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      Trump May Not Need a Coup This Time

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      Gail Collins: Bret, I know you’re busy writing about your reporting trip to Israel, and I am looking forward to reading all your thoughts. But, gee, can we talk about the Times-Siena poll on the presidential race that came out on Sunday? Donald Trump is ahead in almost all the critical states.Yow. Pardon me while I pour myself a drink.Bret Stephens: Nice to be home. Please pour me one while you’re at it.For readers who don’t know the gory details of the poll, here they are: Across six battleground states, Trump leads President Biden 48 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. In the crucial swing states that Biden won last time, Trump is ahead in five — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — while Biden leads only in Wisconsin. Biden is losing support from young voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters — constituencies Democrats have depended on for decades to overcome the longstanding Republican advantage among whites.Women voters favor Biden by eight percentage points, 50 percent to 42 percent, but men favor Trump by a far wider 18-point spread: 55 percent to 37 percent. (I guess that’s another definition for the term “manspreading.”) On the economy, voters prefer Trump over Biden by a 22-point margin. And a whopping 71 percent think Biden is too old to be president, as opposed to just 39 percent for Trump.Gail: Whimper, whimper.Bret: Basically, this poll is to Biden’s second-term ambitions what sunlight is to morning fog. Isn’t it time for him to bow out gracefully and focus his remaining energies on the crises of the moment, particularly Ukraine and the Middle East, instead of gearing up for a punishing campaign while setting the country up for Trump’s catastrophic comeback?Gail: Well, you and I both hoped he wouldn’t run for re-election. But he did, and he is — and as I’ve said nine million times, he’s only three years older than Donald Trump and appears to be in much better physical condition.Bret: For all we know, Biden may be physically fitter than Alex Honnold and mentally sharper than Garry Kasparov, even if he’s hiding it well. But this poll is pretty much voters yelling, “We don’t think so.” Ignore it at your peril.How about putting in a good word for Dean Phillips, the Minnesota representative challenging Biden? Or at least urging the Biden team to lose Kamala Harris in favor of a veep pick more Americans would feel confident about as a potential president, like Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary?Gail: I’m not gonna argue about perfect-world scenarios. Harris might not be your ideal potential president — or mine — but dumping her from the ticket would suggest some historic degree of bad performance. And she really hasn’t done anything wrong.Bret: Harris could well be the best vice president ever, though she’s also hiding it well. But the point here is that voters are underwhelmed, and her presence on the ticket compounds Biden’s already abysmal numbers.Gail: I’m tormented by this whole national vision of Biden as an aging dolt while Trump plays the energetic orator. As our colleagues Michael Bender and Michael Gold pointed out recently, Trump’s had “a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness” in his speeches lately.Bret: Trump has always been the Tsar Bomba of idiocy. But too many people seem more impressed by his rhetorical force than appalled by his moral and ideological destructiveness.Gail: Why does Biden have this terrible image while Trump’s his old, fun-under-multiple-indictments self?Bret: That’s a great question. As a matter of law, I think Trump belongs in jail. The political problem is that the indictments help him, because they play to his outlaw appeal. He wants to cast himself as the Josey Wales of American politics. His entire argument is that “the system” — particularly the Justice Department — is broken, biased and corrupt, so anything the system does against him is proof of its corruption rather than of his. And tens of millions of people agree with him.Gail: This is the world that grew up around us when The Riddler was more fun than Batman.Bret: Perfectly said. The good news in the Times-Siena poll is that Trump’s negatives are also very high. They’re just not as high as Biden’s. Which means Democrats could easily hold the White House with another candidate. But you seem reluctant to push the idea.Gail: Yeah, since Biden is very, very definitely running, I don’t see any point in whining about the fact that I wish he wasn’t. He’d still be 10 times a better president than Trump.Bret: I just refuse to believe Biden’s candidacy is inevitable. Democrats seem to have talked themselves into thinking that any primary challenge to Biden just guarantees an eventual Republican victory, since that’s what tends to happen to incumbent presidents, like George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. But the alternative is to watch Biden risk his single greatest accomplishment — defeating an incumbent Trump in the first place — by heedlessly running in the face of overwhelming public skepticism.Gail: What’s so frustrating is — Biden has a really fine record. The economy has picked up. He’s gotten a huge program passed for infrastructure projects like better roads and bridges. He’s always got the fight against global warming on his agenda. He stands up firmly for social issues most Americans support, like abortion rights.Bret: All the more reason for him to rest on his laurels and pass the baton to a younger generation. I can think of a half-dozen Democrats, particularly governors, who would trounce Trump in a general election just by showing up to the debate with a pulse and a brain. Let me just start with four: Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Jared Polis, Wes Moore ….Gail: I know Trump appears more energetic, but he’s really only a whole lot louder. Either way his multitudinous defects in character and policy really should make the difference.Bret: Hope you’re right. Fear you’re not.Gail: Sigh. Let’s change the subject. You’re in charge of Republicans — what’s your party going to do about the dreaded Senator Tommy Tuberville?Bret: For the record, I quit the G.O.P. more than five years ago.As for Tuberville, who is holding some 370 senior military promotions hostage because he objects to Pentagon policies on abortion, I suggest he should have a look at what just happened in Israel. The country just paid a dreadful price in lives in part because far-right politicians ignored the degradation of the country’s military readiness while they pursued their ideological fixations. I hope defense hawks like Lindsey Graham join forces with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to change Senate rules and move the nominations to a vote.Speaking of Congress, your thoughts on the effort to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib over some of her rhetoric?Gail: Well, Representative Tlaib accused Israel of committing genocide. She’s also said that President Biden “supported” genocide of the Palestinians, a comment that was offensive to Biden while also, I think, hurting the Palestinian cause. But I wouldn’t want to see members of Congress distracted from the deeply serious issues at hand with a squabble about censorship, particularly one championed by folks like the dreaded Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.Bret: Readers won’t be surprised to know that I find Tlaib’s views wrong and repellent. Like Taylor Greene, she’s an embarrassment to her party and the House. But that’s exactly the reason I oppose efforts to censure her. One of the things that distinguishes free societies like America and Israel from dictatorships like Hamas’s in Gaza is that we stand for freedom of speech as a matter of course, while they suppress it. The right censure for Tlaib would be to get voted out of office, not muzzled by her colleagues.Gail: But let’s get back to that poll for a minute. I was fascinated by the fact that only 6 percent of the respondents identified themselves as union members. I think the unions have done great things for the working class and middle class in this country and I’m very much saddened by their dwindling influence.Bret: I’ve always been pro-union. They’re a powerful force for greater automation and an argument for free trade.Gail: Hissss …Bret: OK, that was my inner Alex P. Keaton speaking. But union leaders should at least stop to ask themselves why, if they’re so terrific, so many American workers are reluctant to join them. I feel that way about certain other self-regarding institutions, including much of the news media, that are so full of their own wonderfulness that they can’t figure out why people keep fleeing in droves.Gail: Bret, we’ve entered the November holiday season — really did enjoy the trick-or-treaters last week and was pleased to notice that the popular costumes in our neighborhood seemed to go more toward skeletons and ghosts than celebrities and pop culture heroes. On to Thanksgiving and then I’m gonna challenge you to come up with a list of things in the public world you’re thankful for.Bret: Pumpkin-spice lattes. Just kidding.Gail: Meanwhile, this is Republican debate week, featuring several people nobody’s really heard of and an absent Donald Trump. I guess your fave Nikki Haley is near the head of the pack, such as it is. Think she still has a whisper of a chance?Bret: Not sure. But you’ve somehow reminded me of a lovely poem by Adrienne Rich, which seems to capture both Haley’s candidacy and my daily struggles with coherent prose.You see a mantrying to think.You want to sayto everything:Keep off! Give him room!But you only watch,terrifiedthe old consolationswill get him at lastlike a fishhalf-dead from floppingand almost crawlingacross the shingle,almost breathingthe raw, agonizingairtill a wavepulls it back blind into the triumphantsea.It’s called “Ghost of a Chance.” Here’s me hoping Haley’s got more than that.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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      Quinn Mitchell, Known for His Pointed Questions of Candidates, Ejected From GOP Event

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      Quinn Mitchell, an aspiring journalist from New Hampshire, was escorted out of a G.O.P. candidate summit on Friday, though he was later allowed to return.It was the type of tough question a Republican presidential candidate might get on a Sunday morning talk show, only the person asking it was 15: Quinn Mitchell wanted to know if Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida believed that former President Donald J. Trump had violated the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021.Video of the uncomfortable exchange at a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H., for Mr. DeSantis, who dodged the question, ricocheted online. So did the pair’s next encounter at a July 4 parade in Merrimack, N.H., where a video showed Quinn, an aspiring journalist, being shooed away by a handler for the Florida governor.But the teenager said he was not prepared for what happened on Friday, when he was briefly ejected by police officers from the First in the Nation Leadership Summit, a candidate showcase organized by the New Hampshire Republican Party. The two-day event in Nashua, N.H., featured Mr. DeSantis and most of the G.O.P. field, but not Mr. Trump.“They said, ‘We know who you are,’” Quinn, who has his own political blog and podcast, said in a phone interview on Saturday from his home in Walpole, N.H., referring to the organizers of the summit.Quinn, who received a guest credential for the summit from the state’s G.O.P., said a person associated with the event had told him that he had a history of being disruptive and had accused him of being a tracker, a type of political operative who records rival candidates.The next thing he knew, Quinn said, he was being led to a private room and was then ushered out of the Sheraton Nashua hotel by local police officers. His ejection was first reported by The Boston Globe.Jimmy Thompson, a spokesman for the New Hampshire Republican Party, said in a text message on Saturday that the teen’s removal had been a mistake.“During the course of the two-day event, an overzealous volunteer mistakenly made the decision to have Quinn removed from the event, thinking he was a Democrat tracker,” Mr. Thompson wrote. “Once the incident came to our staff’s attention, NHGOP let him back into the event, where he was free to enjoy the rest of the summit.”Quinn met Vivek Ramaswamy at a Republican event in Newport, N.H., last month. Mr. DeSantis isn’t the only candidate who has faced his direct questions.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA spokesman for the DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.A public information officer for the Nashua Police Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.According to his website, Quinn has attended more than 80 presidential campaign events since he was 10, taking advantage of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status in the nominating process to pose questions to candidates.He said he wanted to hear former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey speak on Friday, along with the businessman Perry Johnson, a long-shot candidate.At a town hall featuring Mr. Christie in April, Quinn had asked another pointed question: Would Hillary Clinton have been better than Mr. Trump as president?Mr. Christie, the former president’s loudest critic in the G.O.P. field, answered that he still would have chosen Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, describing the contest as “the biggest hold-your-nose-and-vote choice” the American people ever had.About two months later, it was Mr. DeSantis’s turn to field a question from Quinn, this one about Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6.“Are you in high school? said Mr. DeSantis, who has faced criticism as a candidate for not being fluid when interacting with voters and journalists, a dynamic that has made for some awkward exchanges on the campaign trail.The Florida governor pivoted, arguing that if the 2024 election focused on “relitigating things that happened two, three years ago, we’re going to lose.”Quinn said that it did not seem like a coincidence that he was kicked out of the event on Friday before Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, which he had planned to skip.“They know the story between me and DeSantis,” he said.By the time he was allowed to return to the event, Quinn said he was able to catch Mr. DeSantis’s remarks. But when the governor opened it up for a question, Quinn left.“OK, one quick question, what do you got?” Mr. DeSantis asked an audience member.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Australia Sees ‘Trump Style’ Misinformation in ‘Voice’ Campaign

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      The reverberations from election conspiracy theories, until recently the domain of political fringes, could be acute, as witnessed by the United States and Brazil.The ballots should, according to the official instructions, be marked with a “yes” or a “no.” A clear and legible “y” or “n” is also likely to be counted. So is a checkmark, for affirmative, but an “X” is considered too ambiguous by the authorities and does not count as a “no” vote.This is how Australians have voted in constitutional referendums for decades. But as the debate over this month’s Aboriginal “Voice” referendum has become increasingly antagonistic and polarized, the process has come under attack.For the first time, in as long as experts can remember, the leader of a mainstream political party in the country has cast doubt on the integrity of an electoral process. Conspiracy theories of a rigged election, the likes of which have led to the storming of government buildings in the United States and Brazil, have rippled from the far right of the political fringes, raising alarm. Election officials have fought back but faced vitriol on social media.A ballot for postal voting in the referendum.James D. Morgan/Getty Images“We may look back at the Voice referendum as a turning point for when election lies and conspiracies went mainstream in Australia,” said Kurt Sengul, a lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies far-right populism. The current debate in the country, he added, was “the first significant Trump style misinformation and disinformation campaign we’ve seen in recent political history,” referring to former President Donald J. Trump.And even though Australia is not at immediate risk of experiencing the kind of election denial seen in the United States, Mr. Sengul added, “That does not bode well for Australian democracy.”The referendum, on whether to set up a body to advise Parliament on Aboriginal issues, has bitterly divided Australia and given rise to a slew of baseless claims on social media, including that the advisory body could seize property or land, or residents would be required to pay rent to Indigenous people if the referendum passed.A rally opposing the “Voice” referendum was held last month in Sydney.David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCaught in the turbulence is the matter of why a checkmark on a ballot counts as a vote while an “X” does not.Longstanding legislation requires officials to count votes as long as the voters’ intent is clear, even if they do not follow the instructions on the ballot paper. Legal advice over the decades has confirmed that an “X,” which many people use on forms and documents to indicate a “yes,” does not show clear intent.However, some pundits and politicians have suggested that the variance is unfair. The leader of the conservative opposition party, Peter Dutton, said that he did not want “a process that’s rigged.”Mr. Dutton did not respond to requests for comment. Fair Australia, which is leading the opposition to the referendum said in a statement: “We understand the rules in relation to formality but believe they give an unfair advantage to the ‘Yes’ campaign. The responsibility for any erosion in trust lies with those who made the unfair rules, not with those who call them out.”A rally in support of the Voice in Melbourne last month.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUnlike in the United States, where national elections are run by a patchwork of state and local officials, in Australia, they are administered by one independent agency, the Australian Electoral Commission, which enjoys broad trust and support and is widely praised by analysts.The agency aims to make voting, which is compulsory in Australia, as accessible as possible. During federal elections, mobile voting stations are taken to remote Indigenous communities using helicopters, four-wheel-drive vehicles and even boats.“The AEC is the gold standard for how you should run elections,” said Bruce Wolpe, who has written a book called “Trump’s Australia.” He added that when Australians go to the polls, “they know their vote will be counted accurately and they’ll abide by the results, and that’s a big deal for how this democracy works in contrast to the U.S.”The commission moved quickly to counter inaccurate claims about the referendum, responding to posts on social media, sending officials to TV and radio shows, and condemning much of the commentary around the issue as “factually incorrect.”In addition to dealing with the issue of check and “X” marks, during this referendum campaign, the commission has debunked suggestions that ballot papers would not be securely stored, pushed back against claims that the referendum would not go ahead and sparred with users who flushed information booklets down toilets, sometimes responding to hundreds of social media comments a day.But even as officials have become more assertive in fighting disinformation, their task is only getting harder.For several years now, experts have watched the political polarization and spread of voting fraud conspiracies in the United States and worried that such rhetoric would leech into Australia’s domestic politics because of the two countries’ close ties.“It is an ongoing concern that we’re seeing groups draw inspiration from U.S. politics that is highly polarized and attempt to export those tactics here,” said Josh Roose, a political sociologist at Deakin University in Melbourne.Tom Rogers, the electoral commissioner, said that after Australia’s 2019 federal election, he “really started to worry about what we were seeing globally.” His agency realized it wasn’t enough to simply run elections fairly and well.“You’ve got to tell people what you’re doing,” he said.Tom Rogers, the Australian electoral commissioner, with the agency’s executive leadership team.Australian Electoral CommissionThe commission started running digital literacy campaigns to educate voters about fake news, working with social media companies and countering incorrect claims about the electoral process online.Its strategy came to national attention during last year’s federal election, when its tongue-in-cheek humor — including beseeching voters not to draw an “eggplant emoji” on their ballot papers — drew both acclaim and criticism. On social media, the agency tries to respond to as many comments as possible — even ones that may seem outlandish, said Evan Ekin-Smyth, who leads that effort.“We take an approach of: Unless you’re going to engage in something that’s deliberately false, deliberately bad faith, we’ll give a response,” he said. “Why not? We’re there to provide fact-based information about the process that we run. No matter how crazy a theory might seem, some people believe it.”However, the agency dialed back the humor for the referendum because it was experiencing new levels of attacks on social media, including, for the first time, threats of physical harm, Mr. Rogers said.Mr. Ekin-Smyth admitted that the agency’s strategy probably would not change the minds of everyone determined to believe conspiracy theories, but he hoped that by injecting accurate, factual information into the discussion, the commission could help stop these theories from spreading further.“Does it feel like we’re pushing a boulder up a hill? Sort of, sometimes,” he said. But “if we’re keeping that boulder from rolling down the hill, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?” More

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      Fact Checkers Take Stock of Their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better’

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      The momentum behind organizations that aim to combat online falsehoods has started to taper off.After President Biden won the election nearly three years ago, three of every 10 Americans believed the false narrative that his victory resulted from fraud, a poll found. In the years since, fact checkers have debunked the claim in lengthy articles, corrections posted on viral content, videos and chat rooms.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.This summer, they received a verdict on their efforts in an updated poll from Monmouth University: Very little has changed. Three of every 10 Americans still believed the false narrative.With a wave of elections expected next year in dozens of countries, the global fact-checking community is taking stock of its efforts over a few intense years — and many don’t love what they see.The number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even fallen, after a booming expansion in response to a rise in unsubstantiated claims about elections and the pandemic. The social networking companies that once trumpeted efforts to combat misinformation are showing signs of waning interest. And those who write about falsehoods around the world are facing worsening harassment and personal threats.“It’s not getting better,” said Tai Nalon, a journalist who runs Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking and disinformation-tracking company.Elections are scheduled next year in more than 5,500 municipalities across Brazil, which a few dozen Aos Fatos fact checkers will monitor. The idea exhausts Ms. Nalon, who has spent recent years navigating a disinformation-peddling president, bizarre theories about the pandemic, and an increasingly polluted online ecosystem rife with harassment, distrust and legal threats.Voters in Brasília in October. Elections are scheduled next year in more than 5,500 municipalities across Brazil, which a few dozen Aos Fatos fact checkers will monitor.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesMs. Fatos’s organization, one of the leading operations of its kind in Brazil, started in 2015 as attention to the fight against false and misleading content online surged. It was part of a fact-checking industry that bloomed around the world. At the end of last year, there were 424 fact-checking websites, up from just 11 in 2008, according to an annual census by the Duke University Reporters’ Lab.The organizations used an arsenal of old and new tools: fact checks, pre-bunks that tried to inform viewers against misinformation before they encountered it, context labels, accuracy flags, warning screens, content removal policies, media literacy trainings and more. Facebook, which is owned by Meta, helped spur some of the growth in 2016 when it started working with and paying fact-checking operations. Online platforms, like TikTok, eventually followed suit.Yet the momentum seems to be idling. This year, only 417 sites are active. The addition of new sites has slowed for several years, with just 20 last year compared with 83 in 2019. Sites such as the Baloney Meter in Canada and Fakt Ist Fakt in Austria have gone quiet in recent years.“The leveling-off represents something of a maturing of the field,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which the nonprofit Poynter Institute started in 2015 to support fact checkers worldwide.The work continues to draw interest from new parts of the world, and some think tanks and good-government groups have begun offering their own fact-checking services, experts said. Harassment and government repression, however, remain major deterrents. Political polarization has turned fact-checking and other misinformation defenses into a target among right-wing influencers, who claim that debunkers are biased against them.Yasmin Green, chief executive of Jigsaw, a group within Google that studies threats like disinformation and extremism, recalled one study in which a participant scrolled past a fact check shared by a journalist from CNN and dismissed it out of hand. “Well, who fact-checks the fact checkers?” the user asked.“We’re in this highly distrustful environment where you’re evaluating just on the basis of the speaker and distrusting people who you decided their judgment is not trustworthy,” Ms. Green said.“We’re in this highly distrustful environment where you’re evaluating just on the basis of the speaker,” said Yasmin Green of Jigsaw, a group within Google that studies disinformation.Rengim Mutevellioglu for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesIntervening against misinformation has a broadly positive effect, according to researchers. Experiments conducted in 2020 concluded that fact checks in many parts of the world reduced false beliefs for at least two weeks. A team at Stanford determined that education about misinformation after the 2016 election had probably contributed to fewer Americans visiting websites in 2020 that were not credible.Success, however, is inconsistent and contingent on many variables: the viewer’s location, age, political leaning and level of digital engagement, and whether a fact check is written or illustrated, succinct or explanatory. Many efforts never reach crucial demographics, while others are ignored or resisted.After falsehoods swarmed Facebook during the pandemic, the platform instituted policies against Covid-19 misinformation. Some researchers, however, questioned the effectiveness of the efforts in a study published this month in the journal Science Advances. They determined that while the amount of anti-vaccine content had declined, engagement with the remaining anti-vaccine content had not.“In other words, users engaged just as much with anti-vaccine content as they would have if content had not been deleted,” said David Broniatowski, a professor at George Washington University and an author of the paper.The remaining anti-vaccine content was more likely to be misleading, researchers found, and users linked to less trustworthy sources than they did before Facebook put its policies in place.“Our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry, and we are laser-focused on tackling industrywide challenges,” Corey Chambliss, a spokesman for Meta, said in an emailed statement. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”In the first six months of this year, more than 40 million Facebook posts received a fact-check label, according to a report that the company submitted to the European Commission.Social platforms where false narratives and conspiracy theories still spread widely have scaled back anti-disinformation resources over the past year. Researchers found that fact-checking organizations and similar outlets grew gradually more dependent on social media companies for a financial lifeline; misinformation watchers now worry that increasingly budget-conscious tech companies will start reducing their philanthropy spending.Such a move could “really turn the screws on fact checkers,” said Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, which is now known as X.Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, said that if tech companies cut back on their philanthropy spending it could “really turn the screws on fact checkers.”Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersIf Meta ever cuts the budget for its third-party fact-checking program, it could “decimate an entire industry” of fact checkers that depend on its financial support, said Mr. Roth, now a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. (Meta said its commitment to the program had not changed.)X has undergone some of the most significant changes of any platform. Its billionaire owner of less than a year, Elon Musk, embraced an experiment that relied on its own unpaid users rather than paid fact checkers and safety teams. The expanded fact-checking program — Community Notes — allows anyone to write corrections on posts. Users can deem a note “helpful” so it becomes visible to everyone; some notes have appeared alongside content from Mr. Musk and President Biden and even a viral post about a groundhog falsely accused of stealing vegetables.X did not respond to a request for comment. Tech watchdogs fretted this week about the quality of content on X after The Information reported that the platform was cutting half the team dedicated to managing disinformation about election integrity; the company had said less than a month earlier that it planned to expand the team.Crowdsourced fact-checking has shown mixed results in research, said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. An article she co-wrote in The Journal of Online Trust and Safety found that the presence of a Community Note did not keep posts from spreading widely. Users who created misleading posts saw no change in the engagement for subsequent posts, suggesting that they paid no penalty for sharing falsehoods.Since most popular posts on X get a surge in attention within the first few hours, a Community Note added hours or days later would do little to reach people who had read the falsehoods, said Mr. Roth, who resigned from the company after Mr. Musk’s arrival last year.“I’ve never found a way around having humans in the loop,” he said in an interview. “My belief, and everything I’ve seen, is that on its own, Community Notes is not a sufficient replacement.”Defenders against false narratives and conspiracy theories are also struggling with another complication: artificial intelligence.The technology’s reality-warping abilities, which still manage to stump many of the tools designed to identify their use, are already keeping fact checkers busy. Last week, TikTok said it would test an “A.I.-generated” label, automatically appending it to content detected as having been edited or created with the technology.Tests are also being run using A.I. to quickly parse the enormous volume of false information, identify frequent spreaders and respond to inaccuracies. The technology, however, has a shaky track record with truth. After the fact-checking organization PolitiFact tested ChatGPT on 40 claims that had already been meticulously researched by human fact checkers, the A.I. either made a mistake, refused to answer or arrived at a different conclusion from the fact checkers half of the time.Between new technologies, fluctuating policies and stressed watchdogs, the online information ecosystem is in its messy adolescent years — “it’s gangly, and it’s got acne, and it’s moody,” said Claire Wardle, a co-director of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University.She is hopeful, however, that society will learn to adapt and that most people will continue to value accuracy. Misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections was less toxic than feared, thanks partly to media literacy efforts and training that helped the authorities respond far more quickly and aggressively to rumors, she said.“We tend to get obsessed with the very worst conspiracies — the people who got radicalized,” she said. “Actually, the majority of audiences are pretty good at figuring this all out.”Audio produced by More

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      How Dana Perino, G.O.P. Debate Moderator, Walks a Fine Line at Fox News

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      The former press secretary in the Bush White House will moderate the next Republican debate. She’s managed to rise at Fox without being a Trump supplicant.Dana Perino can punch and parry with the best of them. But she could be better at ducking.In 2008, when Ms. Perino was the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, she got clocked in the face with a boom microphone in the scuffle that broke out after a journalist threw his shoes at Mr. Bush.“I had a black eye for six weeks,” Ms. Perino, now an anchor for Fox News, said in an interview last week from her sun-dappled Upper West Side apartment.That kind of fracas — and the nearly two years she spent taking questions from reporters in the White House briefing room — may be good preparation for her next act: moderating the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday in Simi Valley, Calif.It will be the biggest moment for Ms. Perino at Fox News since she began co-hosting “The Five” in 2011. Not known for being as provocative or partisan as many of her colleagues behind the desk, Ms. Perino, 51, has spent a good part of the last decade trying to thrive as a Bush Republican working for a network where loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump is often the ticket to high ratings and the career advancement that accompanies them.Ms. Perino, who also co-hosts the two-hour morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor. She says she modeled her transition after two other former West Wing staff members who had made the transition — George Stephanopoulos, the ABC News anchor who served as Bill Clinton’s communications director, and Diane Sawyer, also of ABC, who was an assistant to Richard M. Nixon.Ms. Perino at her final briefing as the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush on Jan. 16, 2009.Doug Mills/The New York TimesCurrent and former colleagues said that she has managed to persevere at Fox by being neither a Trump supplicant nor fierce critic. During the raucous discussions on “The Five,” she can often be seen ducking the fray, flashing a knowing smile as her co-hosts mock Mr. Trump’s liberal antagonists.And she feels no need to deliver the pro-Trump monologues that other conservative hosts have made a staple of their programs.“If she tried to fake it, she knows people would see through her,” said Tony Fratto, a former Bush administration official who worked with Ms. Perino in the White House and remains a friend. Mr. Fratto said that Ms. Perino’s independence was something she was determined to keep while working her way up at the network.“She’s very rational and respectful of people with different views,” he said.Ms. Perino is one of the few Fox anchors to have never interviewed Mr. Trump. And she doesn’t appear especially eager to do so.When Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News over its promotion of conspiracy theories relating to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, some of Ms. Perino texts with her colleagues became public, revealing how little she thought of the former president and his claims that extensive voter fraud cost him the election. She said as much on air as well and told Mr. Fratto, who was representing Dominion at the time, in one text exchange how she was being threatened. “The maga people are crushing me for it,” she wrote, “and I even have death threats now.”Asked last week whether she would prefer it if Mr. Trump participated in this week’s debate — he will skip it, as he did the debate last month in Milwaukee — Ms. Perino wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm.“Sure,” she said. If she were advising Mr. Trump, she said, she would encourage him to go. But she also said she believed his absence presents his rivals with opportunities to break out in ways that have eluded them so far.She said she believed that the last debate, which was hosted by her Fox News colleagues Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, was not particularly successful for the candidates because they spent so much time interrupting each other.“The candidates made a decision to break the rules, and to talk over each other,” she said.She will not shy away from interrupting them if they do the same, she said. And she does not fear playing the role of schoolmarm if she needs to. (Her co-moderator in the debate, Stuart Varney of Fox Business, is no shrinking violet either.)Ms. Perino, the co-host of the morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“I’m happy to be that,” she said, adding that she hopes that isn’t necessary. “I think that for them, they should not want that either, right, because it didn’t help them. If you think about that debate, there was no consensus of who won.”Preparing for the debate can be a thankless task, as many moderators before her have discovered. The candidates often dismiss the carefully drafted questions the moderators have written.Friends and former colleagues said that Ms. Perino has a knack for preparedness that exceeds most.“When she would prepare President Bush for press conferences, you’d go through the anticipated questions,” said Ed Gillespie, who served as counselor to the president during Mr. Bush’s second term. “A question would come, and it would be one that Dana said would come. And then there would be another that Dana said would come. And a third. And every single question would be one that Dana said would come.”President George W. Bush with Ms. Perino in the White House briefing room in August 2007, after announcing that she would be taking over as press secretary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHer Fox colleague Greg Gutfeld, a fellow host on “The Five,” said he pokes fun at her for how she comes to the show armed with a notebook full of ideas based on the news articles that are driving the day. “Unlike me, she reads the articles. She’s like the grade-A student in your class,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “She doesn’t throw it in your face. But she’s prepared.”Former colleagues said that Ms. Perino wasn’t one to pull her punches when it came to briefing the president, which she always came to extensively prepped.“If you’re preparing the president, you have to do it nicely, of course, since he’s the one who was elected,” said Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state during Mr. Bush’s second term. “But you also have to be willing to say, ‘Mr. President, that answer isn’t going to fly.’ Dana did that. And I think President Bush respected her for it.”Ms. Perino’s second act as a news anchor puts her back where she started her career right out of college. After working as a disc jockey on the overnight shift at a country music station in Pueblo, Colo., she graduated from the University of Southern Colorado and moved to the Midwest, eventually landing a job as a reporter for a television station in Champaign, Ill. She decided a life of covering local news — holiday parades, municipal government meetings — wasn’t for her.“I didn’t see how you could get ahead quickly. And I had an ambition,” she explained, adding that she never saw herself becoming “the replacement for Tom Brokaw.” When she left local news, she said, she thought that would be the end of her time in television news. “I really thought if I do this I’ll never work in TV again.”Her first big job in the Bush White House came in 2006 when, after holding a series of communications jobs throughout Washington, she was hired at age 34 as the deputy press secretary under Tony Snow, a former host of “Fox News Sunday.” He stepped down in 2007, after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Mr. Bush named Ms. Perino as the new press secretary.“She can handle you all,” the former president told the room of journalists. Now, she is the journalist. And the G.O.P. presidential candidates will have to handle her. More

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      The Idea That Biden Should Just Give Up Political Power Is Preposterous

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      It was clear from an early point that barring some unforeseen circumstance, the 2024 presidential election would be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — the first contest with two presidents on the ballot since 1912’s four-way matchup between William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, the upstart Woodrow Wilson and the long-shot socialist Eugene V. Debs.Most Americans, according to several polls conducted this year, say they do not want this. Most Americans, a recent CBS News survey reports, think a Trump-Biden rematch — which would not be the first presidential rematch in American history — is evidence of a broken political system. But most Americans who plan to vote are nonetheless resigned to casting a ballot for either Biden or Trump next November.This palpable sense of exhaustion is perhaps the reason so many political observers have taken to speculating about a future in which Biden, at least, doesn’t run.David Ignatius wrote last week in The Washington Post that if Biden and Kamala Harris “campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.” Likewise, Eliot Cohen wrote this summer in The Atlantic that Biden “has no business running for president at age 80.”I find this drumbeat, which has been ongoing since at least 2022 (“Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024,” Mark Leibovich wrote last summer, also in The Atlantic. “He is too old”), to be incredibly strange, to say the least. The basic premise of a voluntary one-term presidency rests on a fundamental misconception of the role of re-election in presidential politics and presidential governance.Re-election — or rather the act of running for re-election — isn’t an unexpected treat or something ancillary to the position. It is one of the ways presidents seek to preserve their influence, whether or not they ultimately win another term of office.“Among the many hats the president wears, none is more important to his long-term success than that of party leader,” the political scientist James W. Davis writes in a 1992 book on presidential leadership. “Unless he is skilled in the management of party affairs, especially in dealing with members of the coequal legislative branch, the president will not be able to achieve that esteemed place in history reserved for all of our great presidents.”The reason, Davis explains, is that the institutional separation of the executive and the legislature along with the fragmented nature of political authority in the American system — presidents and lawmakers of the same party, even lawmakers within the same state, do not share the same constituencies — result in large and imposing barriers to presidential ambition. But, Davis writes, “while the president faces numerous constraints in our Madisonian system of checks and balances, he nevertheless can, if he has the inclination and leadership drive, use his party ties to lead the nation to new heights.”Crucial to achieving this is the possibility of future power, which is to say, the prospect of re-election. The promise of a second term, and thus another four years to achieve their political and ideological goals, is a critical incentive that binds lawmakers to the president in the present. This is especially true given the recent trend toward the nationalization of congressional elections, in which public esteem for the incumbent — or lack thereof — shapes the fate of the entire party.Or, as the presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter observed in a 1957 letter addressing a House committee hearing on the potential repeal of what were then recently enacted presidential term limits, “Everything in our history tells us that a president who does not or cannot seek re-election loses much of his grip in his last couple of years.” In other words, no president wants to be a lame duck.Rossiter, it should be said, opposed the 22nd Amendment — which wrote presidential term limits into the Constitution in 1951 — as a nakedly partisan prohibition “based on the sharp anger of the moment rather than the studied wisdom of a generation.” It was, in his view, an “undisguised insult to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”There was a notion during the 2020 presidential race that Biden would be a one-term caretaker. “Biden should do the honorable thing and commit to standing aside after the completion of a successful first term,” a CNN op-ed declared. Some of Biden’s advisers even floated the idea that he would essentially step aside after winning election. “According to four people who regularly talk to Biden,” Politico’s Ryan Lizza wrote in 2019, “all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.”Even Biden himself said that he viewed himself as a “transition candidate.” Perhaps that was true in the months after he won the nomination. For reasons that should now be obvious, however, it was a fantasy. There is no faster way to political and policy irrelevance than for a president to tell the nation he plans to step aside. Biden could be an effective, successful president or he could be a one-term, transitional figure. He cannot not be both. A president who doesn’t intend to run for re-election is essentially a president who can be safely ignored as a nonentity. No one who wanted to achieve something with the office would make that pledge.Let’s also be honest about the individual in question: the kind of person, like Joe Biden, who plans and plots for a lifetime to become president is going to want to serve as long as the law, and the voting public, will allow.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.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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      The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

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      As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”Wait. What?While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?A note on reader mailI want to end this newsletter with a note of thanks. I deeply appreciate your emails. Every week I receive an avalanche of thoughtful responses, some encouraging, some critical. I want you to know that while I can’t respond to them all, I do read every single email. If you care enough to take the time to write, the least I can do is take the time to read. Thank you, truly, for your thoughts. More

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      Ramaswamy Relies on Denialism When Challenged on Flip-Flopping Positions

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      In clashes with the news media and his rivals, the Republican upstart has retreated from past comments and lied about on-the-record statements.In his breakout performance in the Republican primary race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain, much in the same way that former President Donald J. Trump has mastered.Mr. Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.Here are some notable occasions when he sought to retreat from his past statements or mischaracterized basic facts:A misleading anecdoteAt a breakfast round table event organized by his campaign on Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to promote his immigration proposals to a mostly Black audience.He boasted that nowhere had his ideas on the issue been more enthusiastically received than in the nation’s third most populous city, where his appearance had followed community protests over the housing of migrants in a local high school.“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he said.But Mr. Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who covered both events.The reporter witnessed the audience in Chicago pepper Mr. Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative action. Immigration was barely mentioned during the formal program. It was so absent that a Ramaswamy campaign aide at one point pleaded for questions on the issue. With that prompting, a single Republican consultant stood up to question Mr. Ramaswamy on his proposals.Trump criticismAt the first Republican debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey accused Mr. Ramaswamy of changing positions on Donald Trump.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn one of the more heated exchanges of last week’s G.O.P. debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for lionizing Mr. Trump and defending his actions during the Jan. 6 attack.He sought to cast Mr. Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was trying to pander to Mr. Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to government censorship during the 2020 election.“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Ramaswamy bristled and said, “That’s not true.”But in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Mr. Ramaswamy had harsh words for Mr. Trump and gave a more somber assessment of the violence.“It was a dark day for democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”When asked by The Times about the excerpt, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not evolved and pointed out that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal five days after the Jan. 6 attack that was critical of the actions of social media companies during the 2020 election.“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he said. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”Mr. Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the former president, however.“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he said.During the debate, Mr. Ramaswamy also sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence, whose senior aide and onetime chief of staff Marc Short told NBC News the next day that Mr. Ramaswamy was not a genuine populist.“There’s populism and then there’s just simply fraud,” he said.By blunting his message about the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Ramaswamy appears to be making a play for Mr. Trump’s base — and the G.O.P. front-runner has taken notice.In a conversation on Tuesday with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Mr. Trump said that he was open to selecting Mr. Ramaswamy as his running mate, but he had some advice for him.“He’s starting to get out there a little bit,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him: ‘Be a little bit careful. Some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?’”Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11Since entering the race, Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly floated conspiracy theories about a cover-up by the federal government in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a narrative seemingly tailored to members of the G.O.P.’s right wing who are deeply distrustful of institutions.In a recent profile by The Atlantic, he told the magazine, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers.”While he acknowledged that he had “no reason” to believe that the number was “anything other than zero,” Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that the government had not been transparent about the attacks.“But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he said.Yet when Mr. Ramaswamy was asked to clarify those remarks by Kaitlan Collins of CNN two nights before last week’s debate, he backtracked and accused The Atlantic of misquoting him.“I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually,” he said.Soon after Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that his words had been twisted, The Atlantic released a recording and transcript from the interview that confirmed that he had indeed been quoted accurately.When asked in an interview on Saturday whether the audio had undercut his argument, Mr. Ramaswamy reiterated his contention that the news media had often misrepresented him.“I think there’s a reason why,” he said, suggesting that his free-flowing way of speaking broke the mold of so-called scripted candidates. “I just don’t speak like a traditional politician, and I think the system is not used to that. The political media is not used to that. And that lends itself naturally then to being inaccurately portrayed, to being distorted.”Mr. Trump’s allies have used similar justifications when discussing the former president’s falsehoods, citing his stream-of-consciousness speaking style. His allies and supporters have admired his impulse to refuse to apologize or back down when called out, an approach Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed.Mr. Ramaswamy said that he was asked about Sept. 11 while discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated calls for an accounting of how many federal agents were in the field that day. His campaign described The Atlantic’s recording as a “snippet.”At the start of The Times’s conversation with Mr. Ramaswamy, he said that he assumed that the interview was being recorded and noted that his campaign was recording, too.“We’re now doing mutually on the record, so just F.Y.I.,” he said.Pardoning Hunter BidenIn one of many clashes with the news media, Mr. Ramaswamy accused The New York Post of misquoting him in an article about Hunter Biden.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesNo news outlet has been off-limits to Mr. Ramaswamy’s claims of being misquoted: This month, he denounced a New York Post headline that read: “GOP 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘open’ to pardon of Hunter Biden.”The Aug. 12 article cited an interview that The Post had conducted with him.“After we have shut down the F.B.I., after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of a political motivated persecution — from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests — then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying.The next morning on Fox News Channel, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp, Mr. Ramaswamy told the anchor Maria Bartiromo that the report was erroneous.“Maria, that was misquoted and purposeful opposition research with the headline,” he said. “You know how this game is played.”The Post did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ramaswamy described the headline as “manufactured” and said it was part of “the ridiculous farce of this gotcha game.”Aid to IsraelMr. Ramaswamy clashed with Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night when confronted with comments he has made about aid to Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy accused Mr. Hannity of misrepresenting his views.“You said aid to Israel, our No. 1 ally, only democracy in the region, should end in 2028,” Mr. Hannity said in the interview. “And that they should be integrated with their neighbors.”“That’s false,” Mr. Ramaswamy responded.“I have an exact quote, do you want me to read it?” Mr. Hannity asked.Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about support for Israel has shifted.During a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy called the deal to provide Israel with $38 billion over 10 years “sacrosanct.” But a few weeks later in an interview with The Free Beacon, a conservative website, he said that he hoped that Israel would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.” by 2028, when the deal expires.Wearing masksIn the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Masks for All Act, a bill proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that aimed to provide every person in the United States with three free N95 masks, appeared to receive an unlikely endorsement on Twitter — from Mr. Ramaswamy.“My policy views don’t often align with Bernie, but this strikes me as a sensible idea,” he wrote in July 2020. “The cost is a tiny fraction of other less compelling federal expenditures on COVID-19.”Mr. Ramaswamy was responding to an opinion column written for CNN by Mr. Sanders, who is a democratic socialist, and Andy Slavitt, who was later a top pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden. He said they should have picked someone from the political right as a co-author to show that there was a consensus on masks.But when he was pressed this summer by Josie Glabach of the Red Headed Libertarian podcast about whether he had ever supported Mr. Sanders’s mask measure, he answered no.When asked by The Times for further clarification, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he was an early supporter of wearing masks, but said that he no longer believed that they prevented the spread of the virus. He accused his political opponents of conflating his initial stance with support for mask mandates, which he said he had consistently opposed.An analogy to Rosa Parks?Mr. Ramaswamy appeared to compare Edward J. Snowden to Rosa Parks before immediately distancing himself from the comment.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesWhen he was asked by the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his show in June whether he would pardon the former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden for leaking documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, Mr. Ramaswamy said yes and invoked an unexpected name: the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.He said that Mr. Snowden, a fugitive, had demonstrated heroism to hold the government accountable.“Part of what makes that risk admirable — Rosa Parks long ago — is the willingness to bear punishment he already has,” he said. “That’s also why I would ensure that he was a free man.”To Mr. Hewitt, the analogy was jarring.“Wait, wait, wait, did you just compare Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden?” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy immediately distanced himself from such a comparison, while then reinforcing it, suggesting that they had both effectuated progress of a different kind.“No, I did not,” he said. “But I did compare the aspect of their willingness to take a risk in order for at the time breaking a rule that at the time was punishable.” More