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      ‘There Is a Tension There’: Publishers Draw Fire for Signing Trump Officials

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      Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence and William Barr have book deals. That is raising new challenges for publishers trying to balance ideological lines with a desire to continue representing the political spectrum.Things were already strained at Simon & Schuster.After backing out of a deal with Senator Josh Hawley, a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, the company announced this month that it would publish two books by former Vice President Mike Pence. Dana Canedy, who joined Simon & Schuster as publisher last year, called Mr. Pence’s memoir “the definitive book on one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.” That’s when much of the staff erupted in protest.On Monday, editors and other employees at Simon & Schuster delivered a petition to management demanding an end to the deal, with signatures from more than 200 employees and 3,500 outside supporters, including Simon & Schuster authors such as Jesmyn Ward and Scott Westerfeld.Most were probably not aware that the company has also signed the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, according to people familiar with the matter — a move that is sure to throw gas on the fire.In another era, book deals with former White House officials were viewed as prestigious and uncontroversial, and major publishers have long maintained that putting out books from across the political spectrum is not only good for business but an essential part of their mission. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, however, Simon & Schuster has become a test case for how publishers are trying to draw a line over who is acceptable to publish, and how firmly executives will hold in the face of criticism from their own authors and employees.Many publishers and editors have said privately that they would be reluctant to acquire a book by Mr. Trump because of the outcry that would ensue and the potential legal exposure they would face if Mr. Trump used a memoir to promote the false view that he won the 2020 election.But the reticence extends beyond Mr. Trump himself, and several publishers acknowledge that there are certain ideological lines that they won’t cross. Some said they wouldn’t acquire books by politicians or pundits who questioned the results of the presidential election. Another bright line is working with people who promoted the false narratives or conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump espoused.Certain literary agents representing Trump officials have adjusted their sales tactics. A few are avoiding large auctions in hopes of staving off a backlash until after a contract is signed, according to some publishing executives.“What I’m watching very closely is the succession of lines crossed,” said Thomas Spence, the president of Regnery, a conservative publisher. “People start to wonder: Whom else might they shut down?”Donald Rumsfeld, a defense secretary under George W. Bush, is among the former Republican officials whose books attracted little scrutiny in a different political era.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThose who work in the industry, which is concentrated in New York, tend to be left leaning in their politics, but publishing houses have long adhered to the principle of political neutrality when it comes to who they publish. After the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, major publishers signed deals with administration officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Bush himself, with little blowback. (An imprint of Penguin Random House published a book of portraits and stories about immigrants by Mr. Bush last week called “Out of Many, One.”)After the 2020 election, those ideals have been tested in unprecedented ways.“There is a tension there — on the one hand, I’ve always believed, and I still believe fervently, that we need to publish major voices that are at the center of the national conversation, whether we agree with them or not,” said Adrian Zackheim, the president and publisher of two Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which is geared toward conservative books. “On the other hand, we have to be leery of public figures who have come to be associated with blatant falsehoods.”At the same time, conservative publishers and some literary agents say there is enormous demand for books from voices on the right, particularly now that Republicans are out of power, and publishers are demonstrating that they are eager to work with politicians they regard as acceptable mainstream conservatives. Politico reported that William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, sold a book about his role at the Justice Department. Sentinel acquired a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose appointment by Mr. Trump last year caused an uproar on the left. Ms. Conway’s book will be published by Threshold, a Simon & Schuster imprint focused on conservative titles, though a person familiar with it said it would be more of a memoir than a standard political book.Simon & Schuster declined to comment.The company published several political blockbusters last year, including Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and John R. Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened.” This year has been more complicated.In January, Simon & Schuster dropped plans to release Mr. Hawley’s book following criticism of his efforts to overturn the election and accusations that he helped incite the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. This month, it said it would not distribute a title, published by Post Hill Press, a small publisher in Tennessee, by one of the police officers in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor.The petition drafted by Simon & Schuster staff, which circulated on social media last week, demanded the company cancel Mr. Pence’s books, not sign any more former Trump officials and end its distribution deal with Post Hill Press. Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s chief executive, wrote a letter to the company saying it wouldn’t take those actions.“We come to work each day to publish, not cancel,” Mr. Karp wrote, “which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives.”Staff members who organized the petition were not satisfied by his response. They sent a letter to Mr. Karp and Ms. Canedy on Monday along with the petition.“Let’s be clear: the First Amendment protects free speech from legal encroachment. It in no way calls for publishing companies to publish all viewpoints, much less those as dangerous as Mike Pence’s,” the letter said. “When S&S chose to sign Mike Pence, we broke the public’s trust in our editorial process, and blatantly contradicted previous public claims in support of Black and other lives made vulnerable by structural oppression.”Some publishing employees said the decision to sign Mr. Pence and other Trump officials was especially jarring as major publishers have taken pains to stress their commitment to diversity over the past year.“It feels like you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth,” said Stephanie Guerdan, an assistant editor at HarperCollins, who was speaking in her role as a shop steward at its union. “You want to make a safe space for your Black employees and your queer employees and put out your anti-Asian-discrimination statements. You can’t say the company supports these causes and then give money to people who have actively hurt those causes.”The reluctance among mainstream publishers to work with some conservatives has created an opportunity for smaller independent houses.“It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their nose,” Adam Bellow, who runs the conservative imprint Bombardier, “but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”Guerin Blask for The New York Times“The reaction of people on the right to the cancellation of political books is to double down, so we have lots of books to publish,” said Adam Bellow, who founded the Broadside imprint at HarperCollins and is now an executive editor at Bombardier, an imprint of Post Hill, which has published books by Representative Matt Gaetz and other prominent Republicans.Mr. Bellow added that some conservatives have grown wary of selling their books to mainstream publishing houses.“It’s a purge that’s becoming more of an exodus,” he said. “Many conservative authors are telling their agents they don’t want to be pitched to publishers who have canceled conservative books. It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their noses, but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”The highly charged atmosphere could lead to a realignment in the political publishing landscape, with the formation of a new literary niche that caters to voices on the far right.The D.C. public relations firm Athos started a literary agency and is representing some prominent conservatives. Co-founded by Alexei Woltornist, who worked in communications in the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Trump, and Jonathan Bronitsky, who served as Mr. Barr’s chief speechwriter, Athos recently sold Bombardier a book by Scott Atlas, Mr. Trump’s former coronavirus adviser, about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic.Conservative publishers are also experimenting with direct-to-consumer sales with a new online bookstore, conservativereaders.com, that was created by Mr. Bellow and a small group of colleagues and investors. With a new online outlet, they are aiming to develop an alternative platform to traditional retailers and Amazon in the event that stores refuse to sell a controversial title.Some predict the appetite for political books will only continue to grow.“After the election, there was this big question mark over the future of the political book,” the literary agent Rafe Sagalyn said, “and I think we’re learning now that they’re very much in demand.” More

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      For These Republicans, 2024 Is Just Around the Corner

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      Mike Pence. Mike Pompeo. Rick Scott. They share big ambitions, but one name hovers above them all …Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesPresident Biden told reporters last month that his “plan is to run for re-election,” despite already being the oldest person to have won a presidential election. So, for now at least, the question of who will lead the Democratic ticket in 2024 has been put to rest.On the Republican side, however, certainty is in short supply. It’s beyond early to be talking about the next presidential election (we’re still hardly even ready to talk about the midterms!) — but that’s only if you aren’t planning to run. Some Republican candidates have already made trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and others are laying plans to go, in what often represents the first step in building out a campaign operation in those early-voting states.And on Wednesday, in a conspicuously forward-looking move, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a new political organization, Advancing American Freedom, whose advisory board is stacked high with former Trump administration officials and allies. The news came on the same day Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish Pence’s autobiography as part of a two-book deal.The G.O.P. is badly fractured, trying to hold together a dominant base of those loyal to former President Donald Trump and a stubborn minority of pro-decorum, anti-Trump conservatives. Anyone looking to grab the Republican mantle will have to find some way of satisfying both camps — and maybe even expanding upon them.A national poll from Pew Research Center last month found that most Republicans didn’t think the G.O.P. should be accepting of elected officials in the party who openly criticize Trump. But looking at the nation at large, Pew also found that a majority of Americans called Trump either a “poor” or “terrible” president. So it may be tough for Republicans to get very far in a general election if their candidate is seen as too staunch of a Trump loyalist.With all these factors at play, I caught up with our political reporter and Trump guru Maggie Haberman. Here’s what she had to say.Mike Pence on Wednesday announced that he had started the group Advancing American Freedom, with the self-described mission of “promoting traditional conservative values,” advocating “the successful policies of the Trump administration” and opposing Biden’s “expansion of government.” Is this a preliminary move toward a possible 2024 run?It most certainly gives Pence a perch from which to run, and, more significantly, to differentiate himself from Trump to the best of his ability. He has more of a challenge than most of the potential 2024 candidates in presenting himself as a continuation of what Republicans liked about the Trump era, without the parts they didn’t.A stubborn divide remains between the party’s Trump-supporting base and its establishment wing. Pence, for one, has always done his best to skate along that divide. For Republican presidential hopefuls, will there be any room for being even semi-critical of Trump?I think they all have to survive a G.O.P. primary, and the bulk of the Republican base is going to want someone who resembles Trump in some way.There is going to be little room for a Republican to separate from Trump in the primary — barring new circumstances that change Trump’s standing with those voters — and then pivot back in a general election and be viable with swing voters.Pence has also been so, so reluctant to criticize Trump, even after his own life was at risk in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.A number of other prominent Republicans have recently been laying groundwork in Iowa. (Despite the 2020 Democratic caucus shenanigans, the state is certain to hold an early contest in 2024.) Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida just went there, and others are reportedly planning trips. After the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, what clues are you seeing about how the 2024 field will shape up? Does any one figure seem particularly well positioned?It’s so early in the cycle, it’s very hard to say. We don’t know what the world — or the country — will look like closer to 2024, although the midterms will tell us something about the mood of the electorate.Scott is in a bit of a different position than some candidates, having been a governor and now a senator. Scott surprised leaders in his own party by siding with Trump’s objections to the electoral certification, which helps him in a primary but which could be a challenge in other ways.Where does Trump himself stand in all this? He has been relatively quiet since January, his speech at CPAC aside — but he’s still running a political operation out of his residence in Florida. Whether or not he runs again in three years, is it safe to say he will be playing an active role in the race somehow?Remember, Trump keeps telling people he’s running. While most of his own advisers are skeptical that he will do it, it could have a chilling effect on the field for a while. He wants to remain dominant in the party and he is a major factor in down-ballot primaries so far.But that isn’t the only impactful factor in these races. He wants to be relevant; remember that only a narrow majority of Republicans want to see him as the nominee again.Drop us a lineTrump’s Twitter ban: We want to hear from youWe’re nearing the end of three months in which former President Donald Trump has been barred from Twitter and Facebook. This has upset his supporters, of course, but has resulted in a general lowering of the conversational temperature, particularly on Twitter. Our colleague Sarah Lyall is working on an article about the absence of Trump’s voice on social media, and we’d love to hear from readers.We want to know:1. Did you follow (or block) Trump on Twitter?2. How did his tweets make you feel when you saw them on Twitter, or read about them afterward?3. Have you noticed his absence from social media platforms since January? Do you miss his voice, or are you happy not to hear it anymore?Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com and include your name, email address and profession, and you may be included in forthcoming news coverage.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      At CPAC, a Reverence for Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAt CPAC, a Golden Image, a Magic Wand and Reverence for TrumpThe faithful who flocked to the annual conference of conservatives made it clear that their allegiance was to the former president far more than to the Republican Party.A woman standing next to a metal replica of former President Donald Trump, made by Tommy Zegan, on the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021Updated 10:13 a.m. ETORLANDO, Fla. — Tommy Zegan was appalled by the few sculptures of Donald J. Trump in existence — the life-size nude statue that popped up in major cities in America, the golden toilet in London. So in 2018, he got to work.Mr. Zegan, a Trump supporter who had recently moved to Mexico from the United States, created a six-foot-tall fiberglass mold of the former president and painted it gold. Mr. Zegan’s Trump carried a magic wand in his left hand, a reference to Barack Obama’s quip in 2016 about Mr. Trump’s needing one to bring back manufacturing jobs. The sculpted Trump wore his customary suit jacket and red tie, American flag shorts — and flip-flops — “because technically he should be retired,” Mr. Zegan explained, “but he chose to be a servant.”The final product, titled “Trump and His Magic Wand,” was among the more popular attractions at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. On Saturday, attendees flocked to the event’s merchandise hall for photos with the golden sculpture, the scene an almost literal rendering of the Republican Party, which continues to reserve its reverence not for ideas or elected officials but for one man.“It’s definitely not an idol,” Mr. Zegan insisted. (“I was a youth pastor for 18 years,” he noted.) “An idol is something somebody worships and bows down to. This is a sculpture. It’s two different things.”The defiantly pro-Trump mood at CPAC represented a culmination of a cycle that began in 2016, when Republican leaders publicly supported Mr. Trump’s nomination for president while privately presuming a landslide defeat and subsequent irrelevance. It was a pattern that held firm over the four years that followed, with many lawmakers continuing to indulge the president, all while confident that a breaking point — whether a loss in 2020 or, most recently, the riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6 — was imminent.Meanwhile, their constituents’ devotion to Mr. Trump only hardened. For many voters, Mr. Trump became the party. And at CPAC, many of the thousands of attendees sporting Make America Great Again hats made it clear that their loyalties no longer lay with the institution itself.Despite four years of professions of fealty to Mr. Trump from the party’s elected officials and their orienting of the G.O.P. around his image, dozens of conservatives this weekend bristled at the Republican label, castigated the party’s current congressional leadership and vowed to leave the party altogether should Mr. Trump decide not to run for a second term in 2024.Sany Dash selling merchandise at her CPAC booth. “We’re so disgusted by Republicans that, honestly, if Trump’s not running, we don’t care who wins,” she said.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe party’s viability in the future, these people suggested — some as they proudly displayed their well-worn Trump 2020 T-shirts — was entirely contingent upon its members’ willingness to remain fixed in the past.“We’re so disgusted by Republicans that, honestly, if Trump’s not running, we don’t care who wins,” Sany Dash said as she worked at her Trump merchandise booth.Ms. Dash’s store, Bye Bye Democrats, was bustling on Saturday as CPAC attendees browsed bejeweled MAGA clutches, plush elephants and a tapestry featuring an image of Mr. Trump drinking coffee accompanied by text reading, “The best part of waking up is Donald Trump is president.” (“We’ve sold probably 1,400 Nancy Pelosi toilet paper rolls here,” she said. “Our toilet paper is always a hit.”)Yet Ms. Dash, an Indian-American from New York who called herself a “Day 1” Trump supporter, appeared angrier at the moment at Republicans, and specifically at Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has urged her party to break with the former president. Ms. Dash said she was preparing to open a store in Wyoming in the next two months and call it Bye Bye Liz.“Liz Cheney is a descendant of a warmonger,” she said. “Sorry, we got into war with Iraq, and so many people died — millions of people’s lives changed.”She continued: “I don’t care what she has to say now. It’s like the Bush girls in Austin. I don’t care how woke you are in Austin, just because now you get along with Michelle Obama, but your father killed a lot of people. So excuse me, I don’t want anything to do with you people.”Like all of the dozens of CPAC attendees interviewed, Ms. Dash said she hoped Mr. Trump would run for president in 2024. There are some other Republicans she likes, including Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota — “I like Kristi Noem, because she fights back,” she said, calling her a “female Trump” — but she said she would stick with the G.O.P. only if Mr. Trump, or someone who pledges to lead as he did, was the nominee.“I mean, I’ve heard the rest of them — if they actually come through, that’s wonderful,” she said. “If they don’t, I’m going to be out of this party, just like everyone else. It’s that simple.”Della Striker, 70, is a lifelong Republican and, for the past three years, has been a fitness instructor at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. But she said her allegiance to Mr. Trump had come to transcend political parties. “I only voted Republican, but I never loved anyone — I voted Republican because they were at least pro-life and loved Israel.”But in 2015, she said, she heard a voice.“I’ve heard the Lord five times in my life,” she said. “I woke up in 2015 — I was waking up, and it said, ‘I want you to pray for Donald Trump.’”Six years later, Ms. Striker said she was “very upset.”“Seven Republicans turned on him,” she said, referring to the senators who voted to convict in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial this month. While she had enjoyed listening to some speakers at CPAC, such as Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, she wondered why there were not more speakers she considered sufficiently pro-Trump — in particular, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.Ms. Greene, who was elected in 2020 despite a history of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic remarks and her embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory, was not on the CPAC agenda. But she attended the conference anyway, posing for photos on Saturday with throngs of fans in the hallways of the Hyatt Regency.Other CPAC attendees also questioned Ms. Greene’s absence from the agenda.Timothy Shea and Johnny Flynn, a Republican who is running for Senate in Connecticut, fist bumping in front of a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump on the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesPamela Roehl, a Realtor from Illinois who was wearing a red “Keep America Great” cowboy hat, frowned slightly when asked if she considered herself a Republican. “I’m a conservative,” she said. For her, that meant “following the Constitution” and “America first.” She felt many speakers at this year’s conference — her fourth — fit that mold, but she was also looking forward to learning more about “the new congresswoman from Georgia.”Ms. Roehl, 55, unlocked her iPhone, whose screen background was a photo of Donald Trump Jr., and pulled up a group text to double-check that Ms. Greene was indeed in Orlando. “Yeah, I’m going to go hear her speak,” Ms. Roehl said. “I know she’s controversial with, like, the QAnon stuff and everything, but I like CPAC because you can hear people out.”Ms. Roehl acknowledged that Ms. Greene’s history of inflammatory remarks was “kind of a blemish on her,” but she saw a positive in them, too, contrasting Ms. Greene to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. “A lot of the unfiltered women I’ve seen in politics are more like A.O.C. and other people, so it’s kind of neat to see a more conservative person kind of unfiltered,” she said.Yet when it came to other Republicans who were missing from CPAC’s agenda, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, many attendees seemed ambivalent, as if those figures’ absence hadn’t even occurred to them.“No opinion,” Mr. Zegan, the sculptor of the golden Trump, said with a shrug when asked about Mr. Pence. Mr. Zegan, like several of those interviewed, expressed the false belief that the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists known as antifa was responsible for the riot at the Capitol (“It’s eventually going to come out,” Mr. Zegan promised). But while some said that Mr. Pence had “let down” Mr. Trump by presiding over the congressional certification of Electoral College votes, even they seemed not so much angry toward him as indifferent.As for Ms. Haley, Mr. Zegan was a bit more animated, pulling out his phone and showing a photo of a painting he had made of her. “I would love to present it to her, but I’m kind of disappointed in her,” he said. “When she bad-mouthed Trump — she should’ve just kept her opinion to herself.”In other words, two figures who were once considered rising stars in the G.O.P., who for years have had an eye to 2024, appeared to have less currency at CPAC than a freshman congresswoman known for her conspiracy theories and her devotion to Mr. Trump.Asked how he defined the Republican Party right now, Mr. Zegan grinned weakly. “In shambles,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      After the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentTrial HighlightsKey Takeaways From Day 5How Senators VotedTrump AcquittedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAfter the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was AttackedNew evidence emerged in the impeachment trial about what President Donald J. Trump did from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. the day of the Capitol attack. But many questions remain unanswered.President Donald J. Trump at a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol siege.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMaggie Haberman and Feb. 13, 2021Updated 9:17 p.m. ETThe impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump largely focused on his actions leading up to the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. But there was a crucial period that day of nearly five hours — between the end of Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and a final tweet telling his followers to remember the day forever — that remains critical to his state of mind.Evidence emerged during the trial about what Mr. Trump was doing during those hours, including new details about two phone calls with lawmakers that prosecutors said clearly alerted the president to the mayhem on Capitol Hill. Prosecutors said the new information was clear proof of Mr. Trump’s intent to incite the mob and of his dereliction to stop the violence, even when he knew that the life of Vice President Mike Pence was in danger.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who on Saturday voted to acquit Mr. Trump but offered a sweeping endorsement of the prosecutors’ case, backed them up: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”Still, many crucial questions remain unanswered about the president’s actions and mood from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. Jan. 6. Here is what is known so far:Mr. Trump concluded his incendiary speech on the Ellipse at 1:11 p.m. He had repeatedly told the crowd that the election was stolen from him and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to stop President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified. Mr. Trump said twice that he would go with them. And days before the march, he had told advisers that he wanted to join his supporters, but aides told him that people in the crowd were armed and that the Secret Service would not be able to protect him.Six minutes later, Mr. Trump’s motorcade began heading back to the White House. He arrived there at 1:19 p.m. as the crowd was making its way up Pennsylvania Avenue and beginning to swarm around the Capitol. Television news footage showed the mob as it moved closer to the doors.At some point, Mr. Trump went to the Oval Office and watched news coverage of a situation that was growing increasingly tense.At 1:34 p.m., Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington made a formal request for assistance in a phone call with the Army secretary, Ryan D. McCarthy. At 1:49 p.m., as the Capitol Police asked Pentagon officials for help from the National Guard, Mr. Trump tweeted a video of his incendiary rally speech.It was around this time that some of Mr. Trump’s allies publicly called on him to do something. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, told ABC News that Mr. Trump needed to say something to stop the rioting.At 2:12 p.m., the same moment that the mob breached the building itself, Mr. Pence — who had defied the president by saying he planned to certify Mr. Biden’s victory — was rushed off the Senate floor. A minute later, the Senate session was recessed. Two minutes after that, at 2:15 p.m., groups of rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”Nine minutes later, at 2:24 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted a broadside at Mr. Pence for moving ahead to certify Mr. Biden’s win: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”At 2:26 p.m., after Mr. Pence had been whisked away, a call was placed from the White House to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, according to call logs that the senator provided during the impeachment proceedings.The president had made the call, but he was actually looking for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama. Mr. Lee gave the phone to Mr. Tuberville, who has told reporters that he informed Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had just been escorted out as the mob got closer to the Senate chamber.“I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville recounted to Politico.This was a significant new piece of information. House prosecutors used it to argue that Mr. Trump was clearly aware that the vice president was in danger and that he had a callous disregard for Mr. Pence’s safety. On Friday, Mr. Trump’s defense team had insisted that Mr. Trump was not aware of any peril facing Mr. Pence.Back at the White House, advisers were trying to get Mr. Trump to do something, but he rebuffed calls to intercede, including those from people wanting to see the National Guard deployed. The president, several advisers said, was expressing pleasure that the vote to certify Mr. Biden’s win had been delayed and that people were fighting for him.“According to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” Mr. McConnell said on Saturday. “He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his own vice president.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Republican ally of the president’s, told The Washington Post that he called Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, to try to get her to reason with her father. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, also called Ms. Trump to see if she could talk to her father. A short time later, she arrived in the Oval Office, urging Mr. Trump to issue a statement.The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, hammered at Mr. Trump to understand that he had potential legal exposure for what was taking place.Finally, at 2:38 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”A short time later, at 3:13 p.m., Mr. Trump added a note, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”Ms. Trump quoted her father’s tweet when she sent out her own, telling “American Patriots” to follow the law. She quickly deleted it and replaced it when she faced blowback on Twitter for appearing to praise the rioters as “patriots.”Around 3:30 p.m., Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader and another ally of Mr. Trump’s, told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell that he had spoken that afternoon with Mr. Trump as the Capitol was under siege.“I told him he needed to talk to the nation,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I told him what was happening right then.”The call became heated, according to a Republican congresswoman, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State, who said that Mr. McCarthy told her that Mr. Trump had sided with the mob as the Capitol attack unfolded, suggesting he had made a choice not to stop the violence.In a statement on Friday night that was admitted into evidence in the trial on Saturday, Ms. Herrera Beutler recounted that Mr. McCarthy had a shouting match with Mr. Trump during the call.Mr. McCarthy had told Mr. Trump that his own office windows were being broken into. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Mr. Trump said, according to a report by CNN that the congresswoman confirmed.“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Mr. McCarthy fired back at one point, CNN reported, including an expletive.Meanwhile, the violence continued. At 4:17 p.m., Mr. Trump posted a video on Twitter of him speaking directly to the camera in the Rose Garden. “I know your pain,” Mr. Trump said. “I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now.”He added, “We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”The violence continued. Well before the Capitol Police announced at 8 p.m. that the building had been secured, Mr. Trump put out a final tweet at 6:01 p.m.: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Democrats Could Have Made Republicans Squirm

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Democrats Could Have Made Republicans SquirmG.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.Mr. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”Feb. 13, 2021, 9:13 p.m. ETRepresentative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, with colleagues after the Senate vote.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesProbably nothing could have moved enough Republican senators to vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.But the way the House chose to frame the article of impeachment made the prospect less likely. If the purpose of the proceeding was to produce a conviction and disqualification from future office, as opposed to mere political theater, the House should have crafted a broader and less legalistic set of charges.The sole article of impeachment was for “incitement of insurrection.” It focused on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when then-President Trump addressed an initially peaceful crowd of supporters and egged them on to go to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” against the recognition of an Electoral College victory for his opponent Joe Biden.Presumably, the drafters of the House impeachment resolution chose to frame their charge as incitement because this is an actual crime. The first impeachment of Mr. Trump was criticized (wrongly, in my view) for failing to allege a crime. But it is not necessary for an impeachment to be based on criminal conduct. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment proceedings “can never be tied down by such strict rules” as “in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors” in criminal trials. Rather, he said, the target of impeachment proceedings is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”By charging Mr. Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime. This is not to say that senators may vote to convict only if those elements are proved, but that the terms of the impeachment article invited the defense to respond in the same legalistic terms presented by the House impeachment managers. They tried to broaden the focus during the trial, though not successfully.One element of the crime of incitement is the intent to induce imminent violence. The evidence shows that Mr. Trump was reckless and that violence was a foreseeable consequence of his incendiary speech, but a senator might reasonably conclude that it falls short of proving that he wanted his followers to assault members of Congress or to vandalize the Capitol.Moreover, the terms of the impeachment article opened the door for Mr. Trump’s defense team to play videos in which various Democrats said things that can be construed to encourage violence — a comparison that should be irrelevant but certainly muddied the waters.The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Mr. Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.Whether or not Mr. Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Mr. Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.Moreover, Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were of a piece with attempts — nonviolent but no less wrongful — to intimidate other officials, such as Georgia’s secretary of state, to use their powers to thwart the election results. The Trump campaign had every opportunity to substantiate its claims of massive fraud in court and failed miserably to do so.By focusing the impeachment resolution on the charge of incitement of insurrection, the House made it easier for Mr. Trump’s supporters in the Senate to dismiss these acts of intimidation as irrelevant to the accusation on which they were voting.It should not be necessary to point out that the use of the presidential office to keep power after losing an election is the gravest possible offense against our democratic constitutional order — one that the authors of the Constitution specifically contemplated and sought to prevent. The violence of Jan. 6 was bad, but even if no one at the Capitol had been hurt that day, Mr. Trump’s attempts to mobilize a mob to impede the democratic process was still a high crime or misdemeanor.To make matters worse, Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence even when he was aware it was occurring. He did not deploy forces to the Capitol to put down the riot and protect members of Congress. He sent two messages to the rioters, but his appeals for peaceable behavior were tepid, and intermixed with words of support and affection for the rioters.Perhaps most egregious was his tweet that “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” at a time when rioters were threatening to hang the vice president. We now know that a senator informed Mr. Trump of the danger to Mr. Pence — but Mr. Trump did not retract his tweet or lift a finger to protect Mr. Pence.This dereliction of his constitutional duty was wholly apart from any incitement and was an impeachable offense in itself. But it was not charged in the article of impeachment.It would be foolish to think that the vote on impeachment would come out differently if the charge had been differently framed. But if House was going to impeach, it should have framed the case to make it as difficult as possible for the Senate to acquit.It is far from clear that Mr. Trump incited the violence of Jan. 6 in a technical legal sense, but it is abundantly clear that he sought to intimidate members of Congress and other officials to block Mr. Biden’s election, and that he failed in his duty to do what he could to end the violence once it started. Those would be ample grounds for conviction, quite apart from whether Mr. Trump committed the crime of incitement.Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Deny He Incited Capitol Mob, Saying It’s Democrats Who Spur Violence

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentFriday’s HighlightsDay 4: Key TakeawaysWhat Is Incitement?Trump’s LawyersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump’s Lawyers Deny He Incited Capitol Mob, Saying It’s Democrats Who Spur ViolenceThe former president’s legal team rested its case without using even a quarter of the 16 hours allotted to it.Michael T. van der Veen, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, on Friday before presenting the defense’s case.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesPeter Baker and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 8:04 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump’s legal team mounted a combative defense on Friday focused more on assailing Democrats for “hypocrisy” and “hatred” than justifying Mr. Trump’s own monthslong effort to overturn a democratic election that culminated in last month’s deadly assault on the Capitol.After days of powerful video footage showing a mob of Trump supporters beating police officers, chasing lawmakers and threatening to kill the vice president and House speaker, Mr. Trump’s lawyers denied that he had incited what they called a “small group” that turned violent. Instead, they tried to turn the tables by calling out Democrats for their own language, which they deemed just as incendiary as Mr. Trump’s.In so doing, the former president’s lawyers went after not just the House Democrats serving as managers, or prosecutors, in the Senate impeachment trial, but half of the jurors sitting in front of them in the chamber. A rat-a-tat-tat montage of video clips played by the Trump team showed nearly every Democratic senator as well as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris using the word “fight” or the phrase “fight like hell” just as Mr. Trump did at a rally of supporters on Jan. 6 just before the siege of the Capitol.“Suddenly, the word ‘fight’ is off limits?” said Michael T. van der Veen, one of the lawyers hurriedly hired in recent days to defend Mr. Trump. “Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation. It’s a term that’s used over and over and over again by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And, of course, the Democrat House managers know that the word ‘fight’ has been used figuratively in political speech forever.”To emphasize the point, the Trump team played some of the same clips four or five times in less than three hours as some of the Democratic senators shook their heads and at least one of their Republican colleagues laughed appreciatively. The lawyers argued that the trial was “shameful” and “a deliberate attempt by the Democrat Party to smear, censor and cancel” an opponent and then rested their case without using even a quarter of the 16 hours allotted to the former president’s defense.Representative Jamie Raskin, center, the lead House impeachment manager, on Friday at the Capitol with aides and other managers during a break in the trial.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn the process, they tried to effectively narrow the prosecution’s “incitement of insurrection” case as if it centered only on their client’s use of that one phrase in that one speech instead of the relentless campaign that Mr. Trump waged since last summer to discredit an election he would eventually lose and galvanize his supporters to help him cling to power.“They really didn’t address the facts of the case at all,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead impeachment manager. “There were a couple propaganda reels about Democratic politicians that would be excluded in any court in the land. They talk about the rules of evidence — all of that was totally irrelevant to the case before us.”After the Trump team’s abbreviated defense, the senators posed their own questions, generally using their queries to score political points. The questions, a total of 28 submitted in writing and read by a clerk, suggested that most Republicans remained likely to vote to acquit Mr. Trump when the Senate reconvenes for final arguments at 10 a.m. Saturday, blocking the two-thirds supermajority required by the Constitution for conviction.Some of the few Republicans thought to be open to conviction, including Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, grilled the lawyers about what Mr. Trump knew and when he knew it during the attack. The managers have argued that it was not just the president’s words and actions in advance of the attack that betrayed his oath, but his failure to act more assertively to stop his supporters after it started.Responding to the senators, the defense lawyers pointed to mildly worded messages and a video that Mr. Trump posted on Twitter after the building was stormed calling on his supporters not to use violence while still endorsing their cause and telling them that he loved them. The managers repeated that Mr. Trump never made a strong, explicit call on the rioters to halt the attack, nor did he send help.Mr. Romney and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, zeroed in on Mr. Trump’s failure to exhibit concern for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was targeted for death by the former president’s supporters because he refused to try to block finalization of the election. Even after Mr. Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber that day, Mr. Trump attacked him on Twitter, saying that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Senator Mitt Romney returning to the Senate chamber after a break in the trial on Friday.Credit…Brandon Bell for The New York TimesMr. van der Veen told the senators that “at no point was the president informed that the vice president was in any danger.” But in fact, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told reporters this week that he spoke by telephone with Mr. Trump during the attack and told him that Mr. Pence had been rushed out of the chamber. Officials have said that Mr. Trump never called Mr. Pence to check on his safety and did not speak with him for days.The defense team struggled to avoid directly addressing what managers called Mr. Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen, which led his supporters to invade the Capitol to try to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes ratifying the result. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, challenged Mr. Trump’s lawyers to say whether they believe he actually won the election.“My judgment?” Mr. van der Veen replied derisively and then demanded: “Who asked that?”“I did,” Mr. Sanders called out from his seat.“My judgment’s irrelevant in this proceeding,” Mr. van der Veen said, prompting an eruption from Democratic senators. He repeated that “it’s irrelevant” to the question of whether Mr. Trump incited the riot.Senate Democrats dismissed the defense’s efforts to equate Mr. Trump’s actions with Democratic speeches. “They’re trying to draw a dangerous and distorted equivalence,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, told reporters during a break in the trial. “I think it is plainly a distraction from Donald Trump inviting the mob to Washington.”But for Republicans looking for reasons to acquit Mr. Trump, the defense was more than enough. “The president’s lawyers blew the House managers’ case out of the water,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin.Even Ms. Murkowski, who called on Mr. Trump to resign after the Capitol siege, said the defense team was “more on their game” than during the trial’s opening day this week, although by day’s end, she indicated to a reporter she was agonizing over the decision.“It’s been five weeks — less than five weeks — since an event that shook the very core the very foundation of our democracy,” she said. “And we’ve had a lot to process since then.”During the question period, senators closely watched for clues about where their colleagues stood. Although most lawmakers still guessed that only a handful of Republicans would vote to convict, an additional group of Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have said almost nothing to colleagues about the unfolding trial in private or during daily luncheons before it convenes, prompting speculation that they could be preparing to break from the party.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, on the Senate subway before the trial on Friday.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe managers need 17 Republicans to join all 50 Democrats to reach the two-thirds required for conviction. While Mr. Trump can no longer be removed from office because his term has ended, he could be barred from ever seeking public office again.The former president had trouble recruiting a legal team to defend him. The lawyers who represented him last year during his first impeachment trial did not come back for this one, and the set of lawyers he initially hired for this proceeding backed out in disagreement over strategy. Bruce L. Castor Jr., the leader of this third set, was widely criticized for his preliminary presentation on Tuesday, including reportedly by Mr. Trump.Mr. Castor and David I. Schoen were largely supplanted on Friday by Mr. van der Veen, who has no long history with the president and in fact was reported to have once called Mr. Trump a “crook” with an expletive, a statement he has denied. Just last year, Mr. van der Veen represented a client suing Mr. Trump over moves that might limit mail-in voting and accused the president of making claims with “no evidence.”But Mr. van der Veen on Friday offered the sort of aggressive performance that Mr. Trump prefers from his representatives as he accused the other side of “doctoring the evidence” with “manipulated video,” all to promote “a preposterous and monstrous lie” that the former president encouraged violence.A personal injury lawyer whose Philadelphia law firm solicits slip-and-fall clients on the radio and whose website boasts of winning judgments stemming from auto accidents and one case “involving a dog bite,” Mr. van der Veen proceeded to lecture Mr. Raskin, who taught constitutional law at American University for more than 25 years, about the Constitution. The managers’ arguments, Mr. van der Veen said, were “less than I would expect from a first-year law student.”He and his colleagues argued that Mr. Trump was exercising his free-speech rights in his fiery address to a rally before supporters broke into the Capitol. The lawyers leaned heavily on Mr. Trump’s single use of the word “peacefully” as he urged backers to march to the Capitol while minimizing the 20 times he used the word “fight.”“No thinking person could seriously believe that the president’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse was in any way an incitement to violence or insurrection,” Mr. van der Veen said. “The suggestion is patently absurd on its face. Nothing in the text could ever be construed as encouraging, condoning or inciting unlawful activity of any kind.”Bruce L. Castor Jr. and Mr. van der Veen arriving at the Capitol on Friday.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesSensitive to the charge that Mr. Trump endangered police officers, who were beaten and in one case killed during the assault, the lawyers played video clips in which he called himself a “law and order president” along with images of antiracism protests that turned violent last summer.They likewise showed video clips of Democrats objecting to Electoral College votes in past years when Republicans won, including Mr. Raskin in 2017 when Mr. Trump’s victory was sealed, comparing them with Mr. Trump’s criticism of the 2020 election. At the same time, those videos also showed Mr. Biden, then vice president, gaveling those protests out of order.Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands and one of the managers, objected that many of the faces shown in the videos of Democratic politicians and street protesters were Black. “It was not lost on me so many of them were people of color and women, Black women,” she said. “Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children.”The defense lawyers contended that Democrats were pursuing Mr. Trump out of personal and partisan animosity, using the word “hatred” 15 times during their formal presentation, and they cast the trial as an effort to suppress a political opponent and his supporters.“It is about canceling 75 million Trump voters and criminalizing political viewpoints,” Mr. Castor said. “That’s what this trial is really about. It is the only existential issue before us. It asks for constitutional cancel culture to take over in the United States Senate. Are we going to allow canceling and banning and silencing to be sanctioned in this body?”Emily Cochrane More

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      The Next Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Next TrumpThere is no one quite like him in the Republican Party. So where should we look for the president’s inheritors?Opinion ColumnistJan. 19, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesMost Americans want Donald Trump out of sight and out of mind after he leaves office on Wednesday. Most Americans except Republicans, that is.In every recent poll on Trump, Republicans stand apart. Ask whether Trump should remain a “major national figure for years to come,” as the Pew Research Center did in a survey taken just after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and 68 percent of Americans say no, whereas 57 percent of Republicans say yes.Or ask whether Trump should be disqualified from future office. A majority of adults — 56 percent, according to a recent poll conducted for ABC News and The Washington Post — also say yes, whereas 85 percent of Republicans say no.Of course, the reason the Republican rank and file doesn’t think Trump should slink away is because they think he won the election. Among his voters, 75 percent say he received enough votes in enough states to claim victory. For them, there’s no reason Trump should leave the field as a pariah or relinquish his claim on the party itself. It’s no surprise, then, that most Republican officeholders are sticking with the president and that the most loyal among them hope to harness the pro-Trump energy of the base for their own personal ambitions.This dynamic is part of what spurred Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to amplify the lie that the election was tainted. It’s what kept Mike Pence from turning on the president that made him the target of a deadly mob, and it’s what led Mike Pompeo to turn on his former administration colleague Nikki Haley, for criticizing Trump’s rhetoric since the election.Each of them (to say nothing of the party’s other presidential contenders) all hope to be, in one way or another, the next Trump. The problem for each of them is that this may be impossible.In 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump wasn’t just an unconventional politician with a direct appeal to the prejudiced attitudes of the Republican base, and he wasn’t just a fixture of conservative media and entertainment. He was a bona fide celebrity and household name, with 30 years on the public stage as the embodiment of wealth and luxury. And for more than 10 of those years, he was star of “The Apprentice,” a popular reality television series in which he played the most successful businessman in America, whose approval could turn an ordinary nobody into an extraordinary somebody. His was a persona that rested on the valorization of entrepreneurship and the worship of success.This wasn’t a dour or self-serious performance. Trump wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. He was a winking, cheerful vulgarian who knew the show was an act and played along with the viewers. From his cameos on the big screen in films like “Home Alone 2” to his parodic appearances in professional wrestling, he was affable, even charming.It’s hard to overstate how important this was for Trump’s first campaign. If modern American politics is entertainment as much as civics, then Trump was its star performer. And his audience, his supporters, could join in the performance. This is crucial. Trump could say whatever they wanted to hear, and they could take it in as part of the act, something — as one sympathetic observer wrote — to be taken seriously, not literally. Words that might have doomed any other Republican candidate, and which have in the past, meant nothing to the strength of Trump’s campaign.When he finally ran against Hillary Clinton, celebrity helped him appeal to those voters who hated politicians — who sat at the margins of politics, if they participated at all — but could get behind an irreverent figure like Trump. Did he lie? Sure. But the shamelessness of his lies, and his indifference to decorum, was its own kind of truth. Celebrity was his shield and his sword, and his life as a reality television star primed his supporters to see his presidency as a show that would never end.Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has struggled to win a majority of voters nationwide in a presidential election. They’ve done it exactly once, in 2004, with the re-election of George W. Bush. Trump’s path to victory — a minority-vote Electoral College win with high turnout in rural and exurban areas — may be the only one the party has left. As one group of House Republicans said ahead (and in support) of the vote to confirm the results of the 2020 election,If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes — based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election — we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.The big question is whether it took a Trump to make 2016 happen in the first place. Given the Republican Party’s struggle to build a national majority, was he the only candidate that could pull off a win? And if so, was his celebrity the X factor that made it possible? The fact that Republicans lost when Trump was not on the ballot is evidence in favor of the case.If celebrity is what it takes, then there’s no Republican politician who can carry Trump’s mantle. No one with his or her hat obviously in the ring — neither Cruz nor Hawley, neither Tom Cotton nor Haley — has the juice. There are the Trump children, of course. But the Trump name doesn’t actually stand for success, and there’s no evidence yet that any of them can make the leap to winning votes for themselves.Perhaps the next Trump, if there is one, will be another celebrity. Someone with a powerful and compelling persona, who traffics in fear and anger and hate. Someone who “triggers the libs” and puts on a show. Someone who already has an audience, who speaks for the Republican base as much as he speaks to them. Republican voters have already put a Fox News viewer into the White House. From there it’s just a short step to electing an actual Fox News personality.What are your hopes for the next four years?It could be a better economy, a personal milestone or an ambitious policy. Tell us what you’re hoping will happen during the Biden administration. We may include your responses in a special feature publishing on Inauguration Day.

      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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More