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    Trump Says There Was ‘No Conflict’ at Cemetery, Despite Official Accounts

    Former President Donald J. Trump insisted in a radio interview on Tuesday that “there was no conflict” between members of his campaign team and an official at Arlington National Cemetery, contradicting his campaign’s previous statements about the episode last week and Army officials’ account.“If you look at just the records, there was no conflict, there was no fight, there was no anything,” Mr. Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Hours earlier, Mr. Trump on his social media site claimed “there was no conflict or ‘fighting’” at the cemetery, calling the story, without evidence, “made up” by the White House.It was the latest effort by the Trump campaign to defend itself after a physical altercation between a Trump aide and a cemetery official that was set off by the campaign’s defying of a ban on political campaigning at the cemetery in Virginia during Mr. Trump’s visit last week.Army officials said the cemetery employee had been “abruptly pushed aside” by a Trump campaign aide. The Trump campaign has said there was “no physical altercation” but did not deny there was a dispute. Campaign officials also previously attacked and insulted the cemetery official and said they were prepared to release footage of the episode, though the campaign has not yet done so after repeated requests.A woman who works at the cemetery filed an incident report with the military authorities over the altercation. But the woman, who has not been identified but was described as a seasoned official at the cemetery, later declined to press charges. Military officials said she feared retaliation from Trump supporters if her identity became known as part of any formal investigation.Still, Mr. Trump pointed to her lack of a public statement as evidence that the conflict never took place. “Notice that the person representing now doesn’t want to talk,” he said, and added, referring incorrectly to the cemetery official’s gender, “He doesn’t want to speak or talk.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tucker Carlson, Ousted by Fox, Roars Into Milwaukee as a Top Trump Ally

    After time away from the spotlight, the right-wing host is increasingly welcomed by Trump’s inner circle. He also made a surprise visit to Fox’s convention studio.All of a sudden, Tucker Carlson has roared back to the forefront of Republican politics.Once the top-rated anchor on Fox News — only to be abruptly ousted 15 months ago, his national platform yanked out from under his feet — Mr. Carlson has made an improbable re-emergence into America’s living rooms at this week’s Republican National Convention.He was the first person to greet Donald J. Trump after the former president’s dramatic entrance in the convention hall on Monday, and cameras later caught them joking together in Mr. Trump’s friends and family box, just two seats apart. He is even returning to prime time: Mr. Carlson is set to deliver a televised address to the convention on Thursday in a coveted slot shortly before Mr. Trump accepts his party’s nomination.Mr. Carlson once electrified Fox viewers with racial grievances and flimflam conspiracy theories. Spurned by the network, he found mixed success with a self-produced video series on X and a subscription streaming service that failed to generate much buzz, although a recent pivot to lengthy, Joe Roganesque podcasts has attracted more listeners.But behind the scenes over the past year, Mr. Carlson has become more deeply allied with Mr. Trump than at any point in his long relationship with the former president, a man for whom the broadcaster once expressed deep ambivalence.Mr. Carlson lobbied Mr. Trump to select Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who had been a frequent guest on his Fox show, as his running mate, and he helped broker a meeting in Milwaukee between Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate.He and a longtime producer of his shows, Justin Wells, recently visited Mar-a-Lago to pitch Mr. Trump on a fly-on-the-wall docuseries about his campaign. Mr. Trump granted access, and the series is set to be released on Mr. Carlson’s streaming platform before the election; Mr. Wells and a cameraman were filming several feet away from the former president in Pennsylvania on Saturday when he was shot by a would-be assassin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump and Allies Assail Conviction With Faulty Claims

    After former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty, he and a number of conservative figures in the news media and lawmakers on the right have spread false and misleading claims about the Manhattan case.After former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, he instantly rejected the verdict and assailed the judge and criminal justice system.His loyalists in the conservative news media and Congress quickly followed suit, echoing his baseless assertions that he had fallen victim to a politically motivated sham trial.The display of unity reflected the extent of Mr. Trump’s hold over his base.The former president and his supporters have singled out the judge who presided over the case, denigrated the judicial system and distorted the circumstances of the charges against him and his subsequent conviction.Here’s a fact check of some of their claims.What Was Said“We had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge.”— Mr. Trump in a news conference on Friday at Trump Tower in ManhattanThis is exaggerated. For over a year, Mr. Trump and his allies have said Justice Juan M. Merchan should not preside over the case because of his daughter’s line of work. Loren Merchan, the daughter, served as the president of a digital campaign strategy agency that has done work for many prominent Democrats, including Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign.Experts in judicial ethics have said Ms. Merchan’s work is not sufficient grounds for recusal. When Mr. Trump’s legal team sought his recusal because of his daughter, Justice Merchan sought counsel from the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which said it did not see any conflict of interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    On Live TV, Guardian Angels Tackle Man Sliwa Misidentified as Migrant

    “We’ve got to take back 42nd Street,” Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the anti-crime group, said on “Hannity” as the Guardian Angels pushed a man to the ground.The Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was being interviewed live from Times Square on Tuesday night by the Fox News host Sean Hannity when their exchange took a startling turn.The topic was what both men seemed to agree was a migrant-fueled wave of crime and chaos that they claimed had overtaken New York amid a surge of arrivals into the city from the southern border over the past two years.Suddenly, Mr. Sliwa had a prime-time example. As he spoke, the half-dozen red-jacketed Angels flanking him slipped out of the frame.“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner of 42nd and Seventh where all this is taking place,” Mr. Sliwa said, pointing off camera.“Can you pan the camera?” Mr. Hannity asked his cameraman.The cameraman swung around and captured the Angels confronting a slightly built man in a hooded sweatshirt, throwing him to the ground and putting him in a headlock.“He is out of control,” Mr. Sliwa said as the camera turned away and Mr. Hannity shifted to criticizing President Biden over his administration’s border policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Best Sentences of 2023

    Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She also assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More

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    Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate

    Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions.When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to “come after” the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “vermin” echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new Trump administration.Mr. Trump himself did little to assuage Americans when his friend Sean Hannity tried to help him out on Fox News this past week. During a town hall-style meeting, Mr. Hannity tossed a seeming softball by asking Mr. Trump to reaffirm that of course he did not intend to abuse his power and use the government to punish enemies. Instead of simply agreeing, Mr. Trump said he would only be a dictator on “Day 1” of a new term.“Trump has made it crystal clear through all his actions and rhetoric that he admires leaders who have forms of authoritarian power, from Putin to Orban to Xi, and that he wants to exercise that kind of power at home,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” referring to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Xi Jinping of China. “History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do,” she added. “We just don’t listen until it is too late.”Despite his public sparring with China’s leaders, President Trump has praised President Xi Jinping for his strongman policies.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTalk about the possible authoritarian quality of a new Trump presidency has suffused the political conversation in the nation’s capital in recent days. A series of reports in The New York Times outlined various plans developed by Mr. Trump’s allies to assert vast power in a new term and detailed how he would be less constrained by constitutional guardrails. The Atlantic published a special issue with 24 contributors forecasting what a second Trump presidency would look like, many of them depicting an autocratic regime.Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who was vice chairwoman of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, published a new book warning that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy. And of course, there was the essay by the historian, Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post that prompted Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, to press the Justice Department to investigate.To be sure, American presidents have stretched their power and been called dictators going back to the early days of the republic. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, were all accused of despotism. Richard M. Nixon was said to have consolidated power in the “imperial presidency.” George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both compared to Hitler.But there is something different about the debate now, more than overheated rhetoric or legitimate disagreements over the boundaries of executive power, something that suggests a fundamental moment of decision in the American experiment. Perhaps it is a manifestation of popular disenchantment with American institutions; only 10 percent of Americans think democracy is working very well, according to a poll in June by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.Perhaps it is a reflection of the extremism and demagoguery that has grown more prevalent in politics in many places around the world. And perhaps it stems from a former president seeking to reclaim his old office who evinces such perplexing affinity for and even envy of autocrats.Mr. Trump once expressed no regret that a quote he shared on social media came from Mussolini and adopted the language of Stalin in calling journalists the “enemies of the people.” He told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things” and later said he wished American generals were like Hitler’s generals.Last December, shortly after opening his comeback campaign, Mr. Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution to remove Mr. Biden immediately and reinstall himself in the White House without waiting for another election. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as whining by liberals who do not like him or his policies and are disingenuously trying to scare voters. They argue that President Biden is the real dictator because his Justice Department is prosecuting his likeliest challenger next year for various alleged crimes, although there is no evidence that Mr. Biden has been personally involved in those decisions and even some former Trump advisers call the indictments legitimate.“The dictator talk by Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans not just to distract them from the failures and weakness of the Biden administration but because of something they are even more afraid of: that a second Trump administration will be far more successful in implementing its agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first,” Fred Fleitz, who served briefly in Mr. Trump’s White House, wrote on the American Greatness website on Friday.Mr. Kagan, a widely respected Brookings Institution scholar and author of numerous books of history, has a long record of support for a muscular foreign policy that hardly strikes many on the left as liberal. But he has been a strong and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump for years. In May 2016, when other Republicans were reconciling themselves to Mr. Trump’s first nomination for president, Mr. Kagan warned that “this is how fascism comes to America.”His essay on Nov. 30 sounded the alarm again. Mr. Trump may have been thwarted in his first term from enacting some of his more radical ideas by more conventional Republican advisers and military officers, Mr. Kagan argued, but he will not surround himself with such figures again and will encounter fewer of the checks and balances that constrained him last time. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as complaints by liberals who are trying to scare voters.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAmong other things, Mr. Kagan cited Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn an election that he had lost, disregarding the will of the voters. And he noted Mr. Trump’s overt discussion of prosecuting opponents and sending the military into the streets to quell protests. “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship,” Mr. Kagan wrote.Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who has courted Mr. Trump’s support and was listed by Axios this past week as a possible vice-presidential running mate next year, took umbrage on behalf of the former president. He dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open rebellion,” seizing on a point in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that Democratic-run states might defy a President Trump.Mr. Vance wrote that “according to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is terrible enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would invariably follow.”Mr. Kagan’s piece did not actually advocate rebellion, but simply forecast the possibility that Democratic governors would stand against Mr. Trump “through a form of nullification” of federal authority. Indeed, he went on to suggest that Republican governors might do the same with Mr. Biden, which he was not advocating either.But Mr. Vance was trying to draw a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. By the Justice Department’s logic in pursuing Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article could be interpreted as “an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.” To make his point clear, he insisted on answers by Jan. 6.Mr. Kagan, who followed his essay with another on Thursday about how to stop the slide to dictatorship that he sees, said the intervention by the senator validated his point. “It is revealing that their first instinct when attacked by a journalist is to suggest that they be locked up,” Mr. Kagan noted in an interview.Aides to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance did not respond to requests for comment. David Shipley, the opinion editor of The Post, defended Mr. Kagan’s work. “We are proud to publish Robert Kagan’s thoughtful essays and we encourage audiences to read both his Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 pieces together — and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “These essays are part of a long Kagan tradition of starting important conversations.”It is a conversation that has months to go with an uncertain ending. In the meantime, no one expects Mr. Garland to take Mr. Vance seriously, including almost certainly Mr. Vance. His letter was a political statement. But it says something about the era that proposing the prosecution of a critic would be seen as a political winner. More

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    Trump Deflects Questions on Retribution and Law-Breaking at Town Hall

    Pressed by Sean Hannity to promise not to abuse power, Donald Trump agreed he wouldn’t, “other than Day 1,” adding: “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”Twice during a town hall on “Fox News” on Tuesday night, Sean Hannity asked former President Donald J. Trump to say categorically that he would not abuse presidential power and retaliate against his political opponents if elected next year.Both times, Mr. Trump declined to give an outright denial.First, Mr. Hannity, the moderator, asked Mr. Trump to respond to concerns raised by recent reporting that has detailed his violent rhetoric on the campaign trail and his vow to use the Justice Department against his political foes.“Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if re-elected president, to abuse power?” Mr. Hannity asked. “To break the law? To use the government to go after people?”Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, deflected. “You mean like they’re using right now?” he responded, an allusion to his claims that President Biden has weaponized the Justice Department against him. He then turned to his frequent campaign-trail lament that he has been indicted more times than the gangster Al Capone.But Mr. Hannity, a longtime Trump ally, was apparently unsatisfied, and five minutes later, he brought up the issue again. “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” he said.“Except for Day 1,” Mr. Trump said breezily. There was the smallest silence. “Except for—” Mr. Hannity responded, sounding a bit flustered.“Look,” Mr. Trump joked to the crowd watching him in Davenport, Iowa. “He’s going crazy.”And even as Mr. Hannity tried to clarify that Mr. Trump had no intention of abusing his office, Mr. Trump did not state a clear aversion to the idea of authoritarian power.“This guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Hannity. “I said, ‘No, no, no — other than Day 1.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”Both exchanges underscored a growing challenge for some on the Trump team who are privately aware that his comments are of growing concern to voters ahead of next year’s general election.The Biden campaign has sought to seize on recent reporting about plans being made by Mr. Trump and his allies that would reshape the American presidency, vastly expanding presidential power and upending central elements of American government and the rule of law.Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said in a statement that Mr. Trump “has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s re-elected, and tonight he said he will be a dictator on Day 1. Americans should believe him.”Mr. Trump’s comments were a stark break from an interview in which he was largely on friendly territory. He and Mr. Hannity have a long relationship, and both of them warmly recalled past conversations they had had over Mr. Trump’s political career.Mr. Hannity also did not ask Mr. Trump about his rivals in the Republican primary, who will face off in a debate on Wednesday that Mr. Trump is skipping to attend a fund-raiser in Florida.Still, Mr. Trump made brief mention of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, criticizing her for taking donations from Democrats, and criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for votes in Congress he took that appeared to support changing Social Security benefits.Jonathan Swan More

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    What a Petty Pair DeSantis and Newsom Made

    It’s remarkable how fixated Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom have been on each other. It’s weird. These two opposite-party governors from opposite coasts of the country have been sparring — repeatedly, haughtily, naughtily — for more than two years. If their debate on Thursday night had been the climactic scene in a Hollywood rom-com, Newsom would have left his lectern, marched purposefully over to DeSantis, cut him off mid-insult and swept him into his arms, the tension between them revealed as equal parts ideological and erotic.That, alas, was not how the event played out. While I occasionally detected a spark in each man’s eyes — cocksure recognizes cocksure and has a grudging respect for it — I more often winced at the strychnine in their voices. Their loathing is sincere. It was there at the start of the debate, when DeSantis, in the first minute of his remarks, managed to mention Newsom’s infamously hypocritical pandemic dinner at the French Laundry. It was there in the middle, when DeSantis brought up the French Laundry again.And, oh, how it was there in Newsom’s wicked mockery of DeSantis’s plummeting promise as a presidential candidate. He noted that he and DeSantis had something “in common,” alluding to the fact that he himself is not making a White House bid. “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.”Newsom didn’t stop there, later saying that DeSantis was pathetically trying to “out-Trump Trump.” “By the way,” he quickly added, “how is that going for you, Ron? You’re down 41 points in your own home state.” And later still, for good measure: “When are you going to drop out and at least give Nikki Haley a shot to take down Donald Trump and this nomination?”Soon, I hope. But that didn’t mean the question was a good look for Newsom — or a good look for America.That was my problem with the Florida and California governors, as well as their face-off, which took place on a stage in Alpharetta, Ga., and was moderated by Sean Hannity and televised live by Fox News. While the gov-on-gov action was billed as a battle of red-state and blue-state worldviews and governing agendas, of the Republican way and the Democratic way, it became even more of a mirror of just how little quarter each side will give the other, how little grace it will show, how spectacularly it fails at constructive and civil dialogue, how profoundly and quickly it descends into pettiness.There was substance, yes — more than at the three Republican presidential debates — but it wasn’t broached honestly and maturely. It was instead an opportunity for selective statistics, flamboyant evasions, quipping, posturing. Each of these self-regarding pols kept altering the angle of his stance, shifting the altitude of his chin, changing his smile from caustic to complacent. It was as if they were rearranging their egos.And the dishonesty extended to Hannity, who front-loaded and stacked the roughly 90 minutes with Republicans’ favorite talking points and their preferred attacks on President Biden. There wasn’t a whisper from Hannity about abortion or DeSantis’s support of a six-week ban until 65 minutes into the event, nor did Hannity press the two candidates on matters of democracy, on the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, on Trump’s attacks on invaluable American institutions, on his flouting of the rule of law.Those issues have immeasurable importance, but they took a back seat to border security, crime, tax rates and Americans’ movement to red states from blue ones. Fox News’s real agenda was to make Newsom’s defense of the Biden administration look like a lost cause. The cable network failed to do so, because Newsom is too forceful a brawler and too nimble a dancer to let that happen.He persuasively described DeSantis as the personification of right-wing, red-state stinginess and spitefulness. DeSantis punishingly cast Newsom as left-wing, blue-state profligacy in the flesh. One exchange late in the debate perfectly captured that dynamic.Feigning charitableness, DeSantis acknowledged: “California does have freedoms that some people don’t, that other states don’t. You have the freedom to defecate in public in California. You have the freedom to pitch a tent on Sunset Boulevard. You have the freedom to create a homeless encampment under a freeway and even light it on fire.” His litany went on.Newsom exuberantly countered it. “I love the rant on freedom,” he said sarcastically. “I mean, here’s a guy who’s criminalizing teachers, criminalizing doctors, criminalizing librarians and criminalizing women who seek their reproductive care.” All excellent points and all reasons, beyond the kinder climate, that I’d pilot my U-Haul toward California before Florida.But neither of the two governors left his analysis there. Just seconds later, they were trading taunts and talking over each other, as they had the whole night, during which each called the other a liar or something akin to it dozens of times.“You’re nothing but a bully,” Newsom said, switching up the slurs.“You’re a bully,” DeSantis shot back. I braced for an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” coda. In its place, I got the indelible image of DeSantis holding up a map that apparently charted the density of human feces in various areas of San Francisco.Neither of them won the debate. Haley did, because nothing about DeSantis’s screechy performance is likely to reverse her recent ascent into a sort of second-place tie with him in the Republican primary contest. Gretchen Whitmer did, because Newsom’s pungent smugness no doubt made many viewers more curious about the Michigan governor than about him as a Democratic prospect in 2028.By agreeing to this grim encounter, Newsom and DeSantis implicitly presented themselves as de facto leaders of their respective parties, with a relative youthfulness — Newsom is 56, and DeSantis is 45 — that distinguishes them from the actual leaders of their parties: Biden, 81, and Trump, 77.But leadership wasn’t what they displayed, and what they modeled was the boastful, belligerent manner in which most political disagreements are hashed out these days, an approach that yields more heat than light. “We have never been this divided,” Hannity proclaimed at the start, referring to the country, and just about every subsequent minute exhaustingly and depressingly bore out that assessment.The scariest part of all was when Hannity raised the possibility of extending the event by half an hour. The disagreeable governors agreed, proving that they had two other things in common: an appetite for attention and an itch to squabble.And the happiest part? When Hannity didn’t follow through on that threat. We’d all witnessed squabbling enough.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).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