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      Kevin McCarthy’s Impeachment Gambit: ‘A Dubious Mission in Search of a Crime’

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      More from our inbox:How Much Freedom Should We Give Our Children?Passing the National Popular Vote Compact‘Women,’ Not ‘Girls’ Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “McCarthy Opens Inquiry of Biden, Appeasing Right” (front page, Sept. 13):Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that the House of Representatives — which he leads with subservience to a vengeful far-right minority and a former president to whom he has sold his political soul — has opened an impeachment inquiry into President Biden is clearly a low point in our politics.The scheme by Republicans to punish the president, which comes without evidence, is a desperate gasp. It is motivated by former President Donald Trump’s persistent call for retribution and by congressional Republicans, whose only agenda has been one of obstruction, replacing meaningful efforts toward legislation that could benefit the American people.The heavy weight of evidence supporting Donald Trump’s multiple indictments has not resonated with the vast majority of Republicans, who are determined at all costs to distract from his legal embroilment by elevating Biden family activities to a level of criminality.In Kevin McCarthy, House Republicans have a leader whose actions, beginning with his tortuous unprincipled path to the speakership, have been focused solely on a need to preserve his fragile position.He has embarked on a dubious mission in search of a crime, potentially at great cost to the country.Roger HirschbergSouth Burlington, Vt.To the Editor:Haven’t the Republicans learned from the indictments of Donald Trump that such actions only bolster allegiance from the ranks of the accused?Apparently not.President Biden faces a real hurdle in his re-election bid. Despite a growing economy and low unemployment, his approval stands around a dismal 40 percent. Till now, efforts to gain greater traction have been unsuccessful. It pointedly reflects the fact that a majority of Democrats have ruled that the president’s advancing age and repeated gaffes should disqualify his bid for a second term.So a welcome boost for Mr. Biden may lean on the vigorousness of the G.O.P. efforts to undermine him.Heck, if it works for Donald, why not Joe?Howard QuinnBronxTo the Editor:Kevin McCarthy is holding onto the Republican Party by a thread. The decision to begin an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, without even holding a vote on it, demonstrates the lengths to which the speaker is willing to go in order to maintain control of a party that is increasingly divided.In the midst of a contentious Republican primary, Donald Trump’s legal troubles and culture war fanatics, Mr. McCarthy has become a leader of appeasement. This much was evident when it took 15 rounds of voting for him to even become speaker.From here, that thread is about to snap. Moderate Republicans are pushing back on the inquiry almost as much as far-right members of the House are advocating for it — a wholly unsustainable situation. The political concessions thus far are piling up on one side. The Freedom Caucus has become a vocal minority, and that’s particularly toxic for the Republican Party’s future.While this inquiry is aimed at Mr. Biden, Mr. McCarthy’s future is at stake as well.Kevin LiBasking Ridge, N.J.How Much Freedom Should We Give Our Children? Yann BastardTo the Editor:In support of “To Help Anxious Kids, Give Them More Freedom,” by Camilo Ortiz and Lenore Skenazy (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 6), I note the following:In many traditional societies, as soon as children can toddle, they are expected to contribute to their family’s needs. Family members need fire; a toddler can fetch sticks for it.Expectations increase in difficulty and complexity as the youngster grows and has daily opportunities to watch, learn and practice adult ways. Children are neither shielded from danger (they learn from watching others and their own experience) nor thanked for their contributions (they are sharing family responsibilities, not doing parents a favor).In some societies, children are self-sufficient by age 10 and discharge major responsibilities alone, such as taking the family’s animals — its entire wealth — to a remote pasture for the day. And in many societies, after weaning, a child is routinely cared for by the next oldest sibling, not the parents.At unbelievably young ages, children in many traditional societies are autonomous and willing participants in their family’s economic and social lives. From their examples we know that children, even young ones, are far more capable and responsible than most of us allow them to be.Cornelius GroveBrooklynThe writer is the author of “How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us About Parenting and Children’s Learning.”To the Editor:I read what Camilo Ortiz and Lenore Skenazy had to say about giving kids more freedom and found their ideas thought-provoking but classist. While this advice might be very helpful to parents of children who live in certain ZIP codes, there is a strong middle-class bias here.There are neighborhoods where parents would love to have the opportunity to have their children walk freely, run errands to the grocery store or play in a playground. Unfortunately, in some areas the incidence of gun violence, both targeted and random, renders these options moot. When I read much too often about young children being shot while outside their homes, I understand that the anxiety is quite appropriate.People who are not as privileged as the ones this article was referring to have real reasons to be scared for their lives and the lives of their children. Many children in our country do not have the luxury of being “free range.”Wendy L. FormanPhiladelphiaPassing the National Popular Vote CompactTo the Editor:Re “Trump’s Electoral College Edge Seems to Be Fading,” by Nate Cohn (“The Tilt” newsletter, nytimes.com, Sept. 11):The discussion of the Electoral College being undemocratic becomes moot if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is adopted by states with a total of 270 electoral votes. Under the compact, states would commit to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.Currently, 16 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 205 electoral votes have signed on to the compact. That means only a few more states with electoral votes adding up to 65 must pass the compact to make the Electoral College reflect the national popular vote. For instance, any five out of the following six states — Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Virginia — would be needed to reach 270.Democratic activists need to get their counterparts in those target states on board. Having a president who is elected by the majority of voters can actually be accomplished.James A. SteinbergRhinebeck, N.Y.‘Women,’ Not ‘Girls’ Shira InbarTo the Editor:Re “On the Internet, Everyone Wants to Be a Girl” (Sunday Styles, Sept. 10):In the resurgent feminist movement of more than half a century ago, women insisted on being called “women.” We felt that “girl” — then widely applied to women of all ages, particularly in clerical office jobs — reduced us to the status of perpetual children.It is disheartening, then, to read that some young women now are reverting to being “girls,” particularly at a time when the rights of women are widely under attack in this country. Language matters!Ellen D. MurphyPortland, Maine More

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      Is the Electoral College Becoming Fairer?

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      The Republican Party’s advantage is shrinking in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has been very kind to Republicans in the 21st century. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, and Donald Trump did the same in 2016.But over the past few years the Republican advantage in the Electoral College seems to have shrunk, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out in his newsletter. Republicans are no longer faring significantly better in the states likely to decide the presidential election — like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — than they are nationwide. Instead, a 2024 race between Biden and Trump looks extremely close, with a tiny lead for Biden both nationally and in the swing states.A Shrinking Electoral Advance More

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      This Is the Most Frightening Part of the Trump Indictment

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      Buried in the federal indictment of Donald Trump on four counts tied to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election is one of the most chilling paragraphs ever written about the plans and intentions of an American president.It concerns a conversation between Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, and Co-Conspirator 4. On the morning of Jan. 3, 2021, Co-Conspirator 4 accepted the president’s offer to become acting attorney general, a job he ended up never holding. That means Co-Conspirator 4 is almost certainly Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump hoped to install as attorney general because Clark “purportedly agreed to support his claims of election fraud,” as a report in The Times put it.Later that day, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with Philbin, who told him that “there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the defendant” — President Trump — “remained in office nonetheless, there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States.’” To which Co-Conspirator 4 is said to have responded, “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”You may recall that Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act — which enables the use of the military to suppress civil disorder, insurrection or rebellion — to quell the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Trump wanted thousands of troops on the streets of Washington and other cities, and he had repeatedly urged top military and law enforcement officials to confront protesters with force. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump reportedly said. “Crack their skulls!”We don’t know Trump’s exact plans for what he would have done if his schemes to overturn the election had been successful. We don’t even know if he had a plan. But the fact that he surrounded himself with people like Clark suggests that if Trump had actually stolen power, he might well have tried to use the Insurrection Act to suppress the inevitable protests and resistance, which could have killed hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of Americans in an attempt to secure his otherwise illegitimate hold on power.That this was even contemplated is a testament to Trump’s striking contempt for representative self-government itself, much less the Constitution. With his self-obsession, egoism and fundamental rejection of the democratic idea — that power resides with the people and isn’t imbued in a singular person — Trump’s attempt to subvert the American constitutional order was probably overdetermined. And it’s not hard to imagine a world in which his defeat was a little less decisive and key Republicans were a little more willing to bend to his will. There, in that parallel universe, Jan. 6 might have gone in Trump’s favor, if it was even necessary in the first place.The thin line between Trump’s success and failure is why, despite the protests of conservative media personalities and Republican politicians, this indictment had to happen. There was no other choice. Even if his opponents must ultimately defeat him at the ballot box, it would have been untenable for the legal system to stay quiet in the face of an effort to put an end to the American experiment in republican self-government. Trump is the only president in the history of the United States to try to nullify an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Extraordinary actions demand an extraordinary response.The criminal-legal system is now moving, however slowly, to hold Trump accountable. This is a good thing. But as we mark this development, we should also remember that the former president’s attempt to overthrow our institutions would not have been possible without those institutions themselves.Most people who cast a ballot in the 2016 election voted against Trump for president. But in the American system, not all votes are equal. Instead, the rules of the Electoral College gave a small fraction of voters in a few states decisive say over who would win the White House. The will of a majority of the people as a whole — or at least a majority of those who went to the polls — meant nothing compared with the will of a select few who, for reasons not too distant from chance, could decide the election.Trump won fewer votes, but the system, in its wisdom, said he won his first election anyway. Is it any wonder, then, that in 2020, when a majority of the voting public rejected his bid for power a second time, the former president immediately turned his attention to manipulating that system in order to remain in power? And make no mistake, Trump’s plot hinged on the complexities of the Electoral College.“Following the election, President Trump worked ruthlessly to convert loss into victory, exploiting pressure points and ambiguities in the protracted and complex process, partly constitutional and partly statutory, that we refer to collectively as the Electoral College,” observed the legal scholar Kate Shaw, who is also a contributing Opinion writer to this newspaper, in a 2022 article for The Michigan Law Review. This “baroque and multistep process,” she continued, “afforded Trump a number of postelection opportunities to contest or undermine, in terms framed in law and legal process, the results of an election he had plainly lost.”Rather than try to call out the Army or foment a mob, Trump’s opening gambit in his attempt to overturn the election was to contest our strange and byzantine system for choosing presidents — a system that runs as much on the good faith of the various participants as it does on law and procedure. And so, before Jan. 6, there was the attempt to delay certification of electors, the attempt to find new electors who would vote in Trump’s favor, the attempt to pressure Republican-led state legislatures into seizing the process and deciding their elections for Trump and the attempt to pressure the vice president into throwing the election to the House of Representatives, where statewide Republican delegations would give Trump the victory he couldn’t win himself.But it’s not just that our process for choosing presidents is less resilient than it looks. In addition to its structural flaws, the Electoral College also inculcates a set of political fictions — like the idea that a “red” state is uniformly Republican or that a “blue” one is uniformly Democratic — that can make it easier, for some voters, to believe claims of fraud.There is also the broader problem of the American political system when taken in its entirety. There is the inequality of voting power among citizens I mentioned earlier — some votes are worth much more than others, whether it’s a vote for president, senator or member of the House — and the way that that inequality can encourage some voters to think of themselves as “more equal” and more entitled to power than others.Trump is pathological, and our political system, to say nothing of one of our two major political parties, has enabled his pathology. We do not know how the former president will fare in the courts, and it is still too early to say how he will do in the next election if he stands, for a third time, as the Republican nominee for president.But one thing is clear, if not obvious: If we truly hope to avoid another Jan. 6, or something worse, we have to deal with our undemocratic system as much as we do with the perpetrators of that particular incident. Whatever benefits our unusual rules and procedures are supposed to have are more than outweighed, at this point in our history, by the danger they pose to the entire American experiment. The threat to the integrity of the Republic is coming, as it often has, from inside the house.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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      Georgia Prosecutor Rebuts Trump’s Effort to Scuttle Elections Case

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      The NewsFani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., asked a judge to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to have her disqualified from leading an investigation into whether he and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state.She also asked the judge, in a 24-page court document filed on Monday, to reject a request from Mr. Trump to suppress the final report of a special grand jury that weighed evidence last year in the election meddling case.Ms. Willis was responding to an earlier motion filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that accused her of making biased statements over the course of her investigation. The lawyers also argued that the work of the special grand jury had been “tainted by improper influences,” noting that jurors were allowed to read news articles about the matter during their time of service. (Special grand juries in Georgia have different rules than regular grand juries or trial juries.)In her response, Ms. Willis said that the Trump legal team had not met the “exacting standards” for disqualifying a prosecutor and did not back up various accusations about the investigative process with evidence.She also argued that Mr. Trump did not have legal standing to bring his motion in the first place, noting that he had never been called as a witness before the special grand jury.Donald J. Trump at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., in April.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The Georgia investigation could result in Donald J. Trump being indicted this summer.Mr. Trump has already been criminally indicted in a separate case in New York over hush-money payments made to a porn star, and the Justice Department has two other criminal investigations into Mr. Trump underway. There are indications that the Georgia inquiry could result in a broad indictment that may directly address whether Mr. Trump violated state laws as he sought to overturn President Biden’s victory in the weeks after the 2020 election.A number of experts have said that it would be difficult for Mr. Trump’s legal team to derail the Georgia investigation this early in the process. However, the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, has ruled against Ms. Willis in the past.Most notably, Judge McBurney ruled last July that Ms. Willis’s office could not pursue a criminal case against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones of Georgia, a Republican who was one of 16 Trump supporters who filed bogus papers claiming to be the state’s presidential electors. Ms. Willis, the judge ruled, had a conflict of interest because she had headlined a fund-raiser for Mr. Jones’s Democratic rival in the lieutenant governor’s race.Background: Mr. Trump has accused the chief prosecutor in the case of bias.The special grand jury’s report remains largely under seal, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in their motion, asked that it be “quashed and expunged from the record.” The special grand jury heard evidence for roughly seven months before recommending more than a dozen people for indictments, according to its forewoman, who strongly hinted in a February interview with The New York Times that Mr. Trump was among them.Mr. Trump’s motion criticized public statements that Ms. Willis made in 2021 and 2022, pointing in particular to a “biased political cartoon” that was retweeted by Ms. Willis’s campaign Twitter account last July. The cartoon depicted her in a boat with a fishing rod, “fishing a recently subpoenaed witness out of a swamp,” as the Trump motion put it.The Trump motion also said that Judge McBurney had made prejudicial statements, and that Georgia’s laws governing special grand juries were so vague as to be unconstitutional.Ms. Willis’s response said the Trump team’s contentions were “procedurally flawed” and “advance arguments that lack merit.” It noted that if Ms. Willis’s statements and Twitter posts “were the egregious grounds for disqualification which he asserts they are,” Mr. Trump “had a duty to raise them to the court’s attention as soon as he learned of them.”What’s Next: The judge will decide whether to hold a hearing on Mr. Trump’s requests.Ms. Willis, in her motion, asked that Judge McBurney settle the matter without holding a hearing. It remains to be seen if he will set one.Also unclear is whether Mr. Trump, a master of legal delay tactics, can somehow use the skirmish as a way to delay Ms. Willis’s timetable. Last month, Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to law enforcement officials that a decision on any charges against Mr. Trump or others would come between July 11 and Sept. 1. More

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      Atlanta Prosecutors Drop Effort to Remove Defense Lawyer in Trump Inquiry

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      The NewsGeorgia prosecutors investigating whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies violated state law as they sought to overturn his 2020 election loss there are no longer seeking to disqualify a lawyer representing a group of Republicans who cast bogus Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump.The change of course from the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, was explained in a court filing on Wednesday. At issue was the status of Kimberly B. Debrow, a lawyer from the Atlanta area who until recently represented 10 of the 16 Republicans who cast fake electoral votes for Mr. Trump in December 2020. She now represents eight of them.In explaining why they no longer wanted Ms. Debrow disqualified, prosecutors wrote that they had originally been worried about her representing clients with “differing levels of criminal exposure and differing status as to offers of immunity.”But now, they said, “those potential defendants who have not been offered immunity have hired new, conflict-free counsel and have eliminated the conflict causing the state’s concern.”Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a rally in Manchester, N.H., last month.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: Prosecutors have been working to turn potential defendants into cooperating witnesses.The Georgia investigation could potentially result in another state-level criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, following his indictment in New York in early April. Wednesday’s filing is the latest twist in a spat between prosecutors and defense lawyers, stemming from efforts to turn potential defendants into cooperating witnesses.Those efforts have contributed to a delay in charging decisions in the Georgia matter. Ms. Willis indicated late last month that any indictments, initially anticipated in May, would not come until mid-July at the earliest.Last month, Ms. Willis sought to have Ms. Debrow removed from the case, claiming that Ms. Debrow and her co-counsel at the time, Holly Pierson, had not informed some of their clients of immunity offers that prosecutors had made in exchange for their cooperation.Ms. Willis also said at the time that Ms. Debrow was representing people who were making accusations against another one of her clients, amounting to an untenable conflict.But in a motion filed last week, Ms. Debrow pushed back hard against both claims, calling them “reckless, frivolous, offensive and completely without merit.” And she revealed that her eight clients had been offered immunity deals and that all of them had accepted.In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. Debrow suggested that Ms. Willis had engaged in inappropriate conduct by making unfounded assertions about her and Ms. Pierson last month, and that she should be penalized for it.“The time for the D.A. to get the facts straight was before publicly filing her motion,” she said. “Because she did not, the D.A. should not be able to avoid sanctions by dismissing her baseless motion.”BackgroundThe issue of the pro-Trump electors is one of numerous narrative threads that prosecutors in Georgia are investigating, including calls that Mr. Trump made to state officials including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find” enough votes to overturn the results of the election there.A total of 16 electors cast votes for Mr. Trump in Georgia. Some of them have retained their own lawyers. Prosecutors had previously identified all of the electors as targets who could face criminal charges. But three of them have been considered particularly vulnerable to indictment by those with knowledge of the investigation.Two of the three were previously identified as clients of Ms. Debrow’s: Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator, and Cathy Latham, a Republican Party leader in rural Coffee County, Ga.The third, David Shafer, is the chair of the Georgia Republican Party. He was, for a time, Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pierson’s client, but is now represented by Ms. Pierson and another lawyer.Both Ms. Pierson and Ms. Debrow have been paid by the state Republican Party.A special grand jury that heard evidence in the investigation for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Pro-Trump electors have said that they were within their rights to cast electoral votes for Mr. Trump, arguing that they were seeking to preserve his options in case a lawsuit challenging the election results succeeded. (It did not.)What’s Next: The district attorney will respond to a motion seeking to remove her from the investigation.Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a motion in March seeking to quash the special grand jury’s final report, most of which remains sealed, and to have Ms. Willis removed from the investigation. A judge has given Ms. Willis until Monday to respond. More

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      The ‘Woke Mind Virus’ Is Eating Away at Republicans’ Brains

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      There are a few reasons to think that President Biden might lose his bid for re-election next year, even if Donald Trump is once more — for the third straight time — the Republican nominee.There’s the Electoral College, which could still favor the Republican Party just enough to give Trump 270 electoral votes, even if he doesn’t win a popular majority. There’s Biden’s overall standing — around 43 percent of Americans approve of his job performance — which doesn’t compare favorably with past incumbents who did win re-election. There’s the economy, which may hit a downturn between now and next November. And even if it doesn’t, Biden will still have presided over the highest inflation rate since the 1980s. Last, there’s Biden himself. The oldest person ever elected president, next year he will be — at 81 — the oldest president to ever stand for re-election. Biden’s age is a real risk that could suddenly become a liability.If Biden has potential weaknesses, however, it is also true that he doesn’t lack for real advantages. Along with low unemployment, there’s been meaningful economic growth, and he can point to significant legislative accomplishments. The Democratic Party is behind him; he has no serious rivals for the nomination.But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird. It’s not just that Republican policies are well outside the mainstream, but that the party itself has tipped over into something very strange.I had this thought while watching a clip of Ron DeSantis speak from a lectern to an audience we can’t see. In the video, which his press team highlighted on Twitter, DeSantis decries the “woke mind virus,” which he calls “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.”Now, I can follow this as a professional internet user and political observer. I know that “woke mind virus” is a term of art for the (condescending and misguided) idea that progressive views on race and gender are an outside contagion threatening the minds of young people who might otherwise reject structural explanations of racial inequality and embrace a traditional vision of the gender binary. I know that “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing buzzword meant to sound scary and imposing.To a normal person, on the other hand, this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.Not only do Americans not care about the various Republican obsessions — in a recent Fox News poll 1 percent of respondents said “wokeness” was “the most important issue facing the country today” — but a large majority say that those obsessions have gone too far. According to Fox, 60 percent of Americans said “book banning by school boards” was a major problem. Fifty-seven percent said the same for political attacks on families with transgender children.It is not for nothing that in Biden’s first TV ad of the 2024 campaign, he took specific aim at conservative book bans as a threat to freedom and American democracy.And yet there’s no sign that Republicans will relent and shift focus. Just the opposite, in fact; the party is poised to lurch even farther down the road of its alienating preoccupations. On abortion, for example, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, says candidates need to address the issue “head-on” in 2024 — that they can’t be “uncomfortable” on the issue and need to say “I’m proud to be pro-life.”But the Republican Party has veered quite far from most Americans on abortion rights, and in a contested race for the presidential nomination, a “head-on” focus will possibly mean a fight over which candidate can claim the most draconian abortion views and policy aims.There’s more: DeSantis is in the midst of a legal battle with Disney, one of the most beloved companies on the planet, and House Republicans are threatening the global economy in order to pass a set of deeply unpopular spending cuts to widely used assistance programs.Taken together, it’s as if the Republican Party has committed itself to being as off-putting as possible to as many Americans as possible. That doesn’t mean the party is doomed, of course. But as of this moment, it is hard to say it’s on the road to political success.As for Joe Biden? The current state of the Republican Party only strengthens his most important political asset — his normalcy. He promised, in 2020, that he would be a normal president. And he is promising, for 2024, to continue to serve as a normal president. Normal isn’t fun and normal isn’t exciting. But normal has already won one election, and I won’t be surprised if it wins another.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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      My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis

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      To judge by several early polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has a decent shot of beating former President Donald Trump in the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Some liberals have pronounced this terrible news — because, they say, a DeSantis presidency would be just as awful as, and perhaps even worse than, a second Trump term.This is wrong. A DeSantis presidency would be bad in many ways, and my fellow liberals should fight with all they have to prevent it. But Mr. DeSantis almost certainly would not be worse than Mr. Trump.Exaggerating the threat posed by the Florida governor could inadvertently increase Mr. Trump’s prospects in the Republican primaries. And if Mr. DeSantis does get the nomination, progressive overreaction toward him in the primary contest could ultimately undermine the case against him in the general election.The case against Mr. DeSantis is rooted in his policy commitments. During his time as Florida’s chief executive, he has governed from the hard right, taking aggressive aim at voting rights, pursuing politicized prosecutions, restricting what can be taught in public schools and universities, strong-arming private businesses, using refugees as human props to score political points and engaging in flagrant demagogy about vaccines. Before that, as a congressman, he supported cuts to Social Security and Medicare and voted for a bill that would have severely weakened Obamacare. All of that provides ample reason to rally against him should he end up as the Republican nominee in 2024.But none of it makes Mr. DeSantis worse than Mr. Trump, who also did and sought to do bad things in office: the Muslim travel ban, forcibly separating migrants from their children, and much else.Could the Trump era have been worse? Absolutely, and here liberals have a point when they suggest Mr. Trump’s ability to wreak havoc was limited by his ineptness. Based on what we’ve seen of Mr. DeSantis’s performance as governor of Florida, a DeSantis administration would likely display much greater discipline and competence than what the country endured under Mr. Trump.Yet it’s also the case that people in the Trump orbit recognize this problem and plan to ensure things work out differently next time. That includes ideas for bolder action on policy and much tighter and more focused management of the president, with an eye toward running an administration capable of acting much more shrewdly and ruthlessly than the last time.So let’s stipulate that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis would both try to do bad things in office. Mr. Trump still brings something distinctive and much more dangerous to the contest — or rather, several things. He’s flagrantly corrupt. He lies constantly. He’s impulsive and capricious. And he displays a lust for power combined with complete indifference to democratic laws and norms that constrain presidential power.The way to summarize these various personal defects is to say that Mr. Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president. That was obvious to many of us before his surprise victory in 2016. It was confirmed on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis throughout his presidency. And it became indisputable when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and helped spur efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.That makes Mr. Trump categorically more dangerous than anyone else running or likely to run for president in 2024 — including Mr. DeSantis.Those who suggest Mr. DeSantis would be worse than Mr. Trump often make the additional point that Mr. Trump was quite unpopular and outrightly repulsive to many, whereas Mr. DeSantis has proved himself capable of winning over mainstream voters in his home state. That makes Mr. DeSantis potentially a more popular candidate and president than Mr. Trump was or is likely to be. And that could empower Mr. DeSantis to enact more sweeping policy changes were he elected.There are other things to worry about. Mr. Trump’s lack of popularity added to his dangerousness because it made his administration appear illegitimate. He was a president with an anti-mandate — he lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes in 2016 and suffered persistently low approval ratings — who nonetheless pressed on with enacting extreme shifts in policy. That made the Trump years uniquely polarizing and unstable.Policies can be reversed. A shredded civic fabric is much more difficult to mend.Liberals have a long history of hyping fears of Republican presidential candidates, from Lyndon Johnson’s “daisy” ad (about Barry Goldwater and a potential threat of nuclear war) to sometimes hysterical warnings about various dire threats posed by John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.We heard similarly terrible things about Donald Trump in 2016 — but this time they were true. As with the story of the boy who cried wolf, a real wolf had finally arrived.It’s crucially important that liberals make what should be a cogent case against Mr. DeSantis without resorting to exaggeration that will undermine their own credibility, particularly with persuadable voters. The most effective approach will be to build a case tailored to the distinctive defects of whichever candidate makes it to the general election. Stick to the facts: Mr. DeSantis is a bully who’s ready and willing to trample freedom of speech and expression, voting rights and common decency to win the applause of the Republican base so he can win office and advance the G.O.P. dream of gutting the social safety net in return for tax cuts that benefit wealthy right-wing donors.To make the unconvincing claim that a DeSantis presidency would be even worse than another four years of Mr. Trump isn’t necessary and could even undercut the liberal argument.Calling Mr. DeSantis bad should be good enough.Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right” and is a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.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