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      Gavin Newsom, Set to Debate Ron DeSantis, Wants Fox News Viewers to Hear Him Out

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      After sparring twice with Sean Hannity, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California will jump into the ring this week with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The stakes are high for both men.Gavin Newsom has a scant history of tough debates over his two decades as governor and lieutenant governor of California and mayor of San Francisco.But he is nevertheless unusually prepared for his nationally televised face-off on Thursday with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida: Over the past few months, Mr. Newsom has lived through something of a debate boot camp on how to respond to attacks on California, President Biden, the Democratic Party and his own mistakes over the years.It came in the form of two lively interviews with Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News host who will moderate the debate on Thursday. From the moment they sat down, he pressed Mr. Newsom on the differences between them on issues as varied as immigration and law enforcement.“I want border security,” Mr. Newsom said, disputing the premise of Mr. Hannity’s question in the opening minutes of their first encounter. “Democrats want border security.”“You don’t want any walls,” Mr. Hannity responded, referring to the wall former President Donald J. Trump set out to build along the Mexican border. Mr. Newsom kept talking.“I want comprehensive immigration reform,” Mr. Newsom said. “I want to actually address the issue more comprehensively — just like Ronald Reagan did.” He added, “I don’t need to be educated on the issue of the border or issues of immigration policy.”On Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern, Mr. Newsom will be sparring on Fox News not with Mr. Hannity but with Mr. DeSantis for 90 minutes in a studio in Alpharetta, Ga., with no audience on hand. The stakes will be high for both Mr. DeSantis, 45, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination has appeared to fade in recent weeks, and Mr. Newsom, 56, who has positioned himself for a potential White House run in 2028.The debate between these two relatively youthful national leaders, one from a Republican state, the other from a Democratic one, will offer sharply contrasting views of America’s future during polarized times. Not incidentally, it offers a glimpse at what could potentially be two leading candidates in the next presidential contest.“These are two of the most dominant governors in the country,” Mr. Hannity said in an interview on Monday. “Two very smart, well-educated, highly opinionated, philosophically different governors. They are diametrically opposed.”Mr. DeSantis has faced off against Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential rivals in three debates, all of which former President Donald J. Trump has skipped. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFor Mr. DeSantis, this will be his fourth debate since entering the presidential race. In onstage meetings with Republican opponents like Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, he has sought to display a command of conservative policy priorities and has clashed with his rivals only occasionally, and on the edges.Now, he will be debating a leader of the opposing party, ready to draw sharp differences over U.S. assistance to help Ukraine battle Russia, the turmoil in the Middle East, immigration — and over Mr. Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.Mr. DeSantis has dismissed the idea that Mr. Newsom has toughened himself up for this debate through his sessions with Mr. Hannity. The Florida governor told reporters in New Hampshire last week that his California counterpart was operating in a “left-wing cocoon,” and had little sense of voters’ concerns and the politics of the nation beyond the West Coast.“I think he caters to a very far-left slice of the electorate,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I think that that will be on display when we have the debate.”Still, that Newsom-Hannity encounter in June, as well as an encore after the Republican presidential candidates debated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in September, offer a primer of how Mr. Newsom may approach this moment: assertive, engaging, armed with statistics and catchy phrases, plowing ahead to talk over an opponent or disparage a question he finds specious, and not easy to corner into a mistake.“He came into that interview very prepared,” Mr. Hannity told a New York Times reporter in September. “I’ve interviewed people that come in totally unprepared.”“This is complimentary in every way: He’s out of central casting,” Mr. Hannity said, speaking shortly after finishing his appearance with Mr. Newsom. “He has a lovely family. He’s young. Compare his energy level to Joe Biden’s.”Mr. Newsom, right, speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News after the second Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesIf those earlier sessions are any clue, Mr. Newsom will be combative when confronted with questions about people and corporations leaving California. “We are on the way to becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy,” he has told Mr. Hannity. “Eat your heart out, Germany.”He will defend California against attacks from Republicans, Mr. DeSantis among them, as a place in moral, economic or political decline: “I’ve been hearing this nonsense for half a century — literally half a century.”He will be contrite if asked about homelessness (“Disgraceful. We own this.”) or about his unmasked dinner with lobbyists at the French Laundry, a luxury Yountville restaurant, at the height of the Covid crisis. (“It was dumb.”)And he might even agree with some attacks on Democratic policy in his state, such as the new “mansion tax” on property sales above $5 million recently imposed in Los Angeles. “I opposed it when I was mayor of San Francisco, so I don’t disagree,” Mr. Newsom said when Mr. Hannity questioned the wisdom of such a tax.Mr. DeSantis is not Mr. Hannity, with whom Mr. Newsom has what both men have described as a something of a friendship, albeit a jostling one. (They text each other at night.) Mr. DeSantis has, over the course of the Republican debates, proved to be disciplined, at times almost scripted, and more likely to offer a flash of anger than humor.Mr. Newsom has had his ups and downs with California voters, and it is far from clear how a politician who looks like a Hollywood actor and often seems to be walking the line between sharp and glib — or self-assured and arrogant — will come across to a national audience.But he has proved an elusive target for his state’s beleaguered Republican Party. He easily survived a recall effort in 2021, with support from 62 percent of voters, and was re-elected to a second term with 59 percent of the vote in 2022.“I think Gavin Newsom is going to be the smooth-talking used-car salesman that he always is,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, the chairwoman of the California Republican Party, suggesting what Mr. DeSantis should expect. “Unfortunately, a lot of people still fall for that.”“The facts are on DeSantis’s side,” she said. “What helps Newsom is his charm and his quote-unquote likability. It doesn’t work for me, but it works for a lot of folks.”Mr. DeSantis’s agreement to debate someone who will not be on the Iowa ballot in January has baffled some Democrats as well as Republicans. “We were all frankly surprised he took the offer,” said Sean Clegg, a political adviser to Mr. Newsom.That said, the debate gives Mr. DeSantis an opportunity to draw attention to his candidacy at a time when Mr. Trump has overshadowed him and Ms. Haley threatens to eclipse him.And the debate could provide viewers a sneak preview of key 2028 players.“It’s going to be one of the more interesting events of 2023,” Mr. Clegg said. “It’s a debate between two of the premier governors of the country. Exhibition games can be highly satisfying in their own ways.”Max Scheinblum contributed reporting. More

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      Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

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      Ahead of a presidential election in January, Taiwanese fact checkers and watchdogs say they are ready for Beijing. But they are still worried.Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments.President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof — and potentially one created by Chinese agents.For years, China has pummeled the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears over Beijing’s growing aggression mount, a new wave of disinformation is heading across the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland before the pivotal election in January.Perhaps as much as any other place, however, the tiny island is ready for the disinformation onslaught.Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model to the dozens of other democracies holding votes in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government investments, international media literacy partnerships and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.The challenge now is sustaining the effort.“That is the main battlefield: The fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the top target in the world for disinformation from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers said. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as speaker of the House last year set off a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a surge of debunked online messages and images that fact checkers linked to China.For all of Beijing’s efforts, however, it has struggled to sway public opinion.In recent years, Taiwan’s voters have chosen a president, Ms. Tsai, from the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Communist Party views as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Experts and local fact checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in local elections in 2018; the efforts seemed less effective in 2020, when Ms. Tsai recaptured the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a polling lead in the race to succeed her.China has denied interloping, instead saying it is the “top victim of disinformation.”News about the presidential race on a television in a Taipei noodle restaurant. Many Taiwanese have internal “warning bells” for disinformation, a founder of a group called Fake News Cleaner said.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMs. Tsai has repeatedly addressed her government’s push to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to stifle speech from political opponents. At a defense conference this month, she said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and maintain a cautious balance between maintaining information freely and refusing information manipulation.”Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers teaching anti-disinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.The group is part of a robust collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There is Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is integrated into a popular social media app called Line. Doublethink Lab was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a professor who testified this year before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect for “don’t fool me again.”Taiwan’s anti-disinformation groups include Doublethink Lab, formerly led by Puma Shen.Chiangying-Ying/Associated PressMascots at the entrance of the Taiwan Fact Check Center in Taipei.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesCitizens have sought out fact-checking help, such as when a recent uproar over imported eggs raised questions about videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such demand would have been unthinkable in 2018, when the heated emotions and damaging rumors around a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.“Now, everyone will stop and think: ‘This seems odd. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “This, I think, is an improvement.”Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims swirled recently around Mr. Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers found that a memo at the center of one claim had been manipulated, with changed dates and dollar figures. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post that was shared by a news website in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwanese political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news drove the Taiwanese government last month to set up a dedicated task force.A banner in Taipei depicts Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China, and Taiwan’s flag.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTaiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” with China using social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta took down a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others across other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to shift. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. Now, they have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.A few months ago, an audio file that seemed to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai circulated in Taiwan. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and the A.I.-detection company Reality Defender.Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the zone with obvious pro-Beijing messages, researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms, then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also tried to buy established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.Disinformation that directly addressed relations between China and Taiwan grew rarer from 2020 to 2022, the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents seemed to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health issues. Sometimes, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip guided viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.The ever-present menace, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive attempts at a crackdown. One unsuccessful proposal last year, modeled after regulations in Europe, would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content removal requests.Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have pointed out that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its diverse political leanings, often produces pro-Beijing content that can be misattributed to Chinese manipulation.At an event in June, President Tsai stressed that “well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against one another and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation defense, she said, must be “a whole-of-society effort.”Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”From left, Lu Hong-yu, Lee Tzu-ying and Cheng Hsu-yu placed third as a team in a Taiwan fact-checking competition.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAttempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.” More

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      in Elections

      Why Trump Represents a ‘Trifecta of Danger’

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      Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captures the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”Klaas argues that the presidential contest now pitsA 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to poweragainst “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”Klaas asks:What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?The media, Klaas argues, has adopted a policy in covering Trump of: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”This approach, according to Klaas,has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called “A Duty to Warn” was held at the Yale School of Medicine.The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.In a review of that book, “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mindset:“I think he’s crazy,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” to succeed as president.The warnings that Donald Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence, and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.Glass continued:If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.In March, he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration shoplifters will be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont N.H. on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible, they’ll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”Trump, the Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’ ” and then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency, but that never went into effect.Schedule F, the reporters wrote,would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”Miller wrote that he haslong thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity; failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table and Trump seems rather high on those traits along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration,” adding “this behavior is also consistent with psychopathy which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal, and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama, or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to the book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which I mentioned earlier:Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation, and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls, and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”In 2020, Pew Research reported that “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe.” Pew found:Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three-in-four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.A recent editorial in The Economist, carried the headline: “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concludes:would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.Klaas, who opened this column, concludes that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that dominates over all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.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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      in Elections

      Ignore Trump? Democrats Now Want Him Plastered All Over the News.

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      The former president has been relatively quiet, out of the headlines and off mainstream social media. Democrats are hoping that more attention on him can help turn around President Biden’s fortunes.When Donald J. Trump left the White House, Democrats didn’t want to hear another word from him. President Biden dismissed him as “the former guy.” A party-wide consensus held that he was best left ignored.Three years later, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign and Democratic officials across the party’s spectrum have landed on a new solution to his political slump:More Trump.Criticizing the news media for giving Mr. Trump a platform is out. Quietly pining for major networks to again broadcast live coverage of Trump campaign rallies is in.Behind the improbable longing for the former president to gobble up political oxygen again is Democrats’ yearslong dependence on the Trump outrage machine. Since his ascent, Mr. Trump has been a one-man Democratic turnout operation, uniting an otherwise fractured opposition and fueling victories in three straight election cycles.Now, Democrats worry that the fever of Trump fatigue has passed, and that some voters are softening toward a man they once loathed. Many others may simply be paying little attention, as Mr. Trump’s share of the daily national conversation has diminished, despite the occasional interruption of campaign-trail pronouncements like his recent vow to “root out” political opponents like “vermin.”Mr. Trump, who has never been called a shrinking violet, has nevertheless skipped the three Republican presidential debates and stayed away from the major social media platforms. He is expected to spend large parts of next year in criminal trials that, except for one in Georgia, will not be televised.Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina, said she didn’t hear much about Mr. Trump these days from the rural Black and Hispanic voters her organization focuses on.“I think it’s like a relationship,” she said. “There were a lot of bad things that happened, but the longer distance you get away from the bad things, you’re like, maybe the bad things weren’t that bad.”Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina that focuses on rural Black and Hispanic voters, said that these days, she didn’t hear as much from them about Mr. Trump. Travis Dove for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s campaign, which has been slow to ramp up its operations, is betting that once voters view the election as a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who remains highly polarizing, they will set aside their reservations about the president and fall in line behind him.But while Mr. Trump is likely to rise in the public consciousness as November 2024 approaches, it is far from certain that he will sabotage himself politically. And it remains unclear whether his criminal trials will make him more toxic among moderate and swing voters, or whether weeks of courtroom appearances will keep his presence more muted than normal.Other Biden efforts are meeting limited success. His campaign has little to show for a $40 million advertising push promoting his economic record. And approval of the president, according to polls released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, has fallen sharply among Black and Hispanic voters — demographics that strategists say are more likely to disregard Mr. Trump when he is not front and center in the news.“Not having the day-to-day chaos of Donald Trump in people’s faces certainly has an impact on how people are measuring the urgency of the danger of another Trump administration,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an African American political organizing group. “It is important to remind people of what a total and absolute disaster Trump was.”Mr. Biden and Democrats, of course, cannot control decisions that news organizations make or the topics that absorb voters in person and on social media. But the Biden campaign, which is aiming to make the 2024 election a referendum on whether Mr. Trump should return to the White House, can try to push the national discussion in his direction with its messaging.One big challenge, however, is that many Americans who tuned out the former president when he left office show little interest in hearing more about him.Several voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and are now leaning toward Mr. Trump said they had not followed the ins and outs of the former president’s post-White House activities and tended to discount and brush aside his past scandals.“I know a lot of people get mad about what he said years ago about ‘grab them by whatever,’” said Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. “That was kind of aggravating. But, you know, that was years ago. And that’s how guys talk in a locker room. I don’t think he really would do that. I think he was just saying that.”Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesArthur Taylor, a business owner from Mesa, Ariz., described himself as a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden and now says he will back Mr. Trump in 2024. He said that the business climate was better when Mr. Trump was president and that the 91 criminal charges against him might not be so bad.“There’s so many things that President Trump does that’s just not ethical,” Mr. Taylor said. But he added that with the former president, “there’s a level of honesty and almost transparency, even in a way that we might cringe at it.”Those sorts of sentiments have left the Biden campaign this past week to engage in its own media criticism, publicly urging news shows on network television to follow New York Times articles about Mr. Trump’s plans for immigration and deportation policies if he wins the election.“The more the American people are confronted with who Donald Trump is — a dangerous, extreme and erratic man who only cares about using the power of the government to help himself and his friends — the more they reject him,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “We will continue to highlight for voters what’s at stake if Trump and his cronies are allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.”Mr. Biden and most of his Democratic allies have adopted a collective vow of silence on what portends to be the biggest Trump-related story line over the next year — the four criminal trials he faces in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.In August, 38 House Democrats wrote to the federal courts administrator asking that Mr. Trump’s federal trials be broadcast live on television. Mr. Trump himself last week asked that cameras be allowed in the courtroom for his trial in Washington — a request that federal prosecutors swiftly opposed.“You see one of the court-artist sketches, and you look at that and you’re like, I’m not really sure which trial he’s on,” Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in an interview. “Is anyone paying attention to them?”Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Biden’s decision to stay quiet had allowed Mr. Trump to frame the cases against him as “a one-sided conversation.”“We have not engaged on perhaps Donald Trump’s No. 1 Achilles’ heel, which is the 91 indictments,” she said. “We’ll see what happens when we do.”Aside from the trials, Democrats are longing for the days when cable networks carried Mr. Trump’s rallies live. To watch a Trump rally live now, viewers need to find an online stream or a fringy far-right cable station like Newsmax.On this, Mr. Trump and Democrats tend to be in agreement.“The more people see and hear from Donald Trump and what he has planned for the country if he regains power, the better off Democrats will be up and down the ballot,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “Trump’s voracious need for attention works to Democrats’ advantage.”Google search interest in Mr. Trump remains well below the level it was at when he was in office and running for re-election four years ago. The television ratings for Mr. Trump’s CNN town-hall event in May were strong, but well below what similar events in 2016 and 2020 drew.Jessica Floyd, the executive director of the Hub Project, a progressive group, urged mainstream cable TV networks to “remind people exactly how bad these rallies are and how corrosive they are for our democracy.”She added, “They should also show President Biden selling an absolutely historic level of investment in our economy.”Jon Soltz, a co-founder and chairman of VoteVets, a liberal veterans group, cautioned Democrats to be patient.“There’s a huge amount of the population right now that doesn’t realize that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president,” he said. “When that happens, you will see a different response.”Camille Baker More

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      Judge Rejects Trump Motion to Strike Jan. 6 Mentions From Federal Election Case

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      The ruling was a step toward allowing prosecutors to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol believed they were acting at Donald Trump’s instruction.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election rejected on Friday a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to remove language from his indictment describing the role he played in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The ruling by the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, was an initial step toward allowing prosecutors in the case to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day believed they were acting at Mr. Trump’s instruction.Last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to strike any mention of the riot at the Capitol from the 45-page indictment filed against him this summer in Federal District Court in Washington. The lawyers argued that since none of the four charges in the case explicitly accused Mr. Trump of inciting the violence that day, any reference to the mob attack would be prejudicial and irrelevant.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, shot back that even if they had not filed formal incitement charges, the riot would be instrumental in their efforts to prove one of their central allegations: that Mr. Trump had plotted to obstruct the certification of the election that was taking place at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6.In court papers to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors called the Jan. 6 attack “the culmination” of Mr. Trump’s “criminal conspiracies” to overturn the election. They also suggested that they were poised to introduce video evidence of the riot and call witnesses at trial who could testify that they attacked police and stormed the Capitol after hearing Mr. Trump exhort them to “fight” in a speech he gave before the violence broke out.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested that they will try in a future motion to keep Mr. Smith’s team from introducing evidence like that at the trial. If the lawyers end up taking that route, Judge Chutkan will have to make another ruling about whether the evidence is relevant and not prejudicial.Her decision to keep the references to the riot in the indictment came on the same day that a group of news organizations reiterated a request to televise the trial.Lawyers for the news organizations said Mr. Trump had sought to challenge the “very legitimacy” of the case, and they argued that a live broadcast was needed so people could view the trial firsthand.“Of all trials conducted throughout American history, this one needs the public trust that only a televised proceeding can foster,” lawyers for the organizations wrote.The nine-page brief by the media outlets — The New York Times, among them — was the last round of court papers expected to be filed to Judge Chutkan before she rules on whether to allow cameras at the trial, which is scheduled to begin in March.Lawyers for Mr. Trump, in a combative and misleading filing last week, compared the election interference case to “a trial in an authoritarian regime.” They told Judge Chutkan that it should be televised so that the public did not have to “rely on biased, secondhand accounts coming from the Biden administration and its media allies.”Within days, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel fired back that broadcasting the proceeding would not only violate longstanding federal rules of criminal procedure, but would also allow Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, to turn the trial into “a media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Lawyers for the media coalition said in their filing on Friday that it was “naïve to think that Trump’s trial will be anything other than a ‘media event.’”But the lawyers said that if the proceeding were broadcast live — in a “dignified, carefully managed” manner — it would permit the public to “see this trial firsthand” after Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked the government’s case as an act of pure political persecution.“The media coalition believes that the more people who see the trial in real time, the stronger the case for public acceptance of the result,” the lawyers wrote.The judge who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s trial in Fulton County, Ga., on local charges of tampering with that state’s election has already televised several key hearings and has vowed to broadcast the trial itself, which could take place as early as next summer. (Prosecutors in Georgia filed a motion seeking an Aug. 5 start date on Friday, though the presiding judge will ultimately set the trial date.)But the federal courts have stricter rules about cameras in the courtroom, and Judge Chutkan would have to set them aside to allow her trial to be broadcast live. More

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      How R.F.K. Jr.’s Causes Made Him Millions of Dollars

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      In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned more than $500,000 as the chairman and top lawyer at Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit organization that he has helped build into a leading spreader of anti-vaccine falsehoods and a platform for launching his independent bid for the White House.The compensation was almost three times as high as the amount paid to the organization’s president, but it was not Mr. Kennedy’s biggest source of income. Neither was his family’s fabled wealth. Instead, most of his earnings around the same time came from law firms — a total of $7 million for lending them his name, connections and expertise to sue major companies.Throughout his long public life, Mr. Kennedy has cultivated an image as a man committed to a greater good, the blessing and burden of belonging to one of America’s most storied political families. Whether cleaning up rivers as an environmentalist or railing against the purported dangers of inoculations, he has said he is driven by his family’s legacy of civic duty and sacrifice.He built his presidential run around similar themes, even as his cousin dismissed the campaign as a “vanity project” and other relatives disavowed his beliefs. On the trail, Mr. Kennedy has delivered a populist message of anti-corporate rhetoric and debunked science while invoking a powerful lineage: his uncles, former President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy, and his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.“RFK Jr. began a career of public services as soon as he passed the NY State Bar,” reads one of the top lines on his campaign website.In a 2018 book, he credited his mother, Ethel, for instilling important values. “She tried to give us the sense that we mustn’t be satisfied with ‘making a big pile for ourselves and whoever dies with the most stuff wins,’” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “Our lives, she taught us, should serve a higher purpose.”But an examination of Mr. Kennedy’s finances by The New York Times, including public filings and almost two dozen interviews as well as tax returns and other documents not previously made public, showed that while he appears to believe in the causes he champions, they have also had a practical benefit: His crusades, backed by the power of his name, have earned him tens of millions of dollars.In his 2018 book, Mr. Kennedy credited his mother for instilling important values.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesCampaign events have emphasized Mr. Kennedy’s famed political family.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy inherited many things from his family — a charismatic presence, a gift for public speaking, a place among the nation’s elite — but not necessarily the kind of money that would support a life of both altruism and the trappings of wealth he seems to enjoy, The Times found. His grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, poured a fortune into trust funds for his descendants, helping to support the political ambitions of his sons. But Mr. Kennedy came into a relatively modest portion.Behind much of his public career has been a relentless private hustle: board positions and advisory gigs, side deals with law firms, book contracts and an exhausting schedule of paid speeches, once upward of 60 a year by his own count.While most people have to work, Mr. Kennedy did not always settle for the six-figure salary he was earning in positions with nonprofits. For decades, he has entwined his loftier missions with opportunities for enrichment. In addition to his salary at Children’s Health Defense, for instance, he stands to profit personally from lawsuits, including against the pharmaceutical giant Merck over a common vaccine for children.When Mr. Kennedy was still best known as an environmentalist, he met Alan Salzman, an investor in clean technology companies, and was intrigued: Mr. Kennedy wanted to find alternatives to carbon-based energy, “which I think is the biggest enemy to American democracy and the environment,” he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The Times.“And I also saw it as an opportunity to make some money for my family,” he continued.Mr. Kennedy would earn millions of dollars over at least eight years from work connected to Mr. Salzman’s venture capital firm, VantagePoint, including promoting a project that other environmentalists opposed.In an interview, Mr. Kennedy said that he was proud of giving his family a good life while promoting his causes.“I have been able to use the various gifts I’ve been given — education, the contacts and the value of a name that a generation in my family put a lot of effort into enhancing and retaining its value,” he said. “I’m grateful that I’ve been given those gifts and that I am able to do well by doing good.”His campaign said in a statement that he had “never put a need or desire to make money ahead of his values and moral compass.”Recently, Mr. Kennedy’s presidential bid has gained some traction. In a poll conducted last month by The Times and Siena College, 24 percent of voters in battleground states said they would support Mr. Kennedy in a theoretical matchup between him, President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, the leading Republican candidate.In the campaign, Mr. Kennedy has cast himself as an heir to his family’s mystique. Yet what has at times looked from the outside like the glamorous life of a dynastic prince has occasionally been underwritten by others.Wealthy friends were behind the purchase of the home Mr. Kennedy used on the family compound on Cape Cod, records show. He had an arrangement with a major environmental nonprofit group to pay for his children to accompany him on work trips, and he accepted a free Lexus as part of a promotional event for green vehicles.“The Kennedys’ wealth is inextricably intertwined with people’s impression of the Kennedys — and that isn’t a surprise when you think their grandfather amassed one of America’s biggest fortunes when his kids were young,” said Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard who is writing a two-volume biography of John F. Kennedy.“But two generations later,” Professor Logevall said, “some family members have more of the money than others.”From left: Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.; Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.; Robert F. Kennedy; and John F. Kennedy in 1939.Boston Globe via Associated PressA Grandfather’s WealthJoseph Kennedy’s estate, widely believed to be valued at roughly $500 million when he died in 1969 (about $4.2 billion in today’s dollars), was left largely in trusts for his descendants.Robert Kennedy had been assassinated the previous year while running for the Democratic nomination for president. He left half his estate to Ethel and divided the remainder equally among his children, according to documents filed in Manhattan Surrogate Court. But after an expensive campaign, he died with heavy debt, and more than half of his estate went to pay it off.While the court documents put the senator’s total estate at $1.6 million, there was more, shrouded in trusts whose value is not public. Still, disclosure forms Mr. Kennedy filed with the Federal Election Commission as part of his bid for the presidency, as well as other documents, provide some insight into his portion of the family wealth.Mr. Kennedy owns between $4 million and $15 million in inherited assets, held in trusts — the biggest, a stake in Wolf Point, a Chicago real estate development built on land his grandfather bought decades ago. Over the years, Mr. Kennedy has enjoyed large one-time distributions from his trust funds when assets were sold, according to bank records and public documents.But the trusts do not tend to generate much steady income: He received between roughly $29,000 and $90,500 over a recent 18-month period, according to the F.E.C. filing. While certainly a boon, it is far from enough to finance Mr. Kennedy’s lifestyle: At one point, a little over a decade ago, he estimated that his annual household expenses were $1.4 million.“I have never gotten a lot of money from my family,” Mr. Kennedy told The Times.He said his biggest expense in recent years was his children’s education. He drives, he said, a 1998 minivan. But he also lives with his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, in a $6 million home in Brentwood, an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood.Mr. Kennedy in 1973 with his mother, Ethel, and a mural depicting his father, five years after his assassination.Marty Lederhandler/Associated PressMr. Kennedy said that one reason his branch of the family never enjoyed the clan’s presumed riches, in addition to his father’s debt, is that he was one of 11 children, leaving him with less inherited money than other members of his generation. (When his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. died in 1999, he left a $250,000 bequest to Mr. Kennedy.)In the 2012 deposition, which Mr. Kennedy gave during his bitter divorce from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, he said Ethel Kennedy was “broke,” and family members secretly helped cover her living expenses.“Those of us who stay at her house pay her, and she doesn’t know she’s being paid,” he said.In the interview with The Times, Mr. Kennedy said that his mother, now 95, is no longer struggling financially.Mr. Kennedy in a 2001 rowing race on New York’s Hudson River, which he is credited with helping to clean up.Evan Agostini/Getty ImagesA High-Flying LifeBy the year 2000, after a bumpy early adulthood that included an arrest for heroin possession, Mr. Kennedy was a nationally recognized environmental lawyer. The previous year, he had been named a hero of the planet by Time magazine for his work with the Riverkeeper organization, among the groups credited with cleaning up New York’s polluted Hudson River.As a lawyer, he was on the payrolls of both the environmental litigation clinic at Pace University’s law school and the Natural Resources Defense Council, where his salary was subsidized by Riverkeeper, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.That year, Mr. Kennedy saw an opportunity that would eventually net him millions of dollars.He co-founded a law firm, Kennedy & Madonna, with Kevin Madonna, a Pace Law graduate who had worked at the clinic. The firm allowed Mr. Kennedy to target polluters while profiting at a scale far beyond his nonprofit salaries. Kennedy & Madonna teamed up with other firms on class-action lawsuits against major corporations, including Dupont and the Southern California Gas Company, and took a cut of any proceeds.Although Mr. Kennedy was listed first in the firm’s name, he said in his 2012 divorce case that his partner dealt with most of the detailed legal work. Mr. Kennedy typically handled depositions and court appearances — moments when his famous name and presence would have the strongest effect. Mr. Madonna declined to comment.In 2002, Mr. Kennedy also forged a relationship with a personal-injury law firm in Pensacola, Fla. He was paid to do a radio show with one of the firm’s partners, and was listed as “of counsel” at the firm, which did some class-action environmental litigation.It was adding up to a good living, by most standards. By 2008, his jobs at the Florida firm and the nonprofits were bringing in about $400,000 a year. His trust funds and investments connected to his grandfather generated at least $150,000, according to his tax return.Mr. Kennedy with his third wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIncome from Kennedy & Madonna could be bumpy. For instance, from 2008 through 2010, the firm produced virtually no income, tax records show. But in 2011 Mr. Kennedy received $700,000, part of the firm’s share of a legal settlement with Ford Motor.Still, Mr. Kennedy was leading an expensive life between his home in Bedford, N.Y., a wealthy enclave north of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife and children, and the home he was using on Cape Cod. He bought the Bedford house in the 1980s, with financing from the sale of a luxury Manhattan apartment that a close family friend had willed to him, records show.In 2010, Mr. Kennedy’s household expenses reached $1.4 million. The mortgage and a home-equity loan on the Bedford property cost about $191,000. Memberships to a yacht club and other organizations ran him more than $14,000, while nannies and housekeepers cost more than $70,000. Pool maintenance was upward of $12,000. On top of those expenses, his assistant earned roughly $200,000.His use of the home at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., was made possible by wealthy friends, The Times found. It had been purchased by a lawyer with ties to Wendy Abrams, a Chicago-based philanthropist who has donated millions of dollars to environmental causes, including some of Mr. Kennedy’s, records show.In the interview, Mr. Kennedy said Ms. Abrams and her husband, whom he described as his closest friends, stepped in because he did not have enough money to buy the home when it came up for sale.The house, a six-bedroom with traditional gray shingles, was bought in 2008 for $2.5 million. For years, Mr. Kennedy paid $4,000 a month in rent. The lease, which was reviewed by The Times, shows that he had an option to buy the home for the original purchase price, which he did in 2020.The Abramses, Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition, had also footed the bill for a vacation to Jamaica for him; his then-girlfriend, Ms. Hines; and their respective children, while the Natural Resources Defense Council sometimes paid for his children to travel with him.“All my vacations are paid for. So I just, I try not to spend money,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.Ms. Abrams told The Times she commonly hosted friends in rented vacation homes. Mr. Kennedy said in his interview with The Times that his work for the N.R.D.C. could involve spending weeks in other countries, and the nonprofit agreed to pay for his children to travel to see him. The N.R.D.C. declined to comment.Mr. Kennedy also accepted a free Lexus from Toyota, The Times found. He said he received the car when he helped the automaker promote charging stations for electric vehicles in California.While working at VantagePoint Capital Partners, Mr. Kennedy took paying gigs with companies in which the venture capital firm had invested, including a solar plant developer building a project in the Mojave Desert. Ethan Miller/Getty Images/Getty ImagesA Shadow CareerIn addition to his jobs with nonprofits and his law firms, Mr. Kennedy turned to paid speeches as a big source of income. He said he could charge as much as $250,000 for a talk overseas, and at least $25,000 for others.By the time he entered into divorce proceedings with Ms. Richardson Kennedy, he was on the road at a frenetic pace, at one point giving more than 60 speeches a year. (Ms. Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, before the divorce was final.)If he wasn’t around enough to put in a traditional workweek at any one organization, his name and natural charisma certainly raised their profiles and drew celebrities and deep-pocketed benefactors to their events, including the actors Pierce Brosnan, Alec Baldwin and Ms. Hines.At the same time, Mr. Kennedy’s high-profile environmental work opened the door to a lucrative shadow career as a corporate director and consultant. His reputation, experience and wide network of contacts had value: He could make introductions, offer advice or help secure financing.A turning point had come in 2005. Mr. Kennedy gave a speech at the home of Mr. Salzman, the managing partner of VantagePoint Capital Partners, then one of California’s most prominent venture capital firms. It was an early investor in Tesla, the electric carmaker, and was known for backing companies that were offering solutions to the planet’s environmental problems.Mr. Salzman hired Mr. Kennedy in 2007, initially paying him $100,000 a year to consult on potential investments. “He was obviously passionate about clean water, but also well-connected and very knowledgeable,” Mr. Salzman told The Times.In 2009 Mr. Kennedy became a partner, earning $340,000 at VantagePoint, in addition to his other sources of income. Two years later his salary had jumped to more than $750,000, records show.“He was obviously passionate about clean water, but also well-connected and very knowledgeable,” said Alan Salzman, managing partner of VantagePoint.Andrew Harrer/BloombergMr. Kennedy’s position at VantagePoint led to other paying gigs at companies in which the fund had invested. For instance, he took in $80,000 a year from BrightSource, a developer of large-scale solar plants.That work put him in conflict with environmentalists over two projects BrightSource was planning in California. The first was set for the Ivanpah Valley, in the desert near Nevada. A number of environmental groups opposed the idea, saying it threatened desert tortoises and vegetation.Mr. Kennedy leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for the project in 2011. “I essentially saved the company,” Mr. Kennedy said in the 2012 deposition.BrightSource also wanted to locate a massive solar power farm in a region of the Mojave Desert, on land previously earmarked for conservation. David Myers, president of the Wildlands Conservancy, was among its most vocal opponents, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who died this fall, and officials from the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.Mr. Myers said he had long admired Mr. Kennedy’s work in New York and was devastated by his involvement in pushing the California project. “He was like a hero, in his own mind,” Mr. Myers said. After a protracted fight, BrightSource walked away from the venture.In the interview with The Times, Mr. Kennedy said he had sympathy for the point of view of the project’s opponents, but he believed it was vital to promote solar energy.Ultimately, Mr. Kennedy worked for or served on the boards of at least 16 companies, all while juggling his speaking commitments, his duties at the nonprofits that were paying him and his obligations to his law firm. He joined the board of a holding company that owned a troubled for-profit college in New York, was a paid adviser to an Arizona environmental company known for hiring boldface names and was on the board of a Florida company that made red-light cameras.Mr. Kennedy ended up on the board of that company, Smart Citation Management, because a friend knew he was hard up for cash and recommended him for the position, he said in the 2012 deposition. George K. Stephenson, the president of Smart Citation, described Mr. Kennedy as a “very engaged” board member.At least one company with ties to the Kennedy family still has Mr. Kennedy on its payroll. Marwood Group, a political research firm, has paid him $10,000 a month for years, records show.Its president and founder is Ted Kennedy Jr., Mr. Kennedy’s cousin. The company did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Kennedy said he served as an adviser and consultant.Building on his anti-vaccine work, Mr. Kennedy fought Covid-era restrictions.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesA Shift to VaccinesAround the time Mr. Kennedy spoke at Mr. Salzman’s house, he became interested in another topic: mercury in vaccines.For years, Mr. Kennedy had been warning about mercury contamination from coal-fired power plants, and he has said that concern grew to include vaccines when the mother of a “vaccine-injured child” came to him for help. In 2005 he wrote an article, published in Rolling Stone and Salon, that blamed thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines, for a rise in autism in children.Although both news outlets later withdrew the article after finding that some of its claims were wrong or dubious, and Mr. Kennedy was widely criticized by the scientific community, he dove headlong into his effort. He began giving speeches on the topic, and wrote a book about it in 2015. He did not give up his environmental work: That same year, he began taking about $200,000 in annual salary from Waterkeeper Alliance, a national organization with a mission to clean up waterways.But he also joined the board of a nonprofit organization called the World Mercury Project, which aimed to eliminate mercury exposure in many arenas. In 2018, with Mr. Kennedy’s help, it was rebranded as Children’s Health Defense.Mr. Kennedy proved to be an effective fund-raiser for the fledgling group, just as he had for his environmental allies, even selling $10 raffle tickets to win a tour of the Cape Cod compound. In 2021, the last year for which data is available, the group’s annual revenue was almost $16 million. With an impressive war chest, Children’s Health Defense has become one of the country’s leading spreaders of vaccine misinformation.As Mr. Kennedy’s focus shifted more and more to vaccine skepticism, he parted ways with the environmental groups that had defined so much of his public life. In 2017 he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, that his vaccine work had made him a pariah in some circles and cost him work.“It’s been probably the worst career move that I’ve ever made,” he said. When Mr. Carlson asked him if he was “getting paid for this,” Mr. Kennedy replied: “No, I’m not. In fact, I’m getting unpaid for this.”Except for the Marwood Group, Mr. Kennedy no longer holds paid board positions, according to his F.E.C. filing, and he reported taking in a much-diminished $24,000 in speaking fees. But his effort on vaccines has also been a source of income that would be impressive by many measures.By 2021, the last full year for which data is available, he was making slightly more than $500,000 a year at Children’s Health Defense, up from $255,000 in 2019.After writing his book about thimerosal, he returned to his publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, to write a scathing book in 2021 about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s long-serving top infectious disease specialist who became a focus of rage for people skeptical of the coronavirus vaccine.The book sold well, more than 500,000 copies in hardcover, according to Circana BookScan. Mr. Kennedy said he donated the proceeds to Children’s Health Defense, but he received a $125,000 consulting fee from the publisher over this year and last for referring other authors.Similar to his playbook as an environmentalist, Mr. Kennedy has established profitable relationships with law firms, including one that handles legal work for Children’s Health Defense. Mr. Kennedy told The Times that because he believed his stance on vaccines had cost him income, he had an agreement with Children’s Health Defense to supplement his salary with outside legal work.“I had these big bills that I just couldn’t pay on a badly diminished salary,” he told The Times.“I said, ‘I need an opportunity to make more because that is not going to do it,’” Mr. Kennedy said. Under the deal, he would share the proceeds from any legal wins or settlements with the organization.One firm, the California-based Wisner Baum, paid him $1.6 million over the 18 months ending in June, according to his F.E.C. filing. Over the years, he has worked on environmental cases for Wisner Baum, including as a lawyer on the team that won a $290 million judgment against the chemical giant Monsanto, the maker of Roundup weed killer.More recently, however, Mr. Kennedy has been listed as co-counsel on dozens of lawsuits that Wisner Baum has brought against the pharmaceutical company Merck for injuries it says were caused by a vaccine formulated to prevent the transmission of human papillomavirus.The Children’s Health Defense website also scouts clients for Wisner Baum, encouraging parents to call the firm if they believe their child might have been harmed by the HPV vaccine.Another law firm, JW Howard Attorneys, paid Mr. Kennedy about $315,000 over the same 18-month period. JW Howard was one of the firms that handled a case brought by the Orange County Board of Education and Children’s Health Defense seeking to end the Covid-19 state of emergency that California declared in the spring of 2020.And this past January, JW Howard was counsel on a lawsuit filed by Children’s Health Defense and Mr. Kennedy against The Washington Post, Reuters and other news organizations, accusing them of colluding to stop the publication of certain Covid stories, among other allegations.Mr. Kennedy is also still a partner at Kennedy & Madonna. Between January 2022 and June 2023, he made $5 million for his work there, records show. The law firm, its website has emphasized, does not take vaccine cases.Kitty Bennett More

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      Trump Asks Judge Chutkan to Air His Federal Election Trial on TV

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      The request to Judge Tanya Chutkan was short on legal arguments and long on bluster, and it faces an uphill battle as federal courts generally prohibit cameras.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have told a judge that she should permit his trial on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election to be televised live from the courtroom.It was the first time that Mr. Trump has formally weighed in on the issue of whether to broadcast any of the four criminal trials he is facing. His motion to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election trial in Washington, came after similar requests made by several media organizations and was filed late on Friday.A judge in Georgia who is handling Mr. Trump’s state election subversion case has said that proceeding will be televised. But the request to Judge Chutkan is likely to face an uphill battle given that federal rules of criminal procedure — and the Supreme Court — generally prohibit cameras in federal courtrooms.Mr. Trump’s motion for a televised trial came in a filing adopting his bombastic and combative style.In the motion, his lawyers argued that a televised trial was needed because the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had “sought to proceed in secret” with the election case, even though the prosecution has attracted enormous attention from the news media, had several public hearings and had countless rounds of court papers filed on a public docket.The lawyers also used the motion to complain, as they have at almost every opportunity, that Mr. Trump has been treated “unfairly” by the Biden administration even though the election case — and another federal case in which Mr. Trump stands accused of mishandling classified documents — have been overseen by Mr. Smith, an independent prosecutor.It is little surprise that Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, would want to have the trial broadcast live from Federal District Court in Washington.As his testimony this past week in his civil fraud trial in New York has shown, he has opted to pursue a strategy of creating noisy conflict to obscure the legal issues underpinning his cases and to use the proceedings to amplify the message of victimhood and grievance that sits at the heart of his re-election campaign.Mr. Trump’s Friday night filing to Judge Chutkan was a sharp turn from his stance on the issue last week when prosecutors told Judge Chutkan, at his request, in their filing that his lawyers were taking “no position” on televising the trial.In that filing, prosecutors working for Mr. Smith also told Judge Chutkan that televising the trial was “clearly foreclosed” by federal rules.The prosecutors acknowledged that the public and the media had “a constitutional right of access” to the trial. But that, they claimed, was “the right to attend a criminal trial — not the right to broadcast it.”Mr. Trump’s filing ignored these arguments and instead relied on his usual mix of bluster and belligerence.“In sum,” his lawyers wrote, “President Trump absolutely agrees, and in fact demands, that these proceedings should be fully televised so that the American public can see firsthand that this case, just like others, is nothing more than a dreamt-up unconstitutional charade that should never be allowed to happen again.” More

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      Megyn Kelly Will Moderate the Next G.O.P. Debate, on NewsNation

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      The event, on Dec. 6, is an opportunity for an upstart cable news network to expand its relatively small viewership.Megyn Kelly, whose high-flying career as a Fox News anchor fell to earth after an ill-advised move to NBC — and then remade herself as a conservative podcaster and radio host — is set to return to the political spotlight next month as a moderator for the next Republican primary debate.The event, set for Dec. 6 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., is the fourth meeting of the party’s presidential candidates. Former President Donald J. Trump, who famously clashed (and later made up) with Ms. Kelly during the 2016 election, is unlikely to attend.The debate will be hosted by the upstart television network NewsNation, a 24-hour cable news station that Nexstar Media Group owns. Its selection by the Republican Party is a breakthrough moment of sorts for a channel that is still unfamiliar to many viewers. The channel has aggressively hired veteran anchors and producers in recent years, but its audience remains small compared with rivals like Fox News or MSNBC.Ms. Kelly will be joined at the moderators’ desk by Elizabeth Vargas, a NewsNation anchor, and Eliana Johnson, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site. The Free Beacon and SiriusXM, which airs Ms. Kelly’s radio show, are sponsors of the debate. The event will also be shown on digital platforms and local affiliates of the CW, the broadcast network that Nexstar owns.NewsNation, which presents itself as a centrist, independent news service, has been dogged in the past by accusations of conservative bias, staff resignations and reports of dysfunction. Recently, it has added a number of familiar on-air personalities, including Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield and Ms. Vargas, who was previously an anchor of “World News Tonight” and “20/20” on ABC. Chris Cuomo, who was fired by CNN in 2021 amid ethics concerns, is the channel’s 8 p.m. host.NewsNation is an upstart television network.Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service, via Getty ImagesThe network has also hired numerous former employees of Fox News. They include Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News politics editor who was fired because of his role in the network’s election night call in Arizona that enraged Mr. Trump, and Leland Vittert, a former correspondent who left the network after his critical reporting on Mr. Trump angered Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News’s parent company. Cherie Grzech, who led Fox News’s politics and campaign coverage for many years, is also now at the network.Political parties typically team up with a major broadcast or cable channel to host their primary debates, with an eye toward achieving the largest possible audience. Last month, NewsNation averaged 118,000 viewers in prime time on weeknights, up 23 percent from a year earlier. Sean Compton, the Nexstar executive who oversees NewsNation, said on Thursday that the debate would be “an opportunity to introduce more Americans” to the channel’s “outstanding journalism.”Other participants suggested that viewers could expect a different tone. Ms. Johnson, of The Free Beacon, said the debate would occur “outside of the mainstream media echo chamber” and provide Republicans with “a debate where conservative ideas and values will be the terrain and not the target.”Ms. Kelly promised an entertaining night. “It will be the margarita of debates,” she said in a statement. “Spicy, fun and somewhat intoxicating. Looking forward to it.” More