Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (2020 Election Case)

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      Trump Tells Supporters His Indictments Are ‘For You’ on 2024 Campaign Trail

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      The former president, who has made his 2024 campaign principally about his own personal grievances, is attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.As lawyers for Donald J. Trump float various legal arguments to defend him in court against an onslaught of criminal charges, the former president has settled on a political defense: “I’m being indicted for you.”In speeches, social media posts and ads, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared the prosecutions a political witch hunt, and he has cast himself as a martyr who is taking hits from Democrats and the government on their behalf.“They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom,” Mr. Trump told the crowd at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”In two previous campaigns, 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump presented himself to voters as an insurgent candidate who understood their grievances and promised to fight for them. Now, however, Mr. Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him. He continues to argue, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and to present it as a theft also against his voters. The legal jeopardy he now faces from multiple indictments, he tells followers, is the sort of persecution that they, too, could suffer.There is evidence that the message is resonating.Lorraine Rudd, who attended Mr. Trump’s appearance in New Hampshire, said that after his third indictment last week, in a point-by-point 45-page account of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, she felt that she, too, could be wrongly prosecuted.“If they can do it to him and take him down, they can come for me,” Ms. Rudd, a 64-year old Massachusetts resident, said.She said she firmly agreed with Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. “What, am I next?” she said.In March, when Mr. Trump announced his candidacy before any indictments, he told supporters, “I am your retribution.” The shift to the recent plaint of “I am being indicted for you” suggests a further tailoring of his campaign pitch, as he paints the criminal cases against him as an effort to prevent him from returning to the White House.In June, after being charged with retaining government secrets, Mr. Trump told a Republican gathering in Michigan: “Essentially, I’m being indicted for you.”On Aug. 3, the day of his third indictment, for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump posted on his social media site that facing fraud and obstruction charges in Washington was an “honor” because, as he wrote in all caps, “I am being arrested for you.”Portraying himself as a victim of the criminal justice system — and echoing themes from when he faced an investigation over Russian influence in the 2016 campaign and his first impeachment — has served to consolidate Republican support around Mr. Trump.Since his very first indictment in March, in New York on charges related to payments to a porn star, Republican voters have buoyed Mr. Trump in polls. Congressional Republicans, mindful that the party base has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, have leaned into investigations of what they call the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. And many of Mr. Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals have repeated his pledge to fire the F.B.I. director and end the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House.In a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, before Mr. Trump’s latest indictment, 71 percent of Republican voters said he had not committed serious federal crimes and that Republicans needed to stand behind him.When a long-shot challenger of Mr. Trump, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, told a Republican gathering in Iowa recently that the former president was running not to represent people who supported him in 2016 or 2020 but “to stay out of prison,’’ Mr. Hurd was booed.In public comments, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have indicated they will mount a free-speech defense in the latest case related to the 2020 election. They have argued that anything Mr. Trump said leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot were merely “aspirational” requests. Those include lying about widespread fraud to voters, pressuring Mr. Pence to ignore the Constitution and asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to help him win the state.The former president and his allies in the conservative media and in Congress are simultaneously waging a battle for public opinion by accusing Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, of misconduct in business dealings and trying to tie allegations of shady practices to Mr. Biden himself when he was vice president. Investigations led by House Republicans have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, but the effort has convinced many Republicans that Mr. Trump’s indictments are part of a conspiracy to divert scrutiny from Mr. Biden and his family.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, his likely political rival should he win the G.O.P. nomination. He also continued his personal attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel in the federal cases against Mr. Trump, calling him “deranged.”And without referring to her by name, he criticized Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is Black, as a “racist.” She is overseeing a separate investigation into alleged efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to interfere with the election in the state, where he lost to President Biden.With Mr. Trump dominating every Republican primary poll, a few 2024 rivals have lately been more direct in challenging him on the subject of the 2020 election.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said this week that “of course” Mr. Trump lost re-election in his most blunt acknowledgment yet of a reality he has tiptoed around for three years. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who could be a star witness in a trial focused on Jan. 6, said that Mr. Trump pushed him to “essentially overturn the election.”Roughly an hour northwest of Mr. Trump’s rally on Tuesday night, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, one of Mr. Trump’s toughest critics in the race, mocked the former president’s proclamations.“As I’m walking around Ukraine, he’s waltzing into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., to tell us that he’s being indicted for us. For us! How lucky are we! That we have such a selfless, magnanimous leader,” Mr. Christie said, prompting laughter and a sprinkling of applause. “Because you know that the government was coming to get you and on their way to get you, lo and behold, they came across Donald Trump and they said, ‘Okay, we won’t get you, we’ll get him, for you.’”The narrative of unfair persecution by the criminal justice system, which Republicans as the party of law and order once staunchly defended, has taken strong root among Mr. Trump’s supporters.Steve Vicere, who drove all the way from his home in Florida to see Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, said the indictments were a “diversion” and represented attempts by Democrats to stop Mr. Trump from regaining power.“Everyday freedoms are being systematically taken away, and nobody ever gets held accountable,” Mr. Vicere, 54, said.Dean Brady, a limo driver from Newmarket, N.H., embraced Mr. Trump’s message that he was taking a hit on behalf of his supporters.“He’s representing us,” Mr. Brady, 60, said. “He’s not in it for himself, he could quit this and just go on with life. He’s up there because he loves America and he cares about us.”But not all Republican voters embrace Mr. Trump’s sense of victimhood. Jean Davis, who attended a barbecue in Iowa on Sunday to hear seven of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. rivals, said that his latest indictment ought to disqualify him as a candidate.Her husband, Russ Davis, who supports Mr. DeSantis, said that if Mr. Trump were to become the nominee, his chances of defeating Mr. Biden would be “next to nothing.”“There are so many people on the Republican side who just can’t get past his loud mouth,’’ he said. More

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      The Prosecution of Donald Trump May Have Terrible Consequences

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      It may be satisfying now to see Special Counsel Jack Smith indict former President Donald Trump for his reprehensible and possibly criminal actions in connection with the 2020 presidential election. But the prosecution, which might be justified, reflects a tragic choice that will compound the harms to the nation from Mr. Trump’s many transgressions.Mr. Smith’s indictment outlines a factually compelling but far from legally airtight case against Mr. Trump. The case involves novel applications of three criminal laws and raises tricky issues of Mr. Trump’s intent, of his freedom of speech and of the contours of presidential power. If the prosecution fails (especially if the trial concludes after a general election that Mr. Trump loses), it will be a historic disaster.But even if the prosecution succeeds in convicting Mr. Trump, before or after the election, the costs to the legal and political systems will be large.There is no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party’s probable nominee.This deeply unfortunate timing looks political and has potent political implications even if it is not driven by partisan motivations. And it is the Biden administration’s responsibility, as its Justice Department reportedly delayed the investigation of Mr. Trump for a year and then rushed to indict him well into G.O.P. primary season. The unseemliness of the prosecution will likely grow if the Biden campaign or its proxies uses it as a weapon against Mr. Trump if he is nominated.This is all happening against the backdrop of perceived unfairness in the Justice Department’s earlier investigation, originating in the Obama administration, of Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia in the 2016 general election. Anti-Trump texts by the lead F.B.I. investigator, a former F.B.I. director who put Mr. Trump in a bad light through improper disclosure of F.B.I. documents and information, transgressions by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials in securing permission to surveil a Trump associate and more were condemned by the Justice Department’s inspector general even as he found no direct evidence of political bias in the investigation. The discredited Steele Dossier, which played a consequential role in the Russia investigation and especially its public narrative, grew out of opposition research by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.And then there is the perceived unfairness in the department’s treatment of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, where the department has once again violated the cardinal principle of avoiding any appearance of untoward behavior in a politically sensitive investigation. Credible whistle-blowers have alleged wrongdoing and bias in the investigation, though the Trump-appointed prosecutor denies it. And the department’s plea arrangement with Hunter came apart, in ways that fanned suspicions of a sweetheart deal, in response to a few simple questions by a federal judge.These are not whataboutism points. They are the context in which a very large part of the country will fairly judge the legitimacy of the Justice Department’s election fraud prosecution of Mr. Trump. They are the circumstances that for very many will inform whether the prosecution of Mr. Trump is seen as politically biased. This is all before the Trump forces exaggerate and inflame the context and circumstances, and thus amplify their impact.These are some of the reasons the Justice Department, however pure its motivations, will likely emerge from this prosecution viewed as an irretrievably politicized institution by a large chunk of the country. The department has been on a downward spiral because of its serial mistakes in high-profile contexts, accompanied by sharp political attacks from Mr. Trump and others on the right. Its predicament will now likely grow much worse because the consequences of its election-fraud prosecution are so large, the taint of its past actions so great and the potential outcome for Mr. Biden too favorable.The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the department for our politics and the rule of law. It will likely inspire ever-more-aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposite party, to the detriment of sound government.It may also exacerbate the criminalization of politics. The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries.Many of these consequences of the prosecution may have occurred in any event because of our divided politics, Mr. Trump’s provocations, the dubious prosecution of him in New York State and Mr. Smith’s earlier indictment in the classified documents case. Yet the greatest danger comes from actions by the federal government headed by Mr. Trump’s political opponent.The documents case is far less controversial and far less related to high politics. In contrast to the election fraud case, it concerns actions by Mr. Trump after he left office, it presents no First Amendment issue and it involves statutes often applied to the mishandling of sensitive government documents.Mr. Smith had the option to delay indictment until after the election. In going forward now, he likely believed that the importance of protecting democratic institutions and vindicating the rule of law in the face of Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on both outweighed any downsides. Or perhaps he believed the downsides were irrelevant — “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”These are entirely legitimate considerations. But whatever Mr. Smith’s calculation, his decision will be seen as a mistake if, as is quite possible, American democracy and the rule of law are on balance degraded as a result.Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work.Regrettably, in February 2021, the Senate passed up a chance to convict Mr. Trump and bar him from future office, after the House of Representatives rightly impeached him for his election shenanigans. Had that occurred, Attorney General Merrick Garland may well have decided not to appoint a special counsel for this difficult case.But here we are. None of these considerations absolve Mr. Trump, who is ultimately responsible for this mammoth mess. The difficult question is whether redressing his shameful acts through criminal law is worth the enormous costs to the country. The bitter pill is that the nation must absorb these costs to figure out the answer to that question.Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”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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      If Mike Pence Is a Big Hero, We’re in Big Trouble

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I know we’ll get to the latest Trump indictment in a moment, but I wanted to start by raising a subject we haven’t discussed in detail before: capital punishment. Last week, a jury sentenced Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, to death. I sort of assume you’re against the death penalty but wanted to know your reaction to the verdict.Gail Collins: Bret, many folks who are opposed to the death penalty — including me — feel that if there was one time they’d like to see an exception, it’d be the Tree of Life mass murder.Bret: Agreed.Gail: Still, I wish the jury had come back with a life sentence. Tell that miserable excuse of a human being that he’s going to spend the rest of his existence alone, in a cell, being shunned and treated like the pariah he is.The death penalty just doesn’t work for me. On the intellectual side, there isn’t convincing evidence to suggest that the death penalty deters violent crime. And on the moral side, I just can’t see responding to the deliberate taking of life with deliberate taking of life.I assume you disagree?Bret: I always thought the sole purpose of capital punishment was justice, so even if the death penalty did deter violent crime, that argument wouldn’t hold water with me. But my support has softened over the years, mainly because, as I grow older, I think it’s wrong to foreclose the possibility of atonement and redemption in prison, particularly for those who committed crimes when they were young.Gail: Good thought.Bret: And yet there are some crimes that are so premeditated, hateful and cruel that I think society has to respond in the severest way possible. Life in prison with three meals a day, an hour for exercise, friendships with other inmates, answering fan mail (and there will be fan mail) — all that mocks the idea of justice. I don’t for a second doubt that justice was done when the war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged or the serial killer Ted Bundy was executed or the terrorist Timothy McVeigh was killed by lethal injection. Bowers belongs in their company.And, um, speaking of justice, what do we make of Trump indictment No. 3?Gail: We’ve gotten to the real bottom line, Trump-crime-wise. The country can get past a president who breaks the law in his private life, hides official documents and hides the evidence that he hides official documents. But we can’t survive a president who makes a serious attempt to wreck the election system and stay in office after he’s been voted out.That just can’t be overlooked. He has to be punished.Bret: I thought the right remedy for Jan. 6 was political, via immediate impeachment and conviction, as I wrote at the time. I worry that the latest case is going to turn on the question of whether Donald Trump truly believed he had won the election and could have his vice president reject electoral ballots. In other words, it’s going to be about Trump’s state of mind and his First Amendment rights, rather than the disgrace of his behavior, which increases the chances of his ultimate acquittal.Gail: All this drama keeps bringing me back to Mike Pence — and believe me, I never thought I’d be in a world where I wanted to be back with Mike Pence in any way, shape or form. But when the critical moment came, he followed through and declared the actual election winner the actual election winner.Bret: Sorry, but I will never buy the whole “Mike Pence was a hero” business. He was Trump’s faithful enabler for more than four years, his beard with evangelicals, his ever-nodding yes man. He was mute for the eight weeks after the 2020 election when his boss was busy denying the result. He called Kamala Harris to congratulate her only on Jan. 15, more than two months after she and Joe Biden were declared the winners. And if Pence had tried to overturn the election on Jan. 6, he’d now be facing his own federal indictment.Gail: No way I’m going to battle on behalf of the virtues of Mike Pence. You win.Bret: The only Republican I like these days is Chris Christie. I forgive him for endorsing Trump in 2016 because he’s going so hard and so eloquently against his former friend. I also think he has the right theory of the primary race, which is that the only way to beat Trump is to oppose him frontally. Unfortunately, he’s likelier to end up as Liz Cheney’s rival on “Dancing With the Stars” than he is in the White House.Gail: Well, I’d certainly pay good money to watch that season.But right now, I’m just rooting for a Christie smash-down at that Republican debate this month. Looks like he’ll qualify. And I guess Trump will be too chicken to attend, right?Bret: My guess, too. He has such a commanding lead over the other Republicans that a debate can only hurt him, particularly with Christie in the ring.Switching topics: Congress and spending!Gail: My favorite!Bret: I’d like to propose a legislative idea to you and see if we can find common ground. Right now we have serious problems with our defense-industrial infrastructure. Our shipyards don’t have enough resources to build sufficient numbers of submarines, destroyers and frigates to increase the size of the Navy. Many of our existing ships must wait years for necessary repairs even as we face a growing maritime challenge from China. We’re struggling to replace all of the munitions we’ve given to Ukraine, especially artillery shells but also Stingers and Javelins. And inflation has eaten away at the value of our defense dollars. This doesn’t get a lot of mainstream attention, but people close to the problem understand that it borders on an emergency.So my suggestion is that pro-Ukraine Democrats and anti-China Republicans — and vice versa — unite around legislation that would fund a five-year, $250 billion supplemental defense bill to refurbish our defense infrastructure, create thousands of unionized jobs, restock our munitions and help our allies. In honor of Franklin Roosevelt, I would call it the Arsenal of Democracy Bill. Are you on board?Gail: Hmm. Appreciate your concerns about the shortage of military supplies, and I feel pretty supportive of our aid to Ukraine.My big reservation, however, is that the Pentagon doesn’t really need the extra money. It could come up with the funds itself if it would just cut back on waste. The infamous overcharging by suppliers, for instance, and the purchase of way more planes and weapons than we need.Bret: There’s waste in every government program. Progressives mainly seem to notice it when it comes to the one item of government spending they don’t like.Gail: Defense spending tends to get bipartisan support, not so much because it’s worthy as because so many lawmakers see the money going into their districts. Good target for conservative cost cutting.Sorry, F.D.R.Bret: This seems to me an opportunity for a real bipartisan victory that brings the country around the sensible objective of being strong in the face of aggressive autocracies. I’m picturing a bill sponsored by Richard Blumenthal, one of Connecticut’s two Democratic senators, whose state makes many of our nuclear submarines, and Mike Gallagher, the intelligent and sensible Republican congressman from Wisconsin.Gail: Fine lawmakers, but I’m still not buying that one.Bret: OK, enough of my legislative fantasies. Question for you: Considering that the economy is doing relatively well, why aren’t Biden’s poll numbers better — not even on how he handles the economy?Gail: Excellent question. You’d think a guy who passes breakthrough legislation on everything from education to global warming, who has done a terrific job handling a very troubled economy and is respected as a leader around the world would be superpopular. And I truly think if you had an actual election right now, people would turn out in droves to give Biden another term.Bret: I wouldn’t be so sure. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Trump and Biden in a dead heat. Sixty-five percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track. Food prices keep moving up. The effects of the migration crisis, which have now hit so many places far north of the border, will be felt for years in housing, the school system, even parks. There’s a palpable sense of urban decay in one city after another. Kamala Harris makes a lot of independent voters nervous. Also — and I can’t say this enough, even if it isn’t nice — Biden just seems feeble.Gail: I said if we had an election now, they’d turn out in droves to vote for Biden. Not that they’d be excited about it. The ideal opposition to a crazy, irresponsible former reality TV star isn’t a calm, 80-year-old career politician. I think people are yearning for somebody who’s charismatic and able to get them wildly excited about the future — like the early Barack Obama.We’ll see if anybody pops up.Bret: That person would be Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. But I guess we’re just going to have to accept the cards we’re dealt. Feeble versus evil. Can’t America do better?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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      Trump Calls for Recusal of Judge as His Lawyer Denies Pence’s 2020 Claims

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      Former President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend on the attack on Truth Social while his lawyer, John F. Lauro, ran through a gantlet of interviews Sunday morning.Appearing on five television networks Sunday morning, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued that his actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election fell short of crimes and were merely “aspirational.”The remarks from his lawyer, John F. Lauro, came as Mr. Trump was blanketing his social media platform, Truth Social, with posts suggesting that his legal team was going to seek the recusal of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case, and try to move his trial out of Washington.With his client facing charges carrying decades in prison after a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Trump for his role in trying to overturn the election, his third criminal case this year, Mr. Lauro appeared in interviews on CNN, ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS. He endeavored to defend Mr. Trump, including against evidence that, as president, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject legitimate votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of false electors pledged to Mr. Trump.“What President Trump didn’t do is direct Vice President Pence to do anything,” Mr. Lauro said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He asked him in an aspirational way.”Mr. Lauro used the same defense on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about Mr. Trump’s now-infamous call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. During that call, President Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” to win the state and suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could face criminal repercussions if he did not.“That was an aspirational ask,” Mr. Lauro said.His portrayal of Mr. Trump’s approach is at odds with two key moments in the indictment.In one, prosecutors say that on Jan. 5, 2021, Mr. Trump met alone with Mr. Pence, who refused to do what Mr. Trump wanted. When that happened, the indictment says, “the defendant grew frustrated and told the Vice President that the defendant would have to publicly criticize him.”Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, then alerted the head of Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail, prosecutors said.That same day, after The Times reported that Mr. Pence had indeed told Mr. Trump that he lacked the authority to do what Mr. Trump wanted, the president issued a public statement calling the report “fake news.” According to the indictment, Mr. Trump also falsely asserted: “The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”As Mr. Lauro made the rounds on all five Sunday news shows — what is known as the “full Ginsburg,” from when Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William Ginsburg, did the same amid allegations about her affair with President Bill Clinton — Mr. Trump waged his own campaign on Truth Social.“WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side,” Mr. Trump wrote on Saturday. A few days earlier, he mocked Mr. Pence, now a 2024 rival, for “attracting no crowds, enthusiasm or loyalty from people who, as a member of the Trump Administration, should be loving him.”Mr. Trump went on: “I never told a newly emboldened (not based on his 2% poll numbers!) Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’”His attack came after a judge warned Mr. Trump against intimidating witnesses and after prosecutors flagged another Truth Social post by Mr. Trump as potentially threatening.On Sunday, Mr. Trump also attacked Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Jan. 6 case, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, calling Mr. Smith “deranged” and Ms. Pelosi “sick” and “demented.”In one all-caps message, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Smith of waiting to bring the case until “right in the middle” of his election campaign.In the other posts, Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Pelosi, the former House speaker, who recently said that the former president had seemed like “a scared puppy” before his arraignment. “She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!” Mr. Trump wrote.And he channeled his grievances with the court process toward Judge Chutkan and toward the population of Washington, D.C., writing that he would never get a “fair trial.”For his part, Mr. Pence has been criticizing Mr. Trump’s actions in carefully calibrated terms. He has repeatedly used the same phrases, arguing that anyone who “puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” He repeated similar lines on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” following Mr. Lauro’s appearance, and on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”“What I want the American people to know is that President Trump was wrong then and he’s wrong now: that I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence told the CNN anchor Dana Bash. “I had no right to reject or return votes, and that, by God’s grace, I did my duty under the Constitution of the United States, and I always will.”Maggie Haberman More

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      The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing

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      In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.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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      Coup-Coup-Ca-Choo, Trump-Style

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      WASHINGTON — The man who tried to overthrow the government he was running was held Thursday by the government he tried to overthrow, a few blocks from where the attempted overthrow took place and a stone’s throw from the White House he yearns to return to, to protect himself from the government he tried to overthrow.Donald Trump is in the dock for trying to cheat America out of a fair election and body-snatch the true electors. But the arrest of Trump does not arrest the coup.The fact is, we’re mid-coup, not post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical “Who will rid me of this meddlesome democracy?” plot, hoping his dark knights will gallop off to get the job done.Trump is tied with President Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll, and if he gets back in the Oval, there will be an Oppenheimer-size narcissistic explosion, as he once more worms out of consequences and defiles democracy. His father disdained losers and Trump would rather ruin the country than admit he lost.The Trump lawyer John Lauro made it clear they will use the trial to relitigate the 2020 election and their cockamamie claims. Trump wasn’t trying to shred the Constitution, they will posit; he was trying to save it.“President Trump wanted to get to the truth,” Lauro told Newmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment, adding: “At the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.”In trying to debunk Jack Smith’s obstruction charges, Lauro confirmed them. Trying to halt the congressional certification is the crime.Smith’s indictment depicts an opéra bouffe scene where “the Defendant” (Trump) and “Co-Conspirator 1” (Rudy Giuliani) spent the evening of Jan. 6 calling lawmakers attempting “to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by sowing “knowingly false allegations of election fraud.” Trump melodramatically tweeted about his “sacred landslide election victory” being “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”Giuliani left a voice mail message for a Republican senator saying they needed “to object to numerous states and raise issues” to delay until the next day so they could pursue their nefarious plan in the state legislatures.Two words in Smith’s indictment prove that the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest: “too honest.” Bullying and berating his truant sycophant, Mike Pence, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Trump told his vice president, “You’re too honest.”The former vice president is selling “Too honest” merchandise, which, honestly, won’t endear him to the brainwashed base. Pence’s contemporaneous notes helped Smith make his case.It’s strange to see Pence showing some nerve and coming to Smith’s aid, after all his brown-nosing and equivocating. He and Mother, who suppressed her distaste for Trump for years, were the most loyal soldiers; in return, according to an aide, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows said Trump felt Pence “deserved” to be hanged by the rioters.Pence told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump and his advisers wanted him “essentially to overturn the election.”“It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause,” Pence said, at odds with Lauro. “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”Ron DeSantis, another presidential wannabe who enabled Trump for too long, acknowledged on Friday that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” But Trump and his henchmen were busy ratcheting up the lunacy.“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump threatened on Truth Social on Friday.On the same day and platform, he accused “the corrupt Biden DOJ” of election interference. Exquisite projection. In Trump’s warped view, it’s always the other guy who’s doing what Trump is actually doing.Kari Lake told House Republicans to stop pursuing a Biden impeachment and just decertify the 2020 election because Biden is not “the true president.” Lake said of Trump: “This is a guy who’s already won. He won in 2016. He won even bigger in 2020. All that Jan. 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”Before laughing off this absurdity, consider the finding from CNN’s new poll: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican believe Biden is an illegitimate president, with over half saying there is “solid evidence” of that.While Trump goes for the long con, or the long coup — rap sheet be damned, it’s said that he worries this will hurt his legacy. He shouldn’t. His legacy is safe, as the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval. Amadán, that’s Gaelic for a man who grows more foolish every day.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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      in Elections

      On the Campaign Trail, an Impossible Task: Ignoring Trump’s Latest Charges

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      Voters pressed them to weigh in. Reporters asked about pardons. Mike Pence was heckled. Republicans found it’s not easy to escape the fallout from Donald J. Trump’s legal peril.Days after the front-runner was indicted on charges of trying to subvert an election, Republican candidates in their presidential primary returned to the campaign trail acting as if nothing had changed.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida scooped ice cream in Iowa as he pitched his economic plans. Senator Tim Scott met community leaders at the southern border with a promise to get tough on immigration. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, showed up in Ukraine, a dramatic attempt to focus on foreign policy. And former Vice President Mike Pence talked up the “Trump-Pence administration” record at a town hall in New Hampshire.But their dogged attempts to create a political safe space — an indictment-free zone, where they are not asked to defend or attack former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the race and the party’s most powerful figure — kept failing.Reporters asked questions about stolen-election lies and presidential pardons. Voters wanted to know what they thought of the new charges. Trump supporters greeted Mr. Pence with a sign calling him a “traitor.” Mr. Trump, too, had thoughts.“Every time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” he said at a Republican Party dinner in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday night. “We need one more indictment to close out this election.”The scenes demonstrated the nearly impossible challenge before the Republican field as the candidates soldier on in a primary like no other. As Mr. Trump rallies Republicans to his side against what he says is a political persecution, how can they move beyond a past election to talk about the future?For months, their strategy has been simple: Ignore, deflect and change the subject. But it’s an approach that became significantly harder this week, as the felony counts against Mr. Trump grew to number 78 across three criminal cases with the addition of a federal indictment in a Washington, D.C., federal court accusing him of conspiring to defraud the government and to obstruct an official proceeding, as well as other crimes.Addressing voters at a brewery in northeast Iowa on Friday morning, Mr. DeSantis focused on his usual themes: his record as Florida governor, his biography as a father and a military veteran, and his plans on immigration and economic policy. But he could not entirely escape the drumbeat of news from Washington.When a member of the audience asked whether he thought Mr. Trump’s latest indictment was a “witch hunt,” Mr. DeSantis responded that the case was “politically motivated, absolutely,” and pledged to end the “weaponization” of federal government.Mr. DeSantis tried to steer the conversation away from former President Donald J. Trump while at a brewery in Decorah, Iowa.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesLater, a reporter asked whether he would pardon Mr. Trump, should the former president be convicted in the election case. Mr. DeSantis suggested he would — before quickly trying to recast the race as about the future.“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” the governor, 44, told reporters at a tire shop in Waverly, Iowa. “And just like Ford pardoned Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future.”He added: “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”Still, there were some signs that the newest charges had pushed Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign is under pressure to appeal to more moderate voters, to inch toward criticism of Mr. Trump. After his event, he acknowledged that claims about the 2020 election’s having been stolen were “unsubstantiated” — a more direct response than he typically gives when asked about Mr. Trump’s defeat.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question.Part of the challenge for Mr. Trump’s opponents is that even Republicans who want to move past the former president defend him. Sandy Lloyd, a 61-year-old fourth-grade teacher, said she did not plan to vote for Mr. Trump, having grown tired of the frequent controversies surrounding him. Yet she said that she thought the election had been stolen and that she didn’t want to see Mr. DeSantis attack Mr. Trump.“If I’m going for a new job, I don’t go into my interview and attack everybody else — I tell them why they want me,” Ms. Lloyd said. “That’s what I want to hear. Why do I want you as president?”Others took a different view, arguing that the criminal charges against Mr. Trump would weaken him in a general election.James Smith, a supporter of Mr. DeSantis who drove from Wisconsin to see the governor, said he wanted the Florida governor to be aggressive.“I would love for him to go harder against Trump,” Mr. Smith said. “You’re not going to win the Republican nomination by not going after the leader. The only way to shake up the race is by attacking.”Supporters of Mr. Trump outside a town hall event featuring former Vice President Mike Pence in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesBut no candidate has a harder time escaping the political realities of the Trump indictments than Mr. Pence, who told prosecutors that Mr. Trump had pressured him to reject electoral votes in an attempt to disrupt the transfer of power.About a dozen Trump supporters gathered outside the American Legion post where Mr. Pence spoke Friday evening. They heckled him as he entered.“What Pence did is, he committed treason — that’s the bottom line,” said Derek Arnold, a protester from Derry, N.H. “He had the choice to do the right thing. And that man knows right from wrong, and we’re here to let him know that he did us wrong.”When Mr. Pence told a standing crowd of around 100 people that he had “stood loyally by President Trump,” his comment prompted scoffing from some in the room. But he was applauded after he finished his thought: “And I never changed my commitment to him until the day came that my oath to the Constitution required me to do otherwise.”Mr. Pence answering questions during a campaign town hall event Friday night in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesAsked if he would pardon Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence was noncommittal.“I really don’t understand why some candidates in the Republican primary are assuming that the president is going to be found guilty in these various cases,” Mr. Pence said. “Let him make his case in court, and if I have the privilege of being president of the United States, whatever pardon request comes before me, I’ll always give a thoughtful, prayerful consideration.”Around a dozen people in the crowd said they were still making up their minds on whom to support. Some were looking for a Trump alternative, but not all considered the charges against him disqualifying.“I feel bad that the country has to go through that, never mind Trump himself,” Fran York said of the prosecutions of Mr. Trump. “I’m not sure that what he did was so bad that he should be indicted.”Mr. York, who is supporting Mr. Pence, said he would vote for Mr. Trump again if he won the nomination.Mr. Scott, who has said little about the election indictment, went to Yuma, Ariz., to promote his plan to spend $10 billion on the border wall started by Mr. Trump. There, too, he repeated his accusation that the Justice Department was “hunting Republicans.”“My perspective is that the D.O.J. continues to weaponize their power against political opponents,” he said, deflecting a question from an NBC reporter about whether Mr. Trump’s legal cases were dominating the campaign.Perhaps the only candidate other than Mr. Trump who was eager to talk about the indictment was Mr. Christie, who has focused his campaign on undercutting the former president. Mr. Christie has struggled to break 3 percent in recent polling of the contest.“It’s an aggressive indictment,” he said from a train headed to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday night. “But what I believe is a much more important question than the criminality, in the context of this campaign season, is the fact that he’s morally responsible for Jan. 6.”Charles Homans More