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      A Big Reason to Pay Attention to Iowa? New Hampshire.

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      Second place could mean a lot to Nikki Haley tonight as a showdown with Donald Trump looms in the next primary contest.Finishing second in Iowa could propel Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.John Tully for The New York TimesThe long road to the Republican presidential nomination begins tonight in Iowa, where voters will gather at their neighborhood precinct caucuses to cast the first votes of the 2024 election campaign.Iowa may not have many voters or delegates, but the first-in-the-nation caucuses always attract a media frenzy. With the help of the national spotlight, Iowa voters have been surprisingly influential over the decades: A caucus win has sometimes been enough to propel candidates — think Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter — from a deep deficit or even obscurity to the nomination.But tonight, Iowa voters seem likely to choose Donald J. Trump — someone they didn’t pick eight years ago, but who now appears poised for the largest victory in a contested Iowa Republican caucus.Absent a polling meltdown, Mr. Trump’s victory would be one of the more impressive illustration of his dominance over the Republican Party. In 2016, Iowa voters rejected Mr. Trump in favor of Ted Cruz. And unlike most of the country, the Republican establishment in Iowa has not gone along with Mr. Trump. Yet he’s poised for an overwhelming victory anyway.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?  More

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      Why Jan. 6 Wasn’t an Insurrection

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      I’ve written several times about the case for disqualifying Donald Trump via the 14th Amendment, arguing that it fails tests of political prudence and constitutional plausibility alike. But the debate keeps going, and the proponents of disqualification have dug into the position that whatever the prudential concerns about the amendment’s application, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, obviously amounted to an insurrection in the sense intended by the Constitution, and saying otherwise is just evasion or denial.From their vantage point, any definition of “insurrection” that limits the amendment’s application to the kind of broad political-military rebellion that occasioned its original passage — to the hypothetical raising of a Trumpist Army of Northern Virginia, say, or the seizure of the U.S. Capitol by a Confederate States of Trumpist America — is an abuse of the natural meaning of the word. Such a limitation, they say, ignores all the obvious ways that lesser, less comprehensive forms of resistance to lawful authority clearly qualify as insurrectionary.Here are a couple of examples of this argument: The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, arguing with me and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait; and the constitutional law professor Ilya Somin, going back and forth with his fellow legal scholar Steven Calabresi in Reason magazine.I have a basic sympathy with Calabresi’s suggestion that the “paradigmatic example” that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind should guide our understanding of its ambiguities, and since the paradigmatic example is the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, a five-hour riot probably doesn’t clear the bar. (For related arguments about the perils of applying precedents from specific crises to radically different situations, see this essay from Samuel Issacharoff as well.)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?  More

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      Trump Doesn’t Actually Speak for the Silent Majority

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      I can’t fit everything that I think into a single piece, especially when I’m writing on deadline. My column this week, for example, was on the effort to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Although the piece is not exactly brief, it’s by no means exhaustive of my thoughts on the matter.There was one point in particular that I couldn’t quite fit into the flow. It concerns an assumption that, in my view, undergirds much of the discourse around Trump and his voters.It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”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?  More

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      Want to Understand 2024? Look at 1948.

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      Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.President Truman and his wife, Bess, during his 1948 whistle-stop campaign.Associated PressIn the era of modern consumer confidence data, there has never been an economy quite like this recent one — with prices rising so high and unemployment staying so low.But just a few years before the consumer sentiment survey index became widely available in 1952, there was a period of economic unrest that bears a striking resemblance to today: the aftermath of World War II, when Americans were near great prosperity yet found themselves frustrated by the economy and their president.If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.According to the historian James T. Patterson, “no domestic issue of these years did Truman more damage than the highly contentious question of what to do about wartime restraints on prices.”Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis and later a vice president and Democratic presidential nominee, spoke before a Senate committee on anti-inflation controls in 1948.Associated PressIn retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.Yet Americans were plainly dissatisfied. Incomes in 1948 were twice what they were in 1941, but statistically their dissatisfaction is probably best explained by the decline in real incomes in 1947, just as real incomes declined in 2021-22. The polling in the run-up to the 1948 election — archived at the Roper Center — bears the hallmarks of voter dissatisfaction:Despite the extraordinarily positive developments of the last decade, voters were pessimistic about the future. They believed a depression was likely in the next few years. As late as summer 1948, they were likelier to think things in America would get worse in the years ahead than to get better. They expected prices to keep rising.In November 1947, Gallup found that more than two-thirds of Americans said they were finding it harder to make ends meet than the year before, while almost no one said it was easier.In polling throughout 1947 and 1948, a majority supported reinstating wartime rationing and price controls.In December 1947, more than 70 percent of adults said they would want their own wages to decline in order to bring prices down.Prices seemed to weigh heavily on Americans heading into the election. Voters said that if they got a chance to talk with Mr. Truman about anything, it would be the cost of living and getting the economy back to normal. Ahead of the conventions, voters said a plan to address high prices was the No. 1 priority they wanted in a party platform. More voters said they wanted prices to be addressed over the next four years than any other issue.A rally for equal rights outside the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist party, held a convention of their own in Birmingham, Ala.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe importance of the economic issue faced stiff competition from the rising Cold War, the enactment of the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the formation of Israel and the subsequent First Arab-Israeli War, Mr. Truman’s decision to desegregate the military and the rise of the Dixiecrats.The Cold War, civil rights, Israel and other domestic issues combined to put extraordinary political pressure on an increasingly fractured Democratic coalition. On the left, the former vice president Henry Wallace ran against Mr. Truman as a Progressive; he also ran as someone who was unequivocally pro-Israel, threatening to deny Mr. Truman the support of Jewish voters who had voted all but unanimously for Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the right, the segregationist South defected from the Democrats at the convention over the party’s civil rights plank, again threatening to deny him the support of an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.Truman and the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in August 1948. Dewey led in the polls.Nat Fein/The New York TimesHe won, actually.Frank Cancellare/United Press InternationalIn the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Beats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the “Do Nothing Congress“ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices. Finally, he called for a special session of Congress to act on prices and housing shortages (the links correspond to the YouTube video of those parts of his convention speech, for those interested). In short, congressional failure to act on prices was central to his critique of Republicans.In this respect, Mr. Truman was probably in a stronger position than Mr. Biden. Mr. Truman could blame Republicans for inflation; he could argue he had a solution for inflation; and he could link his position on inflation to his broader message about the Democrats as a party for working people. Polling at the time suggested that voters supported price controls, supported his special session, and did not necessarily blame Mr. Truman for inflation. In fact, more voters blamed Congress, business and labor than the president himself.Where Mr. Biden can still hope to match Mr. Truman is in economic reality, as inflation today is falling just as it was in the run-up to the 1948 election.In January 1948, inflation was 10 percent; by the end of October, it had fallen by half, and would reach one percent by January 1949. At election time, only 18 percent of voters expected prices would be higher in six months; just a few months earlier in June, a majority did so. It seems reasonable to wonder whether Mr. Truman might have lost the election had it been held a few months earlier.Despite those excellent conditions for a comeback, Mr. Truman’s electoral weakness was still stark. He had a powerful message and an improving economy, but he won by just 4.5 percentage points. The third-party candidates Mr. Wallace and Strom Thurmond succeeded in denying Mr. Truman key elements of the Democratic base that the party might have imagined it could take for granted just a few years earlier. He lost much of the Deep South without the support of the Dixiecrats and even lost New York, thanks to considerable defections on the left and among Jewish voters. No Democratic presidential would ever again reassemble the so-called New Deal coalition.But if 1948 is a mixed precedent for Mr. Biden, it’s a good precedent for today’s sour economic mood. It might betray a simple fact about public opinion: Voters hate inflation so much that they won’t ever like the economy if prices go up. There is no precedent in the era of consumer sentiment data for voters to have an above-average view of the economy once inflation cracks 5 percent — the recent high was 9 percent in June 2022 — even when unemployment is extremely low. It may just be that simple; indeed, consumer sentiment has begun to tick up over the last year, as inflation has declined to 3 percent.Alternately, 1948 and this era may suggest a more complex lesson about public opinion in the wake of pandemic or war, as high postwar and post-pandemic expectations quickly get dashed by the reality that the world isn’t returning to “normal” quite so quickly. Not only are high hopes dashed, but they also yield many kinds of economic dysfunction beyond high prices, from supply chain problems and housing shortages to “help wanted” signs and rising interest rates.Indeed, the famous “return to normalcy” election in 1920 — the largest popular vote landslide in American history — followed World War I and the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, which brought a recession and even higher inflation than in the 1940s.Normalcy did not come fast enough to save the party in power in 1920, the Democrats, but in retrospect it wasn’t too far off. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner. And normalcy was just beginning to arrive in 1948, when Mr. Truman won re-election. The country was at the dawn of the prosperous, idealized 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” era that still lingers in the public imagination.If something similar is almost at hand, it can’t come soon enough for Mr. Biden. More

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      The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong

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      It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new. More

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      The Big Climate Stories in 2024

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      We’re watching these developments in the year to come.Last year was the warmest in recorded history. What does 2024 have in store?For starters, it is almost certain to be another scorcher. The naturally occurring El Niño will push up temperatures in much of the world and humans will continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.That will very likely mean more extreme heat, like Phoenix saw last summer in a record streak of days that hit 110 degree Fahrenheit or higher. It will mean more wildfires, like the ones that torched Canada, Europe and North Africa. And it will mean more unusually hot ocean temperatures that threaten coral reefs and melt glaciers.But we’ll be keeping track of more than just the weather and temperatures this year. Here are six other big stories we’ll be watching: The U.S. presidential electionPresident Biden’s signature legislative success has been the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which turbocharged investment in clean energy. Biden has also strengthened emissions regulations and laid the groundwork for tackling industrial pollution. But more action looks unlikely if he fails to win a second term.Donald Trump, who holds a commanding lead for the Republican presidential nomination, leads Biden by 46 percent to 44 percent among registered voters, according to a December Times/Siena poll of registered voters. And if Trump returns to the White House, much of Biden’s work on climate change could be in jeopardy. During his four years as president, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, rolled back environmental protections and promoted an across-the-board expansion of fossil fuels. A second Trump term would most likely see more of the same. Mr. Trump has recently spoken on the campaign trail about expanding oil and gas drilling, and vowed to renege on the U.S. pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund.If Trump wins, Republican operatives have prepared a comprehensive plan to undo federal efforts to address global warming: Shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, power plants, and oil and gas wells; dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government; and increasing the production of fossil fuelsFossil fuel productionA Venture Global liquefied natural gas facility on the Calcasieu Ship Channel in Cameron, La.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesThe United States is already the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, and even more production is on the way. The Biden administration last year approved the Willow drilling project. And as I reported over the holidays, it is currently considering approving a slew of natural gas export terminals that would set the stage for decades of additional methane production. Many other countries around the globe also have ambitious plans to expand oil, gas and even coal production in the years ahead.Those plans are hard to reconcile with the growing calls to phase out fossil fuels. Last month in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, leaders from more than 170 countries called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” So far, there are few meaningful signs that such a transition is actually underway. And until that happens, you can expect global temperatures to keep rising. Renewables growthWind turbines near Block Island, R.I., owned by Orsted, a Danish company.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe world is hungry for energy, and while oil and gas production is growing, so, too, are solar and wind power. Globally, more money is being put toward the development of new clean energy than fossil fuels. Last year, investments in solar outpaced investments in oil for the first time.Those trends look set to continue, but renewable energy developers also face challenges ahead. The offshore wind business has been battered by rising costs, shaky supply chains and volatile interest rates. Proposed solar and wind farms are running into problems getting permits. Nimbyism continues to get in the way of many new clean energy developments. And even when projects do get built, they face hurdles connecting to a power grid badly in need of a large-scale expansion.For the U.S. to come close to achieving Biden’s goal of 100 percent renewable power generation by 2035, a lot will have to go right. Global finance reformsPressure has been building on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to overhaul the way they help developing countries adapt to climate change. In recent months, the World Bank has made some changes, agreeing to pause debt and interest payments for nations hit by natural disasters, and helping establish accountable marketplaces for carbon credits.But the same old problems continue to bedevil poor countries looking for help navigating a rapidly warming planet. It is far more expensive to build new clean energy projects in the developing world than in the United States or Europe, because many risk-averse investors are less likely to finance the projects. More is at stake than many people realize. With more than a billion more people in need of reliable access to electricity in the decades ahead, it matters greatly whether that power will be generated by fossil fuels or renewables. Wind and solar plants could give the world a chance at keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But building a new generation of gas and coal plants across the developing world could put that goal out of reach. LitigationOne of the surprise stories of 2023 was the surge in climate-related lawsuits. Children and young adults in Montana won a victory against the state over its support of fossil fuels. California sued big oil companies, accusing them of downplaying the risks that global warming poses to the public. And municipalities in Oregon, New Jersey and beyond brought cases against companies like Exxon, Chevron and Shell.Expect more lawsuits to be brought against fossil fuel companies and the governments that support them with subsidies and rubber-stamp permits. Some of those cases could see their days in court. In particular, there a decent chance that a landmark case brought by Massachusetts against Exxon could go to trial in 2024.Activism and actionClimate protesters from the group Just Stop Oil interrupted a televised match of the World Snooker Championship in April.Mike Egerton/Press Association, via Associated PressClimate protesters interrupted the U.S. Open tennis tournament and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They continued to vandalize museums in Europe and elsewhere. And they shut down major streets and highways in England, the Netherlands and beyond.But not all climate action was so disruptive. During the United Nations General Assembly in New York, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Midtown Manhattan for a peaceful march calling for an end to fossil fuels. A new generation of young environmentalists is using social media to protest new oil and gas projects. And the White House is starting the American Climate Corps, modeling the program on an effort in California that has put thousands of people to work addressing climate change in their own communities. Expect the action and activism around climate issues to keep going strong in the year ahead.Those are just some of the stories we’ll be following in 2024. Thanks for subscribing and we’ll be back with another edition of Climate Forward on Thursday.Other climate newsIndiana homeowners are concerned that plans to pipe in groundwater for a microchip factory will deplete residential wells. Prince Frederik, who will soon become King of Denmark, is among a generation of young royals who have embraced climate issues.Telsa sales rebounded during the last three months of 2023 after the company slashed prices to attract buyers. In the Times Magazine, the author of the upcoming book “Not the End of the World” talks about letting go of doomerism and working toward a sustainable future. In Spain, a drought revealed a prehistoric stone circle similar to Stonehenge. More

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      Donald Trump’s Final Battle Has Begun

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      Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era, I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances. They’re often a showman’s cheap histrionics, a con man’s gaudy hyperbole.But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year, as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the “final battle.”I first heard Trump use that phrase in March, when he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. I laughed at his indefatigable self-aggrandizement. He said it again weeks later at a rally in Waco, Texas, not far from where the deadly confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal law enforcement officials took place. I cringed at his perversity.But as he continued to rave biblically about this “final battle,” my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins it all? He will probably play dictator for much longer than a day, and the America that he molds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we’ve known and loved until now.With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, a rematch of Trump and Joe Biden is highly likely — and wouldn’t be anything close to the usual competition between “four more years” and a reasonably sane, relatively coherent change of direction and pace. We’re on the cusp of something much scarier. Trump’s fury, vengefulness and ambitions have metastasized since 2020. The ideologues aligned with him have worked out plans for a second Trump administration that are darker and more detailed than anything in the first. He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla.And Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on a promise to unify the country and prides himself on bipartisanship, has recognized in his own way that “final battle” is apt. He has suggested that he is running again, at the age of 81, because the unendurable specter of Trump back in the White House leaves him no other choice. Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days.Trump talks that way all the time, ranting that we’ll “no longer have a country” if Biden and other Democrats are in charge. Biden’s warning about Trump is equally blunt, and it could assume ever greater prominence as he calculates how to win re-election despite widespread economic apprehension, persistently low approval ratings and attacks on his age and acuity.“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake in 2024,” he said at a campaign event in Boston last month. “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.”If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier.“There are people who don’t realize how dangerous 2024 could be,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and arguably Trump’s most prominent evangelical Christian critic, told me recently. “They’re assuming it’s a replay of 2020. I don’t think it is.”He wondered about the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, as a harbinger of worse political violence. He cited “the authoritarian rhetoric that’s coming from Trump.” He referred to the breadth of the chasm between MAGA America and the rest of it. When I asked him if he could think of any prior presidential elections suffused with this much dread and reciprocal disdain, he had to rewind more than 150 years, to the eve of the Civil War. “That’s the only precedent in American history I can see,” he said.It’s certainly possible that over the 10 long months between now and Election Day, there will be surprises that set up a November election with different candidates, different issues and a different temperature than the ones in place at the moment. It’s also possible that our politicians’ heightened language and intense emotions don’t resonate with most American voters and won’t influence them.“I see our political process pulling away from where people are on the ground,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy at Harvard who is an advocate of better civics education and more constructive engagement in civic life. “The political process has become a kind of theatrical spectacle, and on the ground, since 2016, we’ve seen this incredible growth of grass-roots organizations working on all kinds of civic health. I think people are getting healthier — or have been — over the past seven years, and our politics doesn’t reflect that.” She noted that in a growing number of states, there are serious movements to do away with party primaries, a political reform intended to counter partisanship and produce more moderate, consensus winners.But moderation and consensus are in no way part of Trump’s pitch, and if he’s on the ballot, striking his current Mephistophelian pose and taking his present Manichaean tack, voters are indeed being drawn into something that feels like a final battle or at least a definitive test — of the country’s belief in its institutions. Of its respect for diversity. Of its commitment to the law. Of its devotion to truth.Do a majority of Americans still believe in the American project and the American dream as we’ve long mythologized them? Do they still see our country as a land of opportunity and immigrant ingenuity whose accomplishments and promise redeem its sins? Do we retain faith in a more bountiful tomorrow, or are we fighting over leftovers? Those questions hover with a special urgency over the 2024 election.And that’s largely because of the perspective and agenda that Trump is asking voters to embrace. Even if the plans are bluster, the plea is a referendum on American values. He has said several times that immigrants “poison the blood” of our country, and a second Trump administration could involve the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants annually and large detention camps. In his response to his indictments in four cases comprising 91 felony counts, he has insisted that the justice system is corrupt and vowed to overhaul it to his liking and use it to punish political foes. He praises autocrats, equating brutal repression with strength and divorcing morality from foreign policy. He unabashedly peddles conspiracy theories, spinning falsehoods when provable facts are inconvenient or unflattering. He’d have us all live in fiction, just as long as the narrative exalts him.“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”We’d likely become a country with a new relationship to the rest of the world and a new attitude toward our history in it.“The Western liberal international order is the work of three-quarters of a century of eminent statesmen and both parties,” said Mark Salter, who was a longtime senior aide to Senator John McCain, has written many books on American politics and collaborated with Cassidy Hutchinson on “Enough,” her best-selling 2023 memoir about her time in Trump’s White House. “It has brought us times of unexpected prosperity and liberty in the world. And somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy or Donald Trump has got a better idea? It’s just ludicrous.”“I just have this feeling,” Salter told me, “that the next four years are going to be the most consequential four years in my lifetime.”Are our most generous impulses doing battle with our most ungenerous ones? That’s one frame for the 2024 election, suggested by the nastiness of so many of Trump’s tirades versus the appeals to comity and common ground that Biden still works into his remarks, the compassion and kindness he still manages to project. He celebrates American diversity and rightly portrays it as a source of our strength. Trump — and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis and many others in the current generation of Republican leadership — casts it as a threat.“Part of what’s in danger is American pluralism,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of the nonprofit group Interfaith America and the author of the 2022 book “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” “There was a consensus, from Kennedy to Obama, that diversity is part of what’s inspiring about America. Virtually every president in recent memory, with the exception of the guy in the Oval Office from 2017 to 2020, spoke about the virtues of American pluralism.”Trump speaks instead about persecuted Christians, persecuted white Americans, persecuted rural Americans. He beseeches them to exact vengeance. Where, Patel asked, does that leave “the American civic institutions that we just expect to work,” the basketball leagues and Cub Scout troops in which political affiliation and partisan recrimination took a back seat to joint mission? They could well break down. “We’re already seeing this in school boards,” he said. “We see this when a high school doesn’t just have to cancel a play but disband its theater department.”Jennifer Williams, a city councilwoman in Trenton, N.J., who made history a year ago when she was sworn as the first transgender person elected to any city council in the state, told me that while she identifies as Republican and has voted for Republican candidates in presidential elections past, the prejudices that Trump promotes terrify her. “My very existence as a human being and as an American is becoming more and more questioned,” she said.There’s a meanness in American life right now, and the way 2024 plays out could advance or arrest it. The outcome could also strain Americans’ confidence in our democracy in irreparable ways — and that’s not just because the Supreme Court may wind up determining Trump’s presence on the ballot, not just because the popular vote and the Electoral College could yield significantly different results, not just because any Trump loss would be attended by fresh cries of a “rigged” election and, perhaps, fresh incitements to violence.It’s also because so many voters across the ideological spectrum are so keenly frustrated and deeply depressed by the political landscape of 2024. They behold a Supreme Court that enshrines and protects ethically challenged justices and, as in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, seems wildly out of touch with the country. They have watched the House of Representatives devolve into a dysfunctional colosseum of dueling egos and wearying diatribes. They’re presented with candidates who seem like default options rather than bold visionaries. And they feel increasingly estranged from their own government.“That is so detrimental to our democracy,” said Stephanie Murphy, a moderate Florida Democrat who served in the House from 2017 to 2023 and was also one of the nine members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 rioting. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t agree on almost anything, but two-thirds agree that they don’t want to see a Trump-Biden rematch, and that’s what they’re getting.” There will be no real Democratic presidential primary. The Republican presidential primary, to judge by the polling, is an exercise so pointless that Trump hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the four debates so far. “You’re further disenfranchising people,” Murphy said, and you’re fostering “disillusionment among the American electorate that their vote even matters.”The irony is that in 2024, it will probably matter more than ever. How many Americans will see that, and how many will act on it? The final battle may be between resignation and determination, between a surrender of our ideals and the resolve to keep reaching for them, no matter how frequently and how far we fall short.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Looking Ahead to 5 Things That Will Shape the 2024 Election

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      Trials, a Kennedy and the economy are among the variables to consider.A recent Trump caucus event in Waterloo, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressIt’s divisible by four. It’s a leap year. It’s a Summer Olympics year.It’s a presidential election year.Happy New Year?Whether the 2024 presidential election cycle brings you dread or excitement, there’s no doubt that the table is set for an extraordinary year.The potential for political turmoil has rarely seemed more obvious. Voters are deeply dissatisfied with the direction of the country and their options for president. President Biden’s approval rating is lower at this stage than for any president in the era of modern polling, dating to the 1940s. His likely opponent faces several criminal trials. Waiting in the wings, there’s an independent candidate with the last name Kennedy. The Democratic convention is even in Chicago.Here are just a few of the big topics that will shape the 2024 election.Can Nikki Haley win a state?Of all the items on this list, this is probably the least consequential. But it is first up on the calendar, with the early primary contests just a few weeks away, and a Haley win in New Hampshire or South Carolina is neither impossible nor irrelevant.Heading into the holidays, surveys showed Ms. Haley approaching or exceeding 30 percent in New Hampshire — putting her closer to an upset than it might look, given the volatile nature of early primaries.Her path to victory in New Hampshire is still fairly narrow. Her recent stumble in answering a question about the cause of the Civil War may halt her momentum. And even if she does defeat Donald J. Trump in the state, it’s hard to see her posing a serious threat to win the nomination, given the relatively narrow, factional character of her appeal.But if she regained her footing and did manage to pull off an upset in New Hampshire or South Carolina, it would still carry symbolic significance. It would be a reminder that the not-Trump wing of the Republican Party, while diminished and weakened, was still around. It would be a visible crack in Republican support for Mr. Trump, and it would happen just weeks before his scheduled trial in March.There’s a possible chain of events in which the combination of a trial and a Haley win winds up mattering more than we might guess today.The trial of Donald J. TrumpMaybe the criminal trial of Mr. Trump will not go down as “the greatest political spectacle of our lives” or something similarly grandiose, but it’s hard to think of anything like it that’s ever been scheduled on the political calendar.The trial promises to be the political center of gravity for the first half of the year, with the federal election subversion trial scheduled to begin on March 4 — the day before Super Tuesday in the G.O.P. primary — and then possibly lasting through the heart of the primary season, although delays are possible.It is hard to believe that a trial, in itself, will do grave political damage to Mr. Trump. After all, he endured the indictments unscathed. And he would probably amass enough delegates to win the Republican nomination even before the jury issued a verdict. The preponderance of Republican delegates will be awarded within a month of the start of the trial if it begins as scheduled.But there is a way a trial could matter: It might lead to a realization by Republican primary voters and elites that Mr. Trump is likely to be convicted. And whether they see it coming or not, a conviction isn’t the same as a trial or an indictment. It might be far more consequential.Recent polls — including New York Times/Siena College battleground polling in October — show Mr. Biden opening up a lead if Mr. Trump is convicted, let alone imprisoned. These polls should be taken with a grain of salt — they pose hypotheticals to voters, who mostly aren’t paying attention to Mr. Trump’s legal woes. But they’re a reminder that there are risks to his candidacy. In a close race, it might be decisive even if only a sliver of voters refuse to vote for a felon.At the same time, a conviction would offer a new path for those seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot, whether by disqualifying him in the courts or by denying him the nomination at the Republican convention.Mr. Trump also faces a trial in Florida over his handling of classified material and in Georgia in an election case, although appeals and delays may carry them beyond the election. There’s also the coming Stormy Daniels case on the possible falsification of business records in New York, which is generally not seen as rising to the same level as the other cases.And let’s not forget the likely Supreme Court case about whether he’s disqualified to be president under the 14th Amendment.All of this is extraordinary to contemplate. Calling this simply “something to watch” is gross understatement. But that’s our politics nowadays.The new swing voteIf you’ve been following elections long enough, the term “swing voter” might conjure up images of soccer moms, security moms, Reagan Democrats, the white working class and countless other archetypes of the mostly white suburban voters who analysts said decided American elections over the last half century.But as 2024 begins, the voters poised to decide the election look very, very different from the swing voters of lore. They’re disproportionately young, Black and Hispanic.Whether these voters return to Mr. Biden is one of the biggest questions of the cycle, not only because it might decide the election but also because there’s a chance it could shape the trajectory of American politics for decades.As we’ve written countless times, there will be many opportunities over the next year for Mr. Biden to lure back these traditionally Democratic but disaffected voters. In the end, he might well approach or match his support from last time. If he does, perhaps all the debate over it will seem misplaced.But whatever the outcome, the reality of so many young, Black and Hispanic persuadable voters might powerfully shape the incentives facing the candidates and perhaps even the overall course of the race. For the first time, there’s a straightforward case that Democrats and Republicans alike have an incentive to focus more on Black, Hispanic and young voters than on white working-class voters. This might not yield any drastic changes in strategy, policy or messaging. But it would be surprising if it yielded no change at all.Eight years ago, Mr. Trump was kicking Univision out of news conferences. Now, he’s giving Univision exclusive interviews. This is just one small, early anecdote well before the campaign gets underway. The examples may be much more striking by Election Day.The third party?There’s another place that disaffected young, Black and Hispanic voters might go: a third-party candidate, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Mr. Kennedy doesn’t loom over the 2024 race quite the way Mr. Trump’s trials do. We don’t even know if Mr. Kennedy will successfully gain access to the ballot. But it’s another obvious X-factor that we can see coming, even if we don’t know how it might affect the race.The early polling — which shows Mr. Kennedy in the teens — seems plausible at this early stage. Around 20 percent of voters nationwide have unfavorable views of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, and Mr. Kennedy has a brand name that past minor candidates like Gary Johnson, a libertarian in 2016, could never have dreamed of.Historically, most independent candidates fizzle. Mr. Johnson saw his support peak near 10 percent in July 2016, only to win 3.3 percent in November. Mr. Kennedy might fade for similar reasons, especially with the stakes of a Biden-Trump matchup seeming so large. On the other hand, Mr. Johnson was no Kennedy.Does another year help or hurt Biden?In many ways, the outlook for Mr. Biden in 2024 ought to be bright. The economy seems as if it’s finally about to land softly. His opponent is set to go on trial. And the voters he needs — young, Black and Hispanic — are the kinds of voters who Democrats would usually think are easiest to win back to their side.All this might ultimately propel Mr. Biden to re-election. Many incumbent presidents have gone on to win under fairly similar circumstances, with the help of a polarizing campaign and a growing economy.But there’s a catch: Some of these favorable winds have been at Mr. Biden’s back for most of the last year, and he appears weaker than ever.Despite an improving economy, Mr. Biden’s approval rating stands at just 39 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. That’s a net eight points lower than it was a year ago. It’s also worse than any previous president on the last New Year’s Day before re-election. Satisfaction with the country is about as low as it was in 1980, 1992, 2008 and 2020 — years when the president’s party was defeated.One possibility, of course, is that it’s just a matter of time. The economic news has only turned unequivocally positive over the last few weeks or months. Consumer confidence is still below average, but it appears to be improving. That might start to help Mr. Biden’s ratings. If you squint at the numbers, you could argue it has already begun to do so: His approval rating is up about 1.5 points over the last three weeks.Unlike most presidents seeking re-election, Mr. Biden has also been hobbled by persistent questions about whether he should be the party nominee. Democrats have spent more time ruminating about his age than defending his record. His party will presumably put its doubts to the side and rally behind him once he secures the nomination over the summer. Maybe that’s when he’ll finally rejuvenate his support.But the other possibility is that time is not on his side. It might even be part of the problem.The president gets older every day. To the extent his age, stumbles and stutters explain why voters lack confidence in his leadership and the direction of the country, there’s not much reason to expect it to get better. It might get worse. More