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      ‘The View’ Has Narrowed

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      Illustration By The New York TimesThe ladies of “The View” were in high spirits. A piece of news they’d been hankering for had broken at last: President Biden, a revered figure around their talk show table, had kicked off his re-election campaign.The show’s hosts — known in “View” parlance as “the ladies” — had been hyping this moment for months. They’d lavished praise on President Biden for leading the country out of the pandemic and overseeing what they described as a thriving U.S. economy. They’d downplayed scandals and investigations involving Mr. Biden and his family members. They’d also taken extraordinary pains to disqualify as “ageist” questions of whether he is simply too old to run again. Mr. Biden would be 86 by the end of a second term, but when the Democratic strategist David Axelrod expressed mild concern, the comedian Joy Behar snapped that he “should keep his mouth shut.”“I’d rather have Joe Biden, drooling, than any Republican,” Ms. Behar said another day.Now the ladies agreed that Mr. Biden’s campaign announcement made them feel hopeful. They were tired of what Sunny Hostin called Republican “fearmongering,” which, in a startlingly casual aside, she noted had “led to the demise of our democracy.” If any of the ladies was perturbed by the irony of decrying scare tactics while calling U.S. democracy dead, she kept it to herself.“You get behind him,” the actress Whoopi Goldberg said of Mr. Biden, seemingly instructing the Democrats at large, “and we won’t have a problem.”This kind of unabashed cheerleading is reserved for Mr. Biden. The panel of “View” hosts has been annoyed and dismissive of other Democrats who might vie for the nomination. (“You start making inroads — maybe this person, maybe this person — we’re done for,” Ms. Goldberg said.) When compelled to discuss the Twitter-hosted presidential campaign announcement of Gov. Ron DeSantis of the Florida — a man they’d decried as “fascist,” “bigot” and “Death Santis” — the ladies used the occasion to mock the platform and its new owner, Elon Musk, for the tech failures that disrupted the event. As for Mr. Trump, forget about it: Ms. Goldberg won’t even utter his name, referring to him instead as “you know who.”The day after Mr. Biden’s announcement, the co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Republican political operative who’d already been silenced by Ms. Goldberg, giggled from her end of the table. Ms. Farah Griffin has said she’d write in another candidate before voting for either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, but her counterpoints tend to get interrupted or dismissed by the rest of the panel.Mr. Biden “needs another four years to finish the job,” Ms. Behar said. “You can’t fight fascism in four years only. You need eight years for that.”“He has had a lot of accomplishments,” Ms. Hostin agreed.“He brought us back from the precipice,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Maybe it’s not a perfect country, but it’s better than where we were.”With that, the music came up and the audience applauded. The discussion was done.I’ve been a regular Viewer for years, starting when I was a foreign correspondent salving late-night homesickness via satellite TV. Along the way I’ve amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the hosts’ marriages and hobbies, and a habit of analyzing the “Hot Topics” discussions as a bellwether of centrist America’s political and cultural trends. I’m hardly alone — “The View” has long inspired pieces of serious analysis that bob along like flotsam on a choppy sea of dressing room gossip, leaks and hate tweets. For me, though, it’s a solitary fixation, for none of my friends or family members have ever shared my interest in “The View.”“Ugh, I can’t watch that show,” they grimace. Or — this most of all — “Aren’t they always arguing?”Which is funny because, if you ask me, the co-hosts don’t argue nearly enough. At least, not substantively. Not anymore. The freewheeling discussions that once evoked a spectrum of American opinion on everything from reproductive rights to foreign policy — those have mostly fallen silent. “The View” has become a chorus of conformity. The title of this show I’ve loved for years used to suggest messy and fearless debate. Lately, it seems like a command.The hosts include centrist Democrats (Ms. Hostin and Ms. Behar), centrist Republicans (Ms. Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro) and one centrist independent (the TV journalist Sara Haines). But, anyway, they agree. They agree (or at least pretend to agree) that Mr. Biden is basically a good president. Even on topics notorious for splitting American opinion — the need for “common-sense gun reform,” protecting L.G.B.T.Q. rights and funding the war in Ukraine — they don’t find much to debate one another about. Even those who privately consider abortion a sin agree that access should be preserved in some cases.We, the people, are split. Our many divisions obstruct coherent governance. But “The View” continues to project a brightly lit illusion of accord.And there is no article of agreement more important — lending the show an intoxicating but oddly irreal flavor — as the ladies’ absolute disdain for Mr. Trump and, increasingly, anyone who belongs to his party.Current events haven’t always anchored “The View.” Since the program’s 1997 debut, celebrity interviews, gossip and relationship advice vied for time against news and politics. In its current iteration, though, “The View” carries itself like an earnest journalistic platform — a must-do interview for establishment politicians and a reliable midmorning destination for nuggets of news analysis. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine dubbed it “the most important political TV show in America.”Which has made its erasure of the country’s most dynamic and least understood political strains all the more frustrating.As the current season got underway last September, Ms. Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, came out with a sweeping justification for shunning Republicans — all Republicans, she specified, not just MAGA loyalists — because polls showed that the majority of Republicans regard Mr. Trump as their figurehead.“So if you are saying that he is a fascist, what are they? If you are saying that he is a white supremacist, what are they?” Ms. Hostin continued. “If you follow someone that has hate in their heart, and I believe that he does, then you are complicit in that, and you don’t have a pass.”I gathered that Ms. Hostin was enshrining the new ground rules of “The View,” updated to reflect our ever more divided age. She has become the show’s dominant voice, although I can’t tell if that’s by design or whether it’s the inevitable result of her indomitable delivery and the clear, unambiguous opinions she’s polished into repeatable bites.Either way, the idea that Republicans could be written off en masse signaled a radical departure in “View” philosophy. The panelists have traditionally taken pains to distinguish between bad politicians and the regular people who vote for them. Barbara Walters, who created the show and presided over it for years, urged the ladies to appeal to an imaginary viewer in Wyoming, according to interviews with current and former panelists for the podcast “The View: Behind the Table.” When Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Behar stormed off the set mid-interview in 2010 to protest anti-Muslim rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly (“Muslims killed us on 9/11”), Ms. Walters was outraged.“You have just seen what should not happen,” Ms. Walters told the audience that day. “We should be able to have discussions without washing our hands” of one another “and screaming and walking offstage,” she said.But that was a different age. Ms. Hostin’s wholesale dismissal of Republicans comes across as a bleak but frank acknowledgment that the show had adopted the coping mechanisms of our time: Ban thoughts we don’t like and carry on as if all the reasonable people agree. It’s been particularly chilling to watch this attitude finally take hold at a mainstream women’s program that has long postured as a nonthreatening place to air whatever opinions were working their way through the land, a make-believe living room where you could disagree about politics but then bond over bratty bridal behavior and unrealistic beauty standards.There is an argument, familiar by now, that denying Mr. Trump and his supporters a platform is the only moral approach to a movement many regard as a historic evil. But trying to smother any serious consideration of his politics has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that we are afraid of letting Americans hear these ideas because — why? They might like them too much?To be fair, the animosity between “The View” and Republicans is mutual, and finding the origin point is something of a chicken-versus-egg conundrum. For example, “The View” invited Mr. DeSantis to appear this season — a fact we only know because his spokesman tweeted out the invitation, along with the governor’s refusal, which cited various slurs and insults the ladies had used to refer to Mr. DeSantis.Even beyond “The View,” many conservatives, especially those in the thrall of Mr. Trump, now avoid mainstream journalists they decry as purveyors of “fake news.”Whatever the reason, one fact is undeniable: “The View” brazened all the way through Mr. Trump’s first campaign and presidency without deigning to hire a Trump supporter.The closest the show came was Meghan McCain, who spent so much time name-checking her father and bickering peevishly that she often drowned out her own points — which amounted to tortured efforts to reconcile her disgust for Mr. Trump with a desire to speak up for his voters.This may not be a popular take on Ms. McCain (who eventually left the show amid mockery of her entitled attitude and embarrassing lapses in decorum), but she had moments of clarity. She raised valid but then-taboo questions about America’s pandemic response and, to the acute annoyance of her co-hosts, analyzed failures and weaknesses of the Democratic Party.In 2020, when the other ladies nitpicked Bernie Sanders (saying, among other things, that he was ineffective, a fake Democrat and backed by Russians), Ms. McCain calmly laid out her repugnance for the Vermont senator’s leftist policies while acknowledging that his runaway popularity could land him the nomination. It was Ms. McCain who frankly discussed the populist sentiment fueling the rise of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders.Ms. McCain’s seat was filled this season by the more cordial — or perhaps more easily cowed — Ms. Farah Griffin, a former spokeswoman for the Trump administration. Ms. Farah Griffin quit her job amid Mr. Trump’s election lies and went on to testify before the House select committee investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6 — insufficient atonement, according to her new colleagues. Her early weeks on the show were full of struggle sessions in which her co-hosts (most notably Ms. Hostin and Ms. Navarro) snubbed and needled her until she coughed up, yet again, a denunciation of Mr. Trump.“I do question you … ’cause you’re a very smart woman,” Ms. Hostin said to her in a typical early exchange. “When you looked at his history … did it give you pause? As a woman who considers herself a brown woman, ‘My God, I’m working for a racist’?”Ms. Farah Griffin repeated the familiar explanation: She believed public service was a higher calling and didn’t think it was acceptable to cede the White House to “the crazies.”“I could spend the rest of my life debating if that was the right choice and, honestly, I spend a lot of time thinking about it,” she said, sounding weary. “But what I worry about is that this man could be president again.”When I first started watching “The View,” I was immersed in the violence and upheaval that followed Sept. 11, 2001. Peering westward through the window of the TV, I’d marvel at how unaffected the ladies seemed, how coifed and manicured, chatting about cheating husbands while the wars ground along. Sometimes I had the sense of watching anesthesia dripping into the veins of the American public.But then, like clouds parting, the ladies would say real things. Looking back now, I’m struck by how layered and blunt those conversations were — especially compared to those of today.In a 2007 episode, for example, the ladies clashed over torture, morality and America’s reputation abroad. Elisabeth Hasselbeck sneered that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed deserved to be tortured for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks. “Why don’t we give him milk and cookies at the same time,” Ms. Hasselbeck said. “And a lawyer, and let him watch ‘American Idol’?”Rosie O’Donnell countered by asking if labeling someone a terrorist nullified that person’s humanity. “They have been treating them like animals, Elisabeth, not like human beings,” she said.The U.S. government was “sanctioning torture,” Ms. O’Donnell went on, “from the president all the way down,” leading to anti-American protests around the world.Ms. Hasselbeck was unmoved. “I’d rather be safe than liked,” she said.Ms. Behar, a compulsive mood lightener with a habit of cracking jokes and steering the discussion back to daily practicalities, sided with Ms. O’Donnell, saying that she wanted to be greeted warmly on vacation in Italy.“I want them to say, ‘Hey, Americana, come,’” Ms. Behar said. “I don’t want them to not like me.”I still loathe what Ms. Hasselbeck said — suggesting torture as a punishment, mocking the right to a lawyer, prizing safety above all else. But it didn’t shock me. Those values had dominated the U.S. government since 2001, and I’d been watching them play out disastrously in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. If anything, it was cathartic to hear the arguments trotted onto TV, to see them falter and collapse under challenge.What strikes me now, though, was how that debate ended. “I think you’re wrong,” Ms. O’Donnell told Ms. Hasselbeck. “I still love you, but I think you’re wrong.”I love you, but you’re wrong. “The View” isn’t like that anymore. I think Americans are, or could be, or want to be — but we certainly don’t see it done on TV.The ladies often seem on the brink of having an honest and textured discussion — somebody will say something intriguing — but the most compelling comments tend to go untouched.I envision behind them the suited figures of the ABC network and the Walt Disney Company, which owns the network, and the companies that buy ads to sell things in the breaks, all of which benefit from predictable centrist leadership and regard eruptions of popular sentiment as an undesirable expense.Ms. Goldberg, seemingly keen to avoid any steep ideological edges, frequently shuts down conversation with a sweeping and vague speech on the uncertainty of politics or the unreliability of polls or some such.One recent morning, Ms. Haines fretted about the insurrection of Jan. 6 and the erosion of public trust.“The media is at its lowest. The Supreme Court is at its lowest,” she said, ticking off on her fingers. “People don’t trust anyone these days, so to completely ——”Ms. Behar interrupted: “They trust us,” she snapped.“Yes!” Ms. Hostin said emphatically, hands folded around her coffee mug, like a teacher’s pet who’s just called the right answer. As the audience exploded in applause, Ms. Haines stammered to regain her thought.Ms. Behar shrugged, and interrupted again. “Sure,” she said curtly.And that was that.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.

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      Ron DeSantis Avoids Talking About Florida’s Abortion Ban in New Hampshire

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      As he traversed socially conservative Iowa this week, the 2024 contender highlighted his state’s six-week ban. But now, in more moderate New Hampshire, he is shying from the subject.At a stop on his first trip to New Hampshire as a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis mentioned his efforts to provide tax relief for Florida families. He mentioned defunding diversity programs at public colleges. He mentioned his fight with Disney.But what he did not mention was the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida this year.The ban — which Mr. DeSantis chose to highlight in his speeches to audiences in socially conservative Iowa this week — is a potential lightning rod for voters in more moderate New Hampshire.One New Hampshire Republican, Bob Kroepel, approached Mr. DeSantis after his speech in Rochester as the governor signed baseballs and took selfies with the crowd.“Would you support an abortion policy that would allow choice to a certain point?” Mr. Kroepel, who lost Republican primaries for governor in New Hampshire in 1998 and 2002, asked through the din of the crowd and speakers blaring country music.Mr. DeSantis dodged the thrust of the question, talking instead about his efforts to help parents after they have children, including through health coverage and universal school choice.“So my wife has a fatherhood initiative,” he replied. “We’ve also done a lot of stuff to help new mothers, like we now have a year of postpartum health coverage for poor mothers. Obviously, we have the educational choice and a bunch of stuff that we’ve done.”“So we absolutely have a responsibility to help mothers, that’s without question, one hundred percent,” Mr. DeSantis said before moving on to the next voter.Abortion is likely to be one of the most complicated issues for Mr. DeSantis to discuss, especially if he wins the Republican nomination.Moderates and independents tend to be less supportive of bans as early as six weeks, when many women do not know they are pregnant, and Mr. DeSantis has sometimes avoided talking about abortion even in front of friendly audiences. So far, he has skirted questions about a federal abortion ban, suggesting that the matter should be left largely to the states.Casey DeSantis speaking at a lectern that has a DeSantis campaign sign. Mr. DeSantis is standing behind her.David Degner for The New York Times“I think at the end of the day, fighting for life and protecting life really is a bottom-up movement,” he said in a Fox News interview last week. “I think we’ve been able to have great successes at the local level.”His main rival, former President Donald J. Trump, has also not committed to supporting a federal abortion ban. Mr. DeSantis has used abortion to criticize Mr. Trump, after the former president suggested that Florida’s ban was “too harsh.”Republican leaders in New Hampshire say a six-week ban is too extreme for voters in their state, which has a 24-week limit.Jason Osborne, the state’s House majority leader, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview that he hoped the governor would state at some point in the campaign that he would not try “to make Florida’s abortion policy countrywide.”A national six-week abortion ban “would go over like a lead balloon” with New Hampshire voters, Mr. Osborne said after Mr. DeSantis’s Rochester event.“People don’t want it,” he added. If Mr. DeSantis were to propose such a ban, he said, “I think you’d see a lot of people jump ship. I would lose a lot of faith in him.”Mr. Osborne said he agreed with the governor’s strategy of not taking a louder stance on abortion.“I think abortion is one of those issues that should not be talked about in a presidential campaign,” he said. Abortion rights supporters protesting outside Mr. DeSantis’s event on Thursday in Manchester, N.H.David Degner for The New York TimesWhile Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech typically varies little from stop to stop, he does appear to be calibrating his message on abortion. In Iowa on Wednesday, he talked about Florida’s six-week ban, known as the Heartbeat Protection Act, during a lengthy recounting of his record as governor. “We have enacted the heartbeat bill,” he told a crowd in Cedar Rapids before being drowned out by cheers and applause.But he did not mention the bill at several stops in New Hampshire on Thursday.Even New Hampshire voters who said they support a six-week ban said they understood why Mr. DeSantis was unlikely to talk much about the issue.“I mean, my gosh, there’s so much blowback, right?” said Jennifer Hilton, 56, an independent who is open to supporting Mr. DeSantis and heard him speak in Rochester. “And it’s so taken out of context, and such an emotional issue, that people can’t hear you.”Sue Collins, an attendee at a DeSantis event in Salem, N.H., said, “I’ll be honest, I’m not strict pro-life, but I was not happy to see the six-week ban.” She added, “I wish it wasn’t that strict, but it would not prevent me from voting for him.”Mr. Kroepel, the Republican who approached Mr. DeSantis, said that “on balance,” he was not satisfied with how the governor had answered his question. Even so, he acknowledged the difficulties of the discussion.“I understand how delicate this whole situation is,” Mr. Kroepel said. “So I give him credit for at least listening to me.”Ann Klein More

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      Ron DeSantis Snaps at a Reporter: ‘Are You Blind?’

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      The Florida governor, who has frequently clashed with the press, was asked about taking questions from voters on the presidential campaign trail.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was mingling with voters on Thursday after his first campaign stop in New Hampshire as a presidential candidate when a reporter asked him a question: “Governor, how come you’re not taking questions from voters?”Mr. DeSantis sharply disputed the premise of the reporter’s question.“People are coming up to me, talking to me,” he said. “What are you talking about?”But Mr. DeSantis did not leave it there. “Are you blind?” he asked. “Are you blind? OK, so people are coming up to me, talking to me whatever they want to talk to me about.”WATCH: “Are you blind?”: DeSantis snaps at a reporter in New Hampshire after he was asked about his willingness to field voters’ questions. https://t.co/2yQymeHSHx pic.twitter.com/gsU74nLYgX— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 1, 2023
      The moment seemed to crystallize both Mr. DeSantis’s reputed temper and his adversarial relationship with the mainstream news media: As governor, he has frequently clashed with the press, and he generally prefers to give interviews in the friendlier confines of Fox News and conservative talk radio.It also reflects how carefully Mr. DeSantis and his campaign have orchestrated his interactions with the public — a task that will grow more challenging under the national spotlight, especially in the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters expect to talk directly with candidates, including from the stage of their stump speeches.On social media, the governor’s supporters were quick to point out that he has been taking questions from voters who approach him for selfies and autographs after his speeches. The main super PAC supporting his campaign tweeted a video of the interaction, framing it as an example of Mr. DeSantis shutting down “fake news.”But Mr. DeSantis, who formally announced his campaign last week, has not yet held a public forum like the CNN town hall event that former President Donald J. Trump joined last month. Nor has he answered voters’ questions from the lectern after delivering his stump speech.Mr. DeSantis is touring New Hampshire, where he sparred on Thursday with the reporter, Steve Peoples of The Associated Press, during a visit to Laconia. Some voters told news outlets covering the Laconia event that they were disappointed that Mr. DeSantis had not taken questions from the audience.While Mr. DeSantis was largely able to stage-manage his media appearances in Florida, he may need to branch out to reach a larger audience as a presidential candidate. On Tuesday in Des Moines, he held a news conference, his first as a 2024 contender, where he called on a few reporters and answered their questions.And so far in New Hampshire, Mr. DeSantis is taking more questions from members of the press — who peppered him with queries as he spoke with voters — than he has on previous campaign trail appearances.At an event in Rochester, N.H., later on Thursday, Mr. DeSantis flashed a hint of truculence after a reporter asked him about Mr. Trump’s claim that he could fix the country’s problems in six months.“Why didn’t he do it his first four years?” he shot back. More

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      Trump and Cuomo Agree That DeSantis Mishandled Covid

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      The two combative men from Queens have often been antagonists, but now they both see an opening to attack the Florida governor over his pandemic leadership.For years they overlapped in New York politics, two brash sons of Queens rising through the worlds of real estate and government, as Donald J. Trump donated to Andrew M. Cuomo’s campaigns and made a virtual appearance at his bachelor party.Then they were antagonists, with Mr. Cuomo, a powerful Democratic governor of New York, embracing chances to serve as a foil to the divisive Republican president.Now out of power after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and Mr. Cuomo resigned in disgrace, they have found themselves in a moment of alignment, each lacing into Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.“Even Cuomo did better,” Mr. Trump said in a recent video.“Donald Trump tells the truth, finally,” Mr. Cuomo declared on Twitter on Tuesday, though he distanced himself from the former president’s faint accolades on a new podcast.Assessing the success or failure of each state’s handling of the pandemic is a complex task.New York and Florida, two large and populous states, both had higher death rates per 100,000 people than many other states.According to a New York Times tracker, Florida had a slightly lower death rate than New York did from the beginning of the pandemic to March of this year. Florida had a slightly higher number of total deaths than New York did, about 87,000 versus 80,000 in the same period, though New York was known early on as the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic.As he campaigns in Iowa and other early nominating states, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has made his handling of the pandemic central to his presidential bid.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBoth governors faced plenty of scrutiny and criticism over their stewardship of the pandemic, with Mr. Cuomo sustaining particular heat over his administration’s handling of nursing home deaths in the pandemic.For his part, Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as Mr. Trump’s chief Republican rival, has made his pandemic record — including his decision to reopen his state’s economy relatively early, even in the face of coronavirus surges and rising hospitalizations — a focal point of his campaign.He has used the issue as a way to draw his own contrasts with Mr. Trump, who, he suggests, went too far in empowering Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert during the pandemic.“Do you want Cuomo or do you want free Florida?” Mr. DeSantis said in Iowa this week. “If we just decided the caucuses on that, I would be happy with that verdict by Iowa voters.”And in an interview on “Good Morning New Hampshire” on Thursday, Mr. DeSantis defended his record again, saying that “people fled Cuomo’s lockdowns to come to Florida.”“He’s attacking me, siding with Andrew Cuomo in New York, over me,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I think that’s a huge mistake.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.In New York, former Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, said the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo had at times been less rancorous than those between Mr. Trump and many other Democrats.“The acrimony that existed between the president and others was far greater than what theirs was,” said Mr. Paterson, who mentioned that he had recently dined with Mr. Cuomo.“The positive interaction now is, it’s a tricky path,” he said, even as he noted that he did not expect it to be a “prelude to a partnership.”In his podcast, Mr. Cuomo made plain that he did not intend to bear-hug Mr. Trump, noting that the former president had been highly critical of Democratic governors at the height of the pandemic, but seemed to be changing his tune — making a “total 180” — as he focused on a primary rival.“Now the politics has shifted for Mr. Trump, who is running against Mr. DeSantis, and now Mr. Trump says, ‘Cuomo did a better job than DeSantis,’” Mr. Cuomo said. “I’m very proud of the way New York handled it.” More

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      Democrats Want Trump? They’re Out of Their Minds

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      Did we learn nothing from 2016?That, you may recall, was when Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican presidential nominee seemed like some cosmic joke. Some cosmic gift. Oh, how Democrats exulted and chortled.Donald Trump?!?Hillary Clinton could start working on her inauguration remarks early.Or so many of us thought. We got “American carnage,” two impeachments and a deadly breach of the U.S. Capitol instead.And yet some Democrats are again rejoicing at the prospect of Trump as his party’s pick. They reason that he was an unproven entity before but is a proven catastrophe now and that his troubles with the law, troubles with reality, egomania and megalomania make him an easier opponent for President Biden, who beat him once already, than Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott or another Republican aspirant would be. Perhaps they’re right.But if they’re wrong? The stakes of a second Trump term are much, much too high to wager on his weakness and hope for his nomination. The way I size up the situation, any Republican nominee has a decent shot at the presidency: There are enough Americans who faithfully vote Republican, lean Republican or are open to a Republican that under sufficiently favorable circumstances, the party’s candidate wins. And the circumstances in November 2024 are neither predictable nor controllable — just as they weren’t in November 2016. If Trump is in the running, Trump is in the running.So I flinch at thoughts and remarks like those of Senator Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat, who told Politico in late April: “Trump’s obviously an extremely dangerous person who would be very dangerous for the country. But I’m confident that President Biden could beat him.” She added that “politically, for us, it’s helpful if former President Trump is front and center.” The headline on that article, by Burgess Everett and Sarah Ferris, was “Dems Relish Trump-Biden Rematch.”The headlines on other reports that month: “Why a Trump-Biden Rematch Is What Many Democrats Want in 2024” (The Wall Street Journal) and “Trump or DeSantis? Democrats Aren’t Sure Who They’d Rather See Biden Face in 2024” (NBC News).Granted, those three articles appeared before the Washington Post/ABC News poll that shook the world. Published on May 7, the survey gave Trump a six-point lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup and showed that voters regard Trump, 76, as more physically fit and mentally sharp than Biden, 80.Over the weeks since, I’ve noticed a muting of Democrats’ confidence that Biden can roll over Trump. But I still hear some of Biden’s supporters say that they’d prefer Trump to, say, DeSantis, who can define himself afresh to many voters, or to Scott, whose optimism might be a tonic in toxic times.And I worry that many Democrats still haven’t fully accepted and seriously grappled with what the past seven years taught us:There is profound discontent in this country, and for all Trump’s lawlessness and ludicrousness, he has a real and enduring knack for articulating, channeling and exploiting it. “I am your retribution,” he told Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Those words were chilling not only for their bluntness but also for their keenness. Trump understands that in the MAGA milieu, a fist raised for him is a middle finger flipped at his critics. DeSantis, Scott, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley — none of them offer their supporters the same magnitude of wicked rebellion, the same amplitude of vengeful payback, the same red-hot fury.Trump’s basic political orientation and the broad strokes of his priorities and policies may lump him together with his Republican competitors, but those rivals aren’t equally unappealing or equally scary because they’re not equally depraved.He’s the one who speaks of Jan. 6, 2021, as a “beautiful day.” He’s the one who ordered Georgia’s secretary of state to find him more votes. He’s the one who commanded Pence, then his vice president, to subvert the electoral process and then vilified him for refusing to do so and was reportedly pleased or at least untroubled when a mob called for Pence’s execution. He’s the one who expends hour upon hour and rant after rant on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a fiction that’s a wrecking ball aimed at the very foundations of our democracy. His challengers tiptoe around all of that with shameful timidity. He’s the one who wallows happily and flamboyantly in this civic muck.There are grave differences between the kind of threat that Trump poses and the kind that his Republican rivals do, and to theorize a strategic advantage to his nomination is to minimize those distinctions, misremember recent history and misunderstand what the American electorate might do on a given day, in a given frame of mind.I suspect I’d be distraught during a DeSantis presidency and depressed during a Pence one. But at least I might recognize the America on the far side of it.Forward this newsletter to friends …… and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Thursday.The Ears Have ItGetty ImagesI was never much of a listener. It just wasn’t how I took in information. I read. And read. I seemed to register and retain facts and ideas better if they came through my eyes, and I organized my consumption of news and words around that inclination — until a freak stroke about five and half years ago and a marked deterioration of my eyesight forced me to test myself, to stretch, to change.Now I’m all about my ears. I consume perhaps twice as many audiobooks as I do printed ones. I get a fair share of my morning news via podcasts. So I’m not merely grateful for the iOS app for audio journalism that The Times recently introduced; I’m more like ecstatic.It combines, in one terrifically user-friendly place, Times podcasts and narrated articles from all the fields that this news organization so ambitiously and enterprisingly covers — politics, culture, food and more. It’s a sonic storehouse of journalists, including Opinion columnists, whose literary voices you may be well familiar with but whose actual voices you’ve yet to discover. It includes the archive of “This American Life.” And it has audio versions of stories from top magazines beyond the ones that The Times puts out.It’s a convenience, and a mercy, for those of us whose daily rituals or physical quirks make listening an important alternative to reading. It’s available for Times news subscribers, and you can start exploring it by downloading the New York Times Audio app here.For the Love of SentencesMike Segar/ReutersIn The Guardian, Emma Beddington served notice to friends about just how much she enjoys their visits to her and her husband’s home: “We don’t have many guests, because I get funny when people use my mugs, and offer a welcome along the lines of the peregrine falcon nest boxes I watch on webcams: a few strewn pebbles, dismembered pigeon corpses, me hunched and glaring in a corner, covered in viscera.” (Thanks to Steve Verhey of Ellensburg, Wash., for his, um, eagle-eyed notice of this.)Also in The Guardian, Jay Rayner appraised the more-is-more culinary sensibility of a dish at Jacuzzi, which was opened recently in London by the Big Mamma group: “I would have been happy with simple ribbons of that pasta with that ragu, but going to a Big Mamma restaurant in search of simplicity is like going to a brothel hoping to find someone to hold your hand.” (Robert Tilleard, Salisbury, England)In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer marked Memorial Day by recalling a 22-year-old soldier from Raleigh who died in battle in 1918: “Harry Watson got all the honors a young lieutenant could expect on the Western Front — a hasty burial under a fruit tree, laid shoulder to shoulder with three other men.” Shaffer concluded his excellent article by noting that Watson “is recognized as Raleigh’s first casualty in ‘the world war.’ But more would follow — casualties and wars alike.” (Barry Nakell, Chapel Hill, N.C.)In The Washington Post, Matt Bai challenged the idea that candidates for vice president never affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.” (Anne Pratt, Millbrook, N.Y.)Also in The Post, Ron Charles noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.” (Sue Borg, Menlo Park, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reflected: “As career moves go, the path from neo-Nazism to horticulture has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves. That strange omission is rectified by ‘Master Gardener,’ the new movie from Paul Schrader.” (Trudy McMahon, Danville, Calif., and Liz Nichols, Oakland, Calif.)In The Times, A.O. Scott eulogized the writer Martin Amis: “He tapped at the clay feet of his idols with the chisel of his irreverent wit, even as he clambered onto their shoulders to see farther, and more clearly, than they ever could.” (Gerrit Westervelt, Denver)Also in The Times, Michelle Cottle characterized Ron DeSantis as having “the people skills of a Roomba.” (Stephen Burrow, Teaneck, N.J., and Tim McFadden, Encinitas, Calif., among others)And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’” (Laurie McMahon, Hinsdale, Ill.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Writing and ReadingGettyOn the day when DeSantis formally entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination, The Times published this essay of mine about the puzzling ways in which his own actions contradict and undercut the initial case for his candidacy, which has “the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.”There were many excellent tributes to Tina Turner after her death last week but none with more soul, rhythm, blues, jazz and pop than Wesley Morris’s in The Times. It could have filled the entire For the Love of Sentences section, but I’m giving it its own special spotlight here.Ditto for Maureen Dowd’s column last weekend: a mother lode of vibrant prose, deserving of its own special shout-out for that reason, for its wisdom about the necessity of literature and the humanities and because reading or rereading it is your way of honoring Maureen for her just-acquired master’s degree in English literature from Columbia. Congratulations, my brilliant friend.On a Personal (by Which I Mean Regan) NoteFrank BruniIt’s customary for Regan to slow down in the late spring and summer, her interest in movement falling with the mercury’s rise, but there has been a steeper drop this year, and it’s not a function of her health, which is good. It seems to be a function of her age. She’s almost 9½ now, and her mix of breeds (Australian shepherd, Siberian husky) suggests a life span of 12 to 15. So she’s getting up there.I see that in her sleep, deeper and more frequent. I see that in her face, where the black fur is newly stippled with gray. But I see it mostly in her stillness. We’ll get a mile into her 8 a.m. walk, and she’ll sit down or turn around, ready to go back home. We’ll get 20 steps into her 5 p.m. walk, and she’ll do the same, her appetite for exercise having been sated by her morning constitutional. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens somewhat frequently, and why shouldn’t it? The squirrel chasing aside, she’s not the sprightly girl she once was.Occasionally I push her, because I want to keep her stimulated, fit and limber, and I’ve observed that she enjoys most outings once she surrenders to them: Her initial reluctance is as much idle reflex — she psyches herself out — as it is a considered assessment of her ability and vigor. Other times I heed her, because her body may well be telling her something and she’s passing that message along to me.Always I wonder at the line between her reality and my projection of my own situation. At 58, I may be in a place on the human life spectrum similar to hers on the canine one. I find myself wanting to slow down; I exhort myself to speed up, because deceleration can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an irreversible lull, and because I want to maximize the years and energy that remain. When I coax Regan to put in five or six miles on a given day rather than two or three, am I in part coaxing myself, and does the effort have to do with a whole lot more than the physical distance that the two us cover?Just as I don’t know exactly what’s going on in her head, I don’t know exactly what’s going on in mine. We walk together through this fog, grayer each month, our gaits less swift, our mileage less ambitious, our devotion to each other a consolation beyond the ravages of time. More

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      Talk of Racism Proves Thorny for GOP Candidates of Color

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      As candidates like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley bolster their biographies with stories of discrimination, they have often denied the existence of systemic racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina opened his presidential candidacy with a story of the nation’s bitter, racist past. It is one that he tells often, of a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South.A rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, speaks of the loneliness and isolation of growing up in small-town South Carolina as the child of immigrants and part of the only Indian family around. Larry Elder, a conservative commentator and long-shot presidential candidate, talks to all-white audiences about his father, a Pullman porter in the segregated South, who carried tinned fish and crackers in his pockets “because he never knew whether he’d be able to get a meal.”Such biographical details are useful reminders of how far the G.O.P.’s candidates of color have come to reach the pinnacle of national politics, a run for the presidency. But in bolstering their own bootstrap biographies with stories of discrimination, they have put forth views about race that at times appear at odds with their view of the country — often denying the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.“I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” Mr. Scott says in a new campaign advertisement running in Iowa, though he has spoken of his grandfather’s forced illiteracy and his own experiences being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car.”The clashing views of the role that race plays in America are a major theme of the 2024 election, underpinning cultural battles over “wokeness.”Yet behind the debate over structural racism — a codified program of segregation and subjugation that suppressed minority achievement long ago and, many scholars say, has left people of color still struggling — is a secondary debate over the meaning of the stories politicians tell about themselves.Mr. Scott has spoken of being pulled over frequently by the police, including seven times in one year.Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesThat has sometimes made the discussion of race in this presidential primary awkward but also revealing, and has underscored a central difference between the two parties. Republican candidates of color don’t see their pasts in their present, even if the two front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, are elevating racial grievance to the center of conservative politics, through overt or covert appeals to white anger.“I know Nikki and Tim — both are brilliant — but for them not to be able to make the logical jump is troubling: Systemic racism is the issue,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic political commentator who served with Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley in the South Carolina legislature. “For them to recount their own experiences but close their eyes to the bigger picture, it’s troubling.”Mr. Elder, at an April gathering of evangelical Christians in West Des Moines, Iowa, spoke of his father, the Pullman porter who later became a cook in a segregated Marine Corps unit. When he returned from World War II, his father found he could not get a job in the whites-only restaurants of Chattanooga, Tenn., and struggled to find work in Los Angeles because he had no references from Tennessee.Mr. Elder’s father even asked to cook in Los Angeles restaurants for free, just to get references, and again was refused. He ended up with two jobs scrubbing toilets.“There was something called slavery, the K.K.K., Jim Crow — that was codified,” Mr. Elder said in an interview. “Of course there was systemic racism.”But now?No, he replied, recalling the election and re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama.In the early years of the Obama presidency, talk of a post-racial society — where the color of one’s skin has no bearing on stature or success — was common. But later, an upsurge of white supremacist violence, including the massacre of Black parishioners at a Charleston church in 2015 during Mr. Obama’s second term, along with the murder of George Floyd in 2020, shattered that idealized post-racial notion for many people of color from all political persuasions.Larry Elder, a conservative commentator and long-shot presidential candidate, often talks to all-white audiences about his father, a Pullman porter in the segregated South. Rachel Mummey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“That’s part of the problem with Scott and Haley declaring there’s no racism,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of a book on Mr. Obama’s symbolism as a Black president. “You could have argued in 2006 and 2007 that racism was waning. That’s a lot less credible today.”Candidates of color are not the only ones who rely on bootstrap biographies to bolster their appeal. Stories of struggle, impoverished childhoods, working-class roots or ethnic identity are staples for candidates in both parties, from Abraham Lincoln to Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. DeSantis and his “family of steelworkers.” But tales of racism and discrimination lend political biographies an added element of authenticity. Mr. Scott’s family story — “from cotton to Congress” — was the subject of his first campaign ad, unveiled last week.For Republican candidates of color, whose audiences are often almost entirely white, there is another factor, according to strategists: Placing racism safely in the past and trumpeting the racial progress of their own lifetimes relieves today’s G.O.P. voters from having to confront any racial animosity in their party. That can be a soothing message to Republicans who feel defensive about the party’s racial makeup and policies.“They’re saying this to make an overwhelmingly white Republican audience feel better about themselves,” said Stuart Stevens, a former Republican consultant who guided the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. “It’s a variation, oddly enough, of victim politics. People accuse you of being racist? ‘That’s unfair. Vote for me, therefore you’ll prove you’re not racist.’”Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party accommodated white nationalists in its ranks and embraced once-taboo ideas like replacement theory.A Haley campaign spokeswoman, Chaney Denton, said: “In Nikki Haley’s experience, America is not a racist country, and she’s proud to say it. That’s fact, not strategy.” She added that “the only people who seem bothered by that” are “liberal race baiters.”Ms. Haley in New Hampshire in April. “I was the first minority female governor in the country,” Ms. Haley told an Iowa crowd this year. “I am telling you America is not a racist country. It’s a blessed country.”Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAt an event on Wednesday morning sponsored by the news site Axios, Mr. Scott was pressed to describe racism that he had recently experienced, to which he had a ready response: being pulled over by police officers more than 20 times for “driving while Black,” which he said “weighs heavy on the shoulders.”“You find yourself in a position where you’ve done nothing wrong, but you are assumed guilty before proven innocent,” Mr. Scott said on Wednesday. But he added, “Racism is embedded in the hearts of individuals.”Many white Republicans also reject the idea that America is systemically racist.At a Haley event in February in Iowa, Charles Strange, a retired construction worker from North Liberty, Iowa, was more apt to see systemic issues impeding white people such as himself. “Structural barriers, let’s see,” Mr. Strange said. “Here’s a structural barrier: You got quotas for Blacks for education — a structural barrier for a white person.”The downplaying of systemic racism by candidates of color fits with the party’s push to stop the influence of “critical race theory” in how American history is taught and to defund programs that advance diversity in public colleges.Mr. DeSantis, who joined the presidential race last week, recently signed a law eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education and paring back what he called “woke” academic programs. The Florida Department of Education blocked high schools in January from teaching an advanced placement course on African American studies, part of what the governor called an effort to combat “indoctrination” by the left. Elsewhere, Republican-led state and local governments are rewriting textbooks and ridding public libraries of stark racial lessons from the nation’s past.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has often made appeals to the grievances of white voters. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“Of all the threats, there is this national loathing that has taken over our country, where people are saying America is bad or it’s rotten or it’s racist,” Ms. Haley told an Iowa crowd earlier this year. “I was the first minority female governor in the country. I am telling you America is not a racist country. It’s a blessed country.”Many Republican voters and local officials agree.“I’m not more racist than any Democrat, but they like to label and push that against us,” Gloria Mazza, the Republican chairwoman in Polk County, Iowa, said at a Scott event in West Des Moines. But Black audiences, even Republican ones, are far less receptive. Such difficulties for the party were on display recently for another Republican candidate of color, the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy.Mr. Ramaswamy held a town-hall meeting on May 19 on the South Side of Chicago, ostensibly to discuss the migrant crisis that has divided the city. He often talks of his feelings of isolation as the son of Indian immigrants growing up in suburban Cincinnati, but says that the experience made him stronger, not a victim. He has also made eliminating affirmative action a central plank of a candidacy that centers on a critique of identity politics.Vivek Ramaswamy often talks of his feelings of isolation as the son of Indian immigrants growing up in suburban Cincinnati, but says that the experience made him stronger, not a victim. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesBut Black voters made clear they believed strongly that systemic issues, past and present, were holding them back. The discussion kept shifting from immigration to reparations for Black Americans, mass incarceration, disinvestment in Black neighborhoods and easily accessible, high-powered weaponry promoted by the firearms industry.“There’s all the money in the world to incarcerate us, and nothing to integrate us back into society,” Tyrone F. Muhammad, founder of the group Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, said while looking straight at Mr. Ramaswamy, a fabulously wealthy investor. Mr. Muhammad added, “There are too many billionaires and millionaires in this country for it to look the way it looks.”Then Cornel Darden Jr. of the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry stood to confront Mr. Ramaswamy on affirmative action. “Those laws have been in place for 70 years,” Dr. Darden said, “and we’re going to defend them.”After months of telling largely white audiences America is not a racist society, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged bigotry and said race-based preferences were exacerbating it.“I do think anti-Black racism is on the rise in America today,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “I don’t want to throw kerosene on that.”Maya King More

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      In Iowa, DeSantis Signals the Start of a Slugfest With Trump

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      After absorbing months of attacks from the former president, the Florida governor is beginning to fire back — but carefully.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida came to Iowa for his first trip as a presidential candidate and made plain that he was done being Donald J. Trump’s punching bag.After absorbing months of attacks from Mr. Trump that went mostly unanswered, Mr. DeSantis has borrowed one of his rival’s favorite lines — “I’m going to counterpunch” — and jabbed back.He called one of the spending bills that Mr. Trump signed “grotesque” and accused him of increasing the national debt. He said the way Mr. Trump had sided with Disney in Mr. DeSantis’s war with the entertainment giant was “bizarre.” He described Mr. Trump’s criticism of the governor’s handling of Covid as “ridiculous.” And he dared Mr. Trump to take a position on the debt-limit bill pending in Washington.“Are you leading from the front?” Mr. DeSantis said, almost teasingly. “Or are you waiting for polls to tell you what position to take?”A tricky balancing act lies ahead for Mr. DeSantis. All of those comments came not onstage in his first campaign speech before hundreds of Republicans at an evangelical church, but during a 15-minute news conference with reporters afterward. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name when he spoke directly to voters in each of his first four Iowa stops, though he has drawn implicit contrasts.The two-pronged approach reflects the remarkable degree to which his pathway to the nomination depends on his ability to win over — and not alienate — the significant bloc of Republican voters who still like Mr. Trump even if they are willing to consider an alternative.Mr. DeSantis is trying to show voters that he is the kind of fighter who will not back down — even against his party’s dominant figure.Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“I don’t like to see them battle and do smear campaigns,” said Jay Schelhaas, 55, a professor of nursing who came to see Mr. DeSantis on Wednesday in Pella, Iowa. An evangelical voter, he said he was undecided on whom to support in 2024 after backing Mr. Trump in his two past presidential runs.Some themes have emerged in Mr. DeSantis’s early broadsides. He has sought to question Mr. Trump’s commitment to conservatism (“I do think, unfortunately, he’s decided to move left on some of these issues”); his ability to execute his agenda (“I’ve been listening to these politicians talking about securing the border for years and years and years”); and his ability to win the 2024 general election (“There are a lot of voters that just aren’t going to ever vote for him”).It was no coincidence that Mr. Trump arrived in Iowa on Mr. DeSantis’s heels on Wednesday, in a sign of the intensifying political skirmish between the leading Republican presidential contenders and the centrality of Iowa in their paths to the nomination. Mr. Trump holds an advantage of roughly 30 percentage points in early national polls of the Republican primary.In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Mr. DeSantis’s first speech was “crafted to appease establishment Never Trumpers who are looking for a swamp puppet that will do their bidding.”Mr. DeSantis is seeking a challenging middle ground as he begins this new, more confrontational phase. He is trying to show voters that he is the kind of fighter who will not back down — even against his party’s dominant figure. At the same time, he must avoid being seen as overly focused on Republican infighting.“I’m going to focus my fire on Biden,” Mr. DeSantis said at his kickoff speech on Tuesday night in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines, even as he stepped up his attacks on Mr. Trump. “And I think he should do the same.”Advisers to Mr. DeSantis said his more assertive posture stemmed largely from the fact that he is now an actual candidate. But it is a notable shift. At a recent dinner with donors in Tallahassee, Fla., Mr. DeSantis was asked when he would start slugging Mr. Trump, and he suggested he would not be doing so immediately, according to an attendee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.“Leadership is not about entertainment,” Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday in Clive, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines, in an implicit dig at Mr. Trump. Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFor the third time in Mr. DeSantis’s three trips to Iowa this year, Mr. Trump planned to follow close behind with a two-day swing of his own. In March, when Mr. DeSantis came for his book tour, Mr. Trump arrived days later in the same city and drew a bigger crowd. In mid-May, Mr. Trump had scheduled a rally to stomp on the Florida governor’s trip, though he canceled at the last minute, saying it was because of the weather. It was Mr. DeSantis who one-upped him then, appearing at a barbecue joint nearby.“The weather was so nice that we felt we just had to come,” Mr. DeSantis said to laughs in Clive.Mr. Trump is doing a local television interview on Wednesday, and on Thursday he will host a lunch with religious leaders in Des Moines after attending a breakfast with a local Republican group. He is also holding a Fox News town hall event moderated by Sean Hannity.Mr. Trump has been far from subtle in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis, calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” denouncing his leadership of Florida and lashing him from the left for past proposals to trim Social Security and Medicare spending. No matter how much mud Mr. Trump slings, Republican voters have tended not to punish him, a double standard that has long worked to his advantage.“I guess he’s got to respond in some way,” Tim Hamer, a retired Iowan who worked in banking and owned a lavender farm, said of Mr. DeSantis. Mr. Hamer, who was at the governor’s event in Council Bluffs on Wednesday, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but was now leaning toward Mr. DeSantis.“The point is,” he added, “don’t descend to Trump’s level.”Among the issues over which Mr. DeSantis has explicitly broken with Mr. Trump is the legislation the former president signed that allows a pathway for nonviolent offenders to shrink their prison time. Last week, Mr. DeSantis called the measure “a jailbreak bill.”In stop after stop, Mr. DeSantis has also pointed to his ability to serve as president for two terms, unlike Mr. Trump, saying that the next president could appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices.He said on Tuesday, “I don’t need someone to give me a list to know what a conservative justice looks like.” Mr. Trump — whose appointment of the justices who tilted the Supreme Court rightward and overturned Roe v. Wade cheered conservatives — promised in the 2016 campaign to pick a justice from a list that was created by conservative judicial activists, and he has promised to release another list ahead of 2024.Mr. Trump has been far from subtle in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis, calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” and denouncing his leadership of Florida.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesRegina Hansen, who attended the DeSantis event in Council Bluffs, said she wished Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis would patch up their once-friendly relationship. But in the meantime, she said, she thought the best way for Mr. DeSantis to win over Trump supporters was to keep talking about himself, his record and his family.“I have a very positive opinion of him, more so now than I did before I came here today,” Ms. Hansen said after hearing Mr. DeSantis speak.But Will Schademann, who came to the rally with a copy of Mr. DeSantis’s recent book, said he believed the governor needed to stay on the attack against the former president.“I just think it’s the right approach,” said Mr. Schademann, who added he voted twice for Mr. Trump. “He needs to contrast what he did with what Trump did.”At his stops on Wednesday in Council Bluffs, Salix and Pella, Iowa, Mr. DeSantis directed his verbal assaults at President Biden and kept his swipes at Mr. Trump more oblique.“Our great American comeback tour starts by sending Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware,” he said in Council Bluffs.In contrast, Mr. DeSantis criticized Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, indirectly though pointedly.DeSantis supporters in Salix, Iowa, on Wednesday. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“The Bible makes very clear that God frowns upon pride and looks to people who have humility,” he said.In recent days, Mr. DeSantis has seemed especially eager to discuss his handling of the coronavirus, which vaulted him to national prominence. Mr. Trump recently unfavorably compared the governor’s handling of the pandemic to that of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Democrat of New York.Mr. DeSantis has expressed shock at this line of attack, arguing that closures and isolation measures instituted early in the pandemic did more harm than help.“The former president would double down on his lockdowns from March of 2020,” Mr. DeSantis said.“Do you want Cuomo or do you want free Florida?” he added. “If we just decided the caucuses on that, I would be happy with that verdict by Iowa voters.”Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Salix, Iowa. More

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      DeSantis Starts Campaign in Iowa, Hoping It Slingshots Him Past Trump

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      In Iowa, Ron DeSantis warned supporters of a “malignant ideology” taking hold across the country, described children facing “indoctrination” and vowed to fight for conservative causes.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida kicked off his presidential campaign in Iowa on Tuesday with a sweeping denunciation of the “elites” that he said dominated American institutions, pitching himself as an unrepentant fighter who could reverse a tide of progressivism in boardrooms, the government and the military.“We must choose a path that will lead to a revival of American greatness,” Mr. DeSantis told supporters at an evangelical church in the suburbs of Des Moines.In a strident speech, he painted a dark picture of America, saying he would be a salve to a “malignant ideology” that was taking hold across the nation. He described children facing “indoctrination.” He mocked transgender athletes, denounced the “woke Olympics” of diversity programs and reveled in his battle with Disney.“It is time we impose our will on Washington, D.C.,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And you can’t do any of this if you don’t win.”The stop was the first in a three-state, 12-city tour that Mr. DeSantis’s team hopes can begin the arduous process of chipping away at former President Donald J. Trump’s advantage in early polls of the 2024 Republican primary race.Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name in his speech. But he left little doubt about some of the areas in which he planned to draw contrasts with the former president in the coming months, including how each leader handled the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic more than three years ago and his ability to win in 2024.Later, in a news conference, he sharpened the contrast.“The former president is now attacking me saying that Cuomo did better handling Covid than Florida did,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat. “I can tell you this. I could count the number of Republicans in this country on my hands that would rather have lived in New York under Cuomo than lived in Florida in our freedom zone.”“Hell, his whole family moved to Florida under my governorship, are you kidding me?” Mr. DeSantis added later of Mr. Trump.A prayer at Eternity Church in Clive, Iowa, before Mr. DeSantis’s first rally since he made his campaign official.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe pastor at the Iowa church said the auditorium seated 600, and hundreds more were in spillover areas.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe DeSantis campaign’s decision to hold its first in-person event at Eternity Church in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines, signaled the enduring importance of evangelical Christian voters in Iowa’s Republican caucuses, which begin the nominating process.Before the event, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, had met privately with about 15 local pastors for a private prayer over his family and candidacy, according to a campaign aide.“As a pastor, it tells me they value the Christian vote,” Jesse Newman, the pastor of Eternity Church, said in an interview, referring to the DeSantis team’s decision to begin campaigning at the church. In his own brief address to the crowd, Mr. Newman prayed for Mr. DeSantis’s family and urged the Lord’s intervention in the “fight against globalism and socialism.”Mr. DeSantis was introduced by the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, who joked that her state was “the Florida of the north” for the similarly conservative agenda she has pushed.“They’re going to be here a lot,” Ms. Reynolds said of the DeSantis family.Mr. DeSantis entered the stage in a blazer, a blue button-down shirt and no tie, alongside Ms. DeSantis, who also addressed the crowd in a demonstration of the central role she is expected to play in the campaign. The pastor said the jam-packed auditorium seated 600, and campaign officials estimated the spillover crowd that filled the lobby and elsewhere on the complex was more than 1,000.In his speech, Mr. DeSantis made the argument that he had fought the left in Florida and won — both electorally and on a raft of policies that have been enacted during his tenure.Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, joined him onstage.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHe spoke about signing a six-week abortion ban, pressing for the death penalty for those convicted of sexually abusing children, and “even sending illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. DeSantis injected more bits of his biography into his emerging stump speech than he did during his pre-candidacy. He invoked his mother’s work as a nurse, his father’s installation of Nielsen ratings boxes and his own minimum-wage jobs.“I was given nothing,” Mr. DeSantis said.His cadence at times felt rushed. He pushed so quickly through his speech that sections were swallowed by the crowd’s applause, which did not slow him down.Mr. Trump, who has focused on Mr. DeSantis more than on all of his other rivals, is also set to visit Iowa on Wednesday and Thursday, meeting with local Republicans and faith leaders and holding a Fox News town hall event also in Clive.Mr. DeSantis has positioned himself to the right of Mr. Trump on some key issues, including abortion, as part of an effort to woo right-wing voters. In his news conference, he accused Mr. Trump of shifting to the left.“He’s not an orator, I don’t think,” said Matt Wells, a conservative activist who drove 120 miles from Washington, Iowa, to see Mr. DeSantis. “But you give him a question about policy and he’ll run with it. I have wanted someone for so long who, when they’re asked about policy, they have an answer for it right there.”Kenneth Wayne, a retired physician from Clive, cited Mr. DeSantis’s leadership skills, including his military service, as a selling point. He said he had read Mr. DeSantis’s book cover-to-cover.“I feel that this is a fellow who knows his own mind, who is not going to blow with the wind,” said Mr. Wayne, who was wearing a Vietnam veteran hat. “He’s of a solid conservative bent.”Mr. DeSantis has sought to differentiate himself from Mr. Trump on social issues, pointing to their stances on abortion and the governor’s clash with Disney, among other issues, as proof that he is the more conservative candidate in the race and that Mr. Trump has moved to the center.Mr. DeSantis has positioned himself to the right of Mr. Trump on some key issues. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country,” Mr. DeSantis said on Fox News on Monday.It is part of a DeSantis pitch that, more broadly, centers on fulfilling the promises where Mr. Trump fell short, including winning the White House for a second term by appealing to Republicans and independents who say they can no longer support the former president.“There are a lot of voters that just aren’t going to ever vote for him,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters on Tuesday. “We just have to accept that.” More