visit Iowa on Wednesday — by name, but her meaning was clear.Later on Tuesday, one of her Republican colleagues, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, similarly criticized Mr. Trump for his comment. Mr. DeSantis also went after the former president on X.Ms. Reynolds, a Republican popular in her home state, came under attack by Mr. Trump this summer after saying she would not endorse in Iowa’s caucuses, although she has appeared at several campaign events alongside Mr. DeSantis. Criticizing her, and Iowa’s abortion ban, poses a risk for Mr. Trump, the race’s clear front-runner, as doing so could anger the evangelical Christian voters who are highly influential in the state’s Republican caucuses, set for early next year.The conflict over abortion could also provide an opening for Mr. DeSantis ahead of the Republican debate, which Mr. Trump is skipping, next week. The Florida governor and his allies have pilloried Mr. Trump’s comments, especially his statement that he would cut a deal with Democrats on abortion, and Mr. DeSantis may continue that line of criticism at the debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California.“I think all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out,” Mr. DeSantis said in an interview on Monday with RadioIowa. Relatively few faith leaders and elected officials have been openly critical of Mr. Trump for his comments, reflecting how unwilling many have been to challenge the man who retains the loyalty of much of the Republican base.This year, Donald J. Trump has largely dodged questions about abortion.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe nomination race has entered a new phase since Labor Day, with the Iowa caucuses just four months away. While Mr. Trump has consolidated support among Republican voters after four criminal indictments this year, his rivals are now seeking to shift the race.While, in private, Republicans generally described Mr. Trump’s attack on Mr. DeSantis as an unforced error in Iowa, few faith leaders have openly criticized the former president. But comments from Ms. Reynolds and Mr. Kemp have reinforced his comments as an issue.A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds declined to comment. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Few women know they are pregnant by six weeks. Abortion rights backers say such early bans amount to near total prohibition.Mr. Trump has long appeared uncomfortable discussing abortion in the context of Republican politics, as a former Democrat who once favored abortion rights. Yet, he and his advisers are increasingly looking past the primary to the general election. Mr. Trump privately said in 2022 before the elections that the repeal of Roe v. Wade, made possible by the conservative majority he appointed to the Supreme Court, would hurt Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms.This year, Mr. Trump has so far dodged questions about whether he would support a 15-week federal abortion ban, which is the baseline many anti-abortion activists have set for Republican candidates. But he still leads widely in primary polls. Many Republican voters seem willing to give Mr. Trump a pass on the issue because of his role in overturning Roe.Although Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida this year, he also has not endorsed a federal ban at either six or 15 weeks.On Saturday, at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines, Mr. DeSantis was asked whether he supported a federal abortion ban. In keeping with his past statements, he did not give a direct answer.“I think the states have done the better job thus far,” he said. “Congress has really struggled to make a meaningful impact over the years.”He then talked about his efforts in Florida to help mothers and pregnant women.Other candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, have come out strongly in favor of at least a 15-week ban. Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has taken a more nuanced approach, saying that Republicans will find it impossible to force such a bill through the Senate.In Iowa, the six-week ban is not in effect, while it awaits a ruling from the State Supreme Court. Ms. Reynolds signed a similar bill in 2018, but the measure was not made law after a court challenge.The status of abortion in Florida is also awaiting a decision from that state’s Supreme Court. More

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    Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off

    Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

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    Donor Who Backed DeSantis Re-election Is ‘Still on the Sidelines’ in 2024

    The hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin supported Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign in Florida last year, but has not backed a Republican for president.Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge-fund executive and major Republican donor who has made it clear that he wants the party to move on from former President Donald J. Trump, still has yet to settle on an alternative in the primary — even as time dwindles for Mr. Trump’s opponents to cut into his enormous lead before voting begins in January.Mr. Griffin’s continued absence from the primary fight, which he confirmed in an interview with CNBC that was broadcast on Monday night, points to a deep dissatisfaction among some anti-Trump Republican megadonors with their choices in the race.It is also a particular snub to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. When Mr. DeSantis was up for re-election as governor last year, Mr. Griffin supported him to the tune of $5 million, but he has expressed dissatisfaction with his presidential campaign.“I don’t know his strategy,” he told CNBC, in a major departure from his assertion last year that the country would be “well served” if Mr. DeSantis were president. “It’s not clear to me what voter base he is intending to appeal to.”Zia Ahmed, a spokesman for Mr. Griffin’s company, Citadel, confirmed those remarks but emphasized to The New York Times that Mr. Griffin “never said who he’s supporting or not supporting in 2024.”“I’m still on the sidelines,” Mr. Griffin said in the CNBC interview. He added: “Look, if I had my dream, we’d have a great Republican candidate in the primary who was younger, of a different generation, with a different tone for America.”That description might once have seemed to refer to Mr. DeSantis, who is 45 and has tried to present himself as someone who can restyle the Republican message and win back the swing voters turned off by Mr. Trump.But Mr. DeSantis has leaned hard into the cultural grievances that animate the Republican base, denouncing transgender rights and the teaching of race in schools, among other things, while echoing or trying to one-up much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on issues like immigration.Polls show him badly trailing Mr. Trump, at times by dozens of percentage points.People close to Mr. Griffin have described him as particularly upset by Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute,” and by the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida.Mr. Griffin spent more than $100 million in the 2022 midterm cycle, and his largess could make a big difference for a Trump opponent — if, or when, he settles on one. More

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    DeSantis Played Both Sides of the GOP Rift Over the 2020 Election

    The Florida governor created an election crimes unit that placated election deniers. It led to scores of “zany-burger” tips, and, according to one Republican, “Kabuki theater.”It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has said he pushed “the strongest election integrity measures in the country.” But critics say their main impact was to appease a Republican base that embraced conspiracy theories about elections — and that came with a cost.He failed to counter lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Florida judges are considering whether his administration overstepped its legal authority.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.Workers at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department tabulating mail-in ballots in October 2020. The 2020 election was one of the smoothest in state history.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe 2020 AftermathTightening voting rules had not been high on Mr. DeSantis’s agenda when he first came into office in 2019. After the ballot-counting debacle during the 2000 presidential election, Florida had substantially revamped its elections. Experts considered the 2020 election, in which over 11 million Floridians voted, well run and smooth. Mr. Trump won by 371,686 votes.One significant change Mr. DeSantis made to Florida’s elections was his decision to join the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. The data-sharing program, which had bipartisan support, helps states identify people who had moved, died or registered or voted in more than one state.When he announced the move to a group of local election supervisors, they broke into applause.But after the 2020 election, Mr. DeSantis came under concerted pressure from Mr. Trump’s loyalists. Florida became a staging ground for people promoting election conspiracy theories, including Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and the Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.Pressed again and again on whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis dodged. “It’s not for me to do,” he replied in December 2020. “Obviously, we did our thing in Florida. The college voted,” he said, referring to the Electoral College. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.”But within a few months, Mr. DeSantis was pushing for legislation he said would bulletproof Florida’s elections from fraud, with tighter rules for mail-in ballots, the use of drop boxes and third-party organizations that register voters.The governor signed the bill live on Fox News in May 2021.Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, and Mr. DeSantis in 2022.Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated PressElection Crimes UnitBut lobbying by the election denial movement did not end. Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his effort to undo the outcome of the 2020 election, helped organize Florida activists into state and local groups through her national Election Integrity Network.Members of Defend Florida, another group, went door to door canvassing for evidence of voter irregularities. They delivered their leads to local elections officials, who, to the group’s frustration, typically investigated and dismissed them.Public records show the organization’s representatives met repeatedly with aides to the governor and other high-level members of his administration. Six months after the 2021 changes became law, Mr. DeSantis proposed the election crimes unit — a top priority, aides told lawmakers. He requested a team of state law enforcement officers and prosecutors who could bypass the local officials he suggested had turned a blind eye to voting abuses.Some lawmakers worried about giving the governor’s office too much influence over law enforcement, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The Republican-led Legislature did not explicitly authorize state prosecutors to bring voter fraud charges, as Mr. DeSantis had requested.Otherwise, the governor got much of what he wanted: $2.7 million for a 15-member investigative unit and 10 state law enforcement officers dedicated to election crimes. His administration has used prosecutors under the attorney general’s office to handle the bulk of the cases, even without the Legislature’s authorization.The new investigative unit became a receptacle for activists’ tips about fraud. Activists at times alerted conservative media outlets to their leads, generating headlines about new investigations. Some accusations poured through unusual channels.Activists in Mr. DeSantis’s home county, Pinellas, handed over one binder full of tips to Mr. DeSantis’s mother. They later heard back that the package had been successfully delivered in Tallahassee, according to two people familiar with the episode.A small team reviewing the claims found the vast bulk were not credible.“Most that comes my way has zany-burger all over it,” Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, wrote to an official in a local prosecutor’s office in 2022, according to an email obtained by The New York Times through a public records request.Andrew Ladanowski, a former analyst for the unit who describes himself as an elections data hobbyist, said he spent weeks combing through voter records from the 2020 election. He had expected to find thousands of cases of illegal votes, but pickings were slim. “I can safely say there was no large-scale fraud that could have had a change in a state or a national election. It wasn’t sufficient,” he said.Jeff Brandes, a Republican former state senator who opposed the election crimes unit, described it as largely “Kabuki theater.”Five days before Florida’s 2022 primary election, the governor, then running for re-election, announced third-degree felony charges against Mr. Hart and 19 other ex-felons.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been charged with election crimes under the new initiative.Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesA 2018 ballot initiative allowed former felons to vote but exempted those who had been convicted of murder or sex offenses. Defendants and their lawyers have said they were unaware of that distinction. They said they thought they could vote because the state had allowed them to register and issued them voter registration cards.At a news conference announcing the charges, Mr. DeSantis said more cases from the 2020 election were to come. “This is the opening salvo,” he said.But by the end of 2022, the unit had announced only one other case against a 2020 voter. Mr. Ladanowski said by the time he had left in December, the team had moved on to vetting the current voter rolls.As of July, the election crimes unit had referred nearly 1,500 potential cases to local or state law enforcement agencies, according to the governor’s office. Just 32 — or 2 percent — had resulted in arrests or warrants, and those cases were unrelated to the purportedly systematic abuses that elections activists claimed had tainted the 2020 election.Thirteen of the defendants had been convicted of felonies. Defense attorneys said that some ex-felons accepted plea deals simply out of fear of being sent back to prison, and that none received a stiffer penalty than probation. Appeals court judges are now considering whether the state prosecutors had the legal authority to bring charges.The election crimes unit also fined more than three dozen organizations that ran voter registration drives a total of more than $100,000 — much of that for failing to turn in the voter registration forms quickly enough.The governor has said that even a limited number of arrests will deter voter fraud. Press officers for the secretary of state and the state law enforcement agency said the DeSantis administration expected courts to eventually decide that it acted within its authority, and that investigations of mass fraud like ballot harvesting are complex, time-consuming and still open.Warning Against ‘the Left’s Schemes’Mr. DeSantis endorsed Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor, during a rally in Pittsburgh in 2022.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn August 2022, the day after he announced the election crime unit’s first arrests, Mr. DeSantis went to Pennsylvania to endorse Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor.The trip was another chance for the governor to show election activists he gets it. Onstage with a man who had worked with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to send an “alternate” slate of electors to Washington, Mr. DeSantis spoke carefully.He did not mention the 2020 result, but he stressed that his state had cracked down on illegal voters. “We’re going to hold ’em accountable,” he told an enthusiastic crowd, ending his speech with an exhortation to “take a stand against the left’s schemes.”Mr. DeSantis continued to dance around the 2020 election for another year, while his policies sent a strong message to the Republican base.In March 2023, Cord Byrd, Mr. DeSantis’s secretary of state, announced that Florida would pull out of ERIC, the system Mr. DeSantis had ordered the state to join in 2019.Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Byrd had called ERIC the “only and best game in town” to identify people who had voted in two different states, according to the notes of a private call he had with Florida activists allied with Ms. Mitchell. The notes were provided by the investigative group Documented. In its annual report, the election crimes unit also described ERIC as a useful tool.But Ms. Mitchell’s group and other critics had attacked the system as part of a liberal conspiracy to snatch Republican electoral victories. Mr. Byrd said publicly that Florida had lost confidence in it, and his agency cited ERIC’s failure to correct “partisan tendencies.”In Florida, activists celebrated the victory. But they also want more. In interviews they said they were frustrated that the election crimes unit hasn’t brought more charges or validated their claims of mass elections malfeasance.And when Mr. DeSantis finally said last month that “of course” Mr. Biden had won the 2020 election, he faced the sort of reaction he had long tried to avoid.“It’s a betrayal,” said Wesley Huff, a Florida elections activist who has been involved in Defend Florida and other groups.Trip Gabriel More

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    Trump Says Abortion Ban DeSantis Signed Was ‘a Terrible Mistake’

    The former president, while denouncing his chief rival for the Republican nomination, also largely evaded questions on the issue.Former President Donald J. Trump, whose Supreme Court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, harshly criticized his top rival in the Republican presidential primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for a six-week abortion ban that he called a “terrible thing.”Mr. Trump issued his broadside — which could turn off socially conservative Republican primary voters, especially in Iowa, where evangelicals are a crucial voting bloc — during an interview with the new host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kristen Welker, that was broadcast on Sunday morning.Asked whether Mr. DeSantis went too far by signing a six-week abortion ban, Mr. Trump replied: “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”Since announcing his candidacy last November — just a week after Republicans underperformed expectations in midterm elections shaped by a backlash against the overturning of the abortion ruling — there has been no policy issue on which Mr. Trump has appeared more uncomfortable than on abortion.In interview after interview since the repeal of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump has ducked questions about whether he would support a federal ban on most abortions at 15 weeks — the baseline position of many Republicans, including the leading anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.With Ms. Welker on Sunday, Mr. Trump again refused to clarify his position.“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Mr. Trump said. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.”He made a far-fetched promise that as president he would “sit down with both sides” and negotiate a deal on abortion that would result in “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”In reality, Mr. Trump — who years ago said he supported abortion rights before switching his position in 2011 as he considered a presidential campaign that year — appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, providing a majority to reverse the Roe ruling. Democrats have made clear they plan to make Mr. Trump’s role in Roe’s end a key focus in the 2024 general election if he is the nominee.What’s more, Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a measure similar to the one Mr. DeSantis made law. A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment.“This further confirms to Iowans this is not the same Trump we once knew,” said Steve Deace, a conservative Iowa talk show host who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. “This Trump only attacks Republicans from the left.”Mr. Trump’s advisers are mindful that abortion was a political loser for Republicans in the 2022 midterm cycle. Mr. Trump himself, when a draft of the court opinion undoing Roe leaked publicly, told advisers it would hurt his party’s electoral chances.So as he looks ahead to the general election, Mr. Trump — the front-runner for his party’s nomination by a wide margin in national polls — has tried to avoid taking a clear position in the hopes of not alienating additional voters.“I’m almost like a mediator in this case,” Mr. Trump told Ms. Welker. Pushed on whether he would support a federal ban, he said: “It could be state or it could be federal. I don’t frankly care.”Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of S.B.A. Pro-Life America, who had previously described Mr. Trump’s presidency as “the most consequential in American history for the pro-life cause,” indicated she was less than thrilled by Mr. Trump’s attack on Mr. DeSantis’s anti-abortion legislation. Yet she did not directly criticize him for it.“We’re at a moment where we need a human rights advocate, someone who is dedicated to saving lives of children and serving mothers in need,” Ms. Dannenfelser said on Sunday morning in response to Mr. Trump’s comments on “Meet the Press.” “Every single candidate should be clear on how they plan to do that.”She added, “It begins with focusing on extremes of the other side, and ambition and common sense on our own. Anything weaker than 15 weeks as a federal minimum standard makes no sense in this context.”A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, responded to Mr. Trump’s attack by criticizing the former president for suggesting he could negotiate with Democrats on abortion, adding that the “disastrous results of Donald Trump compromising with Democrats” while he was president included “$7 trillion in new debt” and “an unfinished border wall.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, a strict social conservative who has run to the right of everyone in the Republican presidential field on the abortion issue, cast his former running mate’s comments in stark moral terms.“Donald Trump continues to walk away from the pro-life legacy of our administration,” Mr. Pence said in a statement Sunday morning. “There’s no negotiating when it comes to the life of the unborn. We will not rest, we will not relent, until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the nation.” More

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    Why Does the Republican Field All Sound the Same?

    There’s a late-summer-fade quality to the Republican primary contest, as if the candidates are passively sliding into the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch.Donald Trump and a variety of other people see the animating factor here as the indictments against him. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Mr. Trump joked last month. This is also the prism through which the other candidates get discussed: that they don’t criticize Mr. Trump much, especially over his indictments.But there’s a bigger and more claustrophobic reality to the fading quality of Ron DeSantis and all these other Republicans: It’s as if they constructed their identities as Trump alternatives and ended up all the same.Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote this summer that Mr. DeSantis can sound generic next to Vivek Ramaswamy: They talk the same way about China and TikTok, about how they will use military force against the cartels in Mexico (even though this really sounds as if we will be going to war with Mexico), about the F.B.I.Two weeks before Mr. Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Mr. Ramaswamy make Mr. DeSantis sound generic, I heard Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border — houses, which are being broken into — in events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it might not be our country, Mr. Scott said. We will repel the intrusion with force, Mr. DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.“That’s why you see these things like weaponization of agencies, because nobody’s held them accountable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired watching the weaponization of the D.O.J. against their political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, Mr. DeSantis said, we’ll have a new F.B.I. director. The first three things we have to do, Mr. Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “You’re going to have housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee in all the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Scott, who wants to “purge” the politicization of the department for the benefit of all Americans. They walked off the stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel”).It can be hard to remember what made Mr. Trump distinct eight years ago, because it has become the texture of our lives. The 1980s tabloid dimension of his language — weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal action — crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The lurid, fallen vision of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve chumps or in on the corruption is the one we still occupy.Now they all sound kind of like that. Politicians’ impulse to shorthand and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes the old, once-novel Trump themes, aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and the administrative state.At the event in July where Mr. DeSantis sounded so like Mr. Scott did the evening before, he was midway through a period that the campaign had signaled would be a reset. At first, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis ventured onto different ground, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things, debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney and all the rest. If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, seeing Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. DeSantis there, or the full field at something like Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner, you can imagine nearly the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at once and saying with one voice, “End the weaponization of the Justice Department.”This dynamic might be on display in its purest form on the subject of voting and elections, in the way what Mr. Trump cares about flows through the base and becomes the starting premise of what the other candidates talk about. Mr. DeSantis runs a state with well-regarded early voting and ballot-counting practices — one where Mr. Trump won twice, along with a bunch of down-ballot Republicans. He transformed widespread voter fraud, an (illusory) concern of Mr. Trump’s, into a unit that would address (rare) instances of voter fraud and arrested a handful of people, some of whom have said they had no reason to believe they couldn’t vote, to prove the point that he takes Mr. Trump’s fake concerns seriously.Practically every candidacy right now is about Mr. Trump: The protest candidates exist to oppose Mr. Trump; the alternatives basically seem constructed in the negative (Trump but nice, Trump but we’ve got to win the suburbs again, Trump but competent) and grown inside the Trump concerns lab. Here and there, the candidates talk about health care, education costs, the economic changes with artificial intelligence or anything that might be kitchen table — things that exist beyond Mr. Trump’s reach — but it’s amazing how little some of this stuff is emphasized beyond inflation and energy costs.During the August debate, the Fox News moderators put something Nikki Haley said — that trans kids playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time” — to a few candidates. When they asked Ms. Haley, she barely registered her own line and led with, in what seems to be her real voice: “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading. If a child can’t read by third grade, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school.” She can oscillate a bit, in and out of past and present iterations of the G.O.P., but as David Weigel wrote this spring, she accepts the premise of the Trump era: “I am very aware of a deep state,” she told a voter who asked about her plans to dismantle it this spring. “It’s not just in D.C.; it’s in every one of our states.”And none of them are winning! It might be the indictments that have firmed up Mr. Trump’s support, but the inescapable sameness of the candidates, especially when they should sound and seem different, is real.The idea some conservatives had for Mr. DeSantis — including Mr. DeSantis — was that he would be a singular figure, uniting the people attracted to the statist aggression of Mr. Trump and the people looking to move beyond Mr. Trump. Fundamentally, this depended on the idea that Mr. DeSantis is distinct from Mr. Trump, which seems like a misunderstanding. His appeal for certain kinds of conservatives, particularly donors, depended then on a subtle trust that he would not go too far and could shift into some other plane of political operation.But they were never distinct figures; Mr. DeSantis’s rise in the party as a competent aggressor exists because of the Trump era and the things that Mr. Trump is and isn’t. He makes happen what Mr. Trump talks about. And, like all the others who have defined themselves by being an alternative to an individual who is still always present, he has ended up talking about the same things and sounding the same as most of the others. Mr. Trump created the air that everyone now breathes.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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    DeSantis Spreads Covid Vaccine Skepticism With Guidance Contradicting C.D.C.

    The C.D.C. on Tuesday recommended at least one dose of the updated Covid-19 vaccines for most Americans six months and older.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida’s administration issued Covid-19 vaccine recommendations this week that directly contradicted federal officials’ guidance as his presidential campaign tries to use the resurgence of the virus to appeal to Republican voters.With cases ticking up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that everyone six months and older who had not received a Covid-19 shot in the last two months receive a booster vaccine. The new shots, approved by the Food and Drug Administration this week, appear to be effective against a vast majority of Covid-19 variants now in circulation, according to data presented at a C.D.C. meeting on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis’s administration advised that Florida residents under the age of 65 skip the updated boosters.“I will not stand by and let the F.D.A. and C.D.C. use healthy Floridians as guinea pigs for new booster shots,” Mr. DeSantis, who has a history of downplaying the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, said in a statement after he hosted an online panel Wednesday to discuss the new federal guidelines.Appearing alongside Mr. DeSantis was Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, and other medical doctors who expressed skepticism about the shots.“What I have directed our department to do is to provide guidance that really recommends and advises against the use of these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines for anyone under 65,” Dr. Ladapo said during the panel on Wednesday.Covid-19 cases have steadily increased since July, and public health officials have warned of a comeback for the virus in the fall and winter months — though some experts say that this year is less alarming than previous years. Conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and politicians have seized on the moment to stoke fears that the government would again initiate widespread shutdowns or masking requirements to help prevent the spread of the disease. But federal and state officials have not suggested that those types of measures are under consideration.In the release accompanying Mr. DeSantis’s statement, the governor’s office said that Covid-19 vaccines had “shown little to no benefit to prevent Covid-19 infection” — a claim that is directly contradicted by a host of evidence from doctors, public health officials and infectious disease experts.The C.D.C. specifies that while older adults and “persons with weakened immune systems” are at greater risk for hospitalization and death from the disease, “healthy children and adults can still experience severe disease.” The “benefits of Covid-19 vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks,” the agency said.Mr. DeSantis — whose presidential campaign has floundered amid money troubles and mass layoffs — has frequently appealed to Covid-19-related concerns among the Republican base, both from the governor’s office and on the campaign trail.Mr. DeSantis has talked up his handling of the virus in the state to contrast himself with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race whom he trails badly in polls, and whose administration headed the development of the coronavirus vaccines that are now very unpopular among Republican voters. Mr. DeSantis often highlights that he was one of the first governors to fully reopen his state after a pandemic lockdown.At a public health event in Jacksonville last week that, in the absence of formal policy announcements, resembled a campaign rally, Mr. DeSantis said: “I can tell you here in Florida, we did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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    Second G.O.P Debate: Who Has Qualified So Far?

    At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not […] More