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      For Trump, the More GOP Presidential Candidates the Better

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      Ron DeSantis entered the presidential race last week along with Tim Scott, with others to follow. For the former president, the more candidates the better.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida officially entered the presidential race last week, but he appears farther than ever from the one-on-one matchup that his allies believe he needs to wrest the nomination from former President Donald J. Trump.Former Vice President Mike Pence is burrowing deeper into Iowa, crucial to his effort to dislodge the Republican front-runners, even before he has announced his bid. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is intensifying preparations for another campaign, with an expected focus on New Hampshire. And Republican donors and leadership on Capitol Hill are showing fresh interest in Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who kicked off his campaign last week. Even candidates who have barely been mentioned are suddenly expressing interest in 2024.The rapidly ballooning field, combined with Mr. Trump’s seemingly unbreakable core of support, represents a grave threat to Mr. DeSantis, imperiling his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and could mirror the dynamics that powered Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party in 2016.Ron DeSantis met with supporters in Manchester, N.H., this month. Along with Iowa, the state is crucial for the Florida governor.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIt’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of Mr. DeSantis’s potential coalition — whether it be Mr. Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Mr. Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat into Mr. Trump’s votes. The former president’s base — more than 30 percent of Republicans — remains strongly devoted to him.“President Trump — he should go to the casino, he’s a lucky guy,” Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist based in New Hampshire, said of the former casino owner, Mr. Trump.“It’s a gigantic problem” for Mr. DeSantis, added Mr. Carney, who has worked on past presidential campaigns, because “whatever percentage they get makes it difficult for the second-place guy to win because there’s just not the available vote.”Mr. Trump’s advisers have almost gleefully greeted each successive entry as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that his team has spoken about since 2021. And many of the candidates seem more comfortable throwing punches at Mr. DeSantis than at Mr. Trump.The DeSantis campaign sees the landscape differently.“We don’t believe it’s 2016 again,” Ryan Tyson, a senior adviser to Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview.And in a private briefing for donors this week, Mr. Tyson described a Republican electorate split into three parts: 35 percent as “only Trump” voters, 20 percent as “never Trump” and the remaining 45 percent as the DeSantis sweet spot.Mr. Tyson told donors, in audio that was leaked and published online, that every entrant besides the two front-runners were isolated in the “never Trump” segment. “If your name is not Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, you are splitting up this share of the electorate,” he said.In the months leading up to his campaign launch, Mr. DeSantis and his allies framed the 2024 primaries as a two-man race. But as he has stumbled in recent months, amid questions about his personality and political dexterity, rivals have become emboldened. And some have the cash to stay relevant deep into the primary calendar.Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, announced his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination last week.Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesMr. Scott entered the race with nearly $22 million on hand, and he raised $2 million more in his first day as a candidate. The wealthy, little-known governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, now sees a 2024 opening, filming ads recently to prepare for an imminent campaign, according to two people involved in the planning.Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, has invested $10 million of his own money in his campaign. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy sells a similar anti-woke sentiment, but he does so with the charm of a natural communicator.Mr. Trump has welcomed the non-DeSantis entrants to the race. In January, when Nikki Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, called to tell him she planned to run, Mr. Trump did not rant about her disloyalty, as some had expected. He sounded unbothered, telling her to “do what you’ve got to do,” according to two people briefed on their conversation.And in the days leading up to Mr. Scott’s announcement, Mr. Trump was watching Fox News in his Mar-a-Lago office when he said, “I like him. We’re just going to say nice things about Tim,” according to a person familiar with his private comments.The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the year was that the field would be relatively small, perhaps as few as five people running. Republican anti-Trump donors were working to thin the herd to prevent a repeat of the divided field that guaranteed Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. Now, after Mr. DeSantis’s early stumbles, there will likely be as many as 10 candidates competing for attention and vying for the debate stage.For Mr. DeSantis, the squeeze was apparent on the day he entered the race.In New Hampshire, Ms. Haley mocked him on Fox News as merely “copying Trump,” down to his mannerisms. “If he’s just going to be an echo of Trump, people will just vote for Trump,” she said.In Iowa, Mr. Pence sat down with the type of mainstream media outlets that Mr. DeSantis has shunned, including The Des Moines Register. Mr. Pence also met with Bob Vander Plaats, the same evangelical leader Mr. DeSantis had recently brought to Tallahassee for a private meal.The split screen was a reminder that Mr. DeSantis is being pinched both ideologically and geographically, as the field expands.Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, announced her bid for president in February.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Pence and Mr. Scott have made plain their plans to vie for influential evangelical voters in Iowa. In New Hampshire, both Mr. Christie, who focused his campaign on the state in 2016, and the state’s sitting governor, Chris Sununu, a moderate who has left the door open to a run, threaten to siphon votes from Mr. DeSantis. And in South Carolina, he will be sandwiched between two home-state candidates, the former governor Ms. Haley and Mr. Scott.Many Republicans who want to defeat Mr. Trump are aghast at the exploding field — along with Mr. DeSantis’s underwhelming performance in recent months. Mr. DeSantis has slipped in the polls and now trails Mr. Trump in all states and by an average of more than 30 percentage points nationally.“All Republicans have to be hitting Donald Trump,” said Mr. Sununu, who described himself as “50-50” about entering the race. “Any Republican that isn’t hitting Donald Trump hard right now is doing the entire party a disservice because if only one or two people are willing to take a shot at Donald Trump, it looks personal. It looks petty.”So far, Mr. Christie has gotten the most attention for his direct attacks on Mr. Trump, which he has signaled would be crucial to his candidacy. But he also has delighted in needling Mr. DeSantis at times, an acknowledgment of the Florida governor’s position in the race.Former Vice President Mike Pence, in dark suit, talks with Will Rogers, a lobbyist, during a meet-and-greet in Des Moines, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe reluctance to go after Mr. Trump, for many Republicans, feels eerily like a repeat of 2016. Then, Mr. Trump’s rivals left him mostly alone for months, assuming that he would implode or that they were destined to beat him the moment they could narrow the field to a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never transpired.The two Florida-based candidates in that race, Senator Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, a former governor, spent millions of dollars strafing each other. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who wound up as Mr. Trump’s top rival, gloated privately to donors that he was bear-hugging Mr. Trump while also patiently waiting for the moment to pounce. It never came.Mr. Trump’s current rivals seem exasperated by their collective inability to crack his foundation: Mr. Trump’s supporters have been trained for years to come to his defense whenever he is under fire.Mr. Trump has another asymmetrical advantage: Current and potential rivals have sought to avoid criticizing him too harshly so as not to alienate Republicans who still like Mr. Trump and are automatically suspicious of anyone attacking him. By contrast, other 2024 contenders have shown no hesitation in going after Mr. DeSantis.“His team — maybe him — is excellent at manufacturing the veneer of courage without actually delivering on the real thing,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview last month. “And that can work across TV and even social media,” he added. “But once you poke a little bit, it’s like a little bubble in the air: A little touch, and it’s burst.”Mr. Ramaswamy, who has criticized Mr. Trump, has aimed most of his fire at Mr. DeSantis. A close friend of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr. Ramaswamy dined with Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner at the former president’s New Jersey club, Bedminster, in 2021, according to two people familiar with the event.And while the field grows, there is the matter of the debate stage, where Mr. Trump eviscerated his opponents in the 2016 primary.The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, said earlier this year that she did not expect to need two debate stages as the party required in 2016, with the tiers of candidates determined by polling.But there could be as many as a dozen declared candidates by August, and many are already racing to collect the 40,000 donors and 1 percent polling threshold the party has indicated will be needed to get onstage. This pool includes longer-shot candidates like Larry Elder, the talk radio host who got walloped in the California recall election.“Everyone says, ‘We have to keep people from getting in.’” Mr. Sununu said. “That’s the wrong message, the wrong mentality, and that’s not going to work.”But he acknowledged that consolidation will eventually be needed to defeat Mr. Trump.“The discipline,” Mr. Sununu added, “is getting out.” More

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      The DeSantis Delusion

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      If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).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 G.O.P. Primary: ‘City on a Hill’ or ‘American Carnage’?

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt’s 77 weeks before Election Day and over half a dozen people have already thrown their hats into the G.O.P race. On our new podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen take a tour of the 2024 Republican primary field to understand what it takes to survive in the present-day Republican ecosystem — and maybe even beat the Trump in the room.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photograph by Scott Olson/GettyThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (212) 556-7440. We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” was produced this week by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Pence Looks Toward 2024 Run, Using Reagan’s Playbook, Not Trump’s

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      A pro-Pence super PAC is being formed, and so is a plan to barnstorm Iowa. “This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” a G.O.P. operative said.Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-shot campaign for the White House against the president under whom he served, pitching himself as a “classical conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump roots, according to people close to Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.In a sign his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being set up. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence’s who served with him in Congress.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more supplicant than standard-bearer, at least until the rupture in their relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would begin far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in early national and state polls of 2024 Republican primary voters.The Pence team’s bet is that a “Reagan coalition” can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Pence candidacy will focus heavily on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. Iowa’s caucuses are the first contests for Republican presidential contenders early next year.“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview. “It just feels like home.”On a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence’s candidacy and foreshadowed an old-fashioned blitz of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, like we’re running him for county sheriff,” he said.If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s improbable bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — composed of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.“We have to resist the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” Mr. Pence said in the interview.In a Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire focused on economics, Mr. Pence is expected to call for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.He is casting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and staking out sharply different positions from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the most important policy questions framing the Republican 2024 race. Still, running against Mr. Trump so directly will force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes-man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” Mr. Reed said. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”It remains to be seen how frequently Mr. Pence will discuss the moment that has defined him for the last two years: his rejection on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while President Biden’s Electoral College victory was certified.That issue is not a winning one with the base of the Republican Party. But Mr. Pence’s team believes there are enough Republicans who might be won over by Mr. Pence describing the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Pence stands almost alone among the prospective Republican field in advocating views that were once standard issue for his party.Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Mr. Trump entered national politics in 2015, cutting entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has promised in his third campaign not to cut either program and he has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.“It is fairly remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency: The position of never going to touch Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.Mr. Pence said he would “explain to people” how the “debt crisis” would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.Mr. Pence is also drawing a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.“There’s a bit of a movement afoot in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to being the leader of the free world and that questions why we’re providing military support in Ukraine,” Mr. Pence said.Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.“In the aftermath of September 11th, the president articulated a doctrine that I wholly supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they’re running backward.”Mr. Pence supports a national ban on abortion. “For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” he said.Allison Joyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Pence is also resisting the anti-corporate furies that are dominating Republican politics today, arguing limited government means not intervening in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.In the view of New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naïve to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions — academia, Fortune 500 companies, the news media — and conservatives need to use governmental power to fight back.Mr. Pence will run as a staunch social conservative, drawing a contrast with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He has said the issue should be left to the states.Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national ban on abortion.“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” Mr. Pence said. His senior adviser, Marc Short, said Mr. Pence regarded a 15-week national ban as a “minimal threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life beginning at conception.”There is little chance Mr. Pence will receive many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence does not need elected officials to vouch for his credentials. Yet, it’s also unclear how many Republican donors will back his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas when the billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the gathering.Among the hires for the super PAC supporting Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful re-election campaign in Georgia in 2022, one of the few brights spots for Republicans in the midterms. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.For now, Mr. Pence is signaling he’s willing to do without a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s smash-mouth politics and constant warfare against the media.“People want to see us get back to having a threshold of civility in the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from crowds.” More

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      Campaign, Interrupted: Pence May Run, but He Can’t Hide From Trump’s Legal Woes

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      The former vice president faces many challenges in his potential presidential run, perhaps none bigger than his complicated relationship with his old boss.Former Vice President Mike Pence, seemingly in his element as he addressed a gathering of evangelical Christians in Iowa this month, was speaking of “the greatest honor of my life,” serving in “an administration that turned this country around” by rebuilding the military, securing the southern border, and unleashing “American energy.”“But most importantly, most of all,” he said, building to a crescendo — but at the moment he was about to claim some credit for his administration’s success in overturning the right to an abortion, a booming voice came over the loudspeaker from the sound booth: “Check, check, testing, 1-2-3.”It was a small interruption, but one that exemplified the diversions Mr. Pence continues to face as he considers a run for the Republican presidential nomination against the man who was once his greatest benefactor, but also his cruelest tormentor: Donald J. Trump.On Thursday, however, Mr. Pence faced a much more onerous and grueling intrusion into his potential campaign, and one that he had hoped to avoid, when he was forced to testify for more than five hours before a grand jury in Washington about Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts put Mr. Pence’s life at risk on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Mr. Pence, the would-be candidate with unassailable religious convictions who spent four years a heartbeat away from the presidency, cannot seem to find the space to present those credentials to sympathetic Republican primary voters without interruption — and, in this case, on the biggest stage before a campaign has even begun.After Thursday’s testimony, a highly unusual event involving two of the most prominent U.S. public officials during a nascent presidential campaign in which both are likely to run, he is in the odd and uncomfortable position of being both a potential challenger to his former boss and possibly a key witness for his prosecution.Mr. Pence knows that core voters in the Republican base are in no mood to give such legal proceedings against Mr. Trump, including the current civil suit accusing him of rape and defamation, much credence. Paula Livingston, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, waved off the cases pending against Mr. Trump as “all the same, they’re out to stop him.”Nor is Mr. Trump showing any signs of contrition. On Thursday, while campaigning in New Hampshire, the former president embraced a supporter who had served prison time for her actions during the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, and called her “terrific,” even though she said she wants Mr. Pence executed for treason.But after the former vice president’s efforts to quash the Justice Department’s subpoena for his testimony failed, Mr. Pence had little choice but to lend his voice to the federal prosecution.Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., on April 27. Sophie Park for The New York TimesThe Pence camp is now working to put that testimony within the broader rubric of his potential presidential run: Conservative truth teller. Pence loyalists would like Mr. Pence to be getting more credit for the Trump administration’s successes, especially for helping to choose the nominees that tilted the Supreme Court to the right.But Mr. Pence has to play the hand that he has been dealt, and right now that includes testifying against Mr. Trump.“I don’t know if he has to dislodge” Mr. Trump, Marc Short, a former chief of staff to the vice president, said. “He has to remind voters who he is.”Over his 12 years in Congress, as governor of Indiana and in the Trump White House, Mr. Pence was “the consistent conservative,” Mr. Short said, working for a man who was anything but consistent: “That’s an important contrast for him to draw,” Mr. Short said.A Republican close to the former vice president, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations, explained on Friday that Mr. Pence has long stuck with conservative constitutional principles, even when that has meant standing up to his party.As a House member, he chastised the administration of President George W. Bush for its failure to adhere to fiscal discipline as federal budget surpluses turned to large deficits. He has embraced changes to Social Security and Medicare that would trim benefits in the name of balancing the budget, changes that Mr. Trump has loudly rejected.He continues to publicly make the case for U.S. military aid to Ukraine, even as some Republican lawmakers and many Republican voters turn against it. He has said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s fight with the Walt Disney Company over social policy has strayed, and become a violation of the Republican Party’s bedrock belief in free enterprise.And he leaned on constitutional arguments, first to avoid the subpoena of federal prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and now to comply with it. Earlier this year Mr. Pence argued that the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, intended to protect the separation of powers between the three branches of government, shielded him from having to speak of Mr. Trump’s campaign to pressure him not to certify the election results in his ceremonial role as vice president.When that failed, he complied with the subpoena rather than search for another rationale for delay, such as the “executive privilege” claims that have been repeatedly rejected.Mr. Pence, in his recent book “So Help Me God,” described in detail Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure him into blocking congressional certification of President Biden’s victory. Mr. Trump became preoccupied with the idea that Mr. Pence could do something, though Mr. Pence’s chief lawyer had concluded that there was no legal authority for him to act on Mr. Trump’s behalf.But people close to Mr. Pence said that just as he argued that he had to fulfill his constitutional duty on Jan. 6, 2021, he invoked that same Constitution the following day to reject overtures from Democratic leaders to use the Constitution’s 25th amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.Aides to Mr. Pence showed little worry this week as the former vice president continues his deliberations about a run. Mr. Pence’s attitude, they said, is simple: Let the chips fall where they may.“He feels remarkably blessed to have been able to serve the American people in the roles he has had,” Mr. Short said, “and he hopes to continue that service.” More

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      Pence Testifies Before Grand Jury on Trump’s Efforts to Retain Power

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      The former vice president is a key witness to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to block congressional certification of Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared on Thursday before the grand jury hearing evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, a person briefed on the matter said, testifying in a criminal inquiry that could shape the legal and political fate of his one-time boss and possible 2024 rival.Mr. Pence spent more than five hours behind closed doors at the Federal District Court in Washington in an appearance that came after he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury earlier this year.As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Pence’s advisers had discussions with Justice Department officials last year about providing testimony in their criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and a number of his allies broke federal law in trying to keep Mr. Trump in power. But the talks broke down, leading prosecutors to seek a subpoena for Mr. Pence’s testimony.Both Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump tried to fight the subpoena, with the former vice president claiming it violated the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution given his role overseeing the election results certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump claiming their discussions were covered by executive privilege.Mr. Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony based on executive privilege claims were rebuffed by the courts. Mr. Pence partially won in his effort to forestall or limit his testimony; the chief judge overseeing the grand jury ruled that he would not have to discuss matters connected to his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, but that he would have to testify to any potential criminality by Mr. Trump.A federal appeals court on Wednesday night rejected an emergency attempt by Mr. Trump to stop Mr. Pence’s testimony, allowing the testimony to go forward on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s effort to hold onto the presidency after his defeat at the polls — and how it led to the assault on the Capitol — is the focus of one of the two federal criminal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Mr. Smith is also managing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.Mr. Smith has gathered evidence about a wide range of activities by Mr. Trump and his allies following Election Day in 2020. They include a plan to assemble slates of alternate electors from a number of swing states who could be put forward by Mr. Trump as he disputed the Electoral College results. They also encompass an examination of whether Mr. Trump defrauded donors by soliciting contributions to fight election fraud despite having been repeatedly told that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen from him.A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, has also been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election results in that state, and has signaled that she will announce any indictments this summer.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to block or delay certification of the electoral outcome, infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence subsequently became a target of the pro-Trump mob that swamped the Capitol building that day, with some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the complex. Someone brought a fake gallows that stood outside the building.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided on Thursday. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s accounts of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that they could use the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.That plan relied on Mr. Pence using his role as president of the Senate to hold up the process. But Mr. Pence’s top lawyer and outside advisers concluded that the vice president did not have the legal authority to do so.Mr. Pence described some of his conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoir, “So Help Me God.”Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Some of Mr. Pence’s aides have already appeared before the grand jury, in addition to providing extensive testimony last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and what led to it. More

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      Trump Can’t Stop Pence From Testifying to Jan. 6 Grand Jury, Court Rules

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      The ruling by an appeals court paved the way for the former vice president to appear before a federal grand jury as early as this week.A federal appeals court rejected on Wednesday night an emergency attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to stop former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying in front of a grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The 11th-hour ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia paved the way for Mr. Pence to appear before the federal grand jury as early as this week.Mr. Pence has always been a potentially important witness in the inquiry because of conversations he took part in at the White House in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that time, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed Mr. Pence to use his ceremonial role overseeing the congressional count of Electoral College votes to block or delay certification of his defeat.Prosecutors have been trying to get Mr. Pence to talk about Mr. Trump’s demands for several months — first in requests by the Justice Department for an interview and then through a grand jury subpoena issued by the special counsel Jack Smith, who inherited the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power.Last month, in a pair of sealed rulings, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of Federal District Court in Washington, ordered Mr. Pence to appear before the grand jury, striking down two separate challenges that would have kept him from answering certain questions.In one of those challenges, Mr. Pence sought on his own to limit his testimony by arguing that his role as the president of the Senate on Jan. 6, when Mr. Trump’s defeat was certified by Congress, meant he was protected from legal scrutiny by the executive branch — including the Justice Department. That argument was based on the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution, which is intended to protect the separation of powers.Judge Boasberg ruled that while Mr. Pence could claim some protections against testimony under the clause, he would have to answer questions about any potentially illegal acts committed by Mr. Trump. This month, Mr. Pence announced that he did not intend to appeal the decision.Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump’s lawyers took the opposite path, asking the appeals court to reverse Judge Boasberg’s ruling on their own attempts to narrow the scope of the questions Mr. Pence would have to answer. Mr. Trump’s legal team based its arguments on the concept of executive privilege, which protects certain communications between the president and some members of his administration.The appeals court’s sealed ruling on Wednesday night came in response to an emergency request — it was also sealed — to temporarily stop Mr. Pence from answering questions in front of the grand jury as the broader appeal is being considered.When Mr. Pence ends up testifying, it will mark a significant turning point in the monthslong behind-the-scenes battle waged by Mr. Trump and several witnesses close to him to block the disclosure of details about plans to overturn the election. More

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      The 2024 Presidential Campaign is Finally Kicking into Gear

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      Candidates are visiting early primary states, attending cattle calls and holding donor summits. The nascent campaign seems to be kicking into gear.From small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire to the grand stages of interest groups’ conventions, the 2024 presidential campaign is underway, whether or not Americans are ready.The past week has brought at least four declared or likely candidates to New Hampshire, three to Iowa and one to South Carolina. Nine addressed the National Rifle Association’s annual forum in Indianapolis, and three attended a Republican donor retreat in Nashville.The formal choreography of the campaign is falling into place. Last Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago to host its convention next August. On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee, in a surprise to no one, chose Fox News to host the party’s first debate this August.The declared candidates filed their quarterly fund-raising reports late this week, revealing the first big campaign finance error of the season. The campaign of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, exaggerated her fund-raising total by more than $2 million by double-counting sums transferred between different committees.Five major candidates have officially announced campaigns: four Republicans (former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Haley, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author) and one Democrat (the self-help author and 2020 candidate Marianne Williamson).But on the campaign trail, it seems like more.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who announced an exploratory committee on Wednesday, had a particularly packed week, with trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. A tour of Alex’s Restaurant in Goose Creek, S.C., on Friday had the look and feel of a full-blown campaign stop, with supporters holding signs and the number of reporters rivaling the number of diners.Mr. Scott talked with voters and restaurant staff before heading outside to take questions from reporters — walking a thin line between being a declared candidate and one in waiting.“The message is resonating,” he said, underlining his belief that his conservative talking points with religious overtones will appeal to a broad swath of Republican voters. Asked if he had made up his mind about running for president, he said: “I’m getting closer. Without any question.”He added that he would return to Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming days and had plans to stop in Nevada, another early-voting state.While Mr. Scott was in South Carolina, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — the top challenger to Mr. Trump in early polls, though not officially in the race — spoke at Liberty University in Virginia and then flew to New Hampshire. Mr. DeSantis addressed a crowd of 500 at a state Republican Party dinner in Manchester.The event raised $250,000 for the state party, with the party chairman saying Mr. DeSantis had directed his own donors to give an additional $132,000.After his nearly 40-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis spent just as long methodically working his way through the crowd, visiting all 50 tables for handshakes, backslaps, photos and small talk. “Did you get it?” he asked picture takers. “County chairman for where?”The low-stakes interactions appeared designed to dispel criticism that Mr. DeSantis was unwilling to engage in the traditional retail campaigning that political activists in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire value. On Saturday, he also stopped by an airport diner.The governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, was in Nashville, far away from home, testing out his own possible campaign at the Republican National Committee’s private donor retreat. There he spoke at a luncheon on Saturday and implicitly blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s underwhelming performance in the midterm elections. (Data backs him up: A New York Times analysis found that candidates Mr. Trump supported in primaries performed about five percentage points worse than other Republicans did in the general election.)Mr. Trump was at the retreat, too, casting himself against that evidence as the only candidate who could win a general election. So was his former vice president, Mike Pence, whom Trump supporters declared their desire to hang when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“The old Republican Party is gone, and it’s never coming back,” Mr. Trump said in a speech Saturday, less than two weeks after he was arraigned in New York on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. “Instead of being the party of the establishment class, we are now the party of the working class, the party of all Americans.”The evening before, Mr. Pence cast the 2024 election as a fight between “one vision grounded in traditional Republican principles, and another vision that grasps what some think the American people want to hear.” He took repeated but indirect aim at Mr. Trump, noting that in 2022, “candidates that were focused on the past, particularly those focused on relitigating the last election, did not do well.”On Sunday, Mr. Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who announced his campaign this month and was in Iowa a few days ago, partook in another campaign staple: the Sunday morning talk show interview.Appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Mr. Hutchinson gave the usual answer to the question of why he was running — “because we need leadership that brings out the best of America and doesn’t appeal to our worst instincts.” Then the host, Margaret Brennan, pressed him on how he would respond to the country’s bleak parade of mass shootings.He did not endorse any new federal legislation and expressed skepticism about whether red-flag laws — which allow the removal of guns from people deemed to pose a danger to themselves or to others — protected due process. At the same time, he urged states to make greater use of existing laws that allow the institutionalization of people deemed to pose a danger to themselves or to others.There has been much less activity across the aisle, where President Biden is inching toward formally declaring a re-election campaign that he has already said was definite. (“We’ll announce it relatively soon,” he said on Friday.)No one with a large support base has risen to challenge him. But he does have one official competitor, Ms. Williamson, who has been traversing New Hampshire since Friday, hitting Dover, Henniker, Keene, Lancaster and Littleton.A second challenger, the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., plans to announce his campaign this Wednesday.The election will be just 566 days away.Rebecca Davis O’Brien More