Greitens, Eric

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    One Eric Reaps in Missouri as Another Eric Sows

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    CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — Voters here in this languid town along the Mississippi River, famous for being the boyhood home of Rush Limbaugh and for its history of devastating floods, sent an unmistakable message on Tuesday: They like Eric.Eric Schmitt, that is.The attorney general of Missouri stomped the man widely seen as his chief rival, Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor, despite some last-minute high jinks from Donald Trump. With a chaos-inducing puckishness that baffled national Republicans and local operatives alike, the former president had hedged his bets and endorsed “ERIC” — only Eric, no last name — for the Senate seat now held by Roy Blunt, who is retiring.It was a Solomonic, baby-splitting move without precedent, but it reflected Trump’s genuine dilemma and a fierce debate within his camp about which Eric was the true “MAGA” stalwart. Was it Greitens, the retired Navy SEAL, humanitarian Rhodes scholar who once openly admired Barack Obama? Or Schmitt, the mainstream Republican who reinvented himself as an anti-mask and anti-vaccine warrior in preparation for this week’s victory?As of Friday evening, Trump was still asking aides, “What should we do about Missouri?” His son Donald Trump Jr., and the younger Trump’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had lobbied fiercely on behalf of Greitens, and had even claimed after Monday’s ambiguous endorsement that the elder Trump really meant to choose the former governor, not the attorney general. The 45th president himself never clarified, a hedge that allowed him to claim victory either way.Guilfoyle, according to two people who heard accounts of her lobbying efforts, sought to persuade Trump that Greitens was truly ahead in the race. At one point, they said, she cited Big Penguin Polling, a little-known outfit that has a lively Twitter presence but does not disclose the full names of its proprietors. Trump trashed polling by the Remington Research Group, a survey firm linked to Jeff Roe of Axiom Strategies, which managed Schmitt’s campaign. But Remington’s numbers proved far more accurate than Big Penguin’s.In the end, as of early this evening, more than 45 percent of Missouri Republicans had chosen Eric No. 1, while about 19 percent had picked Eric No. 2 — a humiliating end for a man once seen by some Republican donors as America’s first Jewish president in the making.It was also a victory for establishment Republicans in Washington as they tussle (often in vain) for control of the party with Trump’s vast alumni network, which has fanned out across the country to back one candidate or another.A onetime national rising starBefore eventually running as a Republican, Greitens considered a career as a Democrat — pressing friends for meetings with Senator Claire McCaskill, for instance, and even traveling to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008 to watch Barack Obama become the Democratic presidential nominee.In the run-up to his surprise victory in the 2016 governor’s race, Greitens was seeking — and getting — mainstream national attention, despite never having served a day in office. He sat for interviews with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to promote his books, which now read with an eerie irony in light of his subsequent fall from grace.In “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life,” a 2015 book that became a New York Times best seller, Greitens offers kernels of wisdom like “Resilience is cultivated not so that we can perform well in a single instance, but so that we can live a full and flourishing life.”Understand the Aug. 2 Primary ElectionsWhile the Trump wing of the Republican Party flexed its muscle, voters in deep-red Kansas delivered a loud warning to the G.O.P. on abortion rights.Takeaways: Tuesday’s results suggest this year’s midterms are a trickier environment for uncompromising conservatives than Republicans once believed. Here’s what we learned.Kansas Abortion Vote: In the first election test since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Kansas voters resoundingly decided against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, a major victory for the abortion rights movement in a reliably conservative state.Trump’s Grip on G.O.P.: Primary victories in Arizona and Michigan for allies of former President Donald J. Trump reaffirmed his continued influence over the Republican Party.Winners and Losers: See a rundown of the most notable results.One blurb for the book was by Admiral Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the day of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound — an operation conducted by an elite unit of Greitens’s former counterparts in the Navy SEALs. “Eric Greitens provides a brilliant and brave course of action to help navigate life’s roughest waters,” Mullen wrote.There was more. J.J. Abrams, the filmmaker, called Greitens “one of the great Americans of our time.” Tom Brokaw called him “my hero,” while Joe Klein, the former Time magazine writer, devoted half of an entire book, “Charlie Mike,” to Greitens and his military exploits. (“To say that ‘Charlie Mike’ glorifies Greitens is like saying God comes off well in the Bible,” one former colleague of Klein’s wrote in a scathing reassessment of Greitens after his resignation.)Greitens with supporters as he arrived to vote on Tuesday in Innsbrook, Mo. In the years leading up to his successful 2016 bid for governor, he was showered with national accolades. Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesAccolades came easily in a media climate that glorified warriors with Ph.D.s — and Greitens was an unusually charismatic figure whose charity work gained him national recognition and lucrative speaking contracts. Time magazine named him to its “100 most influential people” list (Mullen wrote the short bio, in which he called Greitens “one of the most remarkable young men I have ever encountered”); Fortune magazine rated him one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world, sandwiched at No. 37 behind Joko Widodo, then the governor of Jakarta, Indonesia, and Wynton Marsalis, the jazz musician.Greitens’s relentless self-promotion irked some of his fellow Navy SEAL alumni, who began circulating a video highlighting what they claimed were discrepancies between his account of his military service and his actual record.One of them, Paul Holzer, eventually came forward in a Missouri radio interview to take credit for making the video, which had become weaponized during the 2016 primary for governor. Playing on the title of another one of Greitens’s books, “The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL,” Holzer titled the video “Eric Greitens: The Heart and the Myth.”By the end of this campaign, however, Greitens had alienated all of his onetime admirers. Even Ken Harbaugh, a former close friend and early contributor to his troubled veterans charity, The Mission Continues, recorded a video urging him to drop out.Greitens also made a number of odd choices during the campaign, including his participation in a Christian baptism ceremony (he is Jewish) and a sudden trip to Finland over the July 4 weekend in which he competed in a 400-meter running event that he cast as a typical feat of athletic prowess. Breitbart’s glowing write-up of the race noted that he finished “just deciseconds behind the third and fourth place United States finishers,” without adding that he placed 22nd out of 25 competitors.A victory for McConnellThe defeat of Eric No. 2 was a rare victory for Senator Mitch McConnell, whose allies quietly funneled “around $6.7 million to the anti-Greitens TV blitz,” according to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt.McConnell cloaked his involvement throughout the race, mindful of Greitens’s penchant for political jujitsu. The minority leader’s political advisers, usually quick to run a phone call or text, went silent for weeks. A super PAC set up to run television ads highlighting the former governor’s history of scandals emphasized its Missouri roots, while declining to disclose donors from outside the state.Less than a week before Election Day, both of Eric No. 2’s main opponents said they would not vote to make McConnell majority leader if Republicans took the Senate this fall — a reflection of the anti-establishment fervor among the G.O.P. grass-roots.Eric No. 1’s victory was also a relief for the dozens of Missouri Republicans who labored for months to ensure Eric No. 2’s defeat.As Scott Faughn, the plugged-in publisher of The Missouri Times, a conservative political outlet focused on state politics, put it in a parting comment at Schmitt’s victory party on Tuesday night, “We’re crazy, but not Eric Greitens crazy.”What to readIn Pennsylvania, Nevada and now Arizona and Michigan, Republicans who dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election and who pose a threat to subvert the next one are on a path toward winning decisive control over how elections are run, Jennifer Medina, Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write.Republican candidates and conservative news outlets seized on reports of voting problems in Arizona on Tuesday to re-up their case that the state’s elections are broken and in need of reform, even as state and county officials said the complaints were exaggerated, Stuart Thompson reports.Will Senator Kyrsten Sinema support Democrats’ new climate deal? As usual, she’s not saying. Emily Cochrane takes a look.In The New York Times Magazine, Elisabeth Zerofsky has a deeply reported piece on the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in California that has become a nerve center of the American right.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Schmitt Defeats Greitens to Win Missouri’s G.O.P. Senate Primary

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      Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, easily captured the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. His decisive victory derailed the political comeback of former Gov. Eric Greitens, whose campaign had been clouded by allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity and corruption.Mr. Schmitt, a former state senator and treasurer, made a turn to the hard-right in order to fend off his top rivals, Mr. Greitens and Representative Vicky Hartzler, a longtime social conservative who was in second place as votes were counted Tuesday night, with Mr. Greitens trailing behind. Mr. Schmitt had the backing of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — which he parlayed into multiple appearances on Fox News — and a semi-endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump, who, unable to make up his mind, endorsed “Eric” on Monday without specifying which one.His victory was a relief for Republicans in Missouri and in Washington, who had worried that nominating Mr. Greitens, four years after he resigned his governorship in disgrace to avoid impeachment, would put at risk a seat they hoped to pass easily from retiring Senator Roy Blunt to a Republican successor. Once a swing state, Missouri has become reliably red over the past decade.If Mr. Greitens had won, Democrats planned to attack him on a record that included allegations from his former wife that he had physically abused her and one of their young sons, as well as accusations of sexual abuse from a hairdresser who said that he had lured her to his home, tied her up, torn off her clothes, photographed her partly naked, threatened to release the pictures if she talked and coerced her into performing oral sex.“I’m hoping and praying that it is God’s will that Eric Greitens does not get the nomination, but if Eric Greitens wins the nomination, we will lose a Senate seat to the Democrats,” Rene Artman, the chairwoman of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee, said days before the election. She had pleaded with Missouri Republican officials to more forcefully oppose Mr. Greitens.A super PAC in Missouri funded by affluent donors in and out of the state attacked Mr. Greitens in advertising that used his former wife’s allegations as well as footage from a trip he took as governor to China, in which he appeared to speak positively about the country.Mr. Greitens said the allegations against him were false and orchestrated by Washington Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Karl Rove, the political chief of the George W. Bush White House. Mounting a campaign saturated in violent imagery, Mr. Greitens ran advertising featuring military-style assaults against “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — and shots of himself, a former Navy SEAL, firing high-powered weaponry.In the end, Mr. Schmitt benefited from a highly fractured field of Republicans, 21 in all. It included Representative Billy Long, who claimed to be the true voice of Mr. Trump, and Mark McCloskey, a personal injury lawyer who made headlines when he and his wife brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in front of the couple’s St. Louis home.Ms. Hartzler was backed by Missouri’s junior senator, Josh Hawley, but snubbed by Mr. Trump, who told his supporters on his social media site, “I don’t think she has what it takes to take on the Radical Left Democrats.” Mr. Trump called Mr. Greitens “tough” and “smart” in an interview on the pro-Trump network One America News, and his son Donald Trump Jr. shot automatic rifles with Mr. Greitens at a shooting range and said on camera that they were “striking fear in the hearts of liberals everywhere.”With Ms. Hartzler dismissed by the former president and Mr. Greitens under concerted attack from wealthy Republicans, Mr. Schmitt was able to prevail. More

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      Eric Greitens May Just Get What He Deserves

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      On Tuesday, Republican voters in Missouri will send a signal to G.O.P. leaders nationwide about what they will and won’t accept in a top candidate in the party’s current, Trumpian era: Namely, do they want a Senate nominee who exists in a perpetual swirl of scandal, including fresh accusations of domestic violence?For much of Missouri’s Senate primary race, it sure seemed Republicans were content to careen down this path. Consistently, if narrowly, the crowded G.O.P. field was led by Eric Greitens, the state’s disgraced former governor. Leaning into his bad boy rep, Mr. Greitens sold himself as an ultra-MAGA warrior being persecuted by his political enemies — just like a certain former president! — and a good chunk of the party’s base seemed ready, even eager, to buy his line.But it appears that MAGA may have its limits even in a deep-red state like Missouri. Certainly, electability has mattered more for many Republican officials and donors there, who have been less than enthusiastic about Mr. Greitens’s candidacy. It’s not necessarily that they found his behavior morally disqualifying — this is, after all, Donald Trump’s G.O.P. — so much as they were afraid his scandals would make him a weak general election candidate. (Democrats were certainly raring to run against him.) Losing this seat, currently held by the Republican Roy Blunt, who is retiring, would be a blow to the party’s midterm dream of winning control of the Senate. But efforts to nudge Mr. Greitens out of the race only ticked him off and provided fodder for his martyr self-mythologizing. He looked to be a classic example of how the G.O.P. had lost control of its MAGA monster.Until late last month. That’s when a group of Republicans rolled out a super PAC, named Show Me Values, aimed at bringing down Mr. Greitens. Just a few weeks — and an estimated $6 million in ad spending — later, the effort seems to be working. Multiple polls show the former governor’s support slipping, dropping him behind a couple of his opponents. The state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, appears to have taken the lead. He, too, is an election-denying Trump suck-up. But at this point the G.O.P. is operating on a curve; simply weeding out those alleged to be abusers and other possible criminals can feel like a major achievement.Polls are not votes, and the race remains too tight for anyone to exhale. But with only days to go, it looks as though Mr. Greitens’ political resurrection may flop. This would be a good thing for the people of Missouri. It could also serve as a model, or at least an encouraging data point, for more sensible Republicans looking to stave off the worst actors and excesses of Trumpism — and maybe eventually put their party back on the road to sanity.In an election cycle awash in MAGA bomb throwers vying for the title of biggest jerk, Mr. Greitens has been a top contender. Charismatic, combative and shameless, he is in many ways the essence of Trumpism. Heading into the race, he bore the stench of the multiple scandals — including allegations of sexual misconduct — that led him to step down as governor in 2018 to avoid impeachment by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature.Then, this March, his ex-wife filed an affidavit as part of a child custody dispute, swearing that he had physically abused her and their young son. (He has denied those allegations and, of course, blames dirty politics.) This was an offense too far for many Republicans, some of whom called on Mr. Greitens to leave the race. Among these was Senator Josh Hawley, who asserted, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”When you’ve lost the guy who gave the infamous fist salute to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, you know you’ve crossed a red line.In another era, or another party, a candidate dragging around such sordid baggage might have slouched quietly away. But Mr. Greitens has adopted the Trump guide to making vileness and suspected criminality work for you: Brace up, double down and bray that any and all allegations are just part of — all together now! — a political witch hunt.Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens is a political grievance peddler. Also like Mr. Trump, he saves his most concentrated bile for fellow Republicans. One of the most puerile ads of the midterms thus far has been Mr. Greitens’s “RINO hunting” spot, in which he leads a group of armed men in tactical gear as they storm a lovely little suburban home in search of G.O.P. heretics. “Get a RINO hunting permit,” Mr. Greitens urges. “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” Banned by Facebook, flagged by Twitter and trashed by pretty much everyone, the ad is pure political trolling.It was around the time of the RINO hunting ad that the Show Me Values PAC was announced. Team Greitens responded with characteristic invective. “These swamp creatures and grifters know their time at the trough is finished,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager. “That’s why they’re scared of America First champion Governor Greitens.”Whatever its roots, fear is a powerful motivator. Show Me Values began gobbling up ad time like Skittles, becoming the race’s biggest spender on TV. The spots detailing the abuse allegations by Mr. Greitens’s ex-wife appear particularly devastating. It seems that, with the proper message — and money to drive that message home — even the most flamboyant MAGA candidates can perhaps be deflated.Mr. Trump did not pioneer the brazen-it-out strategy being attempted by Mr. Greitens. But he perfected and popularized it, and under his reign, the G.O.P. has grown ever more willing to tolerate its politicians’ sketchy, creepy, violent and possibly illegal behavior, as long as they toed the line.Just look at Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, who won his primary in May, putting him on a glide path to a third term. Republican voters stuck by him despite his having been under indictment on charges of securities fraud and other naughtiness since 2015 and, in 2020, having had multiple staff members ask federal authorities to investigate him for a smorgasbord of “potential criminal offenses.”And for sheer MAGA shamelessness, it’s hard to top Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Panhandle’s trash-talking mini-Trump. It takes real moxie to fund-raise off the fact that one is being investigated by the feds on suspicion of child sex trafficking. But that is how Matt rolls, and his voters seem cool with it.This is not the mark of a healthy political party. Neither is it sustainable. Republican leaders need to get serious about reining in the Frankenstein’s monsters they have so long nurtured — before the party devolves even further into a circus of thugs, grifters and conspiracy nutters. This Tuesday, Missouri voters will, hopefully, take a baby step in that direction.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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      Eric Greitens Faces Ad Blitz and a Growing Threat to His Political Future

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      If Eric Greitens, a retired Navy SEAL and former Rhodes scholar who resigned in disgrace four years ago as governor of Missouri, loses his bid for a Senate seat in next week’s Republican primary, his defeat will be a lesson that the laws of political gravity do, in fact, still apply.A late advertising onslaught highlighting Mr. Greitens’s past scandals blanketed the airwaves over the last few weeks, funded by donors from his own party. The barrage of attack ads has taken the former governor from a seemingly invulnerable lead in the polls to a position somewhere behind Eric Schmitt, the state’s attorney general.Mr. Greitens, a political chameleon who first ran for office in 2016 as an anti-establishment outsider, only to lose his perch two years later, reinvented himself as an “ultra-MAGA” warrior as he sought to replace Senator Roy Blunt, who is retiring.But his past conduct and aggressive campaign posture have alienated many traditional conservatives in Missouri, while failing to attract their intended audience of one: former President Donald J. Trump, who has not endorsed anyone in the bitterly contested Aug. 2 primary.That decision has left a vacuum that has been filled by Mr. Greitens’s many adversaries, who pooled their resources in a last-ditch attempt to end his political career once and for all. Local donors enlisted Johnny DeStefano, a Kansas City-bred political operative who worked in Mr. Trump’s White House, to lead Show Me Values, a super PAC whose negative ads appear to have done real damage to Mr. Greitens’s standing with voters.Rene Artman, the chairwoman of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee, said Mr. Greitens’s biggest liability was his treatment of women, after allegations of abuse from his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, and a former hairdresser with whom he had a sexual relationship.Ms. Artman and other female Republican leaders in the state had tried and failed to pressure the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party to come out more forcefully against Mr. Greitens’s candidacy.“We are not to stand in judgment, but marriage vows are the most sacred,” she said. “If you can’t keep those vows, if you have betrayed those vows, how can I believe any promises you make to me as a senator?”At campaign events like this one in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Greitens has cast himself as a political outsider being targeted by establishment enemies.Chase Castor for The New York TimesIn response, Mr. Greitens has lashed out against his perceived enemies, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whom he accused without evidence of scheming in Washington to defeat him; Karl Rove, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush who has quietly encouraged donors and political operatives in Missouri to ensure that Mr. Greitens is defeated; and his own ex-wife, who finalized their divorce in 2020 and moved to Texas, where she is now seeking to relocate the ongoing battle over custody of their two children.She has made sworn allegations of domestic abuse that have reverberated during the campaign, underscoring Mr. Greitens’s image in Missouri as a man with a history of violent behavior.Asked for comment, Mr. Greitens’s lawyer in the custody dispute said only that “Eric’s primary focus is on protecting the children” and pointed to a statement from March that questioned Ms. Greitens’s motives.Dylan Johnson, a spokesman for Mr. Greitens’s campaign, said, “Governor Greitens has received tremendous support from the grass-roots,” adding, “We have seen biased and fake polling throughout U.S. Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and these same pollsters are playing the same game in Missouri.”Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      Eric Greitens to Face New G.O.P. Attacks in Missouri Senate Race

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      The long-awaited effort to stop Eric Greitens from becoming the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri is finally getting underway.The big question is whether it’s too late to stop him.A robust, well-financed Republican campaign to highlight Greitens’s personal scandals — which include allegations of domestic and sexual abuse — is set to begin on Friday, starting with at least $1 million in paid television ads.Politico first reported the arrival of the new super PAC, Show Me Values, which is being led by Johnny DeStefano, a longtime aide to Representative John Boehner of Ohio who became a powerful figure inside the Trump White House.The leaders of the drive to halt Greitens, which is being spearheaded by a coalition of in-state donors, hope to fundamentally alter the dynamics of a race that has been stagnant for months by sounding a drumbeat of allegations about disturbing and erratic behavior by the former Missouri governor.But as they look to avoid jeopardizing what is most likely a safe Republican Senate seat, they face a tight timeline ahead of Missouri’s Aug. 2 primary, and it is unclear whether new details about Greitens’s alleged conduct will resonate with G.O.P. voters.The front-runner: Eric GreitensGreitens’s history has long been subject to scrutiny — and new accusations have steadily emerged.In 2018, he resigned as governor amid allegations that he had sexually abused a hair stylist with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Greitens denies the accusations, which the woman detailed in sworn testimony during an impeachment inquiry led by fellow Republicans in the state.His ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, left him after those allegations came to light and moved to Texas. The couple are now waging a bitter court battle over custody of their elementary-school-age children.Sheena Greitens, second from left, during a court session in her child custody case against her former husband on Thursday in Columbia, Mo.David A. Lieb/Associated PressIn a sworn affidavit released in April, Greitens accused her former husband of a pattern of abusive behavior, including allegedly “cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face” and “yanking him around by his hair.”The former governor has denied all wrongdoing, and on Thursday his campaign pointed to a previous statement provided to The New York Times by Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate. The alleged abusive behavior “never happened,” Parlatore said.At a court hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for Sheena Greitens, Helen Wade, said that her client had received death threats this week after the former governor released a violent new political video that shows him armed with a shotgun and storming a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, along with what appears to be a SWAT team wielding military-style rifles. Wade did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment on Thursday.The kingmaker: Rex SinquefieldFor now, Greitens is ahead of his nearest opponent, Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, by about 3.5 percentage points, polling averages of the race show.Schmitt has the backing of Save Missouri Values, a super PAC bankrolled by Rex Sinquefield, a wealthy retired investor who is a dominant player in state politics.Sinquefield, who is also the primary funder of Show Me Values, the new anti-Greitens super PAC, is best known for his devotion to three “idiosyncratic passions,” according to a critical 2014 profile in Politico Magazine: “promoting chess, dismantling the traditional public school system and eliminating income taxes.”Until now in the Senate primary campaign, not one television ad has aired laying out Sheena Greitens’s most recent allegations. One of the new ads from Show Me Values will focus on her accusations, saying that Eric Greitens has faced “scandal after scandal,” according to two people familiar with its contents.The most effective knock on Greitens with likely Republican primary voters in Missouri, polling conducted by a rival campaign discovered, might sound a bit surprising.It involved informing them that he had previously identified as a Democrat and traveled to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to hear a young, progressive senator named Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination for president.The X Factor: TrumpThe president’s endorsement could be decisive — and everybody knows it.Allies of both Schmitt and Representative Vicky Hartzler, another Senate candidate who is closely trailing Schmitt in most polling, have been cautioning Trump and his allies against backing Greitens.One argument that seems to resonate with the former president, according to people who have spoken with him: Don’t risk upsetting your pristine endorsement record in 2022 Senate races.On Wednesday, after Katie Britt defeated Representative Mo Brooks in a G.O.P. primary runoff for a Senate seat in Alabama, Trump boasted that his scorecard remained perfect in Senate primaries this year.“With the great ALABAMA win by Katie Britt tonight, I am pleased to announce that WE (MAGA!) are 12 WINS & ZERO LOSSES in U.S. Senate Primary races this cycle,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media site. He made no mention of the fact that he had previously endorsed Brooks before souring on his candidacy.Eric Schmitt, left, the attorney general of Missouri, is hoping for a surge to win the Republican nomination for Senate.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn Missouri, Trump’s notoriously chaotic decision-making process is complicated by the fact that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s fiancée, are backing Greitens.The younger Trump has advised his father to allow the primary to develop further before endorsing anyone, according to two people familiar with his thinking. A spokesman for Trump said that, to his knowledge, an endorsement was not “imminent,” and that he had not seen any draft announcements.Allies of Greitens are eager to link any effort to attack him to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who is a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McConnell’s team did not return phone calls on Thursday, but there is no evidence that his allies have any connection to the new super PAC.Republicans in Washington worry that if Greitens manages to win the primary, he might saddle their party with an embarrassing, and expensive, candidate who could throw the seat to Democrats.Guilfoyle is the national finance chair of Greitens’s campaign. Despite her help, his campaign has struggled to raise money, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, forcing him to rely almost exclusively on one Republican donor — the billionaire shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, who has given at least $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Greitens’s candidacy.The potential sleeper: Josh HawleyAllies argue that Hartzler, a House lawmaker from western Missouri, has the best chance at beating Greitens. They are counting on the clout of Josh Hawley, the arch-conservative freshman senator who holds the state’s other Senate seat.Her campaign this week began airing a new ad promoting the endorsement of Hawley, who has capitalized on his opposition to the certification of the 2020 election results to earn Trump’s favor and build a nationwide grass-roots donor base.Polls show that Hawley is the state’s most popular politician, and the Hartzler campaign hopes to use his fund-raising prowess and omnipresence on Fox News to move voters in the state’s socially conservative hinterlands. Hawley raised about $400,000 for the campaign over a span of four days, his aides said.“There’s a lot of Republicans running for the Senate,” Hawley says in the ad. “I know all of them.”That’s an understatement: Hawley was the attorney general of Missouri while Greitens was governor, and the two men are not exactly friends.Josh Hawley, left, and Eric Greitens, right, with Steven Mnuchin at a Trump rally in St. Louis in 2017. Whitney Curtis/Getty ImagesIn 2018, Hawley accused Greitens of misusing the donor list of his veterans charity and called on him to resign over the allegations involving the hair stylist.The move helped sideline Greitens, a potential rival for Missouri’s other Senate seat, which Hawley assumed after defeating Claire McCaskill, the incumbent Democrat, in 2018.“Fortunately for Josh,” Greitens shot back at the time, “he’s better at press conferences than the law.”What to read tonightThe Jan. 6 committee revealed on Thursday that a White House lawyer told Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department attorney pushing a Trump-backed plan to subvert the 2020 election results, that he would be committing a felony if he helped to overturn the outcome. Catch up with our live coverage of the day’s big hearing here.In a separate development, federal investigators carried out a predawn search on Clark’s home in connection with the Justice Department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 contest, Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman report.The day’s other big political news: The Supreme Court struck down New York’s gun law, most likely limiting the ability of state and local governments to restrict guns outside the home. Hours later, the Senate advanced a bipartisan gun safety bill that responded to a spate of mass shootings.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      In Ad, Shotgun-Toting Greitens Asks Voters to Go ‘RINO Hunting’

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      A right-wing Senate candidate accompanies a squad of heavily armed men as they storm a home looking for ‘Republicans in name only.’Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Missouri, released a violent new political advertisement on Monday showing himself racking a shotgun and accompanying a team of men armed with assault rifles as they stormed — SWAT team-style — into a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only.“Join the MAGA crew,” Mr. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, declares in the ad. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”The ad by Mr. Greitens was just the latest but perhaps most menacing in a long line of Republican campaign ads featuring firearms and seeking to equate hard-core conservatism with the use of deadly weapons.It was posted online less than a week after the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol showed how threats by former President Donald J. Trump against his own vice president, Mike Pence, had helped to instigate the mob attack on the building.During a hearing by the committee on Thursday, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, suggested that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”The use of violent rhetoric has steadily increased in Republican circles in recent months as threats and aggressive imagery have become more commonplace in community meeting rooms, congressional offices and on the campaign trail.While much of the violent speech and image-making by Republicans has been aimed at Democrats, some of it, as in Mr. Greitens’s ad, has been focused on fellow party members thought to be insufficiently conservative.On Sunday, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, published a letter addressed to his wife from someone who had threatened to execute the couple.By midafternoon on Monday, Twitter had hidden Mr. Greitens’ new ad behind a warning saying that it violated rules about “abusive behavior.” Facebook removed the ad altogether.Mr. Greitens’s campaign made no apologies for it, however. “If anyone doesn’t get the metaphor, they are either lying or dumb,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager.The ad by Mr. Greitens, a former Missouri governor, comes as his campaign for Senate has stumbled following lurid allegations of blackmail, sexual misconduct and child abuse. In March, Mr. Greitens’s former wife, Sheena Greitens, accused him of abusive behavior, including an incident she recounted that loosened one of their son’s teeth. A number of Republicans, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, called on Mr. Greitens then to quit the race.Mr. Greitens has sought an endorsement from Mr. Trump, so far without success. His campaign chair is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.Experts have warned that violent rhetoric can often result in actual physical violence.“When individuals feel more confident and legitimate in voicing violent sentiments, it can encourage others to feel more confident in making actual violence easier,” said Robert Pape, who studies political violence at the University of Chicago. “Unfortunately, this is a self-reinforcing spiral.”Some Republicans criticized Mr. Greitens for posting the ad.“Every Republican should denounce this sick and dangerous ad from Eric Greitens,” Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia, said on Monday. “This is just a taste of the ‘clear and present danger’ that Judge Luttig talked about last week.” More

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      As G.O.P. Candidates Face Accusations, Rivals Tread Carefully

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      In several states, Republican candidates are contending with allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault. Few of their primary rivals want to talk about it.WASHINGTON — When fresh allegations of domestic violence were lodged against former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month, one of his Republican rivals for the state’s open Senate seat, Representative Vicky Hartzler, stepped up and called for him to end his campaign.Then she moved on to an issue perhaps more resonant with Republican primary voters: transgender women in sports.“Eric Greitens is a toxic candidate unfit to hold office,” Michael Hafner, a spokesman for Ms. Hartzler’s Senate campaign, said, before declaring the central message of her campaign: “Missouri family values, freedom, and taking back our country.”In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault — accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. But in an era of Republican politics when Donald J. Trump could survive and thrive amid accusations of sexual assault, opposing candidates are finding little traction in dwelling on the issues.Political scientists who have studied Republican voting since the rise of Trumpism are not surprised that accused candidates have soldiered on — and that their primary rivals have approached the accusations tepidly. In this fiercely partisan moment, concerns about personal behavior are dwarfed by the struggle between Republicans and Democrats, which Republican men and women see as life-or-death. Increasingly, Republicans cast accusations of sexual misconduct as an attempt by liberals to silence conservatives.The candidates who do speak of their opponents’ domestic violence and assault allegations often raise them not as disqualifications in looming Republican primaries, but as matters ripe for exploitation by Democrats in the fall.“It’s a horrible problem; he’ll never be elected, and that’s the educational process we’re going through right now,” Gary Black, Georgia’s agriculture commissioner, said of domestic violence and assault allegations leveled at Herschel Walker, his Trump-backed Republican rival to take on Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in November. “There’s a great desire for Republicans to get their seat back. Electability is going to be the issue over the next six weeks.”Herschel Walker, a Trump-backed Senate candidate in Georgia, has owned up to accusations of violence against his wife but has denied the accusations of violent threats against two other women.Audra Melton for The New York TimesEric Greitens resigned as Missouri’s governor after a sexual misconduct scandal, and is facing domestic violence allegations amid his current Senate campaign.Jeff Roberson/Associated PressDemocrats, including President Biden and Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, have weathered their own accusations of misconduct in the past — and where such charges have proven difficult to discount, the party has shown itself more willing to jettison its candidates.The accusations facing some Republican men are so stark that they raise the question: What would disqualify a candidate in a Republican primary? Mr. Greitens resigned as Missouri’s governor after a hairdresser testified under oath in 2018 that he had taped her hands to pull-up rings in his basement, blindfolded her, stripped her clothes off and taken a photo of her, which he threatened to release if she revealed their affair.Amid his current Senate campaign, Mr. Greitens was accused last month in a sworn affidavit from his former wife that he had violently abused her and had hit one of their sons as his governorship unraveled. Still, a poll taken after the accusations came to light showed Mr. Greitens neck and neck with Ms. Hartzler and Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s attorney general.Mr. Walker, a former college and pro football star who has the backing not only of Mr. Trump but also much of the Republican establishment, has been accused by his ex-wife of attacking her in bed, choking her and threatening to kill her. Mr. Walker doesn’t deny the assault and has said he was suffering from mental illness.Mallory Blount, a spokeswoman for Mr. Walker’s campaign, said he “emphatically denies” the “false claims” from another woman who said he had been her longtime boyfriend and that when she broke up with him, he had threatened to kill her and himself. Ms. Blount also said he has denied a violent stalking charge by a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.Mr. Walker “has owned up to his mistakes, sought forgiveness, gotten treatment, and dedicated his life to helping others who are struggling,” Ms. Blount said, condemning the media for surfacing past allegations.Max Miller, another Trump-backed candidate and a former White House aide running for an Ohio House seat, was accused by one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, of hitting her the day they broke up. Mr. Miller denied the allegation, then sued Ms. Grisham for defamation, accusing her of making “libelous and defamatory false statements.” His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.“It used to be that being accused of domestic violence was an automatic disqualifier, regardless of party,” Ms. Grisham’s lawyer, Adam VanHo, said. “And to turn around and sue to silence your accuser was even more abhorrent.”Max Miller, a Trump-backed candidate for an Ohio House seat, was accused by a former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, above, of hitting her after they broke up. He then sued her for defamation.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Thursday, a Republican state senator in Nebraska, Julie Slama, accused a leading Republican candidate for governor in that state, Charles Herbster, of sexually assaulting her three years ago when she was 22, saying in a statement that she had “prayed I would never have to relive this trauma.” Mr. Herbster denied the charges, claiming he was being targeted by political rivals. He linked himself to others who have beaten back similar accusations.“They did it with Brett Kavanaugh. They certainly did it with Donald J. Trump and now they’re trying to do it with Charles W. Herbster,” he told a local radio station.In Missouri, Mr. Greitens’s defiance spurred Rene Artman, who chairs the Republican central committee of St. Louis County, to organize other Republican women to pressure the party chairman, Nick Myers, to demand Mr. Greitens withdraw.“We’ve heard not a thing, not a thing,” she said on Friday. “This is the breakdown of society. When you take morals and God out of country, this is what happens. I don’t think you can blame this on Trump whatsoever.”Republican candidates, by and large, have remained defiant. One exception is Sean Parnell, Mr. Trump’s pick for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, who suspended his campaign after his estranged wife testified that he had repeatedly abused her and their children.Political scientists are not surprised by Republicans’ tolerance for accusations. Charges of misogyny, sexual harassment and even domestic abuse have “become deeply partisan in terms of beliefs about what is acceptable and what is appropriate,” said Kelly Dittmar, a professor at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “And now it’s fallen into the talk of ‘cancel culture’ in the broader society.”It was widely believed that Mr. Trump’s own confession, caught on an infamous video recorded for “Access Hollywood,” that he routinely grabbed women by the genitals — and the plethora of accusations that followed — would drive away women voters.But in 2016, 88 percent of Republican women voted for Mr. Trump, just a percentage point below the share of Republican men who did. Even in 2018, when women were widely seen as having delivered the House to Democrats in response to the Trump presidency, Republican women were no more likely to vote for Democrats than they had been two years before, said Erin C. Cassese, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware who studies women’s voting patterns.The #MeToo movement and the current debate over transgender rights and education are only widening the gap between Republican women and women who identify as Democrats and independents, Prof. Cassese said. For female candidates, appeals to gender solidarity or attacks on misogyny do not seem to work in Republican primaries.“It’s very hard to make those appeals, even for women candidates appealing to women,” she said. “We don’t have any sense of what messages might work.”Jane Timken, the only woman in the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Ohio, chided her male rivals in an advertisement. Andrew Spear/Getty ImagesJane Timken, the only woman in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, has injected gender into the race — though delicately. In February, she released an advertisement chiding her male rivals: “We all know guys who overcompensate for their inadequacies, and that description fits the guys in the Senate race to a T.”But in an interview on Friday, she explicitly dismissed the issue of gender. “They’re not bad male candidates. They’re just bad candidates,” she said of her opponents, adding that the mistreatment of women is “not an issue that I’m campaigning on. I’m campaigning on the Biden failed policies of border security, inflation and jobs.”In the Trump era, the men who are accused of wrongdoing have become adept at framing themselves as the victims of a broader conspiracy or an intolerant society. Mr. Greitens has blamed George W. Bush’s former political aide, Karl Rove; the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell; even the liberal philanthropist George Soros for the release of his ex-wife’s abuse allegations. His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Republicans running against those accused say they do see an opening, as long as it’s navigated carefully. Representative Billy Long, who is running in the Missouri Republican Senate primary, emphasized the “$400,000 or so in costs, fines and penalties” that state taxpayers have already shouldered for investigations into Mr. Greitens’s activities. Then there’s the ongoing child custody fight between Mr. Greitens and his ex-wife.“If domestic violence is proven true, he’s toast,” Mr. Long said.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Eric Greitens Tests the Limits of the Trump Scandal-Survival Playbook

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      A leading Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri, Greitens faces new allegations from his ex-wife that join a long list of controversies. But for now, he’s staying in the race.Lurid allegations of blackmail, sexual misconduct and child abuse would doom most politicians.Not Eric Greitens. Or at least not yet.Until recently, the former Missouri governor was the undisputed leader of the state’s Senate race, despite facing years of scandals. Republicans have urged him to drop out amid fears that his possible victory in the Aug. 2 primary could hand a seat in the chamber to Democrats — or at least force the G.O.P. to stomach an unpalatable candidate in a state that should be undisputed Republican turf.Pressure has grown on Greitens in recent weeks over allegations made in court filings by his ex-wife, Sheena Chestnut Greitens. In a statement to a Missouri judge first published on Tuesday, she said he had become “unhinged” and “threatening.”Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, had previously accused her former husband of abusive behavior, including an alleged incident that loosened one of their son’s teeth. In her new statement, she said she stood ready to provide “photographic evidence” of the child’s injuries “at the appropriate time.”Instead of stepping aside, Eric Greitens has made a brazen attempt to defy political gravity. Short on cash and bereft of allies, he has vowed to fight on, arguing without evidence that national Republican figures are conspiring with his ex-wife to sully his reputation, which she denies.“I want to tell you directly, Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell,” Greitens said late last month in a video shared on his social media accounts. “Hear me now. You are disgusting cowards. And we are coming for you.”Greitens has denied all wrongdoing, and on Tuesday, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate, said in a statement that the alleged abusive behavior “never happened” and accused Sheena Greitens of lying.A shrinking base of supportNews of Sheena Greitens’s latest statement rippled through Republican political circles in Missouri, where anxiety over the former governor’s bid to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt was already extremely high. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar, resigned as governor in 2018 amid allegations that he had tied up his former hairdresser, taken an explicit photo of her and threatened to make it public if she revealed their sexual affair.“The latest revelations that hit this morning will upend his candidacy and will mean catastrophic shrinkage in his effort,” said Peter Kinder, a Republican former Missouri lieutenant governor who is supporting one of Greitens’s opponents, Representative Vicky Hartzler. The other major contender in the Republican primary is Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who has the backing of some in the state party establishment.There are some signs that Greitens’s support is softening. The latest public poll of the primary, by the Trafalgar Group, showed Greitens falling into second place among likely primary voters for the first time. Another recent survey commissioned by Schmitt’s campaign showed similar results. And on Saturday, in what some saw as evidence of his growing difficulties, Greitens skipped a Republican Party event in Taney County, one of the bigger annual gatherings of activists in the state. The turmoil in the Republican primary has complicated Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome. Some party insiders had feared that Trump would endorse Greitens, who has tailored his campaign message around “defending President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies” and has questioned the 2020 presidential election results.After the previous round of allegations by Sheena Greitens, Trump issued a statement praising “the big, loud and proud personality of Congressman Billy Long,” who is also running for the Missouri Senate seat but has failed to gain much traction. “This is not an Endorsement, but I’m just askin’?” Trump said.Eric Greitens has struggled to raise money, with finance reports showing that his campaign had less than $300,000 in the bank as of January. Super PACs supporting Greitens have received large donations from two Republican billionaires, Richard Uihlein, a shipping magnate, and Bernard Marcus, a founder of Home Depot. Greitens has also brought in nearly $900,000 through his joint fund-raising committee, and a spokesman said his upcoming fund-raising report would show that the campaign had raised a “six-figure” sum of money since Sheena Greitens made her first statement.But James Harris, a Republican lobbyist who has been talking with Missouri donors and activists about the race, said, “They’re really just done with him.” Harris recounted a conversation with a donor who recently turned down a fund-raising pitch by Greitens, saying his wife would “kill me” if he gave money to the former governor.And now, the entry into the race of an heiress to a beer-company fortune threatens to make the general election competitive.Trudy Busch Valentine, an heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, is a well-known donor in Missouri.Hillary Levin/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressDemocrats’ dilemma: The heiress or the veteran?Republicans are warily eyeing the newly announced campaign of Trudy Busch Valentine, who is the daughter of August Busch Jr., the Anheuser-Busch beer baron who died in 1989.A registered nurse who grew up on her family’s 281-acre estate, Grant’s Farm, Busch Valentine is making empathy central to her campaign message.“It seems we have lost our ability to be understanding and compassionate for each other,” she said in her announcement video. “We have so much more that unites us than divides us.”In the video, she also spoke about her son’s death in 2020 from opioid abuse.“Twenty months ago, my oldest son died of an opioid overdose,” Busch Valentine said. “Matt’s death brought us so much sadness, but his death also reignites the passion in me to make a positive difference for others, this time on a larger scale.”Busch Valentine has never held elected office, but she’s a well-known donor in Missouri. Democrats expect her to plow her personal fortune into her campaign, with a focus on winning back some of the white rural voters who have defected to Republicans in recent elections. She is close friends with Claire McCaskill, the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in Missouri.Busch Valentine is already facing questions about her past. And she’ll first have to dispatch her main rival in the Democratic primary, Lucas Kunce, a retired Marine and former Pentagon official whose campaign could hardly be more different.In an interview, Kunce said he was running to “fundamentally change who has power in this country.” He explained how he grew up keenly aware of his parents’ struggles with money — recalling how his family went bankrupt when his sister was born — and laughingly described participating in medical experiments at a V.A. hospital to earn money while he was in college.A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kunce said he was disgusted by how American politicians had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on those conflicts while starving their own communities of resources.“There’s always money for war and Wall Street, never for stuff back home,” he said.Kunce has sworn off money from corporate PACs and federal lobbyists, and his campaign says it has raised nearly $3 million, primarily from grass-roots donations online. He’s as critical of Democrats as he is of Republicans; voters in Missouri have lost faith in both parties, he said.“People feel betrayed by Democrats,” Kunce said. “They think they don’t stand up for working people anymore.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Ex-Wife of Eric Greitens, Missouri Senate Candidate, Accuses Him of Abuse 

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      Sheena Greitens said in an affidavit that her former husband had physically abused both her and their young son. Mr. Greitens, a former governor of Missouri, denied the accusation.The former wife of Eric Greitens, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, has accused him of physically abusing her and one of their sons in a sworn affidavit that could have serious implications in the race for the seat of Senator Roy Blunt, who is retiring.Mr. Greitens, whose campaign denied the allegations on Monday, abruptly resigned as governor in 2018 amid a swirling scandal that involved a sexual relationship with his former hairdresser and allegations that he had taken an explicit photograph of her without her permission. He was also accused by prosecutors of misusing his charity’s donor list for political purposes.But until the latest revelation, his attempt at a political comeback had appeared improbably successful, despite efforts by Missouri’s Republican establishment to block it. Mr. Greitens, 47, a former Navy SEAL, had aligned squarely with former President Donald J. Trump, cheered on anti-vaccine and anti-mask protesters, and surged to the lead in a crowded Republican primary race for a key open Senate seat.He now faces fresh calls from his opponents to drop out, lest he turn a reliably red seat competitive in November.Representative Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, who is running against Mr. Greitens in the Republican primary and has garnered support from many top state officials, issued a statement accusing Mr. Greitens of “a pattern of criminal behavior that makes Eric unfit to hold any public office.”“He should drop out of the U.S. Senate race immediately,” she said. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who as the state’s attorney general in 2018 pressed Mr. Greitens to resign as governor, wrote on Twitter, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”Part of a continuing child custody dispute, the sworn affidavit from Sheena Chestnut Greitens, 39, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, accused Mr. Greitens of physical abuse and “unstable and coercive behavior.” The 41-page affidavit, filed on Monday in Boone County Circuit Court in Missouri, said that Mr. Greitens had become increasingly violent in 2018 as his sex scandal threatened to end a once-promising political rise that he hoped would take him to the White House.“Prior to our divorce, during an argument in late April 2018, Eric knocked me down and confiscated my cellphone, wallet and keys so that I was unable to call for help or extricate myself and our children from our home,” wrote Dr. Greitens, who has two young sons with Mr. Greitens and whose divorce from him became final in May 2020.She added that his “behavior included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”In a statement on Monday, Mr. Greitens’s campaign denied the allegations and said that they were politically motivated. The statement said that Dr. Greitens was “engaged in a last-ditch attempt to vindictively destroy her ex-husband.” Mr. Greitens later issued a personal statement saying he would continue “fighting for the truth and against completely fabricated, baseless allegations.” A lawyer for Dr. Greitens did not respond to requests for comment on Monday about the affidavit, which was reported earlier by The Associated Press. Representative Billy Long of Missouri, another Republican candidate for the Senate seat, said on Monday that he was “shocked and appalled” by the affidavit, adding that Mr. Greitens was “clearly unfit to represent” their state in the Senate.Mr. Greitens’s lead in the polls has flummoxed other Republicans like Mr. Long, considering that the 2018 investigation of Mr. Greitens was led by Republicans and looming impeachment proceedings would have been carried out by the Republican-controlled legislature.In 2018, Mr. Greitens’s former hairdresser described an alarming sexual encounter in which, she said, he had taken a photo of her and threatened to share it if she told anyone about their affair. Around the same time, questions began to emerge about whether he had used the donor list of a veterans charity he founded to help his political campaign in 2016.In her affidavit, Dr. Greitens said her husband had bought a gun but refused to tell her where he had hidden it. She said he had threatened to kill himself “unless I provided specific public political support to him,” despite accusations of infidelity that she said he had admitted to, even as she said he threatened her with legal action if she revealed that confession.Mr. Greitens is one of several Republican candidates aligned with Mr. Trump who have drawn concerns from top party leaders in Washington, though the former president has yet to endorse anyone in the Missouri race. In November, Sean Parnell, a Trump-endorsed candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat being vacated by Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican, dropped out of that contest after a judge ruled in favor of his estranged wife in a custody fight that also involved allegations of abuse. In Ohio, a former Trump White House aide, Max Miller, challenged Representative Anthony Gonzalez after Mr. Gonzalez voted to impeach Mr. Trump, helping to push the incumbent into retirement. Mr. Miller is now suing an ex-girlfriend and former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, after she accused him of physical abuse.In December, another Trump-backed Senate candidate, the former professional football player Herschel Walker, who is running in Georgia, told Axios he was “accountable” for past violent behavior toward his former wife, Cindy Grossman. However, his campaign said he still denied accusations from two other women who said he had displayed threatening behavior toward them.Hannah Norton contributed reporting. More