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      The Marjorie Taylor Greene-ing of America

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      WASHINGTON — Are we ready for our new Republican overlords?Are we ready for an empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene?Are we ready for a pumped-up, pistol-packing Lauren Boebert?“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority.In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican candidate for the House, wants community panels to decide whether rape victims are able to get abortions or not. He’s building on Dr. Oz’s dictum that local politicians should help make that call. Even Oprah turned on her creation, Dr. Odd.J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, before saluting him to gain public office, could join the Senate in January. Talk about American Elegy.Even though he wrote in his best seller that Yale Law School was his “dream school,” he now trashes the very system that birthed him. Last year, he gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy”: His mother-in-law is a provost at the University of California San Diego.It’s disturbing to think of Vance side by side with Herschel Walker. Walker was backed by Mitch McConnell, who countenanced an obviously troubled and flawed individual even if it meant degrading the once illustrious Senate chamber.Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage.Democrats are partly to blame. They haven’t explained how they plan to get a grip on the things people are worried about: crime and inflation. Voters weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from Biden, who felt morally obligated to talk about the threat to democracy, even though that’s not what people are voting on.As it turns out, a woman’s right to control her body has been overshadowed by uneasiness over safety and economic security.To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.”Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.Heaven help us.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      With Falsehoods About Pelosi Attack, Republicans Mimic Trump

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      WASHINGTON — Speaking on a conservative radio talk show on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump amplified a conspiracy theory about the grisly attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, that falsely suggested that Mr. Pelosi may not have been the victim of a genuine attack.“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Mr. Trump said on the Chris Stigall show, winking at a lie that has flourished in right-wing media and is increasingly being given credence by Republicans. “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out — so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break out.”There is no evidence to suggest that. Mr. Pelosi, 82, was attacked on Friday with a hammer by a suspect who federal prosecutors say invaded the Pelosis’ San Francisco home, bent on kidnapping the speaker and shattering her kneecaps.But Mr. Trump, a longtime trafficker in conspiracy theories who propelled his political rise with the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, has never let such facts get in his way.The reaction to the assault on Mr. Pelosi among Republicans — who have circulated conspiracy theories about it, dismissed it as an act of random violence and made the Pelosis the punchline of a dark joke — underscores how thoroughly the G.O.P. has internalized his example. It suggested that Republicans have come to conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.If anything, some Republicans seem to believe they will be rewarded by their right-wing base for such coarseness — or even suffer political consequences if they do not join in and show that they are in on the joke.“LOL,” Representative Claudia Tenney, Republican of New York, who is up for re-election in a competitive district, tweeted on Friday night, circulating a photograph that showed a group of young, white men holding oversized hammers beside a gay Pride flag.On Sunday, Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, who is in line to helm a Homeland Security subcommittee if his party wins control of the House next week, also amplified a groundless and homophobic conspiracy theory hatched on the right about the attack. He tweeted, but later removed, a picture of Ms. Pelosi with her hands covering her eyes, with the caption: “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he thought the federal complaint detailing the break-in and the attack was not telling the entire story.“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said suggestively. “You hear the same things I do.”Mr. Pelosi, 82, remained in intensive care with a fractured skull, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.In Arizona, the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, made the attack a punchline at a campaign event on Monday, noting that while Ms. Pelosi has security around her, “apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” She smiled as her supporters howled with laughter.Republican leaders have condemned the violence against Mr. Pelosi and have not shared the conspiracy theories or sinister memes, but they have not publicly condemned those who have done so or done anything to try to tamp down on the stream of lies. And over the past few years, they have consistently demonstrated to their colleagues in Congress that there are no consequences for making vitriolic or even violent statements.If anything, such behavior has turned those more extreme members into influencers on the right, who carry more clout in Congress.The intruder who attacked Mr. Pelosi had wanted to take Ms. Pelosi, whom he saw as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party,” hostage and break her kneecaps. He entered her San Francisco home with rope, zip ties and a hammer, according to the federal complaint against him.There was a time when such an event would have led to unequivocal denunciation by the leaders of both parties, sometimes followed by a pause in the day-to-day mudslinging of a campaign — if only to ensure that no candidate would make a remark that could be construed as in any way offensive to the victim.This time, few Republicans made such moves.Former Vice President Mike Pence followed the old model, saying that the attack was an “outrage” and noting that “there can be no tolerance for violence against public officials or their families.” But what would have once been a run-of-the-mill statement stood out for being one of the few that was unqualified in its condemnation of the attacker, who Mr. Pence said should be prosecuted.“They don’t have any fear of reprisal,” said Douglas Heye, a former Republican leadership aide on Capitol Hill. “That’s because our politics have become so tribal that anything that is about owning the other side is somehow seen as a political message, even though it’s not.”It is a page out of Mr. Trump’s playbook. For years, he elevated online rumors by speculating about them, bursting onto the national political scene in 2011 with the unfounded “birther” theory about Mr. Obama. When Mr. Trump insulted Senator John McCain of Arizona for being taken captive in Vietnam, his popularity among Republicans suffered no discernible hit.The current crop of candidates and lawmakers who have grown in power through their allegiance to Mr. Trump have replicated his methods. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, tweeted that Mr. Pelosi was attacked by a “friend” and that the media was the source of disinformation. Her post has since been removed.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, recirculated a Twitter thread stating that “none of us will ever know for sure” what happened at Ms. Pelosi’s house and complaining that the attack was being cited as an “indictment of Republicans.” More

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      Kari Lake and the Rise of the Republican Apostate

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      On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.He told Ms. Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about Covid-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees‌. “The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust” of the public, he said.Ms. Ingraham’s guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen back on to her show. Dr. Jensen was, in Ms. Ingraham’s telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who’d had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. “You were vilified,” Ms. Ingraham said. “I was vilified for featuring you.”By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the State Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, at the party’s endorsement convention. Dr. Jensen’s Covid theories proved central to his message. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t popular,” he said at the G.O.P. convention. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t politically safe.”At the heart of Scott Jensen’s candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor who downplays, if not outright denies, the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Dr. Jensen’s self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today’s Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the “corrupt, rotten media” that wants to “brainwash” Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.It is possible to see Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that’s almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.Watching Dr. Jensen’s swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They’ve experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” from memory. He embraced F.D.R.’s New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say, “the Democratic Party left me.”This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.Reagan’s ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous “read my lips” quip — and the voters cast you out.After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Mr. Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.Instead, Mr. Trump’s sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America’s greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about “American exceptionalism” and the “city upon a hill,” the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the “finest fighting force” the world had ever seen, and so on.Mr. Trump’s trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. “We don’t win anymore, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s China with our trade agreements,” he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. “No matter what it is, we don’t seem to have it.”No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Mr. Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like “strangers in their own land.” Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Mr. Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he’d tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were “un-American” and “evil.” Court decisions he opposed were a “disgrace” and judges who ruled against him were “putting our country in great danger.”By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Mr. Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who’d renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn’t deliver what Mr. Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan’s Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Mr. Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but Mr. DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.A judge had dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, Mr. DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general’s office replied that such a theory could mean as many as eight million audits every election. It would “mean that no election results would ever be final.” (The court dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit, saying he had “merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”)Mr. DePerno’s argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that Mr. DePerno is the state Republican Party’s nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state’s election laws.A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, Mr. DePerno’s legal background only enhances his credibility. “He is a killer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DePerno, whom he has endorsed. “We need a killer. And he’s a killer in honesty. He’s an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here.”Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Mr. Trump’s praise with her insistence that Mr. Biden is not the lawful president. Ms. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media’s credibility. “I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she told The Times in an interview. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.” In one campaign ad, Ms. Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. “The media isn’t just corrupt,” she says in another spot. “They are anti-American.”As for Dr. Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his Covid theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor’s public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Dr. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of Covid-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Mr. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6 percent of Covid-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Mr. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?”Dr. Jensen’s popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn’t want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno, Dr. Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate’s path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Dr. Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Ms. Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and Mr. DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by today’s apostate candidates — Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and others — is that they don’t want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Mr. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president’s legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.It’s why Ivy League graduates like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Mr. Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors’ mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Governor Jensen could, for example, pack his state’s medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak. A Governor Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party’s most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern G.O.P. has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It’s “a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change,” says Mr. Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake and Mr. DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      It’s 2024. Trump Backers Won’t Certify the Election. What Next, Legally?

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      The question is most urgent in Arizona, where two of the former president’s loyalists may well become governor and secretary of state.It’s a nightmare scenario for American democracy: The officials in charge of certifying an election refuse to do so, setting off a blizzard of litigation and possibly a constitutional crisis.And there are worrying signs that the fears of independent scholars, Democrats and a few anti-Trump Republicans could become a reality. We could soon be in legal terra incognita, they said — like the days when medieval cartographers would write “Here Be Dragons” along the unexplored edges of world maps.“It would be completely unprecedented,” said Nathaniel Persily, an elections expert at Stanford University. “I hate to be apocalyptic,” he added, but the United States could be headed for the kind of electoral chaos that “our system is incapable of handling.”In Arizona, Kari Lake, a charismatic former television anchor, and Mark Finchem, a state lawmaker, have a very good chance of becoming governor and secretary of state. Both are ardent supporters of Donald Trump and his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.On Friday, a group sponsored by Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the House committee investigating the Capitol assault, put $500,000 behind a television and digital ad that underscores the alarm some anti-Trump Republicans share about Lake and Finchem.“If you care about the survival of our republic, we cannot give people power who will not honor elections,” Cheney says in the ad. “We must have elected officials who honor that responsibility.”Another reason for the worries about Arizona in particular: Unlike in other states where Trump has promoted election-denying candidates, several of the politicians who pushed back on his calls to overturn the 2020 results will be gone.Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who resisted Trump’s efforts in 2020, is leaving office after his term is up, as is Attorney General Mark Brnovich, an ally in that opposition. Rusty Bowers, who as the Republican speaker of the State House stood with Ducey and Brnovich, lost his primary this year for a State Senate seat. And even Brnovich, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against another election denier, Blake Masters, has shifted his tone about the 2020 election.“Ducey was a little bit of a moderating factor,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s leading election lawyer. But Ducey was also “willing to tolerate a lot of crazy,” Elias added.The governor is backing Lake, as is the Republican Governors Association, actions that Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist whose group is spending at least $3 million in Arizona opposing Lake and Finchem, called “despicable.” Longwell said that Lake was especially dangerous because of her ability to “talk normal to the normies and crazy to the crazies.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.What could happen if Lake and Finchem win?The most worrisome scenario, several nonpartisan experts said, is that Finchem and Lake might refuse to fulfill the traditionally ceremonial act of “canvassing” the results of a presidential election under Arizona law, or that the governor could refuse to sign the required “certificate of ascertainment” that is then sent to Washington.Elias’s firm, which has grown to nearly 80 lawyers, would then have to decide whether to sue in state or federal court, or perhaps both, depending on which path was more relevant. But he acknowledged some uncertainty about how that litigation might play out.One new factor in 2024 may be an overhauled Electoral Count Act, which is expected to pass Congress after the midterms. It would create a new panel of three federal judges who would rule on election-related lawsuits, with appeals going directly to the Supreme Court. Proponents say the new panel would allow disputes to be adjudicated more quickly.“It’s not actually all that easy to anoint the loser of an election the winner,” cautioned David Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group.“The one exception to that is the presidential election,” Becker said, in which there’s an opportunity for a “corrupt individual” to send a slate of electors to Washington that does not reflect the will of voters. If the national Electoral College results were close, a protracted dispute in Arizona could hamper Congress from rapidly determining the overall winner.But Becker said he was more worried about the prospect for political violence fueled by uncertainty than he was about the integrity of the legal system.Neither Lake nor Finchem responded to questions. Finchem has said he would certify the next election “as long as all lawful votes are counted and all votes cast are under the law,” while failing to specify what he means by “lawful.” Finchem has also said that he couldn’t imagine President Biden winning.Employees sorting newly printed mail-in ballots in Phoenix. Republicans in several states have increasingly opposed mail voting and called for a return to hand-counting ballots.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe power of a secretary of stateSecretaries of state also have enormous power over elections, though it’s county officials that actually run them.To take just one recent example: Finchem and Lake both support a return to hand-counting ballots, which election experts say would introduce more errors and uncertainty into the process.One rural Arizona county controlled by Republicans, Cochise County, initially planned to count every vote in the midterms by hand — only to back down when Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who is running for governor against Lake, threatened to sue.In neighboring Nevada, another G.O.P.-controlled county’s plan to count ballots by hand is on hold after the State Supreme Court ruled the process illegal. The Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, then ordered the hand-counting process to “cease immediately.” Her possible successor, the Trump-backed Jim Marchant, might have acted differently.One of the Arizona secretary of state’s chief tasks is assembling the elections procedures manual that, once approved by the governor and the attorney general, is distributed to county and local officials. Brnovich refused to accept the 2021 manual proposed by Hobbs, so the state has been using the 2019 edition.The manual is limited to the confines of Arizona election law. But Finchem could tinker with the rules regarding the approval of voter registration, or ballot drop boxes, in ways that subtly favor Republicans, said Jim Barton, an election lawyer in Arizona. He could also adjust the certification procedure for presidential elections.“You can imagine a lot of mischief with all the nitty-gritty stuff that nobody pays attention to,” said Richard Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.Looming over all this is a Supreme Court case on elections that is heading to oral arguments this fall.The justices are expected to rule on a previously obscure legal theory called the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservatives argue that the Constitution granted state legislatures, rather than secretaries of state or courts, the full authority to determine how federal elections are carried out; liberals and many legal scholars say that’s nonsense.If the court adopts the most aggressive version of the legal theory, Persily noted, it could raise questions about the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act, adding a new wrinkle of uncertainty.“My hair is on fire” to an even greater degree than it was in 2020, said Hasen, who published a prescient book that year called “Election Meltdown.”What to readNancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was hospitalized after he was assaulted by someone who broke into the couple’s residence in San Francisco looking for the House speaker. Follow live updates.Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spends a staggering amount of time on talk radio. And, Reid Epstein writes, it’s paying off in his vital race this year.In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz is struggling in his efforts to win over Black voters, Trip Gabriel reports.In the 24 hours before Elon Musk closed his deal for Twitter, some far-right accounts on Twitter have had a surge in new followers, researchers say.viewfinderThe Philly Cuts barbershop in Philadelphia.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesA barbershop campaign stopPhilly Cuts is more than a barbershop. It is a community gathering place for exchanging gossip, catching up on the news — and, sometimes, hosting campaign events.Last Saturday, the Democratic nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, stopped in. Before he got there, I saw the barber Damor Cannon, 46, turn to put the finishing touches on the beard of his customer, Michael Woodward.The word “VOTE” was printed on the back of his T-shirt, and the phrase “Philly Cuts for Shapiro” was on the cape draped around Woodward. On either side of the mirror were framed photos of civil rights leaders. The mirror created a third image, reflecting the present alongside the past.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Liz Cheney’s PAC to Run Ad Against Lake and Finchem, Both Republicans, in Arizona

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      A leadership PAC sponsored by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, announced on Friday a $500,000 media buy in Arizona, where it will air a television spot urging voters to reject Kari Lake, the Republican running for governor, and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominee for secretary of state.“I don’t know that I’ve ever voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in Arizona, I absolutely would,” Ms. Cheney says in the ad. “If you care about the survival of our republic, you cannot give people power who will not honor elections.”Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem have both run campaigns amplifying former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Cheney, vice chair of the panel investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, lost her August primary in a landslide to Harriet Hageman, a Trump-backed challenger. While her future political plans remain vague, for now, she has said she plans to focus her efforts on blocking Mr. Trump from returning to power.Ms. Cheney has previously singled out Ms. Lake as an election denier whom she planned to campaign against. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Kari Lake is not elected,” Ms. Cheney said at the Texas Tribune Festival last month.The move is in line with Ms. Cheney’s efforts to keep election deniers out of office.She also endorsed Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, in a competitive race against Tom Barrett, a Republican state senator and 2020 election denier who has refused to say whether he would respect the results of the 2022 midterm elections.Ms. Cheney, who is arguably the most vocal critic of Mr. Trump in the Republican Party, has fielded dozens of endorsement requests from Democratic candidates, but the nod to Ms. Slotkin is her first of the midterm cycle. The race in Michigan’s seventh district is considered a tossup and is one of the Republican Party’s top targets as it seeks to win back the majority in the House.“I’m proud to endorse Elissa Slotkin,” Ms. Cheney, who served with Ms. Slotkin on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Thursday. Ms. Slotkin also served in the Bush administration when Ms. Cheney worked at the State Department.“While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress,” Ms. Cheney said, encouraging Republicans and independents, as well as Democrats, to support her.Ms. Cheney is scheduled to campaign with Ms. Slotkin in Michigan on Nov. 1 at an event billed as an “evening for patriotism and bipartisanship.” More

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      Kari Lake, Glenn Youngkin and a Post-Trump Era

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      TUCSON, Ariz. — It can be hard to make sense of endings and beginnings in politics and history, but what if we’ve already reached the post-Trump era?Consider the case of Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s former private equity co-C.E.O. governor with a sunshine demeanor, and Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican nominee for governor, a wild proponent of Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him. Theoretically, a Youngkin-Lake event would be a clash of vibes, an effort to mainstream Ms. Lake. But Mr. Youngkin campaigned for her last week, across several events — a decision that drew anguish from a segment of conservatives and hard questions from reporters in televised settings. In real life, there was no clash. It wasn’t one of those awkward, painful episodes in which a more traditional Republican makes an explicit transaction with a party dominated by Mr. Trump. Everything was smooth and cohesive — a joint case about the Republican Party of today.Mr. Youngkin cheerily warned the crowd that everything — our American values and institutions — could fall apart just like that, bam. “You take your eye off the ball and you lose an election, because remember, elections have consequences, and the next thing you know, everything can change.” And Ms. Lake is smooth as hell, a real pro after decades on TV, fluidly moving from offhandedly claiming that Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and the founding fathers would have been America First Republicans to offering a self-deprecating joke to giving advice on persuading independent voters to telling a nighttime crowd to “vote these bastards out,” dialing it up or down, depending on the situation.Looking at this pair one way, you could see Donald Trump’s endless influence over the Republican Party. But if you zoomed out, neither of these people has that much to do with Mr. Trump personally. Neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake owes him an inarguable debt for name recognition, neither particularly mimics his mannerisms, neither cropped up in the background of surreal scenes at the White House, neither has lived some embarrassed, poisoned-in-real-time transition from Trump critic to supporter before a national audience. Really, neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake had much to do with anything that happened nationally between June 2015 and January 2021.This observation — about their distance from a formative era of American life, and its centerpiece — felt very true in Arizona last week, and like a real break from other things in Republican politics. It also coexists with another possibility: that Mr. Trump could be fading politically at the same time that his core support is hardening. This dual reality would not necessarily diminish the force and reverb of his actions, but it might produce asymmetrical results. When people talk about a post-Trump era, there’s usually a subtext that it would involve a clean break and his permanent exit from political life. If we are entering a post-Trump period, though, rather than Mr. Trump being something to get past, he could remain a major factor in politics but no longer the sole reference point around which each development moves.So much in the political conversation still centers on the prospective choices of Mr. Trump and people’s responses to them, as if we were forever in the loop of the period when Mr. Trump’s prominence still felt surreal. But time has passed, and people’s lives have continued — and things have already changed. Arguably, you can see this in some conservatives’ intense focus on restricting trans health care or avoiding Covid recommendations, two issues that have outpaced Mr. Trump’s promotion of them, even if he opened the portal to their prominence.Consider Ms. Lake and Mr. Youngkin, there in the morning light of a Tucson sports bar. Their political careers would probably not exist without Mr. Trump, but their appeal to Republicans rests on a post-Trump political foundation.For a segment of Republicans — and particularly conservative writers and operatives — Mr. Youngkin reflects a fusionist dream, in which a Republican can win without entirely handing himself over to Mr. Trump while adopting MAGA’s aggressive education politics, including on gender identity. Ms. Lake has taken up Mr. Trump’s principal cause, that of the 2020 election result — and she continues to allege fraud — but sets that aside when she wants to, in favor of talking at her rallies last week about fentanyl, the intense anti-Covid-vax vibes she’s embraced, taxes or an idea to two-track high school so juniors have the option of switching into vocational training.You can see the possible fissures between Mr. Trump and Republican politics, in the efforts, too, of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Like Mr. Youngkin, he has undertaken a similar pre-presidential-campaign trip around the country to rally for midterm Republicans, even Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, who was in Washington on Jan. 6 and whom many national Republicans have avoided. Mr. DeSantis exists in a more transitional space between the initial Trump era and wanting to challenge him in 2024. But he has also isolated and advanced a strain of Trumpism: a kind of power politics that emphasizes public displays of, depending on your vantage point, accountability or retribution. In Pittsburgh at the event for Mr. Mastriano, after detailing various accomplishments and fights, Mr. DeSantis moved into a segment on restricting trans health care for minors and ideology. “We must fight the woke in our schools,” he said. “We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.”The Lake-Youngkin events involved a looser vibe — one featured vintage airplanes on display and Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” blasting. Both public events also involved Mr. Youngkin leading a crowd in reciting the opening of the Declaration of Independence — the kind of slightly sentimental thing that draws a certain kind of conservative to Mr. Youngkin, the type of conservative who flipped out when Mr. Youngkin announced he would campaign for Ms. Lake, who is maybe the most prominent stop-the-steal type on the ballot this year, running to oversee a battleground state.On the question of the 2020 election, there are a few ways to look at the Lake campaign. One is that it doesn’t matter what she believes, only what she says, because people straight up listen to what politicians say, without the metatextual strategic filter often applied by political operatives and the media. Over the past year, a lot of Republican discourse centered on ballot drop boxes, and now in Arizona, guys in tactical gear are reportedly staking them out.If Ms. Lake is elected, though, the belief question matters, given that she would help oversee a state’s next elections. Maybe she really does believe fraud corrupted the 2020 election. A third way to consider it is that she’s playing it up with laser focus on the Republican base. This seems to have been the opinion of Jan Brewer, a former Arizona governor and a proto-Trump politician herself. “I want to hear her tell me she did all this because she wanted to win and that it got a little bit out of control,” Ms. Brewer told The Times this summer.Mr. Trump has reportedly told donors that you can ask Ms. Lake about anything — the weather, the family — and she’ll work it back to the 2020 election: “Oh, the weather in Phoenix is OK, but you can never have great weather unless the election is fair.” You can even hear him tell Blake Masters a version of this line over the phone. Anecdotes like this capture Mr. Trump’s central destabilizing essence: compulsively advancing something wild or false even as he comments on those who go along with it. Then again: Ms. Lake told this exact anecdote herself, in public.In Scottsdale, after Mr. Youngkin and Ms. Lake’s last event of the day, a Swiss reporter brought up confidence in the voting process, citing local Republicans’ concerns that some candidates might not accept the results of the election. (“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake recently said on TV.) “People in Switzerland also feel like,” the reporter said, “does democracy work if you don’t accept the outcome?”Ms. Lake responded by calling her opponent, the current secretary of state, incompetent and unprepared for the upcoming election. Then Mr. Youngkin, unprompted, jumped in to talk about his own record on election processes — arguing that it isn’t just Republicans who doubt elections, citing 2000 and 2016. “This is not a Republican problem; it’s an American challenge,” he announced, sitting next to someone who last year said the Arizona secretary of state “should be locked up.”Ms. Lake then pulled out a printed stack of news stories from over the years in which, e.g., Jimmy Carter suggested Mr. Trump was an illegitimate president and Russians tried to hack voting machines. One reporter shouted several times, “Governor, has any other president besides Donald Trump tried to overturn an election?” with Mr. Youngkin defaulting to the things he’d already said, avoiding mention of Mr. Trump. Multiple aides called the next question as the last, which Ms. Lake disregarded and continued calling on people until some staffer finally cranked up Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”In the cold light of politics, for Ms. Lake, in a country where a sizable chunk of voters say they would consider supporting a candidate who doesn’t believe Joe Biden won the election he won, transforming voter fraud concerns into an atmospheric, passive problem would be a way to crab-walk out of a year spent personally amping up the idea that the election was stolen. And for Mr. Youngkin, it’s a way to commit to the Republican Party such as it is, as though time had begun in 2021.Mr. Trump has become predictable in a certain way: You can usually anticipate what his reaction will be to things and what he’ll demand from people, no matter how staggering and corrosive. What happens if a party that orbited him starts to detach from him a little bit and becomes, therefore, even more unpredictable? It’s hard to truly know what will happen if Ms. Lake becomes governor of a large state and how she’d govern.And in politics more broadly, it might still come to pass that Mr. Trump rolls through a presidential primary and straight into 2024, ushering in an eternal Trump era. But you can also imagine, in a party that has reshaped itself to Mr. Trump, his own obsession with the past puts him at a disadvantage with people who, unlike him, can discard it when they want.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Kari Ann Lake’s Hijacking of Martin Luther King

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      Meet Kari Lake. She is the election-denying, antisemite-endorsing former television news anchor who is the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona.She is Donald Trump in lipstick. But she delivers her divisiveness in the calm and measured tones of a person reading the news rather than a man who froths at the mic.She parrots Trump’s disgusting generalizations about immigrants, saying last month: “The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m going to just repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him in a lot of trouble. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”Like Trump, she refuses to commit to accepting the result of the Arizona election — unless she wins. All she would say last week when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether she would accept the outcome was, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” Well, of course.In the same way that Trump sought to brand Hillary Clinton a racist — calling her in 2016 “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future” — Lake is telling CNN that her opponent Katie Hobbs is “a twice-convicted racist.”Convicted? If racism were a crime for which one could be convicted, America wouldn’t have enough prisons to hold the guilty, and Lake’s buddy Trump would be the mascot of the cellblock.Now Lake is joining Trump in invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in self-serving ways. On Martin Luther King Day in 2020, Trump tweeted: “It was exactly three years ago today, January 20, 2017, that I was sworn into office. So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY. African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever. Great!” Trump will always find a way to make things about himself.But Lake one-upped Trump in disrespecting King’s legacy, at a campaign event on Tuesday with the failed Democratic presidential hopeful (and now former Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard.Gabbard said during their exchange that she became a Democrat because she was “inspired” by the “party of Dr. Martin Luther King” and John F. Kennedy, “a party that said we respect your individual freedoms and civil liberties and a government of, by and for the people.” But, she added, “unfortunately that party no longer exists today.”Let’s stop here and start to set the record straight. The Democratic Party is not the party of Dr. King. He was devoted to principles and policies, not parties. In fact, he once said: “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God, nor is the Democratic Party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either.”He was, however, bound to the idea of equality, fairness and truth, things that are anathema to the modern Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, are fighting for voting rights, which King championed, even as Republicans rush to suppress voting.Gabbard is obscene in her obtuseness, but what else can you expect from her?After Gabbard’s distortions about the Democratic Party of her youth disappearing, Lake chimed in, saying, “I’m a true believer that if M.L.K., Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were alive today, if J.F.K. were alive today, if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be America First Republicans.”Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that the founders worried and wrote endlessly about their fear of demagogues like Trump, whom Lake supports and whose lies she propagates.Let’s set aside the fact that Kennedy railed against core Republican policies that remain relatively unchanged, saying in a 1947 speech that the “Republican policies that brought disaster to the country in the late ’20s are good enough for the Republicans of today” and describing their agenda as “stringent labor laws, which strangle labor’s freedom by restraint” and “tax reductions which benefit the prosperous at the expense of the poor, at a time when the buying power in the upper ranges of income is abnormally high, while the buying power in the lower ranges of income is abnormally low.”Let’s instead focus on what has become a standard tactic for Republicans: co-opting King’s legacy, saying that he would have supported people who now stand for exactly what he opposed.It is a brazen act of blaspheming, an attempted theft of moral authority being conducted in broad daylight. And it’s not new. It has been happening for at least a decade, and writers and researchers have long been writing about it. What is striking to me is not that it happened but the consistency and longevity of the fraud.This is not an extemporaneous error but a concerted, coordinated effort to distract and deceive, to claim the antithesis of their political position as their own political avatar.So I say to Lake and all Republicans invoking King while working against his ideals: Keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouths!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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

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      Democratic Party leaders turned toward inflation and the economy after a summer focus on abortion. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said the G.O.P. would seek spending cuts.With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.” More