Presidential Election of 2016

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      How Donald Trump Captured the Republican Party

      by

      INSURGENCYHow Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever WantedBy Jeremy W. PetersWhen Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on the morning of June 16, 2015, there was little indication the event would alter American political history. Pundits dismissed Trump’s chances. He was polling at 4 percent; the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, suggested Trump was really seeking a job at NBC, not the White House.But Trump did make an impression on Steve Bannon, a voluble conservative activist plotting his own takeover of the Republican Party. Watching the reality-television star deliver remarks from the Trump Tower food court to a crowd that allegedly included actors who had been paid $50 to hold signs and cheer, Bannon couldn’t contain himself. “That’s Hitler!” Bannon said. And, as Jeremy W. Peters writes in this spirited new history, “he meant it as a compliment.”“Insurgency” chronicles the astonishingly swift transformation of the Republican Party, from the genteel preserve of pro-business elites to a snarling personality cult that views the Jan. 6 insurrection as an exercise in legitimate political discourse. Peters, a political reporter for The New York Times, depicts mainstream Republicans’ surrender to Trumpism as a form of political self-flagellation. From 1969 to 2008, Republicans occupied the White House for all but 12 years. And yet “one of the more peculiar features of American conservatism is that despite decades of Republican rule, many true believers grew embittered and resentful of their party. They thought it was run by weak-willed leaders who compromised and sold out once they got in power.”The outlines of the Republicans’ hard-right turn are by now largely familiar. What distinguishes “Insurgency” is its blend of political acuity and behind-the-scenes intrigue. Much of the book’s opening material revolves around the first national figure to channel the base’s anger: the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who might have forestalled Trump’s rise had she chosen to run for president in 2012. Trump was sufficiently concerned about Palin’s potential to claim the title of populist standard-bearer that he invited her to Trump Tower in 2011 “to size her up in person.” He concluded that while she had “tremendous political appeal, she didn’t know what to do about it.”Trump, of course, did. Peters is a fluid and engaging writer, and as the narrative of “Insurgency” unfolds and Trump inevitably, irresistibly, assumes center stage, you almost can’t help admiring — as Bannon did — the candidate’s raw, demagogic genius: “Devoid of empathy, incapable of humility and unfamiliar with what it means to suffer consequences, he behaved and spoke in ways most would never dare.” In one luridly fascinating section, Peters details how Trump defused the furor over the “Access Hollywood” tape by ambushing Hillary Clinton with her husband’s accusers at the second presidential debate in St. Louis. The stunt came about thanks to a “norm-shattering” partnership between the Trump campaign and Aaron Klein, a 36-year-old reporter for Bannon’s website, Breitbart News, who tracked down the women and cajoled them into attending.“In the history of modern presidential politics, no candidate had pulled off such a ruthless act of vengeance in public,” Peters writes. “It changed the game, proving to Trump and his allies that there was nothing off-limits anymore.” So pivotal was Klein’s role in Trump’s upset victory that Jared Kushner later told him, “My father-in-law wouldn’t be president without you.”Anecdotes like these make “Insurgency” worth reading, though it’s harder to say who would want to. The book contains too many examples of Trump’s manifest flaws to appeal to MAGA true believers, but not enough revelations of outright criminality to satisfy veterans of the #resistance. With the specter of a 2024 Trump candidacy looming, the rest of us could use a break while we can still get one. “He just dominates every day,” Bannon told Trump’s advisers in 2020, warning of voters’ exhaustion with the president. “It’s like a nightmare. You’ll do anything to get rid of it.” Easier said than done. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      There’s a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers

      by

      The truckers’ protest in Ottawa is the latest barrage from the world’s disaffected in the revolt that found expression in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2017 Unite the Right march on Charlottesville, the rise of QAnon, and the Jan. 6 insurrection in the halls of Congress.One thing that stands out in the Canadian truckers’ protests against vaccination requirements specifically and the Trudeau government generally is the strong support they are getting from conservative political leaders and media figures in this country.“We want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way,” Trump told rally-goers in Conroe, Texas on Jan. 29.“I see they have Trump signs all over the place and I’m proud that they do,” he added.On Feb. 12, Trump brought it home to America during a Fox News appearance: “That’s what happens, you can push people so far and our country is a tinderbox too, don’t kid yourself.”The former president is not alone.“I hope the truckers do come to America,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, told The Daily Signal, a conservative website. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.”Nor was all this confined to North America. “Ottawa truckers’ convoy galvanizes far right worldwide,” an article in Politico on Feb. 6 declared: “Leading Republicans, right-wing influencers and white supremacist groups have jumped at the chance to promote the standoff in Ottawa to a global audience.”In “Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party,” by Shanker Satyanath of N.Y.U., Nico Voigtländer of U.C.L.A. and Hans-Joachim Voth of the University of Zurich offer a counterintuitive perspective on the spread of right-wing organizing in Canada, Hungary, Brazil, India, Poland, Austria and in the United States.The three authors argue that in the 1930s in EuropeDense networks of civic associations such as bowling clubs, choirs, and animal breeders went hand-in-hand with a more rapid rise of the Nazi Party. Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least one-third faster entry. All types of associations — veteran associations and nonmilitary clubs, “bridging” and “bonding” associations — positively predict National Socialist Party entry. Party membership, in turn, predicts electoral success. These results suggest that social capital aided the rise of the Nazi movement that ultimately destroyed Germany’s first democracy.Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Cornelius Lipp, all of the London School of Economics, pick up this argument in a November 2021 paper on the paradoxical role of social capital in fostering far right movements. Noting that the “positive view of social capital has, more recently, been challenged,” the three economic geographers write:The rise in votes for Trump was the result of long-term economic and population decline in areas with strong social capital. This hypothesis is confirmed by the econometric analysis conducted for US counties. Long-term declines in employment and population — rather than in earnings, salaries, or wages — in places with relatively strong social capital propelled Donald Trump to the presidency and almost secured his re-election.It is, the three authors continue,precisely the long-term economic and demographic decline of the places that still rely on a relatively strong social capital that is behind the rise of populism in the U.S. Strong, but declining communities in parts of the American Rustbelt, the Great Plains, and elsewhere, reacted at the ballot box to being ignored, neglected and being left behind.Translated to the present, in economic and culturally besieged communities, the remnants of social capital have been crucial to the mobilization of men and women — mostly men — who chanted “You will not replace us” and “blood and soil” in Charlottesville, who shot bear spray at police officers on Jan. 6 and who brought Ottawa to its knees for more than two weeks.In a separate paper, “The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places,” Rodríguez-Pose argued:Populism is not the result of persistent poverty. Places that have been chronically poor are not the ones rebelling.” Instead, he continued, “the rise of populism is a tale of how the long-term decline of formerly prosperous places, disadvantaged by processes that have rendered them exposed and almost expendable, has triggered frustration and anger. In turn, voters in these so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ have sought their revenge at the ballot box.In an email, Rodríguez-Pose wrote:Social capital in the U.S. has been declining for a long time. Associationism and the feeling of community are no longer what they used to be and this has been documented many times. What my co-authors and I are saying is that in those places (counties) where social capital has declined less, long-term demographic and employment decline triggered a switch to Donald Trump. These communities have said “enough is enough” of a system that they feel bypasses them and voted for an anti-system candidate, who is willing to shake the foundations of the system.In a separate email, Lee noted that while most analysts view higher social capital as a healthy development in communities, it can also foster negative ethnic and racial solidarity: “Social capital can be a great thing when it is open and inclusive. But when everyone knows each other, this can result in in-group dynamics — particularly when people are led to be concerned about other groups.”The accompanying graphic, produced by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, shows the geographic distribution of social capital by county in the United States as of 2018. Social capital is highest in yellow areas and lowest in dark blue regions. The variables used to measure social capital included levels of family unity, collective efficacy, institutional health and community health.Joint Economic CommitteeSocial capital correlated positively with the volunteer rate, the share of adults who made charitable contributions, the share married and the share who trust their neighbors. It correlated negatively with heavy television watching by children, the share of children living with a single parent and the share of births that were to unwed mothers.Regina Anne Bateson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, wrote me in a Feb. 14 email: “The situation in Canada is often described as a truckers’ protest. However, it’s not just truckers who are participating, and this is not just a protest.”The situation in Ottawa quickly devolved, Bateson argues,into an illegal occupation, with heavy elements of extortion. Many people here describe it as a hostage situation. The convoy has deployed tactics intended to harm local residents, such as deafening horn-blowing, in an attempt to extract concessions from the government. More than 400 hate incidents have been reported to police, and there have been coordinated attacks on the 9-1-1 system, flooding it with calls so residents cannot get through.The occupation of Ottawa has become a “militia-like activity,” Bateson writes. “The convoy has resupply bases on the outskirts of town, as well as mobile squads of pickup trucks that rove around the city, delivering supplies and harassing local residents.” The protest organizers have “even been experimenting with governance, including providing services like snow and trash removal. Remarkably, they recently inaugurated a cohort of ‘peace officers,’ who are authorized to detain people if needed. Justin Ling, a journalist, reports that some of the convoy’s peace officers have subsequently tried to arrest Ottawa police.”Perhaps most important, Bateson described thesignificant international involvement, including political support, media coverage, and crowdfunding dollars from the United States. We are also seeing evidence of social media manipulation designed to increase polarization. The includes the use of fake and hijacked social media accounts, troll farms and bots, and inflammatory photos and messages being pumped out en masse.Asked what the potential consequences of the protests are, Bateson replied:There are many medium- and long-term consequences, including emboldened populist and extremist movements within Canada, increased international visibility for those groups (particularly in U.S. media outlets), new recruits to those movements, and the use of crowdfunding as a new form of grassroots foreign intervention. In areas directly affected by the convoy, such as Ottawa, there is also a profound sense of abandonment and loss of trust in the authorities, particularly the police. The convoy has undermined the rule of law in Canada, and they have upended the norms that govern social and political life here.In this context, I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality, and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University, Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics, and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article, “Progressive Cities: Urban-rural polarization of social values and economic development around the world.”Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”The urban-rural conflict between post-materialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”In an email, Luca elaborated:There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in Second Demographic Transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.In their October 2017 paper “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment, and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”The accompanying graphic demonstrates the pattern of Trump’s strength compared with Romney’s, the red bars showing characteristics of areas that voted more for Trump than Romney, the blue bars showing the characteristics of communities that cast more votes for Romney than for Trump.”More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” by Shannon M. Monnat and David L. BrownTrump’s populist message, Monnat and Brown write in their conclusion,may have been attractive to many long-term Democratic voters in these places who felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that has failed to articulate a strong pro-working class message, whose agendas often emphasize policies and programs to help the poor at what seems like the expense of the working-class, and who evidently believed it did not have to work very hard to earn votes from behind the “big blue wall.”In “Social Capital, Religion, Wal-Mart, and Hate Groups in America” a 2012 paper, Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State, Anil Rupasingha, a research economist at the Department of Agriculture, and Scott Loveridge of Michigan State University found that “Higher incomes, more income inequality, higher crime rates, and the presence of more Wal-Mart Stores and foreign-born populations are each associated with a more likely presence of one or more hate groups in the county.”The Wal-Mart effect, they wrote, likely results from the “economic turmoil” as communities “experience steep decline in their traditional downtown shopping districts.”Two factors work to lower the likelihood of hate group formation, they write: “a higher stock of social capital is associated with fewer hate groups” and “a greater share of mainline Protestant adherents is associated with fewer hate groups.”The opposite is true, Goetz, Rupasingha and Loveridge found, “for evangelical Protestant adherents,” writing that “for every 10 percent additional evangelical in a county, the number of hate groups in that county increases by 17 percent.”Regardless of the sources of discontent and regardless of the characteristic of those leading the assault on the liberal democratic state, there is no question that the trucker’s insurgency in Canada is catching fire abroad — currently in France, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand and Australia.“Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests go global: Australia to Austria witness anti-COVID vaccine agitations,” read the Feb. 11 FirstPost headline on a story that described the following developments: “Police and anti-vaccine protesters clashed on the grounds of New Zealand’s parliament, with dozens arrested after demonstrators who laid siege to the legislature for three days were ordered to move on.”And: “Brussels authorities have banned an upcoming ‘freedom convoy’ protest from entering the Belgian capital.”And: “French police warned Thursday they would prevent so-called ‘Freedom Convoys’ from blockading Paris, as protesters against Covid rules began to drive towards the capital.”And: “Austria also announced a ban on any motor protests as several hundred vehicles were set to converge Friday in central Vienna, as well as near a major public park in the Austrian capital.”There will also be a test of the vitality of the trucker protest movement in the United States. “The People’s Convoy” has issued a call to “truckers and all freedom loving Americans” to join together at a rally March 4 and 5 at Coachella Valley in Indio, Calif, which is expected to then aim for Washington D.C.The organizers claim they will provide “fuel reimbursement upon arrival for all attending this event” and “the convoy will roll out of California following the rally. Convoy details will be forthcoming.”There are risks and opportunities on both sides. For Joe Biden, a protest that brings traffic and commerce to a standstill in the nation’s capital would test his skill as the country’s commander in chief, a test that could restore his faltering public image or send him on the road to defeat in 2024. For Trump and his allies on the right, such a protest could mobilize core voters going into the coming elections or it could reinforce the Jan. 6 image of unconstrained chaos, severely damaging Republican prospects.Non-college whites in the United States, like the protesting truckers in Canada, continue to face grim prospects, subordinated by meritocratic competition that rewards what they lack: advanced education and top scores on aptitude tests — accomplishments that feed the resource allocation, the status contests and the employment hierarchies that dominate contemporary life and leave those who cannot prevail out in the cold.As long as these voters remain on a downward trajectory, they will continue to be a disruptive force, not only in the political arena but in society at large.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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Peter Thiel, the Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker

      by

      The wine flowed. Donald Trump Jr. mingled with the guests. And Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and host of the event, had a message for the well-heeled crowd: It was time to clean house.The fund-raiser at Mr. Thiel’s Miami Beach compound last month was for a conservative candidate challenging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming for a spot on the ballot in November’s midterm elections. Ms. Cheney, one of several Republicans who had voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, was the face of “the traitorous 10,” Mr. Thiel said, according to two people with knowledge of the event, who were not authorized to speak publicly. All of them had to be replaced, he declared, by conservatives loyal to the former president.Mr. Thiel, who became known in 2016 as one of the biggest donors to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, has re-emerged as a key financier of the Make America Great Again movement. After sitting out the 2020 presidential race, the venture capitalist this year is backing 16 Senate and House candidates, many of whom have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the election.To get these candidates into office, Mr. Thiel has given more than $20.4 million. That essentially puts him and Kenneth Griffin, the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, in a tie as the largest individual donors to Republican politics this election cycle, according to the nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets.What sets Mr. Thiel’s spending apart, though, is its focus on hard-right candidates who traffic in the conspiracy theories espoused by Mr. Trump and who cast themselves as rebels determined to overthrow the Republican establishment and even the broader American political order. These campaigns have raised millions in small-dollar donations, but Mr. Thiel’s wealth could accelerate the shift of views once considered fringe to the mainstream — while making himself a new power broker on the right.“When you have a funder who is actively elevating candidates who are denying the legitimacy of elections, that is a direct assault on the foundation of democracy,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning group New America, who studies campaign finance and hyperpartisanship.The candidates Mr. Thiel has funded offer a window into his ideology. While the investor has been something of a cipher, he is currently driven by a worldview that the establishment and globalization have failed, that current immigration policy pillages the middle class and that the country must dismantle federal institutions.Mr. Thiel has started articulating his thinking publicly, recently headlining at least six conservative and libertarian gatherings where he criticized the Chinese Communist Party and big tech companies and questioned climate science. He has taken issue with what he calls the “extreme dogmatism” within establishment institutions, which he said had sent the country backward.At an October dinner at Stanford University for the Federalist Society, he spoke about the “deranged society” that “a completely deranged government” had created, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times. The United States was on the verge of a momentous correction, he said.“My somewhat apocalyptic, somewhat hopeful thought is that we are finally at a point where things are breaking,” Mr. Thiel said.Mr. Thiel, 54, has not publicly said what he believes about the 2020 election. But in Mr. Trump, he sees a vessel to push through his ideological goals, three people close to the investor said. The two men met recently in New York and at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Thiel also funded an app company run by John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, two people with knowledge of the deal said.Unlike traditional Republican donors who have focused on their party’s winning control of Congress and the White House, Mr. Thiel has set his sights on reshaping the Republican agenda with his brand of anti-establishment contrarianism, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.“I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate,” said Mr. Bannon, who has known Mr. Thiel since 2016. “I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country.”How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Thiel’s giving is expected to make up just a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are likely to flow through campaigns this cycle. But the amounts he is pouring into individual races and the early nature of his primary donations have put him on the radar of Republican hopefuls.In the past, many courted the billionaire Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate. This year, they have clamored for invitations to Mr. Thiel’s Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes, or debated how to at least get on the phone with him, political strategists said.Mr. Thiel personally vets the candidates he gives to, said three Republican strategists, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. In addition to Harriet Hageman, the challenger to Ms. Cheney, he is backing Joe Kent and Loren Culp, both of whom are running against House Republicans in Washington State who voted to impeach Mr. Trump. He also gave to a political action committee associated with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who is not up for re-election this year. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Archives Found Possible Classified Material in Boxes Returned by Trump

      by

      The National Archives consulted with the Justice Department about the discovery after the former president sent back documents that he had improperly taken from the White House when he left office.The National Archives and Records Administration discovered what it believed was classified information in documents Donald J. Trump had taken with him from the White House as he left office, according to a person briefed on the matter.The discovery, which occurred after Mr. Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the government last month, prompted the National Archives to reach out to the Justice Department for guidance, the person said. The department told the National Archives to have its inspector general examine the matter, the person said.It is unclear what the inspector general has done since then, in particular, whether the inspector general has referred the matter to the Justice Department.An inspector general is required to alert the Justice Department to the discovery of any classified materials that were found outside authorized government channels.Making a referral to the Justice Department would put senior officials in the position of having to decide whether to open an investigation, a scenario that would thrust the department into a highly contentious political matter.The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the National Archives had asked the Justice Department to examine Mr. Trump’s handling of White House records.Officials with the National Archives did not respond to messages seeking comment.In January, after a lengthy back and forth between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives, Mr. Trump handed over more than a dozen boxes of materials, including documents, mementos, gifts and letters. Among the documents were the original versions of a letter that former President Barack Obama had left for Mr. Trump when he was first sworn in, and letters written to Mr. Trump by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.Also included in the boxes was a map Mr. Trump famously drew on with a black Sharpie to demonstrate the track of Hurricane Dorian heading toward Alabama in 2019 to back up a declaration he had made on Twitter that contradicted weather forecasts.Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in September 2019. The map of a storm appears to have been altered with a marker to show Hurricane Dorian headed for Alabama.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe boxes had originally been sent to Mar-a-Lago from the White House residence, where a range of items — including clothes — were hastily packed up in Mr. Trump’s final days in office. Legally, Mr. Trump was required to leave the documents, letters and gifts in the custody of the federal government so the National Archives could store them.After the F.B.I., during the 2016 presidential campaign, investigated Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material while she was secretary of state, Mr. Trump assailed her, helping make the issue pivotal in the outcome of that race. In that case, the intelligence community’s inspector general had made a national security referral to the F.B.I., prompting the investigation of Mrs. Clinton.But during Mr. Trump’s administration, top White House officials were deeply concerned about how little regard Mr. Trump showed for sensitive national security materials. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, tried to stop classified documents from being taken out of the Oval Office and brought up to the residence because he was concerned about what Mr. Trump may do with them and how that may jeopardize national security.Similar to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka used personal email accounts for work purposes. And even after being warned by aides, Mr. Trump repeatedly ripped up government documents that had to be taped back together to prevent him from being accused of destroying federal property.Now Mr. Trump faces questions about his handling of classified information — a question that is complicated because as president he had the authority to declassify any government information. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump had declassified materials the National Archives discovered in the boxes before he left office. Under federal law, he no longer maintains the ability to declassify documents after leaving office.He invoked the power to declassify information several times as his administration publicly released materials that helped him politically, particularly on issues like the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.Toward the end of the administration, Mr. Trump ripped pictures that intrigued him out of the President’s Daily Brief — a compendium of often classified information about potential national security threats — but it is unclear whether he took them to the residence with him. In one prominent example of how he dealt with classified material, Mr. Trump in 2019 took a highly classified spy satellite image of an Iranian missile launch site, declassified it and then released the photo on Twitter.If Mr. Trump was found to have taken materials with him that were still classified at the time he left the White House, prosecuting him would be extremely difficult and it would pit the Justice Department against Mr. Trump at a time when Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is trying to depoliticize the department.The department and the F.B.I. also still have significant scars from its investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information, as the bureau was accused of unfairly tarnishing her and interfering in the 2016 election.Katie Benner More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails

      by

      What is the role of status discontent in the emergence of right-wing populism? If it does play a key role, does it matter more where someone stands at any given moment or whether someone is moving up the ladder or down?In the struggle for status, Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, Denmark and the lead author of “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” argues thatEducation has emerged as a clear cleavage in addition to more traditional indicators of social class. The highly educated fare better in a more globalized world that puts a premium on human capital. Since the 1980s the highly educated left in the U.S. and elsewhere have been forging alliances with minority groups (e.g., racial, ethnic and sexual minorities), who also have been increasing their status in society. This, in turn, pushes those with lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards the right.It is hardly a secret that the white working class has struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive world?Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline troops.Over the past six decades, according to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: “In the 1960s and 1970s the left was associated with an anti-systemic stance but this position is now more aligned with the right-wing.”Those trapped in a downward spiral undergo a devastating experience.Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany wrote in an email:Those falling behind face a serious threat to their self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their own lack of hard work or merit.Instead of focusing on the economic system and its elites, Hartwich continued,Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal elites in culture, politics and the media as the “enemies of the people.” Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along cultural, rather than economic lines.In a January 2021 paper — “Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness” — Hartwich, Julia C. Becker, also of Osnabrueck, and S. Alexander Haslam of Queensland University found that “exposure to neoliberal ideology,” which they describe as the belief that “economies and societies should be organized along the principles of the free market,” results in “loneliness and, through this, decreases well-being. We found that exposure to neoliberal ideology increased loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others.”Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the political consequences of white status decline in her 2018 paper, “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.”“Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups,” Mutz wrote. “Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”Mutz found that:Change in financial well-being had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority-minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.In fact, status decline and economic decline, which have fueled the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party, are closely linked both psychologically and politically.Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard and the author of “Economic and Political Consequences of Trade-Induced Manufacturing Decline,” emailed me that before the 2016 election, the assumption was that “the political consequences of regionally concentrated manufacturing job loss” would be that “left-leaning politicians” would be “the primary beneficiaries.” Trump’s victory “dramatically altered our thinking on the matter.”Instead, Hanson continued, “large scale job loss led to greater tribalism (as represented by the populist nationalism of Trump and his acolytes) rather than greater support for redistribution (as represented by your run-of-the-mill Democrat).” There was, in fact, “precedence for this outcome,” he wrote, citing a 2013 paper, “Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?” by Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke, economists at Queen’s University Belfast, Berkeley and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.The three economists wrote:Consistent with German experience, we find a link between right-wing political extremism and economic conditions, as captured by the change in G.D.P. Importantly, however, what mattered for right-wing anti-system party support was not just deterioration in economic conditions lasting a year or two, but economic conditions over the longer run.Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016 and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the 2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue to plague those regions decades later.Hanson and his co-authors, David Autor and David Dorn, economists at M.I.T. and the University of Zurich, found in their October 2021 paper “On the Persistence of the China Shock” thatLocal labor markets more exposed to import competition from China suffered larger declines in manufacturing jobs, employment-population ratios, and personal income per capita. These effects persist for nearly two decades beyond the intensification of the trade shock after 2001, and almost a decade beyond the shock reaching peak intensity.They go on:Even using higher-end estimates of the consumer benefits of rising trade with China, a substantial fraction of commuting zones appears to have suffered absolute declines in average real incomes.In their oft-cited 2020 paper, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Kaveh Majlesi, an economist at Monash University, found that in majority white regions, adverse economic developments resulting from trade imports produced a sharp shift to the right.Autor and his co-authors describe “an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News Channel, stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”Counties with a majority white population “became more likely to elect a G.O.P. conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat,” Autor and his colleagues write.They continue:In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate. These results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and economic policy.The trade-induced shift to the right has deeper roots dating back to at least the early 1990s.In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections.The trade agreement with Mexico and Canada “led to lasting, negative effects on Democratic identification among regions and demographic groups that were once loyal to the party,” Choi and her co-authors write.Before enactment, the Republican share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the national average, but “by 1998, these once-solidly Democratic counties voted as or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country,” according to Choi and her colleagues.Before NAFTA, the authors write, Democratic Party support for protectionist policies had been the glue binding millions of white working-class voters to the party, overcoming the appeal of the Republican Party on racial and cultural issues. Democratic support for the free trade agreement effectively broke that bond: “For many white Democrats in the 1980s, economic issues such as trade policy were key to their party loyalty because on social issues such as guns, affirmative action and abortion they sided with the G.O.P.”The consequences of trade shocks have been devastating both to whole regions and to the individuals living in them.Katheryn Russ — co-author along with Katherine Eriksson and Minfei Xu, economists at the University of California-Davis, Jay C. Shambaugh, an economist at George Washington University of the 2020 paper “Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing” — wrote in an email that trade induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high-school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”Even worse, these counties “do not bounce back out with the same frequency that counties with the highest fraction of high-school and college-educated workers do. So we aren’t just talking about a phenomenon that may influence the self-perceived status of individual workers, but of entire communities.”Russ cited a separate 2017 study, “Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods” by Leo Feler and Mine Z. Senses, economists at U.C.LA. and Johns Hopkins, which finds that “increased competition from Chinese imports negatively affects local finances and the provision of public services across US localities.”Specifically, “a $1,000 increase in Chinese imports per worker results in a relative decline in per capita expenditures on public welfare, 7.7 percent, on public transport, 2.4 percent, on public housing, 6.8 percent, and on public education, 0.9 percent.”These shortfalls emerge just as demand increases, Feler and Senses write: “The demand for local public goods such as education, public safety, and public welfare is increasing more in trade-affected localities when resources for these services are declining or remaining constant.”For example,Public safety expenditures remain constant at a time when local poverty and unemployment rates are rising, resulting in higher property crime rates by 3.5 percent. Similarly, a relative decline in education spending coincides with an increase in the demand for education as students respond to a deterioration in employment prospects for low-skilled workers by remaining in school longer.As if that were not enough,In localities that are more exposed to trade shocks, we also document an increase in the share of poor and low-income households, which tend to rely more on government services such as public housing and public transportation, both of which experience spending cuts.Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of more authoritarian, anti-immigrant and anti-democratic policies.Rui Costa Lopes, a research fellow at the University of Lisbon, emailed in response to my inquiry about the roots of right-wing populism: “As we’re talking more about those who suffer from relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness, then we’re talking more about the phenomenon of ‘politics of resentment’ and there is a link between those types of resentment and adhesion to right populist movements.”Lopes continued: “Recent research shows that the link between relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness and political populist ideas (such as Euroscepticism) occurs through cultural (anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions.”“The promise of economic well-being achieved through meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies,” write three authors — Elena Cristina Mitrea of the University of Sibiu in Romania, Monika Mühlböck and Julia Warmuth, of the University of Vienna — in “Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults.” In reality, “the experience of upward mobility has become less common, while the fear of downward mobility is no longer confined to the lower bound of the social strata, but pervades the whole society.”Status anxiety has become a driving force, Mitrea and her colleagues note: “It is not so much current economic standing, but rather anxiety concerning future socioeconomic decline and déclassement, that influences electoral behavior.”“Socially disadvantaged and economically insecure citizens are more susceptible to the appeals of the radical right,” Mitrea, Mühlböck and Warmuth observe, citing data showing “that far-right parties were able to increase their vote share by 30 percent in the aftermath of financial crises.Economic insecurity translates into support for the far-right through feelings of relative deprivation, which arise from negative comparisons drawn between actual economic well-being and one’s expectations or a social reference group. Coping with such feelings increases the likelihood of rejecting political elites and nurturing anti-foreign sentiments.The concentration of despair in the United States among low-income whites without college degrees compared with their Black and Hispanic counterparts is striking.Carol Graham, a Brookings senior fellow, and Sergio Pinto, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, document this divide in “The Geography of Desperation in America: Labor Force Participation, Mobility Trends, Place, and Well-being,” a paper presented at a 2019 conference sponsored by the Boston Federal Reserve:Poor blacks are by far the most optimistic group compared to poor whites: they are 0.9 points higher on the 0-10 scale (0.43 standard deviations). Poor blacks are also 14 percentage points (0.28 standard deviations) less likely to report stress the previous day, half as likely as poor whites to report stress in the previous day, while poor Hispanics fall somewhere in the middle.Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found “that blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”Graham and Pinto write:The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.That this is dangerous does not need repeating.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

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Michael Flynn Is Still at War

      by

      On Nov. 25, 2020, President Donald J. Trump announced via Twitter that he was granting a full pardon to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition, though he had later tried to withdraw the plea. A CNN report that evening reflected the conventional view in Washington that the pardon, arriving 18 days after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, was a near-final chapter of the Trump presidency, “a sign Trump understands his time in office is coming to a close.”At the time Trump announced the pardon, Flynn was encamped at the historic Tomotley estate in South Carolina, a more-than-700-acre former plantation dating back to the 17th century, where enslaved people harvested rice until much of the property was destroyed by federal troops at the close of the Civil War. Tomotley now belonged to L. Lin Wood, the Trump-supporting defamation lawyer who sued Georgia election officials over the state’s 2020 election results showing a Biden victory and predicted that the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state “will soon be going to jail.” (One of his suits was later dismissed; another is pending.) Though the next day would be Thanksgiving, Flynn had not brought his family with him. He had flown to South Carolina on the private jet of the former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne and set up camp at Tomotley, where he threw himself into the project of reversing the results of the election Trump had just lost.The president and his loyalists, together and independently, had been working toward this end in various ways since Election Day. Byrne told me that he and Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, met with Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani in Arlington, Va., shortly after the election to offer their assistance. Through Powell, Flynn soon became part of the group as well. Byrne said he had rented several rooms at the Trump Hotel for a few months — paying a full rack rate of about $800,000 — which he, Flynn, Powell and others would move in and out of. Byrne considered the hotel “the safest place in D.C. for a command bunker.” But Flynn suggested that they also establish a separate working area far from the Beltway. Powell contacted Wood, who agreed to host them at his secluded estate. As the group began to assemble in mid-November, Wood told me that he was surprised and “honored” to discover that Flynn, whom he had never met, was among his guests.Powell had brought along two law associates. The other guests were there to gather and organize election information alongside her and Flynn. Among these was Seth Keshel, a 36-year-old former Army military intelligence captain who told me he got Flynn’s attention three weeks earlier by sending what he believed were suspicious election data to Flynn’s LinkedIn page. Another, Jim Penrose, was a cybersecurity specialist who had worked for the National Security Agency. A third, Doug Logan, was an associate of Byrne and the chief executive of a Florida-based software-security firm called Cyber Ninjas. (Powell, Penrose and Logan did not respond to requests for comment.) Wood and Byrne said the group had brought computers, printers and whiteboards. “It looked like Election Central,” Wood recalled.Flynn and the other men slept and ate at an adjacent property, Cotton Hall, but otherwise toiled in the main residence at Tomotley. In a podcast interview, Keshel recalled that when he woke up in the mornings, usually around 5:45 a.m., Flynn typically had “been up for several hours,” juggling “a few different cellphones at any given time.” Keshel told me that while he spent his three weeks at Tomotley assembling data for Powell’s legal filings, Flynn came and went without notice and did not always volunteer what he was working on. “General Flynn is very adept at need-to-know,” he said.Two days after Thanksgiving, Flynn spoke by phone with the Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network, a right-wing religious media outlet. Claiming that the 2020 election involved “probably the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” he asserted that China was “not going to allow 2020 to happen, and so now what we have is this theft with mail-in ballots.” A legitimate counting of the ballots would have resulted in a Trump landslide, he insisted. “I’m right in the middle of it right now,” Flynn said, “and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”While Powell was pursuing legal options for reversing the election results, Flynn was beginning to envision a military role. “It’s not unprecedented,” Flynn, describing the nascent plan, insisted to the Newsmax host Greg Kelly on Dec. 17. “I mean, these people out there talking about martial law, like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times, Greg,” he said, then added, “I’m not calling for that.”But by that point, Flynn was in fact calling for sending in the military to the contested states. Byrne told me that by Dec. 16, he had lined up a series of options for the president to consider, including using uniformed officials to confiscate voting machines and ballots in six states. Flynn suggested to Byrne that the National Guard and U.S. marshals in combination would be the most suited to the job.On the evening of Dec. 18, Flynn, Byrne, Powell and a legal associate took an S.U.V. limousine to the White House. The group found their way into the Oval Office with the help of several eager-to-please White House staff members, including Garrett Ziegler, an aide to the Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro. (Navarro had released his own extensive, and swiftly debunked, report on election fraud the day before and was in the midst of lobbying Republican members of Congress to overturn the 2020 results.) Byrne, Flynn and Powell then made their case directly to the president about the options he had at his disposal, including Flynn’s suggested use of the National Guard and U.S. marshals. According to Byrne, Powell handed Trump a packet that included previous executive orders issued by President Barack Obama and by Trump that the group believed established a precedent for a new executive order, one that would use supposed foreign interference in the election as a justification for deploying the military. In this operation, Byrne added, Flynn could serve as Trump’s “field marshal.”White House lawyers present at the meeting vehemently denounced the plan. According to Byrne, Flynn calmly replied: “May I ask what it is you think happened on Nov. 3? Do you think there was anything strange about the election?” According to another account of the meeting published by Axios, Flynn became livid. “You’re quitting!” he yelled at Eric Herschmann, a senior adviser to Trump. “You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” (Byrne denies that Flynn said this.)Trump was amenable to the idea of civilian authorities’ seizing voting machines; in November, he reportedly proposed the idea of the Justice Department’s doing so to his attorney general, William Barr, though Barr rejected it. But either by his own judgment or on the advice of others, he seemed to draw the line at using the military. Byrne told me that Giuliani recently explained to him that he had counseled the president to reject such a plan because “we would all end up in prison.” (A lawyer for Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.) After Flynn and Powell’s proposal was rejected, Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who served with Flynn and was now working with Powell’s legal team, later offered his own revised draft executive order, in which the Department of Homeland Security would be ordered to seize the machines. But Ken Cuccinelli, the department’s acting deputy secretary, resisted. (Waldron had presented his own martial-law plan to both Flynn and Trump’s legal team; it is unclear whether the plan that Flynn’s group presented originated with him or Waldron.)A merchandise booth at the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesFlynn, meanwhile, continued to agitate for military intervention. Through an intermediary, he contacted Ezra Cohen, the Defense Department acting under secretary for intelligence, who served under Flynn both at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Flynn had been director, and on the National Security Council. Cohen (identified in other reports as Ezra Cohen-Watnick) was traveling in the Middle East at the time; the intermediary told him that Flynn wanted him to return to Washington right away.The call, Cohen told me, was out of the blue. Although it has been reported that he and Flynn were close, he insisted that this was not true: They overlapped at the D.I.A., but Cohen said they met for the first time in the spring of 2016, well after Flynn left the agency, when Cohen wanted to solicit career advice from a veteran intelligence officer. Months later, Flynn recruited him to serve on the N.S.C., but Cohen said they had spoken only briefly a couple of times since Flynn’s departure from the White House.Cohen said he demurred, but Flynn called him a second time, shortly before Christmas, catching Cohen on his cellphone as he was driving home from a Whole Foods in Maryland. He explained that he needed Cohen to direct the military to seize ballots and voting machines and rerun the election.Cohen said he was too stupefied to ask his former boss how he thought Cohen had the authority to do such a thing. “Sir, the election is over,” he said, according to the ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.” “It’s time to move on.” Cohen told me that Flynn yelled so loudly that Cohen’s wife could clearly hear it from the passenger seat. “You’re a quitter!” Flynn berated him, as he had berated Herschmann. “This is not over! Don’t be a quitter!”With Flynn’s fleeting window of direct access to the president closed, he and Powell urged Representative Devin Nunes, a Trump ally, to pursue a particularly hallucinatory rumor that the election results had been manipulated by an Italian defense contractor. But a Nunes staff member found the lead to be meritless, according to someone with knowledge of the discussions. Flynn’s attempts to reach the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, were blocked by the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a government official who was privy to these efforts.It was a stunning near miss for American democracy. But after more than a month of furious machinations, Flynn seemed to have at last exhausted his options. He would later lament to a right-wing podcaster, a fellow retired general and conspiracy theorist named Paul Vallely, that “in the final days of the administration, there was a lot of decisions that could have been made.” Flynn had been boxed out, he claimed, by “a team that wanted to kind of, ‘Let’s get past this; let’s get rid of this guy Trump.’”A day after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the conservative Washington Examiner published an article suggesting that the intelligence community had delayed the publication of a report outlining China’s attempts to influence the 2020 election (though the Office of the Director of National Intelligence categorically dismissed the claim that China played any role in altering the vote totals). Flynn texted a link to the article to an associate with a bitter accompanying note: “Ratcliffe should be ashamed of himself as well as Trump for not demanding this report be made public over a month ago.”On a Friday evening this January, Flynn took the stage at Dream City Church in Phoenix, the latest stop of the ReAwaken America conference: a right-wing road show that combines elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention. Flynn, the featured speaker, was wearing a palm-tree-print blazer over a T-shirt and jeans. He began by leading a round of stretching exercises. “You’re the tough crowd, because you’re the ones who hung in there all day,” Flynn said to the audience of perhaps a thousand.The crowd had thinned considerably from a peak of 3,500. Those who remained had listened for nine hours to a procession of speakers, including Eric Trump; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive; the young conservative activist Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA; and, just before Flynn, a New Jersey gym owner who was banned from American Airlines after refusing to wear a mask on a flight. After hours of apocalyptic pronouncements — coronavirus vaccines described by one speaker as “poison death shots,” the Biden administration by another as “worshipers of Satan” — his musings about the 2020 election seemed bland by comparison.Flynn insisted that the election was rigged against Trump and that the failure to remedy it constituted “a moment of crisis” for America. He labeled the election system “totally broken,” Democrats “socialists” and establishment Republicans “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). But, Flynn said, “people at the county level have the ability to change this country.” Elected county commissioners could write more restrictive voting laws. Elected sheriffs could enforce those laws.“Not everybody can be a Washington, D.C., superstar,” Flynn reminded the crowd. “Not everybody can be a Joan of Arc.”Flynn did not explicitly compare himself to the canonized martyr of the Hundred Years’ War. He did not have to. At this gathering and across the right-wing ecosystem, the story of Flynn’s victimization by a diabolical “deep state” and the news media is practically a matter of scripture. “Look at what they did to the general,” Eric Trump told the crowd earlier that afternoon, with Flynn standing onstage beside him. Warning the audience that “they want to take you down criminally,” Trump then pointed to the human evidence standing to his left: “They did it to him.”‘If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn.’One year since Trump’s departure from office, his Make America Great Again movement has reconstituted itself as a kind of shape-shifting but increasingly robust parallel political universe, one that holds significant sway over the Republican Party but is also beyond its control. It includes MAGA-centric media outlets like One America News, Right Side Broadcasting and Real America’s Voice; well-attended events like the ReAwaken America Tour, which has also touched down in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Michigan and Florida; its own personalities and merchandise; and above all, its shared catechism — central to which is the false claim that Trump was the legitimate victor in 2020.In this world, Flynn is probably the single greatest draw besides Trump himself. The ReAwaken America Tour organizer, Clay Clark, a 41-year-old Tulsa-based entrepreneur and anti-vaccine activist, has featured him in eight engagements across the United States over the past year. “I view it as an honor to pay him to speak at our events,” Clark told me, adding that a nondisclosure agreement prohibited him from revealing Flynn’s fee. At the Phoenix event, two nonprofit organizations Flynn helps lead, America’s Future and the America Project, had separate booths. America’s Future offered $99 annual memberships as well as T-shirts and other merchandise.All of this is bewildering to some of those who knew Flynn in his former life, as a celebrated intelligence officer in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and watched his spectacular fall from grace with bafflement and regret. It is as if Flynn has managed to burrow his way from a Beltway graveyard into a subterranean afterlife, where he has been welcomed by a Trumpian demimonde that deified him at first sight.Flynn possesses unique credibility among the ex-president’s followers, with his own compelling story line: that of a distinguished intelligence official who, he claims, experienced firsthand the nefariousness of the deep state. He is a MAGA martyr of such stature that the faithful have been willing to overlook some complicating elements of history. There is the fact that Trump fired Flynn from his post as national security adviser for the same lie that led to his indictment by the Justice Department, and the fact that Flynn, after pleading guilty, spent 2018 cooperating with the Justice Department investigation of other Trumpworld figures. In the right’s transfigured portrayal of Flynn, “America’s general” was at most guilty of being a conservative who dared to accuse Obama of being soft on Islamic extremists, who dared to chant “lock her up” about the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — and who dared to ally himself with Donald Trump at a moment when doing so, for a retired military figure of his stature, was still deeply taboo. That an American three-star general had faced such persecution — that, as Eric Trump said, “they did it to him” — meant, by extension, that no conservative patriot was safe.In the year since Flynn sought to enlist the military in overturning the election, he has continued to fight the same battle by other means. He has been a key figure in spreading the gospel of the stolen election. Speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5 of last year, the night before the Trump faithful stormed the Capitol, he declared that “everybody in this country knows who won” on Election Day and claimed without evidence that more dead people had voted in the election in some states than were buried on famous Civil War battlefields.In November, the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee issued a subpoena to Flynn ordering him to testify, noting his reported presence at the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting. In his speech the night before the Capitol riot, Flynn pledged: “Tomorrow, we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.” The same day, Flynn was photographed with the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone at the Willard Hotel, where several of the president’s loyalists had assembled. Flynn was also seen that evening down the street from the Willard at the Trump International Hotel, where other Trump advisers and family members had gathered and where Byrne had paid for Flynn’s lodging.Flynn has sued to block the subpoena; his attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement, “General Flynn did not organize or speak at any of the events on Jan. 6, and like most Americans, he watched the events at the Capitol unfold on television.”But the committee’s interest has both reflected and fueled a suspicion that Flynn is something more than a MAGA circuit rider. In addition to his role in the Dec. 18 meeting, Flynn is set apart by the 33 years he spent in the military establishment and the intelligence community, and by his persistent connections to that world. His brother Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn was an Army deputy chief of staff when rioters overtook the Capitol and took part in a phone call that day about whether to bring in the National Guard to assist the overwhelmed Capitol Police force. (Charles Flynn later denied to reporters that his brother’s views influenced the military’s response to Jan. 6.) Flynn’s suggestion at a conference last May that a Myanmar-style military coup “should happen” in the United States led Representative Elaine Luria, a moderate Democrat from Virginia and former Navy commander, to argue that Flynn should be tried for sedition under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.Flynn has denied calling for a coup. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this article. In Phoenix, he described his motive for his ongoing activities as the patriotic urge to “stand here and fight for this country” and alluded to the scandal and financial ruin that followed for his family. “What we experienced was unbelievable,” he said.His war against the federal government is all the more dangerous because it’s personal. “If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn,” a fellow military veteran who later did business with Flynn observed. “You’re vilified. Your family’s ostracized. You don’t see any hope economically. This is how to make an extremist.”Long before his descent into election conspiracism, Flynn was known for his unorthodox information-gathering methods. Those who worked with him at the Joint Special Operations Command, where he arrived in 2004, and his later posting in Afghanistan, where he was the top intelligence officer for the coalition commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, recalled his approach as obsessive, omnivorous, high-velocity.“He was incredibly rapid,” one of his colleagues in Afghanistan recalled. “He’d take in intelligence from unusual sources, from the grass roots” — coalition soldiers in far-flung units — “and from open-source, not relying on signals. And he ran things in a very horizontal fashion. When you sent in a report, his first instinct was, ‘Who needs to see this?’ And he’d put 30 people on the email chain. It was interesting to see someone function not according to the usual rules.”Former colleagues recall Flynn reviewing reports at his desk late into the night, a half-eaten plate of tater tots beside him. His tenacity seemed to be exactly what the U.S. military effort needed. By 2004, it was clear to everyone on the ground in Iraq that one year after the invasion, U.S. troops remained at pains to understand who the enemy was, much less to defeat it. Flynn’s team closed the information gap in a hurry.But Flynn’s intelligence-gathering operation was invariably chaotic, embodied by the general himself — who, the former Afghanistan colleague said, “would contradict himself three or four times over a 10-minute period.” His determination to get actionable intelligence into the right hands also led him to defy protocol on occasion, as when a colleague saw Flynn sharing classified information on his computer with a Dutch officer in 2009. Around the same time, according to a Washington Post account, Flynn also shared sensitive intelligence with Pakistani officials, for which he was reprimanded by the Pentagon’s top intelligence official at the time, James Clapper.Flynn’s discernment as an intelligence analyst also left something to be desired, recalled one former military intelligence officer who worked with him: “During the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, you just couldn’t explain to him that ‘Look, a lot of these guys that were taken off the battlefield just don’t know anything. And they’re all not interconnected.’ And he’d be like, ‘There’s got to be some connection that we’re not making.’ And we’d be like, ‘No, it’s just not there.’” Still, Flynn’s teams provided intelligence on the whereabouts and capabilities of Iraqi and Afghan militants of such value to America’s war-fighting efforts in both countries that his problematic tendencies were largely overlooked at the time.Flynn onstage with Eric Trump in Phoenix.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesIn his book, “The Field of Fight,” Flynn describes how, after the Sept. 11 attacks, he came to believe that radical Islam was an organized global project to destroy the West, akin to the Soviet Union’s designs on the developing world during the Cold War (which Flynn experienced firsthand as a young Army lieutenant participating in the U.S. invasion of Communist-controlled Grenada in 1983). By family tradition, Flynn, the working-class son of an Army sergeant from Rhode Island, was a registered Democrat. But he also regarded the left as useful idiots in the radical Islamists’ plans, if not outright accomplices. While in Afghanistan, he disdainfully opined to a colleague that Obama wanted to “remake American society.”His misgivings about the president became personal in June 2010, when Obama fired McChrystal, Flynn’s mentor, after a Rolling Stone article quoted McChrystal’s team mocking members of the Obama administration. Six years later, Flynn would say in “The Field of Fight” that McChrystal’s “maltreatment is still hard for me to digest.”Still, Flynn’s service under McChrystal had garnered significant admiration in Washington, and Clapper, who by this point was serving as the director of national intelligence, brought Flynn to work at the O.D.N.I. in 2011. A year later, Flynn became the new director of the D.I.A. On paper, bringing in the top intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan made perfect sense. On the other hand, Flynn’s experience as the supervisor of a small operation would not readily scale to an organization of 17,000 employees within a top-heavy and doctrinaire intelligence bureaucracy.One former senior intelligence official recalled trying to warn Flynn that running a large agency required different management techniques from those to which he was accustomed. Flynn, undeterred, wasted little time upending the D.I.A. He shuffled the responsibilities of the agency’s senior executives and made significant structural changes to the Defense Clandestine Service in defiance of the instruction of his Pentagon superiors. He often ignored his civilian chain of command, according to one of his subordinates.Woven into the mythology of Flynn’s martyrdom is that his dire warnings about the growing threat of Islamic extremism were what ultimately cost him his job at the D.I.A. In “The Field of Fight,” he claimed to have been given his walking papers in February 2014 “after telling a congressional committee that we were not as safe as we had been a few years back.” In fact, the only evidence I could find of Flynn saying anything along these lines was his remarks to an audience at the Aspen Institute fully five months after being asked for his resignation by James Clapper and Michael Vickers, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, not Obama. “President Obama wouldn’t have known Flynn if he’d fallen over him,” Clapper told me. “We told Susan Rice” — Obama’s national security adviser — “what we’d done after the fact.” Their reasons for ending Flynn’s tenure, he added, included insubordination and erosion of morale at the agency. Clapper termed Flynn’s fired-for-telling-the-truth narrative “baloney.”Flynn was permitted to retire with the full benefits accorded a three-star general. His retirement ceremony on Aug. 7, 2014 was well attended. He bought a three-bedroom house in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., and set up a consulting shop, Flynn Intel Group, in an office overlooking the Potomac River. And he began venturing into politics. Six months after his retirement, he went on “Fox News Sunday” to criticize the Obama administration’s terrorist-fighting “passivity.” A string of further appearances on the network followed. Flynn also began consulting with Republican presidential contenders, including Carly Fiorina and Scott Walker.But in the private sector, too, Flynn was reckless. His admirers were horrified to see him form a partnership with Bijan Kian, an Iranian American businessman who would later be indicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government (the case has not been resolved). Kian epitomized, in the words of a former colleague, “these guys in the D.C. swamp who prey on generals fresh out of the military with no understanding of how the business world works.”Even more concerning was Flynn’s acceptance of more than $45,000 for a speaking appearance in Moscow, at the 10th anniversary gala of Russia’s state-run RT channel in December 2015, where he was photographed sitting next to President Vladimir Putin. Friends and at least one intelligence official advised Flynn against attending the party to celebrate a Russian propaganda organization that was at the time openly spreading misinformation about and within the United States and other NATO countries. Flynn assured them that he knew what he was doing.Trump did not find Flynn’s views on Russia disqualifying in the least. By the time the candidate had wrapped up the Republican nomination, Flynn was his senior foreign-policy adviser — and, briefly, the only nonpolitician under consideration to be Trump’s running mate, according to a former Trump campaign adviser. Like most of those in Trump’s orbit, Flynn did not seem to be staking his career on a victory in November. Beginning in the final weeks of the campaign, Flynn’s consulting firm accepted over a half-million dollars from a Dutch group with ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. On Election Day in 2016, The Hill published an op-ed by Flynn (in which he failed to disclose his consulting relationship) titled “Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support.”Even for those conservatives who reject the most garish Trump-centric conspiracy theories, there is a tendency to view Flynn as a pawn in a chess match between Trump and federal officials who had reason to wonder if the new president sought help from the Russian government during his campaign. This is true to an extent, but Flynn had placed himself on the chessboard. He lied about discussing the Obama administration’s sanctions on Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition — first to incoming Vice President Mike Pence, then to White House officials, then to the media and finally to two F.B.I. agents. One former senior intelligence official who reviewed the transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak told me that he was struck by the “plain stupidity” of Flynn’s lies — knowing that Trump’s campaign was already drawing scrutiny for its contacts with Russia and knowing as well that any phone conversation with a Russian diplomat was likely to be recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies.When Flynn resigned in February 2017, Trump did not pretend to be heartbroken by the loss. As one of Trump’s senior advisers told me, Flynn “had no chemistry with Trump and didn’t come across as a guy who had it together.” But according to another adviser, the firing of Flynn constituted an early show of weakness in the eyes of the president’s son-in-law and consigliere, Jared Kushner, who confided to this individual in 2020 that throwing Flynn to the wolves was “the biggest mistake we ever made.” (Kushner could not be reached for comment.)The following December, Flynn struck a plea deal with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Over the course of a year, Flynn sat for about 20 interviews and acknowledged, in private and later in court, that he had willfully not told the truth about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak. Though the summaries of these interviews suggest Flynn was far from expansive and at times evasive, Mueller’s team was clearly hopeful that Flynn’s experience would encourage others in Trump’s circle to come forward. The prosecutors indicated that they would not object to Flynn’s receiving no jail time.The crowd at the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesStill, Flynn was racking up immense legal fees and could not find work. In the spring of 2019, he decided to fire his attorneys and replace them with the Dallas-based lawyer Sidney Powell, his future partner in the crusade to overturn the 2020 election. Powell withdrew Flynn’s guilty plea and claimed that the prosecutors were withholding what she called a crucial report that, as it turned out, did not exist. In May 2020, Attorney General William Barr intervened and moved that the case against Flynn be dismissed. A federal judge was still weighing whether to accept Barr’s recommendation when Trump rendered the matter moot by issuing his pardon on Nov. 25.Less than a month after receiving his pardon, Flynn was face to face with the man who had given it to him, presenting what Byrne called the “beautiful operational plan” for deploying the military to six contested states. When both the White House and Ezra Cohen declined to enact this plan, Flynn continued to hype fraud conspiracy theories — and intended to do the same in a speech at Trump’s rally on the morning of Jan. 6, until he was informed at the last minute that his and Byrne’s slots had been canceled.Byrne wrote that “Flynn and I sunk into our seats in despair” in the V.I.P. section throughout the program. They had hoped the president would make an evidentiary case for there having been an election-fraud conspiracy, but he had done nothing of the sort. According to Byrne’s account in his self-published book “The Deep Rig,” the two men repeatedly said to each other: “He does not get that it is not about him. He put on a [expletive] pep rally.” They returned to their hotel, hurriedly packed their bags and did not follow the throng to the Capitol, Byrne wrote.Like several other Trump allies, Flynn refused to testify as scheduled before the Jan. 6 Committee in December and sued to block its subpoena of his phone records. Flynn’s defiance of the committee fuels suspicions in some corners that Flynn has something to hide — though his reticence would also be in keeping with someone who insists an election was stolen by the same deep-state operatives who engineered his dismissal from the White House five years ago. “They did a masterful job of getting rid of me early on, because they knew exactly what I was going to do,” Flynn told Paul Vallely on a podcast in November.In September, I was attending a rally near the Capitol in support of those facing charges in the Jan. 6 riot when a short, muscular man with a shaved head approached me. He wore a T-shirt with Flynn’s face on it. Noticing my press badge, he held his iPhone up to my face and demanded to know: “Why aren’t you guys reporting on the 12th Amendment that’s going to potentially be triggered after Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin nullify their electors?”I tried to explain that I was not writing about the election, but the man continued to talk. The next morning, I learned that a video of the encounter had been posted on the man’s Telegram account. His name was Ivan Raiklin, and he was a former Green Beret and lawyer.Raiklin has often emphasized his dealings with Flynn. When he briefly tried to run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia in 2018, Raiklin was endorsed by Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr., and he sat in the federal courtroom next to Sidney Powell during the elder Flynn’s hearing that December; Flynn has been photographed with Raiklin elsewhere and once described him on Twitter as “a true American patriot.” Beyond that, Flynn has never confirmed their relationship, and Flynn’s brother Joe Flynn, in a brief statement on behalf of their family, said, “We do not have any association with Ivan Raiklin.”‘He kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.’Raiklin is one of a cohort of military-intelligence and law-enforcement veterans who have found or at least claimed places in Flynn’s general orbit since the 2020 election and are engaged in ongoing efforts to relitigate its results. Others include Seth Keshel and Jim Penrose from the group that gathered at Lin Wood’s estate that November; Phil Waldron; Thomas Speciale, the leader of the group Vets for Trump, who worked at the D.I.A. during Flynn’s directorship and has provided security for Flynn; and Robert Patrick Lewis and the former Michigan police officer Geoffrey Flohr of the First Amendment Praetorian, a right-wing paramilitary outfit that has provided security for Flynn and others more than once at Flynn’s behest.Several of these men were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though in what capacity, and to what end, is still unclear. Flohr can be seen in video footage on the grounds near the west side of the Capitol talking on his cellphone just before the attack, though it is not known if he entered the building. Speciale was also on the west side of the building that afternoon, though he maintains that he never entered. Raiklin, too, was at the Capitol but insists he did not go inside the building.What is less ambiguous is the role that some of these figures have played in the effort to reverse 2020’s outcome by other means. Since the election, Trump’s claims of thwarted victory have given rise to a wave of state-level organizing aimed at using legislatures and other levers of power to audit the 2020 election results, on the theory that they will void enough Electoral College votes to force a rerun of the election. Although the handful of state and local audits that activists and Republican lawmakers have managed to set in motion — most significantly in Arizona — have in no cases changed the election results, it remains an area of fervent activity, in which Flynn’s name is regularly invoked.In November in New Hampshire, I attended an “election-security seminar,” presented by an organization called the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group. The conference room was standing room only. The speakers included a state representative, a Republican candidate for Congress and Seth Keshel, who argued that their foremost mission should be “the remediation of the 2020 election.”The final speaker was Ivan Raiklin. In his hypercaffeinated cadence, Raiklin devoted his talk to enumerating the supposed conspirators whose ongoing presence helped explain “why we haven’t remedied 2020 yet.” Those forces, he said, included the F.B.I., the Bushes, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., former Vice President Mike Pence and former Vice President Dick Cheney. This was the deep state that Trump was up against, Raiklin said.And, he added, “who’s the first person of any stature whatsoever who has any credibility, other than within his family and the Trump Organization, that comes in and bats for him? This is important. This is the most important thing. Say it louder: General Flynn.” Flynn and Trump’s independence was a threat to the deep state, Raiklin insisted, which led to Flynn’s indictment and Trump’s defeat. “The reason why a million people showed up on Jan. 6,” he said, was that “they know bits and pieces of the story. And they knew that something had to be called out publicly. ”The same month as the New Hampshire event, the Jan. 6 committee heard testimony from a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania named Everett Stern, who has said he was approached last April by two associates of Raiklin at a Republican gathering in Berks County. Stern, who owns a private intelligence firm, told me that the associates wanted to enlist his help in persuading high-ranking Republican officials in Pennsylvania to support an audit in that state. When Stern asked whom they were working with, one of them replied, “General Flynn.”Later, Stern said, Raiklin communicated directly with him through text messages to find out more about his professional and personal life. After this vetting, Stern says that he was tasked with finding unflattering information about a particular Republican congressman so he could be “pushed” toward supporting an audit. Stern says he was also set up to meet personally with Flynn in Dallas in mid-June. By this time, however, Stern had reported his communications to the F.B.I. and was afraid of his legal exposure. He canceled at the last minute.Michael Flynn before the crowd in Phoenix.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesJoe Flynn told me: “We do not have anything to do with what Everett Stern is alleging,” adding, “He’s nuts.” Raiklin, too, denied to me that he helped recruit Stern to pressure elected officials into supporting a 2020 election audit. But I heard a similar story from J.D. Maddox, a former C.I.A. branch chief who ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia House of Delegates last year. Maddox, who has not previously spoken publicly about his experience, told me that he was at a candidate meet-and-greet in Arlington last May when he bumped into Raiklin. Raiklin again brought up the need for election audits — and suggested tactics far beyond lobbying legislators. “If the Democrats don’t give us that,” Maddox recalled him saying, “then violence is the next step.”Raiklin proceeded into what Maddox described as “a wild, contortionist explanation of how they would reverse Biden’s election,” involving a succession of state audits. First Arizona, then Georgia, then Wisconsin and then other state legislatures would nullify the 2020 election results, he envisioned, until Biden’s victory margin would evaporate. Maddox told Raiklin he was skeptical. “But he said he was certain it was going to happen,” Maddox told me. “And he kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.”“General Flynn is central to all this,” Raiklin had similarly claimed in New Hampshire when I spoke with him briefly after his talk. He refused to elaborate, so what that meant, exactly, was hard to say. In the feverish activity that now attends the 2020 election on the right, it can be difficult to distinguish conspiring from conspiracism — not least in Flynn’s own statements. In an interview in late January with the right-wing conspiracy website Infowars, Flynn accused George Soros, Bill Gates and others of creating the coronavirus so they could “steal an election” and “rule the world.” In another interview, he floated the rumor that “they” may be “putting the vaccine in salad dressing.”But the Capitol riot demonstrated how quickly such conspiracism could be converted into action. The belief that the 2020 election was stolen holds sway in the Republican Party as much now as it did then: According to a YouGov poll in December, 71 percent of all Republicans believe that Biden was not elected legitimately. The stolen-election myth has fused with a host of other right-wing preoccupations — the coronavirus vaccines, critical race theory, border security — into a single crisis narrative, of which Flynn is both purveyor and protagonist: The deep state intends to break America as it tried to break Flynn and the man he had the audacity to serve, Donald Trump.At the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix, I visited a booth hawking art by a man named Michael Marrone. In addition to the usual hagiographic portraits of Trump in Revolutionary War garb, Marrone had several of Flynn and other hallowed figures in the original effort to overturn the election, like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. One featured the general seated next to Powell, both in colonial attire, signing the Declaration of Independence. In another, Flynn stood jut-jawed and eagle-eyed, wielding a musket. A third, featuring him beside Trump on a battlefield, bore Flynn’s autograph, next to the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA (“where we go one, we go all”).In real life, the bonds among this band had started to fray. Wood and Flynn endorsed different Republican candidates for governor of Georgia, a state that has become central to the right-wing efforts to overturn the 2020 results and assert partisan control over future elections. Their estrangement deepened and eventually became public when Wood posted text messages and snippets of a phone conversation on the social media app Telegram. In one of them, Flynn expressed his belief that Trump had “quit” on America.When I spoke with Wood in December, he told me that he had begun to reappraise the general. For so long Flynn’s partner in conspiracism, he had lately begun to wonder if Flynn himself might not be what he seemed. He told me about attending a Bikers for Trump rally in South Carolina last May, where Flynn led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, only to fall silent momentarily during the line “and to the Republic for which it stands.” At the time, “I tried to defend him,” Wood said. “Now I don’t know. Who forgets the Pledge of Allegiance? Draw your own conclusions. It’s troublesome.”It occurred to me that this, one way or another, was probably Flynn’s life for the foreseeable future: The prospect of a normal retirement long gone, he now belonged to a MAGA storybook world of heroes and villains and nothing in between. That world “is filled with strong personalities, which is a complication in any movement,” said J.D. Rucker, a conservative podcaster who is acquainted with and admires Flynn. “When you’re fighting for a cause, you’re also fighting for a spotlight within that cause. The left is less susceptible to this — whether because they have a more collectivist view or because they’re not as capitalistic, I don’t know.”“It’s a challenge to call out a grifter,” Rucker mused, “because usually they have a very passionate, cultlike following. And sometimes we get this situation where we have these multiple grifters going after each other. It’s entertaining, but it’s also dangerous for everybody involved.”Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Why Joe Biden Needs More Than Accomplishments to Be a Success

      by

      No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden. With a razor-thin congressional majority — far smaller than that of Barack Obama — President Biden has delivered two enormous spending bills, with another, the Build Back Better act, likely on its way. Elements of these bills will have a lasting effect on the economy into the next decade; they also push the country to the left.Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?A prisoner of great expectationsThough it came out in 1993, Stephen Skowronek’s “The Politics Presidents Make” helps us understand how Mr. Biden has become a prisoner of great expectations.American politics is punctuated by the rise and fall of political orders or regimes. In each regime, one party, whether in power or not, dominates the field. Its ideas and interests define the landscape, forcing the opposition to accept its terms. Dwight Eisenhower may have been a Republican, but he often spoke in the cadences of the New Deal. Mr. Clinton voiced Reaganite hosannas to the market.Regimes persist across decades. The Jeffersonian regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; the Jacksonian regime, from 1828 to 1860; the Republican regime, from 1860 to 1932; the New Deal order, from 1932 to 1980.Reagan’s market regime of deference to the white and the wealthy has outlasted two Democratic presidencies and may survive a third. We see its presence in high returns to the rich and low wages for work, continents of the economy cordoned off from democratic control and resegregated neighborhoods and schools. Corporations are viewed, by liberals, as more advanced reformers of structural racism than parties and laws, and tech billionaires are seen as saviors of the planet.Eventually, however, regimes grow brittle. Their ideology no longer speaks to the questions of the day; important interests lose pride of place; the opposition refuses to accept the leading party and its values.Every president presides over a regime that is either resilient or vulnerable. That is his situation. When Eisenhower was elected, the New Deal was strong; when Jimmy Carter was elected, it was weak. Every president is affiliated or opposed to the regime. That is his story. James Knox Polk sought to extend the slavocracy, Abraham Lincoln to end it. The situation and the story are the keys to the president’s power — or powerlessness.When the president is aligned with a strong regime, he has considerable authority, as Lyndon Johnson realized when he expanded the New Deal with the Great Society. When the president is opposed to a strong regime, he has less authority, as Mr. Obama recognized when he tried to get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. When the president is aligned with a weak regime, he has the least authority, as everyone from John Adams to Mr. Carter was forced to confront. When the president is opposed to a weak regime, he has the greatest authority, as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan discovered. These presidents, whom Mr. Skowronek calls reconstructive, can reorder the political universe.All presidents are transformative actors. With each speech and every action, they make or unmake the regime. Sometimes, they do both at the same time: Johnson reportedly declared that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, thereby setting the stage for the unraveling of the New Deal.What distinguishes reconstructive presidents from other presidents, even the most transformative like Johnson, is that their words and deeds have a binding effect on their successors from both parties. They create the language that all serious contestants for power must speak. They construct political institutions and social realities that cannot be easily dismantled. They build coalitions that provide lasting support to the regime. Alexander Hamilton thought every president would “reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor.” Reconstructive presidents do that — in fact, they reverse and undo the work of many predecessors — but they also ensure that their heirs cannot.Politics is not physics. A president opposed to the established order may seek to topple it, only to discover that it is too resilient or that his troops are too feeble and lacking in fight. Where we are in political time — whether we are in a reconstructive moment, ripe for reordering, or not — cannot be known in advance. The weakness or strength of a regime, and of the opposition to the regime, is revealed in the contest against it.What is certain is that the president is both creature and creator of the political world around him. Therein lies Mr. Biden’s predicament.The language of reconstructionHeading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, many people thought we might be in a reconstructive moment. I was one of them. There was a popular insurgency from the left, heralding the coming of a new New Deal. It culminated in the Nevada caucus, where people of color and young voters — an emergent multiracial working class — put Bernie Sanders over the top, ready to move the political order to the left.There also were signs that the Reagan regime was vulnerable. Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 suggested that conservative orthodoxies of slashing Social Security and Medicare and waging imperial warfare no longer compelled voters. Mr. Trump’s presidency revealed a congressional G.O.P. that could not unite around a program beyond tax cuts and right-wing judges.As a candidate, Mr. Biden rejected the transformation Mr. Sanders promised and assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch. Yet there were signs, after he won the nomination and into the early months of his administration, of a new, “transformational” Mr. Biden who wanted to be the next F.D.R. The combination of the Covid economy, with its shocking inequalities and market failures, and a summer of fire and flood seemed to authorize a left-leaning politics of permanent cash supports to workers and families, increased taxes on the rich to fund radical expansions of health care, elder care and child care, and comprehensive investments in green energy and infrastructure, with high-paying union jobs.Most important, the package cohered. Instead of a laundry list of gripes and grievances, it featured the consistent items of an alternative ideology and ascendant set of social interests. It promised to replace a sclerotic order that threatens to bury us all with a new order of common life. This was that rare moment when the most partisan of claims can sound like a reasonable defense of the whole.Yet while Mr. Biden has delivered nearly $3 trillion in spending, with another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion likely to pass, he has not created a new order. In addition to a transformation of the economy, such an order would require a spate of democracy reforms — the elimination of the filibuster and curbing of partisan gerrymandering, the addition of new states to the union, and national protection of voting rights and electoral procedures — as well as labor law reforms, enabling workers to form unions.What makes such reforms reconstructive rather than a wish list of good works is that they shift the relations of power and interest, making other regime-building projects possible. Today’s progressive agenda is hobbled less by a lack of popular support than by the outsize leverage conservatives possess — in the Senate, which privileges white voters in sparsely populated, often rural states; in the federal structure of our government, which enables states to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote; and in the courts, whose right-wing composition has been shaped by two Republican presidents elected by a minority of the voters. No progressive agenda can be enacted and maintained unless these deformations are addressed.The only way to overcome anti-democratic forces is by seeding democracy throughout society, empowering workers to take collective action in the workplace and the polity, and by securing democracy at the level of the state. That is what the great emblems of a reconstructive presidency — the 14th Amendment, which granted Black Americans citizenship, or the Wagner Act, which liberated workers from the tyranny of employers — are meant to do. They give popular energy institutional form, turning temporary measures of an insurgent majority into long-term transformations of policy and practice.It’s not clear that Mr. Biden wants such a reconstruction. And even if he did, it’s not clear that he could deliver it.What is stopping Biden?The forces arrayed against a reconstruction are many.The first is the Republican Party. Here the party has benefited less from the “authoritarian” turn of Mr. Trump than from the fact that the Trump presidency was so constrained. As Mr. Skowronek argues, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power.” At critical moments, exercising power was precisely what Mr. Trump was not able to do.Confronting the free fall of the New Deal, Mr. Carter unleashed a stunning strike of neoliberal and neoconservative measures: deregulation of entire industries; appointment of the anti-labor Paul Volcker to the Fed; a military buildup; and renewed confrontation with the Soviet Union. These defied his party’s orthodoxies and unraveled its coalition. Reagan ended the New Deal regime, but Mr. Carter prepared the way.For all his talk of opposition to the Republican pooh-bahs, Mr. Trump delivered what they wanted most — tax cuts, deregulation and judges — and suffered defeat when he tried to break out of their vise. Republicans repeatedly denied him funds to support his immigration plans. They overrode his veto of their military spending bill, something Congress had not been able to do in the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Trump’s own administration defied his Russia policy. This combination of weakness and deference to the G.O.P. helped keep the Republicans — and the Reagan regime — together.The second obstacle is the Democratic Party. There’s a reason party elites, led by Mr. Obama, swiftly closed ranks, when the time came, behind Mr. Biden and against Mr. Sanders. They wanted continuity, not rupture.Likewise a portion of the base. Many Democrats are older, with long memories and strong fears of what happens when liberals turn left (they lose). Newer recruits, who gave Mr. Biden the edge in some key districts, usually in the suburbs, are what the Princeton historian Matt Karp calls “Halliburton Democrats,” wealthy defectors from the Republican Party.“A regime is only as vulnerable as the political forces challenging it are robust,” writes Mr. Skowronek. That robustness is yet to be demonstrated. Despite the clarity of the path the Democrats must take if they hope to topple the Reagan order, it’s not clear the party wants to take it.The third obstacle to a Biden reconstruction is what Mr. Skowronek calls the “institutional thickening” of American politics. Since the founding era, the American political system has acquired a global economy, with the dollar as the world’s currency; a government bureaucracy and imperial military; a dense ecology of media technologies; and armies of party activists. While these forces offer the modern president resources that Jefferson never had, they also empower the modern-day equivalents of Jefferson’s opponents to resist a reconstruction. Should Mr. Biden attempt one, could he master the masters of social media? Mr. Trump tried and was banned from Twitter.The real institutions that get in the way of Mr. Biden and the Democrats, however, are not these latter-day additions of modernity but the most ancient features of the American state.The power of Senators Manchin and Sinema is an artifact of the constitutional design of the Senate and the narrowness of the Democratic majority, which itself reflects the fact that the institution was created to defend slave states rather than popular majorities. Their power is augmented by the centuries-old filibuster, which has forced Mr. Biden to jam many programs into one vaguely named reconciliation bill. That prevents him from picking off individual Republicans for pieces of legislation they might support (as he did with the infrastructure bill).Should the Republicans take the House in 2022, it will probably not be because of Tucker Carlson but because of gerrymandering. Should the Republicans take back the White House in 2024, it will probably be because of some combination of the Electoral College and the control that our federalist system grants to states over their electoral procedures.A polarized electorate divided into red and blue states is not novel; it was a hallmark of the last Gilded Age, which put the brakes on the possibility of a presidential reconstruction for decades. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider argued, the division of the country into the Republican North and Democratic South made the entire polity “extremely conservative because one-party politics tends strongly to vest political power in the hands of people who already have economic power.”How do we move past Reagan?Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” and “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.”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

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Hillary Clinton Reads Discarded Victory Speech From 2016 Election

      by

      Mrs. Clinton read the long-shelved speech aloud for her offering on MasterClass, a site featuring lessons from prominent figures in the arts, business and other fields.It is a glimpse at an alternate political universe: the speech Hillary Clinton would have given on election night, had she not lost to Donald J. Trump in 2016.Mrs. Clinton reads the discarded speech aloud for her offering on the streaming site MasterClass, which features lessons from prominent figures in the arts, business, food and other fields.Mrs. Clinton is promoting her class, “The Power of Resilience,” on Twitter, and a clip of her reading an excerpt from the speech — and tearing up at one point — was released by the “Today” show on Wednesday.The video — and the class — generated mockery from Mrs. Clinton’s detractors on the right and the left, as well as praise from her supporters, who said they found it moving.“In this lesson, I’m going to face one of my most public defeats head-on by sharing with you the speech I had hoped to deliver if I had won the 2016 election,” Mrs. Clinton says in the video.“I’ve never shared this with anybody,” she says. “I’ve never read it out loud.”In the long-shelved victory speech to “my fellow Americans,” Mrs. Clinton strikes themes of unity, and reflects on what would have been her history-making election as the first female president.She recalls meeting women who were born before women had the right to vote as well as boys and girls who didn’t understand why a woman had never been president before.“Now they know, and the world knows, that in America, every boy and every girl can grow up to be whatever they dream — even president of the United States,” Mrs. Clinton says.She chokes up when she discusses her mother and mentor, Dorothy Rodham, who grew up in poverty and was abandoned by her parents as an 8-year-old girl. She died in 2011 at age 92.“I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying, ‘Look at me. Listen to me. You will survive,’” Mrs. Clinton says. “‘You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.’”Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, said she found that part of the speech striking.“Had Hillary Clinton communicated more of that narrative, she would have had more of a successful presidential run,” Professor Jamieson said. “I read that as an interesting, coherent explanation of what would have motivated Hillary Clinton to be a public servant.”Mrs. Clinton had planned to deliver the speech at an elaborate celebration on the night of Nov. 8, 2016, complete with confetti shaped like glass shards that would fall from the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.Instead, she gave a hastily scheduled speech in a dreary hotel ballroom on the day after the election, in which she said the country was “more deeply divided than we thought.”“This loss hurts,” she said that day. “But please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”For scholars of the American presidency, the speeches candidates prepare and then discard on election night can be fascinating, Professor Jamieson said, adding that she would have loved to have read the victory speeches prepared by Barry Goldwater, Hubert H. Humphrey and George McGovern, among other losing candidates.“There’s always a curiosity about where we were about to go, or what we were about to experience,” she said. The speeches, she said, hint at “the course not taken.”Tim Hogan, a former spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said on Twitter that watching her read the speech and choke up “has me sobbing right now.”Others were not as moved.“I’m not sure 1) Why Hillary Clinton is teaching a ‘MasterClass’ on anything or 2) Why MasterClass is selling access to watch her cry while reading her 2016 victory speech that was all for naught,” Spencer Brown, a managing editor of the conservative website townhall.com, wrote on Twitter.Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster and a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, said that reading the speech was simply a way to promote the class.“She has a product to sell, a new product, and it’s clear that she thinks reading what would have been her 2016 acceptance speech is the best way to sell that product,” Mr. Hobart said. “I don’t think it’s really anything more than that.”MasterClass charges $15 to $23 a month for subscriptions. The site plans to release a class from former President Bill Clinton on Dec. 19 and from former President George W. Bush in the spring.Isabella Grullón Paz More