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      Ron DeSantis Is Sworn In for a 2nd Term in Florida, as 2024 Speculation Looms

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is weighing a possible run for president, set his state up as a blueprint for conservative policy across the country.Gov. Ron DeSantis opened his second four-year term on Tuesday with a speech that heralded Florida as a conservative blueprint for the rest of the country and subtly signaled his long-rumored ambitions for the White House.Speaking from the steps of the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee minutes after being sworn in, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, made no direct mention of a potential presidential campaign in 2024. His 16-minute address during his second inauguration was peppered instead with suggestive lines that hinted at contrasts with former President Donald J. Trump, a fellow Floridian who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.Mr. DeSantis, 44, criticized a “floundering federal establishment” for a “spending binge” that “left our nation weaker,” without differentiating between increases under the Trump or Biden administrations. Similarly, he assailed the federal government for “pandemic restrictions and mandates” that “eroded freedom and stunted commerce.” Many restrictions were put in place when Covid-19 first spread during Mr. Trump’s time in office.Mr. DeSantis has publicly questioned the science that federal health officials used to encourage vaccinations. And he has battled with Florida school districts, including in Republican counties, that defied his executive order to ban mask mandates in classrooms.“We lead not by mere words, but by deeds,” Mr. DeSantis said, calling the Republican-led state “the land of liberty and the land of sanity.”Gov. Ron DeSantis and His AdministrationReshaping Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has turned the swing state into a right-wing laboratory by leaning into cultural battles.Eyeing 2024: Polls show Mr. DeSantis gaining strength in a hypothetical Republican presidential primary. But the issue of abortion is a potential point of vulnerability on his right flank.Voter Fraud: A crackdown on voter fraud announced by the governor seems to have ensnared former felons who were puzzled that they were accused of violating voting laws.As he ticked through a list of benchmarks during his first term, Mr. DeSantis repeated the same phrase — “We delivered” — seven times during the first five minutes of his speech. He sought to claim credit for the state’s economic success and population gains, and draw attention to his 19-point margin of victory in November over former Representative Charlie Crist, a Democrat.Mr. DeSantis has not said whether he will run for president. At a debate during his re-election campaign, he refused to commit to serving a full four-year term.On Tuesday, he promised a second-term agenda that would deliver “record tax relief” for Florida families and further lean into the cultural battles that have brought him national attention, Republican support and Democratic criticism.As governor, Mr. DeSantis led the charge to prohibit discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary school and limit what schools and employers can teach about racism. He stripped Disney, long an untouchable corporate giant in the state, of the ability to govern itself for the first time in more than half a century — retaliation for the company’s opposition to the crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. conversations with young schoolchildren.Mr. DeSantis offered no new specific policies in his speech, vowing only to “enact more family-friendly policies” and to lead the fight for “freedom.”In the audience was Jeb Bush, the former governor who came up short in his presidential bid in 2016. Mr. Bush ushered in a modern Republican era in Florida in 1998 with his first election as governor. Since then, Democrats have never recaptured the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee.On a breezy, 72-degree day, Mr. DeSantis was sworn in at about 11:15 a.m., joined by his wife, Casey, 42, and their three children: Madison, 6; Mason, 4; and Mamie, 2. Mason buried his head in his mother’s light green dress as she held a Bible for her husband.The Bible Mr. DeSantis used to take the oath of office was a Bible of the Revolution, the first complete Bible in English to be printed in America, according to Sotheby’s. Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator, posted on Twitter that he lent that Bible to Mr. DeSantis for the inauguration. More

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      Hispanic Evangelical Leaders Ask: Trump or DeSantis?

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      In Florida, where Hispanic evangelicals carry outsize influence, many of their pastors view the budding 2024 rivalry as a sign of the potency of their unabashedly politicized Christianity.MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t announced he’s running for president yet. But among the right-leaning voting blocs that are pulling for him to enter the 2024 primary field are some of his biggest fans: Hispanic evangelical Christians.It’s not that they’re opposed to the one Republican who has already declared himself a candidate, former President Donald J. Trump. But a showdown between the two titans of the right wing could turn Latino evangelicals into a decisive swing vote in Florida — supercharging their influence and focusing enormous national attention on their churches, their politics and their values.“If there is a primary, there’s no doubt there will be fragmentation in the conservative movement, and there’s total certainty that will be true of Hispanic evangelicals as well,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor in Sacramento, Calif., and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We know the values we keep and the policies we want. The question that arises is, who will really reflect those?”Mr. Rodriguez’s group held a gathering last month in Tampa, Fla., with hundreds of pastors from across the country, where attendees said the hallways buzzed between sessions with more chatter about politics than about Scripture.Much of it, they said, came down to a choice: Trump or DeSantis?Few have settled on an answer yet, not surprisingly given that the first votes of the 2024 campaign are over a year away. But the talk of 2024 — of Mr. Trump, who spent years courting evangelicals, and of Mr. DeSantis, who has leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians — showed both the heightened expectations among Hispanic evangelical leaders in Florida and their desire to demonstrate the potency of their now unabashedly politicized Christianity.“It is about morals, and there is one party right now that reflects our morals,” said Dionny Báez, a Miami pastor who leads a network of churches. “We cannot be afraid to remind people that we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. I have a responsibility to make clear what we believe. We can no longer make that taboo.”Hispanic evangelicals have long had outsize influence in Florida, where Latinos make up roughly 27 percent of the population and 21 percent of eligible voters. Though they are outnumbered among Hispanics by Roman Catholics, evangelicals are far more likely to vote for Republicans. Overall, Hispanic voters in the state favored Republicans for the first time in decades in the midterm elections in November.Mr. DeSantis has courted Hispanic evangelicals assiduously as his national profile has risen.When he signed a law last year banning abortions after 15 weeks, he did so at Nación de Fe, a Hispanic evangelical megachurch in Osceola County. He declared Nov. 7, the day before the midterm election, as “Victims of Communism Day,” appealing not just to Cubans in the state, but also immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua, who have helped swell the pews of evangelical churches in Florida. His campaign aides frequently spoke with Hispanic pastors, cultivating support that many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to capitalize on in a presidential campaign.Of course, Mr. Trump, too, can call upon loyalists: Mr. Rodriguez spoke at his inauguration in 2017, and other Hispanic evangelical leaders endorsed him.Latino supporters of Mr. Trump at a rally in Miami in November. Since the former president’s political ascent in 2016, Republicans have made gains among Latino voters in Florida.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis could complicate the equation in a potential 2024 Republican primary because of Hispanic evangelicals’ concentration and considerable sway in Florida. Many view Mr. DeSantis as a hero of the pandemic, praising him for not requiring churches to shut down or instituting vaccine mandates.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, while also being investigated by a special counsel. And his taxes are an issue again as well. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Tax returns. More

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      Will 2024 Be a Vaccine Election?

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      Will Republicans once again nominate Donald Trump for president? Or will they turn to Ron DeSantis instead? I have no idea.What I do know is that anyone imagining DeSantis as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump — a right-wing populist without the reality-denying paranoia — is delusional. DeSantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent has been just as deep.Above all, DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division and have contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.Let’s back up and talk about the story of Covid-19 vaccines so far.In the spring of 2020 the U.S. government initiated Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership intended to develop effective vaccines against the coronavirus as quickly as possible. The effort succeeded: By December 2020, far sooner than almost anyone had imagined possible, vaccinations were underway. (I received my first shot the next month, on Jan. 28, 2021.) And yes, this was a success for the Trump administration.Have the vaccines worked? And how. There are multiple ways to evaluate their lifesaving effect, but I’m especially taken with a simple approach promoted by the analyst Charles Gaba, who looks at the correlation across U.S. counties between vaccination rates and Covid death rates. Between May 2021, when two-dose vaccinations first became widespread, and September 2022 the least-vaccinated 10 percent of counties suffered a death rate more than three times as high as the most-vaccinated.Now, you may have heard that at this point deaths among vaccinated Americans are exceeding those among the unvaccinated, which is true. But that’s partly because most deaths are among the elderly, who are overwhelmingly vaccinated; very few Americans have received no shots; and not enough vaccinated people are getting booster shots.But why are some U.S. counties so much less vaccinated than others? The answer, as Gaba shows, is partisanship: There’s a startlingly close relationship between the share of a county’s voters who supported Trump in 2020 and the percentage of that county’s residents who haven’t received their shots — and the percentage who have died from Covid.You can, by the way, see the same patterns at the level of whole states. For example, although New York was hit hard in the first months of the pandemic (before we knew how the coronavirus spread or what precautions to take), since May 2021 more than twice as many people have died of Covid in Florida than in New York. Even taking Florida’s slightly larger and much older population into account, that’s thousands of excess deaths in the Sunshine State.Yet why should vaccination be a partisan issue?Right-wing opposition to lockdowns and social distancing in the early stages of the pandemic made at least some sense, since these public health measures involved requiring that people make some sacrifices to protect other people’s lives. (Some might say that such trade-offs are what civilization is all about, but whatever.) Even mask mandates required accepting a bit of inconvenience, at least partly for the sake of others.But getting vaccinated is mainly about protecting yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?The immediate answer is the widespread belief on the right that the vaccines have terrible side effects. This belief is hard to justify: If it were true, shouldn’t there be a lot of evidence for such claims, given that more than 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide?Ah, but the usual suspects claim that sinister elites are suppressing the evidence. Which brings us back to DeSantis, who announced on Tuesday that he was forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations — and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified “crimes and misdemeanors” related to coronavirus vaccines.OK, I doubt that anyone believes that DeSantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts, on public health or anything else, with “wokeness,” and demonizes anyone saying things it doesn’t want to hear.As far as I can tell, DeSantis hasn’t joined the likes of Elon Musk in calling for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response. But he has called Fauci a “little elf” and said that we should “chuck him across the Potomac.” (Presidential!)Now, will DeSantis’s attempt to position himself as the leader of the anti-vax movement and give at least tacit approval to conspiracy theories actually endear him to the Republican base? Again, I don’t know. Even if it does, I suspect that it will hurt him in the general election if he does become the nominee: Vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions in the electorate at large.But anyone who imagines that replacing Trump with DeSantis as the G.O.P.’s leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.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 Is Showing Strength. He’s Also Vulnerable on His Right Flank.

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      For staunchly anti-abortion conservatives, the Florida governor’s 15-week ban doesn’t go far enough.In April, when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, he staked out a position as an unapologetic opponent of abortion rights.But now, as polls show DeSantis gaining strength in a hypothetical Republican presidential primary in 2024, he’s under pressure from conservatives to do more. More than perhaps any other issue, abortion is a potential point of vulnerability for the Florida governor — and a rare subject on which he has faced criticism from his right flank.“So far, we’ve actually been quite disappointed with Governor DeSantis,” said Andrew Shirvell, the founder and executive director of Florida Voice for the Unborn, a grass-roots anti-abortion group.And should DeSantis run for president, Shirvell said, “if there’s a big pro-life champion to contrast their record with Governor DeSantis’s record, there’s no doubt that he will be hit. That is his weak point.”It isn’t just DeSantis’s position that makes him a potential target for a future conservative rival; it’s also the state he represents.Florida is a paradox. It’s firmly in Republican hands now. But it also has one of the highest rates of abortion in the country — nearly twice the national average. And as surrounding states have tightened their laws, the number of women seeking abortion care in Florida clinics has roughly doubled, according to Planned Parenthood.“From my perspective, it’s terrible, but for those who would completely ban abortion, it’s not enough,” Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state lawmaker, said of the 15-week ban. “If he thought it was popular, DeSantis would have campaigned on that, and he didn’t. He wouldn’t even say ‘abortion.’”Polls show that somewhere between roughly half and two-thirds of the state’s residents would prefer that abortion remain legal in all or most cases. In battleground states this year, voters punished Republicans they deemed too extreme on abortion. All that might be giving DeSantis pause, even though he cruised to re-election by nearly 20 percentage points and would seem to have little to fear from Florida’s demoralized Democrats.“There’s always going to be a need for abortion care,” said Laura Goodhue, the executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates. “Ron DeSantis is fond of saying he’s in favor of freedom, yet he’s perfectly happy taking away people’s bodily autonomy.”Shifting post-Roe politicsAnti-abortion groups, however, sense a shifting political landscape after the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade. In red states like Florida, where Republicans now hold supermajorities in both chambers of the State Legislature, they see a chance to push a maximalist agenda.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 6Donald J. Trump is running for president again, being investigated by a special counsel again and he’s back on Twitter. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Documents investigation. More

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      Meet Kyrsten Sinema, Former Democrat of Arizona

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I hope I’ve succeeded in turning you into a World Cup fan. In the meantime, any choice words about, or for, Kyrsten Sinema, former Democrat of Arizona?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, you’ve at least turned me into a fan of the Times coverage of World Cup … activities. I also sorta like times like this when there are a billion different games on TV — not just soccer — and for a while every day, people don’t feel obliged to think about the rest of the world.Bret: Such as …Gail: Such as Kyrsten Sinema. Not a fan of hers from the get-go. Always seemed as if her compulsive effort to prove she wasn’t really a loyal Democrat was less about political independence and more about making wealthy donors happy.Bret: And this is on the theory that other politicians don’t care for what their wealthy donors think?Gail: But her official spin is that the two-party system is broken, and virtue lies in standing outside as an independent. I hate that kind of thinking.Bret: Whereas I love it. To me, the choice these days between Republicans and Democrats is about as appealing as a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter: Either you get your heart cut out or your brain removed, and both get served with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti.Seriously, you don’t see any virtue to wanting to break this awful political duopoly?Gail: Virtue, for me, lies in fighting to make the two parties better. Pick the one that’s closest to your beliefs and get busy. Fight for the good local leaders and nominees.It’s way easier to just announce you’re superior to both of them and start your own group. The new gang probably won’t last long, and even if it does, its big achievement will most likely be to draw votes away from the major party candidates you most agree with.Never recovered from Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy for president in 2000 — a noble quest on the issues front that wound up costing Al Gore the job.Bret: A few years ago I would have agreed with you. But the Republican Party is pretty much irredeemable, while the Democrats are … just not the team I’m ever going to bat for.Gail: Come on in. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are waiting with open arms …Bret: Not so sure the Dems would ever want me in the first place: I heart Texas not taxes.As for Sinema, having her join someone like Maine’s Angus King as an independent shows it’s at least possible to have an alternative. I realize she has some very self-interested political reasons for doing so, since the move will spare her a primary challenge from the left if she runs for re-election in 2024. But it also reminds the party establishments that they shouldn’t take their centrist voters for granted. Now I wish a few sane-minded Republicans might go ahead and join her. Lisa Murkowski, hello?Gail: Hey, weird that of the two of us, I’m the one who thinks somebody should try to save the Republican Party.Bret: Raising the dead is beyond our powers, Gail.Gail: You know I don’t do foreign affairs, but I do feel obliged to ask you about Brittney Griner. Do you think Joe Biden did the right thing in making the trade that got her out of prison in Russia?Bret: Well, obviously I’m happy for Griner and her family that she’s back after her 10-month ordeal. And it says everything about the moral difference between the United States and Russia that they will take a harmless person hostage so they can trade her for one of their most notorious gangsters.On the other hand, I don’t understand why we didn’t prioritize the release of Paul Whelan, an American who has been wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for four years but doesn’t have the benefit of Griner’s celebrity. Nor should we forget Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old American teacher trapped in one of Putin’s prisons. My advice to the Biden administration is to tell Russia that $1 billion of its foreign reserves will be seized for every additional day these two stay in prison.Gail: Hope they’re listening.Bret: Oh, and speaking of dealing with gangsters — your thoughts on the current crop of legal cases against the former guy?Gail: I’ve never thought — and still don’t — that a former president is going to go to jail, even for stealing federal documents or rousing violent crowds to march on the Capitol.Bret: Agree. Alas.Gail: But I’ve always had a yearning that he might wind up bankrupt and, say, living in a Motel 6. Knew that was impossible — told myself to remember all the money he can make just on speaking tours or hosting parties at Mar-a-Lago.Bret: Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from “My Dinner With Andre” to that dinner with Kanye.Gail: Now, though, I’m sort of wondering. Is there going to be a market for this guy — chooser of terrible Senate candidates and breaker of bread with neo-Nazis — even just as a celebrity?Bret: I had nearly lost hope that the day would ever come, but I think we are finally watching Trump self-destruct before our eyes even faster than anyone else can destroy him. The midterm results seem to have persuaded a critical mass of Republican voters and politicians that he’s toxic for their chances. Dinner with his antisemitic pals seems to have been the icing on the cake — or whatever the exact opposite of “icing on the cake” is. Toxic algae in the cesspool?Gail: Rotting rutabaga in the refuse? Sorry, that doesn’t actually make much sense. I was seduced by all the R’s.Bret: Gail, would you mind if I rant for a minute?Gail: Bret, I love it when you rant. Even when I hate it.Bret: There’s a special place in hell for the Paul Ryan Republicans — let’s call them PRR’s. What I mean is a certain type of well-heeled, intellectually minded conservative who never liked Trump’s person or politics and who occasionally tut-tutted at his vilest excesses, but who consistently made excuses for him and his presidency while heaping scorn on Never Trumpers as a bunch of virtue-signaling prigs. These Trump-appeasing PRR’s were prepared to defend and vote for him again until the day after the midterms, when they finally realized that he was a titanic political liability.Gail: Well, I truly do love this rant. Go on.Bret: To adapt something Winston Churchill purportedly said to Neville Chamberlain after Munich in 1938: In 2016 conservatives were given the choice between electoral defeat and personal dishonor. They chose dishonor. In the end, they still got defeated.Gail: You know I’m going to ask who’s a Churchillian pick in the Republican world. For instance, Ron DeSantis was never a huge Trump pal, but I think that was only because he was eyeing his job.Bret: So, weirdly, I have much less of a moral objection to those Republicans like DeSantis who liked Trump to begin with, whether because they agreed with most of his policies or appreciated his thumb-in-the-eye personality, or both. At least they came about their support for Trump honestly, without convoluted rationalizations and self-exculpations and various suspensions of disbelief. Of course I don’t agree with them, but I long ago stopped disdaining them.Speaking of disdain, any views on all of these disclosures about Twitter’s speech policies?Gail: Is there any way we can make it illegal for the richest man in the world to own one of the largest social networks? Guess not, huh?Bret: Probably not, though I doubt Musk will profit from the acquisition.Gail: Definitely felt sorry for the Twitter workers who discovered that Musk was putting beds in their work space. And his wild political seesawing would ruin the influence of anybody who wasn’t closing in on a quarter of a trillion dollars.But here we are, and I don’t have any great strategy for making him behave in a more responsible way when it comes to things like … keeping violent hatemongers off his platform. Do you have one?Bret: Violent hatemongers aside, I thought it was pretty appalling to see the lengths to which pre-Musk Twitter went to ban legitimate news stories, like The New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and to downplay views that went against conventional wisdom, like the Stanford professor of medicine who warned about the ill-effects of lockdowns, and to coordinate its decisions with the Biden team — and then mislead the public about what it was doing. Even progressives like Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, warned Twitter about its anti-free speech attitude, which is entirely to his credit and not at all to theirs.Gail: Bret scores …Bret: I guess the point is, we don’t want giant corporations banning political speech, whether it comes from the left or the right, and that goes especially for companies whose entire business model relies on the principle of free speech. For exposing this, I have to give Musk credit.Gail: We’ll pick this up again, Bret. Somehow I suspect Elon Musk will follow us into the new year.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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      Where Trump Stands in Early (Very Early) 2024 Polls

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      The former president’s support has not collapsed. But Republican voters appear strikingly open to another Florida-based politician.Donald Trump’s support in the Republican Party has not collapsed, and perhaps it never will. But a look at the major polls taken since Election Day suggests that the ice is shifting beneath his feet.The data also shows Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida gaining ground in hypothetical 2024 matchups, even though he has yet to declare his intentions.And it underscores the careful line any presidential hopeful must walk with Republican voters; whatever they might think about Trump’s third bid for the White House, there’s little evidence of a clear anti-Trump majority that wants to repudiate him altogether.One of the sharpest articulations of this point I’ve seen came from Nate Hochman, a conservative writer. “If DeSantis allows himself to be defined as the Never Trump — or even the anti-Trump — candidate, he will be permanently discredited in the eyes of many of the voters he needs to win,” Hochman wrote in an essay for Unherd. “If he can convince those voters that he is the next step in the MAGA movement, he may just have a chance.”As Hochman noted in an interview, that will be a far harder trick to pull off when DeSantis actually enters the arena against Trump and the attacks start flying. And he won’t be facing the former president alone, or at least not right away.“In some ways, Trump is in a stronger position now than he was in 2015,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio.A methodological note: Keep in mind that the margin of error goes up whenever you’re looking at smaller subsamples like this. So don’t take the numbers themselves as definitive; focus on the overall trend lines.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      A Conservative’s Take on the Chaotic State of the Republican Party

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      Republicans already hold tremendous power in America. They have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices. They have more state trifectas (control of both legislative houses, as well as the governor’s seat) than Democrats. And come 2023, they will also control the House of Representatives.But there’s a hollowness at the core of the modern G.O.P. It’s hard to identify any clear party leader, coherent policy agenda or concerted electoral strategy. The party didn’t bother putting forward a policy platform before the 2020 election or articulating an alternative policy vision in 2022. It has hardly reckoned with its under-performances in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. At this point, it’s unclear whether there’s any real party structure — or substrate of ideas — left at all.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]All of which raises the question: What exactly is the Republican Party at this point? What does it believe? What does it want to achieve? Whose lead does it follow? Those questions will need to be answered somehow over the next two years, as Republican politicians compete for their party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election and Republican House members wield the power of their new majority.Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We disagree on plenty, but I find him to be one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary Republican Party. So I invited him on the show for an inside-the-tent conversation on the chaotic state of the current G.O.P. and the choices it will have to make over the next two years.We discuss how the party is processing the 2022 midterms, why Dougherty thinks Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Republican nomination again in 2024, whether the G.O.P. leadership actually understands its own voters, how Ron DeSantis rose to become one of the party’s leading 2024 contenders, whether DeSantis — and the G.O.P. more broadly — actually have an economic agenda at this point, why Trump’s greatest strength in 2024 could be the economy he presided over in 2018 and 2019, why Dougherty doesn’t think Trump’s political appeal is transferable to anyone else in the Republican Party, what kind of House speaker Kevin McCarthy might be, which Republicans — other than Trump and DeSantis — to watch out for, and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)Gina Sierra“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. More

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      Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Presidency

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      As he gets his presidential campaign underway, Donald J. Trump has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.He stands with the mob.Mr. Trump sent a video statement of support to a fund-raiser hosted by a group calling itself the Patriot Freedom Project on behalf of families of those charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said. The country, he warned, “is going communist.”The video underscored just how much the former president has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics as he seeks to reclaim the White House through a rematch with President Biden in 2024. With the Justice Department targeting him as well as some of his violent allies, Mr. Trump’s antigovernment jeremiads lately sound like those once relegated to the outer edges of the political spectrum.He has embraced extremist elements in American society even more unabashedly than in the past. The video comes as Mr. Trump has been using music sounding like a QAnon theme song at recent rallies and hosting for dinner Kanye West, a rap star under fire for antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist.And it comes just two days after the conviction of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, placed Mr. Trump at the spiritual heart of a seditious conspiracy to illegitimately keep power in a way that is unparalleled in American history.Mr. Trump’s acceptance, if not outright courtship, of the militant right comes as the Republican establishment blames him for the party’s failure to do better during the November midterm elections. Republican officeholders, led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party leader in the upper chamber, argue that Mr. Trump’s promotion of candidates based on fidelity to his false claims about the 2020 election cost them seats.“Trump is doubling down on his extremist and cult leader profile,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present” and a history professor at New York University. “For someone of Trump’s temperament, being humiliated by people turning away from him will only make him more desperate and more inclined to support and associate with the most extremist elements of society. There is no other option for him.”His former dinner guests fanned the flames on Thursday with fresh incendiary comments on the Infowars show of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist. “I like Hitler,” said Mr. West, who now goes by the name Ye, adding that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” He added that “we got to stop dissing Nazis all the time,” and he denied that the Holocaust happened.At another point, Mr. Fuentes voiced his support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, calling himself “very pro-Putin” and “very pro-Russia.” Ye agreed: “I am also.”The verdict in the Oath Keepers case underscored Mr. Trump’s alignment with a right-wing militia deemed a danger by the government. The trial effectively established that there was an illegal plot to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election, whether the former president was directly involved or simply inspired it through the lies he spread.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, being investigated by a special counsel again and he’s back on Twitter. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Documents case. More