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      Putting 'Jesus' on Your Bus Isn't Faith

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      On Thursday, I saw tweets featuring the debut of a campaign bus for Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia. It is emblazoned with what is evidently her platform: “Jesus, Guns, Babies.” That’s it. No further explanation needed, or perhaps more accurately, no further explanation given.A lot of people mocked the bus online, seeing as “Jesus, Guns, Babies” doesn’t exactly make, you know, sense on its own (a friend joked that it sounded like Jesus was heaving babies out of a cannon).Polling at 3 percent, Taylor’s not a major factor in the race, but I am fascinated by what she represents. She is an example of how a lot of the biggest things that spark polarization in this country are performative. It reminds me of being at a big game. We wave our giant foam hands and chant the cheers without really having any idea what we’re saying or why we’re saying it.This is what our politics has become: We’re often just fans of a party — or even a religion — not believers in actual tenets.As someone who has covered politics, I can appreciate the brutal simplicity of Taylor’s messaging. But as a Christian, I’m … depressed by it. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the savior of all, who was born to the Virgin Mary and suffered and died on the cross at Calvary for the sake of the sins of humanity. I believe he then rose from the grave, and as the Nicene Creed, an ancient statement of faith, puts it, he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.I believe that as much as I believe that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west. I read the Bible regularly (from Genesis to Revelation to the Acts of the Apostles, my favorite book of the Bible) and I think a lot about my faith and its role in my life. Suffice it to say, faith is hard — faith in the unseen, faith in something that encourages you to act against your first instinct, faith that, no matter what you want to do, tells you what you should do instead.It is not hard to be a Christian in America since the majority of Americans identify as Christian and virtually every public institution bends over backward for us. But it is hard to live a Christian life — to exist as a person who has a belief in an eternal savior but spends a lot of time wondering what that really means.Putting the word “Jesus” on a campaign bus is not hard. And it is not an exercise in faith. No one can learn anything about Jesus Christ from that campaign bus.Some will see the word and pump their fist in agreement with what they perceive it to mean — the equivalent of putting a “Go Blue” sticker on your bumper or waving a Red Sox flag at a baseball game. Others will shake their heads, and both sides wind up pushed further apart for no reason whatsoever except that performative religiosity is polarizing. Either you’re in the club, or you’re not. In the Republican primary in Georgia, religious faith — the faith I share, or at least, I might share — evidently isn’t meant to be followed or abided by or lived or rejected or challenged. Instead, it’s a cudgel, waved at passers-by.Sloganeering is not new to politics, of course. Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 with the line, “He kept us out of war.” And while the claim eventually turned false, it was at least a clear argument. More recent presidential campaigns have relied on slogans that seem more illusory, the ideas compressed and minimized into phrases that act more as talismans than as promises — Jesse Jackson’s “Keep hope alive” or Barack Obama’s “Yes we can.”Performative religiosity is just as old hat. Few people were more adept at understanding the power of displaying belief for political reasons than Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump said, “Nobody reads the Bible more than me,” and he accused Secretary of State John Kerry of having never read it. It was like the time he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that women who have abortions should receive “some form of punishment,” a viewpoint that even anti-abortion groups resisted.The Bible is the story of people being people — at their best, worst and most mindbendingly irritating (see: Aaron and the golden calf.) Saying “nobody reads the Bible more than me” doesn’t tell me if you’ve grappled with the Psalms or contemplated your own sins or spent a dark night of the soul wondering what God thinks of you.Did any of us think it was possible that Trump had wrestled with such questions? No matter. It’s enough to flash a cultural symbol for being “the right kind of Christian.” And you certainly don’t need to prove your knowledge of Scripture or your adherence to the actual faith painstakingly described in it. It’s a posture we all recognize and understand, but it’s ultimately meaningless outside of weak political hand waving.But somehow, Taylor and her bus seem like a new nadir. A campaign based entirely on “Jesus, Guns, Babies” sounds like a parody, like what a TV writer would think a Georgia Republican voter wants — a little too on the nose.With that list, she’s not even pretending to have read Scripture or to have engaged with Christianity in any way. She’s got three words, and that’s all she thinks she owes voters. She’s on Team Jesus. She’s even got the bus ready. In a way, it’s so honest about how dumb our political process has become — how crass and empty — that I almost admire it.I’m reminded of Matthew 6:5-6, in which Jesus explains to his disciples how to pray, telling them that there is no need to do so publicly, showing off their religious devotion for the purpose of garnering attention (or polarizing the people around them). Christ tells them: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” And, I would guess (but never assume), that these instructions include “Don’t put Jesus’ name on a campaign bus.” More

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      What President Biden Could Learn from Ronald Reagan

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      Blame is a hallmark of American politics. Ronald Reagan couldn’t escape it in his first midterm elections 40 years ago. Can Biden?They’re called election cycles for a reason. In politics, everything’s on repeat.In 1982, a new president faced his first midterm elections after he was swept into office amid an economic slump, high inflation and deep dissatisfaction with the previous occupant of the White House.Sound familiar?Forty years later, President Biden is facing a completely different set of problems, including a persisting pandemic and a predecessor who refuses to accept that he was defeated. Yet Biden and Ronald Reagan have shared a similar burden: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either one was elected. Both men won the presidency by promising restoration, but both saw their approval ratings sink when they couldn’t immediately deliver.“Blame in American politics runs through the president,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “He is the most prominent salient actor in American politics.”Reagan began his presidency with a double-digit inflation rate. In the months leading up to the election, as inflation settled down, unemployment rose. Throughout 1982, Reagan’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s, where Biden has been stuck since late last summer. In those November midterms, Republicans lost 26 House seats and gained one Senate seat, by replacing one conservative independent with a Republican.We spoke with several historians and Republicans directly involved with the 1982 campaign, and they all warned that as long as the country feels economic pressure during Biden’s first midterm, it’s nearly impossible to dodge the dictum that the party in power loses House seats. Republicans’ 1982 campaign message — “Stay the course”— might have stemmed their losses, but losses were inescapable.The comparison breaks down in one key way for Democrats. Reagan had already been crowned “the Great Communicator” by the 1982 midterms. Biden’s failure to communicate a clear, compelling message to voters has been one of his biggest liabilities so far.However, there’s still time for an upswing in the economy. And even if the economy doesn’t rebound by November, it’s possible for Biden to cut his losses and even win back seats in 2024.Edwin Meese III, who was counselor to Reagan in 1982 before becoming attorney general, noted that Reagan’s “Stay the course” midterm was followed by his optimistic “Morning in America” re-election. He won a second term in a landslide.“It’s a matter of faith,” said Meese, 90, an emeritus fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “President Ronald Reagan knew that there would be difficult times, and the difficult times were not yet over, but that they would be.”‘Give the guy a chance’ In 1982, concerns about midterm losses and disagreements over economic policy led to divisions and finger-pointing within the Republican Party. Even so, the party urged voters to “give the guy a chance.”Nancy Dwight, who was running the House Republicans’ campaign arm at the time, cautions against reading too much into the 1982 example, but sees Biden taking a page from Reagan’s playbook in urging patience as he attempts to get the economy back on track. “He wouldn’t dare use that line, but he’s staying the course,” Dwight told us.Reagan was determined to see his economic plans through, even as the public lost confidence. Given the circumstances, Dwight recalled that she felt relieved that Republicans didn’t lose even more House seats. “I knew it could have been much worse,” she said.Joe Gaylord, who worked with Dwight at the House campaign committee in 1982, said Reagan’s economic crisis was more deep-rooted than Biden’s — with interest rates, inflation and unemployment all blocking recovery.But he said the basic contours of the problem that Biden faced were all too similar. Combine Reagan’s low approval rating with a country that believes it’s on the wrong track, and one thing happens, he said: “You get change.”A “huge problem that Biden has right now is that none of the things he’s done is working, either,” Gaylord added.When the unemployment rate surpassed 10 percent in September 1982, Gaylord said, “Republican candidates just dropped like flies,” as voters’ patience with the Reagan administration evaporated. He recalled hearing frustrated Republicans assert that the problem was simply a failure to communicate with voters — that if Republicans had been clearer about their accomplishments, voters would have supported them.That’s a theory that many Democrats, including Biden himself, have repeated in addressing why the public hasn’t been more supportive of his administration.But the message won’t get through if it doesn’t resonate, Gaylord said: “​​It’s a little tough to make a communication work when people don’t feel it.”Still, in some congressional races, Gaylord credited the “Stay the course” message with keeping seats in 1982. Republicans’ House minority shrunk, but they managed to keep control of the Senate and even gain a seat.President Biden arriving in Cleveland on Thursday. He and former President Ronald Reagan have shared one broad challenge: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either was elected.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesThe blame gameThere are plenty of reasons a president struggles in the midterms.Binder, the fellow at the Brookings Institution, ran through some of them. Voters like to distribute party power when they think it’s too concentrated. Supporters of the newly-elected president are more content and therefore less excited to turn out. Voters aren’t following the intricacies of policy.Jill Lepore, the historian and journalist, suggested thinking about the situation not as political intrigue, but as family drama.“You think about some bad situation in your extended family where your cousin and your aunt don’t speak to each other,” she said. But the conflict all began, she added, with a past inflammatory comment from your grandmother, who’s not engaged in the drama but lit the fire in the first place.“You need the whole story. But that’s not how we think politically, right?”Looking back, Meese said that he and Reagan, along with his top advisers, were confident that the policies Reagan enacted would allow Republicans to rebound in 1984. He didn’t see losing about 25 seats as all that bad, but rather “in keeping with historical norms.”“I don’t think anybody likes the idea of losing seats,” Meese said. “But I think the president felt that to do anything other than continue the program he had started was the wrong thing to do.”What to read A judge ruled that New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, can interview Donald Trump as well as two of his adult children as part of an inquiry into Trump’s business practices.Nicholas Kristof, a former New York Times columnist, cannot run for governor of Oregon, according to a Thursday ruling by the state’s Supreme Court. Even though he has connections to Oregon, the court ruled he had not fulfilled the three-year residency requirement to run, reports Mike Baker.The Ottawa protests “will likely live on long after the last trucks depart,” Natalie Kitroeff and Dan Bilefsky report. The protests have evolved into a “wider movement against pandemic restrictions in general and the premiership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”in the momentThe police confronting Trump loyalists outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesCriticizing the R.N.C., from the benchA federal judge took a swipe at the Republican National Committee on Thursday, taking issue with the committee’s recent move to condemn two Republican lawmakers for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Key Developments in the Jan. 6 InvestigationCard 1 of 3Piecing the evidence together. More

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      Opposition Research Goes Hyperlocal

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      The liberal group American Bridge is launching a new project to collect information for campaigns against Republicans running for state and local offices.Some of the loudest Stop the Steal voices on the right are actually far removed from the levers of America’s election machinery. When a member of Congress makes false claims about hacked voting machines or stolen ballots, he or she has little authority to do much about it.Across the United States, however, there are tens of thousands of state, county and local officials who do have that power. They will set and enforce the rules on voting, then go about counting and reporting the votes in the elections to come.To the alarm of independent experts, allies of Donald Trump have been targeting these once-anonymous offices, seeking to fill them with hard-core partisans all the way down to the level of precinct captain.Now, the Democratic organization American Bridge, known primarily for its opposition research into Republicans, has launched what it says is a $10 million campaign to influence the races for election administration in a dozen key states. The local elections project is part of a $100 million paid media campaign that American Bridge announced a year ago.The group has hired 22 researchers to scrub the records and public statements of candidates and officials running for statewide offices involved in election administration, along with the sort of races unlikely to garner attention outside of their communities: county boards of supervisors, boards of canvassers, local judges and state legislators. They plan to dig up dirt on officials and candidates to ruin their chances of getting elected or re-elected.“It’s about how do we take what we’ve already been expert at and expose the behavior of Republican candidates and officeholders and take it down ballot to these secretaries of state races, the attorneys general races, as well as on down the ballot to the county level,” said Jessica Floyd, the American Bridge president.The sheer scale of America’s decentralized election system presents a formidable challenge to anyone seeking to influence it. In Wisconsin alone, there are 1,850 municipal clerks who administer voting, with rules set by a bipartisan six-member state commission, whose members are appointed by state legislators and the governor.Rick Hasen, the author of several books about elections and democracy, said the use of such hardball political tactics in local elections was “probably a necessary evil.” He added: “Efforts to subvert elections can happen in lots of places.”The Democrats are starting from behind in this effort. There is plenty of evidence that Republicans — more than half of whom remain convinced of Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud — are more motivated than Democrats by concerns about the voting system. And there has been a Republican financial advantage.In 2021, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which invests in state legislative and secretary of state races, raised $33 million, a record for a year in which most states didn’t hold state elections. The Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, took in $21 million, which it too crowed was the most ever in an off-year, but well behind the Republicans.‘You want to win these elections’Floyd, who worked for a handful of Washington’s major Democratic organizations and was an aide to Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said their tactics will help motivate base Democrats. But she added that the American Bridge researchers are in search of information that they believe voters will use to disqualify Republicans from winning local elections.In some communities, she said, that might be a commissioner who didn’t pay property taxes. Elsewhere, it might mean amplifying an untoward statement from a local radio station that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. For statewide candidates, American Bridge plans to hire “trackers” to follow them with cameras.“We’re not making an assumption that voters are going to be paying attention to how a race impacts the future of American democracy, because that’s not necessarily how people are treating the ballot box,” Floyd said. “You want to win these elections. We’re figuring out what’s the information that we have and how to disseminate that information in order to win as many elections as possible.”Kari Lake, a Republican, campaigning for governor in Florence, Ariz., last month.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSome of what American Bridge finds will be handed to news organizations, sometimes with and sometimes without the organization’s fingerprints attached. Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, called on school districts to install cameras to monitor teachers in classrooms in a local radio interview. The group took credit for the story being reported in the Arizona Republic and other local outlets.But more and more, American Bridge has been pushing its research on its own. One of its more prolific researchers maintains a Twitter account devoted to monitoring every local radio interview and television appearance by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Republican Senate candidates.“We should be exposing bad behavior,” Floyd said.What to read Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer profile Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate candidate of Ohio, and his political journey to the far right.U.S. officials are using creative methods to try to understand the thinking of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s enigmatic leader, report David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued a fresh batch of subpoenas, Luke Broadwater reports, including of two top Trump campaign officials and several state legislators.Charlie Savage explains a mysterious filing by John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who has been investigating the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.FrameworkJim Lamon, an Arizona Republican, starred in a gunslinging Super Bowl ad.Jim Lamon for U.S. SenatePrimary matchups at the Super BowlIt’s nothing new for politicians to use the Super Bowl to gain exposure. But on Sunday, two ads that went after the president pushed the boundaries of anti-Biden rhetoric. One repeated a phrase that has become code for a slur against President Biden, and the other showed a candidate shooting at him.The two Republicans behind the ads are running for Senate.Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican, aired an ad that repeated a crowd chanting the “Let’s Go Brandon” anti-Biden phrase for nearly the entire 30-second spot. Jim Lamon, a candidate in Arizona, aired a Wild-West-themed ad in which he shoots at Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mark Kelly, who is up for re-election this year. In the ad, the three Democrats are armed and prepared to duel, but Lamon shoots down their weapons. In what seems to be an effort at slapstick humor, the trio runs away, unscathed and disarmed. Lamon had previously aired another “Let’s Go Brandon” ad.Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, pointed out what was the dual audience that Lamon was speaking to — Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters and Trump himself. It’s an expensive way, in other words, to get the former president’s attention and his possible endorsement.“The people running for Senate in Arizona are all trying to win the Trump primary, not necessarily the Republican Party primary,” Robb told us.It cost the Lamon campaign $25,000 to place an ad in Tucson, Ariz., during the Super Bowl, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks television ad spending. McCormick’s campaign spent $70,000 to place the ad in the Pittsburgh media market.Both ads employed rhetoric that appeals to a smaller segment of the electorate, the most fervent Republican primary voters, even though a much more expansive audience actually watched it.There’s a chance that ads like these end up backfiring on the Republican candidates during the general election. Both Lamon and McCormick ran in states that Biden won in 2020. And, in Arizona, the Trump presidency coincided with Republicans losing both U.S. Senate seats and only narrowly preserving their majority in the State Legislature.Trump drove record turnout in Arizona, Robb said, but it wasn’t just his supporters who came out in record numbers. His opponents turned out as well.Lamon tried to show that he’s wealthy enough to afford a Super Bowl ad to “communicate this very narrow reach message,” Robb said. “But it does alienate the majority of the Arizona electorate.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How Cindy Axne, One of the Most At-Risk Democrats in Congress, Hangs On

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      Meet Representative Cindy Axne of Iowa, who has some advice for the White House about how to talk to voters.Holding a blue seat in a red-tinged place like Iowa’s Third Congressional District takes discipline. It takes a relentless focus on the folks back home, which is why you won’t see Cindy Axne yukking it up on “Morning Joe” or rubbing elbows with Jake Tapper on CNN. It takes doing who-knows-how-many hits on rural radio stations that might reach just a few hundred people at a time.Axne is a living case study in political survival. Donald Trump carried her district in both of his presidential runs. In 2020, a bad year for House Democrats, she hung on to her seat by fewer than 7,000 votes.This year, Axne has one of the hardest re-election tasks of any member of Congress. She’s the lone Democrat in Iowa’s delegation to Washington, representing a state that has moved sharply rightward. Thanks to redistricting, she just inherited nine additional counties that voted for Trump in 2020. At town hall meetings, she proudly tells constituents that hers is “the No. 1 targeted race in the nation.” Forecasters rate it a “tossup,” but privately, Democratic strategists acknowledge she might be doomed.What’s her strategy for survival? Although Axne doesn’t articulate them explicitly, we culled these unspoken rules from an interview in her office on Capitol Hill. It’s the kind of advice President Biden could use as he tries to reverse drooping poll numbers that threaten to bring down his entire party:Struggling to explain your policies? Visualize the voter you want to reach: “Take these big things and bring it down to that one individual. If that mom’s not sitting in the audience, put that mom in your head.”Dealing with bad news? Level with people: “Even if it’s not the answer everybody wants right now, give them the answer that you know.”Selling your infrastructure bill? Talk about convenience, not how many program dollars you allocated: “That doesn’t resonate. It resonates that I gave you 40 minutes of extra time when this bridge is repaired. That’s huge.”You won’t hear much soaring rhetoric about saving American democracy from Axne, either. The voters are her customers, reflecting her business background. “I’ve been a manager my whole life,” she said. “I’ve run customer service departments and retail.”And the way she figures it, the burden is on her to earn the customer’s approval. “It’s my job to go to them, to show them that they can trust me and that I deserve their vote,” she said.She urges the president to adopt that same retail mentality: Leave the mess in Washington behind, go into local communities and bring politics to a human scale.As she put it, “Come out and say, ‘Folks, here’s where we’re at.’”‘Tired’And where her customers are at right now, Axne said, can be summed up with one word: “Tired.”They’re tired of the pandemic. Tired of the disruptions it has brought to their families. Tired of their packages not being delivered on time. It’s the thread running through all the complaints she hears about, whether the issue is education or jobs or masks.“I’ve never seen anything impact our psyche so much like this, right?” she said. “There’s just a lot that families are coping with. It’s just hard for them to see some of the benefits that Democrats have delivered — because honestly, Democrats have delivered, I’ve delivered — but it’s hard to see when things still aren’t back to normal.”If and when they are, Axne said, “We’ve got to be really loud about it and make people feel comfortable and understand: ‘Go back to normal, folks.’”Axne has had to think a lot about how to explain the major legislative packages she has helped to pass and urges the White House to break them down into relatable pieces.She comes back to her infrastructure example, referring to bridges in Iowa that are so poorly maintained that they can’t bear the weight of a bus full of schoolchildren, leading to lengthy detours. “You know, ask any parent what their mornings are like, and would they like 40 minutes more? Heck, yeah.”Axne spoke at an American Legion post in Winterset, Iowa, in 2019.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressEarning counties, then losing themAxne was first elected to Congress in 2018, as part of that year’s anti-Trump wave.She was a longtime Iowa state government official, an M.B.A. holder who started a consulting firm before running for Congress. If you ask her what’s on the minds of Iowa farmers, be prepared for an impromptu seminar on the intricacies of soybean processing.In 2019, when flooding devastated communities in her district along the Missouri River, Axne was everywhere: touring busted levees, lobbying for federal aid. It earned her some credit in the suburban areas around Council Bluffs and Indianola, helping her eke out that win in 2020.In a stroke of bad luck for Axne, those areas along the river are no longer her responsibility. After Iowa’s latest round of nonpartisan redistricting, they’ve become part of the district of Representative Randy Feenstra, a Republican.Her first task this year was to visit her new counties, which together voted for Trump by nearly 19,000 votes. She doesn’t have to win them — just keep the margins small enough while pumping up votes in her stronghold of Des Moines, the Iowa capital. But she does have to create some distance from national Democrats, which she tries to accomplish through humor.“I am not Nancy Pelosi,” she joked at a recent town-hall-style meeting in Ottumwa, one of 74 she’s held since her first election. “I’m a foot taller. I’m from a different state. I don’t wear five-inch heels.”Axne would like to see Democrats break the Build Back Better Act, their stalled social policy bill, into “chunks of coordinated policy.” And in the meantime, she wants Biden to get out there and hear from his disaffected customers directly.“It’s not that he doesn’t understand it,” she said. “It’s just that there’s so much happening at this high level that sometimes it’s really hard to just bring it down to that very micro level. But that micro level is what’s adding up across the country.”What to read Ryan Mac and Lisa Lerer profiled Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who is seeking to become the right’s would-be kingmaker.Trump’s longtime accounting firm has cut ties with his family business amid an investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial practices, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum report.Ukraine’s president hinted at a major concession on Monday and Russia’s foreign minister said talks would continue, suggesting room for a peaceful resolution of the crisis. For more, go here for the latest updates on the diplomatic efforts to avert a Russian invasion.In Opinion, J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge, called on his fellow conservatives to embrace reform of the Electoral Count Act, the 1887 law that governs how Congress counts the votes of the Electoral College.Paul Singer, the New York hedge fund billionaire, in 2014.Andrew Renneisen for The New York TimesMcCarthy and Pompeo to court megadonorsAs Republicans gear up for midterm elections that they hope will give them control of both chambers of Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the man who hopes to become their House speaker, is set to speak in Palm Beach, Fla. this week to some of the megadonors expected to finance the party’s efforts this fall and in 2024.The occasion is the semiannual gathering of the American Opportunity Alliance, a coalition of major donors spearheaded by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer that has worked mostly behind the scenes to shape the Republican Party.Also expected to speak is Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state under President Donald Trump and is said to be considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, which could pit him against Trump.Other prospective 2024 Republican candidates attended a meeting of the alliance last year in Colorado, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, also spoke to the alliance’s donors last year.The Palm Beach gathering is expected to draw candidates vying for Republican congressional nominations, including Herschel Walker (who is running for Senate in Georgia), Katie Britt (Senate in Alabama), Jane Timken (Senate in Ohio) and Morgan Ortagus (House in Tennessee).The donors in the alliance are likely to be assiduously courted by Republican candidates for a range of offices and to be solicited for donations to super PACs and party committees.Their giving and associations will be closely watched as the party and its donor class grapple with whether — and how — to move on from Trump.Singer was among the most aggressive Republican donors in seeking to block Trump from winning the Republican nomination in 2016. A conservative website he financed paid for early research into Trump’s ties to Russia. But Singer later donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and visited the Trump White House on multiple occasions.Other donors who have been involved in the American Opportunity Alliance include the brokerage titan Charles Schwab, the hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin and Todd Ricketts, who served as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee under Trump.Among the donors expected in Palm Beach are the former Trump cabinet officials Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary, and Linda McMahon, who was administrator of the Small Business Administration.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Meta’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Quarter

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      At some point, the jig is up for almost every highflying tech company (consider that Cisco was, for a time in 2000, the world’s most valuable company). That’s usually because executives put on blinders to one constant rule of innovation I’ve observed: The young devour the old.So, are the worrisome quarterly results posted Wednesday by the outfit formerly known as Facebook an early sign of that? That seemed to be Wall Street’s conclusion, which until now has showered the social networking giant with unquestioning love, but nonetheless shaved more than $250 billion off its market value, or 26 percent, the largest one-day dollar drop for a U.S. company in history.That’s quite the indictment, since the money crowd has stuck beside the company despite a roiling series of controversies in the 18 years since its founding. Privacy violations, foreign interference, harmful impacts on teenage girls, data breaches, voluminous disinformation and misinformation, and the hosting of citizens charged with seditious conspiracy have made the company into the singular villain of this digital age. It has even supplanted the ire that was once aimed at Microsoft (ironically, seen today as the “good” tech company).But until now, none of these myriad sins have seemed to matter to investors, who have cheered on Facebook’s digital advertising dominance that has yielded astonishing profits.It posted $10.3 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, an 8 percent dip, despite a 20 percent sales gain to $33.7 billion. But those profits were a disappointment, dragged down in part by $10 billion in 2021 spending on its Reality Labs unit, which makes its virtual reality glasses and similar products. That’s serious money to throw at something, but it looks to be just the tip of Meta’s spear in the battle to dominate the still vaporous metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg has clearly decided to go all in on what he views as the battleground for the future.There are other troubling signs, including the meteoric rise of TikTok and the impact of Apple’s ad tracking changes that have hurt Facebook’s ability to hoover up users’ personal data in service of targeted ads.While the Apple challenge and the metaverse spending are certainly troubling, what we might be seeing is the market’s tiring of co-founder Zuckerberg at the helm, even as more exciting and energetic rivals come into play. Even Microsoft seems more relevant and vibrant, including its recent and very deft plan to snap up Activision, a move Meta wouldn’t dare make due to regulatory scrutiny.So Facebook is forced to be creative on its own, not always its strongest suit given how it is known for ham-handedly shoplifting ideas from others.Indeed, Zuckerberg did not sound much like Caesar Augustus — the techie’s favored Roman emperor — in his earnings call with investors: “Although our direction is clear, it seems that our path ahead is not quite perfectly defined.” You’d imagine $10 billion would buy a better map.Thus, right on schedule, the company is trying to soften up Washington influencers for its next act, the metaverse. According to a report by Bloomberg, Meta is focused on think tanks and nonprofits, especially those that lean libertarian or free market, to presumably convince them that what happened back in web2 will not be an issue in web3, the supposed next phase of the internet.Narrator: It will be in issue.Meta gives funding to a lot of these organizations, of course, a kind of soft way to influence. It spent $20 million on lobbying alone last year — more than five times the amount in 2012 — which is more than triple Apple’s spending and roughly double Alphabet and Microsoft’s. Amazon was the only tech company to surpass Meta, with about $20.5 million in lobbying spending.Given the increasing bipartisan furor with the company, it makes sense. As Neil Chilson of Stand Together, a nonprofit associated with Charles Koch, put it: “There’s a lot of scrutiny on them, and they are trying to move into a new space and bring the temperature down at the same time.”Ya think? In a “Sway” interview I did recently, former Disney C.E.O. and Chairman Bob Iger noted the dangers of the metaverse: “There’s been enough said and criticized about toxic behavior in internet 2.0; Twitter, Facebook, you name it. Imagine what can happen when you have a much more compelling and immersive and, I’ll call it, collective of people or avatars of people in that environment, and what kind of toxic behavior could happen.”“Something Disney is going to have to consider as it talks about creating a metaverse for themselves is moderating and monitoring behavior,” he said.So it appears Zuckerberg is right about one thing about Meta’s direction: It’s going to be a bumpy ride.4 QuestionsI caught up with Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under President Donald Trump and now runs the Krebs Stamos Group. I’ve edited his answers.Are you surprised that the conspiracy theories around election fraud have gotten worse, despite all your efforts to debunk the information, which ultimately led to your being fired in a tweet?Sadly, no, not really. That’s unfortunately the game plan — they flood the zone with garbage to overwhelm evidence-based reality. Not to necessarily prove any particular plot or conspiracy theory, but to confuse the masses so they don’t know whom to trust, they just know that “something isn’t right here.” What really set the stage was the former president’s supporters had been primed to expect a rigged election. After all, Trump had been telling them that’s the only way he could lose. This agitation was made that much easier due to most voters only having a casual understanding of how elections work, exacerbated by some of the changes and confusion around voting during Covid. So, when you’ve been told to expect shenanigans, and you don’t know how anything works, the things you don’t understand look like conspiracy theories. Even though we were regularly debunking election-related conspiracy theories, the flood of lies pushed by elites and influencers amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy that overwhelmed us.Then there’s the ecosystem of grifters that boost these conspiracy theories for their own benefit, because ultimately disinformation is about power, money and influence. Until we hold them accountable for the harm they’ve done to democracy, they’ll continue to do it. We have to place the blame squarely where it lies: The fact that the former president continues to push lies about the 2020 election, simply because he can’t take the loss. That his own party won’t stand up for the country is really one of the more shameful chapters in American political history.The recent New York Times story that as president, Trump tried to get Homeland Security to seize the voting machines feels ominous. Were you aware of this and what is your assessment of his aims?I wasn’t aware of the scheme before I was fired in mid-November 2020, but I heard about it from a few reporters and government officials soon afterward in December. That it was even floated for consideration in the Oval Office is completely insane. It also says a lot that Trump’s own cabinet officials and advisers rejected the concept out of hand as beyond their authorities and illegal. Based on who was reportedly pushing this garbage to the president — namely Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Phil Waldron) — maybe they thought they were going to actually find something despite all available evidence. The more likely outcome? There was nothing there to find and they would either misrepresent something or manufacture a story entirely. That’s exactly what happened in Antrim County in Michigan in mid-December, where a group issued a report that was riddled with errors and misinterpretations that was then thoroughly debunked by experts in the field. Even if the plot had survived the inevitable legal action by the targeted states, it would have been the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security or some other agency analyzing any seized machines, and not the president’s rogue group of advisers. There was no evidence then or now that suggests they’d find foreign manipulation of votes or vote counting — because it didn’t happen.What are your biggest worries about the next election and what is your confidence that it will be secure?I remain confident that the work we all did through the 2020 election led to a secure, free and fair election. I also have continued confidence in the vast majority of professional election officials across the country committed to secure and transparent elections. Congress has to continue investing in elections so that we can continue the march toward 100 percent voter-verifiable paper. In 2016, less than 80 percent of votes had a paper ballot associated with the vote, with the remainder of votes stored on digital media. That’s hard to audit. In 2020, that number jumped to around 95 percent, according to a study by the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Entire states like Georgia and Pennsylvania shifted from paperless systems to paper ballot-based systems, leaving Louisiana as the only remaining state that’s broadly paperless. To its credit, Louisiana has tried, but has run into various procurement snags. We also need to continue expanding postelection, precertification audits that are based on transparent standards and methodologies conducted by election audit professionals. One of my greatest concerns looking ahead to 2022 midterms and 2024 is not necessarily a foreign cyber threat; instead, it’s a domestic insider threat posed by partisan election officials. This isn’t just speculation. In Mesa County, Colo., the Republican county clerk is under grand jury investigation for allowing unauthorized access to voting systems. More concerning, there are “Stop the Steal” candidates running in secretary of state races in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan and elsewhere that, if in office in 2024, would be in a position to affect how elections are run and even refuse to certify if their preferred candidate doesn’t win.That’s just not any American democracy that I recognize, and if you’re anything like me, you’re a single-issue voter: If you run on a stolen election platform, you’re unfit for public office.You formed your firm Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, and one of your first clients was SolarWinds, the famously hacked network software company. What do you do for your clients and what’s the most important thing companies need to pay attention to?The set of companies in the sights of high-level cyber actors are no longer limited to the big banks, energy firms and defense contractors. Instead, the hundreds of technology firms that are critical supply chain partners for just about every aspect of our nation’s economic engine are now targeted by foreign cyber actors. Companies must recognize that if you’re shipping a product, you’re shipping a target; if you’re hosting a service, you are the target, and then adjust their approach to security accordingly.We work with clients to develop and implement risk management strategies informed by this dramatic shift in geopolitical and geo-economic concerns that shape our world today. What’s happening in Eastern Europe is a perfect example. While we might not know for certain if Russia is going to attack Ukraine, Russia has plenty of offensive options, and they’ve proven time and again that they aren’t afraid to use cyber capabilities that directly impact businesses across the globe. Then there’s the Chinese government. As Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray said this week, “Whatever makes an industry tick, they target.” Using hacking, spying, covert acquisition and other techniques to steal intellectual property from advanced technology firms, they seek to gain a commercial advantage for Chinese firms. State actors exploiting our growing digital dependencies for intelligence, commercial, influence and military purposes is now the norm, rather than the exception, and every business needs a security strategy driven from the c-suite.Lovely & LoathsomeLovely: With TikTok full of some truly vile and dangerous challenges (the now-banned milk crate challenge, for one), perhaps we need to focus on the many inventive and fun ones. I am enamored of what’s known as the Drop Down Challenge, in which people, well, drop down into a squat, typically synchronized. There was a skit on it on “Saturday Night Live” this past week, but the real thing is oddly satisfying and, mostly, persistently creative. Check out this one called the “nurse edition.”Loathsome: Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, continues his reign as Twitter’s most obtuse tweeter. Last month, after walking back his repeated statements acknowledging there was a “violent terrorist attack” on the Capitol last January, Cruz the next day accused President Biden of “trying to signal weakness and surrender” to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Mockery ensued, obviously, but that digital dopiness was somehow topped this week with his tweet advising people in his state to get ready for cold conditions, noting it’s “better to be over prepared than underprepared for winter weather.” That comes just a year after he decamped to Cancún, Mexico, amid a serious home heating fuel crisis in Texas, a debacle thoroughly chronicled on Twitter.Conclusion: You cuncan’t make this stuff up! More

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      Trump v. DeSantis: Does the Florida Governor Really Have a Shot?

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      In early 2016, as Jeb Bush floundered, the Republican establishment began to throw its support behind a different politician from Florida who seemed as if he could defeat the upstart Donald Trump. Senator Marco Rubio was 44 and handsome, and had put together a somewhat impressive legislative record during his five years in office. National Review called Rubio a “Republican dream” and hedge fund managers were donating millions to his campaign. Trump led comfortably in the polls, but it was still early, as G.O.P. insiders reminded us, and they still hadn’t put their thumbs fully on the scale. We all know how the story ends: Rubio wasn’t able to mount any sort of credible challenge to Trump and withdrew after just a few months.Today, we are hearing about yet another Florida politician in his early 40s — Gov. Ron DeSantis — who, according to many of those same establishment figures, will collect a vast majority of support from donors. And he is already the subject of plenty of positive media coverage. The headlines about DeSantis are eerily similar to those about Rubio in 2016: “The Rise of Ron DeSantis,” “Why Never-Trumpers Should Bet on DeSantis Now” and “Looks Like Ron DeSantis Could Turn Into Trump’s Personal Nightmare.” If DeSantis runs for president, his job won’t be so much to win the presidency on his own merits, but rather to stop Donald Trump.How seriously should we take DeSantis’s chances?Trump holds sizable margins in pretty much every poll you can find, but some of the numbers are tightening. Last week, the polling firm Echelon Insights published a raft of data on the Florida governor. It found that Trump’s lead over DeSantis among G.O.P. voters, which, according to its own poll, was 62 percent to 22 percent of respondents in October, had shrunk to 57 percent to 32 percent as of late January. Perhaps the most compelling bit of information Echelon found was that while 54 percent of Republicans thought “Trump was a great president and should remain the leader of the Republican Party,” 22 percent said Trump “was a great president but it is time for the Republican Party to find a new leader” and 18 percent said Trump “was not a great president and the Republican Party would be better off without his influence.” Which means that 40 percent of G.O.P. voters are at least open to the possibility of someone new.So things, perhaps, aren’t quite as locked up as they might appear, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of Echelon Insights, told me. When asked whether Trump should run again, many of the respondents to her poll showed “a shocking level of ambivalence” to that question, she said. These people were not never-Trumpers or center-of-right Republicans; they were people who had thought Trump had done a good job but also now believed that it might be time for a fresh voice.These polls, of course, measure sentiment at a fixed moment in time. Given that, it’s difficult to know exactly what to make of a seeming growing hesitancy among Republican voters about Trump, or, for that matter, what it says about DeSantis’s shot.What’s clearer is that Trump has some built-in advantages that are unlikely to change.When the election machine truly kicks in, Trump will no doubt garner a vast majority of the media attention once again. He obviously enjoys unrivaled name recognition. And Trump’s absence from office this term could give him an edge because he has not had to take the blame for what now feels like an endless pandemic. That burden has mostly been shouldered by Joe Biden and can explain, in large part, the president’s tanking approval numbers.Plus, a December University of Massachusetts Amherst poll found that only 21 percent of Republicans thought that Joe Biden won a legitimate victory in 2020, a number that hasn’t budged much over time. There’s also some evidence that shows that G.O.P. voters who think the election was illegitimate appear more likely to vote.When all these things are considered, DeSantis, then, should be seen more as a primary challenger to a popular incumbent. Nobody since the advent of the modern-day presidential primary has successfully unseated an incumbent for the nomination.There’s also a question of timing at play here. DeSantis’s recent rise to national prominence has come from his handling of the pandemic — he has become the loudest anti-lockdown voice in the national conversation and can point to his repeated refusal to shut down his state. This might be a popular stance in 2022, but it’s hard to imagine how it will play in two years. If Covid is shutting down schools and businesses in two years, we will most likely be looking at a vastly different country. If we have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it’s quite possible that nobody will really care how DeSantis handled the pandemic.Anderson believes that DeSantis’s success comes in large part from his willingness to fight, a trait that Trump, of course, also possesses. While she thinks that DeSantis has a chance, she also pointed to the former Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker as a cautionary tale. “Walker is an interesting example of someone who captured the conservative imagination because he was fighting with the teachers unions, and he was standing strong against those Democratic legislators,” Anderson said. “And yet, when push came to shove, that effort fizzled out. And so if you’re DeSantis, you want to avoid that path of being someone who gets a lot of attention and a lot of interest because, hey, you were fighting the right fights at the right time against the right people.” This approach works to a certain extent, Anderson said, but there are also times when things just don’t translate onto the national stage.DeSantis’s stances on Covid have garnered him a reasonable amount of national name recognition. Last month, a Reuters poll found that 80 percent of Republican voters had at least heard of him. If this were a normal Republican election run-up, DeSantis would probably be leading right now: An Echelon Insights poll from December that did not include Trump found that DeSantis comfortably led all other potential G.O.P. nominees. But Trump’s path to power is littered with the campaigns of other upstart Republican candidates who checked off all the right boxes and got along well with the establishment. Is it really reasonable to think DeSantis’s fate will be any different?Have feedback? Send a note to kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.” More

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      Stay Woke. The Right Can Be Illiberal, Too.

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      Those of us who sustainedly criticize the excesses of the Great Awokening are often told that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill. That the real problem is censorship not from the left but from the right. That censorship from the left is largely a matter of pile-ons by anonymous Twitter denizens or college kids expressing themselves, while censorship from the right involves menacing officials dedicated to eliminating, for instance, discussion of race in schools.The characterization of the problem on the left strikes me as somewhere between uninformed and willfully blind. Yes, left-leaning students might demonstrate their free-speech intolerance within the cozy confines of their campuses, but one day they graduate into the real world and take that rehearsed intolerance with them. Superprogressive views may predominate in certain settings, but the presumption, held by too many, that their woke outlook doesn’t even warrant intellectual challenge in the public square is an extension of the broader “dis-enlightenment” I described back in October.That said, I’m genuinely open to the idea that censorship from the right is more of a problem than I have acknowledged. The truth may be, as it so often is, in the middle, and a legal case from the past week has made me think about it.Making sense of things requires synthesis, identifying what explains a lot rather than perceiving a buzzing chaos of people suddenly crazed, which is an implausible and even effort-light approach to things. In that vein, our problem today is illiberalism on both sides.We will salute, then, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker, who last week ruled, in a 74-page opinion, in favor of six professors at the University of Florida who were barred by school officials from acting as expert witnesses in cases challenging state policy on issues ranging from restrictive voting laws to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to withhold funds from schools with mask mandates. (There are also recent reports that U.F. faculty members have been cautioned against using the words “critical” and “race” in the same sentence to describe the curriculums they teach, apparently to head off discussion of critical race theory and its effects on education in a way that might draw a backlash from state legislators or others in the Florida government.)Judge Walker analogized the actions of University of Florida officials to the removal in December of a statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre from the campus of the University of Hong Kong. He echoed the plaintiffs’ argument that “in an apparent act of vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or anticipatory obedience, “U.F. has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party” — admonishing the defendants in a footnote that “if those in U.F.’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”The judge summed up by noting that “the Supreme Court of the United States has long regarded teachers, from the primary grades to the university level, as critical to a healthy democracy.” He added, “Plaintiffs’ academic inquiry ‘is necessary to informed political debate’ and ‘is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,’” emphasizing that “when such critical inquiry is stifled, democracy suffers.”Let’s not forget, either, what happened to the schoolteacher Matthew Hawn last summer: He was fired by school administrators in Tennessee for leading classroom discussions with high school juniors and seniors (in a course called Contemporary Studies; it’s not as if this had been a chemistry lab) on concepts such as white privilege and implicit bias, not long after passage in the state of a ban on teaching critical race theory. As I’ve argued, ideas rooted in that theory do, in refracted form, make their way into how some schoolteachers teach, and it’s legitimate to question the extent of this. But that hardly justifies Hawn’s getting canned for things such as assigning a widely read article by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hawn is pursuing an appeal of his dismissal, and if justice is on his side, he should win it.I’m not doing a 180 here or letting those I term the Elect off the hook. The illiberal tendency on the left is just as oppressive and requires equal pushback: The University of North Texas music professor Timothy Jackson, a founder of his school’s Center for Schenkerian Studies, studies the work of the German Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose early-20th-century work figures prominently in music theory. In a 2019 speech to the Society for Music Theory, Philip Ewell, a Black music professor at Hunter College characterized Schenker as a racist and wrote in a 2020 article for Music Theory Online (a publication of the Society for Music Theory) that “Schenker’s racist views infected his music theoretical arguments,” that “there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized” and that by extension, music theory and even the academic field of musicology are racialized, if not racist.In 2020, Jackson led the publication of an issue of The Journal of Schenkerian Studies dedicated to addressing Ewell’s case, publishing five articles defending Ewell’s case and 10 critiquing it. As The Times reported last year, Jackson was hardly gentle in his pushback, arguing that Ewell’s “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black antisemitism” and partly attributing the dearth of Black classical musicians to fewer Black people who “grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued” and that fostering music education in public schools is the proper remedy.The result was, by today’s standards, predictable: Hundreds of students and scholars signed a letter condemning the issue. After an investigation, the university relieved Jackson of his supervision of the journal and, according to Times reporting, didn’t rule out further disciplinary action.The point here is less whether Jackson’s argument and the issue it appeared in were the quintessence of tact on race issues than whether he deserves to lose his career status and reputation because of them. Nor is the point whether Ewell’s argument was enlightened; one is (or should be) free to subscribe to it. Or not. My view is that while the field of musicology is correct, generally, in examining itself for remnants of racist bias, Ewell’s specific take is flawed.No, the point is that the through line between Jackson’s treatment at North Texas and the treatment of the Florida law professors is that instead of their views being addressed as one side of heated, complex debates, their views were squelched as unutterable heresies.Jackson has sued, and if justice is on his side, he should win. I could cite a great many cases similar to his.To many, I suspect, what happened to the University of Florida professors and to Hawn is more frightful than what happened to Jackson. However, that sentiment is a matter of one’s priorities, not a neutral conception of what justice consists of. Too many of us suppose that people should not be allowed to express opinions they deem unpleasant or dangerous and are given to demonizing those who have such opinions as threats to our moral order.On the right, even if you’re wary of critical race theory’s effect on the way many kids are taught, it is both backward and unnecessary to institutionalize the sense that discussing race at all is merely unwelcome pot stirring (and if that’s not what you mean, then you need to make it clear). On the left, illiberalism does not become insight just because some think they are speaking truth to power. Resistance to this kind of perspective is vital, no matter where it comes from on the political spectrum.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      Donald Trump's Vanity Is Still Holding America Hostage

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      We can rant about the Senate and rail against Fox News. The ranting is warranted and the railing just. We can survey all the Republican efforts to subvert the will of voters, size up the hatred that so many Americans feel for one another and see the makings of a civil war.Or we can wonder how urgently all those forces would matter — whether they would have moved us this fast toward this brink — without the impossibly fragile ego of one insatiably needy man.Does a great nation’s future hinge on a rejected president’s pride?I thought about that on Wednesday morning as I listened to Donald Trump’s interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR. All these months later, Trump was still fixated on the inferior size of the crowds that turned out for Biden in 2020, still prattling on about it, still insistent: I’m bigger! I’m better! That was before he hung up on Inskeep, who had the temerity not to surrender readily to Trump’s delusion that the election was stolen.I thought about Trump’s delicate psyche and our delicate state when my Monday and Tuesday news feeds filled with his attack on Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican. “Is he crazy or just stupid?” Trump said in a written statement. “I will never endorse this jerk again.” Such elevated language, and the prompt for it? Rounds had merely acknowledged that Biden won the 2020 election.I think about Trump’s narcissism every time we get a closer glimpse into what he was doing and how he was feeling during the Jan. 6 riot, when those ghastly images filled our screens. What churned our stomachs salved his vanity. As my colleague Maureen Dowd wrote last weekend, “Rather than admit that he lost re-election, Trump was willing to egg on a seditious cult to overturn the election. You can just picture him sitting there in the White House, surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers, thrilled at the TV scenes of MAGA hooligans attacking the police.”His insistence on an inverted version of history — one that doesn’t merely flatter him but that turns him into a noble martyr — is one of the driving forces behind many Republicans’ anti-democratic maneuvers and their indulgence or outright promotion of conspiratorial thinking. There’s no Big Lie without the Big Liar. And while, yes, this big liar is the product of dynamics in the electorate that he didn’t create, he turbocharges the ugliness with a relentlessness and perverse skill all his own.He must always reassure himself that he’s the king of the jungle. He must forever fluff his mane and amplify his roar.There has long been a (verbally sexist) “Great Man” theory of history, but with Trump we have a subset of that, or an annex to it: the great psychosis theory of history. One man’s pathological insecurity is — or can be — an entire country’s fate. That has been the case elsewhere before. Is it the case here now?Post-Ivy IgnominySenator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, left, and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on Capitol Hill in 2019.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOodles of acquaintances brought my attention to a recent article in The Atlantic, “How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democracy,” by Stephen Marche, because of this withering claim within it: “What the Ivy League produces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwarranted confidence. Its institutions are hubris factories.” My acquaintances wanted my thoughts because I once wrote a book questioning the magical power that so many students and their parents attribute to such schools and because I now teach at an Ivy-esque institution, Duke.My thoughts are that Marche’s assessment applies accurately to some students at elite colleges but by no means to most of them. It’s a big overgeneralization.But his article — an excellent one, worth your time — has stuck with me for a different reason. It pointedly and perfectly captures a truism that we sometimes speed too quickly past and that has special relevance to events in American politics, and to the Republican Party in particular, over these past few years: People will sell out anyone and anything, including themselves, if it gets them to, or keeps them at, the top of the heap.How and why, Marche wonders, do the likes of Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who went to Stanford as an undergraduate and got his law degree at Yale, and Senator Ted Cruz, whose three years at Harvard Law were preceded by four at Princeton, incite anti-elite fury? And how and why do Hawley, Cruz and other lawmakers who make their careers in government fan the flames that would burn down the very institutions they inhabit?Marche describes the contradiction especially well in writing about the second of President Trump’s two secretaries of state: “Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. When a man of those advantages oversees the hollowing out of the State Department, allows the president to fire inspectors general who displease him by their inspection, uses his position to cultivate donors for his party, and consistently bends the norms and destroys the traditions that have lifted him to power, what hope can there be for his country? If he cannot manage to keep faith with the system, who can?”Ouch and amen. But there’s a simple solution to the seemingly complicated riddle of Hawley, Cruz and Pompeo. And Marche provides it: Right now their surest path to power, or firmest grip on it, involves the theatrical trashing of their own trappings, the reinvention of themselves as characters in a story other than their own. They haven’t had some post-Ivy moral or philosophical epiphany. Their makeovers are fundamentally commercial: They sized up the current marketplace and manufactured what sells best.And for them — as for too many people in this age of runaway vanity — brand dictates belief.For the Love of SentencesHanya YanagiharaDavid Levenson/Getty Images“To Paradise,” by Hanya Yanagihara, has attracted extensive analysis, none more deft than a review in The Atlantic by Jordan Kisner: “Reading the novel delivers the thrilling, uncanny feeling of standing before an infinity mirror, numberless selves and rooms turning uncertainly before you, just out of reach.” (Thanks to Barbara Rothschild of Columbia, Mo., for nominating this.)In The New Yorker, Richard Brody has been on a tear. Here’s his appraisal of “Don’t Look Up,” which he calls “a clever film that’s short on wit. The difference is that wit is multifaceted, like a gem that, however small, offers different glimmers at different angles. Cleverness exhausts itself in a single glint and then repeats itself to infinity.” (Zino Vogiatzis, Timonium, Md.)And here he is on one of the less hallowed movies directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who died last week: “Before Michael Cimino’s ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ before Elaine May’s ‘Ishtar,’ there was the scandal of ‘At Long Last Love,’ which the critics of the time heaven’s-gated, leaving Bogdanovich ishtarred and feathered.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)Examining the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot in The Washington Post, Kate Woodsome wrote: “As the psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem teaches, over time, a person’s trauma can look like personality. Growing angry with the banal. Insomnia. Drinking. Scanning everywhere for threats. Maybe this is simply how you are. Or maybe you’re tying your shoes with broken fingers.” (Tricia Chatary, Middlebury, Vt. )And Rex Huppke was having none of it when he fired off this column for The Chicago Tribune, which observed: “A portion of the populace has slid from ‘it’s good to be smart’ to ‘being smart is elitist, so I’m going to follow the medical advice of this podcaster,’ a painfully common epitaph throughout the pandemic.” He added that Jan. 6 “will live in idiocy. It was the charge of the not-bright brigade.” (Helen Mooty, Seabrook, Texas)Now to The Times. Reviewing Carl Bernstein’s new memoir, “Chasing History,” about his beginnings as a reporter, the Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote: “At 77, he is entering his anecdotage.” (Nancy Mansbach, Waban, Mass., and Gordon Brown, Boulder, Colo.) Garner also described Bernstein’s youthful enthusiasm this way: “If he’d been a dog, his head would have always been outside the car window.” (Helaine Fendelman, Manhattan)Weighing in on the final weekend of regular-season N.F.L. games, Mike Tanier explained: “The New England Patriots (10-6) can improve their chances to win the A.F.C. East by beating the Miami Dolphins (8-8), who were eliminated from postseason contention last week, while the Buffalo Bills (10-6) can clinch the division by defeating the Jets, who were eliminated in 1972.” (Mark Cameron, Suquamish, Wash.) And here’s a bonus from Mike, on the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who ended up making it into the playoffs: “Ben Roethlisberger, who is expected to retire at season’s end, now throws and runs like a great-uncle playing a pickup game at a backyard cookout after three I.P.A.s and two helpings of potato salad.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J., and Christopher Bailey, Richmond, Va.)Reflecting on New York City’s new mayor, Ginia Bellafante observed: “Saturday marks the end of Eric Adams’s first week as the mayor of New York, a time he has used to successfully distinguish himself from his predecessor — taking the J train; holding meetings at 9 a.m., an hour that found Bill de Blasio still in sweatpants; riding a Citi Bike in a suit, horse-bit loafers and a rose-colored helmet coordinated to the hue of his tie. Whatever might come, this would not be a tenure of earth tones and lethargy and saturnine expressions.” (Debbie Deitcher, Manhattan)Taking the measure of Mehmet Oz, Annaliese Griffin wrote: “He’s rightly understood as a kind of quasi-religious leader, one who has set up his revival tent between a yoga studio and an urgent-care clinic, with the television cameras rolling.” (Scott Williams, Salt Lake City)Finally, here’s Charles Blow on his dinner with Sidney Poitier: “His enchantment settled on you, like a soft sweater. Cashmere, of course.” (Tom Wild, Killington, Vt., and Vipan Chandra, Attleboro, Mass.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Frank BruniDogs are Rorschachs, and someone less sentimental about them than I am might consider the positions of Regan (right) and Marlin (left, who belongs to my sister and is recovering from toe surgery) accidental. In this view, Marlin happened to place his cone, which he’s wearing so that he doesn’t lick and aggravate his wound, atop Regan’s paws; she was too zonked out to care. I choose a different interpretation. Marlin craved connection. Regan wanted to provide it, even if that meant coarse plastic against her soft fur. Mere inches from me on a conveniently king-size bed, these dog cousins (of a sort) comfort each other. I just look on — and beam.On a Personal NoteIt has been exactly six months since I left New York for North Carolina, and not one of them has gone by without several New Yorkers asking me how much I miss it. It’s an assumptive question: how much, not if. But I get it. In Manhattan I had more friends. In Manhattan I had more restaurants. In Manhattan I had more history, a memory on every street corner, and I had those early evenings when, without even planning it, I found myself walking along the Hudson exactly as the sun set over the Palisades. Don’t I pine just a bit for that?Oddly, no, and I somehow knew I wouldn’t. I could sense within me a growing impatience, a gnawing unsettledness, a twitchy finger wanting to turn the page. And the long list of reasons to ignore that feeling couldn’t compete with the emotional logic of paying it heed. In this life you can make lists of pros and cons and prudently yield to the arithmetic of it all. Or you can respond to the weather inside you, and just as wisely ride those currents.They carried me to Chapel Hill, where I smile almost every time I turn into my driveway because, for someone who’d become so firmly rooted in the concrete jungle, suburbia is the adventure. A garage door that opens automatically and a mailbox with a little red flag on its side are what’s exotic.Hardly a day goes by when Regan, in a patch of forest safely distant from streets and cars, doesn’t give futile chase to a posse of white-tailed deer, either sprinting toward them at a velocity that stuns me or hopping, like a kangaroo, so she doesn’t lose sight of her quarry in the tall grass. That’s my theater.A few of the neighborhood deer seem to have figured out what I already knew: Regan’s all bound, no bite. On those occasions when she catches up to them, she freezes. So they sometimes don’t bother to flee.In pursuing them, she’s just stretching her legs. By leaving Manhattan, I was doing something similar. There’s comfort and safety in staying put, but it can also leave you cramped, cinched. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to stray, why not head into the woods? More