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      Trump Seeks UAW Endorsement as the Union Wavers on Backing Biden

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      A video from the former president attacked electric vehicles, predicting the demise of the American automotive industry.Donald J. Trump, seeing an opening with organized labor, appealed on Thursday for an endorsement from the United Auto Workers for his White House bid and said only his return to the presidency could save the automotive industry from President Biden’s “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade.”Mr. Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the state of the American auto industry does not comport with the reality of an auto sector that has steadily gained jobs over the past three years. But there has been friction between the White House and the new leadership of the old-line industrial auto union.The United Auto Workers, which has a record of backing Democratic candidates for president, including Mr. Biden, has been angered with the Biden administration for pumping tax money into nonunion electric vehicle suppliers, and has withheld its endorsement, even as most labor unions have rushed to back Mr. Biden’s re-election. The U.A.W.’s new president, Shawn Fain, met with Mr. Biden in the White House on Wednesday as contract talks with the Big Three automakers heat up over electric vehicle parts suppliers.In a video on Thursday, Mr. Trump predicted the demise of American auto manufacturing and the “slaughter” of 117,000 auto jobs. “I hope United Auto Workers is listening to this because I think you’d better endorse Trump,” he said. He explicitly warned that Mr. Biden’s policies would cost jobs in the key swing state of Michigan, as well as the more reliably Republican states of Ohio and Indiana.The auto industry has actually gained jobs steadily since Mr. Trump left office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment among auto manufacturers and their parts suppliers reached 1,071,600 in June, up 129,000 since December 2020, the last full month of Mr. Trump’s presidency.Mr. Trump’s insistence that electric vehicles are piling up unsold on car lots contradicts the industry’s own view of its inventory.“We would assert that demand for traditional vehicles and for electric vehicles is strong,” said Matt Blunt, a former Republican governor of Missouri, now president of the American Automotive Policy Council, the domestic auto industry’s trade association in Washington. “This is a time of dramatic transition, but the U.S. industry is well positioned.”But the tension between the U.A.W. and the Biden administration is real. It takes fewer workers to assemble an electric vehicle than one with an internal combustion engine. That has made organizing parts suppliers, especially battery makers, an imperative of the union’s insurgent new leadership.Yet much of the new battery investment prompted in part by Mr. Biden’s climate change policies and infrastructure law is landing in the union-resistant Southeast, especially Georgia, a vital battleground state in the 2024 election. That state has had more than 40 electric vehicle-related projects introduced since 2020, promising investments worth $22.7 billion and the creation of 28,400 jobs.Mr. Biden was at Philadelphia’s shipyard on Thursday, talking up new rules attached to his climate change law intended to help union apprenticeship programs vault workers into the middle class without a college degree.“A lot of my friends in organized labor know, when I think climate, I think jobs,” he said. “I think union jobs.”But Mr. Trump, looking beyond the Republican primaries to a rematch with Mr. Biden, continues to aim for the vote of union workers, if not their leaders. More

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      Key Environmentalists Back Biden, Despite Broken Oil Promises

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      Four major environmental groups are endorsing President Biden’s re-election bid, but some climate activists say his approval of drilling projects has been a betrayal.Four of the country’s largest environmental organizations said they are endorsing President Biden’s bid for re-election, despite anger from activists over his approval of a string of fossil fuel projects, including an enormous oil drilling plan in Alaska and a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia through Virginia.The League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and NextGen America said they were setting aside their concerns over those projects — and the planet-warming emissions they will release.The endorsements are some of the earliest by major environmental groups in a presidential contest. It is also the first time the four groups have made a joint endorsement.In lining up behind the president more than 16 months before the election, some advocates said they hoped to remind Democratic voters that Mr. Biden had enacted the biggest climate legislation in U.S. history, pouring at least $370 billion into clean energy and electric vehicles. His administration has also proposed strict regulations on pollution from automobiles, trucks and power plants that are designed to slash the nation’s emissions to their lowest levels in decades.“This is an administration that has done more to advance climate solutions than any by far,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters.The joint endorsement was announced Wednesday night at the League’s annual dinner event in Washington, where Mr. Biden gave remarks showcasing his environmental record. He is expected to pick up another endorsement, from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., at a labor rally in Philadelphia on Saturday.“Certainly we don’t agree with every decision that they’ve made, but on balance this administration has done far more than any in history,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. She said the groups intend to recruit members to raise money for Mr. Biden’s campaign, participate in phone banks and attend rallies, particularly in battleground states.Mr. Biden campaigned in 2020 on the most ambitious climate agenda of any candidate, promising to slash U.S. emissions roughly in half this decade. Young voters, who surveys show are particularly concerned about global warming, turned out in force during that election. Half of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 cast ballots in that election, one of the highest rates of participation since the voting age was lowered to 18, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.The landmark climate law Mr. Biden signed last year is projected to reduce America’s climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions by up to one billion tons in 2030, and proposed regulations could eliminate as much as 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2055.But Mr. Biden also promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”Despite that pledge, he has agreed to green-light a drilling project known as Willow on pristine federal land in Alaska and mandated the sale of offshore drilling leases as part of a deal to pass the climate bill. During negotiations with Republicans on the debt ceiling last month, Mr. Biden agreed to expedite the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline, intended to carry natural gas about 300 miles from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia through Virginia to the North Carolina line. Environmental activists have been fighting that project for nearly a decade.For many young climate activists, it was the final straw.“You cannot honor the president and call him a climate champion when he is actively approving new fossil fuel projects,” said Michael Greenberg, president of Climate Defiance, a nonprofit group that has been disrupting events featuring Biden administration officials and other Democrats.Climate Defiance members intended to protest outside the League of Conservation Voters dinner on Wednesday night, Mr. Greenberg said.At a demonstration against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in front of the White House last week, Alice Hu, 25, said Mr. Biden’s climate legacy has been undercut by his approval of oil and gas development. As smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires hung in the air, Ms. Hu said the president needed to take on the fossil fuel industry in order to get her vote.“If he wants to count on progressive votes, if he wants to count on youth votes, he needs to stop being a climate villain,” she said.Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, president of NextGen America, which is focused on young voters’ participation, said her group hoped to counter that dissent by endorsing Mr. Biden now. She noted that since Mr. Biden was elected in 2020, 17 million people have reached voting age.“We know we need to spend the time and money to tell young people about why their vote still matters, and that’s why we’re doing this endorsement so early.,” she said.The front-runner in the 2024 Republican field, former President Donald J. Trump, has attacked Mr. Biden’s climate policies, mocked climate science and championed the production of the fossil fuels chiefly responsible for warming the planet.Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist and pollster, said young, climate-minded voters are going to be critical to Mr. Biden’s re-election. But he also argued that while young people want to see the president do more to tackle climate change, there is little evidence that those angry over Willow or the Mountain Valley Pipeline will have much influence.Still, Mr. Garin said, the Biden campaign needs to be better at communicating his climate achievements. “For Biden, what he’s dealing with young voters is a lack of recognition of what he’s done rather than hostility to any particular decision or policy,” he said. More

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      Erdogan Is Endorsed by Sinan Ogan

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      The support of Sinan Ogan gives the Turkish president a boost as he takes on the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.The candidate who came in third in Turkey’s presidential election last week announced on Monday that he was endorsing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the runoff vote on Sunday, granting Mr. Erdogan an additional boost against his remaining challenger.Mr. Erdogan, the dominant figure in Turkish politics for 20 years, appears to have an edge in the runoff, whose victor will shape Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies for the next five years. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Erdogan aimed to link himself in voters’ minds with the image of a strong Turkey, with expanding military might and geopolitical clout.Although most polls in the run-up to the initial vote on May 14 showed Mr. Erdogan trailing his main challenger, the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the president overcame voter anger at high inflation and frustration with the government’s initially slow response to catastrophic earthquakes in February to win 49.5 percent of the vote.Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of a coalition of six opposition parties that came together to try to unseat Mr. Erdogan, won 44.9 percent.In his campaign, Mr. Kilicdaroglu vowed to undo Mr. Erdogan’s legacy, which he said had damaged the economy and pushed the country away from democracy and toward one-man rule.The third-place candidate, Sinan Ogan, is a far-right nationalist who defied expectations to win 5.2 percent of the vote, preventing either of the top contenders from winning the simple majority that would have granted instant victory.In an interview with The New York Times after the first-round results were released last week, Mr. Ogan said he was negotiating with figures on both sides of the political divide to decide whom to endorse for the runoff.Sinan Ogan, who came in third in the first round of presidential voting in Turkey, with supporters in Ankara this month.Burhan Ozbilici/Associated PressHe said he was seeking to ensure that the winning candidate adopts nationalist causes, including a scheduled plan to deport millions of refugees and a refusal to cooperate with pro-Kurdish and hard-line Islamist parties that he considers connected to terrorism.In exchange for his endorsement, Mr. Ogan said he wanted a senior post in the new administration, such as vice president.But it remains unclear whether his support will deliver many voters. Mr. Ogan has no significant party apparatus to mobilize his backers, and in the eight days since the election, his hard-right electoral alliance has broken apart.Political analysts said that many voters who chose him in the first round probably did so to protest the top two contenders and so might not vote at all in the runoff.Mr. Erdogan met with Mr. Ogan on Friday, but neither man released details of what was discussed. That same day, Mr. Erdogan said in an interview with CNN that he did not want to bargain with Mr. Ogan.“I am not a person who likes to negotiate in such a manner,” Mr. Erdogan said. “It will be the people who are the kingmakers.”In announcing his endorsement of Mr. Erdogan at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Ogan said nothing of any agreement the men had reached but characterized his impact on the election as a victory for far-right causes.“We uplifted Turkish nationalists to a key role,” he said, listing the major issues facing Turkey as refugees, earthquake preparedness, the economy and the fight against terrorism.“We recommend that those who belittle our voters watch our work more closely,” he said, apparently referring to a change in rhetoric by the opposition after far-right figures such as himself did better in the election than expected. More

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      He Lost Turkey’s Presidential Election, but Could Swing the Runoff

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      Seen by some as spoiler but by others as a kingmaker, Sinan Ogan, the far-right candidate who came in third in the vote, says he is being courted by the two finalists: the sitting president and his challenger.ANKARA — As Sinan Ogan tells it, he has suddenly become the most sought-after man in Turkey.The hard-right nationalist and third-place finisher in presidential elections last weekend, Mr. Ogan told The New York Times that he has been fielding calls all week, from cabinet members to opposition leaders and even the office of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They all want the same thing — help wooing his critical swing voters one way or the other in the May 28 runoff between the two front-runners.“Very busy,” Mr. Ogan said at his office in the capital, Ankara, on Tuesday afternoon. “I spent my last three or four days negotiating issues with such high-level people.”Mr. Ogan and other hard-right nationalists made a strong showing in Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections, prioritizing national security and the defense of what they consider Turkish identity. In particular, they advocate tough stances on the more than 3.3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.Since the vote, Mr. Ogan’s has been called everything from a spoiler, who blocked the top presidential contenders from an outright victory, to a kingmaker whose supporters may play a role in deciding the runoff. That has given him a sudden clout, evidenced by the flood of calls he says he has received this week.The strong performance of nationalists in these elections will likely pull Turkish government policy further to the right in the years to come, particularly with regards to the country’s Kurdish minority and Syrian refugees.People walking past a banner of Sinan Ogan, who came in third in presidential elections over the weekend, in Istanbul, Turkey on Thursday.Khalil Hamra/Associated PressIn the vote on May 14, Mr. Erdogan won 49.5 percent while his main challenger, the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, took about 44.8 percent. Mr. Ogan won a surprising 5.2 percent.With his comfortable lead in the first round, Mr. Erdogan now looks poised to win the runoff, especially if a good number of Mr. Ogan’s voters throw their support to him. Analysts said they expected more of those voters to choose Mr. Erdogan than his challenger.Mr. Ogan, 55, is a former parliament member and expert on the Caucasus who speaks Russian and earned a doctorate in politics and international relations from a Moscow university.He said he expects to announce his endorsement around Thursday, and assumes that 70 percent of his supporters would follow his recommendation. But political analysts are less sure, noting that Mr. Ogan lacks a powerful party apparatus to corral voters. And many of his supporters may have chosen him to protest the top contenders, and could skip the runoff.Mr. Ogan said he has demands in exchange for throwing his support to a candidate, all of them aimed at promoting nationalist causes. For one, he wants a scheduled plan to deport the refugees from many countries, including Syria and Afghanistan. And in exchange for endorsing a candidate, he also wants a very senior post in the new administration to see his demands through.“Why would I be a minister when I can be vice president?” he said.He declined to say whether he was leaning toward a particular candidate.He said he admired Mr. Erdogan’s work ethic, but also criticized him for not consulting enough with others before making decisions. Mr. Kilicdarolu, he said, was not as hard working but widely solicited others’ opinions.The opposition camp, overlapping with the far right on some issues, including the desire to send the Syrian refugees home, could step up efforts to sway nationalist voters before the runoff.Idris Sahin, an official with DEVA, one of the opposition parties backing Mr. Kilicdaroglu, said his party had done a “sociological study” of Mr. Ogan’s voters and would soon launch a campaign targeting them.On Wednesday, Mr. Kilicdaroglu released a campaign video attacking Mr. Erdogan and his party with harsh nationalist rhetoric.“The border is honor,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said, referring to the president’s allowing millions of refugees from Syria and elsewhere to settle in Turkey. He called the refugees an “unruly flood of people flowing into our veins every day” and warned that their number would increase and “threaten our survival!”Mr. Ogan would not answer directly when asked whether he had spoken with Mr. Erdogan about a possible endorsement. Officials from Mr. Erdogan’s party and the opposition have not spoken publicly about any negotiations with Mr. Ogan.“I talk to everyone,” he said.Among Mr. Ogan’s other demands, he said he doesn’t want any political party that he considers connected to terrorism — a term the government often uses to refer to Kurdish militants — to have any role in the government.He mentioned two parties specifically: the Free Cause Party, a hard-line Islamist party allied with Mr. Erdogan, and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which supported Mr. Kilicdaroglu.The first grew out of an underground Islamist organization known for murdering journalists, intellectuals and others in previous decades. The party’s current leaders say they reject violence.Turkey has fought a yearslong and deadly battle against Kurdish militants and the government often accuses the H.D.P. of cooperation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Turkey, the United States and the European Union all consider a terrorist organization. H.D.P. leaders deny that accusation and say they condemn violence.Mr. Ogan credited his campaign with elevating nationalist causes during the election and hard-right factions also fared well in parliamentary elections. In particular, Mr. Erdogan’s strongest allies in Parliament, the Nationalist Movement Party, performed better than expected.“We blew a very nationalist wind into the field,” Mr. Ogan said.But analysts said it was more likely that such sentiments were already rising among the electorate and Mr. Ogan just happened to catch the wave.Gulsin Harman More

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      DeSantis’s Candidate for Kentucky Governor Loses to Trump-Backed Rival

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      The 2024 hopeful made a dramatic, election-eve show of support in the Kentucky governor’s race, only for his chosen candidate to get clobbered. Another favored candidate in Jacksonville, Fla., lost, too.On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida went out on a limb. On Tuesday, it snapped.A day after he swooped into the Republican primary for Kentucky governor with a last-minute endorsement — a move that turned the race into an obvious proxy fight between himself and former President Donald J. Trump — Mr. DeSantis watched his chosen candidate lose in a landslide to the Trump-backed rival.To make matters worse for Mr. DeSantis, a Republican he had endorsed conceded to a Democratic opponent in the mayor’s race in Jacksonville, the largest city in his state.Mr. DeSantis’s preparations to enter the 2024 primary are intensifying. He has held a series of private dinners in Tallahassee with top donors, and on Tuesday he took a direct shot at Mr. Trump over his dodging whether he would sign a six-week abortion ban.But on Monday, Mr. DeSantis made a last-minute endorsement and robocall for Kelly Craft, a former United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump and a member of a Republican megadonor family.The move confounded Kentucky Republicans and those working for her rivals: While Ms. Craft spent heavily on the race, polls had suggested she was headed for defeat to Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general, an ally of Senator Mitch McConnell who had garnered Mr. Trump’s endorsement in June 2022. Representatives for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.“Kelly shares the same vision we do in Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said in a recording that was sent to Republican voters on the eve of the primary.It ended up being far from close. With nearly 90 percent of ballots counted, she was in a distant third, earning just 17 percent of the vote to Mr. Cameron’s 47 percent.“Let me just say,” Mr. Cameron said in his victory speech, “the Trump culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky!”His choice of words was telling: As Mr. DeSantis nears the announcement of a presidential campaign, his stump speech has often called on the Republican Party to end its “culture of losing” during the Trump era. On Monday, the phrase was splashed across the front page of The Des Moines Register after the governor campaigned in Iowa over the weekend.The Trump team cheered Mr. Cameron’s line. In fact, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, Chris LaCivita, had presaged it less than an hour before Mr. Cameron spoke. When the race was called, Mr. LaCivita wrote on Twitter, “so much for the #alwaysbackdown culture of winning.”Never Back Down is the name of the main super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. One of that super PAC’s top strategists is Jeff Roe, whose consulting firm also worked for Ms. Craft.The unsuccessful election-eve endorsement of Ms. Craft was similar to the last-minute backing that Mr. DeSantis gave to Harmeet Dhillon in the race to lead the Republican National Committee in January.Mr. DeSantis called for “new blood” the day before that vote. The incumbent, Ronna McDaniel, won easily the next day.Meanwhile, Mr. DeSantis’s night did not get better in Jacksonville, where Daniel Davis, the Republican endorsed by the governor, lost to Donna Deegan, a Democrat, for an open seat. Mr. DeSantis had provided little support to Mr. Davis beyond his endorsement, not visiting the city to campaign. Early results showed Ms. Deegan leading Mr. Davis with roughly 52 percent of the vote.Jacksonville has had Republican mayors for most of the last 30 years. More

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      United Auto Workers Hold Off on Backing Biden, for Now

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      A memo by the union’s president underscores how some of President Biden’s moves to fight climate change could weaken some of his political support.The United Auto Workers, a politically potent labor union, is planning to withhold its endorsement of President Biden in the early stages of the 2024 race, according to an internal memo from its president to members on Tuesday.The memo, written by Shawn Fain, the Detroit-based union’s president, said the leadership of the United Auto Workers had traveled to Washington last week to meet with Biden administration officials and had expressed “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president has pursued.The memo underscores how some of Mr. Biden’s boldest moves to fight climate change, which animate his liberal base, could at the same time weaken his political support among another crucial constituency. The U.A.W. has shrunk in size in recent decades, but it still counts about 400,000 active members, with a robust presence in Michigan, a critical battleground state for Democrats.In April, the Biden administration proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations yet, which would ensure that two-thirds of new passenger cars are all-electric by 2032 — up from just 5.8 percent today. The rules, if enacted, could sharply lower planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse emissions. But they come with costs for autoworkers, because it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.In the memo, Mr. Fain provided “talking points” for members about why the union was not immediately lining up behind Mr. Biden, writing that if companies received federal subsidies, then workers “must be compensated with top wages and benefits.”“The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” the memo reads, referring to electric vehicles. “We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments.”Mr. Fain won the U.A.W. presidency as an insurgent candidate this year, toppling the incumbent, Ray Curry. Mr. Fain promised a more confrontational path ahead of contract talks. In the memo, he notes that 150,000 autoworkers are fighting for a new contract with the so-called Big Three auto companies in September, writing, “We’ll stand with whoever stands with our members in that fight.”Labor support is a key part of Mr. Biden’s political coalition and his portrayal of himself as a fighter for the middle class.Within hours of Mr. Biden’s formal entry into the 2024 race, a number of top labor unions backed Mr. Biden, including the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.“Several national unions were quick to endorse,” Mr. Fain wrote in his memo. “The United Auto Workers is not yet making an endorsement.”Mr. Biden’s campaign trumpeted his support from other labor unions in a news release. Notably, Mr. Biden’s first public appearance after announcing his re-election campaign last week was addressing a labor conference in the nation’s capital.“I’ve said many times: Wall Street didn’t build America,” he told the cheering union crowd last week. “The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class!”The United Auto Workers, which has historically endorsed Democrats and supported Mr. Biden in 2020, makes clear in the memo that it has no intent of backing the Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump. Withholding a formal endorsement for now instead appears to be a bid for leverage or concessions from the administration.“Another Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster,” reads Mr. Fain’s memo, which was first reported by The Detroit News. “But our members need to see an alternative that delivers real results. We need to get our members organized behind a pro-worker, pro-climate, and pro-democracy political program that can deliver for the working class.”Mr. Biden has sought to accelerate the transition to all-electric vehicles as a centerpiece of his effort to tackle climate change. A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that nations would have to stop sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 to avert the deadliest effects of a warming planet.To help reach that goal, Mr. Biden has pushed a fleet of policies designed to promote electric vehicles. The Biden administration’s proposed climate regulations announced in April are designed to add legal teeth to consumer incentives, compelling automakers to manufacture and sell more electric vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency rules, however, are not yet final: They are open for public comment, and could still be weakened or otherwise changed before being completed next year.As the Biden administration prepared to unveil the new clean car rules last month, officials planned for Michael S. Regan, the head of the E.P.A., to announce the policies in Detroit, surrounded by American-made all-electric vehicles.But as auto executives and the United Auto Workers learned the details of the proposed regulations, some grew uneasy about publicly supporting it, according to two people familiar with their thinking. No one from the United Auto Workers attended the unveiling, according to the organization’s spokesman, although representatives from Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz were there.And the setting was moved from Detroit to the E.P.A. headquarters in Washington. More

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      Daines Endorsement Reflects Uneasy Senate G.O.P. Alliance With Trump

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      Senate Republicans, even those who have broken with the former president, say their campaign chief’s decision to back him could boost their push for the majority.WASHINGTON — When Senator Steve Daines, the leader of the Senate Republican campaign arm, quietly informed Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, that he intended to endorse former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. McConnell was fine with the idea.Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, is not on speaking terms with the former president, having abruptly turned against him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Trump has publicly savaged the senator and repeatedly demeaned his wife with racist statements.But the minority leader, according to a person familiar with his thinking, believed that somebody in the Senate G.O.P. leadership ranks should have a working relationship with the party’s leading presidential contender — and it might as well be the man charged with winning back the Senate majority.Mr. Daines’s endorsement of Mr. Trump this week — and Mr. McConnell’s private blessing of it — highlighted how top Senate Republicans have quietly decided to join forces with their party’s leading presidential candidate, putting aside the toxic relationship that some of them have with him to focus on what they hope will be a mutually advantageous political union.Mr. Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is the first and so far only member of the Senate G.O.P. leadership team to endorse Mr. Trump. Mr. McConnell, who enabled Mr. Trump and his agenda during much of his presidency before the Capitol riot, has not spoken to the former president since December 2020. His No. 2, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, also has been mercilessly attacked by Mr. Trump.Mr. Thune portrayed Mr. Daines’s embrace of the former president as the cost of doing business — what’s necessary to win.“He’s got a tough job to do,” Mr. Thune told reporters at the Capitol. “He’s got a lot of races around the country that we need to win. And I think he wants as many allies as possible.”Asked about the fact that Mr. Daines has endorsed someone who has attacked both him and Mr. McConnell, the senator was temporarily at a loss for words.“Well,” Mr. Thune said with a pause, “what can I tell you?”Many Senate Republicans, in contrast to their counterparts in the House, view Mr. Trump as a political anchor who cost them the majority in 2020 with baseless claims of voter fraud in Georgia that damaged their runoff chances. Many believe Mr. Trump cost them again in 2022 by endorsing Senate contenders who struggled in the general election. Mr. McConnell has attributed his party’s inability to win the Senate to “candidate quality” problems spurred by Mr. Trump’s primary endorsements.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that there was “tremendous support nationally and statewide” for the former president, when asked about Senate Republican leaders’ reluctant acceptance of Mr. Daines’s endorsement.“By contrast, DeSantis has embarrassingly tiny support,” Mr. Cheung said.Some Republicans are determined to steer clear of Mr. Trump. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a vocal critic of Mr. Trump’s who voted to convict the former president in both of his impeachment trials, insisted that Mr. Daines’s backing for Mr. Trump should not be regarded as an embrace of the former president by the Senate G.O.P.“Montana is a big Trump-supporting state,” Mr. Romney said on Wednesday. “I don’t think he did that as the leader of the Republican team. Mitch McConnell is our leader, and I doubt he’ll endorse anybody.”A spokesman for Mr. Daines declined to comment on Mr. Romney’s characterization of the endorsement.Some wondered whether Mr. Daines was deliberately defying Mr. McConnell like the last chairman of the party campaign arm, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, did during last year’s midterm elections.“I was surprised,” Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, another member of the party leadership, said this week when asked what she thought of the Daines endorsement. “But all of the senators have the opportunity to endorse who they want to endorse.”In fact, Mr. Daines and Mr. McConnell are on the same page.Mr. Trump’s endorsement highlighted how Senate Republicans shows an uneasy alliance among estranged political players.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Daines gave Mr. McConnell a heads up that he would be endorsing Mr. Trump ahead of a Monday night appearance on the podcast of Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, according to the person familiar with his thinking.Mr. McConnell views Montana, West Virginia and Ohio — which Mr. Trump won by big margins — as among the most important Senate battlegrounds in 2024, and it will fall to Mr. Daines to keep the former president on friendly terms with the party’s favored candidates, especially in the states where he remains wildly popular.While the rest of Mr. McConnell’s team keeps their distance from the former president, Mr. Daines speaks frequently with Mr. Trump, including as recently as Wednesday night, said a person with direct knowledge of the call who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.So even after Mr. Trump has denigrated Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, the Senate minority leader has engaged in a familiar game with the former president, with whom he worked closely to cut taxes and stack the federal judiciary with ardent conservatives.Mr. McConnell has said as little as possible about the former president since cutting off all contact with him. He has ignored Mr. Trump’s attacks against him and his wife, and he has refused to follow the approach of former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has said she plans to do whatever she can to stop Mr. Trump from becoming president again.Instead, Mr. McConnell has said he is focused on winning back the Senate, and in service of that goal he is already making accommodations for the former president. He has said he will support Mr. Trump if he wins the 2024 Republican nomination.Like many of his colleagues, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a former chairman of the Republican campaign arm himself, is staying out of Mr. Trump’s way. He said he did not plan to endorse in the primary, but “will support the nominee” in the general election.Mr. Daines, he said, was “entitled to some latitude given the complexity of the political environment that we’re entering into.”Republicans’ goal, Mr. Cornyn added, was to win back the majority.“And I don’t really care what the tactics are,” he said. More

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      Trump Endorsed by Senator Daines of Montana, a Key Republican Fund-Raiser

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      Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, cited the former president’s accomplishments on issues like immigration.Former President Donald J. Trump has secured one of his most important Capitol Hill endorsements for a 2024 presidential bid: Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.While top Republicans in the Senate have been lukewarm about the prospects of another election cycle dominated by Mr. Trump, the endorsement gives him a foothold with a key party fund-raiser.“I’m proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president of the United States,” Mr. Daines said during a Monday night appearance on “Triggered,” the podcast of Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and an occasional hunting buddy for Mr. Daines.He added that the “best four years” he’d had in the Senate was when Mr. Trump was president. And Mr. Daines ticked off a list of accomplishments that he said Mr. Trump had recorded, on issues like immigration.“That’s absolutely awesome,” Mr. Trump Jr. replied.Mr. Trump has notched a string of congressional endorsements, but Mr. Daines, the chairman of the Senate campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has outsize influence. Mr. Daines is in constant contact with the wealthiest donors in Republican politics, who have been reluctant to support Mr. Trump, even as he asserts himself as the clear front-runner less than a year out from the primaries. If Mr. Daines vouches for the former president as he works the donor circuit, it may bolster what has been until now fairly lackluster fund-raising from the Trump campaign.Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, are not on speaking terms, and his supporter in the Senate with the most seniority was Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.Yet for Mr. Daines, the decision was a relatively safe move. With a closer relationship, Mr. Trump could support the Senate candidates backed by Mr. Daines’s committee — or at least avoid attacking the committee’s preferred candidates. Mr. Daines’s relationship with Mr. Trump Jr. is also seen as an important conduit between the Senate and the Trump operation.Mr. Daines and Mr. Trump Jr. began the interview bantering about their past hunting trips but Mr. Daines eventually spoke of how Republicans have a “once a decade” opportunity to pick up seats with a favorable map in 2024. If Republicans failed, he warned, they could remain in the minority “for the rest of the decade.” Before he endorsed Mr. Trump, during the interview, Mr. Daines talked about the power that strength at the top of the ticket could mean in the Senate races.Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has faced some difficulty connecting with potential supporters as he works toward making his candidacy official. Both hopefuls have pushed for endorsements in Congress. While Mr. Trump has collected dozens, Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, has secured just a handful. The people endorsing Mr. Trump have been quick to praise his personal touch.In the 2022 cycle, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Rick Scott, took a largely hands-off approach to the primaries. Mr. McConnell lamented the “candidate quality” of those who had emerged from primaries, and several Republicans aligned with Mr. Trump went on to lose key battlegrounds in November, including Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and Blake Masters in Arizona, both of whom party strategists had predicted would be weak nominees.Mr. Daines has taken a different approach. He has endorsed Representative Jim Banks for an open Senate seat in Indiana and has courted other candidates, including David McCormick, the former hedge fund executive who lost a Senate primary in Pennsylvania last year, to run again.Still, Senate Republicans are facing a gantlet of potential 2024 primaries, and the party leadership is worried that weak potential candidates could yet again hinder Republicans in November, including in Mr. Daines’s home state, Montana.In West Virginia, for instance, national Republicans have wooed Gov. Jim Justice, a billionaire former governor, to run against Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat who faces a tough re-election fight in a state that Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020. Mr. Justice is expected to enter the race on Thursday, but Representative Alex X. Mooney, who won a fierce Republican primary in 2022 with Mr. Trump’s endorsement, has already entered the contest.Other states that may feature thorny Republican primaries include Arizona, where the former television newscaster Kari Lake, who lost her 2022 bid for governor, may run for Senate in 2024, and Pennsylvania, where Doug Mastriano, who badly lost a 2022 governor’s race, is looking at a Senate run.“The primary is ours to walk away with,” Mr. Mastriano said in an interview on Monday with the conservative radio host John Fredericks. “We have the base. We are the base.”Mr. Mastriano is the type of nominee Mr. Daines is seeking to avoid. “His last race demonstrated he can’t win a general,” Mr. Daines said last month. More